Friday, December 26, 2014

BAUAW NEWSLETTER: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2014

Prison Radio posted in $10k in 10 Days to Protect Prisoners' Right to Speak!

Prison Radio    9:25am Dec 26

Please check out this statement from Michelle Alexander and support the lawsuit to protect prisoners' right to speak in PA. Every donation counts. Really! It's not what you give. It's that you give. And your donation will be doubled by the Redwood Justice Fund. We can only win this legal battle with everyone's support #KeepMumiaOnAir

WE HAVE 8 DAYS LEFT!!!! Please Donate now!

Big thanks to Chris Tinson, @Christopher Bangs, @Terence McCormack, Daniel Marc Perlmutter, Marian Douglas-Ungaro, @Anton Kerkula and anonymous donors. We're making it happen together. Thank you!

bit.ly/defendfreespeech

    Protect Freedom of Speech & Keep Mumia on the Air

www.indiegogo.com

Overturn Senate Bill 508: defend the First Amendment rights of prisoners, journalists & all of us.
 
Statement from Michelle Alexander:
Please support this effort to raise funds to overturn legislation adopted in Pennsylvania that empowers prosecutors to silence prisoners - bar them from speaking publicly in any form. This law was passed in response to Goddard College students inviting Mumia to deliver their commencement address from behind prison walls. But this isn't just about Mumia. This law threatens the ability of ANY prisoner in Pennsylvania to speak to the media if a victim objects, in clear violation of free speech principles. If the law is allowed to stand, it will make it even more difficult than it already is for people in prison to have their voices heard. And you can be certain that copycat legislation will be adopted in other states whenever prisoners actually succeed in getting their message heard on the outside. This law needs to be overturned now.

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL



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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS



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SHUT DOWN CREECH!

Mass Mobilization to Stop Drone Wars!

A Convergence For Peace in the Nevada Desert

Join us March 4-6, 2015 at Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs, Nevada, for a national mobilization of nonviolent resistance to shut down killer drone operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan,Yemen, Somalia, and everywhere. Sponsored by CODEPINK: Women for Peace, Nevada Desert Experience , Veterans For Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. CODEPINK will also hold vigils daily on March 2nd and 3rd, prior to the official beginning of this Creech Convergence For Peace, and welcomes everyone to join them.


In 2005, Creech Air Force Base secretly became the first U.S. base in the country to carry out illegal, remotely controlled assassinations using the MQ-1 Predator drones, and in 2006, the more advanced Reaper drones were added to its arsenal.  Creech drone personnel sit behind computers in the desert north of Las Vegas and kill "suspects" thousands of miles away.  Recent independent research indicates that the identity of only one out of 28 victims of U.S. drone strikes is known beforehand. Though officials deny it, the majority of those killed by drones are civilians. In 2014, it was leaked that the CIA's criminal drone assassination program, officially a separate operation from the Air Force's, has been piloted all along by Creech's super-secret Squadron 17. 


Since 2009 dozens of activists have been arrested for allegedly trespassing at Creech, in attempts to stop the indiscriminate killing and burning of innocent people by drones.  At the trial of the "Creech 14," the first Americans prosecuted for trespass at a drone base, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified that "to have a baby burn to death because of a 'no trespass'  sign would be poor public policy, to put it mildly."  In a time of burning children, the "no trespass" signs attached to the fences that protect the crimes perpetrated with drones are not legitimate, and they do not command our obedience.  After all, it is the U.S. military that is guilty of lethal trespassing.


The US drone program is rapidly proliferating as air bases are being converted to drone bases across the U.S. and abroad, but Creech remains the primary air base in U.S. state-sponsored global terrorism. Creech is where the killer drone program started--it is where we shall end it.


We must put an end to this desecration of our Mother Earth and all creatures who inhabit it.

We must put an end to the dehumanization of lives from Ferguson to Palestine to Pakistan.

We must close all foreign U.S. military bases.  Money for human needs. 

We must put an end to drone warfare, drone surveillance, and global militarization.

We must...
SHUT CREECH DOWN! 
More details to come soon!

Sign up on facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/1525740921010540/?context=create&previousaction=create&source=49&sid_create=3742154553#

Or contact:

Toby Blomé of Code Pink, 510-215-5974 (h)

Brian Terrell of VCNV and NDE,   773-853-1886

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Cops vs Free Speech
How police are threatening Mumia, convicts, teachers, and all of us with censorship as well as bullets!


• The New “gag” law in Pennsylvania that seeks to silence prisoners. This law, cobbled together in days following Mumia’s recorded presentation to a commencement ceremony at Goddard College, was explicitly designed to “shut him up.” The targets of this blatantly unconstitutional law, however, include all prisoners convicted of violent crimes!

• A Law Suit has been filed to stop the “gag” law from being implemented!  Support for this effort is critical. Donations will go toward the fight against the “gag” law.

• The  suppression of the “Urban Dreams” web site by the Oakland School Board. This teacher-created site of voluntary curriculum ideas included one comparing the suppression of Mumia’s commentaries with censorship of Martin Luther King’s later writings. While the Superintendent of Schools has now promised to restore the site, we must remain vigilant!

• Both of these measures—the “gag” law in Pennsylvania, and the suppression of the Urban Dreams website—were taken at the behest of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)!  The FOP is a highly politicized organization which seeks to silence social critics such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, and dictate the curricula in schools! The FOP and Democrat/Republican politicians will continue their attempts at intimidation and suppression, unless we act!

• Ferguson shows that black and Latino youth particularly are threatened by militarized and politicized police who shoot first and ask questions later, and frame their targets for crimes they didn’t commit. Chief targets have included Native American Activists like Leonard Peltier, militant working-class activists, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Black Panthers and Martin Luther King. Mumia is currently a top target to silence.  But anyone and everyone can be on their enemies list, and in their cross-hairs!  Fight back now!

Donate Now
to fight the “gag” law!
go to:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protect-freedom-of-speech-keep-mumia-on-the-air

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland CA  •  510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org

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Support Prison Radio

$35 is the yearly membership.

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Pennsylvania legislators are trying to stop prisoners from speaking about their ideas and experiences. Last week, PA Representative Mike Vereb introduced a bill (HB2533) called the “Revictimization Relief Act,” which would allow victims, District Attorneys, and the Attorney General to sue people who have been convicted of “personal injury” crimes for speaking out publicly if it causes the victim of the crime “mental anguish.”

The bill was written in response to political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s commencement speech at Goddard College, and is a clear attempt to silence Mumia and other prisoners and formerly incarcerated people. We believe that this legislation is not actually an attempt to help victims, but a cynical move by legislators to stop people in prison from speaking out against an unjust system.

While to us this seems like a clear violation of the first amendment, unfortunately the PA General Assembly doesn’t appear to agree, and they have fast-tracked the bill for approval and amended another bill (SB508) to include the same language. The legislation could be voted on as early as Wednesday.

If this bill passes, it will be a huge blow to the movement against mass incarceration. People inside prisons play a leading role in these struggles, and their perspectives, analysis, and strategies are essential to our work. Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who write books, contribute to newspapers, or even write for our Voices from the Inside section would run the risk of legal consequences just for sharing their ideas.

That’s why we are asking you to take action TUESDAY OCTOBER 14 by calling Pennsylvania lawmakers to tell them that prisoners should not be denied the right to speak.

Please call your legislators and demand that they vote NO on HB2533 and SB508. You can look up contact information at http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/.

We are also asking folks to call the following Senate leaders and ask them to stop the bill from moving forward:

Senate Majority Whip Pat Browne  (717) 787-1349

Senate Minority Whip Anthony Williams  (717) 787-5970

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi  (717) 787-4712

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (717) 787-7683

Not sure what to say on the phone? Click here for a sample call script.

Want to write a letter to your legislators, or looking for more talking points? Click here for more info!

- See more at: http://decarceratepa.info/freespeech#sthash.TtdN3AkI.dpuf


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COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org/

New Action- write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

November 24, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network
mchugh_md
Secretary of the Army John McHugh
President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.
Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.
It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.
Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:
Secretary of the Army John McHugh
101 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-0101
The Judge Advocate General
2200 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-2200
Army Clemency and Parole Board
251 18th St, Suite 385
Arlington, VA 22202-3532
Directorate of Inmate Administration
Attn: Boards Branch
U.S. Disciplinary Barracks
1301 N. Warehouse Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304
Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:
  • The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help
  • A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.”  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.
  • Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).
  • A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above
This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.
Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea’s legal fees at this critical stage!
> > > Please donate today! < < <



Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
 Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org

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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1) Why Are Our Schools Still Segregated?
By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES




2)  Contesting Traffic Fines, Missouri Sues 13 Suburbs of St. Louis
By ELI YOKLEY and





3) Judge in Maryland Locks Up Youths and Rules Their Lives
By





4) Cuba’s Gay Rights Evolution
By






5) Police Killed Her Son; Afterward, Louisville Evolved
By Dan Barry




6) Raúl Castro Thanks U.S., but Reaffirms Communist Rule in Cuba
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/world/americas/castro-thanks-us-but-affirms-cubas-communist-rule.html?ref=world




7) Fuel Rods Are Removed From Damaged Fukushima Reactor
By




8) In a Year, Egypt Detained 10,000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




9) Chanting ‘Black Lives Matter,’ Protesters Shut Down Part of Mall of America
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS





10)  When Officers Die and Protests Get the Blame
By






11) Argentina: Court Sides With Orangutan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




12) Former Milwaukee Police Officer Won’t Be Charged in Death of Black Man in Park
By





13) After Shootings, Police Union Chief Deepens Rift With de Blasio
By and







14) White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier
By Carl Zimmer
DEC. 24, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/science/23andme-genetic-ethnicity-study.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news




15) A Historic 50-Mile Walk, Nearly 50 Years Later
In ‘Selma,’ King Is Just One of the Heroes NYT Critics' Pick
By





16) Cautions Against Ferguson Comparisons After Officer Kills Black Teenager
Antonio Martin’s Death Is Investigated in Missouri
By and




17) After Killing of Police Officers, Protest Movement Is at a Crossroads
“'Once we were asked to cease our protests, that was affirmation that we could not cease,' said Ms. Yates, 29, who lives in St. Louis but joined protests in New York after the Staten Island grand jury declined to charge a police officer in Mr. Garner’s case. 'They’re telling us that our grief doesn’t matter,' she said."
By NIKITA STEWART

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/26/nyregion/after-killing-of-2-officers-a-reversal-in-attitudes-to-police-of-some-demonstrators-and-officials.html?ref=us







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1) Why Are Our Schools Still Segregated?
By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES

ON Aug. 1, five students in satiny green-and-red robes and mortarboards waited in an elementary school classroom to hear their names called as graduates of Normandy High School. This ceremony, held months after the official graduation, was mostly for students who had been short of credits in May.

One of those new graduates was Michael Brown. He was 18, his mother’s oldest son. He had been planning to start college in September.

Eight days later, he was dead, killed in the streets of nearby Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer in a shooting that ignited angry protests and a painful national debate about race, policing and often elusive justice. Many news reports after Mr. Brown’s death noted his graduation and his college plans. The implication was that these scholarly achievements magnified the sorrow.

But if Michael Brown’s educational experience was a success story, it was a damning one.

The Normandy school district is among the poorest and most segregated in Missouri. It ranks last in overall academic performance. Its rating on an annual state assessment was so dismal that by the time Mr. Brown graduated the district had lost its state accreditation.

About half of black male students at Normandy High never graduate. Just one in four graduates makes it to a four-year college. The college where Mr. Brown was headed is a for-profit trade school that recruits those it once described in internal documents as “Unemployed, Underpaid, Unsatisfied, Unskilled, Unprepared, Unsupported, Unmotivated, Unhappy, Underserved!”

Just five miles down the road from Normandy lies Clayton, the wealthy county seat where a grand jury recently deliberated the fate of Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Mr. Brown. Success there looks very different. The Clayton public schools are predominantly white, with almost no poverty to speak of. The district is regularly ranked in the top 10 percent in the state. More than 96 percent of its students graduate. Eighty-four percent head to four-year universities.

Decades of public and private housing discrimination made St. Louis one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country. A network of school district boundaries has, to this day, divided students in racially separate schools as effectively as any Jim Crow law.

Michael Brown’s education was not exceptional, then, but all too typical, and it illustrates the vast disparity in resources and expectations for black children in America’s stubbornly segregated educational system.

As hundreds of school districts across the nation have been released from court-enforced integration over the past 15 years, the number of what researchers call “apartheid schools” — in which the white population is 1 percent or less — has shot up. The achievement gap, narrowed during the height of school integration, has widened.

According to data compiled by the Department of Education, black and Latino children nationwide are the least likely to be taught by a qualified, experienced teacher; to be offered courses such as chemistry and calculus; or to have access to technology.

“American schools are disturbingly racially segregated — period,” Catherine Lhamon, head of the Education Department’s civil rights office, said in a speech in October.

Since Aug. 9, the day Mr. Brown’s lifeless body lay for hours under a hot summer sun, St. Louis County has come to illustrate the country’s racial fault lines in police conduct and the criminalization of black youth. But most black youth will not die at the hands of the police.

They share the fate that was already Michael Brown’s.

IN 1954, when the United States Supreme Court rejected the notion of separate but equal schools in its Brown v. Board of Education decision, St. Louis ran the second-largest segregated school district in the country.

After the ruling, school officials promised to integrate voluntarily. But the acceleration of white flight and the redrawing of school district lines around black and white neighborhoods allowed metropolitan St. Louis to preserve its racial divide. Nearly 30 years later, 90 percent of black children in St. Louis still attended predominantly black schools.

In 1983, a federal judge ordered a desegregation plan for the entire metropolitan area. At its peak, some 15,000 St. Louis public school students a year attended 16 heavily white suburban districts. Another 1,300 white students headed in the opposite direction to 27 new magnet schools in St. Louis.

The program left another 15,000 of St. Louis’s black students in segregated, inferior schools. But for the transfer students who rode buses out of the city, the plan successfully broke the deeply entrenched connection between race, ZIP code and opportunity. Test scores for eighth- and 10th-grade transfer students rose. The transfer students were more likely to graduate and go on to college. In surveys, white students overwhelmingly said they had benefited from the opportunity to be educated alongside black students. The St. Louis model was heralded as the nation’s most successful metropolitan desegregation program.

But from the moment it started, the St. Louis desegregation plan was under assault. The cost would eventually reach $1.7 billion. In 1999 the program was made entirely voluntary. Today, about 5,000 students get to escape the troubles of the St. Louis public schools — a small fraction of the number who apply for the privilege of doing so.

Incorporated in 1945 and covering fewer than two square miles, Normandy became a destination for St. Louis’s fleeing white working class.

Nedra Martin’s family was among the black strivers who began to make their way to Normandy in the 1970s. Ms. Martin, who still lives in Normandy and works in human resources at Walmart, said her parents settled in the town in 1975. They both worked in government jobs — her dad was a welder for the city, her mom an aide in a state group home. But as black families like the Martins moved in, “For Sale” signs went up and whites fled to new exurbs.

After 1970, black enrollment in the Normandy schools exploded, more than doubling within eight years to 6,200. By 1978, only St. Louis itself enrolled more black students than Normandy.

For years, Normandy’s schools struggled to meet minimum state requirements for student achievement. Then, in 2009, the state decided that the Normandy school district would absorb the ailing Wellston school district.

Wellston was also high-poverty, and held the distinction of being Missouri’s only 100 percent black school system. State officials had called conditions in Wellston’s schools “deplorable” and “academically abusive.”

But one thing was clear: Its students were not going to be absorbed into the high-performing, mostly white districts nearby. Michael Jones, a state board of education official, was blunt about the reason: “You’d have had a civil war.”

BY the time Michael Brown was a high school junior, he had spent most of his educational career in racially segregated and financially disadvantaged schools. Behind in credits, he entered Normandy High in the spring of 2013.

The state’s most recent assessment of Normandy’s schools was spectacularly bleak: Out of Missouri’s 520 school districts, Normandy, among the state’s poorest and 98 percent black, was marooned at the very bottom.

But last year, the Normandy district was thrown an unlikely lifeline. Its schools had failed so badly that the state had formally stripped it of its accreditation. And the Missouri State Supreme Court had just upheld a state law allowing students in unaccredited districts to transfer to accredited ones.

For Nedra Martin, who had a daughter stuck in Normandy’s failing schools, this was the miracle she had prayed for. Just like that, the state’s decision erased the invisible, impenetrable lines of segregation that had trapped her child. “I was elated,” Ms. Martin said. “Just elated.”

Parents in the school district that would have to take Normandy’s students were not. Normandy chose to provide transportation for its transfer students to attend schools in Francis Howell, an 85 percent white district 26 miles away. Officials there held a public forum to address community concerns. More than 2,500 parents packed into the high school gymnasium.Would the district install metal detectors? What about the violence their children would be subjected to, an elementary school parent asked. Wouldn’t test scores plummet? The issue wasn’t about race, one parent said, “but trash.”

Mah’Ria Pruitt-Martin, a rising eighth grader, was sitting in the audience that night with her mother. Hers was one of the few brown faces there, and the girl said she wiped away tears.

“It made me heartbroken because they were putting us in a box,” Mah’Ria said. “I was sitting there thinking, ‘Would you want some other parents talking about your kid that way?’ ”

In the fall of 2013, nearly 1,000 Normandy students — about a quarter of the district’s enrollment — switched to schools in accredited districts. More than 400 headed to Francis Howell.

Mah’Ria said that she was, in fact, welcomed into her new middle school by students and teachers. Despite the fears, recently released state data show that with the exception of one district, test scores in the transfer schools did not drop.

But there was a cruel twist. The state required any failing district whose students were allowed to transfer to pay the costs of their education in the adjoining districts. The payments drained Normandy’s finances. Normandy closed a school and laid off 40 percent of its staff.

“In order to save the district, they killed the district,” said John Wright, a longtime St. Louis educator who had spent stints as superintendent in both St. Louis and Normandy.

The state then announced that it was taking over the Normandy Public Schools district and reconstituting it as the Normandy Schools Collaborative. As a new educational entity, the district got a clean slate. It no longer was unaccredited, but operated as a “state oversight district.” The transfer law, the state claimed, no longer applied. One by one, transfer districts announced that Normandy children were no longer welcome.

Ms. Martin and other parents sued, asserting that the state had no legal authority to reconstitute the district to change its accreditation status. On Aug. 15, after the school year had begun in some districts, a state judge granted a temporary injunction allowing the plaintiffs to enroll their children in the transfer districts.

“Every day a student attends an unaccredited school,” the judge wrote, the child “could suffer harm that cannot be repaired.” The state is fighting the ruling, but most school districts have reopened their doors to the transfer students.

When asked whether black children in Missouri were receiving an equal education, Commissioner Chris Nicastro, the state’s top education official, paused, then inhaled deeply. “Do I think black children in Missouri are getting in all cases the same education as their white counterparts?” Ms. Nicastro said. “I’d have to say no.”

STUDENTS who spend their careers in segregated schools can look forward to a life on the margins, according to a 2014 study on the long-term impacts of school desegregation by Rucker C. Johnson, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. They are more likely to be poor. They are more likely to go to jail. They are less likely to graduate from high school, to go to college, or to finish if they go. They are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods as adults. Their children are more likely to attend segregated schools, repeating the cycle.

“You know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate?” Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, cried on the August day he died. “You know how many black men graduate? Not many.”

Michael Brown was buried in the old St. Peter’s Cemetery.

It lies next to Normandy High School.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is reporter at ProPublica. This is an excerpt from a longer article published by ProPublica.


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2)  Contesting Traffic Fines, Missouri Sues 13 Suburbs of St. Louis
By ELI YOKLEY and

ST. LOUIS — Missouri’s attorney general announced lawsuits against 13 of this city’s suburbs on Thursday, accusing them of ignoring a law that sets limits on revenue derived from traffic fines. The move comes after widespread allegations of harassment and profiteering by small municipal governments against the poor and minorities.

The attorney general, Chris Koster, a Democrat, spoke in downtown St. Louis and suggested that more sweeping changes could be needed to bring municipalities into line.

Since the racially charged protests over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in nearby Ferguson in August, demonstrators have frequently complained about a perceived hypervigilance to minor traffic violations in St. Louis County’s patchwork of 90 municipalities. Many of those cities have their own courts and police departments, but some are only a few square blocks in size and have populations smaller than some high schools.

“When traffic ticketing is used to promote public safety, that’s appropriate,” Mr. Koster said. “When traffic tickets are used to promote revenue, that’s inappropriate.” Such practices, he said, are “predatory.”

Ferguson, with roughly 20,000 residents, was not among the suburbs sued by Mr. Koster, and is large compared with many nearby cities in the northern part of the county, where many of the suburbs sued by Mr. Koster are situated.

State law requires towns to report the percentage of general operating revenue that comes from fines for traffic violations, and limits their potential to profit by requiring that proceeds beyond 30 percent be turned over to the state.

In Normandy, a city near Ferguson, 38 percent of the revenue came from fines and court costs. Mr. Koster sued five St. Louis municipalities that he said failed to file any report, four that filed a report without calculating a percentage, and four, including Normandy, that had revenue over the limit.

At its meeting here this week, the state-appointed Ferguson Commission discussed possible changes to municipal courts. The 16-member commission was asked by Gov. Jay Nixon to listen to residents and propose ideas for lasting social and political changes around St. Louis. The commission’s leaders appeared with Mr. Koster at Thursday’s announcement.

Many say young black men, who are pulled over at a higher rate than whites in some St. Louis County towns, are particularly affected by police officers’ enforcement of traffic laws and municipal judges who impose fines. If defendants do not pay their fines, they are sometimes jailed.

“We have heard across the board, there’s broad agreement, that the municipal courts create challenges for us,” said the Rev. Starsky Wilson, a Ferguson Commission chairman. “Municipal courts are a focal point between policing on the streets and community relations there and municipal fragmentation.”

Mr. Koster said he had not reviewed Ferguson’s records on traffic ticket revenue because the suburb’s report for the last fiscal year is not yet due.

Mayor Francis G. Slay of St. Louis, in a separate news conference Thursday, said that his city’s municipal judges could now take into account someone’s financial means when setting up payment schedules. Mr. Slay suggested that the region’s other courts, where some defendants also struggle to pay, could look into similar changes. But he cautioned that widespread implementation outside St. Louis city limits might be a challenge.

“If you want to get something done in the city, you know where to go,” Mr. Slay said. “In the suburbs, there’s a lot of municipalities.”

Though protests have continued on an almost daily basis, there are signs that St. Louis is returning to some level of normality. Governor Nixon allowed a monthlong state of emergency to expire on Wednesday, resulting in the withdrawal of the Missouri National Guard.

But even with the Guard gone, conversation continues about perceived racial inequities around St. Louis. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the Ferguson-Florissant School District, arguing that the district’s method of electing school board members dilutes the influence of African-American voters. Only one of seven board members is black, though African-Americans constitute a majority of the student body.


Eli Yokley reported from St. Louis, and Mitch Smith from Chicago.




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3) Judge in Maryland Locks Up Youths and Rules Their Lives
By

UPPER MARLBORO, Md. — “Judge Dawson, he don’t play,” a parent once said about Herman C. Dawson, the main juvenile court judge in Prince George’s County. And on this Tuesday morning, Judge Dawson was definitely not in a playing mood.

“Who’s in court with you today?” he demanded of Tanika, the 16-year-old standing before him in handcuffs.

“My mom,” she said.

“I know that,” Judge Dawson snapped.

An honors student, Tanika had never been in trouble with the law before. But for the past year, ever since she was involved in a fight with another girl at her high school, Judge Dawson had ruled her life, turning it into a series of court hearings, months spent on house arrest and weeks locked up at a juvenile detention center in Laurel, Md.

Most recently, he had detained her for two weeks for violating probation by visiting a friend on the way home from working off community service hours. Now he was deciding whether to release her.

“I’m hesitating because I don’t know whether you got the message,” he said.

Juvenile court judges in the United States are given wide discretion to decide what is in a young offender’s best interest. Many, like Judge Dawson, turn to incarceration, hoping it will teach disobedient teenagers a lesson and deter them from further transgressions.

But evidence has mounted in recent years that locking up juveniles, especially those who pose no risk to public safety, does more harm than good. Most juvenile offenders outgrow delinquent behavior, studies find. And incarceration — the most costly alternative for taxpayers — appears to do little to prevent recidivism and often has the opposite effect, driving juveniles deeper into criminal behavior.

“Once kids get in the system, they tend to come back, and the farther they go, the more likely they are to keep going,” said Edward Mulvey, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the author of a major study of delinquent youths.

Slowly, policy makers have begun to heed this message. After decades when states grew more punitive in their approach to juvenile crime, locking up more and more youths, more than a dozen have now revised statutes or regulations to avoid the overuse of incarceration, among them New Jersey and Indiana.

But judges are not always so quick to follow. And often the judges most resistant to change are those most determined to help troubled youths, juvenile delinquency experts say.

Judge Dawson is an example. Presiding in Courtroom D-15 of the mammoth county courthouse here over cases that range from shoplifting to armed robbery, he has won a reputation as a jurist who brooks no excuses and involves himself deeply in the lives of the teenagers who come before him.

Raised by a single mother in the segregated South, he subscribes to a “tough love” philosophy that venerates hard work, education and personal responsibility as the antidotes to poverty, negative peer pressure, chaotic parenting and other forces that can tip children into delinquency.

The juveniles who end up in his courtroom, Judge Dawson says, have often been allowed to run wild without consequences. “People have made too many excuses for them, and they end up believing it,” he said in a recent interview.

But Judge Dawson’s critics, who include defense lawyers, delinquency workers and some parents of young offenders, say that in his zeal to reform wayward youths he goes too far — acting not just as judge but also as prosecutor, probation officer and social worker.

He relies too heavily on locking juveniles up, these critics say, contributing to incarceration rates that are among the highest in the state. His courtroom practices sometimes violate young offenders’ due process rights. And in several instances Judge Dawson has overstepped the law in an effort to keep juveniles locked up for longer periods — in October, a state appeals court ordered him to reconsider his disposition in four cases in which he had set minimum periods of confinement for juveniles, saying that the orders appeared to violate state law.

“These child-saving judges, they think they’re doing something right-minded,” said Mary Ann Scali, deputy director of the National Juvenile Defender Center, “but in fact it’s very wrong-minded.”

Behind the Methods

In court, Judge Dawson, 60, likes to tell stories about his own childhood: how he mowed lawns and shined shoes to earn money for college; how he marched in civil rights protests without missing a day of school; how his mother did not let him or his brothers play baseball on Sunday, taking them to church instead.

“If I can make it out of Selma, Alabama, with all the opportunities kids have now, why is it they can’t take advantage of these opportunities and better themselves?” he asks.

A compact, energetic man whose eyes constantly rove the courtroom, he exchanges teasing barbs with lawyers, and is prone to high-pitched sighs and digressions about golf and fishing. Appointed to the Circuit Court in 1998 by Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat, and elected to a 15-year term in 2000, he is a well-known figure in this mostly black county.

He speaks regularly at high schools and founded a mentoring and scholarship program for troubled youths, often selecting candidates from his courtroom. But a few months ago he halted the program, he said, after complaints that his involvement was inappropriate, given his role on the bench.

Judge Dawson says that in court, where his docket can run to 75 or more cases a day, his goal is to do whatever he can — including yelling, if necessary — to get the attention of young offenders.

“If I can get one of these black kids, Hispanic kids, get them out of high school and get them into college, I’ve done my job,” Judge Dawson said.

To that end, he engages juveniles in a wide-ranging public catechism, peppering them with questions about school performance (“How many times were you suspended last year?”), attire (“You can walk around in a fancy hillbilly shirt but you can’t get an education?”) and behavior (“Why do you do all these dumb things?”).

He routinely assigns dozens or even hundreds of hours of community service and requires that they be completed through the county’s work program, which charges a fee of $50 per case. He is adamant about restitution, bringing offenders back to court repeatedly until victims have been paid. And while most other judges waive court fees for juveniles, he insists on collecting them, even when parents protest that they cannot afford to pay.

“You are so lucky Judge Dawson is not here today, lucky, lucky, lucky,” a public defender told one boy whose parents had not paid the fee, usually $155.

But it is Judge Dawson’s use of incarceration that has stirred the most controversy.

In Maryland, as in other states, the number of juveniles held in locked facilities has declined over the past decade, a result of dropping juvenile crime rates and increasing efforts to keep juveniles at home when possible. A project in Baltimore led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which is financing efforts in 39 states to develop alternatives to locking up juveniles while protecting public safety, has helped decrease the use of detention there by about 40 percent, according to state statistics.

But in Prince George’s County, the rates of detention and longer-term incarceration have remained high and have risen in the more than five years Judge Dawson has presided as the primary juvenile court judge, according to an analysis by the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services.

Commitments to institutional settings increased 55 percent from 2009 to 2014, while, statewide, commitments dropped an average of 5 percent over the same period and complaints filed with the Juvenile Services Department — an indicator of juvenile crime — decreased 63 percent.

Detentions of juveniles from Prince George’s County in secure facilities have risen 115 percent since 2005 — despite a slight decline since 2012 — though they have dropped 29 percent statewide. Only 12 percent of the juveniles were detained for committing new crimes. The rest were locked up for violations stemming from old offenses.

Prosecutors in the county find in Judge Dawson a willing partner.

“If they need to be detained, he’s not afraid to detain them,” said Yvonne Robinson, the assistant state’s attorney in charge of juvenile cases.

But public defenders believe that the high detention rates are driven in part by the multitude of review hearings Judge Dawson schedules to monitor juveniles’ progress. The hearings, the public defenders said, place a teenager’s behavior under a microscope, allowing prosecutors to seize on violations they might never have heard about otherwise.

“I think he cares about the kids,” said Erin Josendale, chief of the public defender’s juvenile division in Prince George’s County. “But having that level of involvement, at least in our county, creates significant due process concerns.”

In one of two interviews in his chambers, Judge Dawson said that the reviews were needed because the Juvenile Services Department often failed to properly monitor its charges. And he defended his use of detention, saying that it was sometimes the department that asked for a young offender to be detained. For the most part, he said, he reserved incarceration for juveniles who had repeatedly committed serious offenses.

“I am looking at the nature of the offense and the harm that the person may cause,” he said.

Over more than three months that a visitor observed his courtroom, Judge Dawson detained juveniles who had cut off electronic monitoring bracelets, had been “out of control” at home, had smoked marijuana while on probation, had failed to complete community service hours in a timely fashion or had missed repeated court hearings. He rarely stated in court the reason for the detentions.

Judge Dawson also often set conditions for probation that even a well-behaved teenager might have difficulty meeting, for example, ordering them to maintain a specific grade average or, as in Tanika’s case, to remain on house arrest for months in a row.

As delinquent acts go, Tanika’s offense was a minor one. One day in the spring of 2013, she briefly tangled with another girl outside a classroom.

The school fight was so trivial that the Department of Juvenile Services initially refused to pursue the complaint. No one was injured and Tanika had no history of delinquency. (The New York Times agreed to withhold the last names of the teenagers in this article because juvenile court records are confidential.)

But when the other girl’s mother insisted — her daughter’s hair weave had been ruined and she wanted $100 in compensation — the department turned the complaint over to the prosecutor, who filed a second-degree assault charge against Tanika.

When the case came to court, the Juvenile Services Department recommended that no action be taken. But when Tanika failed to show up for trial in September 2013, a writ was issued for her arrest. At a hearing in November, Judge Dawson detained her — Maryland law allows the detention of children who pose a flight risk — and set a trial date for December: Tanika was locked up for a month in the detention center.

She ended up pleading guilty. Judge Dawson ordered her to pay restitution and assigned 32 hours of community service. When, five months later, the hours were not completed and she arrived late to court, he doubled the hours and placed Tanika on house arrest, allowing her to leave home only for school or the county work program.

Her second detention at the Laurel center came after she visited a friend. The confinement, her mother, Rachelle, said, “took her summer away.”

“It just took a lot away from her,” Rachelle said. “She couldn’t go to church because of the monitor on her leg.”

If house arrest was difficult, the detention center, the juvenile equivalent of an adult jail, was even worse.

“It was miserable,” Tanika said. “It’s a place you don’t want to be.”

At first, Rachelle visited her daughter in detention — the two had never been separated before. But she eventually decided to stay away, because, she said, “when I did go, when I was leaving, she broke down crying real bad.”

Pushing the Limits

Over the past year, the Maryland public defender’s office became concerned that Judge Dawson was testing the accepted limits of judicial discretion: In at least a dozen cases, he had committed juveniles to locked facilities for specific lengths of time — 18 months in one case, 12 months in several others.

The commitments, the public defender’s office believed, were the equivalent of adult sentences and violated the spirit of Maryland juvenile law, which sets rehabilitation rather than punishment as the goal.

“I’ve practiced all over the state, and I’m aware of no other judge in the state of Maryland who issues these types of dispositions, not a one,” said Stephen Bergman, a supervising attorney in the state public defender’s juvenile protection division. “I think it’s clearly illegal.”

The public defender’s office was not the only agency unhappy about the commitment orders. The state Juvenile Services Department worried that the orders put strain on institutions that had limited bed space and were not set up to hold offenders for longer than the time it took to complete the six- to nine-month programs they offered.

Besides, said Eric Solomon, a spokesman for the department, it was in youths’ best interest to move them out of facilities once treatment goals had been met.

Mr. Bergman had unsuccessfully tried to get another Circuit Court judge in Prince George’s County to strike the language setting specific terms from Judge Dawson’s orders, and the public defender’s office was filing appeals. But the juveniles had remained locked up, in some cases long after the Juvenile Services Department recommended their release.

One of them, Jhenifer, a slight, dark-eyed girl with a sudden, effervescent smile, had become a personal mission for Mr. Bergman, who saw her as special — bright and motivated, her potential stymied by the juvenile system and Judge Dawson’s tough policies.

Jhenifer’s parents moved to the United States from Brazil when she was 3, finding an affordable house in Laurel where they could raise their two daughters. But the area was thick with drug dealing and gang activities, and Jhenifer found trouble hard to avoid.

At 13, she was sexually assaulted by a much older man while at a house in the neighborhood, an attack she told no one about for several years. She lost friends to shootings and to suicide. Filled with anger and surging with nervous energy, she began drinking and smoking marijuana. Sometimes, she would leave home for days at a time.

In 2011, Jhenifer, then 15, was standing on the street with friends, heavily intoxicated, when the police stopped to question the group. She tried to run but the officers tackled her, spraying Mace in her eye and leaving her badly bruised, she said.

In most states, juveniles are not entitled to jury trials. And when Jhenifer came to court, she pleaded guilty to a charge of resisting arrest. Judge Dawson’s order sent her to a residential treatment program in Ohio.

But when she emerged a year later she was, if anything, hardened by time spent in a tightly restricted setting, among girls who were as troubled — or in many cases, more troubled — than she was.

Returning to the same neighborhood and the same school, Jhenifer took up the same routines. And over Christmas in 2012, she was arrested and charged with involvement in a burglary and two robberies, along with a group of other teenagers and at least one adult. One of the robberies involved a BB gun.

No one was injured in the crimes, which netted a jacket and a small amount of cash. But Jhenifer pleaded guilty to an adult charge of armed robbery that was transferred to juvenile court.

For the next 10 months, she sat at a detention center, waiting for placement in a locked residential program. When, last December, she finally came before Judge Dawson for disposition of the case, he was not in a forgiving mood. In open court, with Jhenifer and her lawyer present, he committed her to a secure facility. Later, in his written order, he specified that she must be confined for “at least 18 months.”

But when Jhenifer completed the center’s six-to-nine-month program at the 14-bed J. DeWeese Carter Center in Chestertown — the state’s only secure residential lockup for girls — in only five months, and received higher scores for good behavior than any other girl there, the order began to seem more like a punishment than the rehabilitation called for by Maryland law.

In April, the Juvenile Services Department sent her back to court with a recommendation that she be released. She had shown great improvement at the center, the staff there said, and they thought she should go to college. She was helpful, cooking meals for other girls and keeping her room pin-neat. And she had goals: She wanted to be a medical examiner like Dr. Jan Garavaglia of the television show “Dr. G.”

But when Jhenifer arrived in court, Judge Dawson refused to hear the case, saying that she had been brought there in error.

“He was actually upset because I was in his courtroom,” Jhenifer, now 19, said in an interview. “He didn’t look at me, he didn’t speak to me, he didn’t give my parents time to speak.”

When Jhenifer’s case manager asked that she be given a home pass so that she could at least visit her family, Judge Dawson denied the request.

For another five months, Jhenifer remained at the center, locked in her room each night and confined during the day within the fenced grounds.

But in late September, as the legal challenges to his commitment orders were under review by the state’s Court of Special Appeals, Judge Dawson allowed a hearing on the case to go forward.

“I have some serious questions about whether you’ve been rehabilitated,” Judge Dawson told Jhenifer, as she stood next to Mr. Bergman at the defense table.

In the end, though, he agreed to let her return home — her parents had moved to another county to escape the bad influences on Jhenifer’s younger sister — assigning her 250 hours of community service that she recently completed.

“You’ve gotten a number of breaks, young lady,” he told her. “Sooner or later, your breaks are going to run out.”

‘I Am What I Am’

One day, when Judge Dawson was a law student at Howard University in the late 1970s, he saw a group of juvenile offenders being taken out of a van near the courthouse. The youths were chained together.

“It reminded me so much of slavery,” he said. “I decided I’d do whatever I can do to work with the kids and get them into a better setting.”

If on the bench Judge Dawson is often severe, he can also show warmth and leniency. He asked for a round of applause for a girl who had done well at school. And he praised a boy who came to court in a suit.

Judge Dawson met his father only once, when he was 5, and even then did not know it, only later learning the identity of the man who had bought him a candy bar at a country store.

So he worries, he said, about the many young offenders whose fathers are absent or in prison, and about parents who do not seem to care about their children’s educations.

“I can’t raise 1,700 kids a year,” he is fond of remarking.

Yet lately, Judge Dawson has had to confront the limits on his ability to direct and control young offenders’ lives.

In early October, the Maryland Court of Appeals ordered him to reconsider the set-term commitments he had ordered, noting that a previous appeals court ruling had found such dispositions unlawful. He has since either released the youths or revised the language of the orders to comply with the law.

And this fall, the Casey Foundation, taking note of the high detention rates, expanded its Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative to Prince George’s County. Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children’s Law and Policy in Washington, is leading the effort, which offers training and technical assistance to help jurisdictions reduce overreliance on locked detention and develop other ways of holding juveniles accountable. Mr. Soler and his staff have prepared an assessment of the county’s juvenile system, based on interviews with all parties, including Judge Dawson.

“We want judges to understand that the juvenile system is not the solution to all the problems of children and families,” Mr. Soler said.

Among other things, the initiative encourages the use of standardized measures that rate how likely a juvenile is to flee or commit another offense — measures that Mr. Soler said neither Judge Dawson nor prosecutors had relied on in making decisions, although they can help avoid locking up juveniles unnecessarily. Yet it is far from clear whether Judge Dawson will join the ranks of the judges who have moved away from routinely locking up young offenders.

Like most judges, he is not immune to community pressure: He said he receives letters and phone calls from crime victims and parents who urge him to be harder on young offenders.

After the appeals court issued its order in October, he began committing youths to locked settings but specifying that they could not be sent to the secure facilities available in Maryland, meaning they would go out of state and probably be incarcerated for longer. But he has now reversed most of those orders as well, he said, after public defenders and the Juvenile Services Department objected to them.

Asked if he believes some juveniles should be locked up for longer stretches, Judge Dawson said that for serious offenses like armed robbery and carjacking, they should.

“I’m not in good conscience, no matter what they say about me, going to put that child back in the community,” he said. At least one of the juveniles involved in the appeals court cases violated probation within a week of being released, he said.

“I am what I am,” Judge Dawson said. “If I don’t tell these kids to get out and get an education, for the most part, they are not getting it, and nobody seems to care.”






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4) Cuba’s Gay Rights Evolution
By



In Cuba, street marches have historically been government-orchestrated events or dissident protests that are swiftly crushed by the authorities. So it was downright startling when, in May 2007, Fidel Castro’s niece sauntered down the street with a small army of drag queens waving gay pride flags.

Long before the Obama administration announced a dramatic shift in Cuba policy on Wednesday, asserting that isolating the island had failed, a couple of Western governments with close ties to the United States saw the potential to help gay Cubans, even though it meant working with a prominent member of the Castro family. Havana’s first observance of the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia marked the beginning of a remarkable evolution of gay rights in the most populous island in the Caribbean, a region where hostile attitudes toward sexual minorities remain the norm.Mariela Castro, the daughter of the current president, Raúl Castro, has led the charge on legislative and societal changes that have given rise to an increasingly visible and empowered community. In the process, she has carved out a rare space for civil society in an authoritarian country where grass-roots movements rarely succeed. Some Western diplomats in Havana have seen the progress on gay rights as a potential blueprint for expansion of other personal freedoms in one of the most oppressed societies on earth.

Norway and Belgium have financially supported Ms. Castro’s organization, the National Center for Sexual Education, offering a test of the merits of supporting certain policies of a government that the United States and European capitals have largely shunned because of its bleak human rights record. As the Obama administration begins carrying out its new Cuba policy, it should draw lessons from the impact others have had by engaging.

“It’s fine to criticize, but you also have to acknowledge that they’ve done good,” said John Petter Opdahl, Norway’s ambassador to Cuba, in a recent interview. Mr. Opdahl, who is gay, said his government gave Ms. Castro’s organization $230,000 over the last two years. “She has taken off a lot of the stigma for most people in the country, and she has made life so much better for so many gay people, not only in Havana but in the provinces.”

Fidel Castro’s government ostracized sexual minorities during the 1960s and 1970s, sending some people to labor camps. The brutal treatment of gay men was poignantly chronicled by the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who was jailed in 1974 for literary works the authorities deemed an “ideological deviation.” His autobiography, “Before Night Falls,” a critically acclaimed book that was made into a movie, is perhaps the most authoritative testimony of a particularly dark chapter of Cuban history.

Ms. Castro said she and her mother, Vilma Espín, for years quietly pressed the Castro brothers to soften their attitude toward sexual minorities. A decade ago, Cuba’s gay community was no longer as persecuted, but it nonetheless operated in the shadows. Ms. Castro, a member of Cuba’s National Assembly, opted to take on the issue.

After the 2007 march, Ms. Castro, who is straight, began a public campaign to promote tolerance. She persuaded the government in recent years to offer state-paid gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatment for transgender people. Last year, when the Assembly passed a labor code that protected gays and lesbians — but not transgender people — from discrimination in the workplace, Ms. Castro became the first lawmaker in Cuban history to cast a dissenting vote in protest. Her ultimate goal, she said, was codifying full equality under the law.

Gay Cubans say that discrimination remains a problem, particularly outside big cities. Still, last year, a woman in Caribién, a municipality east of Havana, became the country’s first transgender elected official. At the urging of Ms. Castro and gay bloggers, in 2010 Cuba began voting in favor of resolutions supporting gay rights at the United Nations, breaking ranks with allies in Africa and the Caribbean.

While widely admired, Ms. Castro and her state-run organization are not without critics in Cuba’s gay community. In 2011, Yasmín Portales Machado, a gay rights activist, decided to start a new group called Proyecto Arco Iris, or Rainbow, feeling it was necessary to have a platform for other voices and ideas.In 2012, on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Arco Iris convened a public kissing meet-up to promote diversity and equality. Hours before it began, a security official called Ms. Machado. Next time, he asked, please pick a venue in a part of Havana that isn’t close to sensitive government buildings. The kissing event was a success. The call “was a gay-friendly gesture from state security,” she said, laughing.

The Obama administration has spent millions of dollars promoting gay rights around the world and has made the issue a diplomatic priority. In the Dominican Republic, Washington took a bold stance last year when officials appeared unwilling to accept Wally Brewster, the openly gay entrepreneur President Obama nominated as ambassador. The State Department warned Santo Domingo that if it turned Mr. Brewster down, the country would find itself without an American envoy for a long time.

When Dominican officials acquiesced, they asked that Mr. Brewster be discreet about his sexual orientation. American officials responded that he, like all ambassadors in the region, would be expected to champion gay rights. To make the point, the State Department released a video of Mr. Brewster and his partner expressing their enthusiasm for the new job.

By contrast, American officials have had few opportunities to support Cuba’s gay rights evolution and have been conflicted on how to handle Ms. Castro. When the Philadelphia-based Equality Forum nominated her for an award last year, American officials initially said they would not give her a visa. After the group protested, they relented.

Ms. Machado said most gay rights activists on the island have not accepted support from Washington because its policy toward Cuba was predicated on regime change. “While the United States is the enemy of our state, we can’t work with them,” she said recently in an interview in Havana. “Any support you receive makes you a traitor.”

That entrenched view has stymied American efforts to promote things such as freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. President Obama’s changed policy will make engagement with Americans more palatable.


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5) Police Killed Her Son; Afterward, Louisville Evolved
By Dan Barry

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Well before dawn on these December days, a black woman in a food-service uniform leaves the small house she shares with her sister in the west end of this city. The Christmas wreath on the door she closes behind her hangs on the inside, to keep it from being stolen.

This is Shari Rudolph, 53, Louisville born and raised. She catches the 5:13 bus to South 18th Street and West Broadway, near a pawnshop and within sight of the gigantic Old Forester bourbon bottle looming over a distillery. Then another bus takes her to another long day of selling food at gun shows, cheerleading competitions and R.V. conventions.

But whenever a police officer working security gets in line, Ms. Rudolph busies herself so that another colleague provides service. Fifteen years ago, two police officers shot and killed her troubled son, who was 18 and unarmed, and she cannot take the order.

“They don’t say nothing to me,” she said, matter-of-fact. “And I don’t say nothing to them.”The latest fault line of America’s racial divide is Ferguson, Mo., where the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer set off sometimes violent summer protests that reignited last month when a grand jury did not indict the officer. But many cities have had their Ferguson moment, have had a Michael Brown killed by the police under contested circumstances, leading to grief, rage, protests, calls for a national conversation — and then what?Louisville, 270 miles east of Ferguson, had its fraught Michael Brown moment, or moments, when several young black men died in police shootings from 1999 to 2004. Interactions between the police and black residents have improved since then, people here say, but remain a work in progress.

“Leery” is how Ricky L. Jones, the chairman of the Pan-African studies department at the University of Louisville, described it. “Louisville has gone through a period of calm,” Dr. Jones said, “which is good in a lot of ways, but with calm, folks tend to get a bit complacent.”

“People forget,” he said.

Still, certain moments linger longer in Louisville’s collective consciousness, among them the 1999 shooting of Desmond Rudolph, the son of this woman serving fast food to cheerleader moms and gun enthusiasts.

The young man came from a profoundly unsettled family, beginning with his mother, who said she had spent more than a decade in prison for an array of crimes. Early on, Ms. Rudolph said, her Desmond exhibited severe behavioral problems, including a penchant for stealing cars.

When the police came to his grandmother’s front door one day, he went out the back — only to get stuck in a nearby alley in a stolen Chevy Blazer. As he revved the engine to rock the vehicle free, two white police officers fired 22 bullets in what they said was self-defense. At least nine hit their target.

“I used to go down to the impound lot and just stand at the fence and look at the truck,” Ms. Rudolph said. So many times, she added, that she watched weeds grow taller than the vehicle.

A grand jury chose not to indict the officers, while the city’s public safety director determined that the shooting could have been avoided had the police followed protocol. But the most explosive moment came when the police chief included the two officers among several awarded medals for “exceptional” valor at a police banquet in 2000.

The memory still irks Dr. Jones. “Let us reward the hunters now with medals for their kills,” he said. “That we saw as incredibly disrespectful.”

Sadiqa Reynolds, a black lawyer who represented many young black men at the time, agreed, saying, “It felt like a spit in the eye.”

“We felt that maybe we weren’t valued,” Ms. Reynolds said. “It’s really some of the same of what people are feeling now in the country — which leads to protest, when you don’t feel like you have a voice.”

Protests and protests within protests ensued. After the mayor fired the police chief, several district commanders stepped down from their posts and hundreds of officers rallied outside City Hall. The rate of misdemeanor arrests dropped precipitously, suggestive of a sudden “blue flu.”

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. arrived to lead about 2,000 people in a protest march that began at Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church. But several activists — lawyers and college professors among them, including Dr. Jones — challenged clergy leaders inside the church by standing with hands raised in disapproval.

Before the microphone was snatched from him, Dr. Jones argued that Mr. Jackson would be gone by that evening, and that most of the local black ministers were too conservative and not the true organizers of this Louisville movement against police brutality.

“The funny thing was they eventually called the cops on us,” he said.

Eventually, several community groups harnessed their energies, among them Citizens Against Police Abuse, the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the Justice Resource Center. And some things changed as a result.

Most significant, the city received its first African-American police chief, Robert C. White, in 2003, just as the Louisville and Jefferson County governments were consolidating to create a population of about 750,000. In addition to merging the two police agencies, Chief White was expected to improve relations with the city’s black residents — and he largely succeeded, before leaving to become Denver’s police chief in 2011.

Ms. Reynolds said Chief White had done a “phenomenal job” of building bridges — in part, she said, “by simply coming out of his office and saying: ‘Listen, I understand. I know what it feels like. And here’s the law, here are the facts.’ ”

“I mean, half the battle is just communicating,” she said.

Ms. Reynolds is an example of a continuing effort to improve communications. Today, she is the “chief for community building” for Mayor Greg Fischer, working to give voice to those who might not have had one in the past. “We have come far, but we have far to go,” she said. “I don’t think anybody in Louisville needs to be celebrating as if they have crossed some finish line.”

For one thing, she said, the city has to work harder to recruit minority officers. (Of the 1,217 sworn members of the Louisville Metro Police Department, 1,039 are white.)

K. A. Owens, a veteran community organizer, said that while the police were not perceived with as much distrust now, they remained part of the “criminal-industrial complex” that cycles young black men in and out of prison, often for nonviolent drug offenses. “The Police Department is not the only perpetrator against the black community,” he said.

The Louisville department today strives for transparency, according to its spokesman, Sgt. Phil Russell. It provides daily reports to the news media, operates a citizens’ academy to explain police procedures and has police-involved shootings and fatal interactions reviewed by an advisory “police accountability” board that critics say is toothless and ineffective.

But Sergeant Russell said rhetoric could sometimes overtake fact. In 2013, he said, the Louisville police had 572,000 interactions with the public, among them 33,000 arrests, 600 cases of resisting arrest, more than 200 assaults on police officers — and two police-involved shootings.

“I don’t want young kids to be fearful of the police,” he said. “I want young teens to want to pursue a police career. But my African-American friends in the department say that being a police officer is not seen as an honorable profession. That’s something we’re going to have to look at.”

Ms. Rudolph, the mother of Desmond Rudolph, seemed to agree. She mentioned in passing that a nephew was training to become a police officer, and then crinkled her weary face in disgust.

Sitting in her shotgun house after another long day, that Christmas wreath hanging securely behind her, she talked in flat tones of her difficult life since the shooting. The return to prison. The $200,000 settlement from the city that she saw little of. The second son shot dead by a third son in a botched holdup. The flood that ruined all her family photos.

A hardness infused her every word. Until she recalled seeing her dying son in the hospital all those years ago, his body transformed by bullets, and then her sobs made a mother’s distant loss fresh again.




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6) Raúl Castro Thanks U.S., but Reaffirms Communist Rule in Cuba
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/world/americas/castro-thanks-us-but-affirms-cubas-communist-rule.html?ref=world

HAVANA — President Raúl Castro declared victory for the Cuban Revolution on Saturday in a wide-ranging speech, thanking President Obama for “a new chapter” while also reaffirming that restored relations with the United States did not mean the end of Communist rule in Cuba.

In a televised speech before Parliament and a group of favored guests — including Elián González, the center of a tug of war in 2000 between Cuban exiles and Havana, and the three men convicted of spying in the United States who were released as part of the historic agreement announced on Wednesday — Mr. Castro alternated between conciliatory and combative statements directed at the United States.

He stoked the flames of Cuban nationalism, declaring near the end of his statement, “We won the war.” But he also praised Mr. Obama for starting the biggest change in United States-Cuba policy in more than 50 years.

“The Cuban people are grateful,” he said, for Mr. Obama’s decision “to remove the obstacles to our relations.”

He added that all issues and disputes between Cuba and the United States would be on the table in coming discussions about re-establishing formal diplomatic ties between the two countries. But he offered no immediate concessions to demands for improvement in Cuba’s human rights record.

As he has done since he took over for his ailing brother Fidel in 2006, Mr. Castro prioritized economics. He acknowledged that Cuban state workers needed better salaries and said Cuba would accelerate economic changes in the coming year, including an end to its dual-currency system.

But he said the changes needed to be gradual to create a system of “prosperous and sustainable communism.”

Mr. Castro confirmed that he would travel to Panama in April for the Summit of the Americas, which Mr. Obama is also set to attend. A White House official said Saturday that there were no current plans for the two presidents to meet there.

Mr. Castro, wearing a traditional white shirt called a guayabera and only occasionally gesturing for emphasis, referred repeatedly to Mr. Obama, praising him personally while also emphasizing that with the process of real diplomacy just beginning, “the only way to advance is with mutual respect.”

He insisted, as he and Fidel Castro have for years, that the United States not meddle in the sovereign affairs of the Cuban state.

Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a Cuban diplomat and educator, said Mr. Castro’s strong wording, in a speech that is an annual event and rallying point, seemed to be mostly directed at his Communist Party loyalists.

“It’s domestic politics,” Dr. Alzugaray said.

He noted that, just as Mr. Obama must contend with Cuban-American lawmakers who are angry about the deal, Mr. Castro faces opposition from more conservative party members who recall that Cuba’s previous stance, established in the 1960s, was to hold off resuming relations until the United States lifted its trade embargo completely.

“It’s Raúl reassuring certain people,” Dr. Alzugaray said, adding that in both Cuba and the United States, the embryonic era of friendliness would need to be protected from those resisting reconciliation of any kind. “Obama more than Raúl has initiated the first step, but other steps are needed.”

In Miami on Saturday, several hundred people gathered for a rally where President Obama was denounced as a traitor and a liar.

Surrounded by flapping Cuban flags in the hot afternoon sun in José Martí Park — named after a hero of Cuban independence, protesters excoriated the president in Spanish for his overture to the Cuban government, a move that they insist will only cement the Castros’ hold on power.

“The government in Cuba will still repress and throw into jail anyone who opposes the Castro regime,” said Blanca Gonzalez, 65, who moved to the United States 13 years ago. Her son Normando Hernandez spent seven years in a Cuban prison, she said, for “practicing independent journalism”; he was freed in 2011.

“All Obama is doing is throwing a lifeline to the Castros so that they can continue crushing the people of Cuba,” said Roberto Delgado Ramos,78, who said he was arrested twice, in 1960 and 1964, for “counterrevolutionary activities” and served a total of 12 years in prison. “The Castros are the ones who need to pay for the blood that they have spilled.”


Amy Chozick contributed reporting from Honolulu, and Nick Madigan from Miami.
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7) Fuel Rods Are Removed From Damaged Fukushima Reactor
By

TOKYO — The cleanup of Japan’s devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant crossed an important milestone on Saturday when the plant’s operator announced it had safely removed the radioactive fuel from the most vulnerable of the four heavily damaged reactor buildings.

The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, removed the last remaining fuel rods from the ruined No. 4 reactor building, putting the rods inside a large white container for transportation to another, undamaged storage pool elsewhere on the plant’s grounds. The company, known as Tepco, had put a high priority on removing the No. 4 unit’s some 1,500 fuel rods because they sat in a largely unprotected storage pool on an upper floor of the building, which had been gutted by a powerful hydrogen explosion during the March 2011 accident.This had led to fears of additional releases of radioactive material if the pool was damaged further, such as by an earthquake. By succeeding in the technically difficult task of extracting those rods, Tepco eliminated one of the plant’s most worrisome vulnerabilities. This is also the first time that the fuel has been removed from one of the four wrecked reactor buildings.

It took almost four years to reach this goal, as the cleanup has been plagued by mishaps and a so far unstoppable flow of groundwater that has flooded the basements of the crippled reactor buildings. The aging Fukushima Daiichi plant suffered a triple meltdown after a huge earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11, 2011, knocking out vital cooling systems.

Tepco still faces the far more challenging task of removing the ruined fuel cores from the three reactors that melted down in the accident. These reactors were so damaged — and their levels of radioactivity remain so high — that removing their fuel is expected to take decades. Some experts have said it may not be possible at all, and have called instead for simply encasing those reactors in a sarcophagus of thick concrete.

The fuel cores from those three reactors, Nos. 1-3, are believed to have melted like wax as the uncooled reactors overheated, forming lumps on the bottom of the reactor vessels. Scientists have warned that the hot, molten uranium may have even melted through the metal containment vessels, possibly reaching the floor of the reactor buildings or even the earth beneath.

However, it was the storage pool at the No. 4 unit, and particularly its highly radioactive spent fuel rods, that had caused the most intense concern in the first weeks after the accident. While the No. 4 reactor itself had been safely shut down when the accident happened, hydrogen released by the meltdowns at the other reactors caused an enormous explosion that blew off the reactor building’s roof and walls, leaving its storage pool exposed to the air.

Japanese and American nuclear officials at first worried that the pool may have been cracked in the explosion, but this proved not to be the case. Still, falling water levels in the storage pool caused anxiety that the fuel rods within could be exposed to the atmosphere. This would have caused a far larger release of radioactive materials than what occurred during the actual accident, which spewed contamination across a wide swath of northern Japan.


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8) In a Year, Egypt Detained 10,000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAIRO — Egyptian security forces have detained nearly 10,000 people suspected of being militants, rioters and others wanted in violent attacks over the past 12 months in a crackdown that a senior Interior Ministry official said Saturday was aimed at those trying to curtail Egypt’s development.The official, Maj. Gen. Abdel-Fattah Osman, an aide to the interior minister, spoke to the official news agency MENA in an interview published Saturday, giving a rare accounting of the crackdown.

General Osman said security forces had foiled about 400 terrorist attacks since January. He said the security forces had also arrested 460 suspected members of terrorist cells, 6,400 rioters, 50 wanted militants and about 2,600 people accused of attacking police stations.

Thousands of other people were detained from July to December last year during the political turmoil after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi.


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9) Chanting ‘Black Lives Matter,’ Protesters Shut Down Part of Mall of America
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — A mass of demonstrators chanting “Black lives matter” converged in the Mall of America rotunda on Saturday as part of a protest against police brutality that caused at least part of the mall to shut down on a busy day for holiday shopping.

The group Black Lives Matter Minneapolis had more than 3,000 people confirm on Facebook that they would attend. Official crowd estimates were not immediately available, but pictures posted to social media by local news organizations showed the rotunda was full. The organizer of the demonstration, Mica Grimm, estimated that about 3,000 people participated.

The Mall of America increased security, and certain parts of the mall were closed for some time. Signs were posted at some entrances advising shoppers that the east side of the mall was on lockdown.

There were no official reports on arrests, but Ms. Grimm said she knew of at least five people who had been arrested.About 30 minutes after the protest began, a final warning to disperse was given, and police officers in riot gear began clearing the rotunda, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. A large group of protesters began leaving the mall, but others moved to a shopping area and occupied two levels. A small “die-in” was staged in front of several stores.

About an hour later, organizers sent out a group text message advising those who were still inside the mall to leave. Live video from KSTP-TV showed police officers in riot gear marching through the mall’s skyway, ushering protesters outside.

The rally was part of nationwide protests over the failure to indict or charge police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and in New York.

During Saturday’s rally, protesters in the mall’s rotunda shouted “While you’re on your shopping spree, black people cannot breathe” — a reference to the chokehold a New York City police officer placed on Eric Garner, who died. As they were dispersing, they walked down the hall with their arms raised, shouting “Hands up, don’t shoot!”

Mall representatives had said that a demonstration would violate policy, and protesters could be removed, arrested and banned.

“Mall of America is a commercial retail and entertainment center. We respect the right to free speech, but Mall of America is private property and not a forum for protests, demonstrations or public debates,” the mall’s management said days before the protest.

Ms. Grimm said that organizers believed the protest was a success.

“Our goal is to bring more attention to these issues — and what just happened, nobody can ignore,” she said.


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10)  When Officers Die and Protests Get the Blame
By



In the days after Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s killings of two New York Police Department officers and the shooting of a Baltimore woman, some in positions of authority have linked the crimes to protests against police violence. But others believe this linkage misunderstands both Mr. Brinsley and the protests — and that such misunderstanding could have serious consequences.

Pat Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, a police union, spoke on Saturday of “those that incited violence on the street, under the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day,” according to Azi Paybarah of Capital New York. Mr. Lynch also said “there’s blood on many hands tonight” and “that blood on the hands, starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”

While Rudy Giuliani said on “Fox News Sunday” that “it goes too far to blame the mayor for the murder,” he also said “the mayor did not properly police the protests.” He added: “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence — a lot of them lead to violence — all of them lead to a conclusion: The police are bad, the police are racist.” And on the “Today” show on Monday, the New York City police commissioner, William J. Bratton, said, “It is quite apparent, quite obvious, that the targeting of these two police officers was a direct spinoff of this issue of these demonstrations.”

But, writes Jamelle Bouie at Slate, “despite what these police organizations and their allies allege, there isn’t an anti-police movement in this country, or at least, none of any significance. The people demonstrating for Eric Garner and Michael Brown aren’t against police, they are for better policing. They want departments to treat their communities with respect, and they want accountability for officers who kill their neighbors without justification.”

And at The Guardian, Steven W. Thrasher writes that those protesting in the wake of the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner “have been finding novel and peaceful forms of expression to resist oppression” and “have been protesting in reaction to police violence, not causing it.”

The effort to connect Mr. Brinsley’s crimes to larger public protests may be part of a larger phenomenon. “There is a history,” the sociology and psychiatry professor Jonathan Metzl told Op-Talk, “in the aftermath of senseless public crimes, to tell larger public stories that are linked to the politics of race.” In a recent paper on gun violence and mental illness (also discussed at Op-Talk last week), Dr. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish write that in the 1960s and ’70s, “when the potential assailants of a crime were Black, U.S. psychiatric and popular culture frequently blamed ‘Black culture’ or Black activist politics — not individual, disordered brains — for the threats such men were imagined to pose.”

When crimes are committed by white shooters, Dr. Metzl told Op-Talk, “there is a prevailing cultural narrative that tries to localize the question of what caused this or what is to blame to the pathologies of an individual white brain.” After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, “there was a push to talk about Adam Lanza’s brain and his DNA, and talk about it in terms of individual mental illness.” But in the case of a black shooter, some in America have shown a tendency toward “defining black crime more broadly in terms of black culture,” a tendency he sees in recent rhetoric “that links this individual and by all accounts senseless crime, and a crime that wasn’t supported by any of the main political protest movements, to those very protest movements.”

Mr. Brinsley did apparently make Instagram posts referring to Michael Brown and Eric Garner. However, said Dr. Metzl, “there is often some sort of political connection to senseless crimes, at least in the narratives of the people who try to justify their senseless acts.”

“People who might be at risk or imbalanced in some way certainly coopt these messages and take them on as their own personal rhetoric to commit violence,” he explained. “But to me it’s a mistake to take that connection literally and to say that that is a reflection of the protest movement itself, when clearly what’s happening is a very pathological use of that language for a very different set of means and ends.”

And, he said, making such a connection might make it harder for Americans to take the message of the protests to heart.

“We never see white culture pathologized in the aftermath of senseless killings by white shooters,” he added in an email — “instead we often hear arguments for the affirmation of gun rights.”

Writing at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates draws another distinction, between reactions to the killings of police officers and reactions to killings of black Americans by police:

“The killings of Officers Liu and Ramos prompt national comment. The killings of black civilians do not. When it is convenient to award qualitative value to murder, we do so. When it isn’t, we do not.”

Nazgol Ghandnoosh, a research analyst for the Sentencing Project and the author of a report on Americans’ ideas about race and crime, told Op-Talk that even if Mr. Brinsley was motivated by political conviction and not by mental illness (Kim Barker and Al Baker of The Times cite reports that he had attempted suicide and received psychiatric care), “he acted on his own. The hundreds of thousands of people that have been out on the streets have been very explicit that they are nonviolent people, that they are trying to achieve reforms through nonviolent means. So there could be an underlying shared concern, but people are following very different paths.”

And, she argues, failing to listen to protesters may make it harder, not easier, for police to do their jobs. “We know from accounts from police officers themselves and from prosecutors,” she said, that “they are not able to do the work that they need to do effectively when they don’t have trust and cooperation from the communities that they’re serving.” Lack of trust in police may make it harder to convict criminals, she said, because police are not seen as credible witnesses. And when police have a bad relationship with the communities in which they work, “the happiness and the satisfaction that they have in their own work and the comfort that they have in doing it” can suffer — she cited claims that the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics actually harmed officer morale.

An unwillingness to hear criticism from the community, she said, “doesn’t serve public interest, and it doesn’t serve the interests of the front-line officers and correctional workers that are having to do this work, that are finding it harder to do the work that they need to get done.”


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11) Argentina: Court Sides With Orangutan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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12) Former Milwaukee Police Officer Won’t Be Charged in Death of Black Man in Park
By

MILWAUKEE — In a case that echoed growing tension over race and policing in other cities, a former Milwaukee police officer who fatally shot an African-American man this year will not face criminal charges, a prosecutor announced on Monday.

Nearly eight months after the death of Dontre D. Hamilton, Milwaukee County’s district attorney concluded that the officer, Christopher Manney, who is white, was defending himself when he shot and killed Mr. Hamilton in April. Witnesses said Mr. Hamilton had grabbed the officer’s baton during an encounter in a downtown park and hit the officer with it or was attempting to, the prosecutor found. Officer Manney fired at least 13, perhaps 14 times.“This was a tragic incident for the Hamilton family and for the community,” John T. Chisholm, the district attorney, wrote in a 25-page presentation, which was accompanied by lengthy appendices, released on Monday morning. “But, based on all the evidence and analysis presented in this report, I come to the conclusion that Officer Manney’s use of force in this incident was justified self-defense and that defense cannot be reasonably overcome to establish a basis to charge Officer Manney with a crime.”

In this city, where the case had led to growing protests in recent weeks even before the decision was announced, members of Mr. Hamilton’s family said they were deeply disappointed and seeking a federal investigation. The United States attorney’s office for Eastern District of Wisconsin said Monday that the Justice Department would review the case.

Law enforcement officials, bracing for more demonstrations after one that blocked an Interstate highway in the Milwaukee area over the weekend, got an executive order from Gov. Scott Walker for the Wisconsin National Guard to stand by, and local leaders called for calm.

“It is my hope that these protests, if they continue — and I anticipate that they will continue — remain peaceful,” Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, said at a news conference. Mr. Barrett also noted the shooting deaths of two police officers in New York over the weekend, adding: “We cannot allow all police officers in this nation, all police officers in this city, to be demonized. This is the time for peace.”

For months, supporters of Mr. Hamilton had called for charges against Mr. Manney, who was fired from the city police force after the shooting, and anger over the case gained momentum after the mounting protests that followed the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York City. In a largely white state, 40 percent of Milwaukee’s nearly 600,000 residents are black, and some here have called for a more diversified police force and changes in the way police use of force is overseen. About 35 percent of the Milwaukee’s force of 1,900 are minorities, officials said.

The case in Milwaukee “along with the decisions in Ferguson and in New York City have caused many in our society across racial lines to question our system of justice,” James H. Hall Jr., president of the Milwaukee N.A.A.C.P., said on Monday.

Mr. Hamilton’s death was investigated by an outside agency, the Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation, as required by a recently enacted state law that, in essence, bars a police department from investigating itself in such cases. The prosecutor also sought guidance from a lieutenant with the Greenfield Police Department as well as Emanuel Kapelsohn, of the Peregrine Corporation, whom he described as a leading national expert in use-of-force reviews. Mr. Kapelsohn submitted his report last week, Mr. Chisholm said.

The shooting occurred on the afternoon of April 30 after the police received calls from workers at a coffee kiosk in Red Arrow Park downtown about a man sleeping nearby on the ground. A pair of officers twice answered the calls, and determined, according to the prosecutor’s report, that the man, Mr. Hamilton, was not disturbing anyone.

A short time later, Officer Manney, who had apparently received a voice mail message about the situation, went to the park. After he approached Mr. Hamilton, asked him to stand and began a “pat-down frisk” of Mr. Hamilton, there was a struggle. The officer said that Mr. Hamilton had lunged and tried to hit him, and that they then struggled over the officer’s wooden baton.

“The use of deadly force against Dontre Hamilton was not a choice P.O. Manney made voluntarily, but was instead a defensive action forced upon him by Dontre Hamilton’s deadly attack with a police baton,” Mr. Chisholm wrote, quoting from Mr. Kapelsohn’s findings.

Numerous witnesses were there, and some said they had seen Mr. Hamilton trying to hit the officer with the baton.

Mr. Chisholm said it might have taken just three or four seconds to fire as many as 14 shots. “The wound locations and wound paths through the deceased’s body are consistent with shots fired at an attacker who is first advancing toward the officer, then turning and falling.” Mr. Chisholm wrote, quoting Mr. Kapelsohn’s analysis.

Officer Manney was fired from the Police Department on Oct. 15 after the Milwaukee police chief, Edward Flynn, announced a review of the April confrontation had been completed. The officer was not fired for firing his weapon, but for what the chief described as an “out-of-policy pat down” of Mr. Hamilton that Chief Flynn said “was not based on individualized reasonable suspicion but on an assumption of his mental state and housing status.”

In an interview, Chief Flynn said a key issue “lost in an attempt to make it fit into the national narrative was that this incident was about handling a person in mental health crisis and either doing it the right way or the wrong way.”

An attorney for the Hamilton family said Mr. Hamilton, who was 31, had a diagnosed mental illness but was not homeless and had regular contact with his family. “As a family we deserve the truth,” Mr. Hamilton’s brother Nate said in an interview. “They’re telling us this report is everything, but there’s way more information we don’t have.”




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13) After Shootings, Police Union Chief Deepens Rift With de Blasio
By and

With his slicked-back hair, Queens accent and entourage of mostly white, male union lieutenants, Patrick J. Lynch moves through New York as the rough-around-the-edges, unapologetic labor leader for more than 22,000 street officers.

His public persona — greeting officers on the street and delivering speeches with a cadence that reaches for the Kennedyesque — ranks him among the most recognizable police officers in the city.

But behind the raffish facade is a shrewd tactician who, according to his allies and those who have faced off against him, has proved adept at negotiating deals when it fits his interests, and tangling with mayoral administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, when it has not. It has kept him at the helm of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association for 15 years, representing the bulk of the nation’s largest police force even as it bears less and less resemblance to his Irish Catholic roots.

His latest battle, though, far eclipses anything before.Amid the furious national debate over race and policing, his pugilistic defense of police officers and his vitriolic critiques of Mayor Bill de Blasio have been seen across the country in the days since two police officers were killed in Brooklyn.

“For years, Pat was not the only voice of support for police,” said Al O’Leary, the union’s spokesman. “And now he is because there is no support for the police in City Hall.”

Mr. Lynch, 51, declined requests for an interview and has lowered his profile since Saturday, when the officers were killed. But his last words that night still echo, the most provocative public statements in a career of fiery rhetoric.

“There is blood on many hands, from those that incited violence under the guise of protest to try to tear down what police officers did every day,” Mr. Lynch said at the hospital where the mortally wounded officers had been taken. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.”

In laying the blame for the killings on the doorstep of a first-term liberal mayor, he also strained his relationship with William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, who had sought to bring the union chief back into the department’s embrace after years of estrangement.

The broadside by Mr. Lynch prompted former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a law-and-order Republican, to come to the defense of the mayor, a Democrat. “The blood is not on his hands,” Mr. Giuliani said on Sunday in a radio interview.

Even before the fatal shootings, Mr. Lynch had been waging an increasingly pointed campaign against Mr. de Blasio over the mayor’s response to the wave of demonstrations that followed a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner.

Mr. Lynch urged officers to bar the mayor from their own funerals if they died in the line of duty. The effort, while publicly backed by only a tiny fraction, signaled the depths of discontent among the rank and file.

But Mr. Lynch’s invective in recent days deepened the rift between the police and the de Blasio administration, which had made repairing relations between officers and the city’s minority communities a priority.

Even before the hospital diatribe, Mr. Bratton had said that Mr. Lynch had gone “too far.”

How widely shared that sentiment is and whether Mr. Lynch will win another term as union president next year are questions likely to animate discussions in the coming months. No formidable opponents have emerged, said John F. Driscoll, a retired captain who once led the Captain’s Endowment Association and remains in contact with many officers.

Mr. Driscoll said that for some, though, it might simply be a time for a new voice.

His members have been working without a contract since June 2010; negotiations broke down with the city and are headed to arbitration.

Both the mayor and police commissioner have suggested Mr. Lynch’s views do not reflect those of all officers.

Mr. Lynch entered the union’s leadership ranks in the early 1990s during a period of retrenchment for the union. He began as an officer in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a sergeant suggested he should put up his name for a union position, saying “Hey, Lynch, you’ve got a big mouth, why don’t you run?”

In 1999, he became the youngest president in the union’s history.

By 2004, he was flexing his organizing muscle during contract negotiations, harrying Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outside public events with large groups of off-duty officers whose chants and comments edged close enough to threats to draw the attention of the Police Department itself, which sent a video team to record the protests.

The union’s actions exposed a widening divide between Mr. Lynch and Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner at the time. Earlier that year an officer fatally shot an unarmed black man, Timothy Stansbury, on the roof of a Brooklyn housing project. Almost immediately, Mr. Kelly said the shooting appeared to be unjustified.

It might as well have been a declaration of war to Mr. Lynch, who lashed out. But that response did not sit with Mr. Kelly, a former Marine with little tolerance for dissent.

Mr. Lynch’s stout defense of officers is not new. He has done so when there is ample evidence of police misconduct — standing by the officers who killed Amadou Diallo in 1999 or defending one who shoved a bicyclist to the ground during a protest ride in 2008.

His face was so familiar to people in government that sensitive contract negotiations during the Bloomberg administration were held far from in City Hall.

“When Pat Lynch walks into the mayor’s side of City Hall, it gets noticed,” said Edward Skyler, a former deputy mayor, who chose more private spaces like Gracie Mansion or a Gramercy coffee shop for contract discussions.

Mr. Lynch earns about $175,000 a year, roughly $76,000 from his job as an officer and $98,000 from the union, according to its most recent tax filing.

For much of the Bloomberg years, Mr. Kelly kept Mr. Lynch from most official activities at Police Headquarters.

That changed under Mr. Bratton, who invited Mr. Lynch and other union leaders to sit on the dais at official ceremonies, gave them office space inside Police Headquarters and consulted Mr. Lynch on officer morale, learning from him at the start of the year that it was “awful.”

Instead, morale sank further, even as his chief complaint by the end of the Bloomberg administration, that officers had to fulfill quotas for stop-and-frisk activity, became moot. This year, recorded stops are at their lowest levels in a decade.

And Mr. Lynch’s megaphone appeared to grow only louder, despite his return to the department’s fold.

Officers, who said in interviews they felt the de Blasio administration did not have their back, now are haunted by the killings of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, who were ambushed in their patrol car on Saturday afternoon in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Mr. Lynch, nearly always dressed in a suit in public, wore his patrol uniform to visit the memorial in Brooklyn accompanied by one of his sons, also in uniform.

Like a politician, he adapts his language to his audience, at times using words, like describing arrested suspects as “mutts,” that working-class officers can relate to.

But Mr. Lynch’s comments attacking the mayor come from a place of personal feeling, Mr. O’Leary, his spokesman, said. His youngest son is set to graduate from the Police Academy in January.

“It was gun and shield day the other day,” said one longtime associate of Mr. Lynch, describing the moment when cadets are given their police hardware. “And he was there.”



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14) White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier
By Carl Zimmer
DEC. 24, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/science/23andme-genetic-ethnicity-study.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white.

The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people “whose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.”

There was just one problem. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia’s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.

So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the “Pocahontas exception.” Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law.

People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.

In the United States, there is a long tradition of trying to draw sharp lines between ethnic groups, but our ancestry is a fluid and complex matter. In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people.

The researchers were able to trace variations in our genetic makeup from state to state, creating for the first time a sort of ancestry map.

“We use these terms — white, black, Indian, Latino — and they don’t really mean what we think they mean,” said Claudio Saunt, a historian at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study.

The data for the new study were collected by 23andMe, the consumer DNA-testing company. When customers have their genes analyzed, the company asks them if they’d like to make their results available for study by staff scientists.

Over time the company has built a database that not only includes DNA, but also such details as a participant’s birthplace and the ethnic group with which he or she identifies. (23andMe strips the data of any information that might breach the privacy of participants.)

The scientists also have been developing software that learns to recognize the origins of the short segments of DNA that make up our genomes. Recently they used their program to calculate what percentage of each subject’s genomes was inherited from European, African or Native American forebears.

“This year we saw that we were in a great position to do the analysis,” said Joanna L. Mountain, senior director of research at 23andMe.

On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.

Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African. The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.

These broad estimates masked wide variation among individuals. Based on their sample, the resarchers estimated that over six million European-Americans have some African ancestry. As many as five million have genomes that are at least 1 percent Native American in origin. One in five African-Americans, too, has Native American roots.

Dr. Mountain and her colleagues also looked at how ancestry might influence ethnic identification.

Most Americans with less than 28 percent African-American ancestry say they are white, the researchers found. Above that threshold, people tended to describe themselves as African-American.

Katarzyna Bryc, a 23andMe researcher and co-author of the new study, didn’t want to speculate about why people’s sense of ethnic identity pivots at that point.

“We can only take it so far as geneticists,” she said.

The scientists also linked geographical patterns to their subjects’ ancestries. Latinos in the Southwest had high levels of Native American DNA, they found, while Latinos in the Southeast had high levels of African DNA.

The genes of African-Americans varied strikingly from state to state. In Oklahoma, the researchers estimated, 14 percent of African-Americans have genomes that are at least 2 percent Native American. This high percentage is probably due to the unique history of the state.

Some Native American tribes in the South, such as the Cherokee and Choctaw, kept African slaves. When they were expelled to Oklahoma in the 1830s, they brought the slaves with them. In some tribes, Native Americans and African slaves intermarried, and their descendants continue to live in Oklahoma today.

Dr. Saunt was fascinated in particular by the genetic findings among people in South Carolina. Dr. Mountain and her colleagues estimated that 13.3 percent of European-Americans in South Carolina have genes that are at least 1 percent African in origin.

But the researchers also found that African-Americans in South Carolina have among the lowest percentages of European DNA of any African-American population in the United States.

At one point, Dr. Saunt noted, South Carolina had more slaves than any other state. But there was also a large population of freed slaves in Charleston permitted to interact with whites.

“We know lots of planters had mistresses in Charleston, and they obviously had children together,” said Dr. Saunt. “So what happened to those children? Some remained in the African-American community, and some moved into the white community when they were able to.”

Jeffrey C. Long, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who was not involved in the study, cautioned that the research was not based on a random sample of Americans. Instead, Dr. Mountain and her colleagues studied only people who were curious enough about their DNA to pay for a test.

“Perhaps people who have mixed ancestry are more interested in their ancestry than people who don’t think they have mixed ancestry,” Dr. Long said.

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University and a co-author on the new study, acknowledged this was a reasonable concern. “It’s classic survey bias,” he said. But Dr. Reich also noted that the new results were consistent with smaller studies done in the past.

As genetic databases grow, Dr. Reich predicted it would be possible to get even more detailed insights into American history. DNA may be able to illuminate the movements of people across the United States, such as the Great Migration that took African-Americans from the South to Chicago.

“We’re in striking distance of that now,” Dr. Reich said.





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15) A Historic 50-Mile Walk, Nearly 50 Years Later
In ‘Selma,’ King Is Just One of the Heroes NYT Critics' Pick
By


On the afternoon of March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and members of a Dallas County posse, armed with clubs, cattle prods and tear gas, attacked civil rights demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. The marchers had planned to walk the 50 miles to Montgomery, the state capital, as part of a long-building protest against the denial of basic voting rights to Southern blacks. The procession would have crossed Lowndes County, where not a single African-American voter had been registered in more than 60 years. Efforts to change this had been met with bureaucratic obstruction, intimidation and lethal brutality, including the killing, a week earlier, of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old laborer and protester, by a state trooper.A few days later, a second march, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., turned back rather than risk further violence. By the time the third, ultimately successful effort left Selma on March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson, pushed by Dr. King and televised images of official brutality as well as by his own political and moral instincts, had introduced the Voting Rights Act in a nationally televised address to Congress.

The above can serve as a partial plot summary of “Selma,” Ava DuVernay’s bold and bracingly self-assured new movie about the march and the events, in Selma and elsewhere, leading up to it. History does not come with spoilers — or spoiler alerts — but it does have a habit of setting traps for ambitious filmmakers. The most basic is the lack of clear beginnings and ends. To tell the story of the American civil rights movement properly, a conscientious director would have to plot a course from at least 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived, to this week.

Narrowing the scope — “Selma” begins with Dr. King’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December 1964 and ends in Montgomery a little more than three months later — poses its own challenges. How do you capture the chaos, uncertainty and sheer crowdedness of events without sacrificing coherence? How do you suggest what happened before and after? How do you endow a relatively well-known episode from the recent past with the urgency of the present tense?

The answers are all up there on the screen. Ms. DuVernay, in her third feature (after “I Will Follow” and “Middle of Nowhere”) writes history with passionate clarity and blazing conviction. (The cinematographer, Bradford Young, captures its shadows and its glow.) Even if you think you know what’s coming, “Selma” hums with suspense and surprise. Packed with incident and overflowing with fascinating characters, it is a triumph of efficient, emphatic cinematic storytelling. And much more than that, of course: It would be hard to imagine a timelier, more necessary popular entertainment in the year of Ferguson, Mo., a reminder both of progress made and promises unkept. But such relevance is hardly automatic. A timid, pious or dishonest movie about the time-burnished glories of the civil rights era — the kind of soothing fable of awakened white conscience that Hollywood has too often favored — would not do anyone any good.

Instead, Ms. DuVernay, working from a screenplay credited to Paul Webb, has stripped away layers of fond memory and retroactively imposed harmony to touch the raw, volatile political reality of the mid-1960s — the courage and the cravenness, the idealism and the calculation, the visible and invisible divisions and rivalries. Dr. King, played by David Oyelowo with the requisite grace and dignity and also with streaks of humor, weariness and doubt, occupies a central place in “Selma,” but the film is less interested in affirming his greatness than in understanding its sources and limitations, and in restoring his human dimensions.

Dr. King’s heirs did not grant permission for his speeches to be quoted in “Selma,” and while this may be a blow to the film’s authenticity, Ms. DuVernay turns it into an advantage, a chance to see and hear him afresh. Mr. Oyelowo, a British actor of Nigerian background, has mastered the Southern inflections and preacherly cadences that have become part of the permanent soundtrack of our educational system, and the script offers credible paraphrases of his character’s unmatched eloquence. But this version of Dr. King is less an orator than an organizer. He is also, in his mid-30s, a man trying to navigate his public role, his private life and the expectations of his allies and friends.

Ms. DuVernay’s portrait is astonishingly rich and nuanced, and it is very much a group portrait. We see Dr. King at home in Atlanta with his wife, Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), confronting her worries about his safety and her suspicions of his infidelity. Those suspicions, handled with delicate candor, are fueled by the determination of J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker), the F.B.I. director, to destroy a leader he views as a “political and moral degenerate.”

Under constant surveillance — F.B.I. field reports typed onto the screen fill the audience in on his whereabouts — Dr. King travels a hectic circuit from pulpit to jail cell to the White House and back. There are many piquant moments of behind-the-scenes political theater in Washington and Montgomery: confrontations and colloquies between Dr. King and President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson); between the president and Gov. George C. Wallace (a gleeful Tim Roth); between Gov. Wallace and Al Lingo (Stephen Root), who led Alabama’s public safety department. But while “Selma” acknowledges the importance of men in power, its heart is with the activists on the ground in Selma.

To say that an extraordinary group of actors supports Mr. Oyelowo’s performance — Oprah Winfrey, Wendell Pierce, Tessa Thompson, Henry G. Sanders and many more — is to state the obvious and also, somehow, to get it backward. Dr. King worked in the service of the movement, not the other way around, and Mr. Oyelowo’s quiet, attentive, reflective presence upholds this democratic principle by illuminating the contributions of those around him. I have rarely seen a historical film that felt so populous and full of life, so alert to the tendrils of narrative that spread beyond the frame.

While entirely satisfying on its own, “Selma” seems to contain the seeds of at least a dozen other movies — a reminder of how fertile the civil rights era is and how poorly it has been explored by popular culture. Spike Lee and Denzel Washington gave us a fine Malcolm X (who shows up here briefly, played by Nigel Thatch), but how long will we have to wait for a biopic devoted to Bayard Rustin (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint) or Andrew Young (Andre Holland)? Or for a daring director to tackle the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose internal tensions and impatience with Dr. King surface here in arguments between James Forman (Trai Byers) and the future Congressman John Lewis (Stephan James)? Where is the premium-cable mini-series about Diane Nash (Ms. Thompson) and James Bevel (Common)? The Martin Luther King-Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) buddy movie? The “Law & Order” spinoff about the career of the Justice Department lawyer John Doar (Alessandro Nivola)? They are all here, in miniature, but “Selma” made me impatient for more.

Impatience was one of Dr. King’s great virtues: His “Letter From Birmingham Jail” was published as a pamphlet with the title “Why We Can’t Wait.” “Selma” takes up his history with its eyes very much on the future, reminding us that the voting-rights victory nearly 50 years ago was not inevitable and is not yet complete. The nonviolent fight against white supremacy required not only righteous vision but also strategic insight and tactical discipline. The ideology that would sanction the beating and killing of black Americans who dared to assert their citizenship has not vanished, though its methods, language and partisan affiliations may have changed since 1965.

“Selma” is not a manifesto, a battle cry or a history lesson. It’s a movie: warm, smart, generous and moving in two senses of the word. It will call forth tears of grief, anger, gratitude and hope. And like those pilgrims on the road to Montgomery, it does not rest.

“Selma” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Violence, bigotry, brief cigarette smoking.

Selma

Opens on Thursday

Directed by Ava DuVernay; written by Paul Webb; director of photography, Bradford Young; edited by Spencer Averick; music by Jason Moran; production design by Mark Friedberg; costumes by Ruth E. Carter; produced by Christian Colson, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Oprah Winfrey; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes.

WITH: David Oyelowo (the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), Tom Wilkinson (President Lyndon B. Johnson), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Fred Gray), Alessandro Nivola (John Doar), Carmen Ejogo (Coretta Scott King), Lorraine Toussaint (Amelia Boynton), Colman Domingo (Ralph Abernathy), Tim Roth (Gov. George C. Wallace), Oprah Winfrey (Annie Lee Cooper), Tessa Thompson (Diane Nash), Nigel Thatch (Malcolm X), (Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Bayard Rustin), Andre Holland (Andrew Young), Common (James Bevel), Trai Byers (James Forman) and Stephan James (Congressman John Lewis).


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16) Cautions Against Ferguson Comparisons After Officer Kills Black Teenager
Antonio Martin’s Death Is Investigated in Missouri
By and

A few miles from the St. Louis suburb where Michael Brown died in August, another black teenager was fatally shot by a police officer on Tuesday night, setting off a flurry of tense confrontations between protesters and the police on Wednesday.

The authorities in the region moved quickly to distinguish the shooting from Mr. Brown’s case and others, which have set off protests over police conduct and race around the nation. Officials from the St. Louis County Police Department, which is investigating the shooting, said the teenager, Antonio Martin, pointed a gun at the police officer, who is white, before being shot outside a gas station late Tuesday night in Berkeley, Mo. The officials said a handgun was found at the scene, and they released surveillance video of portions of the encounter.Theodore Hoskins, the mayor of Berkeley, a mostly black city of about 9,000, said that the city would also conduct its own investigation, but that from his initial review of the video recording, it appeared that the officer was threatened and did not open fire until a gun was pointed at him.“This is not a policeman in the city of Berkeley half-cocked, going out,” said Mr. Hoskins, who is black. “You couldn’t even compare this with Ferguson or the Garner case in New York,” he added, referring to Mr. Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was shot by an officer in nearby Ferguson, and Eric Garner, who died after a confrontation with the police on Staten Island.

Some Missouri demonstrators, though, noted that the images from surveillance video were grainy and difficult, in the view of some, to make out because they were distant. They questioned why the officer had approached Mr. Martin and a companion in the first place, and said they want to hear from witnesses before drawing any conclusions.

“All the evidence is not out, and we’ve got a community that’s grieving,” said Taurean Russell, the co-founder of Hands Up United, a group that formed after Mr. Brown’s death.

Family members of Mr. Martin, 18, told the local news media that they were reeling, and national leaders said they mourned the death and called for a nonviolent response.

“As we await the results of the investigation into the shooting death of Antonio Martin, we ask that the community exercise peaceful protest and refrain from any violent retaliation,” said Cornell William Brooks, president of the N.A.A.C.P.

In the early morning hours on Wednesday, after the shooting and before the surveillance recordings from three angles were made public, a crowd gathered at the gas station in Berkeley. At points, explosives, likely fireworks, were set off, the police said, and bricks or rocks were thrown at the police. Four people were arrested on charges of assaulting an officer, and at least two police officers were injured, the police said.

By sunrise, the crowd was gone. But Wednesday night, after a brief candlelight vigil and prayer, about 50 protesters returned to the gas station and briefly blocked the southbound lanes of Interstate 170 in North St. Louis County. Later, they left the inner-belt interstate highway near Lambert Airport in St. Louis and blocked the intersection of Airport Road and North Hanley.

Law enforcement authorities said Tuesday night’s confrontation began after the Berkeley police officer, whom the authorities declined to identify, received a report of a theft and was conducting a “routine business check” at a Mobil gas station not far from Lambert-St. Louis International Airport around 11:15 p.m. on Tuesday.

The officer, who is 34 and has been on the Berkeley force for about six years, was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into the shooting. One fellow member of the Berkeley force, Dennis Shireff, who is black and has been an outspoken critic of police brutality, described the officer as a “diplomatic guy” who “hasn’t displayed any signs of abuse or anything like that.”

One angle of the surveillance video from the gas station showed the marked police car pulling into the station’s parking lot. The officer appeared to get out of the car, turn on his flashlight and speak for several seconds with two people.

The video was taken from a distance, but the episode did not appear to turn confrontational until one of the men turned away, reached down and then turned back to face the officer, appearing to point his arm straight out. The police said the man was holding a 9-millimeter handgun. At that point, the video stops; the shooting itself is not shown. The second man in the images fled, the police said, and was being sought on Wednesday.

In a news conference, Chief Jon Belmar of the county police extended his sympathy to the dead man’s family and said shootings like this “are nothing but tragedies.” He said Mr. Martin had been arrested in the past, though the county police did not provide specifics.

Chief Belmar, who was criticized for how his department responded to unrest in Ferguson after Mr. Brown’s death, said the surveillance video appeared to show that the officer was in immediate danger. Using a Taser or pepper spray was not a realistic option at that moment, he said.

“You have somebody that’s pointing a gun at a police officer,” he said. “There’s not a lot of time. I can imagine that most of us would feel that we’re in imminent danger of losing our lives.”

Investigators believe that the officer fired three times, striking Mr. Martin once. It did not appear that Mr. Martin fired his gun, they said. Chief Belmar said the officer had been given a body camera during his shift but was not wearing it at the time of the shooting. The police cruiser was equipped with a dash camera, the chief said, but it was not clear whether it filmed the encounter. Investigators have seized the car and are checking for footage, Chief Belmar said.

Gov. Jay Nixon, who has faced intense scrutiny for his handling of unrest after Mr. Brown’s death, issued a one-sentence statement on the more recent shooting: “The events in Berkeley are a reminder that law enforcement officers have a difficult, and often dangerous, job in protecting themselves and law-abiding citizens.”

State Senator Jamilah Nasheed, a Democrat who represents part of St. Louis and has protested in Ferguson, said that she was not sure exactly what to make of Tuesday’s shooting, but that it spoke to broader issues of gun violence and a lack of trust between some African-Americans and law enforcement.

“We have a systemic problem,” she said. “The young man apparently had a gun. If he had a gun, what did he have a gun for and why did he point it at the police officer?”

Before protesters blocked the highway Wednesday night, Robert White, pastor of the Peace of Mind Church and a member of a clergy group that has served as a liaison between demonstrators and the police, addressed those gathered at a makeshift memorial.

“Antonio did not have to die,” he said, asking for prayers and support for the Martin family, some of whom were present. He then took off his baseball cap to accept donations to help defray the cost of Mr. Martin’s funeral.


Alain Delaquérière, John Eligon and D.J. Wilson contributed reporting.





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17) After Killing of Police Officers, Protest Movement Is at a Crossroads
“'Once we were asked to cease our protests, that was affirmation that we could not cease,' said Ms. Yates, 29, who lives in St. Louis but joined protests in New York after the Staten Island grand jury declined to charge a police officer in Mr. Garner’s case. 'They’re telling us that our grief doesn’t matter,' she said."
By NIKITA STEWART

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/26/nyregion/after-killing-of-2-officers-a-reversal-in-attitudes-to-police-of-some-demonstrators-and-officials.html?ref=us

City Council members took to the streets in New York to block traffic in solidarity with the demonstrators demanding changes in policing. The Council speaker opened a meeting of her fellow Council members with a call to utter the protest mantra, “I can’t breathe,” the final words of a Staten Island man killed by a police chokehold. And last Friday, the mayor sat down with leaders of the demonstrations, heeding their appeal for a face-to-face meeting even as they vowed to continue disrupting the city.

The gestures served as an unabashed embrace by the city’s unabashedly liberal elected leaders, a sign that protest organizers, after weeks in the streets, had begun the process of channeling raw anger into real change.

Then, on Saturday, in the seconds it took to shoot two officers dead in Brooklyn, the ground shifted beneath the marching feet of the thousands of people who had made New York the center of protests over the killing of unarmed black men by the police.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were gunned down on Saturday afternoon as they sat in their patrol car at a busy intersection in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They were killed by a man who hours earlier announced his intentions on Instagram and invoked the names of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed by the chokehold in July, and Michael Brown, the man killed by the Ferguson, Mo., police in August. The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, killed himself minutes later, the police said.

The killing of the officers, coming five days before Christmas, stunned the city into collective mourning. In an instant, criticism of the police seemed out of touch. “Die-ins,” which had become a staple of demonstrations in Grand Central Terminal, City Hall and elsewhere, suddenly struck a discordant note. And as the city prepared to bury Officer Ramos on Saturday, Mayor Bill de Blasio asked the protesters to suspend their demonstrations until the officers’ funerals were over.

The groups had already been grappling with their future, working on ways to retain the energy and diversity of the younger protesters while exploiting the organizational assets of established civil rights groups.

Now, they face an even more pointed test.

“This is par for the course,” the Rev. Michael A. Walrond Jr. told protesters after a march through Harlem on Sunday, the day after the officers were killed. “You were called for such a time as this. Don’t get tired. Don’t get weary.”

Indeed, though some groups were willing to stand down, others balked. Along with the protest on Sunday, led by Justice League NYC, a demonstration was held on Tuesday along Fifth Avenue. Another protest is to take place in Brooklyn on Saturday, the day of the funeral for Officer Ramos.

Joo-Hyun Kang, executive director of Communities United for Police Reform, said halting the protests would be misguided.

“It is wrong to connect the isolated act of one man who killed N.Y.P.D. officers to a nonviolent mass movement,” she said.

“Silencing the countless voices of New Yorkers who are seeking justice, dignity and respect for all, is a mistake.”

On Monday, the group Ferguson Action tweeted, “The N.Y.P.D. wants to use this tragedy to silence this movement. Not gonna happen.”

Ashley Yates, a member of Ferguson Action and a co-founder of Millennial Activists United, said she knew immediately that the officers’ deaths would cause some backlash. But the call for a protest suspension surprised her.

“Once we were asked to cease our protests, that was affirmation that we could not cease,” said Ms. Yates, 29, who lives in St. Louis but joined protests in New York after the Staten Island grand jury declined to charge a police officer in Mr. Garner’s case.

“They’re telling us that our grief doesn’t matter,” she said.

For some who share the protesters’ concerns, the insistence on pressing on in spite of the funerals is damaging.

“I don’t think the protesters do themselves a favor by protesting until after these officers are laid to rest,” said Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough president.

Mr. Diaz, echoing some other elected leaders, said the groups were costing themselves support with their disruptive tactics. “They’re losing favor with a lot of New Yorkers,” he said.

Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University professor who studies protest movements, said the strongest ones can survive a lot of animosity and adversity.

“In the antiwar movement, too, there was a lot of bad publicity given people burning draft cards and burning flags,” Professor Kazin said. “But the movement went on and was successful in convincing the public that we needed to get out of Vietnam.”

Obstacles, he said, are inevitable. “In some ways, the test of a successful movement is how you respond. You have to expect that there will be moments like this in a movement. If you don’t, you’re naïve and you don’t know what you got yourself into,” he said.

Just how dramatic the turnabout has been in New York could be measured by a scene that unfolded this week at City Hall. There were no Council members blocking traffic. There were no choruses of “I can’t breathe.” And there were no mayoral meetings with protesters.

Instead, there was unstinting praise for the police from the Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, who earlier this month had asked her colleagues to repeat “I can’t breathe” 11 times, for the number of times Mr. Garner said those words before he died in the encounter with the police.

“We are here to send a simple and direct message: that we unequivocally support, appreciate and value our police officers, that we condemn any and all violence against them, that we must end hateful and divisive rhetoric which seeks to demonize officers and their work,” Ms. Mark-Viverito, flanked by fellow Council members, said at a news conference.

Tanzina Vega and Vivian Yee contributed reporting.
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18) Rise in Loans Linked to Cars Is Hurting Poor
By and



The rusting 1994 Oldsmobile sitting in a driveway just outside St. Louis was an unlikely cash machine.

That was until the car’s owner, a 30-year-old hospital lab technician, saw a television commercial describing how to get cash from just such a car, in the form of a short-term loan.

The lab technician, Caroline O’Connor, who needed about $1,000 to cover her rent and electricity bills, believed she had found a financial lifeline.

“It was a relief,” she said. “I did not have to beg everyone for the money.”

Her loan carried an annual interest rate of 171 percent. More than two years and $992.78 in debt later, her car was repossessed.

“These companies put people in a hole that they can’t get out of,” Ms. O’Connor said.

The automobile is at the center of the biggest boom in subprime lending since the mortgage crisis. The market for loans to buy used cars is growing rapidly.

And similar to how a red-hot mortgage market once coaxed millions of borrowers into recklessly tapping the equity in their homes, the new boom is also leading people to take out risky lines of credit known as title loans.

They are, roughly speaking, the home equity loans of subprime auto. In these loans, which can last as long as two years or as little as a month, borrowers turn over the title of their cars in exchange for cash — typically a percentage of the cars’ estimated resale values.

“Turn your car title into holiday cash,” TitleMax, a large title lender, declared in a recent television commercial, showing a Christmas stocking overflowing with money.

More than 1.1 million households in the United States used auto title loans in 2013, according to a survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the first time the agency has included the loans in its annual survey.

Title loans are an increasingly prevalent form of high-cost, short-term credit in subprime finance, as regulators in a number of states crack down on payday loans.

For many borrowers, title loans, also sometimes known as motor-vehicle equity lines of credit or title pawns, are having ruinous financial consequences, causing owners to lose their vehicles and plunging them further into debt.

A review by The New York Times of more than three dozen loan agreements found that after factoring in various fees, the effective interest rates ranged from nearly 80 percent to over 500 percent. While some loans come with terms of 30 days, many borrowers, unable to pay the full loan and interest payments, say that they are forced to renew the loans at the end of each month, incurring a new round of fees.

Customers of TitleMax, for example, typically renewed their loans eight times, a former president of the company disclosed in a 2009 deposition.

And because many lenders make the loan based on an assessment of a used car’s resale value, not on a borrower’s ability to repay that money, many people find that they are struggling to keep up almost as soon as they drive off with the cash.

As a result, roughly one in every six title-loan borrowers will have the car repossessed, according to an analysis of 561 title loans by the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit in Durham, N.C.

The lenders argue that they are providing a source of credit for people who cannot obtain less-expensive loans from banks. The high interest rates, the lenders say, are necessary to offset the risk that borrowers will stop paying their bills.

Title loans are part of a broader lending boom tied to used cars. Auto loans allowing subprime borrowers — those with credit scores at 640 or below — to buy cars have surged in the last five years.

The high interest rates on the loans have enticed an influx of Wall Street money. Private equity firms are investing in lenders, and some big banks are ramping up their auto lending to people with blemished credit.

Propelling this lending spree are the cars themselves, and their centrality in people’s lives.

In most parts of the country, a car is vital to participating in the work force, and lenders are betting that people will do virtually anything to keep their cars, choosing to make auto loan payments before paying for just about any other expense.

The title lending industry, perhaps more than any other facet of subprime auto lending, thrives because of the car’s importance.

While people seeking title loans are often at their most desperate — dealing with a job loss, a divorce or a family illness — the lenders are willing to extend them loans because they know that most borrowers will pay their bill to keep their cars. Some lenders do not even bother to assess a borrower’s credit history.

“The threat of repossession turns the borrower into an annuity for the lenders,” said Diane Standaert, the director of state policy at the Center for Responsible Lending.

Unable to raise the thousands of dollars he needed to repair his car, Ken Chicosky, a 39-year-old Army veteran, felt desperate. He received a $4,000 loan from Cash America, a lender with a storefront in his Austin, Tex., neighborhood.

The loan, which came with an annual interest rate of 98.3 percent, helped him fix up the 2008 Audi that he relied on for work, but it has sunk his credit score. Mr. Chicosky, who is also attending college, uses some of his financial aid money to pay his title-loan bill.

Mr. Chicosky said he knew the loan was a bad decision when he received the first bill. It detailed how he would have to pay a total of $9,346 — a sum made up of principal, interest and other fees.

“When you are in a situation like that, you don’t ask very many questions,” he said.

Cash America declined to comment.

Rapid Expansion

Clutching handfuls of cash, a former Miss America contestant zips around in a red sports car, dancing and rapping about how TitleMax has “your real money.”

Commercials like these help companies like TitleMax entice borrowers to take on the costly loans. TitleMax, a brand of TMX Finance, is privately held — like virtually all of the title loan companies — and does not disclose much financial information. But a regulatory filing for the first three months of 2013 offers a glimpse into the industry’s tremendous growth.

During that period, the profits at TMX Finance rose by 47 percent from the same period two years earlier, and the number of stores it operated nearly doubled, to 1,108. The total volume of loans originated during the first three months of last year reached $169 million, up 67 percent from the same period in 2011.

TMX Finance, based in Savannah, Ga., wants to expand further, opening stores in states where regulations are “favorable,” according to a 2013 regulatory filing. Only a few years after emerging from bankruptcy in 2009, the company is enjoying an influx of cash from mainstream investors. Big bond funds managed by Legg Mason and Putnam Investments have bought portions of TMX Finance’s debt. The company also borrowed $17.5 million to buy a private jet.

The title lenders are seizing upon a broad retrenchment among banks, which have become wary of making loans to borrowers on the fringe of the financial system. Regulations passed after the financial crisis have made it much more expensive for banks to make loans to all but the safest borrowers.

The title lenders are also benefiting as state authorities restrict payday loans, effectively pushing payday lenders out of many states. While title loans share many of the same features — in some cases carrying rates that eclipse those on payday loans — they have so far escaped a similar crackdown.

In 21 states, car title lending is expressly permitted, with title lenders charging interest of up to 300 percent a year. In most other states, lenders can make loans with cars as collateral, but at lower interest rates.

Seeing the regulatory landscape shift, some of the country’s largest payday lenders are switching gears. When Arizona effectively outlawed payday loans, ACE Cash Express registered its payday loan storefronts in the state as car title lenders, state records show.

Lenders made similar changes in Virginia, where lawmakers outlawed payday lending in 2010. But title lenders were untouched by that law and have expanded throughout the state, drawing business from Maryland.

The number of stores offering title loans in Virginia increased by 24 percent from 2012 to 2013, according to state records. Last year, the lenders made 177,775 loans, up roughly 612 percent from 2010, when the state banned payday lending.

In Tennessee, the number of title lending stores increased by about 22 percent from 2011 to 2013, reaching 1,017.

That is a small fraction of the industry’s overall size, state regulators say, because only a handful of states keep statistics. Legal aid offices in Arizona, California, Georgia, Missouri, Texas and Virginia report that they have experienced an influx of clients who have run into trouble with the loans.

“The demand is there for people who are desperate for money,” said Jay Speer, the executive director of the Virginia Poverty Law Center.

Loopholes and Adversity

When Tiffany Capone suggested that her fiancé, Michael, take out a $10,000 TitleMax loan with a 119 percent interest rate, she figured it would be a temporary fix to pay the bills. But this summer, after Michael fell behind on the loan payments, the couple’s three-year-old Hyundai was repossessed.

“It had my child’s car seat in the back,” said Ms. Capone, of Olney, Md.

With their car gone, the couple had to sell most of their furniture and other belongings to a pawnshop so they could afford to pay for taxis to ferry Michael, a diabetic with a heart condition, to his frequent doctors’ appointments.

The hardships caused by title loans are being cited as one of the big challenges facing poor and minority communities.

“It is a form of indenture,” said Robert Swearingen, a lawyer with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, adding that “because of the threat of repossession, they can string you along for the rest of your life.”

Johanna Pimentel said she and both of her brothers had taken out multiple title loans.

“They are everywhere, like liquor stores,” she said.

Ms. Pimentel, 32, had moved her family out of Ferguson, Mo., to a higher-priced suburb of St. Louis that promised better schools. But after a divorce, her former husband moved out, and she had trouble paying her rent.

Ms. Pimentel took out a $3,461 title loan using her 2002 Suburban as collateral.

After falling behind, she woke up one morning last March to find that the car had been repossessed. Without it, she could not continue to run her day care business.

Pointing to such experiences, lawmakers in some states — regulating the industry largely falls to states — have called for stricter limits on title loans or outright bans.

In Virginia, lawmakers passed a bill in 2010 that institutes some restrictions on the practice, including preventing lenders from trying to collect money from customers once a car has been repossessed. That same year, Montana voters overwhelmingly backed a ballot initiative that capped rates on title loans at 36 percent.

But for every state where there has been a crackdown, there are more where the industry has mobilized to beat back regulations.

In Wisconsin, it took the title loan industry only one year to reverse a ban on the loans that had been put in place in 2010. In New Hampshire in 2008, state legislators enacted a law that put a 36 percent ceiling on the rates that title lenders could charge. Four years later, though, lobbyists for the industry won a repeal of the law.

“This is nothing but government-authorized loan sharking,” said Scott A. Surovell, a Virginia lawmaker who has proposed bills that would further rein in title lenders.

Even when there are restrictions, some lenders find creative ways to continue business as usual. In California, where the interest rates and fees that lenders can charge on loans for $2,500 or less are restricted, some lenders extend loans for just over that amount.

Sometimes the workarounds are more blatant.

The City of Austin allows title lenders to extend loans only for three months. But that did not stop Mr. Chicosky, the veteran who borrowed $4,000 for car repairs, from getting a loan for 24 months.

Last year, after applying for a loan at a Cash America store in Austin, Mr. Chicosky said, a store employee told him that he would have to fill out the paperwork and pick up his check in a nearby town. Mr. Chicosky’s lawyer, Amy Clark Kleinpeter, said the location switch appeared to be a way to get around the rules in Austin.

The lender offered a different explanation to Mr. Chicosky. “They told me that they didn’t have a printer at the Austin location that was big enough to print my check,” he said.










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