Black Lives Matter

What political party dominated US policy during the sixties? Those policies that widened the wealth gap between black and white? You can thank the Democrats. You can thank the welfare programs where blacks outnumber White's 2 to1. There are plenty of other races other than black who were discriminated against and disadvantaged after World War II in this country who made it just fine as far as wealth is concerned.

People who are given things never learn the value of wealth and therefore never learn how to obtain it.

Just more radical liberally biased propaganda from Bob...

Seriously? You suggest that blacks income were equal under the Republicans???? Pull your head from your butt.

All your statistics come from your funtimus, also.

Baltimore Residents from Rep. Elijah Cummings to Local Activist Speak Out on Being Stopped by Police

The damning report issued by the Justice Department this week about policing in Baltimore highlighted one African-American man in his fifties who was stopped more than 30 times by police.
By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now!
August 11, 2016


Democracy Now! spoke with Maryland Congressmember Elijah Cummings and local activist Ralikh Hayes about their own experiences with police in Baltimore. Cummings says he has been stopped "many times"; Hayes says at least 20 times; meanwhile, reporter Baynard Woods, who is white, says he has never been stopped.


AMY GOODMAN: During the Democratic National Convention, I caught up with Maryland Congressmember Elijah Cummings, who represents the 7th Congressional District in Baltimore, and I asked him about policing in Baltimore.

REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: When I talk to police officers in Baltimore, they tell me that they know of people that shouldn’t be on the force. The other thing that we have to acknowledge is that black men are dying, that black mothers are afraid for their sons and are afraid for their husbands and nephews. But the fact is, is that we have to talk together. You know, we have to do what we did at the convention tonight: had the police present and tell what their concerns are, but at the same time have those people who are simply asking for accountability and respect from the police to be able to voice their concerns. And hopefully we have a mutual thing going on there. The police cannot do their jobs without the cooperation of the community, and the community certainly needs the police. OK?

AMY GOODMAN: Have you ever been stopped by the police over the years?

REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: Many times. Many times. Many times. And keep in mind what then—as a younger—I got stopped a lot more as a younger man. I’ll never forget one time I was fortunate enough to get an Acura automobile, and I was being stopped almost every week. I was about 32, and I was being stopped every week. AMY GOODMAN: That’s the congressmember, Elijah Cummings, speaking about his own experiences. Ralikh, as you listen to him, your comments on what’s happening at the federal level—he’s a congressman—if you’re satisfied with what he’s doing in his community, in your community, in Baltimore?

RALIKH HAYES: As of this moment, I am not satisfied with any black elected official that has not signed on for the Vision for Black Lives platform, which is a united front platform from the Movement for Black Lives team, built by over 30 organizations. If he wants my support, that’s how you get it. As far as his story about constantly getting stopped in Baltimore, that’s his story. That’s my story. That’s the story of every black man and person, really, in Baltimore City, particularly trans folk and black men. We also—

AMY GOODMAN: Ralikh, how many times have you been stopped?

RALIKH HAYES: It has to be over 20 at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: On what grounds?

RALIKH HAYES: It has to be. There’s various times. I’d just be walking around my neighborhood, and I will get stopped as—you know, search me. Like, "Do you live around here?" "Yes, I do." It has lessened recently—well, not recently, but in the last three years or so, because I temporarily served on the Baltimore City Youth Commission, and that’s like a "Oh, you’re one of the good blacks. We can let you go."

BAYNARD WOODS: And by comparison, I’ve been stopped zero times.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Baynard Woods, you—

RALIKH HAYES: And most of those don’t—

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Ralikh. RALIKH HAYES: I was—most of those, I can honestly say, probably never exist on paper. I never got a citation. I may have gotten two citizen citations and a few traffic stops in my life, but the rest of them are directly informal interactions.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Baynard Woods, you have looked at particularly gender bias and trans bias on the part of the police. Explain.

BAYNARD WOODS: Yeah, so there are just some horrible allegations in the report. They go—they don’t go as far as saying that gender bias violates federal law, but then they point out a number of areas that they find very troubling in terms of gender bias. I mean, in one case, the report cites a police officer who was regularly having sex with a sex worker for U.S. currency and for immunity from prosecution. There are cases where they’re not investigating sexual assault claims. A member of the State’s Attorney’s Office calls a woman who had made a sexual assault report a "conniving whore," and the police officer writes back, "LMAO, I agree." And another police officer said that—who was dealing with sexual assault crimes, that "We don’t have any victims, and all of our cases are"—and then he uses an un-radio-friendly expletive. But it’s just a systematic—and I think if you separated that out, you would find that many of those cases, they don’t look at race and gender together. But many of those cases are black women, and that trans women, being in a place, in an area like a bus stop, and just being there, can be suspicion of soliciting or prostitution. So it takes that loitering aspect and pushes it another step further in really criminalizing being in public as an African American in Baltimore.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to—

RALIKH HAYES: And actually, you said something—

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Ralikh, and we’re going to wrap up with your comment.

RALIKH HAYES: You said something—you said something really key—right?—which is like the collusion between the State’s Attorney’s Office, and I would also add the FOP in there, in how it, you know, pretty much provides—they provide amnesty for these officers—

AMY GOODMAN: The Fraternal Order of Police.

RALIKH HAYES: —and don’t allow—yeah, they don’t allow the transparency necessary for accountability, which is why we also would really like a DOJ investigation into the State’s Attorney’s Office. And the FOP should be divested from immediately.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. We will certainly continue to follow this story. Baynard Woods is a journalist who writes for The Guardian. We’ll link to your pieces. And Ralikh Hayes, activist, coordinator of Baltimore Bloc, speaking to us from Baltimore.

Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of The Silenced Majority, a New York Times best-seller.

Bob are you stupid or what? Are you making up your arguments as you go along regardless what I post? Where did I ever say that blacks income under Republicans were equal? If you can't keep up just stop... You're embarrassing yourself.

Federal Investigation Lays Bare How Baltimore Police Systematically Abuse the Civil Rights of the City's Mostly Black Residents

It took an uprising to bring attention to the rampant racism of the city police department.
By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet
August 10, 2016



When Baltimore erupted in an uprising last year following the violent death of Freddie Gray in police custody, angry protesters, most of them black youth, were widely denounced as criminals and thugs. Maryland’s governor deployed the national guard as riot police poured in from across the state and residents faced a city-wide curfew. At one point, cops surrounded and maced high school students in the Mondawmin neighborhood, a provocation described as “absolutely vile” by Brian Arnold, an eyewitness and former Baltimore City high school teacher. As rumors of a “gang truce” circulated, no holds were barred in the clampdown on protests.

Yet, as in Ferguson, Missouri, it was the sustained mobilization to Baltimore’s streets that forced the world to see the systemic racism of the city’s police department, and forced Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to ask the Department of Justice to launch an investigation. Poor black residents of the deeply segregated city described a police department that behaved like an occupying force, brutalizing and disproportionately targeting them with unnecessary stops and deadly force.

"They are killing us. They are actually killing us, and then they make this seem like we're out of control,” 26-year-old Antwion Robinson told the Baltimore Sun in April 2015. "But they're killing our neighbors and brothers. We're just supposed to sit back and take that?”

Now, the Department of Justice has released the findings of its investigation in a damning report that confirms police systematically abuse the civil rights of residents, disproportionately targeting African Americans with unjustified stops, searches, arrests and violent force, and committing horrific acts of degradation. The Department of Justice concludes that “there is reasonable cause to believe that BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.”

In other words, Baltimore’s widely demonized protesters were telling the truth. They were expressing outrage at a police force whose atrocities against their community are now confirmed and documented in harrowing detail by the federal government.

“I’m glad we were able to make them see what’s been going on forever,” Tawanda Jones, whose brother Tyrone West suspiciously died in police custody in 2013 after he was picked up during a traffic stop, told AlterNet. “They were doing anything to us and literally getting away with it.”

The report cites the city’s “zero tolerance” policing practices, dating to the late 1990s, as responsible for “repeated violations of the constitutional and statutory rights, further eroding the community’s trust in the police.”

Such policies target black communities, the report confirms. “BPD officers recorded over 300,000 pedestrian stops from January 2010–May 2015, and the true number of BPD’s stops during this period is likely far higher due to under-reporting,” the investigation states. “These stops are concentrated in predominantly African-American neighborhoods and often lack reasonable suspicion.”

Meanwhile, approximately 44 percent of pedestrian stops occur in just “two small, predominantly African-American districts that contain only 11 percent of the city’s population,” the report states. “Consequently, hundreds of individuals—nearly all of them African American—were stopped on at least 10 separate occasions from 2010–2015. Indeed, seven African-American men were stopped more than 30 times during this period.”

Pedestrian stops often occur without any reasonable suspicion. According to the report, only 3.7 percent of pedestrian stops resulted in an actual citation or arrest, and “many of those arrested based upon pedestrian stops had their charges dismissed upon initial review by either supervisors at BPD’s Central Booking or local prosecutors.”

“In some cases, unconstitutional stops result from supervisory officers’ explicit instructions,” the report states. “During a ride-along with Justice Department officials, a BPD sergeant instructed a patrol officer to stop a group of young African American males on a street corner, question them, and order them to disperse. When the patrol officer protested that he had no valid reason to stop the group, the sergeant replied, ‘Then make something up.’”

Once stopped by police, individuals are subject to dehumanizing treatment. The investigation describes degrading strip searches performed in public with no apparent grounds, such as in the following account:

In one of these incidents—memorialized in a complaint that the Department sustained—officers in BPD’s Eastern District publicly strip-searched a woman following a routine traffic stop for a missing headlight. Officers ordered the woman to exit her vehicle, remove her clothes, and stand on the sidewalk to be searched. The woman asked the male officer in charge “I really gotta take all my clothes off?” The male officer replied “yeah” and ordered a female officer to strip search the woman. The female officer then put on purple latex gloves, pulled up the woman’s shirt and searched around her bra. Finding no weapons or contraband around the woman’s chest, the officer then pulled down the woman’s underwear and searched her anal cavity. This search again found no evidence of wrongdoing and the officers released the woman without charges. Indeed, the woman received only a repair order for her headlight. The search occurred in full view of the street, although the supervising male officer claimed he “turned away” and did not watch the woman disrobe. After the woman filed a complaint, BPD investigators corroborated the woman’s story with testimony from several witnesses and by recovering the female officer’s latex gloves from the search location. Officers conducted this highly invasive search despite lacking any indication that the woman had committed a criminal offense or possessed concealed contraband. The male officer who ordered the search received only a “simple reprimand” and an instruction that he could not serve as an officer in charge until he was “properly trained.”

According to the report, police exhibit hostility toward the public they are entrusted to protect:

Interviews with BPD officers throughout the chain of command also revealed that officers openly harbor antagonistic feelings towards community members. We found a prevalent “us-versus-them” mentality that is incompatible with community policing principles. When asked about community-oriented problem solving, for example, one supervisor responded, “I don’t pander to the public.” Another supervisor conveyed to us that he approaches policing in Baltimore like it is a war zone. A patrol officer, when describing his approach to policing, voiced similar views, commenting, “You’ve got to be the baddest ************ out there,” which often requires that one “own the block.”

In one stunning example of institutional racism, a police department template for documenting trespassing arrests already included the terms "BLACK MALE" and "PUBLIC HOUSING" filled in.



The report identifies “a persistent failure to discipline officers for misconduct, even in cases of repeated or egregious violations,” as well as “a cultural resistance to accountability has developed and been reinforced.”

Such observations come as no surprise to members of the public outraged after Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced last month that she is dropping all charges against six police officers for the killing of Freddie Gray.

However, the report still manages to unearth disturbing information, including the following excerpt:

Indeed, BPD’s internal affairs records contain only one complaint that officers categorized as a racial slur allegation in the six years of data we examined. Our interviews with hundreds of Baltimore residents, along with other complaints we have received from the Baltimore community, demonstrates that this number is implausibly low. Because of this, we manually reviewed the narrative descriptions of a subset of the complaints that were not classified as alleging racial bias, and we identified more than one hundred examples of officers allegedly using racial epithets, slurs, and making threats when interacting with African Americans in that subset. Indeed, we found 60 separate allegations between 2010 and 2016 that officers used the word “n****r” that were not classified as complaints alleging use of racial slurs or other racial bias.

Police Commissioner Kevin Davis is already hitting the media circuit to claim that reforms are underway and Rawlings-Blake proclaimed Wednesday that "we'll put in place a concrete plan for change and a new culture." Yet in a city where such mistreatment has been perpetrated and ignored for so long, and residents who express outrage are subject to demonization and repression, many say the system is simply broken.

“We're past reform. It's about saving lives right now,” said Jones, who is now active with the grassroots organizations Baltimore BLOC and the Justice for Tyrone West Coalition. “These cops are still walking the beat and terrorizing people. They set out to brutalize and beat, and they get away with it. My kids, community and people have to pay the price when they encounter a deadly cop.”

Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, she coedited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.

You have no reading comprehension whatsoever. Maybe you ought to stop sampling the evidence room.

I said "suggesting" - look it up. What was your purpose using Democrat in your fact-less little poopball?

And all the crap you just posted here is the operative phrase:

and local activist Ralikh Hayes

And I'm positive he loves being stopped... Because if he wasn't he would be a nobody and no one would ask his opinion.

Disturbing Video of Car Ploughing Into Black Lives Matter Protester—Followed by Gunshots—Emerges

Protesters were gathered to commemorate the second anniversary of Michael Brown's shooting.
By Janet Allon / AlterNet
August 10, 2016

Protesters were gathered by the side of the road in Ferguson Tuesday night to commemorate the second anniversary of Michael Brown's death when all hell broke loose. A grainy video shows a car hitting one of the protesters, and after a horrified crowd gathers around the man, gun shots are heard, scattering them.

One woman is heard screaming multiple times, "Oh, my God," and after the gunfire breaks out she exclaims that the "cops are just sitting over there," despite the evident pandemonium.

The man who was struck was reportedly helped to his feet, after flying into the air on impact. According the AP, a spokesman for Ferguson said it appears the driver did not hit the protester deliberately.


Watch the graphic video here:

Handcuffed While Dying: Police Killing of Black Teenager Paul O'Neal Sparks Protests in Chicago

Chicago is once again rocked by protests over police brutality, following the release of video showing the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager.
By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now!
August 9, 2016



The newly released video from Chicago police body cameras shows the moments before and after police killed 18-year-old Paul O’Neal on July 28. In the video, police are seen shooting repeatedly at the car O’Neal was driving, which police say was stolen. The video then shows a police officer running over to O’Neal, who is lying face down in a growing pool of blood surrounded by other officers. The officers then handcuff O’Neal with his arms behind his back and search his backpack, as he continues bleeding. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office says he was shot in the back. For more, we’re joined by Michael Oppenheimer, the attorney for the family of Paul O’Neal.

AMY GOODMAN: In Chicago, hundreds of protesters marched through the streets and blocked traffic in a series of demonstrations over the weekend following the release of video showing the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager. The newly released video from police body cam shows the moments before and after police killed 18-year-old Paul O’Neal. It was July 28th. In the video, police are seen shooting repeatedly at the car O’Neal was driving, which police say was stolen. The video then shows a police officer running over to O’Neal, who’s lying face down in a growing pool of blood surrounded by other officers. The officers then handcuff O’Neal with his arms behind his back and search his backpack as he continues to bleed. Afterward, one of the officers can be heard complaining he’ll be on desk duty for the 30 next days. Listen carefully.

POLICE OFFICER: [bleep], man, I’m going to be on a desk for 30 goddamn days now. [bleep] desk duty for 30 days now. Mother [bleep]!

AMY GOODMAN: Paul O’Neal died shortly afterwards at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office says he was shot in the back. Police say they’re investigating why the body camera worn by the police officer who shot O’Neal did not capture the actual moments of the fatal shooting. Three officers have been suspended in relation to the shooting. This is Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaking Monday.

MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL: There’s a gut reaction because it’s a loss of life, and I think it’s a horrible thing, and, as I said, it’s a tragedy. I think what I’m trying to do is get—superintendent took his immediate steps on both the material, getting it out, as well as what he’s done with the officers. I’m reserving any judgment while it’s in the middle of investigation, because there’s a lot of questions, and I probably want to echo what the superintendent says. There are more questions at this time than there are answers, and I don’t want to jump to a conclusion until we know some basic fundamental facts from an event that happened.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as today marks the second anniversary of the death of African-American teen Michael Brown, who was 18 when he was killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in the suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. For more, we’re joined by two guests. Charlene Carruthers is the national director of the Black Youth Project 100, and Michael Oppenheimer is the attorney for the family of Paul O’Neal. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! First, Michael Oppenheimer, what do you understand took place on July 28th?

MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: Well, as the mayor said, there’s a lot of unanswered questions. All we know is that he was in—Paul was an 18-year-old kid who graduated from high school this past year, when he was 17. He was in a stolen car. The police, as you can see from the video that I’ve seen, go on a chase for that stolen car. It looked to me like a police officer got out of the car; as the car was going by, shot improperly at the car. Another police officer, going the wrong way on a one-way street, rammed the car that Paul was in. Paul got out of the car. As he was running away, at some point, although we don’t see it on the body cam, he was shot in the back by unknown police officers.

AMY GOODMAN: They also shot at the car, right?

MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: They shot at the car as the car was going by the police officer, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And what has happened at this point? Police officers have been, what, suspended?

MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: It is my understanding that police officers involved in the shooting have been suspended by the superintendent, Eddie Johnson, and that’s it. We have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in this case. It was filed last week in federal court. But all that’s happened so far is the police officers have been suspended. As you heard from one of the officers, as he swore, he said, "Now I’m going to be on desk duty for 30 days."

AMY GOODMAN: That was his response to killing a young man.

MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: That was his response to a young man lying there bleeding to death on the ground as he was being handcuffed.

AMY GOODMAN: And this showing the man, Paul, laying on the ground in his own blood as the pool was getting larger and larger of that blood, and they were busy handcuffing him. MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: It’s quite disturbing. They’re busy handcuffing him, and while he’s being handcuffed lying there bleeding to death, other officers are checking themselves for injuries. And one officer says, "I think my leg hurts," or something to that effect.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the video? Why didn’t the officer who shot him have his video camera on?

MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: Well, that’s the big question. For years, we’ve had other cases that we’ve fought for the release of videos, including Ronald Johnson. You’ve seen the Laquan McDonald video. Traditionally, the Chicago Police Department and the city have fought the release of these videos. Now, in, quote, "a spirit of transparency," they released this video only a few short weeks after the shooting. It’s new technology. And in the age of GoPro and Instagram and all these things, how in the world does the officer who actually shot him—how does his body cam not work? I smell a cover-up. They’re saying he may not have turned it on, or it wasn’t functioning.

AMY GOODMAN: On Friday, the family of Paul O’Neal, who you represent, Michael, called for answers as protesters confronted Chicago’s police superintendent during a news conference. This is O’Neal family spokesperson Ja’Mal Green.

JA’MAL GREEN: If you looked at the video, one of the body cameras supposedly was not working, but that officer supposedly turned it on as he was leaving the incident. I don’t believe that story. I think we need to investigate more into what happened. I’m putting pressure on Superintendent Johnson to see if that camera was really recording, if that camera was turned off, because it seems to me that all the other cameras were working. That one should have been working, and it shouldn’t have just magically came on after the incident happened.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Ja’Mal Green, family spokesperson. Michael Oppenheimer, you’re their attorney.

MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: I couldn’t agree more with Ja’Mal. I mean, how in the world does this camera go off, and then it goes on? I think the investigation needs to show that there may be unknown footage. We’re still doing our investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlene Carruthers, you’re national director of Black Youth Project 100. You’ve been out in the streets. Hundreds of people have been protesting. What are you calling for?

CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Well, what we’ve witnessed here, once again, is not simply a failure or a technical failure of a piece of equipment, but a failure of the Chicago Police Department to keep black people safe. Here in the city of Chicago, we invest about 40 percent of our public service budget to policing, and the amount of money that’s been invested in body cameras has been astronomical. And for me and for the folks that I work with every single day, body cameras don’t help us sleep at night. What it tells us, that while police officers can have a camera on their body, they can still take it upon themselves to take our lives. And so, we’re calling for what we’ve been calling for: divestment from policing and investment in our communities, so that we can create actual safe communities and not communities that rely on police or prisons to keep us safe.

Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of The Silenced Majority, a New York Times best-seller.

"Stop the Cops & Fund Black Futures": Voices from First Day of New York City Hall Park Occupation

On Monday, hundreds of activists gathered at New York City Hall demanding the defunding of the New York Police Department, the firing of New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and reparations for victims of police brutality.
By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now!
August 2, 2016

Democracy Now!’s Charina Nadura and Andre Lewis were at the park speaking to protesters gathered at New York City Hall in New York City Monday.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn right now to the release of the new platform coming as Black Lives Matter protests continue nationwide following the police killings of African Americans Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. On Monday, hundreds of activists gathered here in New York City at City Hall demanding the defunding of the New York Police Department, the firing of the New York police commissioner, Bill Bratton, and reparations for victims of police brutality. Democracy Now!’s Charina Nadura and Andre Lewis were there.

PROTESTER 1: Fire Bill Bratton. For what? You fire Bill Bratton when executive leadership of a city agency is malfeasance.

VIENNA RYE: My name is Vienna Rye. I’m an organizer with Millions March NYC. And we are here today to demand that Bill Bratton be immediately fired, and broken windows policing ended, that reparations are paid to all victims and survivors of racist police brutality, and that the NYPD is defunded and that money is reinvested into black, brown and working-class communities.

PROTESTER 2: [echoed by the People’s Mic] We will not allow for it to continue!

PROTESTER 3: We’re here to stop the cops and fund black futures. We sincerely believe that a disinvestment in the NYPD, rather than investing $5.5 billion into a corrupt, racist police institution, and investing that money instead into our communities is a way that we can achieve freedom for our people.

NABIL HUSSEIN: My name is Nabil Hussein. I’m an organizer with Millions March NYC. There are so many ways that this money could be used besides—besides the NYPD. This money could be used for funding a system of mental health first responders, so that we would have someone to call other than the police when someone is having a mental health episode. There’s no reason to believe that introducing an element of deadly force is actually going to be something that improves the situation. This money could be used for building housing in the city. This money could be used for jobs, for—this money could be, honestly, for pretty much anything other than the police, the jails and the prisons.

PROTESTERS: Who do you serve? Who do you protect? Who do you serve? Who do you protect?

FRANCIS MARIE BRATHWAITE: My name is Francis Marie Brathwaite. Around, you say about—maybe about 10:30 or about 10:00, 10:30, you see a large police presence come towards the park, even though there was a presence there already, but not as large as it was just now. And around 11:00, they pulled the LRADs out. They gave us our first warning. And the funny thing is that while they’re all out there compiled, everybody else went into the park. They didn’t know what was going on. And that was the contingency plan, to come to this park here, which is a 24-hour space, open to the public. As long as we don’t violate any of the rules here, we’re fine. Well, for me, I’m an occupier. I know what these demands mean to the city, period. You know? And I feel like I need to be out here with my comrades, supporting them.

PROTESTERS: We gonna be all right! We gonna be all right!

FRANCIS MARIE BRATHWAITE: There’s things that need to be done that are not being done, and people are not being held accountable, and they need to be held accountable. So, I’m out here. I’m going to occupy for as long as it takes, until our demands [inaudible].

Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of The Silenced Majority, a New York Times best-seller.

Hey Bob you left out the best part... The poor woman who accidentally hit the idiot protester standing in the middle of a busy street stopped and then had her car riddled with bullets buy one of the piece of **** protesters.

Terrible, I hope it does not follow the same pattern of ultimate injustice for the young man who died. I don't have much hope, I can't imagine how hopeless the black community feels reading and/or seeing another young black man's death by the hands of the police.

You're making this too easy.

Yes yes once again the voice recognition that does my typing is not always precise and if you can't figure it out oh well

no Izzy I don't but the voice recognition sometimes decides on its own what it's going to print and I wonder why you're so hung up on one word but never seem to answer the salient point of my posts... well actually I don't wonder I know... And so do you

I know we are kind of going down a rabbit hole (forgive the pun) of trivia, but, (also know I bring up my husband a lot) but my husband uses the talk option when he text, it won't misspell a word, it will simply use a wrong word for the word he wants to use. He has a country accent, KY, so, you know, a lot of wrong words.

Hung up on one word? I only mentioned it once. You have to admit it's really funny when someone who claims to be "normally intelligent" has such rudimentary problems.

Racist trigger happy cops plus racist trigger happy black hate groups doesn't equal positive outcome. Black lives absolutely matter. They are out making Olympic medals and being neurosurgeons and judges and lawyers, some black people are my river brothers. We aren't talking about your typical black guy though. We are talking about a hate group. An extremely violent, destructive, racist hate group. Black lives have always mattered in my life. But the black people in my life don't rob stores and shoot police and piss on flags. They are the police/ army/ river brothers. The group BLM gives the term black lives matter a bad name. As for racist white cops, I don't like them either. They smear my race. That isn't what the people in uniform are about though. The organization does NOT support racism. It DOES disconnect itself from racist violent people as soon as it has a case to do so. That's the difference.

You are wasting your time... as a white person you are not allowed to critically comment about any negative aspects of the black community... according to the bleeding heart liberal white apologists the only thing you're able to do is to blindly agree with BLM

It really is a different time, because when I grew up in Sacramento, our area was a concentration of minorities with very few whites. It was the poor neighborhood of Sacramento, or as they say, the wrong side of the tracks. When I attended the 50th year reunion of our elementary school, many were professionals like doctors, lawyers, property/land owners, and such. We didn't have gang problems back then. We all just got along.