On Tuesday night, I was in an auditorium with 100 black men in the city of Baltimore, when the subject pivoted to Brett Kavanaugh. I expected to hear frustration that the sexual-assault allegations against him had failed to derail his Supreme Court appointment. Instead, I encountered sympathy. One man stood up and asked, passionately, “What happened to due process?” He was met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods.
If you think Kavanaugh receiving some measure of support from black men in inner-city Baltimore is as strange as Taylor Swift suddenly feeling the need to become a modern-day Fannie Lou Hamer, then brace yourself: The caping for Kavanaugh does make a twisted kind of sense. Countless times, black men have had to witness the careers and reputations of other black men ruthlessly destroyed because of unproved rape and sexual-assault accusations. And as that Baltimore audience member also argued, if the claims were made by a white woman, expect the damage to be triple.
A Nashville T-shirt company known for its philanthropy has created a new design to honor and benefit the victim’s of the Waffle House shooting in Antioch.
Project 615’s latest shirt is a redesign of the Waffle House logo and reads “Spread Love.”
“Due to the recent tragedy at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee, we are reminded just how important it is to Spread Love,” said Project 615.
“With heavy hearts, we created this tee in hopes that in some small way we can create a ripple effect to spread love after such a tragedy and to bring any relief we can to the victims who were impacted.”
All profits from the shirt will be donated to the victims of the Waffle House shooting. It is priced at $29.99.
Posted by Libergirl…too many black men dead unnecessarily….I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it so I’m repressing it….One day five years now I’ll be drinking a cup of coffee and I’ll just snap.
Murders in Chicago have already topped 700 this year, police said on Thursday, as a surge in violence in the third largest U.S. city has sent the number of killings to its highest point in nearly two decades.
There were 77 murders in November, according to the Chicago Police Department, bringing the number of murders to 701 for the year to date.
Murders have surged 55 percent from the same period last year, according to CPD spokesman Frank Giancamilli. The murder rate is the highest since 704 people were killed in 1998 and 761 in 1997.
The number of murders in Chicago, a city of 2.7 million, exceeds those in Los Angeles and New York combined, according to data from the respective police forces. Both cities have considerably larger populations than Chicago.
1. The Police Have No Duty To Protect You
It’s plastered right on the side of many police cruisers: “To Protect And to Serve”, but this serves as little more then a PR slogan for the public to feel more comfortable and trusting of the police. In 2005 the supreme court ruled in a case titled Warren Vs The District of Columbia it was ruled that police do not have a constitutional duty to protect, all the way to and including against a women who has a protection from abuse order from a husband and is being attacked by said husband. Being stalked? No duty to protect. Locked away somewhere by an attacker. No duty to protect. Being raped? Well, you get the point, unfortunately. The court went as far as to say “”[t]he duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists. ”. Supporters of this verdict will tell you that it is because individuals are expected to protect themselves and their loved ones, which is true, but many states such as New York, and New Jersey get in the way of that with their draconian gun laws, effectively making them reliant on police, who then have no duty to oblige. A viscous cycle indeed.
Authorities have ruled the death of an inmate at a jail run by a top law enforcement supporter of GOP nominee Donald Trump a homicide caused by “profound dehydration.”
Image: Joe Raedle, Getty Images
Terrill Thomas, 38, was found dead in a Milwaukee County Jail cell on April 24, nine days after being arrested in connection with a shooting. Other inmates heard Thomas beg for water in the days before he died, the Journal Sentinel reported in July.
The Huffington Post has been tracking jail deaths ― more than 800 ― in the year since Sandra Bland died in a Texas jail on July 13, 2015.
The Huffington Post has been tracking jail deaths ― more than 800 ― in the year since Sandra Bland died in a Texas jail on July 13, 2015.
In a continued push for criminal justice reform, President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 111 additional inmates, the White House announced Tuesday.
Image: Image: Tri-Parish Times
Obama broke his previous single-day record when he pardoned 214 federal inmates earlier this month. According to the White House, a whopping 325 people were granted clemency this August, making it the greatest number of commutations ever granted by a president in a single month.
“We must remember that these are individuals — sons, daughters, parents, and in many cases, grandparents — who have taken steps toward rehabilitation and who have earned their second chance,” White House Counsel Neil Eggleston wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “They are individuals who received unduly harsh sentences under outdated laws for committing largely nonviolent drug crimes.”
The majority of those pardoned Tuesday were serving lengthy sentences for cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine trafficking, USA Today reports. Thirty-five individuals also had their life sentences commuted.
Obama has fiercely defended his use of commutations and continues to work with bi-partisan Congress to make sweeping criminal justice reforms. However, legislation aimed at ending unduly harsh sentencing for drug offenses remain stalled on Capitol Hill.
