It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.
Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday. It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama, never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.
As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.
In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.
Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:
1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.
2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.
3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.
The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:
1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..
2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.
3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.
4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).
5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.
6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.
7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.
Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,
An abrasive arrest of young pool party attendees in McKinney has led to the suspension of one of the responding officers after a video of the incident appeared online.
The video, seen by many as another example of racially motivated and unnecessary police force, shows the officer throwing black juveniles in swimsuits to the ground and pulling his gun on them in one instance. The incident occurred Friday at a community pool in the city northeast of Dallas. One officer has been suspended pending an investigation, according to a statementby the McKinney Police Department on Sunday morning.
RELATED: 24 episodes of police abuse caught on camera.
The department said officers were responding to reports of juveniles fighting at a community pool. In the YouTube video, one officer can be seen forcing a black male to the ground. He then spends a significant portion of the seven-minute video dragging to the ground and detaining a 14-year-old black girl in a bikini.
When she stands up again at one point, the officer pulls his gun out. He puts it away several seconds later and puts his knees to the girl’s back while waiting for other officers to cuff her. The officer also is seen shouting and cursing at pool partygoers throughout the video, telling them to get to the other side of the street or they’d also be arrested. In the middle of the scrum, one girl yells at him, “You’re not going to be a cop no more.”
Here’s what the McKinney Police Department had to say about the incident:
“The initial call came in as a disturbance involving multiple juveniles at the location, who do not live in the area or have permission to be there, refusing to leave. McKinney Police received several additional calls related to this incident advising that juveniles were now actively fighting.
First responding officers encountered a large crowd that refused to comply with police commands. Nine additional units responded to the scene. Officers were eventually able to gain control of the situation.
McKinney Police later learned of a video that was taken at the scene by an unknown party. This video has raised concerns that are being investigated by the McKinney Police Department. At this time, one of the responding officers has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of this investigation.”
Buzzfeed News spoke to the Brandon Brooks, who uploaded the video and believes the incident was racially charged. “Everyone who was getting put on the ground was black, Mexican, Arabic,” said Brooks, who is white. “[The cop] didn’t even look at me. It was kind of like I was invisible.”
Another 14-year-old girl, who said she was the only white person detained at the scene, told BuzzFeed News the fight broke out after adults told the black juveniles to return to “Section 8 [public] housing.” The girl was released after 25 minutes and her family told BuzzFeed News they’ll file a complaint against the adult woman who made the racist remarks.
Days after the launch of two newspaper database projects aimed at tracking killing by police officers, two Democratic senators announced Tuesday that they will introduce legislation that would require all states to report to the Justice Department anytime a police officer is involved in a shooting or any other use of force that results in death.
The legislation, introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), would require reporting of all shootings by police officers — including non-fatal ones — which is a step further than the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which was approved by Congress last year. Each state would be required details including age, gender, race and whether the person was armed for any police shooting.
“Too many members of the public and police officers are being killed, and we don’t have reliable statistics to track these tragic incidents,” Boxer said in a statement. “This bill will ensure that we know the full extent of the problem so we can save lives on all sides.”
(Post analysis: 385 people shot and killed by police during first five months of 2015).
The nation has faced months of at-times tense discussions around issues of race and law enforcement following a series of deaths of black men and boys at the hands of police officers that became national stories — including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C., and Freddie Gray in Baltimore.
Those incidents have renewed calls, which have been made for years by some civil rights groups, for more standardized reporting of police use-of-force incidents. To date, there is no accurate, comprehensive data available about how many people are killed by American police officers each year.
In a release announcing the bill, Boxer and Booker specifically cite The Post’s reporting — which on Sunday revealed that at least 385 people have been shot and killed by police since January, putting the nation on pace to have more than double the number of fatal police shootings tallied on average by the federal government.
That piece is the latest in a yearlong effort by The Post to report onpolice accountability, which includes the creation of a database that will chronicle every fatal shooting by police officers in country this year.
On Monday, the Guardian unveiled a similar reporting project, The Counted, which aims to tally every person killed by a police officer — by shooting, Taser or other death in custody — in 2015.
(Post analysis: Thousands dead, few officers prosecuted).
“The first step in fixing a problem is understanding the extent of the problem you have. Justice and accountability go hand in hand — but without reliable data it’s difficult to hold people accountable or create effective policies that change the status quo,” Booker said in a statement. “Our legislation is vital to ensuring we have the data required to make good decisions and implement reform measures that are balanced, objective, and protect the lives of police officers and the public.”
Some civil rights leaders have criticized Congress of passing little legislation in response to the unrest in Ferguson. Many activists who have led protests in the past year would consider the passage of legislation requiring detailed death in custody reporting to DOJ to be a major victory.
However, with Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate, Democratic legislative proposals face an uphill march toward passage.
“This is a step in the right direction. I’d have to read the bill to understand the details but the fact that there seems to be political will to establish a federal database is a very good sign,” said David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri who has been fighting for more than a decade for better reporting on police use of force incidents.
“You can’t just label this something racial. When you have three African-American officers involved, you’ve got to say: ‘Wait a minute, is there a system in place in which they don’t want to tell on each other? Has it become a routine?'”
REPRESENTATIVE ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS a Democrat who lives in Baltimore, on the police officers who are facing charges in the death of Freddie Gray.
WASHINGTON — Early this year, Megan E. Green, a St. Louis alderwoman, met with officials of a local police union to discuss a proposal for a civilian oversight board that would look into accusations of police misconduct. After Ms. Green refused to soften her support for the proposal, the union backed an aggressive mailing campaign against her.
But Ms. Green won her primary with over 70 percent of the vote, and the Board of Aldermen approved the oversight board by a large margin. “All that stuff backfired,” Ms. Green said. “The more they attacked me for it, the more people seemed to rally around me.”
During the urban crime epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s and the sharp decline in crime that began in the 1990s, the unions representing police officers in many cities enjoyed a nearly unassailable political position. Their opposition could cripple political candidates and kill police-reform proposals in gestation.
But amid a rash of high-profile encounters involving allegations of police overreach in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., the political context in which the police unions have enjoyed a privileged position is rapidly changing. And the unions are struggling to adapt.
“There was a time in this country when elected officials — legislators, chief executives — were willing to contextualize what police do,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And that time is mostly gone.”
In Baltimore, the local police union president accused protesters angry at the death of Freddie Gray of participating in a “lynch mob.” In South Carolina, the head of the police union where an officer had shot and killed an unarmed black man who was fleeing fulminated against “professional race agitators.” In New York, Patrick Lynch, a local police union chief, accused Mayor Bill de Blasio of having blood on his hands after the shooting death of two police officers last December.
If voters’ reactions to Mr. Lynch’s statements are any indication, the provocative language has largely served to alienate the public and isolate the police politically. According to a Quinnipiac University poll in January, 77 percent of New York City voters disapproved of Mr. Lynch’s comments. Sixty-nine percent disapproved of police officers turning their backs on Mr. de Blasio at funerals for the two slain officers, a protest seen as orchestrated by the union.
In Baltimore, too, the police union has been less than sure-footed in navigating the more hostile political terrain of the past few years. The union, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, has responded with open resistance to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s proposals to make it easier to remove misbehaving police officers, and to give the city’s police civilian review board a “more impactful” role in disciplining officers.
The union also opposed the decision by Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts to invite the Justice Department in to help overhaul the city’s Police Department after an investigation by The Baltimore Sun produced numerous allegations of police brutality.
Union officials say they have been fulfilling their mandate to protect their members, airing legitimate concerns about overreach on the part of their civilian overseers. And sympathetic observers have questioned the political motivations of the mayor.
“She seems to suggest that the blame lies elsewhere, when the buck should stop with the mayor, always,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “She’s been there five years. The thing is an institutional disaster. It’s your institution.”
A spokesman for the mayor said that some of her efforts, like disbanding a plainclothes unit linked to an unusual number of excessive-force complaints, began shortly after she took office.
In some cases, the union’s hostility to scrutiny has been self-defeating. In 2014, the Fraternal Order of Police declined to endorse Gregg Bernstein, then the state’s attorney for Baltimore, after members of the union’s endorsement committee complained that Mr. Bernstein had been too aggressive in prosecuting police misconduct, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
Mr. Bernstein, who suffered from diminishing support in districts where the union has long been influential, lost his re-election bid to the current state’s attorney, Marilyn J. Mosby, who has made prosecuting police misconduct a priority. Ms. Mosby recently charged six Baltimore police officers in the death of Mr. Gray, the resident whose death last month set off tumultuous protests around the city.
St. Louis offers a particularly vivid example of the inability of police unions to update their tactics amid widespread frustration with policing. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen first passed a measure creating a civilian oversight board back in 2006. Mayor Francis G. Slay, a Democrat, vetoed the bill at the time, citing its “inflammatory antipolice” language and questioning whether it would survive a legal challenge given that the State of Missouri still formally controlled the local Police Department.
But, in December, after months of outrage following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in nearby Ferguson, Mr. Slay agreed to support a bill similar to the one he vetoed a decade ago. A spokeswoman for the mayor said that local control of the Police Department now made the bill legally defensible.
The St. Louis Fraternal Order of Police, one of two prominent local unions, was not persuaded. Although the alderman involved in drafting the legislation met with union officials around the same time and asked them for input, the union offered suggestions in writing only on April 13, two days before the board was set to vote on the bill, and far too late to incorporate any of its changes.
“When we met with them in December, I was honestly interested in their thoughts,” said Alderman Terry Kennedy, who sponsored the legislation. “I would have tried to incorporate as much as I could have.” But, Mr. Kennedy said, the union’s objections proved to be a “constantly moving target.”
Jeff Roorda, a spokesman for the union, said that once it became clear that the Board of Aldermen was determined to give the oversight board investigative authority, rather than simply review powers, the union felt it was better to save its reservations for a future legal challenge.
“It put us in a tough spot, to tip our hand about what our legal objections were, telling them how to write legislation within the legal parameters,” Mr. Roorda said. The measure will become law this week.
In contrast to the unions’ hard-line public stance, many can be pragmatic behind the scenes when dealing with prosecutors over individual allegations of misconduct. In Baltimore, for example, there have been several recent instances when the police union declined to fund the legal defense of an officer whose behavior it had concluded was beyond the pale.
“People have the impression, when it comes to police unions, that there’s never an unwarranted case of police abuse,” said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois. “The public would be surprised by the level of rational behavior on the part of union grievance officers.”
But when it comes to what the unions perceive as larger, institutional threats, they are characteristically unrelenting, even when a more nuanced response might better serve their long-term interests.
There may be no better example than the creation of New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board two decades ago. In September 1992, after a monthslong standoff between the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins and the city’s police over his proposal for an independent review agency, a union-organized protest degenerated into what the news media called a “riot,” as thousands of police officers overwhelmed barricades blocking the steps of City Hall.
“It was a very bad inning for the unions,” Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union said. “Most people view that as being the incident that pushed civilian oversight over the line.”
Fox News erroneously reported that Baltimore police shot a man Monday in the same neighborhood where unrest broke out last week — a mistake quickly corrected by the news network.
The midafternoon report by correspondent Mike Tobin, which also found its way onto Foxnews.com, was potentially dangerous, given the elevated tensions in Baltimore’s Sandtown section where protests and lotting erupted in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.
Tobin’s report caused about 30 minutes of unease in Baltimore before Fox anchor Shepard Smith went on-air to correct the story and apologize for the incorrect information. His apology followed a statement from Baltimore police that there had been no shooting.
Live news reports often have errors, and Tobin’s is merely the latest in a long series of them. Yet few recent reports have had as much potential as Tobin’s to stir a violent reaction, considering it came amid more than a week of protests about alleged police misconduct.
Bystanders near Pennsylvania and North avenues shot cellphone footage of a man lying on the sidewalk surrounded by an apparently agitated crowd around 2:45 p.m. As police quickly moved to surround the scene, some in the crowd began to shout that the unidentified man had been shot in the back by officers.
Tobin was on the air moments later reporting that “a guy running from cops” had been shot. “As he was running away, an officer drew his weapon and fired,” said Tobin, who reported seeing a revolver lying on the ground next to the man.
Tobin said he was sitting in a car about 40 feet from the incident and was preparing for a later live report. He said on-air that he “never saw the individual do anything aggressive” and that he counted one gunshot. He also said he saw an officer draw his weapon.
Fox aired footage of the man on a stretcher as he was loaded into an ambulance.
Smith began to back way from Tobin’s initial live report after 3 p.m., although he inaccurately reported, “According to our team there . . . an officer shot that man you see there on the stretcher. We are hearing conflicted reports on local scanners there. It’s very early, and Fox News cannot confirm exactly what happened.”
Tough-on-crime policies that emphasized arrests and convictions for relatively minor offenses have failed the country, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday, leading to overcrowded prisons and too many black men “missing” from their families and communities.
“We need to restore balance to our criminal justice system,” Clinton told an audience at Columbia University in New York.
Calling for an “end to the era of mass incarceration,” Clinton endorsed body cameras for police nationwide to record interactions between officers and potential suspects. Making her most specific policy proposals since launching her campaign earlier this month, Clinton said it’s time for a nationwide overhaul of what she called misguided and failed policing and prison strategies.
In effect, she was saying that policies put in place when her husband Bill Clinton was president have not worked. Clinton did not mention her husband or identify exactly which laws and sentencing policies she thought had gone wrong. But many of those policies grew out of the crackdown on drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses that took place before and during Bill Clinton’s presidency 20 years ago.
Later in the day, a Clinton campaign spokesman tamped down on the notion that she was refuting her husband’s policies:
In her address, Clinton said there is an emerging bipartisan consensus that the current system isn’t working. Much of the speech dealt with the deaths of black men after interactions with police, and the protests that turned violent in Baltimore this week.
She listed some of those men, including Freddie Gray, whose death in police custody set off the Baltimore rioting.
“Not only as a mother and grandmother, but as a citizen, as a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families,” Clinton said. “We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”
She reeled off statistics about what she called the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates for black men and what she called the broader economic and educational inequality of poor and minority communities.
“We need smart strategies to fight crime that help restore trust between law enforcement and our communities, especially communities of color,” she added.
Amazing Democrats’ Editor’s note: We have heard from President Obama and likely presidential contender Martin O’Malley on what is happening in Baltimore but Hillary Clinton’s silence on this very serious issue which is on the forefront of most Americans is doing her damage and she needs to make a statement about this important issue sooner rather than later. We do not want another “controlled” Hillary Clinton presidential campaign like we had from her in 2008. Hillary it is time to speak up on this issue as your silence is deafening and this is something you or your advisers can’t ignore for very much longer.
Likely Presidential contender Martin O’Malley Speaks Up about what is happening in Baltimore (New York Times):
Likely presidential contender Martin O’Malley cut short his speaking tour in Ireland to head back to his hometown of Baltimore and was on the riot-scarred streets on Tuesday night.
O’Malley served from 1999 to 2007 as Mayor of Baltimore and followed that with eight years as Maryland’s governor. Now he is sizing up a White House bid.
“There’s a lot of pain in our city right now and a lot of people feeling very sad,” he told the New York Times.
“And look, we’ve got to come through this together,” he said. “We’re a people who have seen worse days, and we’ll come through this day.”
O’Malley asked local activists whether it was safe to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in the city where some of the worst rioting occurred.
The former mayor was greeted with both jeers and cheers from the locals when he stepped out of his car.
“Did you see all those boarded-up houses on your way out?” shouted a man who greeted him in front of the Arch Social Club.
“I actually did,” Mr. O’Malley said.
“You plan on doing anything about that?”
“I got elevated to the same rank as you, I’m a citizen now,” O’Malley said.
“You made a lot of promises,” the man shouted.
“And I did the best that I could,” the former mayor said.
“In what community? Not in the black community!”
O’Malley pointed out he had buried ten police officers during his time in Baltimore. “I buried 10 police officers too, half of them were black and half of them were white.”
Ernest Taylor, thanked Mr. O’Malley for getting him off drugs through a prison program. “Ah, good man,” O’Malley said. “Say that again. Give me a big hug.”
The riots that devastated urban America during the 1960s were often ignited by acts of police brutality that inflamed poor African-American communities where the police were seen not as protectors but as an occupying force. These same tensions resurfaced last year in the suburban St. Louis community of Ferguson, Mo., where riots broke out after a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager. They have now erupted on a larger stage, in Baltimore, after the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who suffered a catastrophic injury while in police custody.
President Obama has condemned as inexcusable the looting and arson that spread across the face of the city after of Mr. Gray’s funeral. But he also implied that the Baltimore Police Department had “to do some soul-searching.” Indeed it does: A well-documented history of extreme brutality and misconduct set the stage for just this kind of unrest.
Proof can be found in a meticulously reported investigation by The Baltimore Sun of lawsuits and settlements that had been generated by police-brutality claims. “Over the past four years,” the investigation noted, “more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations.” The victims included a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant woman who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.
The report, published last fall, detailed what it called “a frightful human toll” inflicted by the police: broken bones, head trauma, organ failure, and even death, occurring during questionable arrests. It found that judges and prosecutors routinely dismissed charges against the victims and that city policies helped to hide the extent of the human damage. Settlements prohibited the victims from making public statements. The Sun estimated that the cash-strapped city had spent $5.7 million on settlements and $5.8 million on legal fees since January 2011.
Baltimore residents were familiar with these and other stories of police abuse when Mr. Gray’s case fell into the public spotlight earlier this month. The police chased and apprehended him on April 12, allegedly because he had “made eye contact” with a lieutenant and then ran away. Cellphone videos of his arrest showed him being dragged into a police van, appearing limp and screaming in pain. The police have acknowledged that they delayed in calling for medical help. When he arrived at the police station, medics rushed him to the hospital, where he slipped into a coma and died a week later.
His family has said that 80 percent of his spinal cord was severed and that his larynx had been crushed. This account is at odds with a police report claiming that “the defendant was arrested without force or incident.”
The Baltimore Police Department has a particularly egregious history and has entered into a voluntary reform agreement with the Justice Department. But there is no reason to believe that it is unique in terms of its toxic relations with the people it is meant to protect.
Indeed, over the last five years, the Justice Department has opened 21 investigations into local police departments around the country and is enforcing reform agreements with 15 departments, some investigated by previous administrations.
Mr. Obama was right on the mark when he observed on Tuesday that tensions with law enforcement had simmered in African-American communities for decades and now seemed to be bursting into view once a week.
“This has been a slow-rolling crisis,” he said. “This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”
He also said that addressing the problem would require not only new police tactics but new policies aimed at helping communities where jobs have disappeared, improving education and helping ex-offenders find jobs. The big mistake, he said, is that we tend to focus on these communities only when buildings are burning down.
A model has filed a suit in which she claims Bay Area police officers slammed her to the ground and broke four bones in her face. Footage from police security and body cameras recorded at least part of the incident.
Megan Sheehan of San Francisco filed a federal lawsuit against the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department, saying officers used excessive force when they detained her during a drunken night on St. Patrick’s Day in 2014.
In U.S. District Court documents, Sheehan says she plans to amend her lawsuit to include the city of Oakland, as well as an Oakland police officer she claims held her hand back during the fall.
The officers’ actions were “willful, wanton, reckless, malicious, oppressive and/or done with a conscious or reckless disregard” for Sheehan’s rights, according to the lawsuit.
Body camera video footage obtained by KGO-TV on Saturday shows officers grabbing Sheehan’s arms and appearing to push her to the ground while the model was being booked in Santa Rita jail. In the background, someone says “Ooh,” after she was thrown to the ground. Another voice says, “You might want medical.”
Photographs taken at the hospital show Sheehan’s bloodied, bruised and swollen face.
BART spokesman James K. Allison said he couldn’t comment on the case because of the ongoing litigation.
Sheehan rode the BART train to the Lake Merritt substation in Oakland, where she was arrested on suspicion of battery on an officer and resisting arrest, according to the lawsuit.
Once she arrived at the Santa Rita jail, she claims four assailants beat her unconscious. As a result of the beating, four bones on her face were broken. Her front tooth was cracked and her molar was split.
Sheehan was taken to a hospital, where she spent two days receiving treatment.
She was returned to the jail and later released on bail. She says criminal charges were never filed against her.
Sheehan believes officers used excessive and unreasonable force against her and violated her rights.
“Municipal defendants BART and County of Alameda were responsible for ensuring the health and safety of the individuals placed in their custody.” the lawsuit stated. “This included but was not limited to protecting those in custody from excessive or punitive uses of force.”
A spate of videos has brought what looks like police brutality into our living rooms.
Logic says these incidents are aberrations; that’s what makes them news. But I’m having trouble clearing my mind of those ugly scenes — and I know I’m not alone.
Are these just individual cops gone rogue? Or are they the tip of a giant iceberg of on-duty misconduct?
That’s become the subject of private small talk and public dialogue, as we grow uncomfortably accustomed to the sight of law enforcement officers meting out street justice.
This week brought criminal charges against a Los Angeles Police Department officer
caught last fall on camera stomping and kicking a man being held down by other officers on a South Los Angeles street. The video from a store’s surveillance camera hasn’t been publicly released, but when the police chief pronounces it disturbing, you can imagine how bad it must be.
We did see the beating of Francis Pusok in San Bernardino County, shot by a television news helicopter this month. It shows sheriff’s deputies kicking and punching Pusok, who is on the ground with his hands behind his back.
And the cellphone video of a homeless man being shot to death during a tussle with LAPD officers on skid row.
And the pummeling of a mentally ill woman by a California Highway Patrol officer who’d been summoned to keep her from walking onto a busy freeway. A passing motorist captured and shared the stomach-turning scene.
Just last Sunday, a federal marshal was caught on video smashing a woman’s cellphone on the ground as she recorded officers detaining several people in her South Gate neighborhood.
For me, the most painful of the flurry of police videos recorded an encounter in South Carolina, where an officer shot a man eight times in the back as he fled during a traffic stop. Then the cop placed what appeared to be his stun gun next to the dying man, and claimed that the shooting had occurred during a scuffle over the weapon.
The officer’s story would have been hard to refute had a passerby not captured the encounter on his cellphone. After the video surfaced, the officer was charged with murder.
That’s hardly mollifying. I’ll recall that video and that lie whenever I hear an officer explain a shooting with: “He was reaching for my gun.”
I spend a lot of time lecturing readers who email to complain about something horrible that “the blacks” have done: It’s wrong to judge an entire group by the actions of some. I’m not to blame for the black guy who burglarized your house or the black woman who was rude to you at Walmart.
Yet, even though I’ve felt the sting of stereotyping, I feel like I’m in the grip now of an insidious bias — battling a new and reflexive distrust of law enforcement.
I know that’s unfair, yet every video peek behind the curtain seems to reinforce it.
It’s not just the officers who administer the beatings or fire the guns that poison my perception. The ones who watch, but don’t intervene, do just as much damage to our collective impression. They suggest that what we’re seeing is business as usual.
Take the case of Omar Abrego, who died last summer after struggling with a pair of officers trying to arrest him. A cellphone video captured Abrego’s suffering, but doesn’t make clear whether officers went too far.
What it does show is more than a dozen patrol cars descending on the street, adding nothing but chaos to an already tense encounter. “I think we have enough, fellas,” one officer said as a half-dozen cops crouched around Abrego and others milled about.
Two dozen officers to arrest a guy for reckless driving. It’s a scene out of sync with what we consider community policing, but it’s the reality in some neighborhoods.
“For some people these videos provide a sort of relief,” said Sandra Hernandez of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “It gives a certain validation to what they know is true. For years, they have been saying this goes on, and no would believe it.”
Technology is reshaping our perception of policing and the criminal justice system it serves. Both, it seems, are more fallible than we’d like to believe.
The omnipresence of cameras is making it harder for officers to avoid accountability. Advances in DNA matching have freed more than 300 people around the country convicted for crimes they didn’t commit.
The revelations are forcing us to acknowledge that justice can be ambushed — by manufactured evidence, coercive interrogations, errors by eyewitnesses and even outright lies by those we’ve armed with badges and guns.
So where do we go from here?
Beyond a focus on individual officers and high-profile offenses, and toward a deeper evaluation of how and why things go wrong.
“We give police officers rights that we don’t give any other government officials,” ACLU attorney Peter Bibring pointed out. “They have the power to take a life based on their split-second judgment. So it’s crucial for us to understand how police are using their powers. And the video provides that understanding in a way almost nothing else does.”
That’s what makes these videos important — not just that they catch officers red-handed when they are doing wrong, but that they force us to talk about what we expect and what we won’t tolerate from law enforcement.
And that’s a conversation that has to do more than fixate on blame or founder on stereotypes.
The Amazing Democrats 