Tag: eric garner
#EndorseThis: Watch Spike Lee's Stunning Tribute To George Floyd

#EndorseThis: Watch Spike Lee's Stunning Tribute To George Floyd

Believe it or not, Spike Lee is 63 years old -- but his voice is vital as ever. He is releasing a new feature (Da 5 Bloods) and last week delivered a compelling film tribute to George Floyd titled 3 Brothers. Every adult American should try to watch it, especially anyone who might not grasp the urgency of radical police reform.

Jimmy Fallon watched 3 Brothers debut on CNN and realized that his own audience ought to see it. He brought the great director on The Tonight Show to introduce and provide insightful commentary, which he does in trademark style.

Please be warned: This film includes graphic violence. It induces feelings of grief, rage, and perhaps shame. But that's the point.

View and share at your discretion.


Promising New Partnership Seeks To Reduce Incarceration

Promising New Partnership Seeks To Reduce Incarceration

Eric Garner. John Crawford III. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Eric Harris. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray.

You know their names; you’ve heard them countless times in newscasts and read them in newspaper headlines. They make up a police dishonor roll: unarmed black men who’ve been killed by law enforcement officials or who’ve died in their custody.

Yet, the controversy that has attended those deaths owes more to a quiet and slow-running civic revolution than to the attention of journalists, the passions of activists, or the decisions of higher authorities.

If crime rates were still high, if the numbers of murders, armed robberies, and violent assaults were still vaulting to new records, many people wouldn’t care what happened to Rice or Garner or Gray. They’d believe they deserved what they got. Such is the power of police officers when crime seems out of control.

But crime rates have fallen sharply over the last few decades — down, in 2013, to 1978’s levels. Let’s hope the relative safety of our streets allows us to reconsider not only police brutality but also the prison-industrial complex.

The United States locks up a larger proportion of its citizens than any other nation in the world. While we have about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, we house about 22 percent of its prisoners, according to researchers. That’s simply, well, criminal.

And mass incarceration has exacted a terrible cost — on state budgets, on black neighborhoods, on economic and social justice. According to federal statistics, one in three black men can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetimes.

The misnamed War on Drugs has probably done more to exacerbate black poverty and destroy black families than any other force of the last 50 years. Countless black men have been incarcerated for nonviolent, drug-related offenses. They leave prison burdened by felony records that make them unemployable.

Some conservative criminologists continue to insist that crime rates have fallen because we lock up so many of the bad guys. They’re likely wrong.

To be fair, no one knows for sure why crime is down and keeps falling. But it’s happening throughout the developed world — including in countries, such as Canada, where authorities don’t lock up nearly as many citizens.

Leading politicians — including one or two brave Republicans — have already called for criminal justice reform. Last month, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton gave a major address in which she outlined proposals that included alternatives to mass incarceration.

“There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes. And an estimated 1.5 million black men are ‘missing’ from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death,” she noted.

Among Republicans, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination, has joined with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) to author a bill that would help nonviolent offenders seal their records. And Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has reached across the aisle to co-author a bill with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to help eligible prisoners reduce their time.

But the truth is that any substantial progress will have to come through governors and state legislatures; federal authorities have jurisdiction over only about 6 percent of prison inmates. The vast majority of criminal activity is governed by state and local courts.

That’s why a new partnership between ultra-conservative groups and liberal activists who want to reduce the incarceration rate, the Coalition for Public Safety, is so promising. Its backers include the Koch brothers and the American Civil Liberties Union. That sort of alliance ought to prove powerful.

And it will need to be. Most statehouses are controlled by Republicans, who still reflexively play to a conservative base easily whipped up by fear of crime. Few politicians want to face an opponent who accuses them of being soft on murderers or rapists.

But the drop in crime is real, and it provides an opportunity for any thinking legislator to reconsider mass incarceration. We are locking up too many of our citizens and paying too high a price.

(Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.) 

Photo: Neon Tammy via Flickr

‘What Can I Do?’ Let’s Find Out

‘What Can I Do?’ Let’s Find Out

“There comes a time when people get tired.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., Dec. 5, 1955

Tracy is tired. She was tired even before Baltimore burned this week.

I received an email from her on April 12. She wanted me to know she is a 55-year-old white lady from Austin, Texas, who is tired unto tears by incident after incident of police violence against unarmed African-American men — including a 2013 shooting in her own hometown. “What can be done?” she asked. “What can I do? I’m sincere in this question. I want to DO something. What can that be? I’m embarrassed to have to ask; I feel like I should KNOW what to do, but I don’t.”

There comes a time when people get tired. And then what?

In Baltimore, the answer some people gave was to break windows, smash cars, set fires, and loot stores. In so doing, they gave aid and comfort to every enemy of justice who would just as soon not look too closely at what happened in that city. Meaning, of course, the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man who mysteriously suffered fatal injuries — on April 12, no less — while in police custody.

As Martin Luther King noted after young people in Memphis broke windows and looted stores during the last march he ever led, violence has a way of changing the subject. He lamented that he was now forced to talk about the vandalism rather than the exploitation of dirt-poor working men that had brought him to Memphis in the first place.

Similarly, we are now required to take time out from demanding justice for Freddie Gray to discuss the sacking and looting of Baltimore and to say the obvious: The road to better policing does not go through a burned-out CVS pharmacy. So the rioting — whether motivated by genuine anger or craven opportunism — was not just thuggish, shortsighted, and self-defeating. It was also tactically stupid, ceding the moral high ground and giving media, politicians, and pundits permission to ignore the very real issues here.

Not that they ever need much of an excuse, particularly over at Fox “News” and other citadels of conservative denialism. Indeed, on Monday night even as Baltimore burned, Fox’s Lou Dobbs was, predictably enough, blaming the violence on President Obama.

Apparently, the death of Gray, whose spine was partially severed in some still unexplained way, had nothing to do with it. Repeated incidents of police violence against men and boys who somehow always happen to be black and unarmed, had nothing to do with it. No, it was Obama’s fault.

Amazing.

It has reached a point where you can’t keep the atrocities straight without a scorecard. Besides Gray, we’ve got Eric Harris, an unarmed black man shot in Tulsa who cried that he was losing his breath, to which a cop responded “F*ck your breath.” We’ve got Levar Jones, a black man shot by a state trooper in South Carolina while complying with the trooper’s commands. We’ve got Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Eric Garner. We’ve got video of a black man named Walter Scott, wanted for a traffic violation and back child support, running from a police officer and being shot to death. We’ve got video of a white man named Michael Wilcox, wanted for murder, running toward a police officer, threatening him, daring him to shoot, refusing to remove his hands from his pockets, yet somehow not being shot.

We’ve got all this plus statistical proof. Yet the same people who cry “War on Christmas!” every time some city hall in Podunk erects a menorah on the lawn can discern no racial disparity in police violence against unarmed men.

So if there comes a time when people get tired, who can blame them?

Reading Tracy’s email I was reminded of how a white college student once confronted Malcolm X at a Harlem restaurant and asked him the same question Tracy did: What can I do? To which Malcolm replied: “Nothing.” I’ve always thought the student deserved better than he gave her. After all, the fight for human rights is not a black thing. Human rights are a human thing.

Here, then, begins a series of columns — “What Can I Do?” — aimed at finding answers to Tracy’s question. It will be open-ended and run irregularly. I will be interviewing people who can provide Tracy — and by extension, the rest of us — concrete strategies for making change. Some of those I talk to, you will likely know; some may be new to you.

If you have a serious answer for Tracy — or think there’s someone I should talk to — send me an email: lpitts(at)miamiherald.com. Maybe I’ll write about it. Put “What Can I Do?” in the subject line. Keep it short — 1,000-word treatises will go unread.

Tracy asked something we all should be asking. Assuming the news does not intervene, our search for answers begins with my next column.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.) 

A Maryland Transit Authority patrol car burns at North and Pennsylvania Avenues on Monday, April 27, 2015, in Baltimore. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun/TNS)

Walter Scott, Just Another ‘Isolated Incident’?

Walter Scott, Just Another ‘Isolated Incident’?

“…You foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear.” — Jeremiah 5:21

So here we are with another isolated incident.

That, at least, is how the April 4 police killing of 50-year-old Walter Scott will play in those conservative enclaves where the notion that there is such a thing as systemic racism is regarded as deluded and absurd. Those enclaves will not, of course, be able to claim innocence for now-fired North Charleston, SC, police officer Michael Slager. As cellphone video captured by a passerby makes brutally clear, Slager repeatedly shot the fleeing, unarmed African-American man in the back after a traffic stop.

They will likewise find it difficult to defend a police report that claims officers administered CPR to the dying man. The video shows them doing no such thing. Finally, they will find it problematic to support Slager’s claim that he shot Scott after the suspect seized his Taser. The video shows Slager picking up a small object and dropping it near Scott’s body, fueling strong suspicion that he planted the Taser.

The video, in other words, will make it impossible to deny Slager did wrong. But conservatives will dispute with vehemence the notion that the wrong he did has larger implications.

Indeed, Bill O’Reilly of Fox “News” has already invoked misleading statistics to assure his audience that “there doesn’t seem to be, as some people would have you believe, that police are trying to hunt down young black men and take their lives.”

In other words, move on, nothing to see here.

We ought not be surprised. It is only human that a Bill O’Reilly would want to think of himself and of the culture in which he has flourished as decent and good. To acknowledge that there is bias in that culture is to put oneself into an unenviable moral squeeze: One must either bestir oneself to say or do something about it — or else stop thinking of oneself as decent and good.

It is easier simply to deny the bias, to say that what is, is not. Small wonder that’s the default position of conservatism on matters of race: Absent burning crosses and pointy white hoods, nothing is ever racism to them. And the more fervently one denies self-evident truth, the more emotionally invested one becomes in doing so.

Thus, every incident that illustrates the racism of our system, every statistic that quantifies it, every study that proves it, becomes just another “isolated incident.” There is never an accumulation of evidence pointing toward an irrefutable, irredeemable conclusion. They are a thousand trees, but no forest, a million raindrops, but no storm.

Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima? Isolated incidents.

Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice? Isolated incidents.

Sean Bell, Levar Jones, Trayvon Martin? Isolated incidents.

A study co-authored by law professor David Baldus, a 1991 study by the San Jose Mercury News, a 1996 report from the National Criminal Justice Commission, a 2000 study co-sponsored by the Justice Department, a 2004 report by The Miami Herald, a 2010 book by reporter Joseph Collum, all documenting profound and pervasive racial bias in the justice system? Isolated incidents.

Sometimes, you have to wonder at our conservative friends: Where is conscience? Where are intellectual integrity and moral courage? Where is simple, human decency?

Because if you are a decent person, you are up in arms right now. You are demanding solutions — not making excuses.

And if you are not up in arms yet, then pray tell: how many more “isolated incidents” do you need? How much more obvious must this be? How many more bodies will it take?

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)