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Black Cops Back Officers Charged in Freddie Gray’s Death

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Clockwise from top left: Baltimore police officers William G. Porter, Garrett E. Miller, Caesar R. Goodson Jr., Edward M. Nero, Alicia D. White, Brian W. Rice. (Baltimore Police Department)

Clockwise from top left: Baltimore police officers William G. Porter, Garrett E. Miller, Caesar R. Goodson Jr., Edward M. Nero, Alicia D. White, Brian W. Rice. (Baltimore Police Department)

By Kamau High
Special to the NNPA News Service from The AFRO

 

 
BALTIMORE (NNPA) – The Vanguard Justice Society has voiced its support for Sgt. Alicia D. White and the other five officers implicated in the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.

“The purpose of this press conference is to express our full support in reference to the officers that have recently been charged and one officer in particular, a Vanguard member, Sgt. Alicia White,” Ken Butler president of the non-profit group that advocates for minority police officers in Baltimore.

White was charged earlier this month with manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison. At a May 13 press conference at Baltimore Community College, Butler said Sgt. White was recruited into Vanguard out of the police academy and was mentored by the organization.

In addition to Vanguard members, Barbara Jackson, a community organizer, spoke of Sgt. White’s Christian faith and volunteer work. Two of her lawyers, Ivan Bates and Tony Garcia, of Bates & Garcia, also addressed the media.

Bates began by pointing out that according to State’s Attorney General Marilyn Mosby, Sgt. White had about 15 seconds of interaction with Freddie Gray and that Sgt. White never actually touched him.

Garcia also noted that Sgt. White was born and reared in Baltimore city as well as attended high school in Baltimore. “Alicia White is your sister, she’s your cousin, she’s your friend, she’s your neighbor,” Garcia said. “She is Baltimore city.”

The law firm of Bates & Garcia is known for suing the Baltimore Police Department for police brutality, including the Kollin Truss case, that involved a Baltimore police officer captured on video tape repeatedly punching Truss in the face.

Of the six officers charged in the Gray case, three of them – including Sgt. White – are Black.

Lisa Robinson, vice president of Vanguard, said the group is looking forward to speaking to the Department of Justice during their investigation of the Freddie Gray case and wants to bring up several issues themselves.

“Those include policies and procedures in terms of hiring, firing, disciplinary actions as well as promotions and transfers, policing strategies,” she said. “Our goal is also to look at the stop snitching culture. The stop snitching culture is prevalent on the streets of Baltimore as well as within the Baltimore Police Department.”

She added, “It is our hope that at the end of this process that Baltimore will have a better, safer police department and city for all the citizens of Baltimore.”

During a question-and-answer period, Garcia, one of Sgt. White’s lawyers criticized Marilyn Mosby, the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City. He said, “You’re going to see accuracy was sacrificed for speed. You’re going to see a ‘chuck and duck’ style of prosecution that is not fair or unbiased to anyone.” He added,” You’re going to see that Ms. White was steamrolled into this. She was at the wrong place at the wrong time and had nothing to do with this.”

Mosby’s press office did not return calls by AFRO press time. However she released a statement, May 5 that said, in part, “While the evidence we have obtained through our independent investigation does substantiate the elements of the charges filed, I refuse to litigate this case through the media.”

Bates, another White’s other attorney, said, “We’ve asked the state’s attorney numerous times to allow us to see the evidence and they haven’t. I guess for some reason the state feels that they have evidence that Ms. White didn’t do anything but before Ms. White got to the point to not do anything Ms. White would have to know that something needed to be done.”

Asked what Sgt. White had told them about her actions on the day of Freddie Gray’s arrest, Bates replied, “I can’t necessarily go into what the client has told us but let’s just say we feel very confident about our defense.”

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Activism

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

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: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.
: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

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Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

 Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.

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Activism

Oakland Post: Week of December 18 – 24, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 18 – 24, 2024

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