When I joined the NFB back in 1969, I truly believed that if enough
> blind people got together, we could change public attitudes. When I
> began working in the Orientation and Training Center, I believed that
> if I were diligent and persuasive I could change people's attitudes
> about blindness. Today, after 50 years as a blind man, 46 years in
> blind organizations, 40 years in the field of work for the blind, the
> greatest change in attitudes has been between my own two ears. Oh
> sure, things have improved slightly for blind and disabled people.
> But after 25 years of ADA working to "educate" the public, statistics
> show an actual decrease in employment among the disabled population.
> I'll say that again. With all it's efforts to change public attitudes
> toward disabled people, ADA has not been effective in changing
> employers attitudes toward hiring disabled workers.
> Our training program at the Department of Services for the Blind is a
> residential program. When I was director, we worked with students
> from 8:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M., five days per week with many evening
> events and weekend outings. Students entered the program and lived in
> the Dorm for 6 to 9 months. We had a staff of 8, including myself,
> and 4 dorm coordinators. That came to 12 folks working with the
> students. Add to that 1 secretary and we had 13 total employees and a
> student body of 17. 6 to 9 months and at the end of this concentrated
> training I very often turned to my staff and said about a graduating
> student, "I wish they were just now coming into the program". We
> presented a trophy, a statue, upon graduation. Each student entered
> the program when an opening occurred, and left, or graduated, when
> staff and their VRC felt they had gained all they could from the
> training. So we held a celebratory luncheons in the honor of each new
> graduate and presented the little statue. On it was engraved their
> name and the dates of their stay in the program. Below were the
> words; Skills Attitudes Motivation.
> We called it the SAM Award, or the Sammy. Some members of my staff
> felt I should not present the Sammy to any student who had not
> attained a certain level of competency in all of the skills areas we
> taught. They felt that those students who really did achieve high
> levels, would feel the award was meaningless. I came to believe
> differently. I put together a short sermon in which I challenged the
> graduating student to put their Sammy in a prominent spot in their
> home and look at it every day. "When you think of the words on your
> Sammy, Skills, Attitudes, and Motivation, you need to remind yourself
> that you did not graduate from this program, you graduated into the
> rest of your life. Finally, remember this, if you are not constantly
> developing your Skills, improving your Attitudes and Motivating
> yourself, it's a pretty good sign that you're dead".
> And so Sam represented a beginning. But I never convinced some of my
> staff, and I watched as many of our graduates went forth into the
> world and applied for Care-Givers and all of the free services
> available. If one of the program's goals was to reduce costs to the
> taxpayers and promote self reliance, we were a standout failure. We
> tweaked the program, adding new elements, changing our approach,
> involving successful former students, on and on, without any
> significant difference. And yet, years later I meet former students,
> never having worked, living in subsidized housing, needing care
> givers, and stuck on SSI, students who completed the OTC program, and
> they grab me and thank me for all I did for them. I think I have an
> idea of what went through Barak Obama's mind when he was told he'd
> been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
> And yet, some students did grow during their stay in the program. And
> they, and a few others, did and do continue to grow. But our Sighted
> Culture is against them. Against all of us disabled folks.
> The Establishment will say, "We open our arms to these poor disabled
> folks, and do what we can for them". They are totally unable to see
> their prejudice toward the, "Less Fortunate".
> While I did manage to pull myself away from my original belief that I
> was the Super Savior of the Blind, I was never successful in changing
> some of my staff's, "Rescuer Complex".
> Society tends to dismiss the impact of subtle under currents. But the
> ones being discriminated against are very well tuned into them. I go
> crazy when I'm in a conversation with someone who feels they must
> announce, "I haven't a prejudiced bone in my body". I used to say, "I
> envy you. I fight my prejudices every single day".
> I finally gave up on that approach. I feel sometimes like the fellow
> pushing the boulder up the steep hill, only to have it slip past him
> and roll back to the bottom. Perhaps the majority likes things the
> way they are. They have their little Ruling Class to tell them when
> to jump, and how high, and they have those folks, like the Colored and
> the Disabled, to pick on, and to "help". Maybe that's all we can hope
> for. I mean, hope for from our sighted all white society. Most days
> I figure I just let them do their thing and I do mine.
> Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>> And everyone is talking about this stuf and writing about it as if this
>> is
>> new! My God, do these young reporters actually know why the Black
>> Panthers
>> formed and what they were talking about? If only we had them today. They
>> began in California where it was legal to openly carry guns and that's
>> what
>> they did. They patrolled black neighborhoods with guns in order to defend
>> residents from police brutality. They are not the radicals who threw
>> bombs
>> and tried to destroy buildings. That was mostly young white radicals who
>> were deluded into thinking that they could stop the war by bombing the
>> pentagon. The Black Panthers wanted only to defend their people within
>> their
>> communities. Well, I started reading a very long academic history of the
>> group, and now I've been sidetracked by 2 other books. But the leadership
>> was killed by cops and the FBI. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed
>> while
>> he slept. And today, Black Lives matter does peaceful noisey protests
>> and
>> they're being spied upon by our security state and arrested for
>> demonstrating. And, in the same way the blind organizations keep saying
>> that
>> they will educate the sighted world someday, black people say that they
>> will
>> overcome the system of institutional racism some day.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
>> Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2015 3:30 PM
>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Macho Cop not fit to wear the uniform
>>
>> No doubt about it. Sandra Bland was victimized by a cop not fit to wear
>> the
>> uniform.
>> I have done something I've avoided doing 99% of the time. I listened to
>> the
>> recording, several times, of Sandra Bland being cornered in a cat and
>> mouse
>> game where she was the prey.
>> As I say, I avoid these reports as much as I can because I become so
>> outrageously angry. And there's nothing I can do after the fact.
>> Furthermore, all I need to do is to wander around my own area and talk to
>> White folks about discrimination, to get the message that prejudice still
>> rules.
>> "I'm not prejudiced," an elderly White client told us. "But I don't know
>> why them Coloreds have to push in where they're not wanted."
>> Thank goodness he's not prejudiced.
>> "They say they're as good as the rest of us," a waitress in our favorite
>> eatery told us. "So why are so many of them selling and using drugs and
>> getting into fights and getting themselves arrested?"
>> She went on to exclaim that we don't have that sort of violence and drug
>> crime in Sequim. Ah yes, Sequim. A retirement town of about 9,000
>> almost
>> all White residents. Mostly older. Cathy and I serve a great number of
>> these people, in their apartments and homes. Sequim does not have any
>> area
>> one might consider to be slums. No Colored Ghetto. No hookers walking
>> up
>> and down in front of the Penny Arcades.
>> No Arcades. No pimps jockeying with one another for the choice street
>> corners for their Ladies. No drugs...oops! Wait a second. A couple of
>> years back some 32 "users" were rounded up and booked in Jefferson County
>> court. They were "captured" in the small, almost all White community of
>> Quilcene, about 25 miles East of Sequim. . Little Quilcene, closest
>> town
>> to my home, boasts a population of 2,500. I swear they're counting the
>> local cows and horses. But 32 arrests out of some 2,500 people, cows and
>> horses? That's a huge percentage to ignore when bragging about our
>> "clean"
>> county.
>> A client of ours told us that he never went to the doctor. "I keep a
>> positive frame of mind and that keeps me healthy", he bragged. He died
>> at
>> 73 of a diabetic coma. Is America killing itself by denying our
>> prejudices?
>> We sure can't have them removed until we admit that we have them.
>>
>> Carl Jarvis
>>
>> On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Taibbi writes: "The Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's 'courtesy
>>> policy.'"
>>>
>>> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on
>>> July 17.
>>> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
>>>
>>>
>>> ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State Rules
>>> Violations Sandra Bland Was Murdered By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
>>> 25 July 15
>>>
>>> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death
>>>
>>> So news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
>>> "full faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was
>>> "no evidence of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old
>>> African-American woman who was ludicrously jailed last week after an
>>> alleged lane change violation.
>>> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy
>>> policy." The state said there was "no evidence" yet of criminal
>>> behavior on Encina's part.
>>> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play
>>> out in the media.
>>> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the
>>> usual blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of
>>> suicide, questioning Bland's mental health history, and by
>>> highlighting the reports of marijuana found in her system.
>>> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
>>> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on
>>> officer Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is
>>> too "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
>>> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
>>> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is
>>> now mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and
>>> drugs, instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not
>>> legally, surely murdered Sandra Bland.
>>> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets
>>> after the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week,
>>> holstering the usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if
>>> he'd just obeyed the law" variety.
>>> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course,
>>> law-and-order commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the
>>> secret to preventing police brutality.
>>> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem.
>>> The real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to
>>> behave during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be
>>> polite!
>>> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a
>>> piece last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not
>>> get shot by police." After revealing that his only real experience in
>>> this area involved speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that
>>> "the first key to not getting shot" is to not think of the police as a
>>> threat:
>>> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot
>>> you for no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at
>>> it and chances are, it's not going to sting you.
>>> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
>>> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can
>>> see them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
>>> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like
>>> Hawkins imagining to himself that black America has not already tried
>>> using the word "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But
>>> over and over again, we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear
>>> crowd, which as time passed flailed around with increasing desperation
>>> in search of a non-racial explanation for all of these violent
>>> episodes.
>>> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist
>>> named Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only"
>>> was actually used - the "man who tragically decided to resist."
>>> Michigan's even dumber Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel,
>>> countered that Garner would still be alive if his parents had raised
>>> him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly obese asthmatic."
>>> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
>>> solution to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the
>>> black community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson -
>>> the same guy who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would
>>> still be alive "if he'd just followed orders."
>>> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive
>>> today, if only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even
>>> for TownHall.com types.
>>> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the
>>> criminal code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical
>>> prohibitions that a determined enough police officer can stop and/or
>>> arrest pretty much anybody at any time.
>>> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she
>>> was pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something
>>> roughly 100 percent of American drivers do on a regular basis.
>>> Irritated at being stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her
>>> up. He didn't like her attitude and decided to flex his muscles a
>>> little, asking her to put out her cigarette.
>>> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that
>>> she get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you
>>> up," and eventually threw her in jail.
>>> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as
>>> if for the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that
>>> a person may be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful
>>> order," which in the heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
>>> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing
>>> in big cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows
>>> and other "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move
>>> into (typically
>>> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off
>>> corners, and then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or
>>> "failing to obey a lawful order" if they don't.
>>> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on
>>> such practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones,
>>> which give police automatic justification for arrest even if a person
>>> is guilty of nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to
>>> produce ID - even in the halls of your own building, in some cases -
>>> or being seen in or around a "known drug location" can similarly be
>>> grounds for search or detention.
>>> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches."
>>> Police stop people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really
>>> anywhere at all, and ask for their consent to search their property or
>>> their persons. Sometimes they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog
>>> standing beside them.
>>> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are
>>> pulled over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than
>>> double, even though white people are statistically more likely to have
>>> illegal drugs on them.
>>> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also
>>> known as "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an
>>> "articulable suspicion"
>>> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question
>>> any person.
>>> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are
>>> millions of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent
>>> data showed a rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72
>>> percent involving black people - and this in a city that's only 32
>>> percent
>> black.
>>> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
>>> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly
>>> target black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the
>>> population.
>>> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
>>> knees in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could
>>> have just handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these
>>> encounters are going to end in fights, struggles, medical accidents
>>> and other disasters. Like the Bland case.
>>> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the
>>> job.
>>> Of
>>> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of
>>> depression during an illegal detention should be the same kind of
>>> crime. It's especially true given our long and sordid history of
>>> overpolicing misdemeanors.
>>> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
>>> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
>>> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for
>>> such absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
>>> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even
>>> had stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where
>>> any black male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around
>>> written proof that he had a job.
>>> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness"
>>> and being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"?
>>> What's the difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest
>>> for "disorderly conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's
>>> anything more than a semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
>>> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can
>>> avoid getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting
>>> cops like dangerous dogs or bees.
>>> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some
>>> instances, it won't stop police from stopping people without reason,
>>> putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for
>>> infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk
>>> ticket. That's not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a
>>> year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of
>>> incidents we never hear of.
>>> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was
>>> stopped and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but
>>> it's even worse than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass
>>> people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram - a
>>> campaign that's been going on forever, and against which there's
>>> little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything,
>> obeying it is no magic bullet.
>>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
>>> valid.
>>>
>>> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on
>>> July 17.
>>> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20
>>> 150724
>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20
>>> 150724 ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State
>>> Rules Violations Sandra Bland Was Murdered By Matt Taibbi, Rolling
>>> Stone
>>> 25 July 15
>>> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death o
>>> news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
>>> "full faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was
>>> "no evidence of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old
>>> African-American woman who was ludicrously jailed last week after an
>>> alleged lane change violation.
>>> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy
>>> policy." The state said there was "no evidence" yet of criminal
>>> behavior on Encina's part.
>>> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play
>>> out in the media.
>>> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the
>>> usual blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of
>>> suicide, questioning Bland's mental health history, and by
>>> highlighting the reports of marijuana found in her system.
>>> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
>>> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on
>>> officer Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is
>>> too "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
>>> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
>>> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is
>>> now mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and
>>> drugs, instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not
>>> legally, surely murdered Sandra Bland.
>>> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets
>>> after the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week,
>>> holstering the usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if
>>> he'd just obeyed the law" variety.
>>> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course,
>>> law-and-order commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the
>>> secret to preventing police brutality.
>>> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem.
>>> The real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to
>>> behave during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be
>>> polite!
>>> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a
>>> piece last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not
>>> get shot by police." After revealing that his only real experience in
>>> this area involved speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that
>>> "the first key to not getting shot" is to not think of the police as a
>>> threat:
>>> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot
>>> you for no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at
>>> it and chances are, it's not going to sting you.
>>> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
>>> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can
>>> see them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
>>> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like
>>> Hawkins imagining to himself that black America has not already tried
>>> using the word "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But
>>> over and over again, we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear
>>> crowd, which as time passed flailed around with increasing desperation
>>> in search of a non-racial explanation for all of these violent
>>> episodes.
>>> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist
>>> named Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only"
>>> was actually used - the "man who tragically decided to resist."
>>> Michigan's even dumber Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel,
>>> countered that Garner would still be alive if his parents had raised
>>> him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly obese asthmatic."
>>> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
>>> solution to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the
>>> black community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson -
>>> the same guy who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would
>>> still be alive "if he'd just followed orders."
>>> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive
>>> today, if only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even
>>> for TownHall.com types.
>>> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the
>>> criminal code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical
>>> prohibitions that a determined enough police officer can stop and/or
>>> arrest pretty much anybody at any time.
>>> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she
>>> was pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something
>>> roughly 100 percent of American drivers do on a regular basis.
>>> Irritated at being stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her
>>> up. He didn't like her attitude and decided to flex his muscles a
>>> little, asking her to put out her cigarette.
>>> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that
>>> she get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you
>>> up," and eventually threw her in jail.
>>> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as
>>> if for the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that
>>> a person may be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful
>>> order," which in the heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
>>> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing
>>> in big cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows
>>> and other "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move
>>> into (typically
>>> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off
>>> corners, and then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or
>>> "failing to obey a lawful order" if they don't.
>>> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on
>>> such practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones,
>>> which give police automatic justification for arrest even if a person
>>> is guilty of nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to
>>> produce ID - even in the halls of your own building, in some cases -
>>> or being seen in or around a "known drug location" can similarly be
>>> grounds for search or detention.
>>> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches."
>>> Police stop people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really
>>> anywhere at all, and ask for their consent to search their property or
>>> their persons. Sometimes they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog
>>> standing beside them.
>>> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are
>>> pulled over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than
>>> double, even though white people are statistically more likely to have
>>> illegal drugs on them.
>>> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also
>>> known as "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an
>>> "articulable suspicion"
>>> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question
>>> any person.
>>> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are
>>> millions of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent
>>> data showed a rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72
>>> percent involving black people - and this in a city that's only 32
>>> percent
>> black.
>>> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
>>> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly
>>> target black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the
>>> population.
>>> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
>>> knees in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could
>>> have just handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these
>>> encounters are going to end in fights, struggles, medical accidents
>>> and other disasters. Like the Bland case.
>>> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the
>>> job.
>>> Of
>>> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of
>>> depression during an illegal detention should be the same kind of
>>> crime. It's especially true given our long and sordid history of
>>> overpolicing misdemeanors.
>>> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
>>> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
>>> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for
>>> such absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
>>> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even
>>> had stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where
>>> any black male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around
>>> written proof that he had a job.
>>> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness"
>>> and being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"?
>>> What's the difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest
>>> for "disorderly conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's
>>> anything more than a semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
>>> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can
>>> avoid getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting
>>> cops like dangerous dogs or bees.
>>> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some
>>> instances, it won't stop police from stopping people without reason,
>>> putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for
>>> infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk
>>> ticket. That's not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a
>>> year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of
>>> incidents we never hear of.
>>> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was
>>> stopped and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but
>>> it's even worse than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass
>>> people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram - a
>>> campaign that's been going on forever, and against which there's
>>> little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything,
>> obeying it is no magic bullet.
>>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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