REDEYE 8/10/16

Racist cops still killing as often as before Ferguson 

Fivethirtyeight.com, 7/7 — Alton Sterling and Philando Castile…were killed by police…weren’t posing as threat, let alone one that justified deadly force….

Outrage about police killings has gone national since Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, nearly two years ago….Police chiefs and the director of the …[FBI] have said rising violent crime rates were the result of increased scrutiny of police: a supposed “Ferguson effect.”

Yet the best available data suggests that if police…are being watched more closely, that hasn’t reduced the frequency with which they kill people. In fact, they might be killing people more often. And the people dying still are disproportionately black….

The federal government…agencies’ various counts are incomplete. Fatal Encounters and Killed By Police…try to fill in the gaps….Mapping Police Violence collates and fact-checks these….The Guardian added its resources….and The Washington Post and the Gun Violence Archive count fatal police shootings,…the majority of police killings….

Volunteers and journalists have filled the void left by the government….

…All agree that police killings have held steady…in the years before and after [Michael Brown] died.

And blacks continue to make up about 30 percent of the people dying from police violence, though they make up 13 percent of the nation’s population.

 U.S. ‘founders’ ingrained racism from the get-go

NYT, 7/4 — For more than two centuries we have been reading the Declaration of Independence wrong,.…not the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote it. To them, separation from Britain was…more about racial fear and exclusion….

The Declaration…detracts…from the heart of the document. The 27 accusations against King George III….the very last one — the ultimate deal-breaker — was the most important for them….“He has excited domestic insurrections…to bring on the…merciless Indian savages….In the…18^th century, “domestic insurrections” refers to rebellious slaves. “Merciless Indian savages” doesn’t need much explanation….

…A group of people gathered in…Huntington, N.Y…create[d] an effigy of King George….The blackened his face, and then…stuck his head “full of feathers” like “savages”… lined it with gunpowder and then set it ablaze.

The 27^th and final grievance was at the Declaration’s heart….

The crowd in Huntington… [was] indeed celebrating an…America…defined by racial fear and exclusion….The effigy represented…enemies who were all excluded from the republic….

This idea — that some people belong as proper Americans and others do not — has marked American history ever since….

…Americans since 1776 have operated time and again on the assumption that blacks and Indians don’t belong in this republic. This notion comes from the very founders….

 U.S.-backed rulers caused violent refugee crisis

NYT, 6/28 [letter] — …The plight of young Central American refugees [are] trying to escape their crime-ridden societies [but] ….the oligarchs and generals…greed and brutality have created the violent crisis. And the United States has supported and protected them from their own people for decades….

The root cause of their problem is not United States immigration policy. It is United States foreign policy.

‘Blood on Obama’s Hands’

NYT, 6/20 — …The Obama administration’s…fine words about refugees…rank with deadly hypocrisy….[It] pressured and bribed Mexico to do…[the] dirty work, detaining and deporting people fleeing gangs in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala….betray[ing] some of the world’s most vulnerable people.

The American-Mexican collusion began in 2014 after a surge of Central Americans crossed into the United States, including 50,000 unaccompanied children….

…Obama portrayed his action as an effort to address a humanitarian crisis… [but] made the crisis worse….to put refugees…back into mortal peril….In the last five years, Mexico and the U.S. have deported 800,000 people to Central America, including 40,000 children….Last year Mexico deported more than five times as many unaccompanied children as it had five years earlier, and the Obama administration heralds this as a success….

…Salva Lacruz, coordinator of a human rights center in Tapachula…[said] Obama’s eloquent speeches on refugees and immigration…. “It’s just words….A lot of hypocrisy.”

The prosecutors aim to kill

NYT, 7/3 — One kept a paperweight of an electric chair on his desk. Another boasted about being named the “deadliest prosecutor in America”…and mocked defendants with intellectual disabilities….

…The death sentences [these five prosecutors]…have obtained are equal to 15 percent of the current national death row population….

During their tenures, each either secured dozens of death sentences personally or led offices that won hundreds….

…Mr. Macy…won 54 death sentences during two decades as Oklahoma County’s district attorney….Three people he sent to death row were later exonerated….

…Another prosecutor said of Mr. Myers, “Virtually the only time you see him in the courtroom is when he’s trying to kill people….”

…The rate of death sentences has less to do with the crimes of the people being prosecuted than with the men and women doing the prosecuting.