You see something absurd. You hear something absurd. You read something absurd = Yeah,TNTG. Posts tagged police.
“ It’s a damned shame I don’t know more Black graffiti artists, but that speaks volumes about who gets their graffiti deemed “art” and who’s just “vandalising”. Banksy gets to sell his art to Angelina Jolie and the whole of Los Angeles, and they call it a revolution anti-anti-anti-everything, while the most widely known Black artist, Michael Stewart, gets killed by the hands of the cops who arrested him when they caught him “scrawling graffiti”. exactly when POC do it, its vandalizing, suburban white boys do it and they’re hot shit.
— the bad dominicana (via funkyfest)
“
The fact is that transgender people—in particular, transgender people of color—have simply not experienced the same strides forward as their lesbian, gay and bisexual brothers and sisters. A landmark new report, ‘Injustice at Every Turn,’ presents undeniable proof. This report, released on Friday, is based on a comprehensive survey of over 6,000 transgender people and the findings are too shocking to ignore, especially when it comes to African-American transgender people.
Our transgender brothers and sisters are far more likely to lack proper medical care, to be unemployed, to live in extreme poverty, and to be HIV-positive—and that’s when compared to their white transgender counterparts, not just the general population. The survey’s respondents were four times more likely than the general population to live in extreme poverty. One in five reported having been refused a home or apartment, another one in five report having been refused health care. More than one in five, 22 percent, reported having been harassed by law enforcement, and nearly half reported fear of seeking assistance from police. African American respondents reported all of this in even higher numbers.
—
Mandy Carter, Still No Freedom Rainbow for Transgender People of Color (COLORLINES)
If you haven’t already, I recommend taking a look at that report. The race statistics are sobering, and too important to ignore.
(via kiriamaya)
“ I will know the difference when I start seeing these policemen shoot white boys in the back—because they have keys in their hands that look like guns. Then when you ask me that question, I’ll say: ‘We’ve got there.’ If they can do something THAT outrageous and talk to some white parents and say, ‘Oh! Excuse me. I thought it was a gun.’ And when THAT makes sense, then we’re in good shape.” -
— Toni Morrison on when she will know that America has made racial progress (via howtobeterrell)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (via ethiopienne)
Stopped, Frisked and Speaking Out
The Police Department stopped and questioned more than 684,000 people last year. Close to 90 percent were black and Latino. Civil liberties groups have protested, but rarely do we hear from the men who are so frequently stopped. Filmmakers Lindsey Groot and Robin Antonisse provide us with four such stories in this exclusive video.
New Details in Trayvon Martin Case: This is why the police didn’t want to release his cell phone
Trayvon Martin’s friend has spoken out. She was on the phone with Trayvon just moments before his murder.
“He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on. He said he lost the man. I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run but he said he was not going to run. Eventually he would run, thinking that he’d managed to escape. But suddenly the strange man was back, cornering him.
Trayvon said, ‘What, are you following me for,’ and the man said, ‘What are you doing here.’ Next thing I hear is somebody pushing, and somebody pushed Trayvon because the head set just fell. I called him again and he didn’t answer the phone.”
“George Zimmerman’s claim that Martin was suspicious and up to no good is completely contradicted by this phone log, showing all day he was just talking to his friends— like so many teenagers do. Martin was talking to her when he went to the 7/11 and when he came back. Her testimony connects the dots, completely connects the dots of this whole thing.
The friend’s phone call completely blows Zimmerman’s absurd self-defense claim out of the water.
A kid who is up to no good isn’t on the phone constantly calling his friends back. Somebody who’s looking to break in somewhere isn’t on the phone talking to his friend, when she’s in Miami.
Zimmerman wants you to believe he was on drugs and acting suspicious so he can justify killing him in cold blood.
The girl’s family wishes that she remain anonymous because of the traumatic nature of the event:
“This was her really, really close personal friend. They were dating… She couldn’t even go to his wake. She was so sick, her mother had to take her to the hospital, she spent the night in the hospital.” - Martin’s Attorney”
“I thought if you do something wrong you’re supposed to get punished.
(chuckles) Oh Chris, not if you’re white.”
RELEVANT
BREAKING NEWS in Trayvon Martin Case: Officer in the Case Has A Prior Record of Racial Controversy →
WFTV, a local Florida television station, reports that the supervising officer who initially responded to the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford has a prior record of racial controversy. In 2010, Sergeant Anthony Raimondo declined to arrest Justin Collison, who brutally attacked a black homeless man, leaving him unconscious and breaking his nose. Collison, who is white, is the son of a Sanford police officer and the grandson of a former Florida judge.
Collison was intoxicated at the time of the unprovoked attack. Also, a Youtube video captured the attack while it occurred. Despite having possession of the video, Raimando still refused to arrest Collison. Police only arrested Collison after the national media released the video and criticized police handling of the case.Raise your hand if you are surprised by this.
^ Anyone? Anyone?
Didn’t think so.
In his book Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, Paul Barrett traces how the sleek, high-capacity Austrian weapon found its way into Hollywood films and rap lyrics, not to mention two-thirds of all U.S. police departments.
“I was terminated not because my service was inadequate, but because I hold certain opinions that are shared by millions of my fellow Americans,” [former border patrol agent Bryan] Gonzalez is quoted as saying in an ACLU press release. “I am no less patriotic or dedicated to excellence in my work because I respectfully disagree with some of our current border enforcement policies. It was wrong for the U.S. Border Patrol to retaliate against me for exercising my free speech rights guaranteed by the very Constitution I swore to uphold”…
Last September, Joe Miller, a probation officer in Arizona’s Mohave County, near the California–Mexico border, joined 32 members of LEAP in signing a lettersupporting last year’s failed California ballot measure to legalize and tax marijuana. Two months later, Miller was notified that he was under investigation for failing to “indicate that [his] opinion was not the opinion of the Mohave County Probation Department,” even though the LEAP letter included a disclaimer at the bottom that specified that that “all agency affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.” Miller was ultimately terminated.
The majority of the people who signed the petition that Joe Miller was fired for were retired police officers. Think about that for a moment: the majority of the people who signed a petition stating how much damage the drug war has done were police officers who didn’t feel comfortable enough to speak out until they retired (for good reason- look at what happened to Officer Miller).
The threat is implicit, but never deny that it is there. It is there to stifle criticism of the Drug War, and to continue the militarization of the police. A civilian police force should be filled with people in touch with their community and willing to say what policies negatively affect them. Instead, we’ve filled our police force with soldiers who aren’t allowed to question orders.
