anarcho-queer:

Three Aggressive NYPD Officers Handcuffed And Detain 15 Year Old Student For Using A Student MetroCard

A 15-year-old Harlem student claims she was roughed up, handcuffed, and detained by aggressive cops who mistakenly thought she was too old to be using a student MetroCard. “They called me liar,” Alexis Sumpter told the News of the July 26 incident. “Then they grabbed me by my arms and flung me up the stairs. I kept saying, ‘I’m only 15—why are you guys doing this?’ They said they didn’t owe me an explanation.”

Sumpter, who attends Harlem Village Academies, was on her way to her first day at a marketing internship on Canal Street when two plainclothes cops spotted her using her student MetroCard at the 125th Street Station. “They didn’t approach me in a calm manner and they were very rude the whole time,” she said. “They were talking to me like they were trying to show they were superior to me.” The DOE confirmed the card is valid until Aug. 17.

The cops demanded to know how old she was, but didn’t believe her when she said she was 15—she told them she didn’t have ID because she had recently been mugged for her iPhone and wallet. She says a third cop joined them, and pressed her face to a wall while the other two cuffed her. Cops called her father, who vouched that she was 15; still not believing her, they called her mother, who rushed over with her daughter’s birth certificate. Alexis was held in custody for 90 minutes altogether, and wasn’t arrested or given a summons; but she did go to the hospital because the handcuffs caused swelling on her wrists.

Alexis says she avoids that train now: “I don’t want to see them again,” she said. “I don’t want to have to go through that again.” The whole situation sounds eerily similar to the frivolous arrest of a 21-year-old female student who was held by NYPD for 36 hours for not carrying ID in Riverside Park—Sumpter’s situation also calls to mind the Charleston-dancing couple who claims they spent 23 hours in custody for dancing while waiting for the subway.

(via crunkfeministcollective)

feedmerevolution:

Bay Area cops kill Black man in front of his own home
Police story contradicted by witness and survivor

[Story by Liberation News]

In the early hours of Sept. 2, the Vallejo Police Department claimed its fifth shooting fatality in four months. Mario Romero, a 23-year-old African-American father, died after two cops fired 31 rounds into his vehicle.

Romero and his brother-in-law, 21-year-old Joseph Johnson, were sitting in Romero’s car talking in front of Romero’s house. Suddenly, a police cruiser pulled up in front of the car and a bright light was shined into the eyes of the two men. The cops started screaming at them to put their hands up but never identified themselves as police.

The police claim that Johnson put his hands up but that Romero opened the car door and appeared to be exiting. The cops maintain that they saw a gun in Romero’s waistband as he was exiting while simultaneously claiming that their view of Romero was obscured by the open car door. Under this pretext the police justify their shooting Romero.

After being shot, police say Romero appeared to be clutching something from behind the car door. They say he did not put his hands up when ordered to do so a second time, so the cops then fired a total of 31 rounds into the vehicle, killing Romero and severely wounding Johnson. After the shooting, the cops allege they found a pellet gun, which is neither dangerous nor illegal, in Romero’s car. No actual gun was found in the car.

What the cops did not know was that there was a witness in the house. The bright lights and screaming that preceded the shooting awoke Cynquita Martin, Romero’s sister. She looked out her window and saw cops pointing guns at her brother and brother-in-law as they sat in the car. She says that the cops started shooting instantly after ordering the men to put their hands up. Romero never even began to leave the car. After firing several rounds at the two men, Martin said one of the cops “hopped on top of the car and he was just letting his gun loose. He was just shooting and shooting.”

After hearing Martin’s account of the events, the police acknowledged that one of the cops jumped on top of the car after the shots were fired but claimed the officer was checking to see whether there was anyone else in the vehicle beside Romero and Johnson. This is hardly a more comforting account of the incident. From his hospital bed, Johnson has backed Martin’s version of events. He maintains that there was no pellet gun in the car and that neither he nor Romero ever exited the vehicle.

Romero’s relatives have set up daily protests outside the Vallejo Police Department. Martin has been a vocal leader, demanding answers: “All this inside stuff—all these internal investigations—they aren’t working. We need answers. This needs to end.”The family has found support from Adam and Jeralynn Blueford, who have become leaders of the anti-police brutality movement in the Bay Area since their son Adam was killed by an Oakland cop on May 6.

Vallejo police chief Joseph Kreins made this disgusting defense of the officers involved in the shooting: “When dealing with violent confrontations, our officers are trained to use whatever force is reasonable and necessary to effect an arrest or eliminate a threat. In this case, [the officers] fired several rounds, stopped firing, re-evaluated the threat and then continued firing until they perceived that the threat was no longer imminent.”

In other words, when cops accost a person of color, and “feel threatened,” it is alright for them to shoot that person until they are certain the person is dead.

Martin has said: “It’s unjust that [Romero] couldn’t come home. This is supposed to be his safe place. When you go home that’s supposed to be your safe place. And they took that away from all of us in this house.”

http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/bay-area-cops-kill-black-man.html

(via decolonizeyourmind)

thepeoplesrecord:

Youth activists infiltrate Florida immigrant detention center, find people wrongly held
July 31, 2012

Activists with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance intentionally placed themselves in deportation proceedings in order to enter the Broward Transitional Center, an immigration detention facility in Florida — and they say they found scores of detainees who shouldn’t be there under the Obama administration’s revised deportation policies.

Beginning in June 2011, the administration ordered broader discretion in the prosecution of undocumented immigrants, with consideration to be given to age, how the person entered the country and his or her education, military service, criminal history and family circumstances. Then in June of this year, the administration extended the policy to cover undocumented youth brought to the U.S. as children.

But it appears that those policies are not being applied on the ground. Over the course of the past month, seven NIYA activists who themselves are undocumented immigrants entered the facility (in photo) in an effort to organize detainees. They report finding people who should not or need not be there, including:

* people with pending applications for U visas, which give temporary legal status and work eligibility to victims of certain crimes including rape, torture, domestic violence and human trafficking;

* more than a dozen youth eligible for conditional permanent residency under the DREAM Act, federal legislation that has not yet been approved by Congress but which sets out criteria that the Obama administration says it is using in making deportation decisions;

* several cases of immigrants in need of immediate medical care, including one person with a blood clot in his leg and another with a bullet in the spine; and

* more than 60 people with no criminal record or prior deportations who are eligible for discretion under the administration’s policy.

Many of the detainees have been at the facility for at least five months, with some there for as long as 20 months, the activists report. Among those involved in the undercover investigation was Viridiana Martinez, an immigration-reform activist with the North Carolina Dream Team.

A facility specifically for low-priority immigrant detainees, Broward Transitional Center is operated by the GEO Group, a private correctional services company based in Boca Raton, Fla. Formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections Corp., GEO Group receives an average of about $166 a day in tax dollars for each detainee at the Broward facility, which has a capacity of 600.

NIYA publicized the findings of its undercover investigation in a July 30 press conference held outside the office of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). The group is petitioning Homeland Security officials to undertake a full and immediate review of all detainees at the facility.

“NIYA will no longer allow GEO Group or other private prison corporations to profit off of shattered families and broken lives,” the group said in a statement. “We will continue to organize inside their jails until the president lives up to his promises.”

Source

(via decolonizeyourmind)

Today in What The Entire Fuck?!: Mississippi Schools Sending Kids To Prison For Misbehaving In The Classroom

The Department of Justice on Friday uncovered a so-called “School-to-Prison pipeline” in Mississippi, where teachers and principals are shipping off children into the criminal justice system for infractions as small as a dress code violation.

Schools in the city of Meridian, MS, have an established practice of sending students, particularly black and disabled students, to prison for minor disciplinary problems — in clear violation of the Constitution. As ABC reports, that DOJ is claiming that the schools, which protect against “abuse of government authority in legal proceedings and fairness of due process rights,” are violating the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

from ABC:

Also in the findings letter the Civil Rights Division alleges that “Lauderdale County and the Youth Court Judges violate the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments by failing to provide children procedural due process in the youth court. Lauderdale County, the Youth Court judges, and the Mississippi Division of Youth Services violate the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments by failing to provide children procedural due process rights in the probationary process.”

(Source: girljanitor, via bad-dominicana)

darkjez:

djphatrick:

A 13-Year-Old’s Slavery Analogy Raises Some Uncomfortable Truths in School

In a bold comparative analysis of TheNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Jada Williams, a 13-year old eighth grader at School #3 in Rochester, New York, asserted that in her experience, today’s education system is a modern-day version of slavery. According to the Fredrick Douglass Foundation of New York, the schools’ teachers and administrators were so offended by Williams’ essay that they began a campaign of harassment—kicking her out of class and trying to suspend her—that ultimately forced her parents to withdraw her from the school.

In her essay, which was written for a contest, Williams reflected on what Douglass heard his slave master, Mr. Auld, telling his wife after catching her teaching Douglass how to read. “If you teach that [n***er] (speaking of myself) how to read, there will be no keeping him,” Auld says. “It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.”

Williams wrote that overcrowded, poorly managed classrooms prevent real learning from happening and thus produces the same results as Mr. Auld’s outright ban. She wrote that her white teachers—the vast majority of Rochester students are black and Hispanic, but very few teachers are people of color—are in a “position of power to dictate what I can, cannot, and will learn, only desiring that I may get bored because of the inconsistency and the mismanagement of the classroom.”

Read more: Education - GOOD

truth.

I’m so freaking proud of this child.

“The conservative Frederick Douglass Foundation gave Williams a special award, saying that her essay ‘actually demonstrates that she understood the autobiography.’ They have also reached out to the school for an explanation of the 13-year-old’s treatment.”

(via queergiftedblack)