Racism Unacknowledged in U.S., Madison

Forums, talks and initiatives on Madison, Wisconsin's southwest side continue with commendable objectives: Peace and understanding.

Yet, these efforts in Madison's Meadowood and surrounding neighborhoods (Mosiman, Wisconsin State Journal) are doomed unless stakeholders aka people, acknowledge a reality: Many white people simply do not like the sight of young black and brown adults walking, driving, laughing and certainly not running in public.

Secondly, we live in a police-prosecutor state where the careers of police and prosecutors thrive as they generate good statistics of imprisoning Americans, innocence or guilt of crime not relevant.

Taking away someone's liberty should be the very last resort, but in America it's the go-to action of police.

This absurd spectacle of society is sustained by local citizens who don't like living in the same neighborhood as them, just how much can a white Meadowood and Jamestown resident take?

There's a name for this social pathology: Racism.

I see it most everyday.

Young black and brown folks live it everyday.

To create a healthy, friendly community, you have to treat all members of the community as equals and ask them to join in the fight to make their city, neighborhood, and community to be the best place possible, (Mal Contends). Can anyone seriously suggest this occurs today?

When a major political party, the Republican Party, is working at cross purposes to this objective, success is difficult at best.

Racism is so pervasive and virulent that many black folks with whom I talk adopt the same taboo morality about young minorities: Well, 'she was cussing and swearing.'

That's important? Jail is the answer?

As for the Madison police who fill the Dane County jail with minorities daily, (targeting black drivers on Raymond Road and Whitney Way for example), they don't help matters by the contemporary, robotic and for all-occasions your-papers-please demand to citizens: Your name and birthday.

The correct response to this demand in a Constitutional republic is 'none of your fucking business.'

Yet, consider what this would get a black man 'talking back' to the 'man.'

Racism is the foundation of myriad problems.

Racism's twin—the mindless, authoritarian and imperial bearing of cops towards the citizenry even when they're not arresting them—is baleful, foolish and contemptuous of the traditions of this country founded upon fending off police-military incursions upon human rights.

Composition of police remains the result of self-selection: Civil liberties, peace activists, and intellectuals are not found in abundance under this process. Racists and dumb cops are.

As a Washington Post column argues today: Take the cops out of school for christ's sake (St. Germain, Post), they have no place there and further the school-to-prison pipeline, an obscenity worse even than the breathing-while-black pipeline to jail.

Wisconsin's Trial Run for New Law, Verdict Is In: Lives Are Cheap

Updated - The New York Times has a piece on the new Wisconsin law mandating outside agencies investigate cases of police shootings.

Erik Ljung has a video with the Times piece with compelling footage of community outrage against recent police killings of Paul Heenan (Schenider, The Capital Times) and Tony Terrell Robinson Jr. in Madison, Michael Bell in Kenosha (2004), and Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee (Luthern, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel; Mal Contends).

Killer cops in Madison, the most liberal city, notes Paul Gottinger in CounterPunch.

Writes Gottinger:

Since 1976 there has been 1,403 people convicted of a crime, sentenced to the death penalty, and then executed. This number is only slightly larger than the number of Americans killed by cops LAST YEAR ALONE.

Imagine if ISIS, or Black gangs were killing at this scale. What would the country’s reaction be?

Now we’re told to wait for the investigation of Robinson’s murder by the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation.

Acclaimed former Madison Police Chief David Couper (ret) has been writing about the police assaulting the citizenry as enemies residing in the occupied territories for decades. Stop the Killing—Now, writes Couper in a particularly incensed recent piece.

Blind faith in outside law enforcement investigators (the Wisconsin Department of Justice led by a Republican with a history of corrupt political action) gathering evidence on police killings is what we have now.

Considering the investigation into the police killing of Tony Robinson under 2013 Wisconsin Act 348, why not a new law mandating an investigative agency with subpoena power composed of civil liberty activists, retired law professors, legal journalists and other academics?

The reason is murderous police would not stand a chance.

Being Police gives police a license to kill, and prosecutors a (qualified) license to lie.

The Times piece asks: "As this Times video explains, it would be the first case to test how effective the new law is. Could it help provide a new faith in the justice system?"

No, no faith.

The law, 2013 Wisconsin Act 348, the Times cites is indeed on trial, but the verdict is in.

There won't be a prosecution.

Don't blame Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne for this, Ozanne can't make up evidence that won't be presented to his office.
 
The law needs to be expanded and police killings considered in an objective sphere of justice and truth.

The Wisconsin DoJ will present the results of its investigation into the Tony Robinson killing within two weeks.

Consider that Wisconsin and the nation will never get the facts from the tainted Wisconsin DoJ whom adults know are playing politics every bit as much as 'law enforcement' in what passes for a criminal justice system.

In America, lives and liberty are cheap in the eyes of police and The Prosecutor, as the jurist Robert Jackson noted some 75 years ago.

Stop the Killing, Pleads Police Chief David Couper

Madison, Wisconsin Police Chief
David Couper (ret)

Been reading Madison, Wisconsin Police Chief David Couper (ret) for some time, and I have never discerned such pain in his prose in his extensive commentary on policing.

"Stop killing the unarmed must be your first step — review your policies, review your training, review the tools of force you use, review your attitudes about people — listen to your hearts — you know this must stop," writes Couper. "I firmly believe that if today’s police officers look at this problem they will come to understand that the first step forward to restore trust and support of those whom they serve is to stop using deadly force on those who are unarmed."

His latest piece from Improving Police is reproduced below:

By David Couper

Looking back through a half-century of policing, the turmoil of the anti-war and civil rights years, the integration of women, people of color, and those with differing sexual orientations into our ranks, the excitement of putting into practice the new and exciting concepts of problem-oriented policing, getting close to, and working with, the people we served, and being able, from time to time to remain above the occasional and embarrassing times we were sullied by the graft, corruption, false testimonies and excessive force by fellow officers, I must say that the situation we and our nation’s police find ourselves in today is a new low.

Maybe it has been caused by the explosion of smart phones and social media, maybe people are not as respectful to police as they were in the past, but maybe it’s because police are taking the lives of too many people who are unarmed. The impact of this on our nation is enormous.

Is it a trend? We don’t know because police departments in our nation are not required to report these shootings. They are voluntary and some cities simply do not report.

Policing in America is at a tipping point. The number of police killings may be important, but the fact is that one mistake, one young person's life extinguished in circumstances many people think is outright wrong is one too many.

What can police do? The first step is to stop the killing. Yes, I am being harsh especially to those of you who, with great control in your own use of force, selflessly serve. But you know that policing is a field in which the behavior of a few impact your ability to do a good job and be trusted.

Stop killing the unarmed must be your first step — review your policies, review your training, review the tools of force you use, review your attitudes about people — listen to your hearts — you know this must stop.

The task of policing is a learning and teaching adventure about the proper handling of people. It is 90% relational and 10% coercive. I firmly believe that if today’s police officers look at this problem they will come to understand that the first step forward to restore trust and support of those whom they serve is to stop using deadly force on those who are unarmed. And coming to that understanding, and with the help of their communities, they can make the necessary changes and share the improvement steps they are taking with their communities.

If they [do] less, they will have failed to rebuild the trust that is absolutely necessary between police and citizens in a free society — and they must do it now!

Wisconsin's DoJ Probe on Tony Robinson Killing Offers Blind Faith

David S. Matthews, Administrator of
the Division of Criminal Investigation is
leading the investigation of the killing of
Tony Robinson, 19-years-old

Update II: See Madland: The criminal justice system is broken and black men pay the price (Talaga, Isthmus)

Update: WISC News: "The Dane County Medical Examiner says 19-year-old Tony Robinson suffered firearm trauma to his head, torso and right arm."

Just had to shoot this young man to death, right? White police shooting young, black men to death, a common occurrence in the United States, provokes outrage but not surprise.
 ---
Updated: The Wisconsin Attorney General is Republican Brad Schimel, former district attorney of Waukesha County (R-White People) and a dedicated partisan who was elected last year on a campaign devoid of civil rights activists and criminal justice reformists.

Schimel leads the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

During Schimel's predecessor's tenure the DoJ became so deeply immersed in partisan activity any semblance of trust in its objectivity was destroyed.

In the investigation into the police killing of Tony Robinson under 2013 Wisconsin Act 348, Brad Schimel's election changes nothing.

Former attorney general J.B. Van Hollen is gone, replaced by Schimel earlier this year.

No organization headed by a Wisconsin Republican these days, especially the DoJ, brings to Wisconsin citizens cause for trust.

Heading up the investigation into the police killing of Tony Robinson is not a civil rights activist, a turgid UW-Madison law professor, investigators from the Innocence Project, or an investigative counsel like a modern-day John Doar, Bill Dixon or Hillary Clinton.

The man in charge of providing answers to the Robinson family, friends and Wisconsin is: David S. Matthews, Administrator of the Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI).

Matthews was appointed to his current position by Van Hollen in 2012.

Matthews is an Air Force veteran, does not have a law degree or from looking at his public profile any experience in civil rights work or much interest in the liberal arts.

The DCI, charged with investigating the killing, is described by Anne E. Schwartz, Director of Communications and Public Affairs of the Wisconsin Department of Justice as a "division of full-time, sworn, professional, veteran law enforcement investigators," in an email.

Veteran law enforcement investigators investigating a killing by a veteran law enforcement officer. The whole point of Act 348 is to have objective, external investigations into police-involved shootings.

Trust is all the Wisconsin people have to go on in this matter, and if truth be the objective, trust in these matters in Wisconsin is for fools.

Black Lives Matter, in Wisconsin not so much

Time to Name the Names and State the Facts—Racism Is Alive and Virulent

Came across a Facebook posting by a former exec director of a Madison, Wisconsin non-profit praising the cop who hugged a young black man at a protest against racism on the west coast.

Couldn't resist noting that a simple act of kindness and decency by a white cop treated as extraordinary indicates much about our political culture and it isn't good.

Certainly hugging young black and brown men is eminently preferable to shooting them to death or throwing them in prison but that this 'let's move forward' reaction to the murder in Ferguson gaining currency in some white liberal circles is appalling.

As Natasha Hakimi Zapata writes in The Guardian and Truthdig: Why That Moving Photo of a Cop Hugging a Boy at a Ferguson Protest Is Bullshit.

Writes Zapata:

Like a supermarket Christmas ad, this photograph taken at a Ferguson protest in Portland, Oregon, feasts on a moment of truce and peace amid the anger. What nonsense. It is one moment among many, and the choice to look at it and celebrate it is clearly a choice to be lulled by cotton candy. It has got more than 400,000 Facebook shares. Each one of those shares is a choice of what to see and what not to see. In the context of the completely unresolved and immensely troubling situation, not just in Ferguson but across the United States, where Ferguson has opened wounds that go back centuries, this picture is a blatant lie.

This is a lie.

But there is truth in the 100s of protests across the United States.

In arguably the most brilliant piece on a political news show, the Lawrence O'Donnell Show, I have ever seen. The St. Louis district attorney's office has two prosecutors who should be investigated for misconduct for their affront to justice and law during the grand jury proceedings.

In Ron Kuby's piece in in the New York Daily News.

From the U.S DoJ and White House.

And in the hearts and minds of 10s of millions of Americans, not among them the Republican Party that relies on racism as a foundation.

Racism is an American as apple pie and its staying power over the bodies and lives of minority Americans remains an outrage.

Civil Rights Group Blasts Grand Jury Failure to Indict White Killer Cop

'Open season on people of color'

Why should anyone offer an institutional critique of racist St. Louis County and prison-state America when Jay Nixon (Dope-Missouri) might run for Senate in 2016?

Because it's right.

From the Center for Constitutional Rights:

"Today, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Executive Director Vincent Warren released the following statement in response to the news that the Grand Jury in the Michael Brown case failed to indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who killed him.

"It’s difficult to see how anyone in the community can have faith in the system at this point: the failure to indict sends the clear message that it's open season on people of color. All resistance must be viewed through that lens, and the focus must remain on the injustice of a white police officer getting away – yet again – with killing a young unarmed Black man. We stand with the community in anger and in mourning. We stand with the people in the streets of Ferguson, just as the world stood with protesters in Tahrir Square, in Gaza, in Hong Kong. The world must learn: Black lives matter."

Another Young Black Man Killed by White Police

Message at George Washington U.
  Via ThinkProgress/ Holley Matthews

You could be killed for being black for walking down the street - Yes, you can

Update: "While the grand jury proceeding in St. Louis County has concluded, the (U.S.) Justice Department’s investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown remains ongoing. Though we have shared information with local prosecutors during the course of our investigation, the federal inquiry has been independent of the local one from the start, and remains so now."
-- Attorney General Holder Statement on the Conclusion of the Grand Jury Proceeding in the Shooting of Michael Brown
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The fact is few expected the murderous white garbage, Darren Wilson, who calls himself police would have be held accountable for harassing and then killing Michael Brown.

Few expected the ass of the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, Robert P. McCulloch, to act as a public advocate; he sounded more like a defense attorney for Wilson last night. McCulloch belongs to the racists.

Few expected Gov. Jay Nixon (Dope-Missouri) to act and speak for justice.

No one will confuse these slime with civil rights advocates.

A base of white America holding political power in white America doesn't like blacks, doesn't like the sight of blacks driving, walking, voting, and would prefer blacks be segregated away or in prison.

White America has largely succeeded in its sick project.

"As I have said in previous posts, no matter which way you cut it, policing in a democracy is 90 percent about relationship. No one polices a community and effectively responds to crime and disorder in that community without FIRST building honest and thoughtful relationships with that community," writes former Madison, Wisconsin police chief, David Couper.

The relationship between blacks and St. Louis County racists is not thoughtful and honest, it's hateful, hostile and life-destroying.

Is anyone surprised that a small segment of the community reacted with rage and violence? (Eligon, Blinder, NYT)