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The Violent Tone of Black Lives Matter Has Alienated Even Liberals Like Me

July 9, 2016

DALLAS — Early Thursday evening, in the loud pitch of protests for the Black Lives Matter movement here at Belo Garden Park, at the corner of South Griffin Street and Main Street, a quiet moment went mostly unnoticed. A smiling middle-aged black man, carrying a handwritten placard, “No Justice. No Peace,” stopped to take a photo of a phalanx of several police officers. One of the officers, a white man, responded with a smile and said, “Wanna take a picture together?” A Hispanic female officer stepped forward to take the man’s camera phone, while the protestor stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the police officers, his sign visible at his feet, a black police officer on his right and the white officer on his left, all smiling. Beside them, with friends and my son, I smiled. It was a moment of warmth in an unfortunate race war that has polarized America.

In town for a fencing tournament, we had stepped out of dinner moments earlier to the buzz of helicopters overhead. Emergency vehicles wailed nearby. A young man, hustling for money, told us folks were in downtown for a demonstration against police shootings of black men. “Be careful,” he said. We followed others to the protest, crossing South Griffin Street, to enter the well-manicured Belo Garden Park, where a black man shouted into a megaphone, with about 500 protestors around him. My friend, who is Hispanic, was wary of possible danger, having grown up years ago amid violent anti-dictatorship protests. We stopped when I spotted the line of police. “We’ll be safe next to the police,” I told my friend. It is a difficult truth to acknowledge: After watching the streets of America burn from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore, we feared violence from the protestors, not the police. Little could we know, we were — metaphorically, at least — in the sniper’s line of fire, with targets on the backs of police, six of them to be injured, five of them to be slain, hours later.

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SOURCE = HeatStreet

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AT&T’s CEO urges employees to confront racial tensions, and explains the problem with “all lives matter”

October 1, 2016

An eloquent defense of the Black Lives Matter movement has come from an unlikely source: the white CEO of a major American corporation. “Our communities are being destroyed by racial tension,” said Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T since 2007, in a speech to company employees last week. “And we’re too polite to talk about it.” In a speech recorded by an attendee at AT&T’s Employee Resource Groups conference, Stephenson praised the “black lives matter” movement and dismissed the retort “all lives matter,” that has been adopted by its critics. Admitting to his own previous naiveté and confusion about race, Stephenson paraphrased some wisdom imparted by a close black friend:

When a parent says, “I love my son,” you don’t say, “What about your daughter?” When we walk or run for breast cancer funding and research, we don’t say, “What about prostate cancer?” When the president says, “God bless America,” we don’t say, “Shouldn’t God bless all countries?” And when a person struggling with what’s been broadcast on our airwaves says, “black lives matter,” we should not say “all lives matter” to justify ignoring the real need for change. Stephenson said he is taking it upon himself to start a deeper discussion within his company. “It is a difficult, tough issue, it’s not pleasant to discuss,” he said. “But we have to start communicating, and if this is a dialogue that is going to begin at AT&T, I felt like it probably ought to start with me.”

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SOURCE = Quartz

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‘Black Lives Matter’ Xmas protest turns violent in Oakland

December 26, 2014

A “Black Lives Matter” march against police brutality in Oakland turned ugly, with protesters reportedly attacking a journalist, smashing shopfront windows, throwing bottles, and defacing the main Christmas tree in the heart of the city. Dozens of protesters turned up for the Christmas day “No Time Off” march, which fell under the broader banner of the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement sparked by the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner earlier this year.

CBS says around 50 protesters gathered at 5:30 pm local time at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, which was the main protest encampment for the 2011 Occupy Oakland movement. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the marchers carried a banner reading, “Justice for O’Shaine Evans. No Justice. No Peace,” in reference to a 26-year-old Oakland man shot and killed by San Francisco police in October. The officer who shot Evans seven times said the man had aimed a gun at him.

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SOURCE = Russia Today

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US police shooting: Philando Castile’s partner tells BBC she wants change

July 12, 2016

The woman who live-streamed US police killing her black partner Philando Castile in the state of Minnesota last week says she wants changes in the law. Diamond Reynolds says the powers of those whose job it is to protect the people need to be curtailed. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama is visiting Dallas, where five police officers were killed by a black man. It followed protests against the police killing of Mr Castile and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge a day earlier. In an interview with the BBC, Diamond Reynolds, who is also known as Lavish, recounted the moment her partner was killed, and why she chose to film it. “I was thinking about our rights, right there at that very second. I was thinking about whether or not people were gonna believe what happened. Because I was still at disbelief myself,” she told BBC 5 Live.

“Right then and there I knew I wanted to make a change,” she said. She says changes are needed to laws applying to police. “If we can’t turn to our higher power, you know officers and things of that sort, then who are we to turn to if people that are supposed to be protecting us, are the ones that are assassinating us?” Mr Castile had been stopped in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St Paul, because the car had a broken rear light, Ms Reynolds said. Before he was shot, he had told the officer that he was licensed to carry a concealed gun and had one in his possession. Police have started an investigation and the officer involved has been put on leave.

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SOURCE = BBC News

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Climate change is a racist crisis: that’s why Black Lives Matter closed an airport

September 6, 2016

This morning London City airport was shut down. This was a Black Lives Matter action. Since then our phones have been ringing constantly, with requests to explain, and comment on the action. “But how is this in any way linked to the last action on 5 August? Aren’t you moving away from the original narrative of deaths in police custody?” we’re being asked. The aim of that last action, when BLMUK shut down major traffic arteries in Birmingham, London, Manchester and Nottingham, was to re-centre the conversation around black lives, here in the UK. In a video we released two days before the action, figures such as Marcia Rigg, whose brother Sean Rigg died in police custody in 2008, spokespeople from Movement For Justice and others laid out our message for the world to hear. And it was clear that in police custody, in prisons, in employment, in education and on our streets racial inequality is alive and kicking in Britain.

Today we are saying that the climate crisis is a racist crisis. On the one hand Britain is the biggest contributor per capita to global temperature change. It is also one of the least vulnerable to the effects of climate change. On the other hand, seven of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in sub-Saharan Africa. We’re not saying that climate change affects only black people. However, it is communities in the global south that bear the brunt of the consequences of climate change, whether physical – floods, desertification, increased water scarcity and tornadoes – or political: conflict and racist borders. While a tiny elite can fly to and from London City airport, sometimes as a daily commute, this year alone 3,176 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean, trying to reach safety on the shores of Europe.

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SOURCE = The Guardian

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African American Officer Sues Black Lives Matter for Violence Against Police

September 20, 2016

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Black Lives Matter: What has the movement achieved?

October 1, 2016

The killing of an unarmed black man by police in the US city of El Cajon on Tuesday led to a series of protests throughout the city. The incident followed other recent police shootings of black men in the cities of Tulsa and Charlotte, which have brought hundreds to the streets in a call for police reform and to combat police violence against black Americans.

Often at the forefront of such demonstrations is the Black Lives Matter movement, which grew from Facebook post in 2013, to a trending hashtag, to a global movement, and has galvanised support across the world in its efforts to expose what it calls institutionalised racism within US police forces.

Now more than three years after the movement started, what has Black Lives Matter achieved? And does it use the right approach? In this week’s Arena, we debate the tactics of the movement with BLM activist and writer Shaun King and columnist and 1960s activist Barbara Reynolds, who is critical of the protesters’ approach.

Copyright © = Al Jazeera

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Black Lives Matter Leader Condemns Violence at St. Paul Protest

July 10, 2016

The founder of St. Paul’s Black Lives Matter chapter denounced the violent protesters who blocked a major interstate and attacked police officers Saturday night in the Twin Cities, saying they did a disservice to the officers trying to maintain order and that their actions did nothing to further the group’s goals. Rashad Turner, who leads Black Lives Matter in St. Paul, tells TIME that he blames much of the violence on people who he says weren’t from the area. “There were people outside of the community I didn’t recognize,” he says. “They were doing stupid stuff, and it’s something we don’t tolerate.” More than 100 people were arrested late Saturday and into Sunday after protesters marched from the Minnesota governor’s mansion toward I-94, which connects St. Paul and Minneapolis.

The protests followed days of largely peaceful demonstrations after the death last week of Philando Castile, who was killed by police officers following a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minn., a suburb of St. Paul. Video of the shooting’s aftermath was posted to Facebook Live by his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds. On Saturday around 9 p.m., protesters began blocking traffic in both directions along I-94, leading to a stand-off between demonstrators and St. Paul police. Twenty-one officers were injured after demonstrators set off fireworks, threw bricks and bottles from pedestrian overpasses, and wielded rebar from a nearby construction site.

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SOURCE = Time Magazine

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Group Chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ Charged With Riot for Allegedly Attacking White Targets

August 23, 2016

Early Sunday in Akron, Ohio, police say a group shouting “Black lives matter” approached a group of seven white people and attacked them while shouting. Cleveland19 News reported that according to police reports, the alleged assailants punched, kicked, and hit their targets with bottles. Police say the alleged attackers were five black men and two white men. One of the victims reportedly lost consciousness after falling to the ground and being kicked in the head. The suspects allegedly ran off with the victims’ belongings before police responded and apprehended them nearby.

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SOURCE = Law Newz

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NYPD sent undercover officers to Black Lives Matter protest, records reveal

September 29, 2016

Legal papers filed by the New York police department reveal that the department sent its own undercover officers to protests led by Black Lives Matter after the death of Eric Garner. The NYPD documents also show that it collected multimedia records about the protests.

The NYPD disclosed its undercover operations in response to a group of New York attorneys requesting records under the state freedom of information law. The department has thus far declined to provide the records requested. But its descriptions in August court filings of the records it is refusing to release provide new details about its monitoring of protests at Grand Central Station:

• The first set contains “multimedia records” relating to the petitioners’ request for “pictures, videos, audio recordings, data, and metadata” collected or received by the NYPD at the Grand Central Station protests, which Black Lives Matter groups are still leading, according to the NYPD response.
• The second “consists entirely of communications between and among NYPD undercover officers and their handlers”, pertaining to the protests. According to a 22 August NYPD Memorandum of Law, these undercover communications “consist primarily of immediate impressions concerning ongoing events”.
• The third “consists of a single record, which is a communication from an NYPD officer working in an undercover capacity and his base”, pertaining to the protests, the response indicates.

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SOURCE = The Guardian

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