When Did You Agree to Make Public Servants Your Master? Video Cop Shows Dallas Cop Lose Control of His Uncontrollable Authority by Repeatedly Punching a Defenseless Black Man Laying on the Ground

From [HERE] The Dallas Police Department is investigating itself after one of its officers is caught on camera assaulting a defenseless Black man in Deep Ellum.

The video shared by Dallas Texas TV shows an officer pushing a man into a light post and then punching him repeatedly while he was on the ground.

It then shows two other officers removing the officer from the man on the ground

Larken Rose observes:

“Despite all of the complex rituals and convoluted rationalizations, all modern belief in “government” rests on the notion that mere mortals can, through certain political procedures, bestow upon some people various rights which none of the people possessed to begin with. The inherent lunacy of such a notion should be obvious. There is no ritual or document through which any group of people can delegate to someone else a right which no one in the group possesses, And that self-evident truth, all by itself, demolishes any possibility of legitimate “government.”

The average person believes that “government” has the right to do numerous things that the average individual does not have the right to do on his own. The obvious question then is, How, and from whom, did those in “government” acquire such rights? How, for example – whether you call it “theft” or “taxation”– would those in “government” acquire the right to forcibly take property from those who haw earned it? No voter has such a right. So how could voters possibly have given such a right to politicians? All modern statism is based entirely on the assumption that people can delegate rights they don’t have. Even the U.S. Constitution pretended to gran to “Congress” the right to “tax” and “regulate” certain things, though the authors of the Constitution had no such right themselves and therefore could not possibly haw given such a fight to anyone else.

Because each person has the right to “rule” himself (as schizophrenic as that idea may be), he can, at least in theory, authorize someone else to rule himself. But a right he does not possess, and therefore cannot delegate to anyone else, is the right to rule someone else. And if “government” ruled only those individuals who had each willingly delegated their right to rule themselves, it would not be government.

And the number of people involved does not affect the logic. To claim that a majority can bestow upon someone a right which none of the individuals in that majority possess is just as irrational as claiming that three people, none of whom has a car Cl money to buy a car, can give a car to someone else, To put it in the simplest terms, you can’t give someone something you don’t have. And that simple truth, all by itself, rules out all “government,” because if those in “government” have only those rights possessed by those who elected them, then “government” loses the one ingredient that makes it “government”: the right to rule over others (”authority”). If it has the same rights and powers as everyone else, there is no reason to call it “government.” If the politicians have no more rights than you have, all of their demands and commands, all of their political rituals, “law” books, courts, and so on, amount to nothing more than the symptoms of a profound delusional psychosis. Nothing they do can have any legitimacy, any more than if you did the same thing on your own, unless they somehow acquired rights that you do not have. And that is impossible, since no one on earth, and no group of people on earth, could possibly have given them such superhuman rights.

No political ritual can alter morality. No election can make an evil act into a good act.

If it is bad for you to do something, then it is bad for those in “government” to do it. And if the same morality that applies to you also applies to those in “government”if those in “public office” have the same rights that you do, and no more – then “government” ceases to be government. If judged by the same standards as other mortals are judged, those wearing the label of “government” are nothing but a gang of thugs, terrorists, thieves and murderers, and their actions lack any legitimacy, any validity, any “authority.” They are nothing but a band of crooks who insist that various documents and rituals have given them the right to be crooks. Sadly, even most of their victims believe them.

[On Lacking the Mamba Mentality] Did Lebron Jinx The Suns? In Its Promotion of Niggativity the Dependent Media Pretended Not to Notice as Their Rolebot Champ Cheered On the Team that Dominated Him

In its propaganda of rolebot Lebron James as “a winner” the dependent media, which Ishmael Reed describes as a “segregated white-owned enterprise with billions of dollars at their disposal,” consistently ignores or glosses over even his most egregious loser conduct. Cheering for the team that just eliminated you from playoff contention is anti-competitive. During pivotal game 5 of the NBA Championship Lebron sat court side and cheered on the Phoenix Suns (after his appearance they didn’t win another game). The same Suns who eliminated Lebron’s team, the LA Lakers, winners of last year’s bullshit COVID bubble “championship,” in the first round of the playoffs in game 6. To be clear, the Suns didn’t eliminate the Lakers last season, it happened last month. Also, it was no ordinary victory, the Suns embarrassed the Lakers on their home floor in game 6 and Lebron in particular [please don’t take BW’s word for it, go watch it for yourself, if it hasn’t already been scrubbed from the internet]. While facing elimination at crunch time in the 4th quarter of game 6, the Suns players bounced up and down the court visibly talking shit to Lebron and despite the fact that his teammates desperately needed his scoring especially due to the loss of Anthony Davis, aloof Lebron wandered around the court like a child searching for a lost puppy. Lebron didn’t look like an old guy who still had the Mamba mentality but no longer possessed his physical gifts, he was non-competitive and disinterested. As if it never happened, the usually gossipy and chatty dependent sports media had no reaction to BronBron’s conduct after either episode. (Sports Illustrated noted that he brought a bottle of his tequila to the game). A silent approval and an indirect message from elite whites that his conduct was normal for a great champion like Lebron. Rooting for the team you are playing against is the same as rooting against yourself and the essence of self-defeat, the conduct of a loser. Can you imagine the media outrage if Sixers guard Ben Simmons traveled to Atlanta and sat court side to root for the Hawks in their series against the Milwaukee Bucks?

Neely Fuller correctly states in the system of racism white supremacy Black people are subject to the direct and indirect power of elite racists in all areas of activity including Economics, Education, Entertainment, Labor, Law, Politics, religion, Sex and War. Therefore, elite racists are the direct or indirect masters of Black people. Elite racists are responsible for everything that happens or does not happen in regards to Black people.’ Fuller describes Black people as “the powerless class” because it accurately describes the power relationship between Blacks and whites. He explains, "in a socio-material system dominated by White Supremacists, all major decisions involving non-white people are made by White Supremacists. The White Supremacists are their bosses, their masters, and their major decision-makers. Whatever a Black person gets, and/or is allowed to keep, is the result of decisions made by elite racist suspects. This is the functional meaning of White Supremacy (Racism) that many people — particularly non-white people — prefer not to acknowledge. [MORE]. Nevertheless, in reality it is elite whites who control Black people’s food, electricity, water, jobs, education, information, etc. Dr. Amos Wilson asks “Who tells you what to wear when you go to work? Who tells you when to come to work...when to leave...when to go to lunch...how to speak...how to write...how to do this...how to do that...and how are these things taught, and how they are conditioned?"-- It is by reward and punishment. " You do this you get paid; you don't do this you don't get paid; you get a raise, you get docked. What do we have here? . . ‘ ‘To live under the power of another people is to be created by that people. To be rewarded or punished by that people is to be created by that people.’

In the area of “entertainment” the dependent media makes great use out of Showcase Blacks to control the behavior and thinking of Black and other non-white people. In the hands of elite, corporate, racist suspects entertainment, as Dr. Blynd explains, “is mental masturbation bringing you to indoctrination—coming into your (five) senses.” Elite racists have created an entire community of “Showcase Blacks” or rolebotic Blacks whom they control through various rewards and punishments. Said role-bots have priceless value to racists in the system of racism white Supremacy. FUNKTIONARY explains, “A role-bot merely plays the role of the mask - the personae - society issued and approved.” Said “coin-operated negros” are high-profile blacks that are constantly paraded before the public. They may be political dignitaries, pro athletes, entertainers, educators, business people, judges or elected officials. Anon explains, Showcase Blacks are not showcasing themselves, they are being showcased by white supremacists to promote some aspect of racism white supremacy (RWS).’ A function of showcase blacks is to present a numerous array of personalities and characters in movies, tv, social media programming that are compatible with the white supremacy dynamic, servant role and government authority. Black individuals indulging in the entertainment thereafter mimic, download and integrate the SNiggering, dancing, singing, begging, emotional, thug, nigger/ho/bitch, obedient, ongoing smiling face, sambo, BOHICAN characters presented into their own personalities. Like Chuck D said “people see, people do, and these brand new pied pipers have got a hold on you.” The illusion of Lebron James, not the real Lebron James, is such a character.

Back in the day the dependent media declared Lebron great before he had actually done anything great. Obviously, Lebron is ineligible for “White privilege,” which FUNKTIONARY defines as “an invisible package of unearned assets bequeathed to all Caucasians or an invisible weightless knapsack of advantages.” [MORE] But as an elite showcase Black and in exchange for dutifully playing his role, Lebron has been given an “invisible knapsack of advantages” which include exaggerating his accomplishments, ignoring his frequent lack of competitiveness, overlooking his disappearances at clutch time and equating his mediocrity with excellence and lack of criticism from sports media and more. Despite having accomplished very little, elite whites at Nike and Espn pre-King’ed him, “King James.” At once he summarily surpassed Wilt, Oscar, Elgin, Russell and Kareem straight into greatness. Only Jordan, a suspected target of all such programming, could reasonably be consider greater, or so goes the white historiography or white boy’s criteria. There was never a need to dethrone Kobe in face to face competition or alternatively, to even exceed his accomplishments – Lebron was deemed better and presumptively superior to Larry Bird, Magic, Julius Erving or Olajuwan because elite racists and their Black proxymoronic parrots said so. Similar to how racist suspect sports “journalists” elevated boxer “Triple G” to greatness despite the reality that he would’ve gotten knocked the fuck out by his contemporary, Andre Ward, a legend he ran from (among others) during his still overhyped career.

Most importantly, throughout his career the dependent media has falsely associated Lebron with “winning.” No matter how much rationalizing goes on, losing is not winning in professional basketball. The main goal of the NBA is to win championships. Lebron is often equated with Tom Brady, a consistently clutch NFL player whose name has become synonymous with winning. However, Brady is perceived as a winner because he actually wins and is expected to win Super Bowls. Lebron has lost six (6) championships and won four. That is, he won 4 out of 10 attempts. In real life, doing something 40% of the time gets people fired, demoted, transferred, bad credit, evicted or docked pay. Six championship losses makes him perhaps the greatest loser of championships of all time in any sport. He loses championships most of the time. Clearly, the dependent media would never let it go if Brady quit during the 4th quarter of an elimination game and shortly thereafter was found cheering on the sideline for the same team that embarrassed him in the following championship round. In reality, Lebron is more like Peyton Manning – a legend no doubt, but not legendary when it matters the most. However, in The Spectacle he is predicted by the dependent media to win next years NBA championship every year.

The showcasing of Lebron as a champion is a very small part of ongoing psy-ops or false consciousness programming aimed at Black people to promote niggativity, negrosis and the annihilation of Black self-respect in general. In less pronounced ways it also being done now with failed rolebot, Simone Biles whom the NY Times proclaimed “the GOAT” despite and after her mental meltdown at the Olympics yesterday. “Winning is losing” or “2 plus 2 = 5” is not dissimilar to the relentless illogical propaganda peddled to neuropeon believers in Trump world who want to be deceived and are preoccupied with “the destruction of reason.” Social relations between Blacks and whites are mediated by false images and narratives within The Spectacle. According to FUNKTIONARY, in this constructed reality the totality of the messaging and images presented are the actual materialization of the ideology of racism white supremacy. Dr. Blynd states The Spectacle is “the mirrorization of the noumenon into the phenomenal universe without understanding or overstanding it as such an objectivization in duality.” Relentless propaganda maintains the cooperative master servant relationship between Blacks and whites and has kept Black people in a "continuous state of checkmate” and a “losing streak that is centuries long.” [MORE]

According to Dr. Amos Wilson, ‘The only way that Black people can be in the condition we are in is to believe lies. Our mentality has been reversed and our behavior made backwards because we take the lie for the truth, and the truth for the lie. A small minority in the world [white people are less than 10% of the global population] can only rule by making backwards the mentality of the large majority. It makes mentally backward the large majority by reversing the truth, creating lies and getting the majority to believe the lies that it creates.’ He explains, ‘For the degradation of Black people to be effectively realized into self-hatred and self-defeat, Black people have to accept what whites say. It is not so much that the European says we are inferior and that the European maligns our character, et cetera. It is the belief on our part that what he says is true that drives us to be crazy. It is a crazy reaction to what the European says, an insane and unthinking kind of approach to dealing with what he says about us, that maintains the craziness." [MORE]. As a result, ‘Black consciousness and behavior under the various regimes of White domination is characterized by habitual thought patterns and behavioral tendencies which render them pliable to White authoritarian social control with minimal resistance; which induce Blacks to accept their subordinate status as natural, perhaps actually to misperceive their oppression as freedom." This manufactured consciousness and its produced behaviors require that Blacks operate against their own best interests in the interests of their White oppressors; that they be self-denying, self-defeating, and oftentimes self-destroying, while convincing themselves that the opposite is true.' [MORE] The goal of the perpetual showcasing of Lebron James is to promote:

Niggativity - self-destructive thought-forms programmed as looped subroutines into the minds and subconscious of descendants of enslaved Africans by descendants of former slavemasters—source-coded to induce thought patterns and resulting reactions that perpetuate the sense of self-hatred, self-ignorance and self-denial ultimately and effectively aborting, sabotaging and annihilating any concrete attempts of people of African descent to become a self-determined people.

Negrosis - the psychological disease affecting and afflicting native Black Americans, Afrikans, Afrikan-Americans, Negroes and all other people of Afrikan genetic heritage characterized by double-consciousness resulting from the falsification of Afrikan consciousness, history and applied spiritual sciences. (See: Double-Consciousness & Asili)

Entertainment Criminals - the Media Mafia. If you give them your attention, you give them your power, unless you can observe the Spectacle without involvement, consumeristic demand or mindless attachment to a virtual world.

Rooting for those who dominate you and pretending that winning 40% of the time is the work of champs is not the kind of consciousness capable of fighting the power of racism white supremacy - and that is the crux of the entire matter. To perpetually maintain this white over Black system it is a political necessity for a mass of Black people to be kept in a state of mental maladaptiveness. In direct contrast, racists and mentacidal Blacks are probably threatened by the image of Michael Jordan because he carried himself with supreme self-confidence, self-acceptance and self-love and played the game with a relentless intensity, as if he was in a life or death struggle with an enemy that he had to defeat to survive. MJ did not cheer for people who beat him, he tried to destroy them. He had his own self-imposed standards of excellence and his greatness was self-generated. Win or fuck it. He was not a quitter and he did whatever it took to win. Jordan was a winner because he was legendary whenever it mattered– to him winning was the only standard of success. The example he set was the forerunner to the so-called “mamba mentality” that Kobe and other courageous, gamblers try to imitate. That mind or something similar is a necessary element of sports greatness. Such a a consciousness in other, more important areas of people activity, it is most likely also a required element for Black individuals in mass to neutralize and destroy racism white supremacy. Although most Blacks believe they are awake, they are fast asleep and must wake up. Dr. Frances Cress Welsing explained, ‘Thus far, all persons such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the BPP, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Mohammed, Nelson Mandela and many courageous others who have attempted to establish justice and/or to eliminate racism white supremacy have utterly failed.’ [MORE] Self transformation must take place; not attempting to change white folks or waiting for them to change or to free us, like a slave, but Black individuals transforming their thinking and being one by one.

Osho Rajineesh explained, “You cannot do anything about the deceivers, so don't be worried, let them be themselves. But you can do something about yourself, that is the point.” Consensual, voluntary master servant relations, which are the gravamen of racism white supremacy, is something Black people can control and must be destroyed. Black people live under whites in a white over Black system due to the power whites exercise over them. If Black people truly want to change the conditions that they live under then they must change their relations with whites. Under such a circumstance elite whites at ESPN and elsewhere could go on with their ‘Lebron is a winner’ fantasy programming but Black individuals having a truer consciousness would instinctively ignore and drop it, like valueless currency or fake gold.

Wilson states;

“The ability of dominant Whites to socially manufacture or markedly influence Afrikan states of consciousness and conduct in the interest of perpetuating White supremacy, is both the source and product of the power relations and inequalities which inhere between these races. The White social manufac­ture of Black consciousness and behavior will end when the power differentials which make this process possible are equalized or reversed by the increased Black empowerment. This necessary equation or reversal of power relations begins when Afrikans come to understand the nature of power, its social origins and applications; when they recognize that they are as capable of its acquisition and disposition as are their European (and other ethnic group) counterparts; and when they consciously and deliberately choose to acquire and dispose of it in their own interests and in the defense of their own liberty.” He also states, “The strategies and tactics by which dominant Whites attempt to order, re-order and disorder Afrikan consciousness and behavior must be neutralized by Afrikan-centered strategic and tactical counterattacks. The metaphysical preparation to undertake such countermoves first must include the thorough decolonizing of Afrikan consciousness and the strategic organization of the Afrikan community, making it capable of creating a collective intelligence and adaptational talent which in turn will enable it to overthrow White supremacy and achieve its liberation from oppression. [MORE] and [MORE]

NO WAY TO CONTROL AUTHORITY. Video Shows 2 Aurora Cops Degrade and Brutalize a Black Man to Make a Trespass Arrest; White Cop Pistol Whips and Strangles Him as He Begs for Life. Both Charged

Evil is the Destruction of Freedom. Slavery exists wherever the freedom of man is destroyed. The lie of tyranny is that you will maintain the freedom of life by obeying authority.

Larken rose states: “The problem is not just that “authority” can be used for evil; the problem is that, at its most basic essence, it is evil. In everything it does, it defeats the free will of human being controlling them through coercion and fear. It supersedes and destroys moral consciences, replacing them with unthinking blind obedience. It cannot be used for good, any more than a bomb can be used to heal a body. It is always aggression, always the enemy of peace, always the enemy of justice. The moment it ceases to be an attacker, it ceases to fit the definition of “government.” It is, by its very nature, a murderer and a thief, the enemy of mankind, a poison to humanity. As dominator and controller, ruler and oppressor, it can be nothing else.“

From [HERE] and [HERE] A white Colorado police officer has been arrested on felony charges after a video showed him using his pistol to beat Kyle Vinson, a Black man, he was attempting to arrest, choking him and threatening to kill him, and a second white officer was also arrested after authorities say she failed to stop her colleague as required by a new police accountability law [rules of morality don’t apply to police officers].

The incident took place on July 23. This past Monday, the Aurora Police Department said it issued two arrest warrants for the officers involved.

Body camera footage was shown Tuesday at a news conference of the Friday incident that happened in the Denver suburb of Aurora, whose police department has been plagued by numerous police misconduct cases in recent years including the 2018 death of Elijah McClain.

On the footage, Haubert told a sergeant after the arrest, "I was going to shoot him but I didn't know if I had a round in it or not," the documents state. Haubert also said blood on the man was from "pistol-whipping him."

White officers John Haubert and Francine Martinez responded to a call alleging three Black men were trespassing, which is a minor misdemeanor. After officers arrived at the scene, two of the men fled the scene, leaving Kyle Vinson alone. Apparently angry, the white cop decided to arrest Vinson.

The video begins with the white cop pressing his automatic weapon onto the Black man’s head, threatening his life. Vinson says ‘you have the wrong guy, I don’t have any warrants’ and asks ‘why are you arresting me.’ The Black man is visibly shaking and appears to be no threat to the police officers.

During the video the Black man repeatedly begs the officer to stop hitting him and yells "You're killing me," as Aurora police Officer John Haubert holds him down, strangles him and strikes him, the video shows.

If you move, I will shoot you," the white cop continually yells making felony threats against the man. While straggling him the officer says repeatedly "Stop fighting," as the man cries and gasps for air. Then the disfluent cop starts yelling over and over “GET ON YOUR FACE.” Vinson shows his hands surrendering and attempts to comply. Vinson was defenseless and during the attack was crying.

"I need water," Vinson yells as the body camera footage comes to an end. His head is bleeding in multiple areas and there are lumps and contusions on his face. He was hospitalized after he was arrested on suspicion of trespassing. 

Aurora police Chief Vanessa Wilson called the arrest a "very despicable act" at the press conference.

Haubert now faces charges of attempted first-degree assault, second-degree assault, felony menacing, official oppression, and first-degree official misconduct. Martinez, who stood by during the beating, faces charges of duty to intervene and duty to report the use of force by a peace officer.

Whitenology Rule: If You're Black and Possess a Gun, Lawfully/Unlawfully, Cops Will Use it as an Excuse to Execute U Regardless of Whether U Pose a Threat;MD Cops Release Ryan LeRoux Execution Video

Cop Artists Theater: LOOK. GET COVER! WE CAN KILL!! From [HERE] and [HERE] Body camera videos released Tuesday show a 21-year-old Black man moving inside a parked car, apparently sitting up from a reclining position, moments before police shot and killed him outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Maryland.

At a media briefing, Montgomery County police Chief Marcus Jones narrated a 28-minute-long compilation of bodycam video excerpts and a recorded phone call between police and the driver, Ryan LeRoux, before the July 16 shooting in Gaithersburg. But the chief didn’t express any opinion about whether the Friday night shooting was justified.

Prosecutors in a neighboring county are investigating.

Jones, who didn’t take any questions from reporters, said police recovered a gun from LeRoux’s lap after four officers opened fire on him. The chief didn’t say whether investigators believe LeRoux raised a weapon or posed a threat to police during a standoff that lasted approximately 30 minutes.

Later Tuesday, LeRoux’s mother told reporters that her son was depressed, had lost his job and girlfriend, and was grieving the death of his grandmother last month. Rhonda LeRoux also said her son was living out of his car and had legally purchased a gun to protect himself.

“I wouldn’t wish this pain on any parent,” she said.

Rhonda LeRoux said the “handpicked” videos shown by police don’t show her son raising his hand with a gun or pointing it at officers.

“Ryan was sitting inside his car for over an hour. Clearly, the Montgomery County police failed to deescalate the situation,” she said. “Their way of resolving this situation was just to unload a barrage of 24 bullets into him while he’s sitting in his car.”

Police haven’t specified how many shots were fired by the officers.

Jones showed segments of videos that captured the shooting from the perspective of an officer’s body camera and a body camera that officers had placed in a drive-thru window closer to LeRoux’s sport utility vehicle.

“Their cameras do not replace the human eye and what the officers saw that evening,” Jones said.

An officer responded to a trespassing call that LeRoux had ordered food, refused to pay for it and wouldn’t move his SUV from the drive-thru lane, according to police. The officer immediately radioed that he saw a gun on the front passenger seat and repeatedly ordered LeRoux at gunpoint to raise his hands and slowly unlock one of his doors with his left hand.

“He’s awake, but he’s not listening to my commands,” the officer said over his radio. “He’s got his hands on his phone. The gun is on the passenger seat. Get cover!”

Officers taking cover behind a shield approached LeRoux’s SUV and placed “stop sticks” in front of the vehicle. Police placed the camera in the drive-thru window to get a better vantage point of the gun in his car, Jones said.

A woman from the police department’s emergency command center spoke to LeRoux over his cellphone. LeRoux said he saw the officers and complied with their commands to raise his hands.

“I can hear them just fine,” he said.

“We’re just trying to help you here,” the woman told LeRoux, asking him to extend his hands out a window.

Jones said the officers didn’t see LeRoux’s hands up or out the window.

A police sergeant later called LeRoux.

“What’s going on, man?” the sergeant asked. “Hello? He just hung up on me.”

The video from the drive-thru window shows LeRoux sit up from a reclining position moments before gunfire erupted, shattering the window.

“He’s up!” at least two officers shouted just before the shooting.

A crisis negotiator was en route to the scene but didn’t arrive before the shooting, Jones said.

LeRoux died at a hospital. A loaded Glock 47 was recovered from the scene, according to the chief.

The four officers involved were placed on administrative leave, a standard procedure after a shooting. All four officers are white, and LeRoux was Black, police department spokeswoman Shiera Goff said.

“The continued killing and murder of young Black men in this county has to stop. It’s unacceptable,” said Racial Justice Now co-founder Zakiya Sankara-Jabar.

Her Montgomery County-based group belongs to the grassroots Silver Spring Justice Coalition, formed after a Montgomery County police officer fatally shot Robert White, an unarmed Black man, in June 2018. Prosecutors cleared the officer who shot White, saying bodycam footage shows White assaulting the officer.

Sankara-Jabar said the coalition is calling for the police chief’s resignation.

“It seems to me that this chief does not have control of this department at all,” she said. “He continues to make excuses for these officers under his leadership.”

The Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office will review LeRoux’s shooting under an agreement with its counterpart in neighboring Montgomery County.

Capitol Cop Shames Blue Lives Matter: ‘I’m still waiting for them to condemn the violent attack,' Misunderstanding that Blue Lives Matter and FAGA Folks Both Use Gov Authority to Dominate Non-Whites

Black cops fulfill their roles dutifully because they misunderstand it completely. Said Borgs believe themselves to be aligned with the experimenter controlling Skinner's cage when in actual reality they are aligned with the mice inside it!

From [HERE] A U.S. Capitol police officer shamed Republicans who publicly back law enforcement to serve a racist agenda but tolerate violent attacks by Donald Trump's supporters.

Sgt. Aquilino Gonell was the first witness to testify in the House commission hearing to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection, and he called out GOP lawmakers and others who object to protests against police brutality but defended the rioters who brutally attacked officers as they attempted to overturn Trump's election loss.

"There are some who express outrage when someone kneels by calling for social justice," Gonell said. "Where are those same people expressing the outrage could condemn the violent attack on law enforcement at the Capitol and our American democracy? I'm still waiting for them."

"As Americans and the world watched in horror what was happening at the Capitol we did not receive timely reinforcement and support we needed," the officer added, "in contrast during the Black Lives Matter protest last year. U.S. Capitol police had all the support we needed and more. Why the different response? Were it not for the brave members of the [Metropolitan Police Department] and later on from other law enforcement agencies, I'm afraid to think what could have happened on Jan. 6."

While Begging the Black Votary to Vote for Him Biden Said He’d Cut Incarceration in Half. So Far, the Federal Prison Population is Growing

According to FUNKTIONARY:

A candidate is a person who stands for what he thinks the public will fall for.

From [HERE] During his campaign, President Joe Biden pledged repeatedly to reduce the country’s prison population, which, because of racist policing and sentencing laws, is disproportionately composed of people of color. At one point, he said his administration could cut the number of incarcerated people by more than half, largely by investing in alternatives to prisons. Later he said he didn’t want to be bound by a percentage, but he reiterated that he hoped to drastically lower the number of people locked up.

But six months into his term, those promises are ringing hollow. The number of people in federal prisons is growing. And Biden’s legal team recently announced that thousands of people who were released early from federal prisons last year to slow the spread of the coronavirus could be forced to return again after the pandemic ends.

“This is the most telling sign yet that this administration has criminal justice low on its list of priorities, despite the campaign promises to the contrary,” Rachel Barkow, an NYU law professor who served on the US Sentencing Commission under President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitterafter the news broke. “I honestly don’t know how anyone who cares about criminal justice reform and works in this administration can stand by and let this happen.” [MORE]

What Happened to Ta'Neasha Chappell is Another White Supremacy Mystery: Black Woman Arrested for Shoplifting Died in Custody. Secretive IN Jail Orderlies Can't Explain Why She Had Bruises on Her Face

From [HERE] and [HERE] Ta'Neasha Chappell died shortly after being transported from an Indiana jail to a nearby hospital on last Friday.

The 23-year-old, from Louisville, Kentucky, was an inmate at the Jackson County Jail after being arrested on shoplifting charges on May 26.

On Friday July 16, she was taken by ambulance to Schneck Memorial Hospital in Seymour, where she died later that day, the Indiana State Police said in a news release on Sunday.

The Indiana jail where Louisville woman Ta'Neasha Chappell was held before her death had conditions tantamount to unconstitutional "cruel and unusual punishment," an attorney for the family alleged during a news conference Thursday evening.

"It was so bad that Ta'Neasha called and her family and let them know, 'Please get me out of here. If I can't get out, I'm going to die here,'" local attorney Lonita Baker said. "Unfortunately, her greatest fear happened.

"She went in a young, 23-year-old mother, healthy, and she should have returned to her family that same way."

Chappell was being held in the Jackson County Jail in Brownstown, Indiana, 50 miles north of Louisville, on charges stemming from an alleged May 26 theft and high-speed chase. She was one of the few Black women in the jail population, Baker said.

On July 16, she was taken to Schneck Memorial Hospital in nearby Seymour, where  she died, according to Indiana State Police, which is investigating the death.

Besides Baker, Chappell's family has hired prominent lawyers Sam Aguiar and Florida-based Ben Crump to help get answers about what happened to her. The trio previously secured a $12 million settlement last year from the city of Louisville for the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in March 2020.

Only Baker was at the press conference.

She said Chappell, who had a 10-year-old daughter, began to get sick on July 15, when she started vomiting and spiked a fever that was severe enough for jail staff to check her temperature every 15 minutes. But EMS was not called until nearly 24 hours later when staff found Chappell unresponsive, the lawyer said.

Jail staff told Chappell's family they believe her death was "something chemical," but the family has been told little else, Baker said.

"But that doesn't explain the bruises on her face," Baker said. "It doesn't explain the frantic calls to her family."

The Jackson County Sheriff's Office, which runs the jail, has previously declined to comment on the case. The sheriff's office did not immediately return a phone call left on a voicemail on Friday. A woman who answered the phone at the office on Wednesday morning said all questions were being directed to the Indiana State Police.  

The state police confirmed an autopsy has been performed and declined Tuesday to offer any additional information, saying the results will take "several days or longer."

Chappell did not have any preexisting conditions, according to her sister, Ronesha Murrell.

Baker said she does not have any indication as to Chappell's cause of death, but there will be an independent medical exam conducted.

Murrell said her sister was jumped inside the jail and had been cut on her neck, but she wasn't separated from others after that incident.

In a Facebook post shared shortly before the press conference, Aguiar alleged numerous serious issues at the Jackson County Jail. Many of the claims involve a lack of hygiene and medical care, including that those in the jail have been "forced to live in sewage multiple times. Black mold too."

The post says the jail doesn't have "any medical personnel available most of the time."

"Deprived of basic medical needs. Guards telling them they’re faking or making them wait over a week to even see a nurse," it reads. "See a nurse who doesn’t give them their medications that are critical for health. And when inmates say something, nurse locks them down."

Aguiar also alleged the jail has mishandled the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

"This jail has 240 inmates coming and going. But claims to have had zero inmates with COVID. Ever. Only staff," the Facebook post reads. "Well that’s what happens when you ignore people who can’t breath(e), have uncontrollable fevers and are neglected. Oh, and Jackson County, as of late last year, had the highest COVID positivity rate in all of Indiana.

"Zero inmates with COVID though at all since the pandemic started? That’s deliberate indifference."

Other allegations listed in the post included prisoners being "deprived of showers" and "constantly attacked with guards doing nearly nothing." It said people are "constantly called the N word if one of the few Black female inmates" and "have to deal with guards who are constantly showing favoritism to certain female inmates who will flirt back with them."

Aguiar said those who complain "have many of their grievances crumbled and thrown in trash by guards." He also alleged people held in the jail are "deprived of food and water if they try to speak out about the inhumane conditions."

"Ta’Neasha didn’t have a chance," the post concludes. "Release the video. Explain why she was left in her cell for 24 hours while vomiting and fighting a spiking fever. Explain the facial injuries. What happened to Ta’Neasha Chappell?"

Citizens who Drive Recklessly and Kill Someone Face Criminal Charges but Not So w/Cops b/c Only the Law of the Jungle Applies to Them: Still No Charges Against Minn Cop Who Broadsided Killed Black Man

From [HERE] and [HERE] Laneal Frazier, the recent victim of a police chase, was laid to rest early this week in a ceremony in which his family looked back fondly on their memories of him. It also had a tone of defiance.

“An innocent man minding his business, traveling in his neighborhood home to see his family, gets killed because you violated a policy,” said Ben Crump, whose firm is representing Frazier’s family. “We have to say no more innocent Black people being killed at the hands of the police for violating their policies.”

Vigils have been held honoring Frazier’s memory and calling for justice, and last week a press conference was called by family members and activists. “This is about race,” said attorney Jeff Storms at the conference.

Frazier was killed in the early morning hours of July 6 when Minneapolis Police Officer Brian Cunningham broadsided him while ignoring a traffic light and speeding through an intersection while giving chase to a robbery suspect. No charges have been filed against the officer. Participants called on the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office to file charges against the officer involved.

“We didn’t have an opportunity to view the body,” complained Orlando Frazier, brother of Laneal Frazier. “How can this keep going on like this? My family is hurting. My brother was a happy person, and he didn’t deserve what he got.”

“I started looking at facts,” said Storms, “and USA Today did a study five years ago that showed that Black Americans are more likely to be killed by police chases even as innocent bystanders and are three times more likely to be killed than other Americans. So when someone says this is not about race, that is ignoring the various systematic race issues that are at play here, and how law enforcement polices Black communities, and the aggression with which law enforcement, in particular, polices our Black brothers and sisters.

“Accountability does not have to stop with civil accountability. When a citizen drives recklessly and kills somebody, they face criminal charges. And that’s exactly what needs to be pursued and applied here.”

Storms addressed those who said this case was a hard case to win. “The Black community has had to fight every step of the way to get anything resembling equality in this country. Some say these cases are hard. Cases are hard when the defendant, the offending party, doesn’t want to be held accountable.

“The City of Minneapolis has got to ask itself what kind of precedent are we going to set now. We have seen the precedent previously set in 2010 [when] a man named David Smith died almost exactly the way George Floyd was killed.”

Storms pointed out that some people have been saying, “We have a crime problem. We have to fight crime.” He asked aloud if they are they saying, “Your innocent members of the Black community have to die to in order for us fight crime. It’s not enough that members of the community die from pre-textual stops like Daunte Wright, but they are now telling us that in order to properly police the city of Minneapolis, innocent members of the community have to die too. That cannot be the answer to this problem.”

 “Those who are in positions of power refuse to hold these police accountable,” said Nekima Levy-Armstrong.

Flint Government Authorities Deleted Text Messages on their State-Issued Phones to Cover Up Evidence of Wrongdoing in Poisoning Residents Water

From [HERE] IN OCTOBER 2015, then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder finally announced that Flint’s water was contaminated with dangerous lead levels. That public admission had come after more than a year of pleading from the city’s residents to examine the situation. The city, Snyder promised, would immediately stop using water from the Flint River, which residents had been drinking for 18 months.

The public announcement raised as many questions as it answered and kick-started a yearslong investigation into how the decision that delivered the toxic water to Flint had been made in the first place, how many people were sickened and killed as a result, and when senior government officials first learned of the deadly consequences. 

Along the way, however, investigators who were part of a three-year Flint water investigation beginning in 2016 kept drilling dry holes. 

Dr. Eden Wells became Michigan’s chief medical executive in May 2015. By then, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services had been aware for at least seven months of a significant increase in the deadly waterborne Legionnaires’ disease throughout Flint.

But when investigators obtained access to Wells’s phone, they discovered something unusual. “For Dr. Wells’ phone the earliest message is from November 12, 2015,” then-Flint special prosecutor Todd Flood wrote in a subpoena petition obtained by The Intercept. During the key period that investigators were probing, no messages were found. In 2018, a judge ruled that Wells would have to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter, along with obstruction of justice, over her role in the water crisis. (Those charges were dropped by current Attorney General Dana Nessel in 2019; in January 2021, Nessel’s Flint water prosecutors recharged Wells with involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in office, and neglect of duty.)

Other searches turned up similar results. The phone of Tim Becker, MDHHS’s chief deputy director, had no messages on it prior to April 14, 2016, two months before he left his role with MDHHS. Becker testified to having first asked questions about Flint’s Legionella outbreak in January 2015.

Patricia McKane, an epidemiologist with MDHHS who testified that she was pressured to lie by Wells about elevated blood-lead levels in Flint’s children, was found to have only had four text messages on her phone from 2015 and seven total messages. (Wells denied pressuring her to lie.) Fellow MDHHS epidemiologist Sarah Lyon-Callo, director of the state Bureau of Epidemiology and Population Health, who Wells copied in an email responding to accusations by a Wayne State University professor that she was trying to conceal the link between the Flint River switch and the Legionella outbreak, had no messages prior to June 2016. 

“Again, for some strange reason the earliest text message in time on her device begins June 20, 2016,” Flood wrote. Wesley Priem, manager of the MDHHS’s Lead and Healthy Homes program, who emailed colleagues erroneously challenging the findings of high blood-lead levels in Flint children discovered by Flint pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, had just one text message found on his state-issued phone from January 22, 2016.

The lack of phone messages from top MDHHS officials was a major red flag to investigators and an obvious impediment to those investigating who knew what and when. Despite department epidemiologists hypothesizing in October 2014 that the source of Flint’s deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak was the switch to the Flint River six months earlier, Flint residents weren’t informed of the deadly outbreak until 16 months later, when Snyder announced it in January 2016. PBS found a 43 percent increase in pneumonia deaths in Flint during the 18 months the city received drinking water from the Flint River — and also found that scientists believed that some of those 115 pneumonia deaths could be attributed to Legionnaires’ disease, which has similar symptoms to pneumonia and is often misdiagnosed as such.

Investigators also discovered that phone data belonging to a key official close to Snyder was completely erased shortly before the Flint criminal investigation was launched.

Sara Wurfel, Snyder’s press secretary during the water crisis in 2014 through fall 2015, told Flood her phone was “wiped” when she left her job at the end of November 2015, after a civil suit was filed against the Snyder administration and a month before the launch of the Flint water criminal investigation. 

“Do you have text messages from 2015 currently [on your phone]?” Flood asked Wurfel in a confidential interview obtained by The Intercept. 

“No. So when I left the governor’s office, everything got wiped. I mean, when — I turned in my phone, it got wiped,” Wurfel told Flood. Wurfel, who kept her state cellphone number when she left her government job, said she didn’t recall if she had been asked to hand in her phone at any other time in 2015 prior to leaving her job in November. She also said she didn’t think that she had used iCloud to back up her phone data.

When asked for comment by The Intercept, Wurfel said, “Not sure what you’re referring to — please share if there’s a specific document, item, etc.” When provided with what she told the special prosecutor regarding her phone being wiped when she left her state role, she did not reply. 

“That is not standard,” a former Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget, or DTMB, official who worked for the state during this period and was involved with state data preservation told The Intercept about Wurfel’s phone being wiped upon leaving her role as Snyder’s press secretary. “There are retention schedules that every agency, including the governor’s office, is supposed to adhere to,” said the ex-official, adding that for the governor’s office, data is supposed to be retained for at least a year after an official leaves. But with potential litigation looming, “it should’ve been held indefinitely,” the official concluded. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation.

50-year War on [Blacks] Drugs Imprisoned Millions of Black Americans

From [HERE] Fifty years ago this summer, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Today, with the U.S. mired in a deadly opioid epidemic that did not abate during the coronavirus pandemic’s worst days, it is questionable whether anyone won the war.

Yet the loser is clear: Black and Latino Americans, their families and their communities. A key weapon was the imposition of mandatory minimums in prison sentencing. Decades later those harsh federal and state penalties led to an increase in the prison industrial complex that saw millions of people, primarily of color, locked up and shut out of the American dream.

An Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data shows that, between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million Americans. Among them, about 1 in 5 people were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.

The racial disparities reveal the war's uneven toll. Following the passage of stiffer penalties for crack cocaine and other drugs, the Black incarceration rate in America exploded from about 600 per 100,000 people in 1970 to 1,808 in 2000. In the same timespan, the rate for the Latino population grew from 208 per 100,000 people to 615, while the white incarceration rate grew from 103 per 100,000 people to 242. [MORE]

Drug Dealers, Johnson & Johnson Reach $26 Billion Deal to Resolve Opioid Lawsuits

Alex Gorsky is chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, and chairman of the executive committee, the company's senior leadership team. He is the seventh person to serve as chair and CEO of Johnson & Johnson since it became a publicly traded company in 1944.

From [HERE] The nation’s three biggest opioid distributors and drugmaker Johnson & Johnson reached a $26 billion settlement to resolve thousands of lawsuits over the opioid epidemic, a crisis that has killed more than 500,000 Americans over the past two decades. 

A bipartisan group of attorneys general announced Wednesday the agreement with three major drug distributors — McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen — and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, potentially releasing the companies from current and future litigation if a critical mass of communities across the country agree to drop their cases. 

Attorneys general who unveiled the deal said that while they could not adequately compensate the families of those who have died, but the money states will receive over the next 18 years may help reduce the future threat.

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), whose state will recoup about $1.25 billion as part of the nationwide settlement, said a “trail of destruction and tragedy has basically ravaged every corner of New York and every region of this nation.” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) said the agreement sends a message that states “simply will not tolerate this kind of behavior.”

The opioid files

The companies have denied wrongdoing. In a joint statement, the distributors said that while they dispute the claims made in lawsuits, the settlement marks a step “toward achieving broad resolution of governmental opioid claims and delivering meaningful relief to communities across the United States.”

“The companies remain deeply concerned about the impact the opioid epidemic is having on individuals, families, and communities across the nation and are committed to being part of the solution,” the statement said.

Johnson & Johnson, which said it would contribute up to $5 billion to resolve the litigation, said its marketing and promotion of opioids “were appropriate and responsible.”

“We recognize the opioid crisis is a tremendously complex public health issue, and we have deep sympathy for everyone affected,” Michael Ullmann, the company’s executive vice president, general counsel, wrote in a statement. “This settlement will directly support state and local efforts to make meaningful progress in addressing the opioid crisis in the United States.”

Under the settlement, Johnson & Johnson would be barred from manufacturing, marketing and selling opioids. The company voluntarily halted sales of pain pills last year.

The deal would also require the distributors to establish and fund a “clearinghouse” that shows where every opioid dose is headed, an accountability mechanism that would alert regulators of suspicious orders.

Tentative opioid deal would provide $26 billion and a new way to regulate painkillers

The settlement, which still needs broad support from states and communities, would settle more than 3,000 lawsuits brought by states, cities, counties and other jurisdictions that were consolidated into one of the largest and most complex civil litigation battles in U.S. legal history. A settlement has not yet been reached between the companies and Native American tribes. [MORE]

White Va. Deputy Indicted for Felony Reckless Handling of a Firearm After Shooting Unarmed Black Man who Posed No Threat. Cop Claimed he Mistook a Phone for a Gun. Faces Only 5 Years if Convicted

From [HERE] A Virginia sheriff's deputy accused of firing on an unarmed Black man after the officer allegedly mistook a phone in the man's hand for a gun has been charged with felony reckless handling of a firearm, special prosecutor LaBravia Jenkins said. Reckless handling of a firearm is usually a misdemeanor, but Jenkins said it is a felony in this case largely because of the significant injuries suffered by 32-year-old Brown.

The victim, 32-year-old Isiah Brown, "did nothing wrong and was on the phone with a 911 dispatcher when [the deputy] recklessly shot him eight times," Brown's attorney David Haynes said in a statement shared with PEOPLE.

The shooting left Brown with about eight gunshot wounds and he has suffered permanent injuries, said Brown’s attorney David Haynes. Six bullets are still lodged in Brown’s body, including one in a leg bone and another in his pelvis, Haynes said. Brown is recovering at home after spending more than a month in the hospital.

Haynes said Brown is grateful Turbyfill was indicted, but the charge, which carries a maximum sentence of five years, should have been more serious. Brown and his family have called for Turbyfill to be fired from the department. Turbyfill has been on administrative leave since the shooting.

“In the 911 call, [Isiah] clearly told dispatch that he did not have a weapon more than 90 seconds before the deputy arrived,” Haynes told 8News in April. “He told dispatch that he was walking away from the house and away from anyone else and was on the roadway by himself.”

Body camera footage shows that Turbyfill fired multiple shots at Brown around 30 seconds after exiting his vehicle at the scene. Brown was hit numerous times and the deputy provided aid at the scene. Brown was then taken to the hospital.

In the hours prior to the shooting that occurred after 3 a.m. on April 21, that same officer, identified in the indictment as Spotsylvania County Sheriff's deputy David Turbyfill, had given Brown a ride home from his stalled car, according to NBC News. 

The grand jury indictment charges Turbyfill with "reckless handling of firearm resulting in serious injury," and alleges the deputy "did unlawfully and feloniously handle (a) firearm in a manner so gross, wanton and culpable as to show a reckless disregard for human life."

Haynes earlier accused the responding deputies of "terrible, grave basic policing errors" during the incident, which is documented by a 911 audio recording and officer-worn body camera footage released by the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office.

According to the 911 audio, Brown placed the call and told a dispatcher, "My brother won't let me get inside my mom's room." After the dispatcher replied, "OK but your car is broken down so why do you need your key?," the brothers are overheard arguing, with Brown saying, "Give me the gun."

As the brother refuses, Brown says to the dispatcher, "Can you send somebody down here?"

"What is going on, Isiah?," the dispatcher says. "Why don't you just – what is the problem?"

"I'm about to kill my brother," he says.

"Don't kill your brother," says the dispatcher. "Why would you say something like that?"

"Somebody needs to come here real quick," Brown says.

"Do you understand that you just threatened to kill your brother on a recorded line, on 911?," the dispatcher says. "Why would you say something like that?"

"Because I need to get my sh--," Brown says.

The dispatcher asks Brown if he has a gun. He first answers yes, then "nope." While outside with his brother inside, Brown again repeats that he doesn't have any weapons on him as he begins to walk down the road.

"How are you walking down the road with the house phone?" the dispatcher asks.

"Because I can," Brown says.

As the sound of approaching sirens can be heard, the 911 dispatcher tells Brown to raise his hands. Then an arriving deputy shouts, "Show me your hands, drop the gun!"

Another voice is heard saying: "He's got a gun to his head."

"Drop the gun now!," shouts the first officer. "Stop walking towards me! Stop walking towards me! Stop! Stop."

Then shots are fired.

"Show me your hands, drop the gun, drop the gun!," the officer repeats. "Let go of the gun! Show me your hands now! Show me your hands now!"

Later, an officer is heard saying, "I killed a guy."

According to the 911 transcript, Brown's brother approaches while the officer is administering first aid to ask: "Does he still have the house phone?"

The deputy answers: "It's right here." Then, to Brown, the officer says: "Come on, man, stay with me." Finally, in the commotion of the first aid, and after promising "the hospital is coming," the deputy shouts, "Hey, where's the gun at? Where's the gun?"

Haynes said Brown and his family called for the deputy's "immediate termination," while also asking for the release of "all audio communication between the deputy and dispatch, all video from the scene as well as Turbyfill's employment records and personnel file."

Court Upholds the IRS' Right to Revoke Your US Passport If You Have a Lien for $50k or More in Tax Debt. [The Right to Travel to Another [country] Free Range Prison is a Not a "Fundamental Right"]

From [HERE] In late 2015, as we noted at the time, Congress voted — as part of an unrelated surface transportation bill — to authorize the Department of State to revoke and/or refuse to issue a U.S. passport to anyone against whom the IRS has assessed an administrative lien or levy (even in the absence of any judicial action) for $50,000 or more in tax debt.

This week, the first appellate court to review this law upheld it as Constitutional, although on limited grounds. In its “per curiam” opinion in Maehr v. Department of State, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision by a U.S. District Court judge in Colorado dismissing a lawsuit by Jeffrey T. Maehr, one of almost half a million people who have been deemed subject to revocation or non-issuance of U.S. passports, and thus prohibited from legally leaving (or returning to) the U.S.,  for alleged tax debts.

Two judges wrote opinions in support of the “per curiam” decision, each joined in different parts by the third member of the three-judge panel.

All three judges found (wrongly, we think) that, although there is some sort of “right” to international travel by U.S. citizens, it is not such a “fundamental” right as to make restrictions on the exercise of the right to travel be subject to to what courts call “strict scrutiny”.

Due to Alarmist, Sensationalistic, Decontextualized and Racist Media Coverage, Americans are Overestimating Crime in their Neighborhoods

From [HERE] Americans are overestimating crime in their neighborhoods. In a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 62 percent of Americans believed that crime had gotten worse in the United States, but a plurality felt that their own community was no more dangerous, closely paralleling the results of a Navigator poll. “Citizens have only the mass media to rely on for information about the national crime picture, and that information is often alarmist, sensationalistic, and decontextualized,” Mark Warr, a sociologist.

Americans are freaked out about crime in the United States. As many as eight in 10 say it’s a major problem. They rank it ahead of health care and poverty, perennial priorities. Solid majorities believe that crime is worse today than it was 30 years ago, which is not even close to true, despite record increases in homicides in 2020.

This fear about crime has potentially large implications. President Joe Biden, eager to show that the White House is paying attention, launched a series of crime-fighting initiatives focused on guns last month. Republicans have sought to tie Democratic support for cutting police budgets to the rise in crime, and local and congressional efforts at police reform could all be shaped by the public’s views on crime.

But ask Americans how things look in their own communities, and in survey after survey, they evince much less worry. In a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 62 percent of Americans believed (correctly) that crime had gotten worse in the United States, but a plurality felt that their own community was no more dangerous, closely paralleling the results of a Navigator poll. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 59 percent saw crime as a serious problem nationally, but only 17 percent felt the same way about their own area. This split is not new, but it may be widening. In November, Gallup recorded the largest difference ever: 78 percent of Americans said crime was rising year over year nationwide, but only 38 percent said it was up in their area.

Americans are onto something. “Violent crime in particular is hugely concentrated,” Wesley G. Skogan, a political scientist at Northwestern University, wrote to me in an email. “Unlike Lake Wobegone, almost all neighborhoods are below average.”

The divergent views of crime locally and nationally produce two divergent possibilities for fighting the increase in violence. Politicians could take worries about national crime as a cue to pursue blunt and simplistic answers of the past, including stricter sentencing and over-policing. But the nuanced views among the public suggest that policy makers have the flexibility to devise locally appropriate strategies for crime.

Some crime trends do move nationally: From the 1970s to the 1990s, crime surged nationwide, followed by a marked decrease. At the peak, in 1991, there were almost 10 murders per 100,000 people. By 2014, that had dropped to 4.4 per 100,000. In 2020, murders surged in most American cities, producing the largest increase in murder rate on record, at an estimated 6.6 per 100,000. Understanding the broad trends is important, but most crime-fighting is local, and the federal government has little role. Or as Skogan put it, “What the heck is ‘crime in the nation’?”

Opinion polls have long shown that Americans overestimate the level of crime in the country, as the Pew Research Center’s John Gramlich has written. Even amid a historic decline in crime rates, majorities in surveys said they believed that crime was on the rise. Much of the blame for this misperception likely falls on the press. The media tend to follow the maxim “If it bleeds, it leads”—violence tends to earn coverage. Criminologists say that this is especially true of television journalism.

“Citizens have only the mass media to rely on for information about the national crime picture, and that information is often alarmist, sensationalistic, and decontextualized,” Mark Warr, a sociologist who has studied the perception of crime, wrote in an email. “So crime nationally often looks much worse than it is.” But even as Americans fret about national crime rates, they see the situation in their home community as largely stable. Scholars believe that citizens are aware enough to tell what’s really going on around them, despite especially crime-focused local news coverage. [MORE]

Contrast the Willingness of Whites to Pay Liability Judgments for Wrongful Convictions w/ Their Unwillingness to Properly Fund Education for Black Kids or Provide Adequate Housing Food or Healthcare

Dr. Amos Wilson explains:

"Given the historical and contemporary virulence of White racism in America and the injustice toward Blacks that such racism engenders, the number of arrests, incarcerations, and in many instances, convictions of Black males should be viewed with a jaundiced eye. The willingness of White Americans to heavily tax themselves in order to finance accelerated and increased prison construction, rapidly expanding police forces and so-called criminal justice system personnel, burgeoning private police and security establishments; their willingness to finance the incarcera­tion of a Black male prisoner upwards of $30,000 to $40,000 per year, in sharp contrast to their unwillingness to tax themselves to provide for the appropriate funding of the education of Black children and to commit themselves to the ending of racist employment practices; to provide adequate housing medical care, food and clothing; clearly implies that alleged Black male criminality plays a very important role in defining the collective White American ego and personality.  [MORE]

From [HERE] Studies have consistently found that a system of criminal law in which the death penalty is available as a punishment is far more expensive than a system in which the most severe punishment is life without parole or a long prison term. Now, as the number of murder exonerations mounts across the United States, a previously hidden cost is emerging: the cost of liability for police and prosecutorial misconduct associated with 9the wrongful use or threatened use of the death penalty. 

The innocence movement has shown that, in addition to the increased costs associated with investigation, pretrial detention, prosecution, jury selection, trial and sentencing, appeal, and incarceration in death-penalty cases, wrongful capital prosecutions are costing state and local taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Two factors drive up the costs of wrongful conviction judgments: official misconduct and length and severity of incarceration. 

Both factors are increasingly present in death-row exonerations. DPIC’s February 2021 Special Report: The Innocence Epidemic found that the average time between a death-row conviction and exoneration has risen every decade since the 1970s, to more than 21 years for the 29 exonerations in the 2010s and more than 25 years for the 7 exoneration so far this decade. More than 90% of the cases in which it took two or more decades to exonerate a person who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death involved police or prosecutorial misconduct. Most of the time, that official misconduct occurred in concert with perjured witness testimony or false accusation, which was present in 85% of the death-row exonerations that took 20 years or more.

In May 2021, a federal jury in North Carolina awarded intellectually disabled death-row exonerees Henry McCollum and Leon Brown (pictured) $75 million dollars for the wrongful imprisonment stemming from their convictions and death sentences in the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. No physical evidence linked the brothers to the murder, but they were convicted on the basis of false confessions extracted by coercive police interrogations. The North Carolina courts overturned the death sentence imposed on Brown, who was 15 at the time of the murder and 16 when he was sentenced to death. He spent 30 years in jail before being exonerated. McCollum, who was 19 at the time of the offense, spent three decades on death row.

In May 2020, the city of Cleveland agreed to pay $18 million dollars to settle a civil rights lawsuit by three former death-row prisoners who, as a result of police misconduct, spent more than a combined 80 years imprisoned for a murder they did not commit. Kwame Ajamu, his brother Wiley Bridgeman (who died June 27, 2021), and Rickey Jackson were convicted in 1975 of the robbery and murder of Harold Franks based on the coerced false testimony of a 12-year-old boy. Police also fabricated evidence and withheld evidence of the men’s innocence. 

An investigative report by the Philadelphia Inquirer found that at least 13 wrongful murder prosecution lawsuits were pending against the city of Philadelphia as of June 13, 2021, with the cases of seven other murder exonerees still within the time limitation for filing suit. Samantha Melamad reports that “[t]ogether, the plaintiffs served 365 years in prison for convictions that were overturned by courts for reasons ranging from significant legal errors to egregious misconduct by police or prosecutors to compelling evidence of innocence.” Many of the cases involved the threat or use of the death penalty against defendants or witnesses. The seven settlements since 2018 have cost a total of $34 million to the city of Philadelphia and cases involving the use or threat of the death penalty make up more than $16 million of that total. [MORE]

Tennessee Finally Removes the Bust of a Former Klu Klux Klansman from the Capitol - a Symbol Reminding All Visitors that Government Authority Should be Used by Racists to Dominate Blacks

Forty-two years after the bust of Confederate General and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest was installed in the Tennessee Capitol, the statue of the former slave trader was removed from the building Friday, loaded onto a truck and driven away. [MORE]

'We Just Want Police to Use Their Uncontrollable Power to Forcibly Control Us in the Right Way.' Video Shows a White Columbus Cop Fighting a Black Man b/c a White Clerk Wanted Him Removed from Store

A BROWN WATCH [RACISTS ARE WATCHING YOU] An Instagram video shows a physical confrontation between a 30-year-old Black man, a white Columbus police officer and a white store clerk inside a gas station convenience store. Apparently, the clerk wanted the Black man to leave the store for some reason. So the racist suspect used the government to initiate violence against the Black man. Then during the fight the clerk, acting as an auxiliary member of the police force, jumped in to help the officer.

During Nazi Germany, German citizens functioned as an auxiliary police force; monitoring, arresting and watching Jews to assist Nazi police & soldiers with genocide. This "watch" of the Jews enabled Nazi control because Jews outnumbered the German police/soldier forces combined. Similar to Nazi Germany, with regard to non-whites, especially Black males, racists function as an auxiliary police force. They are watching YOU. If Anything you do makes them feel uncomfortable they will call the cops on you. As explained by Amos Wilson, ‘in the context of White American domination there is no innocent Black male, just Black male criminals who have not yet been detected, apprehended or convicted. Their mere presence inspires in racists, fears of being assaulted, raped, robbed, or some other indefinable dread of being criminally victimized.’ [MORE] Also similar to Nazi Germany was the fact that Jews had been deceived to believe that they were fully integrated, German citizens and equal participants in a so-called democracy. [MORE]

The man who said he filmed the video, Cortez Thomas, told the Columbus Dispatch that before he started recording, the store clerk was aggressive toward the customer, who entered the store "bubbly" and "excited."

Things got heated between the two and the officer approached the man, who repeatedly asked what he was doing wrong. And then, "before you knew it, everyone was tusslin'," Thomas said.

The 31-year-old who lives on the East Side said he thought that if the Columbus police officer had been allowed to do his job without interference from the clerk, he could have deescalated the situation.

"What I’m pushing for is to let our cops be our cops," Thomas said, explaining why he posted the video. "Let the ones who are there to protect and serve, protect and serve. Because if we don’t, stuff like this will continue to happen. Cops are scared and civilians are scared and that’s not any way to be safe." [MORE]

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Based on the Thomas’ last statement he is a believer in “authority” and unknowingly a participant in his own subjugation. FUNKTIONARY explains that unprovoked violence against others or the use of “force” is the basis of all social evils and can only be used in the sense of attack not defense. It states “Unfortunately, governments only function by force. Once established, they put laws into effect by threatening persecution, imprisonment, fine, or death against all who don't comply with those laws--including the use of the force continuum.” [MORE] Murray Rothbard explains government is that ‘organization which maintains a monopoly on the use of force and violence; it is the only organization that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.’

If a “public servant," such as a police officer, is uncontrollable, unaccountable, can’t be hired or fired by you, has irresponsible power over you and provides a compulsory “service” then he is actually your Master. Lysander Spooner, stated “It is of no importance that I appointed him, and put all power in his hands. If I made him uncontrollable by me, and irresponsible to me, he is no longer my servant, agent, attorney, or representative. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over my property, I gave him the property. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over myself, I made him my master, and gave myself to him as a slave. And it is of no importance whether I called him master or servant, agent or owner. The only question is, what power did I put into his hands? [MORE]

US Judge Postpones (Again) Suit Over COVID Conditions at Dallas Jail. Inhumane Authorities Failed to Provide Soap, Cleaning supplies, Food, blankets and had Shortages of Basics like Toilet Paper

From [HERE] In late April 2020, shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas and its partners filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Dallas County Sheriff Marian Brown in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

The lawsuit was continued again in July.

Representing nine plaintiffs, the filing comes in light of more than 30 individuals in the jail testing positive for COVID-19 back then. The lawsuit accuses Sheriff Brown and her department of failing to take proper action in order to protect incarcerated people from the novel virus.

Ideare Bailey, one of the nine plaintiffs, testified that when he was arrested for property theft and landed in the Dallas County Jail on April 6, he was not provided with a mask despite being forced to live in close proximity in a dormitory with 60 other people. He also had no feasible way to stay apart from the men coughing in the dorm.

When Bailey inevitably got sick, the medical staff not only refused to take his temperature until three whole days later but also were negligent of his aftercare after his positive COVID-19 diagnosis.

Allegedly, they only gave Bailey a mask soon after he tested positive and just gave him Tylenol to cope with the side effects. They did not administer insulin for his diabetes nor check his oxygen levels.

Other plaintiffs have also spoken out on how during the pandemic the jail did not provide access to soap and cleaning supplies, had a constant shortage of food and blankets, and were inconsistent in giving out basic supplies like toilet paper.

The lawsuit is asking the District Court to immediately remove medically at-risk people from jail and ensure that the jail establishes proper health protocol to combat the virus spread, such as providing sufficient cleaning supplies, testing regularly, and enforcing physical distancing.

At the filing of the lawsuit, Alison Grinter of the NGAN Legal Advocacy Fund stated that the COVID-19 pandemic “will spread faster and hit harder in our jails and [the court] must take action now to prevent needless deaths.”

Terri Burke – former executive director of ACLU of Texas – also commented, “People’s lives are at stake … and [we are] asking the court to take immediate action. We [must make] sure that our vulnerable loved ones in jail don’t get left behind and have a way out.”

However, reality often does not meet expectations.

The case has been pending for more than a year now and a trial was initially scheduled to take place on July 27. But, citing the need for the court to shuffle through an increasing backlog of motions, U.S. District Judge Ada Brown ordered the postponement of the upcoming trial and has yet to set a new date.

In light of this delay, objections have obviously erupted from ACLU of Texas and advocates of their lawsuit.

ACLU of Texas staff attorney Brian Klosterboer stated that “this is a lawsuit that could be resolved if the county takes some small steps to keep people safe in jail” and the million dollars spent fighting the lawsuit could have gone into actually solving the growing health crisis in the jail.

Jails and prisons are generally accepted as one of the most dangerous places amidst the pandemic as the outbreak of the virus is much stronger in their facilities. Dallas County Jail is no exception because during November last year, it was already one of the worst hotspots for the disease in the country.

A study by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas found that incarcerated people in Texas jails and prisons tested positive at a rate of 490 percent higher than the state’s general population.

Evidently, according to an ACLU of Texas statement earlier this month, the situation in the Dallas County Jail has not improved much since the filing of the lawsuit in that it “still does not provide comprehensive testing for COVID-19 … [and even] failed its annual inspection for the first time in years … due in part to a failure to provide soap and hygiene products [to detainees].”

As of May 2021, it has also purportedly administered vaccines to, at most, just 25 percent of the jail’s population.