Armed Black Militants Protest at the California State Capitol, May 2, 1967

https://youtu.be/KD3uemBXG74

Bobby Seale: “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general, and the black people in particular, to take careful note of the racist California legislature, which is now considering legislation, aimed at keeping the black people disarmed, and powerless at the very same time. Racist police

agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people.

Ferguson Department of Justice Report

https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press- releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf

RedState.com – Many Conservatives are Blowing it on the Ferguson DOJ Report

http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2015/03/15/many-conservatives-blowing- it-ferguson-doj-report/

The Ferguson PD Habitually Uses Excessive Force, The Ferguson PD has Utterly Failed to Supervise its Officers’ Use of Force, The Ferguson PD Systematically Punishes Residents of Ferguson for ‘Contempt of Cop’, The Evidence of Racial Bias in the Administration of Justice in Ferguson is Overwhelming

However, the two most clear control issues were as follows: First, anyone of rank sergeant or above reviews their own “Use of Force” Reports. This is a completely inexcusable practice that ensures that a significant part of the FPD operates effectively without any supervision whatsoever with respect to their use of force.

Ferguson has no system in place to determine ability-to-pay with respect to municipal fines and offers no community service alternative for those who are unable to pay. As a result, the Ferguson municipal court and police system operates functionally as a debtor’s prison.

Charging documents (again provided by the FPD) revealed that in officers’ own words, they arrested and cited citizens in retaliation for exercising their First Amendment rights not to be polite to cops, including one woman who was, by admission, arrested for peacefully calling an officer’s supervisor during the course of that officer making an arrest in her presence that she felt involved the excessive use of force. The Ferguson PD also engaged repeatedly in conduct that can only be described as retaliation against citizens for attempting to videotape them, a behavior that has been roundly condemned on the conservative side of the aisle.

The Ferguson PD also has policies and practices that are blatantly unconstitutional and that essentially invite any FPD officer to stop any person in Ferguson without probable cause or judicial oversight for the purpose of running their warrants (see

above). One particularly troubling aspect of this system set forth in the report is the Ferguson PD’s use of “wanteds,” a system in which the Ferguson PD is essentially allowed to issue their own arrest warrants without judicial oversight at all and which is predictably by all accounts subject to widespread abuse. The “wanteds” system, even as described in the words and policies of the FPD, is a blatant violation of Constitutional Fourth Amendment warrant protections and is characteristic of the FPD’s systematic disregard for the Fourth Amendment even as set forth in their own documentary evidence.

Much has been made of the fact that blacks are more frequently stopped by the Ferguson PD than whites; however, the more conclusive and indicative evidence of racial bias comes in the disposition of the suspect after the stop has occurred. From the report:

• African Americans are 2.07 times more likely to be searched during a vehicular stop but are 26% less likely to have contraband found on them during a search.

They are 2.00 times more likely to receive a citation and 2.37 times more likely to be arrested following a vehicular stop.

• African Americans have force used against them at disproportionately high rates, accounting for 88% of all cases from 2010 to August 2014 in which an FPD officer reported using force. In all 14 uses of force involving a canine bite for which we have information about the race of the person bitten, the person was African American.

• African Americans are more likely to receive multiple citations during a single incident, receiving four or more citations on 73 occasions between October 2012 and July 2014, whereas non-African Americans received four or more citations only twice during that period.

• African Americans account for 95% of Manner of Walking charges; 94% of all Fail to Comply charges; 92% of all Resisting Arrest charges; 92% of all Peace Disturbance charges; and 89% of all Failure to Obey charges.

• African Americans are 68% less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by the Municipal Judge, and in 2013 African Americans accounted for 92% of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued.

African Americans account for 96% of known arrests made exclusively because of an outstanding municipal warrant.

FPD reported 11,610 vehicle stops between October 2012 and October 2014. African Americans accounted for 85%, or 9,875, of those stops, despite making up

only 67% of the population. White individuals made up 15%, or 1,735, of stops during that period, despite representing 29% of the population. These differences indicate that FPD traffic stop practices may disparately impact black drivers.39 Even setting aside the question of whether there are racial disparities in FPD’s traffic stop practices, however, the data collected during those stops reliably shows statistically significant racial disparities in the outcomes people receive after being stopped.

Unlike with vehicle stops, assessing the disparate impact of post-stop outcomes— such as the rate at which stops result in citations, searches, or arrests—is not dependent on population data or on assumptions about differential offending rates by race; instead, the enforcement actions imposed against stopped black drivers are compared directly to the enforcement actions imposed against stopped white drivers. In Ferguson, traffic stops of black drivers are more likely to lead to searches, citations, and arrests than are stops of white drivers. Black people are significantly more likely to be searched during a traffic stop than white people. From October 2012 to October 2014, 11% of stopped black drivers were searched, whereas only 5% of stopped white drivers were searched.

Despite being searched at higher rates, African Americans are 26% less likely to have contraband found on them than whites: 24% of searches of African Americans resulted in a contraband finding, whereas 30% of searches of whites resulted in a contraband finding. This disparity exists even after controlling for the type of search conducted, whether a search incident to arrest, a consent search, or a search predicated on reasonable suspicion. The lower rate at which officers find contraband when searching African Americans indicates either that officers’ suspicion of criminal wrongdoing is less likely to be accurate when interacting with African Americans or that officers are more likely to search African Americans without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. Either explanation suggests bias, whether explicit or implicit. 40 This lower hit rate for African Americans also underscores that this disparate enforcement practice is ineffective.

Other, more subtle indicators likewise show meaningful disparities in FPD’s search practices: of the 31 Terry stop searches FPD conducted during this period between October 2012 to October 2014, 30 were of black individuals; of the 103 times FPD asked both the driver and passenger to exit a vehicle during a search, the searched individuals were black in 95 cases; and, while only one search of a white person lasted more than half an hour (1% of all searches of white drivers), 59 searches of African Americans lasted that long (5% of all searches of black drivers).

Of all stopped black drivers, 91%, or 8,987, received citations, while 87%, or 1,501, of all stopped white drivers received a citation.41 891 stopped black drivers—10% of all stopped black drivers—were arrested as a result of the stop, whereas only 63 stopped white drivers—4% of all stopped white drivers—were arrested. This disparity is explainable in large part by the high number of black individuals arrested for outstanding municipal warrants issued for missed court payments and appearances. As we discuss below, African Americans are more likely to have warrants issued against them than whites and are more likely to be arrested for an outstanding warrant than their white counterparts. Notably, on 14 occasions FPD listed the only reason for an arrest following a traffic stop as “resisting arrest.” In all 14 of those cases, the person arrested was black.

These disparities in the outcomes that result from traffic stops remain even after regression analysis is used to control for non-race-based variables, including driver age; gender; the assignment of the officer making the stop; disparities in officer behavior; and the stated reason the stop was initiated. Upon accounting for differences in those variables, African Americans remained 2.07 times more likely to be searched; 2.00 times more likely to receive a citation; and 2.37 times more likely to be arrested than other stopped individuals. Each of these disparities is statistically significant and would occur by chance less than one time in 1,000. The odds of these disparities occurring by chance together are significantly lower still.

MotherJones.com – Police shootings wont stop unless we stop shaking down black people http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops- excessive-fines

In 2014, Ferguson’s bottom-line-driven police force issued 16,000 arrest warrants to three-fourths of the town’s total population of 21,000. Stop and think about that for a moment: In Ferguson, 75 percent of all residents had active outstanding arrest warrants. Most of the entire city was a virtual plantation of indentured revenue producers.

Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of this atrocity were African American, meaning that “walking while black” is not a punch line. It is a crime.

“Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning,” said William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice who has been studying the sudden rise in “nontraffic-related fines.”

In Alabama, a circuit court judge, Hub Harrington, wrote a blistering opinion three years ago asserting that the Shelby County Jail had become a kind of “debtors’ prison” and that the court system had devolved into a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket.” This pattern leads to a cruel paradox: One arm of the state is paying a large sum to lock up a person who can’t pay a small sum owed to a different arm of the state. The result? Bigger state deficits. As the director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program put it, “Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes sense in no reasonable world.”

Pierre Bourdieu – The Forms Of Capital

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Bourdieu-Forms-of-Capital.pdf

“The reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed. This work, which implies expenditure of time and energy and so, directly or indirectly, of economic capital, is not profitable or even conceivable unless one invests in it a specific competence (knowledge of genealogical relationships and of real connections and skill at using them, etc.) and an acquired disposition to aquire and maintain this competence, which are themselves integral parts of this capital. This is one of the factors which explain why the profitability of this labor of accumulating and maintaining social capital rises in proportion to the size of the capital. Because the social capital accruing from a relationship is that much greater to the extent that the person who is the object of it is richly endowed with capital (mainly social, but also cultural and even economic capital), the possessors of an inherited social capital, symbolized by a great name, are able to transform all circumstantial relationships into lasting connections. They are sought after for their social capital and, because they are well known, are worthy of being known (‘I know him well’); they do not need to ‘make the acquaintance’ of all their ‘acquaintances’; they are known to more people than they know, and their work of sociability, when it is exerted, is highly productive.

Every group has its more or less institutionalized forms of delegation which enable it to concentrate the totality of the social capital, which is the basis of the existence of the group (a family or a nation, of course, but also an association or party), in the hands of a single agent or a small group of agents and to mandate its plenipotentiary, charged with plena potestas agendi et loquendi, to represent the group, to speak and act in its name and so, with the aid of this collectively owned capital, to exercise a power incommensurate with the agent’s personal contribution. Thus, at the most elementary degree of institutionalization, the head of the family, the pater familias, the eldest, most senior member, is tacitly recognized as the only person entitled to speak on behalf of the family group in all official circumstances. But whereas in this case, diffuse delegation requires the great to step forward and

defend the collective honor when the honor of the weakest members is threatened, the institutionalized delegation, which ensures the concentration of social capital, also has the effect of limiting the consequences of individual lapeses by explicitly delimiting responsibilities and authorizing the recognized spokesmen to shield the group as a whole from discredit by expelling or excommunitcating the embarrassing individuals.

If the internal competition for the monopoly of legitimate representation of the group is not to threaten the conservation and accumulation of the capital which is the basis of the group, the members of the group must regulate the conditions of access to the right to declare oneself a member of the group and, above all, to set oneself up as a representative (delegate, plenipotentiary, spokesman, etc.) of the whole group, thereby committing the social capital of the whole group. The title of nobility is the form par excellence of the institutionalized social capital which guarantees a particular form of social relationship in a lasting way.

nplusone – The Gun Control We Deserve

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-gun-control-we-deserve/

Many commentators who should know better conveniently forget that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was a mere subsection of the Biden-authored and Clinton- approved Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. That legislation allocated $9.7 billion to new prison construction and gave money to states to pursue harsher sentencing guidelines while eliminating prison education programs— effectively writing a check for the New Jim Crow to leap into the 21st century.

That crime bill was unprecedentedly sprawling, but bundled regulation of guns and targeting of minorities by those in power was hardly new. Recall the so-called Mississippi Plan of 1875, whereby white Southern Democrats sought to simultaneously disarm and disenfranchise freed blacks, and New York City’s Stop and Frisk program, which many liberals originally supported when it was presented to them as a way of getting guns off the street. Given that today’s Aversive Minimalists include many white liberals whose primary concerns vis-à-vis “gun violence” more or less boil down to making high-profile rampage killings disappear from their newsfeeds, the possibility that they will embrace measures that gesture at solving that problem while doubling down on militarized policing, surveillance, and America’s overcrowded prisons is depressingly easy to imagine. As many critics have observed, we would be naïve to think that heavy-handed gun control measures would not involve the same disproportionate racial targeting and police violence we rightly condemn in the War on Drugs and in everyday encounters in places from Baltimore to Ferguson to Cleveland to Oakland.

“Pro-gun” and “anti-gun” stances are similarly blinkered. The vehement single- mindedness of these labels—when considered alongside the historical record— suggests that they, and debates over guns more broadly, are proxy battles for deeply ingrained tensions over race, class, and rural versus urban ways of life. When the

Black Panthers staged an armed open carry action in the California State House in 1967, the response from Republican legislators, organized by assemblyman Don Mulford, was swift, and inaugurated what many analysts see as the beginning of modern gun control regulation.

RedState.com – The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came To This In Dallas Yesterday http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/07/08/uncomfortable-reason-came- dallas-yesterday/

As the child of white parents who grew up in the rural panhandle of Texas, I was taught that police were there to help, any time I had a problem I should go to them. I should always follow their orders and show them the utmost respect. No one is more important and helpful to your community than the police.

Now imagine, for a minute, that your parents instead grew up as black people in the 50s or 60s in one of the many areas where police were often the agents of – let’s call it what it was – white oppression. How might that have changed, for understandable reasons, the way not only those people but also their children and their children’s children interact with the police? More importantly, how might it impact the belief that police will ever be held accountable for abuses of their power?

And here’s the most important part: when they do so, they never or almost never face punishment.

Tulsa Race Riot (Black Wall St.) 1921 – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot

Boneface (artwork):

http://www.boneface.co.uk/

Videos:

Armed Black Militants Protest at the California Capitol, May 2, 1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD3uemBXG74&feature=youtu.be

NYT: A Raw Scene As Ferguson Turns Violent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt9-byUhPdg&feature=youtu.be

Vice News: Investigating Ferguson and the Militarization of America’s Police

http://www.vice.com/video/watch-our-hbo-episode-about-ferguson-and-the- militarization-of-americas-police

NYT: Ferguson 2014: A Protest Ignited

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC9vBlgBfjY&feature=youtu.be

Ruptly: Kenya: Playground Protest (developers v. schoolchildren, cops and teargas) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gKPYjhSwVY&feature=youtu.be

EuroNews: Police Teargas Schoolchildren at playground demonstration – no comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OtY515M8oM&feature=youtu.be

The History Channel – Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Wall St. Race Riot Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLwVxyD7A98&feature=youtu.be

some frenz’ opinions:

“my ideal is kind of a federation of the dispossessed econclans, united by a commitment to destroying capitalism b/c we recognize that maintaining the cycle of violence (colonizer-colonized-colonizer-*repeat*) will eventually destroy us” (reminds me of Black Panther Party)

“Alton Sterling was executed in a parking lot for having a gun. (His state of Louisiana, btw, is the most incarcerated state in the country and has signed in a “Blue Lives Matter” law that makes criticism of police hate speech. Its a state conditioned to see blacks as criminals, and thus an expendable revenue target). Philandro Castile, the latest victim in a string of cops killing black men, informed the cop that he had a legal firearm then gets shot to death for it.”