THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES!: Anti-Police Brutality Protest, New York City — July 8, 2016

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Photographs and video Ronald David Jackson

Stephen A. Smith Says There's NO Racism in America Today - Here's His 'Proof' (Video)

Obviously Stephen A. Smith needs "help' — Here it is.

Rebellion Breaks Out After Cops Shoot Teen In Salt Lake City, Utah — He Had A Broom Handle (Video)

Abdi Mohamed.

By Don Crothers
A teenager was shot four times by police at about 8 p.m. Friday, in the Rio Grande District of Salt Lake City, Utah, according to a report from Fox 13, and riots have broken out in response. The victim remains unidentified, but witnesses indicate that he is 16.

While details are still sketchy, it is alleged that police were responding to an unrelated incident when they received reports of a fight between a teenager and an older man. The teenager was wielding a broomstick.

According to one witness, Selam Mohammed, the police ordered the teenager to drop the broomstick, but shot him before he could comply with the order.

“They told him to put it down, once.”

“[The police] started shooting him as soon as he turned around.”

Mohammed said that the victim was his friend and confirmed his age, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

________

________

The state of the teenager’s wounds is currently unknown, but Mohammed indicated that he had been shot in the chest and stomach.

“The police said, ‘Drop it’ once, then they shot him four times. We were trying to break it up before the police even came, but the police ran in on foot and pulled their guns out already. They already had them, like, as soon as he was running he was already grabbing for his gun, not even trying to Tase him or anything… He said ‘Drop it’ [then] ‘Boom, boom!’ four times.”

Police have confirmed that it was an officer-involved shooting and that two officers were involved, and the victim was rushed to hospital.

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Stone Cold Cowardly Murderers: Cops Kill Couple Who Were Sleeping in Car (Video)

The Victims: Marquintan Sandlin (Middle) and Kisha Michael.

By Matt Agorist
Police responded to a call of a suspicious vehicle parked on Manchester Boulevard around 3:10 am. When police arrived, they engaged in a 45-minute long standoff before opening fire on the man and woman inside the vehicle, killing them both.

In the news release on Monday, following the shooting, police claimed that the woman in the car had a gun. Scott Collins, a spokesman for the Inglewood Police Department said that the couple refused to obey the officers’ commands to exit the vehicle. The officers then feared for their safety and opened fire on the car — killing the couple.

The woman was pronounced dead shortly after the shooting, and the man succumbed to his injuries after paramedics transported him to a local hospital, according to the LA Times.

The shooting seemed like an open and shut case until the next day. Mayor James Butts, while responding to questions about the shooting, opened up a huge can of worms — both the man and the woman were unconscious.

For at least 45 minutes, police attempted “to rouse” them in an effort “to de-escalate the situation,” said Butts.

After admitting that the couple was asleep, Butts quickly defended the officers, noting, “Obviously at some point they were conscious because somebody felt threatened.”

However, that notion has yet to be proven and is particularly unlikely due to the fact that not a single officer received so much as a scratch, nor did the couple have any reason to be violent.

Both of the victims were parents; Kisha Michael, 31, a single mother of three sons, and Marquintan Sandlin, 32, a single father of four daughters.

Michael’s twin sister Kisha stated the obvious when she said that it’s possible that Kisha merely passed out on the way home from their night out.

Families for both described them as devoted parents who made arrangements for care of their children while they took a night off, according to NBC Los Angeles.

“The police ain’t telling us nothing,” said Trisha Michael after being met with tight lips from the department.

“He was a loving father,” said Sandlin’s sister Leandra Faulkner. “All he cared about was his girls, getting them right.”

Of course, as is standard procedure for all those killed by police, their arrest records were released to shame them. Michael was on probation for a misdemeanor last year, and 7 years ago, Sandlin was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm in Los Angeles.

According to his relatives, Sandlin had a ‘rough life’ but had turned it around and was working as a successful truck driver.

Sadly, these children will now grow up knowing that their parents were taken from them by cops, scared of a sleeping couple.

Reprinted with permission from  Free Thought Project

Black NYC Cops Sue Police Department: They Were Pressured to Meet Quotas in Arrests and Summonses of Blacks

Officer Edwin Raymond: He was forced to sue the NYPD over quotas in arrests and summonses of blacks.

By David Love
What if rotten, corrupt and racist police departments are working as they were designed to?

When the callous white police officer responds to the Black Lives Matter movement with the retort that “Blue lives matter,” is that a heartfelt sentiment? What of the Black cop? Although certainly there are African-American police officers who have internalized the racial oppression of a career that originated with the slave patrols, others have refused to betray their Blackness and have challenged the system instead.

There is a reason Black police officers have Black police associations. Obviously, the dominant law enforcement associations and unions fail to address the needs of Black officers. But for that badge, hat and gun, Black officer, you are one of the multitude of Black faces you patrol — the folks who get stopped and harassed for doing nothing, and who may even find themselves brutalized and shot dead if they aren’t careful.

The police culture is all about the blue mentality, but it is also a white mentality, where a culture of racism and brutality have been ingrained since the plantation days. Like a gang, it is an indoctrination process, with punishment and retaliation for those who fight against the system and refuse to abide by the rules. Changing the institution from the inside is laudable, though a hard sell. Consider the case of Edwin Raymond, a Black NYPD officer who was the subject of a New York Times Magazine story by Saki Knafo.

Raymond — the son of a Haitian immigrant family and a racially- and socially-conscious Black man — believed he could reform “New York’s Finest” internally. And he was in for a rude awakening. Ultimately, he joined a lawsuit of a dozen Black officers who sued their own department for racism, even secretly recording conversations he had with his superiors. Raymond and others refused to follow the NYPD policy of quotas for arrests and summonses, a race-based practice in which officers were pressured to boost arrests of Blacks and Latinos but stay away from whites and Asians.

An award-winning officer who placed at number eight on the sergeant’s exam, Raymond was passed over for promotions and given abysmal performance reviews because he would not toe the line and make a sufficient number of arrests. Raymond was a Black man in a police force that is only 16 percent Black and whose top ranks are less than 7 percent Black, according to the Marshall Project. The population of New York City is only one third white, but a mostly white police force patrols over an overwhelmingly Black, Latino and Asian population.

Here is a conversation Raymond secretly taped with his supervisor, Sgt. Martin Campbell, also Black, over a bad performance review that Campbell was ordered to write by his own boss:

What is the issue with me?’’ he asked Campbell. ‘‘Just the activity, the quota?’’

Campbell laughed. ‘‘What do you think, bro?’’

‘‘Man,’’ Raymond said.

‘‘Honestly, what do you think?’’

‘‘But it has to be more,’’ Raymond said, “because technically, when it comes to numbers—”

‘‘No, no, no,’’ Campbell said. ‘‘There’s not more. That’s it.’’

And yet that wasn’t it — at least, Raymond didn’t think so. There were other officers in the district, not many, but some, whose numbers were even lower than his.

‘‘You really want me to tell you what I think it is?’’ Campbell asked.

‘‘Of course, because I need to understand this.’’

‘‘You’re a young black man with dreads. Very smart, very intelligent, have a loud say, meaning your words is loud. You understand what I’m saying by that?’’

‘‘Yeah.’’

‘‘I never seen anything like this, bro,’’ Campbell said.

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Charter Schools Were Invented To Maintain Racial Segregation: Law for One Missouri District Still Says Blacks Can't Attend

Edmund Lee: His mother was told he can't attend a charter school because he's black.
(Credit: change.org)

By Ben Norton
The echoes of Jim Crow continue today, five decades after it officially ended.

Edmund Lee is a third-grader at Gateway Science Academy in St. Louis, Missouri, a charter school he has attended since he was in kindergarten. Yet his family recently learned that he will no longer be able to attend the charter school because he is black.

Lee’s family is moving to a new suburban school district, where a decades-old state law does not allow black students to attend charter schools in the city.

“When I read the guidelines I was in shock,” Lee’s mother LaShieka White told a local Fox affilliate. “I was crying.”

School officials say they are unable to override the state law. But the school’s principal and staff have come out in support of the young boy and his family.

“To not see his face in the halls next year would be extremely sad,” Lee’s third grade teacher told local media. “The family is saying they want to stay. I don’t understand why they can’t.”

The young boy’s mother created a Change.org petition, imploring Missouri state officials: “Don’t let race determine my son’s enrollment.”

“My son Edmund is an awesome young man. He currently has a 3.83 GPA, and has above average testing scores in language arts, math, and science. Edmund is very loving and the first to extend a helping hand if a fellow student needs help,” White writes in the petition.

“So imagine our shock when we found out Edmund would no longer be allowed to attend Gateway Science Academy because he is African-American,” she continues.

“The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education should not deny my son admission based on his race,” White adds. “We are going to show Edmund that his parents, community, and people across the country will fight for what is right.”

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New 'Master Race'? - Pt 2: Israeli City Routinely Rejects Ethiopian-Israelis Registering for Marriage

At least 30 Ethiopian-Israeli couples have been denied marriage licenses in Petah Tikva in the last nine months, Army Radio reports. 

Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir greets new immigrants from Ethiopia, 1991.
(Photo by Government Press Office)

(

By JTA
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.704821
Ethiopian-Israelis registering for marriage licenses in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva reportedly are routinely rejected and forced to register elsewhere.

At least 30 Ethiopian-Israeli couples have been denied marriage licenses in Petah Tikva in the last nine months, Army Radio first reported Monday, when it interviewed an Ethiopian-Israeli woman identified as Shega, a Petah Tikva resident who is scheduled to be married in April.

In a conversation last week with the registrar that was secretly recorded, Shega said that despite presenting the paperwork proving she had converted to Judaism, the registrar asked her to provide a letter from a rabbi attesting to the fact that she was a practicing Orthodox Jew. He then suggested the couple register in her groom-to-be’s home community.

“I don’t understand,” the woman told The Jerusalem Post later on Monday. “I presented the forms and approvals from the rabbinate of Jerusalem, and that’s not enough for the rabbi of Petah Tikva, but approval from a rabbi of my ethnicity will satisfy him? They know that my wedding date is imminent, and in any event they are trying to make it difficult for me.

“Would a secular woman have received the same barrage of questions, or is it because of the color of my skin that I am subject to this embarrassing mask of questions?”

Platiel Eisenthal, the supervisor of the Petah Tikva religious council, told The Jerusalem Post when asked about the questions, “What is permitted and required in every other city is also permitted and required in Petah Tikva.” Eisenthal said the issue would be investigated.

Tzohar, an organization made up of religious Zionist rabbis who aim to bridge the gaps between religious and secular Jews in Israel, condemned the rejections.

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Cops Raping Women While On Duty — This Time 2 Cops in Los Angeles Stand Accused

By Reuters
Two Los Angeles Police Department officers have been charged with repeated sexual assaults on four women while on duty in their squad car and elsewhere, prosecutors and police said on Wednesday.

The veteran officers, James Nichols, 44, and his partner, Luis Valenzuela, 43, were arrested on Wednesday and were slated to be arraigned on Thursday, with prosecutors expected to ask that bail be set at nearly $4 million for each man, according to the district attorney’s office.

An 18-count criminal complaint filed on Tuesday charges both officers with numerous instances of forcible rape, rape by threat to arrest or deportation, sexual battery and forcible oral copulation, among other offenses.

The complaint says the two were armed during the majority of the alleged assaults and that most occurred while they were on duty. Valenzuela was also charged with one count of assault with a firearm for allegedly pointing a gun at one of the victims.

If convicted, the two men each face a maximum sentence of life in prison, the district attorney’s office said. They have been suspended without pay since 2013, according to police.

The four women, who were not identified, had all been arrested at various times by Nichols and Valenzuela during drug busts, the D.A.’s office said in a statement.

They ranged in age from 19 to 34 at the time of the alleged assaults, which according to prosecutors began in December 2008 and continued through March 2011.

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NYPD Cop Found Guilty of Manslaughter: Akai Gurley Shot — Walked Down Stairs Due To Broken Elevator

Akai Gurley (l.) was shot in a stairwell of the Pink Houses in Brooklyn. Peter Liang (r.) leaves the courtroom
after the jury's verdict on Thursday.

By Christina Carrega-woodby, John Marzulli, Stephen Rex Brown
The rookie NYPD cop who gunned down innocent and unarmed Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn housing project was convicted Thursday of manslaughter.

The shocking verdict was a powerful message from the jury that the public’s opinion on police killings has radically changed in the wake of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Michael Brown and other tragedies around the country.

The tension was palpable in the Brooklyn courtroom as the jury returned with the verdict just before 7:00 p.m.

Gurley’s family sat in the front row, as they had every day for the two week-long trial.

"I want to thank God. The D.A. was a man of his word,” said Kimberly Ballinger, the mother of Gurley’s daughter. “And I thank the jurors so much."”

“We’re not rejoicing,” Gurley’s aunt Hortencia Peterson told the Daily News. “But it's about being accountable. It’s about a girl who will never know her father.”

Liang, also convicted of official misconduct, faces up to 15 years in jail when he’s sentenced April 14. He is the first NYPD cop to be convicted for a police-involved shooting in a decade.

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Ferguson Fraud: City Spent Months Negotiating Deal On Policing Practices With Justice Department — Sued for Reneging at Last Minute

By Matt Pearce
The city of Ferguson, Mo., must now defend itself against a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice after months of negotiations failed to bring a compromise on a package of reforms designed to revamp the city's controversial policing practices.

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U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch announced the action against Ferguson on Wednesday, a day after federal officials said Ferguson’s City Council tried to unilaterally modify and pass its own version of reforms.

A “disappointed” Lynch criticized Ferguson’s city leaders for trying to amend a package of reforms that had been hammered out between city and federal officials after seven months of what she called “painstaking” negotiations. The reforms include the mandatory use of body cameras and a repeal of city laws that allow police to jail people for not paying fines.

In a 6-0 vote Tuesday night, the City Council said it would only accept the package if the Justice Department agreed to several conditions that included limits on staffing mandates and longer deadlines.

“Every part of that document was discussed and was negotiated extensively,” Lynch said in a televised news conference in Washington, D.C.

Lynch added, “The city was well aware that had they decided not to accept it, they were choosing litigation.”

Ferguson became a national symbol of troubled policing after the August 2014 police shooting death of unarmed, black 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white police officer led to riots and lengthy protests in the predominantly African American St. Louis suburb.

An ensuing Department of Justice investigation found no reason to charge the officer who shot Brown, Darren Wilson, who said Brown had charged at him. Federal investigators could not prove activists’ claims that Brown had his hands up when Wilson shot him.

But a separate department investigation found that the city's police force systematically racially profiled and harassed black residents. The Justice Department report released last March found that the city’s overwhelmingly white police force set dogs on black residents and that officers were seven times more likely to use force on black residents than whites. Black drivers were almost twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during a traffic stop even though they were less likely to be found in possession of something illegal.

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White (Riot) Privilege: Sports Fans Rioted, Again —That's OK, They're Just White Kids Having 'Fun'

Broncos Fans Rioted, Media Displays Typical Double Standard with Little Coverage


By Ricky Riley
After the Denver Broncos won Super Bowl 50, fans took to the street and a “peaceful” celebration turned into a riot with 12 people arrested. Major media outlets seem to have blacked out the event because images of the riot have not been plastered across TV screens and social media outlets.

Here is the video of the incident from The Denver Channel:

Sports riots are common in cities where a team either wins or loses. While Black people who riot over the multitude of social injustices in the country are called “animals” or “savages,” white rioters in these sports riots are given a slap on the wrist and not dehumanized.

Here are some major examples of the double standard. After the 2010, 2012 and 2014 World Series, San Francisco Giants fans took to the streets, flipped buses and caused major damage.

Photo by Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

In 2011, during the Jerry Sandusky child molestation investigation into Penn State University, fans who supported Coach Joe Paterno after he was fired took to the streets to riot.

After a 2015 college football championship, Ohio State fans were responsible for an estimated 90 fires.

That same year, University of Kentucky fans destroyed property after their Final Four loss. There were 31 arrests, according to the New York Daily News.

These riots are just a small sample of the double standards and racial undertones at play in news coverage. These events of dangerous property damage and arson involved majority-white crowds, while “riots” in Baltimore and Ferguson happened after incidents of social injustice in poor Black communities.

The coverage is always different. It also shows the real ugliness of racial bias and white privilege many in the dominant society are oblivious to.

Originally published in Atlanta BlackStar 

The Oscars Are Too White — and That's a Jewish Problem

By Jay Michaelson
The Jews control Hollywood.” It’s one of those anti-Semitic tropes that, we all know, contains a certain grain of truth. “Control,” no — not with that ominous, conspiratorial connotation. But “helped create”? “Disproportionately populate?” Sure.

From the founding of California’s motion picture industry (well documented in books like Neal Gabler’s “An Empire of Their Own: How Jews Created Hollywood”) to the present day, Jews have played an outsized role as its producers, agents, directors and writers. It’s not just a myth.

Which is why the at-least-equally disproportionate exclusion of people of color from the Academy Awards — the phenomenon hashtagged as #OscarsSoWhite — is a Jewish problem. But it’s also a Jewish opportunity, because if Jewish leaders took the initiative to address the crisis proactively, the Jewish “elephant in the room” could instead be a powerful force for change.

We can’t know precisely how many Jews vote in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a lofty name for what is mostly a trade organization. That’s because the names of the academy’s 5,765 voting members are kept secret.

RELATED STORY: Who runs Hollywood? C'mon

In 2012, however, the Los Angeles Times did what Angelenos do best — they networked — to confirm the identities of more than 5,100 of those voters. What they found, to no one’s surprise, is that the academy is as white as this year’s honorees. In 2012, Oscar voters were 94% white and 77% male. Blacks and Latinos constituted about 2% each.

That is disgraceful, even if the numbers have improved over the past four years.

[...]

Here’s where Jewish leadership could play a role.

Suppose L.A.’s celebrity rabbis urged Jewish film machers to take the initiative in diversifying the industry as a whole, not just the academy specifically. Suppose those movers and shakers personally committed to more recruitment, more support and more training of women and people of color in the film industry at large.

None of this would require government programs, quotas or race-based hiring. Rather, imagine if the Spielbergs and Geffens of L.A. endowed scholarships for minority students working in film, internship opportunities at their own shops, and proactive efforts to reach out to those from disadvantaged communities.

And imagine if they did so as Jews — generally, in the case of Hollywood, non-practicing and non-religious Jews, but still members of what Justice Felix Frankfurter once called “the most persecuted minority in history.” If a public alliance of American Jewish filmmakers took personal initiative to fix this unjust, embarrassing and ugly situation, they could make a real difference.

Would this not honor American Jews’ long experiences with marginalization and exclusion, the historic support of Jews for the civil rights movement, and the most profound teachings of the Jewish ethical tradition?

It would also honor the Jewish history of Hollywood itself. That history is, in many respects, an honorable one with respect to race and class. Gabler’s book makes a convincing argument that Jews, excluded from the elitist and racist New York film industry, created an alternate universe in California that valued the underdog over the elite, the outsider over the insider. This was the world of “Gone With the Wind” (produced by the Jewish David O. Selznick) — which, for all its racial stereotypes and concentration on white Southerners, focuses on a female hero with far less prejudice than her peers — rather than that of the overtly racist “Birth of a Nation,” in which the Ku Klux Klan are the heroes.

So, to call for a Jewish response to #OscarsSoWhite is not to demean the Jewish role in Hollywood, but to affirm its best aspects while working to remedy its shortcomings.

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Drug Planting Cover Up Gets Brutal Cop A Light Prison Sentence: Drug Planting Caught On Tape Not Mentioned in Charge or Sentence (Video)

The District Attorney, the Judge and the Media engaged in a drug planting cover up right before your eyes...

"Officer" William Melendez was recorded beating an innocent motorist and then planting drugs in his car.  He had a past record of brutality and planting evidence but was only cited for brutality when his mere 13-month prison sentence (with an alleged possibility of up to 10 years) was announced. It seems a good bet that the drug planting was not mentioned because to do so would have called into question every drug arrest Melendez and his corrupt cop cronies were involved in.—Ronald David Jackson

Floyd Dent, the victim of the beating, arrest and attempting drug framing, passed a lie detector test and his fingerprints weren’t found on the baggie of white powder that was found in his car.

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Ex-Cop William Melendez Gets Up to 10 Years for Beating of Michigan Driver Floyd Dent

By Erik Ortiz
The ex-Michigan cop convicted in the beating of an unarmed driver during a traffic stop last year was sentenced Tuesday to 13 months to 10 years in prison.

__________

Melendez and His Accomplices Beat a Motorist for No Reason,
then Melendez Plants Drugs in the Victim's Car

__________

William Melendez, 47, was caught on police dashboard camera in the January 2015 assault against driver Floyd Dent, who was hit 16 times and choked so hard that he testified he passed out.

RELATED STORY: Crazy, Corrupt, Brutal, Racist Cops and Other 'Public Servants' - Get Fired or Run Off, Only to Be Rehired Somewhere Else — And Inflicted on Blacks

Melendez during his hearing was also sentenced to 90 days on a misconduct in office charge. He was already given 85 days credit for time served, reported NBC affiliate WDIV.


From the bench Tuesday, Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Vonda Evans admonished Melendez for an incident that seemed to spiral out of control from a simple traffic stop.

RELATED STORY: Cop Charged With Abuse - Indictment Says Nothing About His Drug Planting Caught On Tape — They'd Have To Reopen All of His Cases

"You were so into your bravado that you forgot the eye of justice was recording you," Evans said. "You knew better. You were better trained than any of those officers out there. You were more experienced."

Meledenz, who was fired from the Inkster Police Department last April, was found guilty in November of misconduct in office and assault with intent to do great bodily harm.


The jury, however, found him not guilty of a separate count of strangulation. The jury had nine black jurors and seven white jurors — four of those jurors were selected as alternates, although it was unclear which ones.

Dent, a 58-year-old Ford Motor Co. worker, was initially charged with driving on a suspended license, possession of cocaine and assaulting or resisting a police officer. But those charges were later dropped.

Dent has maintained police planted the cocaine on him.

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The Killing of Laquan McDonald: What it Could Have Sounded Like if Police Audio Equipment Was Not Sabotaged (Sound Dubbed In)

Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams To Block Audio, Records Show:
What the 16 bullets into Laquan McDonald could have sounded like

(sound of gunshots dubbed in)

16-Year-Old Girl Found Dead in Cell After 'Martial Arts Hold' Used On Her By Staffer While She Was In Detention

Gynnya McMillen is dead because "she refused to remove her hoodie for a pat down search and photograph."

Gynnya McMillen via Justice for Gynnya McMillen Facebook Page

By Tom Boggioni
A staffer working at a Kentucky juvenile detention center used a martial arts hold on 16-year-old Gynnya McMillen hours before she was found dead in her cell, reports CBS.

According to a spokesperson for the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice, the teen refused to remove her sweatshirt for a pat down search and to have her booking photo taken, leading a staffer to use an “Aikido restraint” on her in order to get her to comply.

HEAR THE AUDIO: Kentucky Jail Staffers Waited 11 Minutes to Begin CPR After
Teen Who Was Restrained With Martial Arts Move Found Dead

“The staff performed an Aikido restraint hold to safely conduct a pat-down search and remove the youth’s hoodie,” spokesperson Stacy Floden stated. “The purpose of having multiple staff involved in a controlled restraint is to ensure the safety of the youth and staff.”

McMillen was found dead in her cell at the Lincoln Village Juvenile Detention Center on Jan. 11, after officials failed to check on her well-being throughout the night.

According to center policy, juvenile detainees in isolation cells must be checked on every 15 minutes by staffers.

On Thursday, Reginald Windham, a 10-year veteran of the juvenile justice department, was placed on administrative leave for failing to check on the teen.

According to the Kentucky Center for Investigative reporting, McMillen’s cold lifeless body was discovered “in a sleeping position” in a “secure” room at 9:55 a.m., after failing to respond to twice earlier when asked if she wanted to eat.

Despite her lack of communication, staffers never entered her cell to check on her.

According to the Hardin County coroner there were no obvious signs of trauma or a drug overdose, and that a toxicology report is still pending and could take two more weeks.

Juvenile justice expert Michele Deitch criticized the use of martial arts on the teen.

“I’ve never heard that phrase used in the context of a corrections setting,” Deitch said, adding refusal to remove a sweatshirt is not acceptable grounds for restraint.

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Cops in San Francisco So Racist — They're Forced to Recite An Anti-Racism Pledge

By AP
San Francisco police officers are being asked to combat racism in the ranks and take a pledge to turn in colleagues displaying intolerant behavior, such as slurs and jokes targeting people of color, gays and women.

The pledge is part of a broader public relations campaign by the embattled police department to repair frayed relations with minority neighborhoods and community activists.

The campaign comes amid growing tensions between police and black communities that are shaking up departments across the country and have led to the dismissal of top brass in some cities, including Chicago. Politically progressive San Francisco is not immune from the unrest. The Dec. 2 shooting of a young black man clutching a kitchen knife by five officers has increased racial tensions and sparked calls for the police chief's removal.

So far, San Francisco's mayor has stood behind the chief amid the emergence of racist text messages exchanged among several officers and a judge's decision that he failed to punish the officers in timely fashion.

Police say Mario Woods, 26, had stabbed a stranger earlier that day, ignored commands to drop the knife and shook off blasts of tear gas and shots from a bean bag gun before officers opened fire.

Police say only one of the five officers involved was white, but protests over the shooting persists. Mayor Ed Lee has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate.

Chief Greg Suhr said the pledge and the "Not on My Watch" campaign had been in the works long before the Woods shooting, but the incident gave the project new urgency. Several angry protests were organized in the rough neighborhood where Woods died. And people demanding the chief's dismissal disrupted the mayor's inauguration on Jan. 8 and briefly shut down the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 18.

Yulanda Williams, who leads a minority police officers group, helped initiate the pledge after she found that a white colleague used a black slur in text messages to other officers complaining about her promotion to sergeant. Other text messages exchanged among Williams' colleagues contained racist and homophobic insults and slurs.

"I will not tolerate hate or bigotry in our community or from my fellow officers," the seven-sentence pledge states in part. "I will confront intolerance and report any such conduct without question or pause."

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10 Things They Won’t Tell You about the Flint Water Tragedy. But I Will — MIchael Moore

News of the poisoned water crisis in Flint has reached a wide audience around the world. The basics are now known: the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the free elections in Flint, deposed the mayor and city council, then appointed his own man to run the city. To save money, they decided to unhook the people of Flint from their fresh water drinking source, Lake Huron, and instead, make the public drink from the toxic Flint River. When the governor’s office discovered just how toxic the water was, they decided to keep quiet about it and covered up the extent of the damage being done to Flint’s residents, most notably the lead affecting the children, causing irreversible and permanent brain damage. Citizen activists uncovered these actions, and the governor now faces growing cries to resign or be arrested.

By Michael Moore
Here are ten things that you probably don’t know about this crisis because the media, having come to the story so late, can only process so much. But if you live in Flint or the State of Michigan as I do, you know all to well that what the greater public has been told only scratches the surface.

1. While the Children in Flint Were Given Poisoned Water to Drink, General Motors Was Given a Special Hookup to the Clean Water. A few months after Governor Snyder removed Flint from the clean fresh water we had been drinking for decades, the brass from General Motors went to him and complained that the Flint River water was causing their car parts to corrode when being washed on the assembly line. The Governor was appalled to hear that GM property was being damaged, so he jumped through a number of hoops and quietly spent $440,000 to hook GM back up to the Lake Huron water, while keeping the rest of Flint on the Flint River water. Which means that while the children in Flint were drinking lead-filled water, there was one — and only one — address in Flint that got clean water: the GM factory.


2. For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Could’ve Been Prevented. Federal law requires that water systems which are sent through lead pipes must contain an additive that seals the lead into the pipe and prevents it from leaching into the water. Someone at the beginning suggested to the Governor that they add this anti-corrosive element to the water coming out of the Flint River. “How much would that cost?” came the question. “$100 a day for three months,” was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it — and as a result the State may now end up having to pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.


3. There’s More Than the Lead in Flint’s Water. In addition to exposing every child in the city of Flint to lead poisoning on a daily basis, there appears to be a number of other diseases we may be hearing about in the months ahead. The number of cases in Flint of Legionnaires Disease has increased tenfold since the switch to the river water. Eighty-seven people have come down with it, and at least ten have died. In the five years before the river water, not a single person in Flint had died of Legionnaires Disease. Doctors are now discovering that another half-dozen toxins are being found in the blood of Flint’s citizens, causing concern that there are other health catastrophes which may soon come to light.


4. People’s Homes in Flint Are Now Worth Nothing Because They Cant Be Sold. Would you buy a house in Flint right now? Who would? So every homeowner in Flint is stuck with a house that’s now worth nothing. That’s a total home value of $2.4 billion down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the U.S., don’t have much to their name, and for many their only asset is their home. So, in addition to being poisoned, they have now a net worth of zero. (And as for employment, who is going to move jobs or start a company in Flint under these conditions? No one.) Has Flint’s future just been flushed down that river?


5. While They Were Being Poisoned, They Were Also Being Bombed. Here’s a story which has received little or no coverage outside of Flint. During these two years of water contamination, residents in Flint have had to contend with a decision made by the Pentagon to use Flint for target practice. Literally. Actual unannounced military exercises – complete with live ammo and explosives – were conducted last year inside the city of Flint. The army decided to practice urban warfare on Flint, making use of the thousands of abandoned homes which they could drop bombs on. Streets with dilapidated homes had rocket-propelled grenades fired upon them. For weeks, an undisclosed number of army troops pretended Flint was Baghdad or Damascus and basically had at it. It sounded as if the city was under attack from an invading army or from terrorists. People were shocked this could be going on in their neighborhoods. Wait – did I say “people?” I meant, Flint people. As with the Governor, it was OK to abuse a community that held no political power or money to fight back. BOOM!


6. The Wife of the Governor’s Chief of Staff Is a Spokeswoman for Nestle, Michigan’s Largest Owner of Private Water Reserves. As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein: “Follow the money.” Snyder’s chief of staff throughout the two years of Flint’s poisoning, Dennis Muchmore, was intimately involved in all the decisions regarding Flint. His wife is Deb Muchmore, who just happens to be the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle Company – the largest owner of private water sources in the State of Michigan. Nestle has been repeatedly sued in northern Michigan for the 200 gallons of fresh water per minute it sucks from out of the ground and bottles for sale as their Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water. The Muchmores have a personal interest in seeing to it that Nestles grabs as much of Michigan’s clean water was possible – especially when cities like Flint in the future are going to need that Ice Mountain.


7. In Michigan, from Flint water, to Crime and Murder, to GM Ignition Switches, It’s a Culture of Death. It’s not just the water that was recklessly used to put people’s lives in jeopardy. There are many things that happen in Flint that would give one the impression that there is a low value placed on human life. Flint has one of the worst murder and crime rates in the country. Just for context, if New York City had the same murder rate as Flint, Michigan, the number of people murdered last year in New York would have been almost 4,000 people – instead of the actual 340 who were killed in NYC in 2015. But it’s not just street crime that makes one wonder about what is going on in Michigan. Last year, it was revealed that, once again, one of Detroit’s automakers had put profit ahead of people’s lives. General Motors learned that it had installed faulty ignition switches in many of its cars. Instead of simply fixing the problem, mid-management staff covered it up from the public. The auto industry has a history of weighing the costs of whether it’s cheaper to spend the money to fix the defect in millions of cars or to simply pay off a bunch of lawsuits filed by the victims surviving family members. Does a cynical, arrogant culture like this make it easy for a former corporate CEO, now Governor, turn a blind eye to the lead that is discovered in a municipality’s drinking water?


8. Don’t Call It “Detroit Water” — It’s the Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the World. The media keeps saying Flint was using “Detroit’s water.” It is only filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant. The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third largest body of fresh water in the world. It is a glacial lake formed over 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age and it is still fed by pure underground springs. Flint is geographically the last place on Earth where one should be drinking poisoned water.


9. ALL the Children Have Been Exposed, As Have All the Adults, Including Me. That’s just a fact. If you have been in Flint anytime from April 2014 to today, and you’ve drank the water, eaten food cooked with it, washed your clothes in it, taken a shower, brushed your teeth or eaten vegetables from someone’s garden, you’ve been exposed to and ingested its toxins. When the media says “9,000 children under 6 have been exposed,” that means ALL the children have been exposed because the total number of people under the age of 6 in Flint is… 9,000! The media should just say, “all.” When they say “47 children have tested positive”, that’s just those who’ve drank the water in the last week or so. Lead enters the body and does it’s damage to the brain immediately. It doesn’t stay in the blood stream for longer than a few days and you can’t detect it after a month. So when you hear “47 children”, that’s just those with an exposure in the last 48 hours. It’s really everyone.


10. This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days, So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break. When Governor Snyder took office in 2011, one of the first things he did was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break passed by the Republican legislature for the wealthy and for corporations. But with less tax revenues, that meant he had to start cutting costs. So, many things – schools, pensions, welfare, safe drinking water – were slashed. Then he invoked an executive privilege to take over cities (all of them majority black) by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as “dictators” over these cities. Their mission? Cut services to save money so he could give the rich even more breaks. That’s where the idea of switching Flint to river water came from. To save $15 million! It was easy. Suspend democracy. Cut taxes for the rich. Make the poor drink toxic river water. And everybody’s happy.

Except those who were poisoned in the process. All 102,000 of them. In the richest country in the world.

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Copyright © Michael Moore, michaelmoore.com, 2016