Why?
Sunday, November 1, 2020
Friday, October 30, 2020
Nation’s Leading Latino Civil Rights Organization Calls for Action Instead of a One Day Observance
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Thursday, October 29, 2020
An experience uncommon for most Americans, except other Black men, 'A Knee on His Neck'. Washington Post. October 2020
Floyd’s persistent cycle through Harris County’s criminal justice system during the War on Drugs was remarkably routine for Black people like him.
“Nobody is going to look out for you,” Floyd’s siblings recall their mother, Larcenia Floyd Jones, saying as she admonished them about how to survive an interaction with police.
The rules were: Speak the King’s English. Try to comply. Don’t give White folks an opportunity to think you did something wrong.
And perhaps most critically: Respect the police.
Sports kept Floyd out of trouble during his youth, friends and relatives said. But as he aged into adulthood, that changed. His friend Travis Cains struggles to distinguish their many encounters with police during their time in Cuney Homes. But he does recall the pebbles of broken street gravel that stung his cheek when police pushed him and Floyd to the ground. He remembers the “jump-out boys,” a plainclothes Houston Police unit of the gang squad known for flying out of cars after a drug transaction and pouncing on anyone they could arrest. He recalls officers finding drugs where there had been none.
“Injustice has been happening to us all our life,” Cains said.
Show-ups and throw-downs
The year Floyd’s family moved to Houston in 1977, city police officers faced murder charges in the slaying of a Mexican American war veteran who was arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct at a bar, then tortured and pushed into a bayou to drown. A judge sentenced the offending officers to probation and issued a $1 fine for negligent homicide in the killing of Joe Campos Torres. Protesters chanted, “A Chicano’s life is only worth a dollar!”
Tensions exploded on the first anniversary of Campos Torres’s arrest at Moody Park, when officers arrived to break up a fight during a Cinco de Mayo celebration. The crowd retaliated, invoking Campos Torres’s name. People ransacked stores, torched police cars and threw rocks at officers in bloody bedlam.
Brown came in to shift the policing paradigm through a neighborhood-oriented model that put officers in precincts inside communities, including Third Ward. Floyd’s neighborhood was an easy target for “bean-counting officers,” said Bradford. Federal grants provided perverse incentives for locking up people, doling out overtime money based on the number of arrests, tickets and calls.
Being an officer in Texas was like “a Black man joining the Klan” in the eyes of many, McClelland said. It made little sense to the Black residents of areas such as Cuney Homes to see a Black face in uniform when they viewed police as the state’s instrument of oppression. He remembered feeling the same way growing up in East Texas, where police enforced Jim Crow laws and kept people from voting.
“They overreacted, sometimes, out of fear,” he said. “They didn’t understand Black people or minorities; they didn’t understand their culture; they didn’t grow up around Black people or minorities and they always felt a greater threat when we would engage minorities. They always had a sense that they would get hurt or killed, and I rarely felt that.”
Parts of Third Ward were simultaneously over-policed and under-policed, said Scott Henson, a Texas criminal justice reform researcher. While officers were incentivized to aggressively police low-level crimes, “if someone was shot or threatened, Black folks were not finding police at their beck and call,” said Henson, who also worked on police accountability for the ACLU of Texas and was a policy director for the Innocence Project of Texas.
Brown, tried to stop the racially disparate treatment of Houston residents, or at least curtail it, former officers said. He recruited and promoted Black and Hispanic officers, developed youth programs and brought citizens — including local ministers — into the public safety strategy.
But little had changed by the time Bradford, an acolyte of Brown’s, became chief in 1996. He took a similar approach, wanting his officers to be problem-solvers who help prevent crime and not just enforce the law. He fired criminal officers, opened a victim services unit and encouraged de-escalation training.
[Who was George Floyd? Post Reports explores the experiences of the man who sparked a movement.]
A year into Bradford’s tenure as the head of Houston Police, Floyd was charged with his first drug offense.
The 23-year-old was back where he had started after a promising collegiate athletic career disintegrated, and he came home from college with nothing to show for it. He was charged with selling less than a gram of cocaine, a state jail felony. After a 10-month sentence at Lychner State Jail, Floyd returned to Cuney Homes with a couple hundred dollars in court debt and few ways to pay.
“Now he’s walking the street, he can’t get an education, he can’t get a job, he can’t get a place to live. So what is he going to do?” said longtime activist James Douglas, who leads the Houston NAACP and is a Texas Southern University law professor.
Cains, Floyd’s longtime friend, said he and Floyd were harassed regularly by police who knew they had records. One night, officers detained them during a trip to the corner store on suspicion of driving a stolen car, and threw the pint of ice cream they had bought to the ground. The officers’ suspicion was unfounded, Cains said.
Prosecutors ultimately reduced the charges to theft, leaving out the firearm charges. Floyd took the deal, but it would not be the last time he would serve time based on questionable eyewitness identification.
Police were operating on a belief that the more arrests they made, the safer the community would be, McClelland recalled. They believed that locking up young offenders for a long time and releasing them as older adults would push them to age out of crime.
“But we didn’t understand — and I don’t know if people in Houston Police management, at that time, understood — the long term consequences of that type of philosophy,” he said.
As a result, a generation of young Black Americans could never fully return to society......
It does not end on November 3rd, or any election year in any community.
To our next generation leaders. Take charge. Get involved locally.
Business as usual before March 2020 is approaching in many minds. Do not lose the momentum.
Vulnerable communities, vulnerable population. Our communities will continue to get the
‘short end of the stick’, or NO STICK AT ALL.
- Disasters
are known to effect disenfranchised and communities of color greater.
- Public
Health crisis (COVID-19) effect disenfranchised communities, and zip codes
have now identified them even further.
- Individuals
in recovery (drug addiction, financial loses, mental and physical health
recovery that may lead to homelessness) will continue to increase globally
- Climate Change with environmental ‘injustice’ will raise its head even more in 2021 with the communities mentioned above being bypassed for true equity and wealth from the funding to address the impacts of climate change.
BEMA International cannot step up to the plate with you in your community if you’re not involved.
Get involved. You have nothing to lose.
Be safe, stay healthy.
CDS
Charles
D. Sharp
Cornell University Climate Fellow Chairman\CEO Black Emergency Managers Association International 1231-B Good Hope Road. S.E. Washington, D.C. 20020 Office: 202-618-9097 bEMA International |
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"It is my belief that the best
results in business come from a creative process, from the ability to see
things differently from everyone else, and from finding answers to problems
that are not bound by the phrase 'we have always done it this way.' "
Wayne Rogers
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Wednesday, October 28, 2020
Busboys and Friends: Zoom Dinner Party with Alicia Garza Friday, October 30, 2020
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