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Can you say "APARTHEID"??
Can you say "BLACK Men have become strangers in the UNITED STATES....Land of the FREE"??
Can you say "the U.S. Federal Gov't and CONGRESS are at Fault"??
Article Sources: AOL; Huffington Post; Youtube
ARTICLE: "Sheriff Defends Stopping Black Man For Walking With Hands In His Pockets"
A black Michigan man who was stopped by a sheriff's deputy after walking with his hands in his pockets said he believes he was the victim of racial discrimination.
The local sheriff says the deputy acted appropriately, and that the video of the incident doesn't show the full story.
Brandon McKean, 25, told The Huffington Post he was in the middle of walking a mile from a friend's house in Pontiac, Michigan to his own home to eat dinner around 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. The temperature had hovered around freezing that day, and he had his hands in his pockets.
McKean had been walking for just a few minutes, he said, when an Oakland County sheriff's deputy drove up, got out of the car and questioned him. McKean began filming with his phone.
"You were walking by … well you were making people nervous," the deputy says in the video McKean recorded, above. "They said you had your hands in your pockets."
"Wow, walking by having your hands in your pockets makes people nervous to call the police, when it's snowing outside?" McKean responds.
"They did," the deputy says. "I'm just checking on you."
McKean posted the video on Facebook, intending to show a few friends what he considered an absurd and unjustified stop by police. But it quickly went viral, with many outraged commenters sharing the post.
By Tuesday, the video had been seen more than 3 million times, according to Facebook's stats, and had circulated widely, from Gawker to "The Colbert Report."
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard forcefully objected to the version of the incident that comes across when McKean's clip is viewed on its own, saying it doesn't clarify the reason for the stop and leaves out context.
McKean's video cuts off before the end of their conversation, when the deputy further explains why he stopped McKean and the importance of following up on any 911 call.
The video "was posted with an agenda," Bouchard told HuffPost.
The sheriff said that before McKean was questioned, a business owner called 911, audibly frightened, about a man who had walked by the shop six or seven times looking in the windows with his hands in his pockets. The caller believed the man was casing the business and that a robbery could be imminent. The business and its employees had reportedly already been robbed seven times.
Bouchard would not name the deputies who were dispatched nor the business, but said they had determined the person the 911 caller described was McKean, "without question." After the furor over the video, the sheriff's office posted their own video, which the deputy had also recorded with a phone.
"It boils down to this, if someone calls 911, do you want the police to come or not?" Bouchard said. "A police officer responded, made a quick ascertainment of the situation and determined that nothing else was needed, didn't pat down an individual, never detained an individual, called off secondary units and left. I think that was a very restrained, very professional approach."
McKean told The Huffington Post that the suspicious person spotted by the business owner definitely wasn't him and that he had not walked the stretch that many times.
The encounter occurred at a time when racial bias in policing has become a national conversation in part because of the death of Mike Brown, a black 18-year-old who was killed by then-police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri this summer. A grand jury's decision not to indict Wilson was announced just a few days before McKean's brush with police, and McKean said Brown's death was just one of the many situations, including several others he experienced in the past, that prompt him to record encounters with law enforcement for his own safety.
Bouchard said controversial instances of policing around the country, like Ferguson, become teachable moments for his staff, and deputies' continual training includes cultural sensitivity. When his people do wrong, the sheriff said, he wants to hear from the community and hold officers accountable. But he argued McKean's stop is not one of those cases.
"Given the sensitivity and the anxiety for a lot of people around this country, it's not helpful to the dialogue and certainly not helpful to keep the community the safe," Bouchard said.
McKean was less positive about how police handled the incident in Pontiac, despite telling the deputy he was glad officers were around to patrol. He told The Huffington Post he'd been stopped "for absolutely no reason" three or four times in the last five years.
"The crazy thing is, I know somebody who got their house broken into and they called the police, and the police took about two hours to come," he said. "And they came and pulled up on me in under five minutes for walking with my hands in [my] pockets, and that doesn't make sense."
#FERGUSON COMPARED TO APARTHEID BY MSNBC HOST JOE SCARBOROUGH.
AMERICA'S POLICE BRUTALITY = APARTHEID & MARTIAL LAW
I'M SURE HIS CO-HOST MIKA BREZINKSI DIDN'T APPROVE OF JOE SUPPORTING BLACK PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ELITE.
Article Sources: MSNBC; National Review; Politico; Youtube (Circa August 25, 2014)
ARTICLE: "Making Sure Ferguson Never Happens Again"
Michael Brown will be buried today.
It will be a solemn end to a brutal month that should have never happened.
The people of St. Louis County have endured a long, hot August punctuated by protests, riots, looting and streets that looked more like Fallujah than Ferguson.
It has all put the issues of race and police brutality up for debate across America and the world.
The generals of Egypt and the ayatollahs of Iran have joined a chorus of dictators who have seized on the grim images of August to condemn our country.
But there’s no need to concern ourselves with lectures coming from tyrants. Instead, now is the time for us to start asking how this altercation spiraled out of control and became an international incident.
No one knows whether the shooting of Michael Brown was justified.
Forensic evidence should give us a better idea of what happened on that fateful afternoon. But we can already pass judgment on the negligent response of local officials to the teenager’s death.
The first ingredient in this toxic brew was a police force that was radically different from the people they were paid to serve and protect.
It’s hard to practice what experts call community policing when your force looks nothing like the community they patrol.
New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has been a champion of community policing. It is a strategy designed to get the community invested in keeping city streets safe.
The choke-hold death of Eric Gardner shows that New York cops aren’t perfect, but the bank of trust that Bratton’s approach has built up keeps New York’s protests over the killing peaceful.
As the Rev. Al Sharpton said while calling for peace at the New York rally, “We are not against the police.” That’s because many come from the same communities they are policing.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for Ferguson residents. In a town that is overwhelmingly black, the Ferguson police force of 53 has 50 white cops on the streets.
That’s an ethnic breakdown that’s more reminiscent of apartheid governments from South Africa’s grim past than community policing in today’s America.
And while many are quietly criticizing the welfare culture that they claim has led to the collapse of this troubled Missouri town, these armchair sociologists should be just as concerned with a police culture in Ferguson that is unrepresentative and isolated from the very people they should protect and serve.
A second cause of the Ferguson tragedy was the callous treatment of Michael Brown’s body after the shooting.
Policing experts suggest that officers gather evidence quickly and get a body off the street as quickly as possible. Former NYPD Detective Sgt. John Paolucci said police should conduct very little examination of the body at the scene other than photographing it.
Then, out of respect to the deceased and his community, the body should quickly be removed.
But Michael Brown’s body was left in the middle of a street in sweltering heat for over four hours. Parents had to rush their children away from the area and keep them hidden in rooms with windows facing away from the grisly scene.
As Bloomberg’s John Heilemann said today on ‘Morning Joe,’ it’s inconceivable to believe such a delay would have happened had a black cop shot a middle-class white teenage boy in his affluent hometown.
Rand Paul has declared there to be two different Americas when it comes to criminal justice. This should not be an opinion open to debate.
It is a fact provable by objective evidence. Anyone still denying that reality in 2014 has their head stuck in the sand — or worse.
The third ingredient to this toxic brew is the hyper-militarized nature of the Ferguson police department’s initial response.
Republicans Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Erick Erickson condemned Ferguson’s militarized tanks, assault rifles and other war-ready equipment shipped from Washington with very little training and fewer strings attached.
The militarization of local police departments is a trend so troubling that Red State’s Erickson wrote that conservatives should not wait for a white teenager to get killed under such circumstances before they demand change.
For law enforcement officials worried about an overreaction to the events of this August, they must understand that if D.C. bureaucrats are going to ship out high-grade military equipment to small-town cops, tough guidelines and rigorous training have to be a part of the deal.
The problem is not with each and every police officer in towns like Ferguson.
The problem is cultural and these weapons demand an intense, disciplined training program to make sure we never repeat these same mistakes again.
How do we make sure this never happens again? You start with community policing — a force that represents the people they are supposed to protect.
Then we need a tough, long look at the militarization of local police departments. And finally, it is past time to put cameras on cops. As I said at the beginning of this crisis, these cameras would protect citizens, protect good cops and provide evidence that would let us know in real time what happened in cases like Michael Brown’s.
The only people hurt by putting cameras on cops are bad cops.
And we need them the hell out of the police force anyway to make sure we don’t endure a month like the one that just passed.
MIKE'S FAMILY WENT TO THE UNITED NATIONS, NOW THE OBAMA ADMIN, FERGUSON POLICE & MEDIA ARE TRYING TO SHUT THEM UP.
THE FEDS WANT TO CONTINUE MURDERING BLACK PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY BUT WANT US TO BE QUIET ABOUT IT.
THAT IS APARTHEID.
Article Sources: CNN; KPLR11; USA Today; Youtube
ARTICLE: "Police Asking: Did Michael Brown's Sep-father Intend To Spark Riots?"
To some, they're the gut-wrenching emotional cries of a man whose stepson's life was taken.
Others say they were dangerous words that sparked a powder keg as violent protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri last week.
But did Michael Brown's stepfather intend to incite rioting in the St. Louis suburb?
That's a question Ferguson police say they're looking into.
Brown's stepfather didn't hold back as news of a grand jury's decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson reached Ferguson.
As throngs in front of the Ferguson Police Department listened to St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch's announcement on cell phones and radios, Louis Head stepped onto a platform above the crowd and embraced his wife, Brown's mother. He then turned to the demonstrators -- some of them shouting "F--- the police!" -- and yelled, "Burn this motherf---er down!" and "Burn this bitch down!"
His comments drew widespread attention in the aftermath of the violence as a video of his reaction, recorded just after McCulloch's announcement, circulated online.
No charges have been filed against Head, but police have interviewed people who know Head and who were with him November 24, the day a prosecutor announced that Wilson would not be indicted in the August 9 shooting, Police Chief Tom Jackson said Tuesday.
Head isn't being singled out, but he's one of the people being "looked at as part of an ongoing investigation into the activities surrounding Nov 24 pertaining to the rioting, looting and arsons," Ferguson spokesman Jeff Small said.
Brown's mother has defended her husband's reaction. Last week, CNN's Sunny Hostin asked her about accusations that her husband's words single-handedly started rioting and fires.
"I say that that's impossible," Lesley McSpadden said. "These things have been going on since August 9th, when it first happened."
Protests rocked Ferguson that day, hours after Wilson shot Brown. They grew as time passed and news of the shooting spread.
When the prosecutor finally revealed the grand jury's long-awaited decision last week, it wasn't long before Ferguson erupted again.
St. Louis County Police tweeted their first reports of looting less than 15 minutes later. In the hours that followed, a row of businesses on West Florissant Avenue, a major thoroughfare in the St. Louis suburb, was engulfed in flames. Police cars and vehicles at a nearby dealership were turned into fireballs. There were so many blazes that firefighters couldn't reach them all.
Police chief: 'We are pursuing those comments'
Police have not spoken to Head about his actions, but they intend to do so, Jackson said Tuesday, adding that multiple law enforcement agencies were involved in the investigation.
The police chief told TV and radio host Sean Hannity something similar Monday, but he didn't classify the probe as formal.
"We are pursuing those comments, and there's a lot of discussion going on about that right now, but I really can't get into that at this time," he said.
But police aren't singling out Head, Jackson told Hannity.
"We can't let all that happened in Ferguson and Dellwood and the community die. Everyone who is responsible for taking away people's property, their livelihoods, their jobs, their businesses -- every single one of them needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," he said.
McSpadden, who was standing next to Head when he made the comments and herself told the crowd she'd never experienced anything like this, offered some context in a CNN interview last week.
After hearing the grand jury's decision, McSpadden said she felt like she'd been shot herself and her "emotions were raging." Head was angry, too, she said.
"He just spoke out of anger. It's one thing to speak, and it's a different thing to act. He did not act. He just spoke out of anger," she said. "When you're that hurt and the system has did you this wrong, you may say some things as well. We've all spoke out of anger before."
Brown family attorney Benjamin Crump has previously called Head's remarks inappropriate but asked the public not to condemn the family for being human. More recently, he told CNN to remember that Brown's mother and father have repeatedly asked protesters to remain peaceful.
He further called Head's statements "indefensible" and "not appropriate in any way."
"We don't condone people acting on emotion calling for people to do irresponsible things at all," Crump told CNN. "And so we want his family, his mother and father's message to come across louder than anybody who might be associated with them. ... And they can't control what others do. They can control what they pray for."
Others have called for Head's arrest, including Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, who told radio host Laura Ingraham last week "that he should be arrested and charged with inciting to riot."
Would prosecutors pursue charges?
St. Louis County Police also said Tuesday that they were looking into Head's comments. Police will present their investigation to prosecutors once its complete, police spokesman Brian Schellman said.
But is it a case prosecutors would pursue?
It's unlikely, CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes said.
"I think they'll have a hard time proving that somebody that heard him in the midst of all that noise actually went over and did an arson or committed an act of starting a fire. I think most of the people you see in the crowd are not watching CNN. They're not watching media reporting of him saying that," he told "The Situation Room." "So it is probably very few people that heard it at that time."
Also, Fuentes said, it's likely many people who'd gathered in Ferguson as the grand jury's decision was announced were already determined to act.
"I think the cause and effect of his words will be hard to prove," Fuentes said.
Hostin, a CNN legal analyst, said prosecutors should also weigh what impact charging Head could have on the community.
"I think any prosecutor that looks at a case like this, given what is going on, what has gone on in Ferguson, would never touch this case," she said. "You would have to be really tone deaf to the larger issues that are at play here to bring a case like that."
Ferguson police also under investigation
More than a week after the grand jury's decision, investigations into Brown's shooting and its aftermath are far from over.
The U.S. Justice Department also is investigating the shooting as part of a civil rights probe -- and investigating the Ferguson Police Department, looking at past incidents, procedures and training.
Another part of the probe, according to law enforcement officials, is a pattern of actions by Jackson, the Ferguson police chief, who critics accuse of inflaming public reactions after Brown's shooting.
Among them: the chief's decision to release a video showing a convenience store robbery in which Michael Brown stole cigars minutes before the fatal confrontation with Wilson, Jackson's comments to the media that Wilson would be welcomed back to the police department if a grand jury declined to bring charges, and, now, Jackson's announcement that his department was investigating Head for possibly inciting a riot.
Wilson resigned over the weekend, saying he was worried about putting Ferguson's residents and police officers at risk.
On Tuesday, the Fraternal Order of Police revealed that its members had been providing the officer with free protection since Brown was killed.
Wilson began receiving threats via phone, email and social media after the shooting, and "the (Ferguson Police) department being unwilling or unable as an entity to provide security for him, Fraternal Order of Police members from the surrounding area volunteered and have provided him with security from that time, right up until the present," said the group's executive director, Jim Pasco.
Despite Pasco's assertion that a police department is supposed to protect someone "when a person in the community is inundated with threats on his or her life," it's been widely reported that Wilson went into hiding so hastily after the Brown shooting that he left his lawn half-mowed.
In another development Tuesday, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon announced that the National Guard will scale back operations in the area.
"The Guard has completed its duties within the city of St. Louis, and has begun to systematically reduce its presence in St. Louis County," Nixon said in a statement.
Troops are still supporting local law enforcement agencies in Ferguson and other parts of the county, he said.
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