Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Criminal Justice
NYPD Officers Shoot and Kill Three Black Men in One Week
04 days ago
Ramarley Graham, 18, was shot and killed by a NYPD officer in the Bronx on Thursday afternoon after running into his home as undercover officers pursued him. He’s the third person the NYPD have killed in a week. According to the police spokesperson, he was unarmed.
Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman,
said there was “no evidence that he was armed” when the officer, a
member of a narcotics unit, shot him once in the upper left chest, the New York Times reports.
The Graham shooting is the third time in a week that a member of the
NYPD had killed a suspect. On Jan. 26, an off-duty police lieutenant
shot a 22-year-old carjacking suspect in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. And on
Sunday, an off-duty detective shot a 17-year-old in Bushwick, Brooklyn,
during a mugging, authorities said.
In Graham’s case, police found a small bag of marijuana in the toilet at the home he entered after the pursuit, the NY Times reports. “It’s likely the story will thicken and the NYPD will argue the cop acted in self defense, but right now it looks like the cops killed a kid trying to get rid of a little pot,” said Seth Freed Wessler, Colorlines.com’s investigation reporter.
“Despite directives from the NYPD Commissioner to stop arresting people for simple possession of marijuana, the NYPD actually conducted more marijuana arrests in 2011 than in the previous year,” Wessler said.
In New York City, marijuana arrests strike people of color the hardest. Last year the NYPD made a near-record number of low-level marijuana arrests, making 2011 the second-most prolific period for marijuana arrests in NYC history. Close to 87 percent of those arrested for marijuana were black or Latino, while only 10 percent were white.
“The daily practice of harassing black and Latino kids with stop and frisk policing and then arresting them for simple possession of pot would be bad enough even if it did not lead to shootings. In this case in the Bronx, it looks like the day-to-day drug war left this 18-year-old kid dead,” Wessler said.
Report: NYPD Document Tells Cops to Consider Religion When Policing
05 days ago
Just a week after news broke that the NYPD showed 1,500 of its officers grossly Islamophobic propaganda, the AP is reporting new evidence that the police department is profiling on the basis of religion, conducting surveillance specifically of Shia Muslim, Iranian and Palestinian communities.
The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report obtained by the AP is entitled, “US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City,” made a series of recommendations, including: “Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi’a mosques.”
The report, drawn largely from information available in newspapers or sites like Wikipedia, was prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It was written at a time of great tension between the U.S. and Iran. That tension over Iran’s nuclear ambition has increased again recently.
Police estimated the New York area Shiite population to be about 35,000, with Iranians making up about 8,500. The document also calls for canvassing the Palestinian community because there might be terrorists there.
“The Palestinian community, although not Shi’a, should also be assessed due to presence of Hamas members and sympathizers and the group’s relationship with the Iranian government,” analysts wrote.
The secret document stands in contrast to statements by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said the NYPD never considers religion in its policing. Kelly has said police go only where investigative leads take them, but the document described no leads to justify expanded surveillance at Shiite mosques.
The AP also reports that the NYPD is engaged in intelligence gathering and surveillance work in other states and in at least 11 foreign cities.
“The report specifically documents efforts by the NYPD to monitor 15 different mosques throughout the Tri-State Area. This is despite the fact that no illegal, or even suspicious activity, has ever been reported at these religious centers,” read a joint statement signed by a broad coalition of civil liberties, human rights, Muslim, and interfaith organizations on Thursday. The coalition includes the Council on American-Islamic Relations – New York (CAIR-NY) and the Arab Muslim American Federation.
The coalition’s statement calls for the “NYPD to acknowledge this wrongdoing, immediately cease all such activities, and create more transparency.”
“It’s another crystal clear indication that the NYPD is out of control and is running roughshod over the civil rights and civil liberties of New York’s Muslim and Middle Eastern residents,” Colorlines.com’s Seth Freed Wessler said about the AP’s findings.
How East Haven, Conn., Became Synonymous With Racial Profiling
05 days ago
On Sunday afternoon, about 10 men and a couple of women were gathered inside La Bamba’s, a Latino-owned bar on Main Street in East Haven, Conn. “Look at this place,” said manager Esdras Marin, gesturing toward the empty bar. “On a Sunday afternoon like this, this place would have been full. People are afraid to come. The police come by here and harass us.”
In November 2008, an officer waiting outside of the bar pushed Marin’s brother to the ground, driving his chin into the concrete and drawing blood. The officer handcuffed the man’s hands behind his back and then proceeded to kick him repeatedly.
“The cops are out of control,” said Marin.
Each of the men and women in the bar on Sunday had a story to tell about the police harassment. A 40-year-old construction worker who’d come to East Haven from Ecuador a decade ago recalled, “It was winter and they took my car when they stopped me and they made me walk through he snow.” He added, “My friend left and went back to Ecuador out of fear. They arrested him and beat him up in jail. He got out and left.”
The stories are the same all over town: Latino residents who’ve been profiled, beat up, followed and taunted by local police officers. They’re the stories that populate dozens of pages of recently released legal documents manifesting a clear pattern of unchecked police violence.
In December, the Justice Department issued a report charging that the East Haven cops systemically profile and harass Latinos. Last week, the FBI arrested four of East Haven’s 49 active-duty officers on related criminal charges. East Haven’s Mayor Joseph Maturo then made national headlines when he offered to solve the city’s racism problems by eating tacos for dinner. On Monday, facing growing outcry from across the country, including the mocking delivery of 500 tacos to his office, Maturo announced that his police chief, Leonard Gallo, would resign.
The swirling events in the 30,000-person town have for good reason been focused on needed change in the city’s government and police force. Advocates and residents have long understood East Haven to be a hotbed of racism from a lawless and unaccountable police force. Many people of color have left the area. Others continue to live in fear.
But the events unfolding in East Haven point to a related problem that’s gone largely without discussion in the last two months of disarray. As East Haven’s police have been profiling and harassing Latino residents for the last five years, they have also been shuttling them into deportation proceedings.
After profiling, falsely arresting and often brutalizing Latinos in town, the cops routinely called ICE to report those without papers, locals charge. “When they come into this bar,” explains Marin, “the first thing they check is immigration status. And then they’ll probably call immigration.”
Even as the Department of Justice was investigating the police for alleged civil and criminal violations, another federal agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was acting in cahoots with the East Haven cops’ assault on immigrants.
ICE has consistently claimed that its enforcement practices do not rely on racial profiling to find immigrants and that it only deports serious criminals. The unfolding drama in East Haven does significant damage to that claim.
From Italian to Latino
In the middle of the 2000s, the demographics of East Haven began to shift. Latinos from surrounding areas began moving to East Haven for cheaper rent and a calmer life. Shops with names like Los Amigos and La Bamba’s opened on Main Street. The Latino population grew from 4 percent of the city’s residents in 2000 to 10 percent in 2010.
For some white residents, the changes felt like an existential threat.
Ferdinando Cerrato, a 79-year-old man dressed in a worn corduroy jacket, stood in the town office building waiting to pay his taxes after the mayor announced Gallo’s departure on Monday. “They’ve destroyed our culture and our history,” he said. “Everything you see and everywhere you go, everything is in Spanish.”
Referring to the FBI’s recent arrests, Cerrato told Colorlines.com, “The cops are the wrong ones to be arrested. The Latinos should be arrested because they are illegal.”
Cerrato says his parents were Italian immigrants who “came to the U.S. in 1928 and waited in line to come in. Back then, we came the right way. Now you can enter illegal and then they get rewarded instead of arrested.”
The only book on Italian immigration to Connecticut in the town’s public library paints a different picture of that history. The book’s author wrote that in 1927 her Italian father and uncle “didn’t have enough money for the trip … so a friend of theirs helped them to stow away on the ship.” He was later deported.
Under the leadership of Gallo, the police department of the predominantly Italian-American town forgot this history as it honed in on Latino migrants, in what appears to be a ruthless attempt to drive them out.
On Sunday afternoon, a man named Fernando stood chatting with others inside My Country Store, another Latino-owned business on Main Street. “Basically,” explained Fernando, who works for a company fixing train tracks in New Haven, “if you’re Latino they don’t ask you to open your window. They pin you up against the car and hit you. And then they threaten you with deportation and call immigration.”
East Haven cops have a long history of targeting and brutalizing communities of color. In 1997, an East Haven police officer followed a 21-year-old unarmed black man named Malik Jones from East Haven to New Haven and shot him to death.
The year after Jones was murdered, newly elected Mayor Maturo appointed Gallo as chief. It was a questionable decision: Gallo had been a rising star officer in nearby New Haven, but known for brutish police tactics. According to the New Haven Independent, in 1990 he was demoted to a post in the city’s animal shelter as new leadership attempted to move toward a community policing model and reign in cops known for targeting residents of color.
In 2009, after years of intensified profiling and harassment of Latinos under Gallo’s leadership, the East Haven Police made the mistake of broadening their assault and arresting a local Catholic priest–a white man named Father James Manship–as he tried to record a group of police officers as they harassed the owners of My Country Store.
The arrest made headlines like nothing in the town had since Malik Jones was shot, and by September 2009, the Department of Justice had rolled into town to investigate.
Too Much Power
The police department under Gallo’s reign was out of control and beyond reproach. Firing a police chief is rarely easy, even for a mayor with the will to do so. In 2010, after the DOJ investigation began, then Mayor April Capone put Gallo on leave while the investigation proceeded. Capone wanted to fire Gallo but could not, according to a source close to city government who asked not to be named. “To fire a police chief is next to impossible,” said the source. “The just-cause statute and the union power is so tight and so strong that a mayor just can’t do it.”
In October 2010, pressure on the department grew when a Yale University Law School clinic filed a civil rights action on behalf of Manship, the two owners of My Country Store and seven other Latino plaintiffs who claimed to have been the victims of the East Haven Police Department’s abuse. The complaint lists as defendants the East Haven Police Department and two fifths of its active duty cops.
The Yale complaint paints a frightful picture of the police department that’s echoed by residents who live there. In one March 2009 incident described in the complaint, the same officer who regularly harassed customers at My Country Store pulled over four Latino men as they drove them down Main Street on their way to La Bamba’s.
According to the complaint, that officer screamed slurs at the men, pulled them from their car and with the help of another officer arrested them. When they arrived at the police station, one of the men asked why he’d been arrested and an officer replied by spraying him in the face with mace. The officer then proceeded to open the back door of the cruiser and punch the now blinded man in the face repeatedly as he pulled him to a cell. According to the police report, at least three other officers watched as the man was brutalized.
Later that night, the Yale complaint says, three of the arrested men overheard the police beating the fourth man. The three others feared they would be next.
On December 19, 2011, the Department of Justice released the findings of its two-year civil and criminal investigation of “allegations that EHPD officers engage in biased policing, unconstitutional searches and seizures, and the use of excessive force.”
The DOJ documented officers targeting Latino-owned businesses and issuing Latino drivers tickets disproportionately, often roughing them up before falsifying police reports to cover up police violence.
The federal investigation also expressed concerns that East Haven police were inappropriately enforcing immigration laws by inquiring into the immigration status of non-citizens and reporting them to federal immigration authorities without the legal authority to do so.
The East Haven Police Department “does not have an agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the report states. But nonetheless, the department “allowed its officers to engage in haphazard and uncoordinated immigration enforcement efforts to target Latino drivers for traffic stops … [as a] means for EHPD officers to harass and intimidate the Latino community.”
On January 18, a grand jury indicted four East Haven officers for conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate various members of the East Haven community” and for use of “unreasonable force.”
All four men face jail sentences of over 10 years if found guilty.
Retiring police chief Gallo was not yet charged criminally by the feds, but at a press conference on Monday, his attorney admitted that his client is “Co-Conspirator 1″ in the indictment and may face charges.
“My sense from the community is that there is a sense of vindication, that we have been listened to,” said Father Manship after he finished Mass on Sunday for the 800 Latino congregants of his church in nearby Fair Haven. “But nobody thinks this is over with.”
A Widespread Problem
Though the DOJ makes clear that the East Haven police abused their powers in enforcing immigration law, neither the federal indictment nor the Yale complaint address the impact of those efforts.
Even if East Haven’s lawlessness is fixed, questions remain that go far beyond its city limits. According to a number of advocates and attorneys in the East Haven area, the issue was not just that the local cops wanted to deport immigrants; it’s that federal immigration authorities obliged them, even as the DOJ was investigating the East Haven police.
John Lugo, an organizer with the New Haven group Unidad Latina en Accion told Colorlines.com that several of the group’s members and many others have been deported as a result of East Haven’s racist policing.
Michael Boyle, an attorney who practices immigration law in nearby North Haven, says that in the last couple of years he’s seen a number of immigrants who’ve been arrested by the East Haven police and then sent into deportation proceedings.
“ICE says it has more of a focus on people with criminal problems,” says Boyle, “but then the question is what kind of problems result in a call to ICE. In a place like East Haven, everything gets called in.”
And in a place like East Haven, virtually every Latino Colorlines.com interviewed had been profiled or arrested.
In July 2011, almost two years after the DOJ began investigating, Boyle says a young Ecuadoran man came into his office for immigration help. He’d been pulled over by the East Haven police and arrested for driving without proper registration. “The police called ICE and the next morning ICE showed up and told him he’d have to appear in immigration court.”
“It was one of these cases where he’d been staked out by the police at an Ecuadorian bakery. He was a really nice young man with a U.S.-citizen wife and he was targeted by the police there.”
Boyle decided to send the case over to the Yale law clinic, thinking that the man had been a victim of the very practices the clinic was litigating.
Ultimately, according to Boyle, the clinic succeeded in getting the man relief from deportation. “But,” he said, “had I taken the case and done the normal stuff without the civil rights claim, he’d be back in Mexico now.”
Another local immigration attorney, Glenn Formica, said he’d had a couple of cases from East Haven that resulted in deportation. Formica argued that even when ICE did not respond to calls from the East Haven Police over people picked up for simple traffic violations, the local police know what to charge immigrants with so that ICE will respond.
“Five years ago the cops in the area didn’t really think much about getting people deported,” said Formica. But as the federal government shifted its enforcement tactics to target local jails, “police departments that want to get people deported can do so pretty easily.”
“All you have to do is charge someone with the right thing. The East Haven police learned what to charge people with to get them deported.”
On Wednesday, clergy members in the East Haven area, including Father Manship, held a press conference to demand that the Connecticut state attorney make a full review of all convictions in the last four years based on arrests by the indicted East Haven officers. The clergy argue that any arrest colored by racial profiling or discrimination should be immediately vacated.
Yet some of those who were pegged with these convictions based on tainted arrests have already been deported.
According to John Lugo and some of the men gathered in La Bamba’s, ICE has just recently stopped picking people up from the East Haven Jail.
ICE did not answer Colorlines.com’s specific questions about whether the agency has continued to deport people from East Haven. An ICE spokesperson responded with the statement, “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) take allegations of racial profiling and other complaints relating to civil rights and civil liberties violations very seriously.”
ICE may have backed off of East Haven in recent months–as it did in Maricopa County, Ariz. following the DOJ’s investigation of civil rights violations there–but what about the agency’s cooperation with the East Haven cops before the DOJ issued it’s report? And, in towns and cities around the country where local police are wise enough to avoid arresting social justice minded Catholic priests and therefore avoid federal investigation, it’s unlikely that ICE has any way to ensure it’s not deporting the victims of racial profiling and police misconduct.
ICE is rapidly expanding programs that use local police to enforce immigration laws. Mostly significantly, the Secure Communities program, which the Obama administration says will be fully operational in every jail around the country by 2013, automatically checks the immigration status of anyone booked by local police. The government claims that the program avoids racial profiling because it’s simply checking the immigration status of those already booked into jail. But that may be precisely the problem: the automated immigration check system can’t discern who is and who is not a victim of racial profiling.
Nearby New Haven has joined a growing cohort of counties and cities around the country who want to opt-out of the Secure Communities program. Mayor John DeStefano has warned that Secure Communities will undermine trust between local residents and the police. He and other city leaders have asked that ICE not implement the program in their city.
But the federal government has repeatedly said that localities can’t opt out. The result will be that every emerging Gallo, every East Haven police department, will now find it even easier to push their de jour undesirables into deportation.
If you think investigative stories like this are important, please donate today to support Colorlines.com.
Hazing Ruled Not the Cause of Chinese-American Marine’s Suicide
06 days ago
On Monday a judge in Hawaii sentenced a Marine to 30-days in jail and have his rank reduced to private first class for punching and kicking a fellow Marine who killed himself shortly afterward. The judge ruled she found no evidence the abuse led to the Lance Cpl. Harry Lew’s suicide.
Lew committed suicide shortly after the Jacoby punched and kicked him on April 3, 2011.
Lance Cpl. Jacob Jacoby, 21, who pleaded guilty to assault, acknowledged he punched and kicked Lew out of anger and frustration that the fellow Marine repeatedly fell asleep while on watch for Taliban fighters, the Associated Press reports. He’s also one of the three Marines accused of regularly hazing Lew by punching, kicking and forcing him to do pushups.
Navy Lt. John Battisi, Jacoby’s attorney, successfully argued that Jacoby lost his temper and struck Lew, but that he made sure to hit Lew on his body armor where he was best protected.
“If this is how you’re going to approach and motivate your peers,
then you do not need to be a part of the service,” Schweig said in
closing remarks at the sentencing hearing,” said Navy Capt. Carrie Stephens, the judge in Jacoby’s special court-martial.
Schweig went on to say the government was confident Jacoby is capable of rehabilitating himself.
Lew’s Chinese immigrant parents told the LA Times last year that they tried to prevent their son from joining the Navy but he insisted he wanted to serve his country.
“My son died — I have only one son,” Lew told the AP on Monday. He went on to say he doesn’t understand how Marines could do the things they did to their own.
In a similar incident last October, U.S. Army Private Danny Chen was found dead in a guard tower in Afghanistan with”an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Reports found Chen suffered from violent hazing and racist bullying that may have led to his to suicide.
The Prison Industrial (Retirement) Complex, by the Numbers
06 days ago
Human Rights Watch released a report last week, Old Behind Bars: The Aging Prison Population in the United States, that details a new challenge created by the extreme sentences dished out over the past generation. According to the report, in 2010 there were 124,400 prisoners–8 percent of inmates–aged 55 or older, which is an increase of 57.3 percent from 2009. This is due to the number of inmates serving life sentences and the many others serving sentences of 20 years or longer. Roughly half of people who get life sentences are black, according to the Sentencing Project.
The report pointed out that about one in 10 state prisoners is serving a life sentence and 11 percent have sentences longer than 20 years. Some sentencing reform advocates have warned that, as the case against the death penalty builds steam, it’s crucial that lawmakers and advocates alike keep in mind the core problem: a sentencing system that empowers prosecutors and limits judicial discretion, leading to widespread extreme sentences.
Prisons aren’t equipped to properly care for the geriatric prisoners who fall ill and need daily living assistance. In 2007, 46 percent of inmates aged 55 and over died in state prison. As Jamie Fellner, the author of the report, told the New York Times, “Age should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card, but when prisoners are so old and infirm that they are not a threat to public safety, they should be released under supervision. Failing that, legislatures are going to have to pony up a lot more money to pay for proper care for them behind bars.”
* This story has been updated since publication.
Muslim Americans to NYPD: Enough Already, the Commish Must Go
01 week ago
On Tuesday the New York Times reported that the New York Police Department showed nearly 1,500 of its officers “The Third Jihad,” a 72-minute documentary that casts Muslim Americans as ubiquitously engaged in “a strategy to infiltrate and dominate America.” It was the latest item in a growing list of revelations about the NYPD’s profiling and surveillance of Muslim Americans, and now it has prompted demands that the police commissioner, one of the city’s most powerful public figures, immediately step down.
Dozens of community and religious leaders gathered on the steps of City Hall Thursday to call for the immediate resignation of both the commissioner and his top spokesperson. The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition convened the press conference following reports that NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and spokesperson Paul Browne had lied about the police department’s use of the video, which depicts Muslim Americans as “homegrown terrorists.”
“Not only did the NYPD show this film to 1,500 officers, but Commissioner Kelly participated in its making,” said Amna Akbar, a member of the Civil Liberties Coalition and a law professor at the City University of New York. “But it does not stop there, either. Commissioner Kelly lied about his part in the production of that film.”
Last year, the Village Voice’s Tom Robbins broke the story about the video. A police officer who viewed the film during a training session told Robbins, “It just made Muslims look like the enemy. It was straight propaganda.”
Kelly appears in an interview for under a minute in the 72-minute film.
After Muslim community leaders objected to the video’s use last year, Kelly responded in a March 2011 letter, noting that the NYPD “did not participate in the production and we do not believe the content is appropriate for training purposes.”
But on Tuesday, the Times revealed that the video had been aired widely and that the commissioner and his spokesperson had in fact agreed to participate in its production.
On Wednesday, NYPD spokesperson Browne said that in 2007, after the film’s producers approached him, he recommended that Kelly sit down for an interview.
“I agreed, and regret that, considering I thought that somebody with those credentials would have produced a more objective production and that turned out not to be the case,” Browne told WNYC.
The film was financed and produced by a right wing, Zionist organization called the Clarion Fund, which has produced a number of Islamophobic films that have been widely distributed. During the 2008 presidential election, Clarion funded the production of an anti-Muslim film that it then mailed to millions of swing state voters to raise support for John McCain’s candidacy. One of the Fund’s major donors is Sheldon Adelson, who recently poured millions of dollars into a super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.
Kelly gave a 90-minute interview to the film’s producers. In several minutes of that footage posted online by the producers, Kelly noted that operatives connected to Iran and Hezbollah pose a threat to the city. “Hezbollah is a formidable group, there’s no question about that. Do they have a presence here in this country? We have to assume that they do.”
The narrator of “The Third Jihad,” who claims to be a lone, moderate Muslim who was “outcast by the Islamic leadership across the country” opens the film warning of a homegrown movement of Muslims who will commit acts of terrorism and impose sharia law on the United States.
“We all know about terrorism,” the narrator says. “This is a war you don’t know about.”
The film is rife with ominous images of Muslim men burning American flags, Hezbollah rocket fire, sensational clips from Fox News and claims of terrorist sympathies among leading Muslim American advocates and civil rights groups based solely on guilt by association.
In addition to calling for Kelly and Browne to resign, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition is also calling for the NYPD to retrain the police officers who viewed the film and for the City Council to institute an independent community oversight mechanism to place a check on the NYPD’s practices.
Apologies, But No Changes
Mayor Bloomberg defended his top cop on Thursday.
“Commissioner Kelly should not step down. I think it’s fair to say that it was a little bit of an embarrassment that this film was made,” said Bloomberg, WNYC reported.
Bloomberg also said he would not support the retraining of officers or additional oversight of the police department.
Instead of action, on Wednesday Commissioner Kelly issued a tepid apology.
“I offer my apologies to members of the Muslim community,” Kelly wrote in a statement.
“While it never became part of the Department’s curriculum,” he wrote, “and was not authorized for any training, regrettably it was shown in a room where officers … view it over an extended period in 2010.”
A number of City Council members spoke at the press conference as well. Jumaane Williams, a Council member from Brooklyn called for Browne’s immediate resignation, though stopped short of demanding Kelly’s ouster.
“There are too many instances where he has blatantly lied about what is going on with the NYPD to the tax payers to pay his salary,” Williams said of Browne. “If the mayor and the commissioner will not hold [Browne] accountable–will not hold themselves accountable– then perhaps it’s time for them to go as well.”
Last year Council member Williams was the target of the NYPD’s racial profiling practices when he was arrested without cause while trying to enter an event at the Brooklyn Museum, during Brooklyn’s annual West Indian Day Parade. At the time of his arrest, Williams was wearing a Council member’s pin on his lapel.
After Thursday’s press conference Williams told Colorlines.com, “There’s only so much disrespect and feeling like someone’s in your community to hurt you and harm you—and you’re paying these people to do it; you feel under siege–there’s only so much you can take of that.”
Profiling’s Familiar to Muslim New Yorkers
The revelations about “The Third Jihad” come as little surprise to many in the Muslim community in New York, who have been the targets of growing surveillance and infiltration by the NYPD.
Last year, The Associated Press reported that the NYPD has been engaged since 9/11 in systemic practices of surveillance, infiltration and “mapping” of Muslim communities. According to an August 2011 AP investigation:
undercover officers, known as “rakers,” [are sent] into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.
The NYPD has also made extensive use of informants who infiltrate communities. The AP reported:
[The NYPD] dispatched more officers to Pakistani neighborhoods and, according to one former police official directly involved in the effort, instructed them to look for reasons to stop cars: speeding, broken tail lights, running stop signs, whatever. The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior. An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant.
The informants’ activities have led to convictions. But it has become increasingly clear that these convictions are based on practices that amount to entrapment. In many cases, the terrorism plots would never have existed were it not for the work of the informants, who often presented fake plots to vulnerable young men with no previous connections to terrorist organizations. When the men agreed to participate, often in secondary roles and with trepidation, they were arrested and the NYPD and federal officials claimed victory in foiling the attacks they dreamed up in the first place.
On Thursday, Akbar explained that the press conference had been called “not just because of the recent revelations of their involvement with ‘The Third Jihad’. It’s because a number of actions they’ve taken and the approach their department has taken to policing our communities–to infiltrating them and to treating us like we’re suspects when we’re just living our lives day to day.”
Groups Want NYPD Chief’s Job Over Anti-Muslim Propaganda in Trainings
01 week ago
On Thursday, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition held a press conference is front of City Hall calling for the NYPD Chief Raymond Kelly’s resignation after news surfaced that an anti-Muslim documentary he appears in was being was being played on a loop at police trainings. According to documents uncovered by the NYU’s Brennan Center, the NYPD showed the anti-Muslim film to nearly 1,500 officers during its training curriculum, reports The New York Times.
According to the film, the goal of “much of Muslim leadership here in America” is to “infiltrate and dominate” the United States.
Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne told Times on Monday that the filmmakers had relied on old interview clips and had never spoken with Kelly, but on Tuesday Browne admitted the police chief had personally cooperated with the filmmakers of “The Third Jihad” — a decision the commissioner now describes as a mistake.
The film, according to the documents obtained, was shown on a “continuous loop” for between three months and a year to officers receiving antiterrorism training. The film, amid images of assassinations, bombings and executions, portrays many mainstream American Muslim leaders as closet radical Islamists, and states that their “primary tactic” is deception.
“It has become increasingly clear in recent years that the NYPD is engaged in systemic and unapologetic practices of surveillance and racial and religious profiling of Muslim communities. The practices have long raised serious civil rights and civil liberties concerns and create a climate of fear in New York’s Muslim communities,” said Seth Freed Wessler, Colorlines.com’s investigation reporter.
“Relations between police and the diverse Muslim community are already tense after The Associated Press uncovered aggressive surveillance of Muslims, including American citizens. The propaganda of this film will only damage those relations further and make law enforcement more difficult,” the New York Times editorial board wrote on Tuesday.
Along with the call for Kelly’s resignation, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition this morning demanded that the City Council institute an independent community control and oversight mechanism for the NYPD. They also called on the NYPD to retrain all 1500 officers who watched The Third Jihad during cadet training.
Ward Connerly Being Investigated by IRS for Mismanaging Funds
02 weeks ago
Ward Connerly, the man that’s campaigned agaisnt affirmative action across the country, is being accused of mismanaging and exploiting donations made by fellow conservatives for his own benefit. The American Civil Rights Institute that was founded by Connerly is under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and by the attorney general of California, according to the NY Times.
Connerly has faced similar accusation before but this time the detailed allegations come from Jennifer Gratz, the named plaintiff in a landmark 2003 Supreme Court case that struck down a race-based admissions policy at the University of Michigan.
“I’m sorry to hear this because I’m a great admirer of both of them,” Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which also opposes affirmative action, told the NY Times. “She is a courageous, smart person — and Ward is also a courageous, smart person.”
Clegg went on to say there were “few people who can do or would do what he does,” adding that it is hard to set a salary on a job that requires enduring racially charged name-calling from fellow blacks.
According to Times, the most recent tax filings from the American Civil Rights Institute showed Connerly’s annual salary reached $1.5 million, more than half the institute’s revenue.
Below is a copy of a letter sent to the board of Ward Connerly’s group,
the American Civil Rights Institute, last September by a lawyer for
Jennifer Gratz. The letter was obtained by The
New York Times.
NYPD Officers Shot and Killed a Black Man Yesterday in his Own Home
03 weeks ago
Details about NYPD Officers shooting an African-American male in his home Thursday still remain unclear but neighbors claim the victim had been innocent of any wrongdoing.
Police say they arrived outside the home of 26-year old, Dwayne Browne after several 911 calls were made by a woman reporting a “robbery in progress.”
Family members say Browne was upstairs listening to music, when he went outside to check on a possible break-in after seeing two men running from the residence from his window upstairs.
Details are still developing but the New York Times’ City Room blog reports the latest:
Charles Barron, a city councilman, who was speaking at the scene on Friday morning, said people had gone into Mr. Browne’s house “to do some harm,” just before the shooting. But Mr. Browne’s role in the events and his actions when officers responded to the scene remained murky.
A law enforcement official said that uniformed officers from the 75th Precinct had responded to the address for a call of a “home invasion.”
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing, said that at one point, two officers opened fire. Afterward, the official said, investigators recovered drugs and a scale. The official also said a gun – possibly belonging to the dead man – was recovered at the location.
Another law enforcement official said the weapon the police recovered was a .38-caliber handgun, “with five live rounds and one in the chamber.” But the official said the only bullets fired in the incident came from the police.
The 75th Precinct is where Officer Peter J. Figoski was fatally shot last month as he arrived as part of a backup team to officers responding to a call of a burglary in progress at a basement home at 25 Pine Street, in East New York. In that case, the police said that an armed crew of four men was interrupted as they tried to rob a residence they believed was a base for a marijuana dealing, and that one of the men, Lamont Pride, opened fire.
“They’re trying to cover something up because they stay too long in that house. They’ve been there for hours trying to cover up what they want to cover up,” Browne’s mother told WCBS.
Browne leaves behind a 7-year old son, Dasani.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Punches Mentally Ill Woman [Video]
03 weeks ago
On Monday evening, a Los Angeles Police Department officer struck a special needs woman in the face with his elbow–and it was all caught on video. The unidentified woman, who police say has mental health issues, was “not being combative” according to witnesses.
The incident happened on a Los Angeles Metro bus in nearby Bellflower, which is a predominantly Latino community just outside Downtown LA.
“They said get off the bus. She then started cursing at (the female deputy). You could tell she had special needs. After that they grab her, she curses him out, calls him a big shot, next thing you know he gives her a big shot,” explained Jermaine Green, who recorded the incident, to KNBC.
“I couldn’t believe it. He seen me taping. He looked up at the camera a few times, and he still hit her like that, and I can’t believe he didn’t try to diffuse the situation at all,” Green went on to say in an interview with KNBC.
Green went on to explain the officer attempted to confiscate the video he recorded:
Green claims the deputies then tried to intimidate him when he refused to hand over his cell phone.
“He comes to me and says you can be under arrest if you don’t give me that video,” Green said.
Green said the deputy then asked if he had any warrants.
“I said no, I’m a veteran, I just came back, I have six years, I have no record, and he said ‘We’ll see about that.’”
At a press conference on Wednesday Sheriff Lee Baca confirmed it was his understanding the woman was homeless and had a history of mental problems.
Baca also pointed out that the woman was not arrested. She is currently held on a 72-hour psychiatric hold.
This post has been corrected since publication.