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https://nytimes.com/2022/07/07/us/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-sentence.html

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Killer of George Floyd Sentenced to 21 Years for Violating Civil Rights (Published 2022)

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Derek Chauvin, already serving more than 22 years in state prison for murder, pleaded guilty to federal charges that he used excessive force against Mr. Floyd and a 14-year-old boy.

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The Green Mile (1999) Official Trailer - Tom Hanks Movie HD

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All Rise Lets Us See Ourselves In Powerful Roles

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(The following synopsis was taken from IMdB.com with the author's credit at the end.)

"Two drifters are passing through a Western town, when news comes in that a local farmer has been murdered and his cattle stolen. The townspeople, joined by the drifters, form a posse to catch the perpetrators. They find three men in possession of the cattle, and are determined to see justice done on the spot."
Written by DavidLevene

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1943 - The Ox-Bow Incident - Henry Fonda; Henry Morgan

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(The following synopsis was taken from IMdB.com with the author's credit at the end.) "Two drifters are passing through a Western town, when news comes in that a local farmer has been murdered and his cattle stolen. The townspeople, joined by the drifters, form a posse to catch the perpetrators.

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Selma Official Trailer #1 (2015) - Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr. Movie HD

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The Great Debaters  { 2007 } Full Movie .Denzel Washington.Forest Whitaker.

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To Kill A Mockingbird(1962) - The Trial Scene(Tom Robinson's testimony)

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American Crime Story , The People vs O.J Simpson, trailer

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Marshall Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Trailers

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Department of Afro-American Research Arts Culture

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Preview Clip: Separate But Equal (1991, starring Sidney Poitier)

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Trump Selects Amy Coney Barrett to Fill Ginsburg’s Seat on the Supreme Court

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Trump Selects Amy Coney Barrett to Fill Ginsburg’s Seat on the Supreme Court

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Follow NPR's coverage of Ginsburg's death and the political aftermath here.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.

The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington, D.C., surrounded by family. She was 87.

"Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature," Chief Justice John Roberts said. "We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tireless and resolute champion of justice."

Architect of the legal fight for women's rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, becoming its most prominent member. Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight of the presidential campaign.

Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

She knew what was to come. Ginsburg's death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the court about to open a new term, the chief justice no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases.
Upcoming political battle
Though Roberts has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones this year, casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to protect at least temporarily the so-called DREAMers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.

Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012, the high court upheld the law in a 5-4 ruling, with Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority. But this time the outcome may well be different.

That's because Ginsburg's death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another appointment by President Trump so conservatives would have 6-3 majority. And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others.

At the center of the battle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016, he took a step unprecedented in modern times: He refused for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee.

Back then, McConnell's justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of justice they wanted. But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. Instead he will try immediately to push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg's liberal shoes, even if Trump were to lose his reelection bid. Asked what he would do in circumstances such as these, McConnell said: "Oh, we'd fill it."

So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election. It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice John Paul Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did - until age 90.
"Tough as nails"
"My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did," she said in an interview in 2019.

She didn't quite make it. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless a historic figure. She changed the way the world is for American women. For more than a decade, until her first judicial appointment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gender equality. When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men. Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution.

That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court's 7-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution. True, Ginsburg said, most women - indeed most men - would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands.

"Reliance on overbroad generalizations ... estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," Ginsburg wrote.

She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was "tough as nails."

By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star to women of all ages. She was the subject of a hit documentary, a biopic, an operetta, merchandise galore featuring her "Notorious RBG" moniker, a Time magazine cover and regular Saturday Night Live sketches.

On one occasion in 2016, Ginsburg got herself into trouble and later publicly apologized for disparaging remarks she made about then-presidential candidate Trump.

But for the most part Ginsburg enjoyed her fame and maintained a sense of humor about herself.
The road to law
Asked about the fact that she had apparently fallen asleep during the 2015 State of the Union address, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, admitting that although she had vowed not to drink at dinner with the other justices before the speech, the wine had just been too good to resist. The result, she said, was that she was perhaps not an entirely "sober judge" and kept nodding off.

Born in Brooklyn, Ruth Bader went to public schools, where she excelled as a student - and as a baton twirler. By all accounts, it was her mother who was the driving force in her young life, but Celia Bader died of cancer the day before the future justice would graduate from high school.

Then 17, Ruth Bader went on to Cornell University on a full scholarship, where she met Martin (aka "Marty") Ginsburg. "What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain," she said.

After her graduation, they were married and went off to Fort Sill, Okla., for his military service. There Mrs. Ginsburg, despite scoring high on the civil service exam, could only get a job as a typist, and when she became pregnant, she lost even that job.

Two years later, the couple returned to the East Coast to attend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of more than 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that "should go to a man."

At Harvard, she was the academic star, not her husband. The couple were busy juggling schedules and their toddler when Marty Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Surgeries and aggressive radiation followed.

"So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me," Marty Ginsburg said in a 1993 interview with NPR.

The experience also taught the future justice that sleep was a luxury. During the year of her husband's illness, he was only able to eat late at night; after that he would dictate his senior class paper to her. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ruth Bader Ginsburg recalled in an NPR interview. "Then I'd take out the books and start reading what I needed to be prepared for classes the next day."

Marty Ginsburg survived, graduated and got a job in New York; his wife, a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her law school class. Despite her academic achievements, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, she wasn't even interviewed.

It was bad enough that she was a woman, she recalled later, but she was also a mother, and male judges worried she would be diverted by her "familial obligations."

A mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, finally got her a clerkship in New York by promising Judge Edmund Palmieri that if she couldn't do the work, he would provide someone who could. That was "the carrot," Ginsburg would say later. "The stick" was that Gunther, who regularly fed his best students to Palmieri, told the judge that if he didn't take Ginsburg, Gunther would never send him a clerk again. The Ginsburg clerkship apparently was a success; Palmieri kept her not for the usual one year, but two, from 1959-61.

Ginsburg's next path is rarely talked about, mainly because it doesn't fit the narrative. She learned Swedish so she could work with Anders Bruzelius, a Swedish civil procedure scholar. Through the Columbia University School of Law Project on International Procedure, Ginsburg and Bruzelius co-authored a book.

In 1963, Ginsburg finally landed a teaching job at Rutgers Law School, where she at one point hid her second pregnancy by wearing her mother-in-law's clothes. The ruse worked; her contract was renewed before her baby was born.
The "mother brief"
While at Rutgers, she began her work fighting gender discrimination.

Her first big case was a challenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from taking a tax deduction for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the deduction, by statute, could only be claimed by women, or widowed or divorced men. But Moritz had never married.

The tax court concluded that the Internal Revenue Code was immune to constitutional challenge, a notion that tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg viewed as "preposterous." The two Ginsburgs took on the case - he from the tax perspective, she from the constitutional one.

According to Marty Ginsburg, for his wife, this was the "mother brief." She had to think through all the issues and how to fix the inequity. The solution was to ask the court not to invalidate the statute but to apply it equally to both sexes. She won in the lower courts.

"Amazingly," he recalled in a 1993 NPR interview, the government petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, stating that the decision "cast a cloud of unconstitutionality" over literally hundreds of federal statutes, and it attached a list of those statutes, which it compiled with Defense Department computers.

Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, "were the statutes that my wife then litigated ... to overturn over the next decade."

In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed. Ruth Bader Ginsburg represented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the executor of her son's estate instead of her ex-husband.

The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. The answer from the all-male Supreme Court: no.

It was the first time the court had struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender.

And that was just the beginning.

By then Ginsburg was earning quite a reputation. She would become the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

As the chief architect of the battle for women's legal rights, Ginsburg devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning.

Knowing that she had to persuade male, establishment-oriented judges, she often picked male plaintiffs, and she liked Social Security cases because they illustrated how discrimination against women can harm men. For example, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she represented a man whose wife, the principal breadwinner, died in childbirth. The husband sought survivor's benefits to care for his child, but under the then-existing Social Security law, only widows, not widowers, were entitled to such benefits.

"This absolute exclusion, based on gender per se, operates to the disadvantage of female workers, their surviving spouses, and their children," Ginsburg told the justices at oral argument. The Supreme Court would ultimately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she argued.

Over the years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seeking to persuade the courts that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applies not just to racial and ethnic minorities but to women as well.

In an interview with NPR, she explained the legal theory that she eventually sold to the Supreme Court.

"The words of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause - 'nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.' Well that word, 'any person,' covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971," Ginsburg said.

During these pioneering years, Ginsburg would often work through the night as she had during law school. But by this time, she had two children, and she later liked to tell a story about the lesson she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a proclivity for getting into trouble.

The scrapes were hardly major, and Ginsburg grew exasperated by demands from school administrators that she come in to discuss her son's alleged misbehavior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. "I had stayed up all night the night before, and I said to the principal, 'This child has two parents. Please alternate calls.' "
The Supreme Court's second woman
After that, she found, the calls were few and far between. It seemed, she said, that most infractions were not worth calling a busy husband about.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as something of a centrist liberal, and in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court, the second woman appointed to the position.

She was not first on his list. For months, Clinton flirted with other potential nominees, and some women's rights activists withheld their active support because they were worried about Ginsburg's views on abortion. She had been publicly critical of the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade.

But in the background, Marty Ginsburg was lobbying hard for his wife. And finally Ruth Ginsburg was invited for a meeting with the president. As one White House official put it afterward, Clinton "fell for her - hook, line and sinker." So did the Senate. She was confirmed by a 96-3 vote.

Once on the court, Ginsburg was an example of a woman who defied stereotypes. Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went parasailing. At home, it was her husband who was the chef, indeed a master chef, while the justice cheerfully acknowledged she was an awful cook.

Though a liberal, she and the court's conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, were the closest of friends. Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.

Over the years, as Ginsburg's place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women's rights cases.

Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back pay available for victims of employment discrimination. The resulting legislation was the first bill passed in 2009 after Obama took office.

In 2014, she dissented fiercely in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit companies to refuse, on religious grounds, to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in health care plans. Such an exemption, she said, would "deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs, access to contraceptive coverage."

Where, she asked, "is the stopping point?" Suppose it offends an employer's religious belief "to pay the minimum wage" or "to accord women equal pay?"

And in 2013, when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, contending that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dissented. She said that throwing out the provision "when it has worked and is continuing to work ... is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

She viewed her dissents as a chance to persuade a future court.

"Some of my favorite opinions are dissenting opinions," Ginsburg told NPR. "I will not live to see what becomes of them, but I remain hopeful."

And yet, Ginsburg still managed some unexpected victories by winning over one or two of the conservative justices in important cases. In 2015, for example, she authored the court's decision upholding independent redistricting commissions established by voter referenda as a way of removing some of the partisanship in drawing legislative district lines.

Ginsburg always kept a backbreaking schedule of public appearances both at home and abroad,even after five bouts with cancer: colon cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer 10 years later, lung cancer in 2018, and then pancreatic cancer again in 2019 and liver lesions in 2020.During that time, she endured chemotherapy, radiation and, in the last years of her life, terrible pain from shingles that never went away completely. All who knew her admired her grit. In 2009, three weeks after major cancer surgery, she surprised everyone when she showed up for the State of the Union address.

Shortly after that, she was back on the bench; it was her husband, Marty, who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.

A year later her psychological toughness was on full display when her beloved husband of 56 years was mortally ill. As she packed up his things at the hospital before taking him home to die, she found a note he had written to her. "My Dearest Ruth," it began, "You are the only person I have ever loved," setting aside children and family. "I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell. ... The time has come for me to ... take leave of life because the loss of quality simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less."

Shortly after that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the justice, was on the bench, reading an important opinion she had authored for the court. She was there, she said, because "Marty would have wanted it."

Years later, she would read the letter aloud in an NPR interview, and at the end, choke down the tears.

In the years after Marty's death, she would persevere without him, maintaining a jam-packed schedule when she was not on the bench or working on opinions.

Some liberals criticized her for not retiring while Obama was president, but she was at the top of her game, enjoyed her work enormously and feared that Republicans might not confirm a successor. She was an avid consumer of opera, literature and modern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sustained her.

"I do think that I was born under a very bright star," she said in an NPR interview. "Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men."

And it was that legal crusade for women's rights that ultimately led to her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87

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Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, died from complications from cancer. Her death will set in motion what promises to be a tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her.

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Barmhall's World: Justice System and Eric Garner - Lady Justice can't breathe,Bill Bramhall/New York Daily News
Statement of New York City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus
"The New York City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus stands united today to denounce the Grand Jury's failure to hold New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo accountable for the death of Eric Garner.

The death of Eric Garner by an illegal chokehold is only one example of unwarranted practices and the use of excessive force exercised by some NYPD officers. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Garner family who now join the ranks of the families of Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown who have not only tragically lost a son, husband and father, but have now been denied justice.

We are outraged that the Grand Jury failed to indict Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. The failure to recognize that black and brown lives matter is evident throughout all five boroughs, as New York's communities of color suffer the brutality of hyper-aggressive policing and are too often denied meaningful accountability of officers who to choose to use excessive and deadly force.

We demand accountability for officers who use excessive and deadly force in communities of color throughout our city."

[more statements here:]

[ The City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus consists of 26 of the 51 members of the City Council. The BLA Caucus convenes to make sure that issues of particular concern to the City's Black, Latino and Asian communities are being addressed through the legislative, oversight and budgetary powers of the City Council. The Chairs of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus are Council Members Rosie Mendez and Andy King.]

How can anyone in the community have faith in the system now?

Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Executive Director Vince Warren issued the following statement yesterday after the grand jury's decision:

How can anyone in the community have faith in the system now? First Ferguson, now Staten Island. The Grand Jury's failure to indict sends the clear message that Black lives don't matter. But they do. It's bad enough that broken windows policing over something as harmless as selling untaxed cigarettes led to this tragic killing; it's even worse when the officer responsible - who was caught on tape using a prohibited choke hold, no less - is not held accountable. The problem isn't one officer, though: it's systemic. We need real reform of discredited broken windows policing and of the NYPD more than ever. With the court-ordered joint reform process in our class action stop-and-frisk case Floyd v. City of New York finally getting underway, we have that opportunity.

Day of Action, Thursday at 5:30 in New York City at Foley Square to demand justice for Eric Garner and an end to discriminatory policing.
New York Civil Liberties Union

Justice for Eric Gardner

On July 17, Eric Garner, a black 43-year-old father of six and grandfather of two, died after NYPD officers held him in an illegal chokehold while Garner protested, "I can't breathe!" The tragedy was caught on video, and the medical examiner ruled Garner's death a homicide.

Today, the grand jury in Staten Island decided not to indict the NYPD officer involved.

The failure of the grand jury to file an indictment in the killing of Eric Garner leaves New Yorkers with inescapable questions: How will the NYPD hold the officers involved accountable for his death? And what will Commissioner Bratton do to ensure that this is the last tragedy of its kind?

We need answers.

Donna Lieberman,
Executive Director
New York Civil Liberties Union

We still fight for Eric Garner

A Staten Island Grand Jury has refused to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking 43-year-old Eric Garner to death, just weeks after a St. Louis Grand Jury refused to hold Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson accountable for killing Mike Brown. We are outraged and hurt at this painful injustice and send our deepest condolences to Eric Garner's family.

This non-indictment comes despite the fact that NYPD officers were caught on camera strangling Eric Garner to death. In a horrifying video that later went viral, Pantaleo can be seen chocking Garner as he screams out in pain, "I can' breathe, I can't breath," 11 times.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and President Obama have a duty and responsibility to protect our community against discriminatory policing tactics and violence, especially when local prosecutors fail to do so. But the DOJ will only file federal criminal charges against Eric Garner's killer if enough of us raise our voices and demonstrate a groundswell of outrage against a criminal justice system that shields killer cops from dealing with the consequences of their deadly actions.

Join us in calling on Pres. Obama and the Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Officer Pantaleo under federal criminal charges and overhaul the New York policies and practices that led to Eric Garner's death:

The NYPD's unjust killing of Eric Garner is one among many, and cops who kill or brutalize Black folks are almost never held accountable for their deadly actions. In 1999, officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, killing him in his Bronx apartment; in 2006, police fired 50 shots at Sean Bell, killing him on his wedding day in Queens; and in 2012 officers targeted Ramarley Graham, broke down the door to his home without a search warrant, and killed him in front of his grandmother and younger brother. In all of of these horrifying cases, the District Attorney's office failed to secure a guilty verdict. And some of the officers involved in these deadly altercations were even allowed to remain on the police force with their gun-carrying privileges restored.

Now, with the inhumanity and racism of today's broken criminal justice system on national display, we must go above and beyond to hold our leaders accountable. We are amidst a national crisis that requires nothing short of a transformative, people-led movement to end white supremacy and police brutality. Law enforcement are killing Black youth and adults at the same rate of Jim Crow Era lynchings.

Join us working together to create real-world change.

Urge President Obama and Attorney General Holder to hold Officer Pantaleo accountable for the tragic killing of Eric Garner, and to protect the 1st amendment rights of peaceful protesters.

Tell A.G. Eric Holder and Pres. Obama: indict Officer Pantaleo on federal criminal charges

Dear US Attorney General Eric Holder and Department of Justice,

I urge you to bring federal charges against Eric Garner's killer and investigate the discriminatory NYPD patterns and practices, such as the "Broken Windows" policing tactic that led to this tragic police killing. A New York City Grand Jury has refused to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo who targeted and choked Eric Garner to death.

Many believe that the NYPD conducted an unlawful stop of Eric Garner; witnesses say he was breaking up a fight, not selling untaxed cigarettes as the NYPD claims. That illegal stop quickly escalated, with fatal consequences. Multiple NYPD Officers can be seen on camera, brutally slamming Garner to the ground and applying pressure to his neck despite him repeatedly saying "I can't breathe." And despite the fact that the entire deadly altercation was caught on camera, the criminal justice system has once again failed to hold a law enforcement officer accountable for choking Garner to death.

I demand that you conduct a full and thorough investigation, convene a federal grand jury, arrest and prosecute Officer Daniel Pantaleo to the fullest extent of federal law. By filing federal charges against Officer Pantaleo the DOJ could make it clear that they are prepared to uphold the value of Black life and protect Black folks from discriminatory policing tactics and police violence, especially when local prosecutors fail to do so.

According to FBI statistics, law enforcement kill Black Americans at nearly the same rate as Jim Crow Era lynching. And the NYPD's unjust killing of Eric Garner is one among many, and cops who kill or brutalize Black folks are almost never held accountable for their deadly actions. In 1999, officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, killing him in his Bronx apartment, in 2006, police fired 50 shots at Sean Bell, killing him on his wedding day in Queens, in 2012 officers targeted Ramarley Graham, broke down the door to his home without a search warrant, and killed him in front of his grandmother and younger brother and just last month an officer "accidentally" shot and killed Akai Gurley. This devastating crisis cannot continue.

We are in a historic time; the tragic police killings of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice and so many others has inspired a powerful police accountability movement. And what the DOJ does in this moment will have a major impact on the future of racial profiling and police brutality in America.

The DOJ has the power and responsibility to seucre justice for Eric Garner and investigate the NYPD policies and practices that keep leading to these deadly encounters. I urge you to take immediate action, file federal charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo and overhaul discriminatory NYPD policies and practices that keep leading to these deadly encounters.

Signed,

ColorOfChange

The System that Failed Eric Garner and Michael Brown Cannot be Reformed

By Mychal Denzel Smith
December 3, 2014
TheNation.com Blog

Protesters rallied against police violence in New York on November 24, 2014.
credit: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz // The Nation

That a grand jury decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing 43-year-old Eric Garner the same week where President Obama proposed spending $75 million in federal money to outfit 50,000 police officers across the country with body cameras would seem to be hack Hollywood writing with neatly applied plot points. Garner's death was caught on video-video that the police were aware was being taken-and it still was not enough to indict anyone, least of all the man responsible for choking Garner to death, for any type of wrongdoing. It's as if this decision was handed to us at this time in order to get us to say "now what?"

So. now what? We can move forward with this notion that police officers wearing body cameras will make them more judicious in their use of force, but it seems pretty clear that they just don't give a fuck, and the court system is content to allow them to keep on not giving a fuck. And we'll be right back here when they don't indict the officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland.

So. now what? Not much, so long as the reverence paid to police officers lends itself to deference. They are not regarded as citizens also beholden to the law. They are an armed force charged with maintenance of a status quo steeped in white supremacy and anti-blackness. Key to the reign is the suspension of a belief in the rule of law. Whatever tools they require for to carry out their actual purpose, the public and the courts are eagerly ready to provide.

So. now what? Body cameras seem like a good idea when we think the issue is there isn't enough evidence with which to hold police accountable. They're a good idea if we think the issue is accountability. Other things get tossed around, like diversifying police forces (NYPD is among the most diverse in the country). That sounds like a good idea if we think the problem is sensitivity or cultural miscommunication. We are thinking wrong.

We keep applying the language and framework of accountability, diversity and sensitivity to an issue of oppression. We are attempting to fly an airplane with the keys to a motorcycle. Our tools are woefully inadequate, and until we are ready to admit to ourselves that the police are an inherently oppressive force, and then use the language of anti-oppression and anti-racism in our analysis and solutions, it will not end today, as Eric Garner had hoped. The dead bodies of black folks will continue to line our streets and sidewalks, and they will be treated no better than the roadkill with whom they occupy those spaces.

Last night, at an event addressing racial profiling on the campus of Vassar College, a student told their administration that putting body cameras on security guards was like "Band-Aids to a bullet hole." I was in attendance and was struck by just how literal that phrasing was. We are being choked and shot with impunity, and yet all that is being offered to us in response is a means to relive the experience over and over again. But we already do.

[ Mychal Denzel Smith is a contributing writer at The Nation, a blogger at TheNation.com and a Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is also a freelance writer and social commentator. His work on race, politics, social justice, pop culture, hip hop, mental health, feminism and black male identity has appeared in various publications, including The Guardian, Ebony, theGrio, the Root, Huffington Post and GOOD.]
Copyright c 2014 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted without Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription to The Nation for just $9.50! permission. Distributed by Agence Global.

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Demand Justice - Federal Action Needed in Grand Jury's Failure to Hold Police Officer Accountable for Death of Eric Garner

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Statement of New York City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Executive Director Vince Warren Donna Lieberman, Executive Director, New York Civil Liberties Union Demand the Department of Justice and Pres.