Category: Racism

The Tamir Rice Investigatation Gets Even Less Credible

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It turns out that the grand jury investigating the two officers who shot 12 year old Tamir Rice to death never even took a vote on whether to indict:

The grand jury that opted not to indict Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback in the shooting death of Tamir Rice never actually took a vote on the matter, according to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office.

What actually happened in the most significant grand jury hearing in county history isn’t quite clear, and the mechanism by which the grand jury “declined to indict” — in Prosecutor Timothy McGinty’s own words — is equally unclear.

At the conclusion of a typical grand jury hearing, there are two possible outcomes achieved via vote: a “true bill,” which results in criminal charges and a case number in the court system, or a “no bill,” which is a decision not to bring charges. A “no-bill notification” is signed and stamped and kept on record at the county clerk’s office.

Though Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty never explicitly said the grand jury voted not to indict — nor did he utter the phrase “no bill” — in his Dec. 28 press conference, he declared that that grand jury had declined to indict.

How, then, if not by voting?

After learning and confirming on Jan. 15 that there was no “no-bill notification” on file at the county clerk’s office for the Tamir Rice grand jury proceedings, Scene formally requested the document officially showing the decision, however it was reached, and wherever said document might be. We were told that it didn’t exist. Employees at both the clerk’s and prosecutor’s officers were unable to explain the lack of paperwork.

Tuesday, Scene spoke with Joe Frolik, the communications director for the Prosecutor’s Office, who said no no-bill record exists because, “it’s technically not a no-bill, because they didn’t vote on charges.”
He elaborated: “This was an investigative grand jury. This was kind of their role. Sometimes, a grand jury, after its investigation, will decide if there are no votes to be taken on charges.”
But how that decision was reached and the location of any record of that decision remain publicly unaccounted for. The term “investigative grand jury” appears nowhere in McGinty’s public statements and reports on the proceedings.

………

As for a case that went before a grand jury but didn’t result in a vote, [Law Professor Jonathan] Witmer-Rich said, “I’m not aware of an example…It could happen, I suppose, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about that.”
Professor Lewis Katz, a criminal law expert at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, noted that investigative grand juries are ordinarily held in secret. In his view, the Tamir Rice grand jury was not investigative.

………

Reached Tuesday, Subodh Chandra, the local attorney for the Rice family, said that the whole process has been “irregular.” He said he and his team had asked the county if the grand jury members were led through each possible charge for a vote or whether there was one overarching vote on all charges, but never received an answer. When informed no vote of any kind took place, Chandra said: “If it is true that the prosecutor didn’t even call for an up or down vote on potential criminal charges, including aggravated murder, then it is truly the ultimate insult to the Rice family,” Chandra said, “that the prosecutor didn’t even think it mattered to bring the grand jury proceedings to their proper conclusion.”

Our system allows a lot of leeway for prosecutors to make decisions, so I don’t think that there is any call here for a criminal investigation, but the good people of Cleveland need to put a permanent end to this guy’s political career.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Geraldo Rivera

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On Fox News, he has stated thatthe reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency shows that the nation was not ready for a black man in the White House.

He further goes on to state that he believes that Obama shirked his duty to address these issues, which I also agree with:

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera was Tuesday’s “One Lucky Guy” on the network’s “Outnumbered” midday hit and shared his unpopular opinion with the conservative female co-hosts ahead of President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address Tuesday evening.

………

 But Rivera argued that despite substantive policy disagreements, the real divisions made clear during the Obama presidency fall along racial lines:

When you strip away all of the gun rights and the, you know, terror all rest of it, what you have essentially is a nation divided between white people and everybody else in broad strokes. When you look at the groups that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats right now, the Asians, the Hispanics, the African-Americans, the Muslims, you see a nation where people have largely chosen up sides and if you strip away everything else, what you are going to find is a racial divide. It’s biggest, unaddressed issue.

………

 Rivera finally relented and charged that Obama had failed to confront race relations head-on as the first African-American president. “If I was this president,” the Fox News personality offered, “I would have said ‘I’m going to deal with this race. I’m going to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. The Civil War is over. The North/South divide — I would have made that the central focus of my president were I him.”

“He failed utterly,” Rivera concluded, and by “benign neglect made it worse.”

As I have noted many times before, Barack Obama’s public personae is all about avoiding to appear the “Angry Black Man”, and as such he has studiously attempted to avoid facing racial issues.

Still, agreeing with Geraldo?

I feel so dirty.

The Truth, from John Erlichman, of All People

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Over at Esquire, the inimitable Charlie Pierce found this gem from Dan Baum’s book Smoke and Mirrors, in an interview of John Ehrlichman:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

While the Nixon administration is not generally considered to be a font of unvarnished truth, sometimes, after a career is over, the truth will slip out, and in retrospect, Ehrlichman always seemed the most self aware of that scurvy lot.

A Better Reason than Steve Miller Not to Go to Cleveland

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A while back, I suggested that there was one less reason to go to Cleveland, because Steve Miller had been put in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I wished to have nothing to do with any institution that has anything to do with Steve Miller.

Well, we now have another reason not to go to Cleveland, or for that matter the whole of Cuyahoga County, specifically, it is now clear that the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor is less interested in pursuing police misconduct than Frank Rizzo, who famously promised to “Make Attila the Hun kook like a faggot.”

Simply put, black, white, or green, if you go there, you are taking your life into your own hands:

Tim McGinty never intended to prosecute the officers who killed Tamir Rice. Will that cost him his job?

 Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty’s announcement that a grand jury, at his office’s recommendation, declined to file charges against the two officers who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice surprised almost no one.

 McGinty has made no attempt to mask his belief that rookie officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner Frank Garmback committed no crimes on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014. That’s the day when Garmback rapidly pulled their police cruiser within inches of Rice at a Cleveland community center and Loehmann jumped out, firing.

 In fact, during his press conference, McGinty made numerous mentions of the many risks police officers face, the split-second decisions they have to make to protect their and the public’s lives, and how real the toy gun Rice was holding as he played at the park looked.

 In what could have been a defense closing argument, McGinty stated that the enhanced surveillance video that captured Rice’s shooting, and the aftermath in which he lay bleeding and unattended on the ground, while his 14-year-old sister was tackled to the ground by officers, handcuffed and put in the back of a patrol car as she tried to run to him, “proved” that Rice was indeed “drawing his pistol” (which was actually a pellet gun) as the officers approached.

………

None of it was unexpected.

McGinty insisted on taking the case to a grand jury, dragging it out for months, despite a judge ruling in June that there was probable cause to charge Loehmann and Garmback with crimes, including involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide dereliction of duty and, in Loehmann’s case, murder. Attorneys for Rice’s family cried foul as McGinty allowed the officers to take the oath and read prepared statements to the grand jury with no cross-examination, and he released reports justifying the killing written by outside experts, which the family’s attorneys denounced as biased.

Last month, he made disparaging remarks about the Rice family and their lawyers, appearing to accuse them of seeking to profit from the child’s death through a pending lawsuit.

And despite his professions of sympathy for the family, including saying he and his staff could see their own children and grandchildren in the face of the now-dead boy, attorneys for Rice’s family said that prior to telephoning her on Monday to inform her of the grand jury decision, the prosecutor has rarely bothered to communicate with Tamir’s mom.

We have a deeply evil bigot running criminal justice in Cuyoga county.

Simply put, until the rule of law returns to Cuyahoga county, visiting, conducting business, going to school in that place is a dangerous decision.

The Past 48 Hours in Criminal Justice has Been a bit of a Roller Coaster

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Yesterday, I looked out the window at work, and saw 2 helicopters hovering about 5000 feet up in the general direction of Lexington Market.

On closer examination, I noticed that they were both news choppers, as I saw the cameras, and I figured that something had happened in the first Freddie Gray trial.

It turned out that we had a hung jury and a mistrial:

A judge declared a mistrial Wednesday in the case of Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter after jurors said they had failed to reach an agreement on any of the charges against him in the death of Freddie Gray.

 The decision, which came a day after jurors told Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams they were deadlocked, frustrated activists who had watched the first trial in Gray’s death closely. Outside the downtown courtroom, city officials and community leaders pleaded for calm, and authorities reported two arrests, but no violence or serious disruptions.

 Porter, 26, the first of six police officers to be tried in Gray’s death, remains charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Gray, 25, died in April after suffering a severe spinal cord injury in the back of a police van.

 Jurors deliberated for three days before Williams declared the mistrial. The decision now throws the other trials into flux.

 Prosecutors chose to try Porter first, planning to use him as a witness at the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson. Goodson, who is charged with second-degree murder, was slated for trial in the first week of January.

I can’t imagine that the States Attorney Marilyn Mosby is not going to announce her intention to retry him soon.

Even ignoring the political overtones, if she gives up, she has no leverage at all about getting him to testify against his superiors.

Even so, it’s kind of depressing.

On the other hand, the announcement that “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli had been arrested for securities fraud:

It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals.

He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”

Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.

Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.

The picture of him being hauled off in handcuffs (above) just made my day. (Does this make me a bad person?)

The comment of the day on this comes from the inimitable Charlie Pierce, “I suppose he could argue for a change of venue, but I think it impractical to delay the trial until we make it to Mars.”

Honestly, I think that it would be impossible to find a jury that wouldn’t want to give him the death penalty for jaywalking.

Antonin Scalia is Too Extreme for ……… Donald Trump?

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This is strange beyond belief:

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump says he does not agree with comments from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia questioning the efficacy of affirmative action.

“I don’t like what he said, no, I don’t like what he said. I heard him, I was like, ‘Let me read it again,’ because I actually read it in print, and I’m going, I read a lot of stuff, and I’m going, ‘Woah,’ ” Trump said in an interview televised Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The billionaire said he thought Scalia’s comments were “very tough to the African-American community.”

Trump, who has supported affirmative action in the past but declined to say whether he was in favor of it today, said he has great friendships with black people.

“I have great African-American friendships,” he said. “I have just amazing relationships. And so many positive things have happened.”

We f%$#ing live in f%$#ing Bizarro World.

I think that this was an authentic statement from Trump, but honestly, I’m not sure when he is sincere, and when he is just trolling.

F%$# Donald Trump for Making Boris Johnson Look Wise

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The fact that Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who can best be described as little more than a life support system for his hair, can appear wise when talking about Donald Trump is an indication of just how wrong and disturbing the whole phenomenon of Trump’s political ascendance is:

London’s mayor, the conservative politician Boris Johnson, also chimed in.

“As a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, London has a proud history of tolerance and diversity and to suggest there are areas where police officers cannot go because of radicalization is simply ridiculous,” he said.

“The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump,” Johnson quipped.

We live in Bizarro World.

It Appears That Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia Thinks That Blacks Are Too Stupid for College

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Yes, he actually said that during an affirmative action argument before the Supreme Court:

In the oral arguments Wednesday for a Supreme Court affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia—a well known critic of affirmative action—suggested that the policy was hurting minority students by sending them to schools too academically challenging for them.

Referencing an unidentified amicus brief, Scalia said that there were people who would contend that “it does not benefit African-Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.”

He argued that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.”

“They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re — that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them,” Scalia said.

Remember when I said that I was ready for Scalia to choke on his own bile?

It’s not gonna happen.

If it could, he would have been taken to hospital in an ambulance today.

In fact, half the court would have had to be treated for bile suffocation just from the amount that he spewed.

I See that You Have Jumped C. Megalodon*

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C. Megalodon. One Big Shark

While there are some very valid reasons for students to make protests, but the protesters of Lebanon Valley College have lost their f%$#ing minds:

Lebanon Valley College administrators were presented a “list of demands” Friday, after a heated week of equality-driven student demonstrations and calls to action that gripped the predominantly white institution.

 It was against this backdrop that a standing room-only crowd gathered inside a lecture hall in the school’s Miller Chapel Friday, and organizers delivered demands meant to bring about greater diversity in faculty and student ranks, as well as a greater sense of inclusiveness on campus.

 The demands — announced at the end of Friday’s meeting and promptly handed to the university’s president, Dr. Lewis Thayne — include calls for a more diverse curriculum; removing or altering the name “Lynch” in the college’s “Lynch Memorial Hall” due to the word’s racial connotations; more sensitivity training for staff; diversity workshops; regular surveys of the racial climate on campus; facilities recognizing varied gender identities and disabilities; and clearer protocols for officials in responding to allegations and acts of bias.

As an FYI, the hall is not named after the practice of extrajudicial murders by hanging or burning, it’s named after a former president of Lebanon Valley College, Clyde A. Lynch, who among other things, kept the college going during the depression.

I guess we should fire the current Attorney General of the United States, a black woman named Loretta Lynch, because these delicate little flowers feel vaguely uncomfortable.

You know, there are statues to actual racists, and defenders of racism, all over the couintry, see Lee, Robert E. and Forest, Nathan B., and you are going after this?

Here is a counter proposal:  Get your head out of your collective asses.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Well, This Is One F%$# of a Campaign Slogan………

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Too Evil for Dick Cheney.

Seriously, it is a complete mindf%$# that the Donald has plumbed depths that Dick Cheney recoils from in horror:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is joining a chorus of voices slamming GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims from entering the U.S.

“I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in,” Cheney told radio host Hugh Hewitt.

“I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from,” Cheney added during Monday’s interview.

This is so wrong, and so weird, that I am at a complete loss for words.

They Have Learned Nothing, and They Have Forgotten Nothing*

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We now have a report on the the police response that created the rioting in Baltimore.

It appears that excessively aggressive police actions, including when the police kettled large numbers of  students leaving high schools at the end of the day at Mondawmin in an misguided attempt at dick swinging, are not on the agenda:

As rioting erupted on Baltimore’s streets in April, the city police Command Center — where top decision-makers had gathered to get a handle on the situation — was itself in disarray, according to a new review of the agency’s response to the unrest.

 In a room designed to hold 30 to 40 people, as many as 100 had gathered, some without a clear role. The crowding was so severe that the department’s 10-person Analytical Intelligence Section, which was charged with developing information that could help the department deploy resources and anticipate threats, was blocked from its own equipment — and provided just two computers to do its work. The room was so loud the analysts could barely hear threat tips being relayed to them over the phone.

 That environment, described as “chaotic” and “distracting” by some in the room, was just one of many “major shortcomings” in the Baltimore Police Department’s handling of the unrest, according to a sweeping review by the Police Executive Research Forum, a highly regarded law enforcement think tank based in Washington.

 The group’s 79-page report, which then-Commissioner Anthony W. Batts requested this summer, is scheduled to be released publicly on Monday but was provided to The Baltimore Sun.

 The report — titled “Lessons Learned from the 2015 Civil Unrest in Baltimore” — provides new critiques of key top-level decisions and details that bolster previous criticism. It also highlights continuing gaps in knowledge about how the worst of the rioting, looting and arson erupted, noting that reviewers were “unable to determine who issued the order to cancel bus service” at Mondawmin Mall on April 27 — a decision that left many students stranded in the area that day.

 The report detailed a long list of “major findings,” reflected in 56 recommendations for the Police Department to implement. It said planning was inadequate, arrest policies were unclear, equipment was severely lacking, officer training was inadequate, mutual aid agreements with other localities were insufficient or unclear, and orders to officers were not clearly defined. Command positions were also changed at times without notice, causing confusion, the report said.

This is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

They cannot find out who gave the order to kettle what were primarily students trying to get home because it was a relatively low level functionary who has gotten his friends to cover for him, and they are covering for him, because these officers believe that it is essential for them to be kept in their place.

They thought that they were justified in taunting a bunch of adolescent teens and confining them for no reason because they were “Uppity.”

Unfortunately, this deeply toxic mindset is the rule, rather than the exception in policing in the United States.

You can find the full report here.

*This is frequently attributed to the French stateman Tallyrand, but he is not the source.

Not a Surprise………

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It turns out that when correcting for poverty, crime rate, and the like, the only thing that determines the level of law enforcement personnel at a school is solely determined by the percentage of black students:

With the viral video of a police officer violently arresting a black female student at high school in South Carolina reinvigorating the debate over school resource officers, new research bolsters critics’ claims that school security can have a negative effect on students, particularly African Americans.

The new study by two academics in New York showed that the mere presence of African American students at a school makes it more likely the school will take on security measures, even when controlling for neighborhood crime and school misconduct.

The study also found, among other things, greater racial disparities in student suspensions and arrests in schools where there are cops present or other security measures are taken. Those arrest and suspensions are believed to contribute to the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.”

This is not a surprise.

It has been “Zero Tolerance”, and “Getting Tough On insertnounhere”, etc. have almost always been primarily an a ploy to excuse racism.

So, When White Folks Start to Oppose a Policy, Obama Starts to Listen

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After 6 years of failure, and complaints from teachers, poor and minority have complained that the Obama administration’s support of relentlessly mindless testing and a corporate for profit model for public schools.

Well, now that the protests are reaching into white school districts, Obama finally has to pay attention to parents and teachers, as opposed to listening to corrupt grifter and banksters who are determined to make their fortunes off of public education money:

Faced with mounting and bipartisan opposition to increased and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s public schools, the Obama administration declared Saturday that the push had gone too far, acknowledged its own role in the proliferation of tests, and urged schools to step back and make exams less onerous and more purposeful.

 Specifically, the administration called for a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to “reduce over-testing” as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools.

 “I still have no question that we need to check at least once a year to make sure our kids are on track or identify areas where they need support,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, who has announced that he will leave office in December. “But I can’t tell you how many conversations I’m in with educators who are understandably stressed and concerned about an overemphasis on testing in some places and how much time testing and test prep are taking from instruction.”
………
As a new generation of tests tied to the Common Core was rolled out last spring, several states abandoned plans to use the tests, while others renounced the Common Core, or rebranded it as a new set of local standards. And some parents, mostly in suburban areas, had their children opt out of the tests.

(emphasis mine)

That last bit is exactly the same racist tripe that Duncan used 2 years ago, when he stated his mystification over the the fact hat there were white suburban parents were opposing his ruining the public schools.

I don’t think that either Duncan or Obama understand why white people are finally turning on their educational vision, but I do think that they understand the political reality.

Black people, brown people, and teachers they could ignore, but once it was white folks, they were forced to at least pretend to listen.

Hired Guns Arrive at Predetermined Conclusion

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The prosecutors in Cayuga County hired a couple of “experts” to review the Tamir Rice shooting and they determined that Cleveland Police did the right thing when they shot a 12 year old to death.

This is hired gun expert witness bullsh%$ at its worst:

Two outside investigators looking into the death of Tamir Rice have concluded that a Cleveland police officer, Tim Loehmann, acted reasonably in deciding last year to shoot when he confronted the 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a replica gun.

 Those opinions, reached separately by a Colorado prosecutor and a former F.B.I. supervisory special agent, were released Saturday night by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty, whose office will ultimately present evidence in the case to a grand jury to decide on possible criminal charges.

 “The question is not whether every officer would have reacted the same way,” Kimberly A. Crawford, the retired F.B.I. agent, wrote in her report, which noted that Officer Loehmann had no way of knowing Tamir’s gun was fake. “Rather, the relevant inquiry is whether a reasonable officer, confronting the exact same scenario under identical conditions could have concluded that deadly force was necessary.”

 The reports, which were commissioned by the prosecutor’s office, come almost 11 months after the shooting outside a recreation center on Nov. 22, 2014. Footage of the shooting was captured on a surveillance camera, and Tamir’s name quickly became among the most prominent in a series of black men and boys whose deaths at the hands of the police were memorialized in Twitter hashtags and protest chants.

 Both Ms. Crawford and S. Lamar Sims, the prosecutor from Colorado, said in their reports that they were evaluating Officer Loehmann’s actions under the United States Constitution, not Ohio state law.

 “There can be no doubt that Rice’s death was tragic and, indeed, when one considers his age, heartbreaking,” Mr. Sims wrote. But he added that “Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat.”

These so-called experts were hired by the prosecutor because they knew that they would say before they ever signed a contract:

A YouTube video of a prosecution expert who has sided with Cleveland police in the shooting death of Tamir Rice has emerged. The video shows him making pro-police comments about the case months ago.

Further, a second expert hired by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty to review the Rice shooting was once admonished by the U.S. Department of Justice for being “unfaithful” to the law in an effort to exonerate police in their use of deadly force.

The videotaped comments by S. Lamar Sims, a senior chief deputy district attorney in Denver, and the pro-police stance by expert Kimberly Crawford are raising questions of McGinty’s motive in retaining their reports of the 12-year-old boy’s shooting death last year.

McGinty released their respective reports late Saturday. Both experts hired by McGinty found the officer’s shooting of Tamir, who was armed only with a pellet gun, to be justified.

………

In the YouTube video posted on May 8, Sims does not mention Tamir Rice by name. However, it is clear that he is speaking about the boy’s shooting last year outside of the Cudell Recreation Center on Cleveland’s west side.

………

Subodh Chandra, the Cleveland attorney representing the Rice family, said Sims’ comments appear to favor police. Chandra said the comments make it appear that Sims was selected by McGinty for his pro-police stance.

“It’s clear from the video that this so-called expert engaged by the prosecutor’s office had already prejudged this matter long before he was engaged by the prosecutor,” said Chandra. “It also raises questions in the Rice family’s minds about whether that was precisely why that so-called expert was engaged.”

Chandra said Crawford’s past support of police also raises questions about her biases and whether those past opinions are the reason McGinty asked that she review the evidence connected to Tamir’s shooting death.

In a past case of police use of deadly force, Crawford’s opinion was rejected by the Department of Justice for being outside the law, “overly protective of law enforcement” and going “too far to exonerate the use of force.”

What we have here is yet Another prosecutor who is trying to lose a case against a rogue cop who murdered a black kid.

Get a Brain, Morans

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Some inbred white bigots who don’t know how to use a spell checker have decided that enough is enough, so they took to flying pro confederate banners over various monuments:

Community activists and historic preservationists got help from an unusual source to draw attention to their protest Saturday of statues of Confederate leaders on Monument Avenue during the first day of training for the UCI Road World Championships.

 A small plane carrying a banner with a Confederate battle flag and the phrase “Confederate heros matter” circled above Monument Avenue, where the protest had gathered at the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

 The Virginia Flaggers, who took credit for the banner on their Facebook page, said the misspelling of “heroes” was “Pilot error. We sent the right spelling. We think the point was still made.”

 “This is the first time he’s ever messed up,” Grayson Jennings, a spokesman for the Virginia Flaggers, said of the pilot in an interview. “I don’t think half the people even knew he messed up.”

(emphasis mine)

Trust me, people know.

This is going to end up a major meme, kind of like this pic:

The stupid, it burns us.

I Think That Obama Is Beginning to F%$# with Republicans for Sh%$S and Giggles

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White House officials have just met with Black Lives Matter officials:

Black Lives Matter activists, including select members of Campaign Zero, met with top White House officials on Wednesday, a senior administration official confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

Activists met with senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, as well as Roy Austin, the deputy assistant to the president for urban affairs, and a collection of White House officials. The meeting focused on law enforcement and community policing with an emphasis on how to increase public safety locally.

I can hear wingnut heads exploding right now.

And in the News of the Self-Evident

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The Justice Department has determined that police tactics worsened unrest and violence during the Ferguson protests:

Tactics used by police during the days of sometimes-violent street protest last year in Ferguson, Missouri, increased tensions between law enforcement and protesters, according to a report Thursday by the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Service, known as COPS.

The report said the use of dogs, snipers and tactical vehicles designed for the military “inflamed tensions and created fear among demonstrators.”

The COPS office reviewed how police responded in the 17 days after the fatal police shooting Aug. 9, 2014, of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown.

Although it focused on the conduct of four agencies — St. Louis County police, St. Louis Metropolitan police, the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the Ferguson Police Department — it said more than 50 law enforcement agencies were eventually involved. Their participation suffered from “inconsistency in direction” and a lack of effective communication.

The report said using dog teams for controlling crowds of protesters “invokes powerful emotions in many observing citizens and protesters, particularly where racial tensions exist.” Tear gas was used inappropriately, it says, without considering how protesters could safely move away.

I am a bit more skeptical of what was going on.

I think that the actions of law enforcement in and around Ferguson were calculated to stoke unrest, because they wanted a pretext to respond with violence in order to assert their authority.

Law enforcement wanted to create a violent situation in order to justify their use of violence, and they hoped for, and largely got, a complacent media to buy into their narrative in order to discredit the protesters narrative.

Some Good Law Enforcement News for Today

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The new judge in charge of the Ferguson Missouri municipal court has rescinded hundreds of arrest warrants, and has promised to make the court less abusive on poor and black people:

A new municipal judge in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday ordered sweeping changes to court practices in response to a scathing Justice Department report following the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown a year ago.

Municipal Court Judge Donald McCullin, appointed in June, ordered that all arrest warrants issued in the city before Dec. 31, 2014 be withdrawn.

Defendants will receive new court dates along with options for disposing of their cases, such as payment plans or community service. Fines may be commuted for indigent people.

The changes come five months after the U.S. Department of Justice strongly criticized city leaders in its report, saying the police force and court worked together to exploit people in order to raise revenue.

The Justice Department specifically said Ferguson’s municipal court practices caused significant harm to many people with cases pending as minor municipal code violations turned into multiple arrests, jail time, and payments that exceeded the cost of the original ticket many times over.

Here is hoping that the reforms stick, but I doubt it.

In the long run, there is too much money in shaking poor black people in Ferguson for it to end without an outside agent forcing them to do so.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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Analysts at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that black students are expelled from school at a disproportionate rate:

With the Obama administration focused on reducing the number of suspensions, expulsions and arrests in public schools, a new analysis of federal data identifies districts in 13 Southern states where black students are suspended or expelled at rates overwhelmingly higher than white children.

The analysis, which will be formally released Tuesday by the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on states where more than half of all the suspensions and expulsions of black students nationwide occurred. While black students represented just under a quarter of public school students in these states, they made up nearly half of all suspensions and expulsions.

In some districts, the gaps were even more striking: in 132 Southern school districts, for example, black students were suspended at rates five times their representation in the student population, or higher.

………

Still, “I am actually shocked that there is not more outrage,” said Shaun R. Harper, associate professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania and the executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education who was a co-author of the analysis.

………

“This is at least partly attributed to people having these racist assumptions about black kids,” Mr. Harper said. “We argue that too little happens in schools of education to raise consciousness about that.”

This is an outrage, and it is also not even a little surprise.

We have already had the story of the three year old son of an upper middle class black woman who has been suspended 5 times, while her white friends at the preschool noted that their kids had done worse with no consequences.

We are still a deeply racist society.