The Day Ferguson Cops Were Caught in a Bloody Lie

Ah yes. You are a smart one too Izzy. Thumbs up! But I am actually asking nicely what justified the entire town getting ripped to shreds? Why is there no comment made about anything in the situation that DID happen? No sympathy for those people who got straight robbed? Or what about the stores that didn't even have anything to do with the shooting but still got bricks thrown through their windows? Does that mean black people are bad because black people did stupid things? Why doesn't Wilson have to have any evidence against him before being portrayed as a criminal, but everyone else who wrecks people's lives go unnoticed and unspoken about?

That was not what happen to had been reported in the media.

Wilson is 6'4 himself and weighed 210 pounds, hardly a weakling, surely he could have held an unarmed wounded Brown before fatally shooting him for three minutes.

Its true...I have learned to dumb it down so idiots like you can c-o-m-p-r-e-h-e-n-d

That was not what was reported in the media.



Right he should have taken great risk to his own life to made you happy and how could Wilson know that Brown did not have a knife to gut him as he held Brown in his arms?

Because the first shot in the head did not stop the attack.



He could be a massive and grave threat.



Grazes that may as well have been misses.



It seldom works that way.



He is supposed to shoot him as many times as he can until the attack stops.

That is why three cops with 15 round magazines can sometimes shoot a suspect more than 40 times.

Brown was 292 at autopsy

You've dumbed down so much it's permanent. Be honest for once, there's only one reason for your limited vocabulary, and inability to punctuate a basic sentence, it's because you're thick as ****. That's fairly obvious.

Tony, do you know anything about Ferguson or what a "Sundowner" town is/was? It used to be Sundowner town,vwey commonin the South and the rest of the US. Some of these towns, a lot of them in the South had signs that literaly said, "N--------s! Don't be caught in town after sundown!"



Here's a site dedicated and not in a nice way, what its like. WARNING: this is a hate site: http://www.chimpout.com/forum/showthread.php?323293-Freedom-of-speech-Ha!-not-when-niggers-get-involved

Ferguson was a sundown town: http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/59690/



Another, very serious problem is that the police department is over 90% white and 90% of the cops don't live in Ferguson. Are they patrolling a prison or are they an occupying force? Andamajor part of the town budget is derived from police activities ie: fines and tickets. A system gaurenteed to derail lives of the poor.

People who feel trapped may well want to burn the trap and get revenge from the system that keeps them held down.

Grand Juror Sues McCulloch, Says He Mischaracterized The Wilson Case

St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch announces that the grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson on any of five counts that were presented to it.
Credit Bill Greenblatt | UPI

A grand juror is suing St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch in an effort to speak out on what happened in the Darren Wilson case. Under typical circumstances, grand jurors are prohibited by law from discussing cases they were involved in.

The grand juror, referred to only as "Grand Juror Doe" in the lawsuit, takes issue with how McCulloch characterized the case. McCulloch released evidence presented to the grand jury and publicly discussed the case after the grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, then a Ferguson police officer, in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American.

“In [the grand juror]’s view, the current information available about the grand jurors’ views is not entirely accurate — especially the implication that all grand jurors believed that there was no support for any charges,” the lawsuit says. “Moreover, the public characterization of the grand jurors’ view of witnesses and evidence does not accord with [Doe]’s own.”

“From [the grand juror]’s perspective, the investigation of Wilson had a stronger focus on the victim than in other cases presented to the grand jury,” the lawsuit states. Doe also believes the legal standards were conveyed in a “muddled” and “untimely” manner to the grand jury.

In the lawsuit filed Monday in federal court, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri argues that this case is unique and that the usual reasons for requiring the jurors to maintain secrecy should not apply.

In this specific case, “any interests furthered by maintaining grand jury secrecy are outweighed by the interests secured by the First Amendment,” the lawsuit says, adding that allowing the juror to speak would contribute to a discussion on race in America.

As the grand juror points out in the lawsuit, the Wilson case was handled in a very different manner than other grand juries. Instead of recommending a charge, McCulloch's office presented thousands of pages worth of evidence and testimony before the grand jury. At one point, McCulloch's spokesman characterized the grand jury as co-investigators.

“From [Doe]’s perspective, although the release of a large number of records provides an appearance of transparency, with heavy redactions and the absence of context, those records do not fully portray the proceedings before the grand jury,” the lawsuit says.

McCulloch has done several interviews since the grand jury decision was announced on Nov. 24, but the grand jurors have been prohibited from speaking about the case. The county prosecutor admits that some of the witnesses were lying, but said the grand jurors were aware.

The 12 people who could say for sure are currently sworn to secrecy.

Although the county released redacted transcripts of witness and expert testimony, the grand jurors deliberated without a court reporter or member of the prosecutor’s office present.

State law says that grand jurors shall not “disclose any evidence given” nor “the name of any witness who appeared before them,” adding that any juror who violates that is guilty of a misdemeanor. The ACLU is asking a judge to grant an injunction that prohibits enforcing those laws (or threatening to) in this case.

The laws “prevent [the grand juror] from discussing truthful information about a matter of public significance,” the lawsuit says. “As applied in the circumstances of this case, the challenged laws act as a prior restraint on [Doe’s] expressive activity.”

McCulloch's office declined to comment.

Listen
Listening...
4:22
"St. Louis on the Air": Reporter Chris McDaniel discusses the lawsuit.

Editor's note: In an unrelated case, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the ACLU are co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit with Chris McDaniel against the Missouri Department of Corrections for withholding public records.

Follow Chris McDaniel on Twitter: @csmcdaniel

Ferguson didn't happen in a vacuum. NYC is one big Ferguson. Think about it: do you think only the bad stuff was caught on on camera? How much more happens off camera? Listen to how some of those on this site refuse to believe their eyes when they watch the filmed outrages. How much more open are they to the unfilmed ones?

Thanks for the heads up. I think he thinks he's playing some sort of "holy fool", that he can dumb question someone into a new world view.

He''s half way there. The questions ARE dumb. Or at least uninformed. Like the Nazis, racists tend to leave a very well self documented history.

Could be worse, could be a gooeystuffonthechinjohn answer. You know, where you don't just look stupid, you prove you are.

The "I know you are, but what am I?" defense. How old are you, nine?

The NYPD’s Mini-Rebellion, and the True Face of American Fascism
By Andrew O'Hehir / Salon
January 5, 2015

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In 1935, with Hitler and Mussolini forging a historic alliance in Europe and the world sliding toward war, Sinclair Lewis published the satirical novel “It Can’t Happen Here,”which depicted the rise of an indigenous American fascist movement. Lewis is a fine prose stylist, but this particular book has an overly melodramatic plot, and is highly specific to its era. It has not aged nearly as well as “Brave New World” or “1984,” and not many people read it today. (At the time, it was understood as an attack on Sen. Huey Longof Louisiana, the populist firebrand who was planning to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, but was assassinated before he could do so.) But certain aspects of Lewis’ fascist America still resonate strongly. His clearest insight came in seeing that the authoritarian impulse runs strong and deep in American society, but that because of our unique political history and our confused national mythology, it must always be called by other names and discussed in other terms.

Oh, yeah — Happy New Year, everybody! Now let’s get back to fascism. When the “Corpo” regime installed by tyrannical President Buzz Windrip in “It Can’t Happen Here” strips Congress of its powers, tries dissidents in secret military courts and arms a repressive paramilitary force called the Minute Men, most citizens go along with it. (Yeah, some of that sounds familiar — we’ll get to that.) These draconian measures are understood as necessary to Windrip’s platform of restoring American greatness and prosperity, and even those who feel uncomfortable with Corpo policies reassure themselves that America is a special place with a special destiny, and that the terrible things that have happened in Germany and Italy and Spain are not possible here. No doubt the irony of Lewis’ title seems embarrassingly obvious now, but it was not meant to be subtle in 1935 either. His point stands: We still comfort ourselves with mystical nostrums about American specialness, even in an age when the secret powers of the United States government, and its insulation from democratic oversight, go far beyond anything Lewis ever imagined.

I’m not the first person to observe that the New York police unions’ current mini-rebellion against Mayor Bill de Blasio carries anti-democratic undertones, and even a faint odor of right-wing coup. Indeed, it feels like an early chapter in a contemporary rewrite of “It Can’t Happen Here”: Police in the nation’s largest city openly disrespect and defy an elected reformist mayor, inspiring a nationwide wave of support from “true patriots” eager to take their country back from the dubious alien forces who have degraded and desecrated it. However you read the proximate issues between the cops and de Blasio (some of which are New York-specific), the police protest rests on the same philosophical foundation as the fascist movement in Lewis’ novel. Indeed, it’s a constant undercurrent in American political life, one that surfaced most recently in the Tea Party rebellion of 2010, and is closely related to the disorder famously anatomized by Richard Hofstadter in his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

There’s no doubt that the NYPD crisis has disturbing implications on various levels. Amid a national discussion about police tactics and strategy, and the understandable grief following the murders of two NYPD officers, it amounts to a vigorous ideological counterattack. In effect, many cops (or at least their more intransigent leaders) want to assert that law enforcement is a quasi-sacred social institution, one that stands outside the law and is independent of democratic oversight. Sometimes this is taken to ludicrous and literal-minded extremes, as in a recent column by Michael Goodwin of the New York Post celebrating the NYPD and the United States military as “Our angels in a time of danger and cynicism.” (Without realizing it, Goodwin was buttressing the conclusions of James Fallows’ must-read Atlantic article about the way American society has become disconnected from the military and sanctified it at the same time.) As Salon columnist and veteran New York reporter Jim Sleeper has noted, this tendency also makes clear how little the tribal, insular culture of big-city policing has changed, even in an era of far greater diversity.

We still don’t know where this confrontation between de Blasio and his cops will lead, or how it will be resolved. (So far, the city has been peaceful – and nobody on my block got a parking ticket all week! So it’s win-win.) But I’d like to strike a counterintuitive position and insist that it’s important not to overstate the threat, or to give an arrogant blowhard like Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association head Patrick Lynch more importance than he merits. My fellow Irish-Americans will recognize Lynch as a latter-day example of the small-minded bigots and “begrudgers” too common in the tribe. But set him against Joe McCarthy and Father Coughlin, and he barely registers on the historical scales of infamy.

In the final analysis I don’t find Lynch and his minions especially terrifying, for exactly the same reasons I don’t find Sen. Ted Cruz especially terrifying. Both may dream of a Corpo America, in which dissent is crushed with an iron fist and our glorious national destiny is reclaimed from the appeasers and multiculturalists and pantywaists. But they lack the political finesse or rhetorical subtlety to make it happen. Ultimately, the real dangers may be closer at hand, and more difficult to see.

With both the disgruntled NYPD leadership and the so-called intellectual leader of the Tea Party, the appeal to fascism – no, excuse me, to “patriotism” and “true Americanism” – is just too blatant, and their rejection of democracy too obvious. Many people inclined to feel sympathy for the police, and skittish about the street protests of recent weeks, were dismayed to see cops turn the funeral of a murdered officer into a petty political confrontation, against the wishes of the dead man’s family. It was, or should have been, a moment of mourning and contemplation, when the city and the nation were poised to reflect on the uniquely difficult lives of police officers, who so often bear the brunt of policies they did not create and attitudes they cannot realistically be expected to escape.

Instead, Lynch and his followers got buffaloed into a political protest that may have served the ends of right-wing strategists, and galvanized the Fox News audience, but is exceedingly unlikely to improve the lives of NYPD officers and their families. Ted Cruz is a craftier character than Lynch, no doubt, but his entire career has been self-serving political theater meant to enhance his star status and thrill his zealous core of followers. He is widely disliked within his own party for his pattern of ideological overreach and political blunders, and many conservatives will never vote for him. He’s not remotely qualified for the role of Buzz Windrip or Huey Long, who had enormous popular appeal and campaigned on a platform of Mussolini-like public handouts. Republican apparatchiks will do everything possible to stop Cruz from becoming the party’s 2016 presidential nominee; if he wins the nomination anyway, he might well lose 40 states in the general election.

As I said earlier, despite their different contexts, the NYPD’s cold war with de Blasio, the Tea Party movement and the not-entirely-fictional American fascism of “It Can’t Happen Here” all have the same philosophical roots. It’s not just about race, although America’s racial divisions play an inescapable and central role. (In Lewis’ novel, Windrip’s movement seeks to suppress blacks and Jews, and revoke female suffrage.) At root it’s also not about police-state policies and tactics, even if those might seem to be the desired outcome. (Tea Partyers claim to oppose those things, with varying degrees of sincerity — except when Muslims or other varieties of dark-skinned immigrants are involved.) Rather, these worldviews rest on the idea that America is not defined by its democratic institutions, but by a mystical or spiritual essence that cannot be precisely described — but is understood far better by some of its citizens than by others. If those attuned to this patriotic frequency overwhelmingly tend to be white males, that is not evidence of racism (they might say) but of the clarity and selflessness of their political vision.

In this view, Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” takes a distant second place to John Winthrop’s vision of America as a transcendent “city upon a hill.” This vision does not have to be specifically religious or Christian (though it sometimes is) to be infused with a puritanical sense of manifest destiny, and of the unbridgeable gulf between the elect, who perceive the true nature of America, and the damned, who do not. (I would argue that this kind of American exceptionalism is an inherently religious idea — but that’s a topic for another time.) Democracy is only valued insofar as it produces the “correct” results, and comes to be seen as debased and perverted when it does not. So for the committed patriot of the Pat Lynch/Buzz Windrip/Ted Cruz persuasion, only some democratic outcomes are legitimate expressions of “America” (see Bush v. Gore, 2000), only some elected leaders are worthy of respect, and only some exercises of authority require deference.

I’m no defender of the Democratic Party in general or of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama in particular, a pair of Wall Street flunkies and national-security ridealongs who are both to the right of Richard Nixon on most meaningful issues. But the concerted and unceasing campaign to depict both men as criminals and usurpers, whose spurious claims to the White House could magically be undone with a stained cocktail dress or a Kenyan birth certificate, provides one of the clearest manifestations of America’s proto-fascist disorder. The central issue was never whether Clinton should be impeached for lying about a sleazy affair, or whether Obama qualified as a “natural-born citizen.” (Which he probably would have, even had he been born overseas.) Those things were headline-grabbing expedients, symbolic fictions from the Leo Strauss playbook (Benghazi!), meant to stand in for an esoteric truth the benighted public was incapable of grasping: Those guys were not real Americans. The Force was not with them; they had no right to the throne; any method used to defeat them was justified.

These have been upsetting and dramatic weeks in New York and across the nation, and 2014 is likely to be remembered as a pivotal year in our society’s relationship with the police profession. But I suspect the spectacle of those cops turning their backs on Bill de Blasio is best understood as a rearguard action, a pathetic echo of the campaigns of vilification and de-Americanization conducted against Clinton and Obama. It’s fascist wishful thinking, a nostalgic appeal to a white working-class, “Reagan Democrat” demographic that is fading away. It might yield some short-term political benefits for the Republican operatives who apparently orchestrated it, but it is not the first stage of a putsch.

If there’s an urgent lesson to be drawn from Lewis’ 1930s allegory, it might come from turning its premise upside down. We don’t need an unctuous hypocrite like Buzz Windrip, or a buffoonish blackshirt like Pat Lynch, to end up with something close to fascism. (Lewis was arguably not fair to the real-life Huey Long, who was an exceptionally complicated figure – part Napoleon, part Occupy Wall Street. He would be viewed as a dangerous radical today, not acceptable in either political party.) Congress has already rendered itself irrelevant; any president who stripped it of its powers would be applauded. We already have the secret courts and the secret police, in the form of agencies we do not have the right to know about. Our president is charming and urbane, and despised by the old-school, would-be fascists with the Dad pants and the bad haircuts. So the fact that he has amassed unprecedented executive power he will hand on to his successor, and stands astride a vast subterranean “deep state” no one can see or control, is not something to worry about. This is America, and America is a special place. It can’t happen here.

Black Cops Fear Other Cops
By Cliff Weathers / AlterNet
December 23, 2014

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Photo Credit: David Hosford/Creative Commons

Black New York City Police officers often think that they are being racially profiled by their white colleagues, according to a shocking new report by Reuters.

The wire service interviewed 25 black male officers, ten current cops and 15 retired. With just one exception, they said that they have been victims of racial profiling by police, both when wearing the uniform and while off duty. For its article, Reuters identified racial profiling as “using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime.”

In the article, Reuters equates what they experience as the same type of racial profiling that cost Eric Garner his life after he was swarmed by police officers and one applied a choke hold to him.

The black police officers said their experiences included being pulled over by police for no reason (multiple times for most), being stopped and frisked, thrown into prison vans, and being physically assaulted and threatened. Black cops say that they’ve had their heads slammed against vehicles and guns brandished in their faces.

"The black officers interviewed said they had been racially profiled by white officers exclusively, and about one third said they made some form of complaint to a supervisor."

"All but one said their supervisors either dismissed the complaints or retaliated against them by denying them overtime, choice assignments, or promotions. The remaining officers who made no complaints said they refrained from doing so either because they feared retribution or because they saw racial profiling as part of the system."

Reuters joined a group of black officers at a casual outing, where they discussed the Eric Garner incident and unanimously agreed that his death was avoidable. According to Reuters, the cops that met at a Williamsburg tavern said the methods used against Garner were inadvisable and other options, like talking him down or spraying him with mace could have been employed by their colleagues instead of a choke hold.

The NYPD and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association both declined to speak with Reuters. The NYPD also failed to respond to a data request from Reuters showing the racial breakdown of harassment complaints by its officers to its Internal Affairs Bureau.

Ohio Cops Back into, Then Arrest Woman Who was Protesting Killing of Unarmed Black Man at Walmart
By Scott Kaufman / Raw Story
December 21, 2014

Police in Beavercreek, Ohio backed into, then arrested a woman protesting in front of the Walmart where cops shot a black patron holding a toy gun earlier this year.

The protests began inside the store, but employees called for a storewide evacuation shortly after the protesters staged a “die-in” in the very aisle where police shot and killed John Crawford III on August 5, 2014.

In this video, protesters — including the open carry activist recording protest — can be heard singing “justice for John Crawford, justice for us all” as they peacefully moved toward the exits:



According to one shopper, Roxanna Lee, cashiers became “flustered” as news of the protest spread, until one of them announced that a “Code Sam” — store nomenclature for a potential security threat — had been called.

Cashiers then began to herd angry shoppers out of the store, where they were greeted not only by protesters, but law enforcement officials from multiple jurisdictions, including Beavercreek, Fairborn, Kettering, Bellbrook, Sugarcreek Twp. and the Greene County Sheriff’s Office. In this video, police can be heard threatening the protesters — who are holding up their arms and chanting, “hands up, don’t shoot” — with arrest if they do
not leave the parking lot:



According to Counter Current News, police began to focus an undue amount of attention on one African-American male protester, which led another protester — an older white woman — to demand to know why they were “singling him out.”

At that point, a Beavercreek Police Department cruiser allegedly backed into her. In another video, one of Counter Current News’ “citizen journalists” can be heard shouting, “that cop right there — 149 — just backed into that old lady! He just backed into her!”

In the video below, three officers can be seen pulling the older woman onto the hood of a squad car and arresting her for resisting arrest.

“I’m not resisting,” she can be heard saying, “I’m just asking why you singled him out.” The woman — whose name is not known — is one of at least four people arrested at the protest.

Activists Plan March to Demand Firing of Officer Who Tweeted #CopsLivesMatter, Death Threats Against Protesters
By Alyssa Figueroa / AlterNet
December 18, 2014

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On Thursday, activists plan to march to the San Jose police headquarters to demand the firing of Officer Phillip White for his recent threatening tweets, according to Inside Bay Area News.

White has taken to Twitter to mock the Black Lives Matter protests. As Buzzfeed reported, he tweeted on December 8:

Nothing like some torrential rain & wind to quell a protest. Let’s see how important this really is to them when they’re drenched.

On December 11:

Just wondering … where are the protesters today #ICantSwim.

White’s tweets took a more ominous turn this past weekend when he wrote the following two tweets:

Threaten me or my family and I will use my God given and law appointed right and duty to kill you. #CopsLivesMatter

By the way if anyone feels they can't breathe or their lives matter I'll be at the movies tonight, off duty, carrying my gun.

Silicon Valley De-Bug, a social justice community group, started an online petition calling for Officer White to be fired. To date, the petition has nearly 15,000 signatures. The group wrote on the petition:

The San Jose community is appalled by Officer Phillip White's threats to protesters through his twitter account. His words, if tolerated, make the notion of positive police-community relations impossible. Every second he has a badge and a gun, our community is at risk. He must be fired.

The San Jose police chief stated that White’s words do not represent the feelings of the department and that the SJPD does not “condone this type of behavior.” White has since deleted his Twitter account and has been placed on administrative leave with pay while the department investigates his actions. Buzzfeed reported that the San Jose Police Department of Internal Affairs and the city’s Independent Police Auditor would also investigate the matter.

Many community members still want White fired from the department. Activists will meet in front of the Santa Clara County government building today at 4pm and march to the SJPD to deliver their online petition.

Raj Jayadev of Silicon Valley De-Bug explained to CBS San Francisco why he wants White fired: “I saw venom and vitriol and I saw someone who is a walking danger and a walking threat who has a badge and a gun along with the state’s authority to use it.”

There Is an Unbroken Line of Police Violence in the US that Takes Us All the Way Back to the Days of Slavery’
By Stuart Jeffries / The Guardian
December 14, 2014


“There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan,” says Angela Davis. “There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.”

I had asked the professor, activist, feminist and revolutionary, the woman whom Richard Nixon called a terrorist and whom Ronald Reagan tried to fire as a professor, if she was angered by the failure of a grand jury to indict a white police officer for shooting dead an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri earlier this year. “The problem with always pursuing the individual perpetrator in all of the many cases that involve police violence,” the 70-year-old replies, “is that one reinvents the wheel each time and it cannot possibly begin to reduce racist police violence. Which is not to say that individual perpetrators should not be held accountable – they should.”

We’re talking at the Friends Meeting House in London before a memorial service to her friend and colleague Stuart Hall, the black British cultural studies theorist and sociologist, who died in February. It was Hall, she tells me, as much as her mentor, the German Jewish philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who made her think about the structural issues in any given political struggle.

Not that Davis is insensitive to the outrage over specific cases of police violence against black men, be it the riots in Ferguson, the worldwide protests over the death of Eric Garner in police custody, or Trayvon Martin. Davis focuses on the latter to make an incendiary point about the racism endemic in Obama’s America. In 2012, she reminds me, Martin, a black high school student, was fatally shot at a gated estate in Florida by George Zimmerman, a white neighbourhood watch coordinator. Zimmerman, who was later acquitted of Martin’s killing, reminds her of “those who were part of the slave patrols during the slave era”.

Surely the lives of African-Americans in 2014 are better than during the days of slavery? Yet Davis isn’t the only black American intellectual to be less than sanguine. Professor Cornel West recently said that the US still has in effect a “Jim Crow criminal justice system” that “does not deliver justice for black and brown people”. Davis agrees. “You have this huge population of people who come up against the same restrictions that the Jim Crow south created,” she says. The segregation laws that existed until 1965 in the American south, where she grew up, might have gone but, as Davis points out, racist oppression remains.

One key feature of that racist oppression, Davis says, is what she and other leftist intellectuals call the “prison industrial complex”, the tawdry if tacit alliance between capitalism and a structurally racist state.

“The massive over-incarceration of people of colour in general in the US leads to lack of access to democratic practices and liberties. Because prisoners are not able to vote, former prisoners in so many states are not able to vote, people are barred from jobs if they have a history of prison.”

But, lest Britons get complacent, Davis tells me, “the proportion of black people in prison in Britain is larger than the proportion of black people in prison in the United States”.

In Davis’s philosophy, this should come as no surprise; for her, the prison industrial complex is not just a racist American money-making machine, but a means to criminalise, demonise and profit from the world’s most powerless people. “I think it is important to realise that this is not just a US phenomenon, it’s a global phenomenon. The increasing shift of capital from human services, from housing, jobs, education, to profitable arenas has meant there are huge numbers of people everywhere in the world who are not able to sustain themselves. They are made surplus, and as a result they are often forced to engage in practices that are deemed criminal. And so prisons pop up all over the world, often with the assistance of private corporations who profit from these surplus populations.”

If structural racism and state violence against African-Americans, aided and abetted by global capitalism, are as rampant as Davis says, isn’t she disappointed in the failure of the US’s first African-American president to speak out when a case comes up that seems to dramatise what she is indicting? Davis smiles and recalls a conversation she had with Hall two months before his death. “We talked about the fact that people like to point to Obama as an individual and hold him responsible for the madness that has happened. Of course there are things that Obama as an individual might have done better – he might have insisted more on the closing of Guantánamo – but people who invested their hopes in him were approaching the issue of political futures in the wrong way to begin with. This was something Stuart Hall always insisted on – it’s always a collective process to change the world.”

Isn’t she letting Obama off the hook? “Perhaps we should always blame ourselves,” she says. “Why have we not created the kind of movement that would put more pressure on Obama and force the Obama administration to deal with these issues? We might have arrived at a much better healthcare plan if those of us who believe healthcare is a human right were out on the streets, as opposed to the Tea Party.”

This is classic Davis – offering bracing analysis that, instead of blaming someone else, puts responsibility for changing the world in our hands. For all that Davis was the late 60s/early 70s radical who stuck it to the man, for all that her indomitable spirit and iconic hairdo made her a poster girl for African-Americans, feminists and anyone with a radical consciousness, this is perhaps Davis’s key significance now – a woman who comes at the hottest political issues from unexpected and inspiring angles. For instance, the day before we meet, at a keynote lecture titled Policing the Crisis Today at a conference honouring Hall at Goldsmith’s, she spoke about racist violence, but focused on the case of Marissa Alexander, jailed for 20 years for firing a warning shot over the head of her estranged, unharmed husband, who attacked and threatened to kill her. “Let us ask ourselves what is so threatening abut a black woman in the southern United States who attempts to defend herself against so-called domestic violence,” said Davis, as she finished her speech to rapturous applause.

Why, I ask Davis, the day after, did you focus on Alexander’s case? “We rarely hear about the women,” she replies. “Just because the majority of the prison population is male doesn’t mean we need to start with their experience.”

Davis has long campaigned against prisons, regarding them as brutalising racist institutions from which, latterly, big bucks are to be made. After her speech, when she is asked why the white cops who shoot black men shouldn’t face jail, Davis stands her ground arguing that the institution of prison “only reproduces the problem it putatively solves”. Not that she has any answers about what the alternative to this prison industrial complex might be. “I don’t think there’s a predetermined answer, but I want us to think.”

Someone else asks Davis if Beyoncé is a terrorist. The audience giggles, but the question is serious. During a panel discussion on liberating the black female body earlier this year, feminist activist bell hooks described Beyoncé as a terrorist and anti-feminist who was “colluding in the construction of herself as a slave”. In an emollient reply, Davis said that she liked the fact that Beyoncé had sampled Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech on feminism on her album.

The following day, I ask Davis more about it. “Whatever problems I have with Beyoncé, I think it is so misleading and irresponsible to use that word in connection with her. It has been used to criminalise struggles for liberation. But we don’t use the word terror and terrorism to describe US history and the racism of the pre-civil rights era.”

Certainly the terror, if that’s the word, that was perpetrated on African-Americans when Davis was a girl in pre-civil rights Birmingham, Alabama, is burned into her consciousness. She was born in 1944 in a city that was to become notorious during the civil rights struggles for setting dogs and turning hoses on African-Americans seeking the vote – and much much worse. “I grew up at a time when, as a response to an interracial discussion group I was involved in, the church where we were having the discussions was burned. I grew up at a time where black people would move in to the white neighbourhood right across the street from where we lived, and bombs would be set in those houses. I’ve never heard the word terrorism used in that context, but on the other hand it is used to evoke this sense of danger coming from the outside without ever recognising the extent to which the history of the United States has been a history of terror against indigenous people, a history of terror against people of African descent.”

Davis looks at me and laughs: “So, to call Beyoncé a terrorist just does not work!”

The word terrorist has a deeper personal resonance. That is what president Nixon called Davis when, 44 years ago, she was one of the FBI’s top 10 most wanted, a fugitive from so-called justice. She was finally arrested and faced charges of conspiracy to kidnap and murder, charges for which she could have been executed. At her trial in 1972, she was acquitted, while other co-defendants, former Black Panthers whom she insists are political prisoners, were less fortunate: “My former co-defendant Ruchell Magee has been in prison for 51 years now.” There are many other such political prisoners from that Black Panther era still languishing unjustly in jail, she says. George Jackson, whom she once called her “lifetime” husband (even though the pair never married), is not among them: he was shot dead in 1971 during an attempted prison breakout, three days before he was due to stand trial for the murder of a white prison guard. Davis has not married since.

I ask her about another Black Panther, Albert Woodfox, jailed for armed robbery and later convicted with two other men for the murder of a prison guard at Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola prison); last month, Woodfox had his conviction overturned after enduring 42 years in solitary confinement. “Of course I’m so happy, having been involved in the campaign to free the Angola Three for many many years, but why has it taken so long?”

If the Black Panthers were active in 2014, Davis believes “they’d be on the receiving end of the war on terror”. She cites Assata Shakur, the activist and Black Panther supporter who was convicted as an accomplice to the murder 40 years ago of a New Jersey state trooper, and was put on the FBI’s most-wanted list earlier this year. “I think that the move to designate Assata a terrorist and to post a $2m reward for her capture, which means that any of the mercenaries from the new privatised security firms might try to travel to Cuba [where Shakur has been living for 35 years], capture her and bring her back for the $2m reward, that is not so much an attack on Assata – which it is – but it sends out a message to vast numbers of young people who identify with her. Her autobiography is very popular and it seems to me that that is the message to young people today: ‘Watch out! If you get involved in progressive struggles, radical movements, this is how you will be treated – you will be treated as a terrorist.’”

Still, Davis thinks young people now are made of sterner stuff than to be browbeaten by a terrorising state. “I’m very, very hopeful. I hear people repeatedly referring to the apathy of young people but there are probably more people who are actively involved in radical political projects in the US today than there were in the 1960s.”

She takes particular succour from the Occupy movement, at whose encampments she spoke repeatedly in 2011. “They didn’t know necessarily where they were going but they did know they were standing up to capitalism.” For a veteran communist (Davis stood twice as vice-presidential candidate for the Communist party USA in the 1980s), that anti-capitalism is especially heartening. “I think the influence of Occupy will continue even though the encampment could only exist for a very defined period of time. One can see the influence of Occupy in the Ferguson demonstrations now, in the sense that they recognise that it’s not only about demanding that this one individual cop be convicted but it’s also about recognising the connection between racist violence and the profit machine. That’s what we’re fighting against.”

Racists are very good at fooling themselves into believing the crap they spout isn't racist after all, and their fellow racists lap it up. Some people are worth the effort of debating with, others are not. Not only is it a complete waste of time, by debating you can end up legitimising their view. And his particular view makes me want to throw up.

Just another post with the standard answer, as if Izzy draws the line between the facts and his inability to say anything relevant. The idiot can't even admit what goes on in the UK.

All in all, a poor judge of anything having to do with justice.