"Fried another Nigger"
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
While attention here focuses on Occupy Wall Street I'm wondering if we will ever be able to occupy our own black and brown main streets without having to deal day in and day out, putting up with occupying police who enthusiastically pursue stop and frisk laws with reckless and racist abandon in our hoods.
So though the story got ignored here in Dkos folks in my home town didn't ignore it, and thankfully the Justice Department seems to be taking action - on this particular case.
The NY Times reported:
Officer Faces Civil Rights Charges in Stop-and-Frisk Arrest
A city police officer has been charged with a federal civil rights violation after prosecutors said he used a racial slur while bragging that he had falsely charged a black man with resisting arrest after stopping and frisking him on Staten Island last spring. The officer, Michael Daragjati, 32, an eight-year veteran, stopped a 31-year-old man on Targee Street in the Stapleton neighborhood on April 15, prosecutors said.
A search of the man revealed no contraband, but after he complained about his treatment and asked for the officer’s badge number, Officer Daragjati arrested him and charged him with resisting arrest, telling him that he did not like being disrespected, prosecutors said. Officer Daragjati then wrote in a police report that the man had flailed his arms and kicked his legs during the arrest, causing the man to be detained for about 36 hours, according to a federal complaint.
The next day, the government intercepted a phone call between Officer Daragjati and a female friend in which the officer complained that he had just gotten out of court on the stop-and-frisk case, but that it had been worth the hassle. “I sat there for a couple of hours by the time I got it all done but, fried another nigger,” the officer says on a transcript provided by prosecutors. “What?” The woman asks. Officer Daragjati uses the same phrase and then adds, “no big deal.” The woman laughs.
The NYTimes also had this editorial:
Civil Rights and Resisting Arrest
The arrest of a New York City police officer, who was accused of violating the civil rights of an African-American man during a stop-and-frisk arrest, provides good reason for Justice Department officials and state lawmakers to investigate whether others on the force are engaging in similar practices.
Federal prosecutors on Monday charged the officer, Michael Daragjati, with violating the man’s constitutional rights by falsely accusing him of resisting arrest. The criminal complaint suggests how easily that charge can be abused. Nearly 6,000 New Yorkers were taken into custody last year with resisting arrest as the most serious charge against them, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services has reported.
...
The officer’s conduct might easily have escaped notice had he not been under surveillance for alleged extortion and insurance fraud, with which he has also been charged. Civil rights lawyers have long complained about trumped-up arrests of mainly minority citizens who are dragged into the criminal justice system.
Several elected officials in NYC are calling for yet another probe of the NYPD.
Michael Daragjati, cop accused of racism-fueled false arrest, case prompts probe of NYPD policy
In the wake of the arrest of a racist Staten Island cop accused of violating a black man's civil rights, several elected officials have called for a federal probe of the NYPD stop and frisk policy. "I have never been stopped and frisked,'' Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said Wednesday about the tactic that leads to hundreds of thousands of blacks and Latinos being stopped by cops each year.
"But I can no longer look mothers and grandmothers in the eye, knowing in the bottom of my heart that there is a two-tiered justice system."
Stringer - as well as State Sen. Eric Adams (D-Brooklyn) and City Councilmen Juumane Williams (D-Brooklyn) and Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Manhattan) - said the behavior of Officer Michael Daragjati is not an isolated incident.
A judge this week slammed Daragjati as "a blatant racist" after he was busted for violating a man's civil rights by fabricating charges against him.
Daragjati's arrest is bringing some of his past practice out from under the hood and into the light
Man Says Racist NYPD Cop Ruined His Future
We reported yesterday how NYPD officer Michael Daragjati is under fire for the allegedly false April arrest of a Black man, and now, another man has come forward to say that a false arrest by Daragjati changed the course of his life forever.
In 2005, Jared Williams was a promising center fielder for Wagner College’s baseball team. According to Williams, his future was bright and he dreamed of making it to the major leagues — until he was falsely arrested by Daragjati during a night out in Staten Island. I feel he [Daragjati] racially profiled me," Williams told the New York Daily News.
There was a fight, he said, and "I feel we were the first Black people he saw and we got pulled over."
Williams was arrested that night and although the criminal charge was eventually thrown out and he received a $12,500 settlement from the city, the incident scarred his good standing with his school. As a result of the arrest, Williams was kicked off the baseball team just as he was beginning to be noticed by talent scouts from several major league teams. Finally, because he did not play for the school’s team during his senior year, Williams was disqualified from the baseball draft — ending his chances of following his dreams to the majors. "I'm a Christian, so I'm forgiving, but I believe he [Daragjati] should be punished for his actions," Williams, who now teaches fourth- and fifth-grade special education students in a Washington elementary school, said. "It breaks my heart that someone who took an oath to protect and serve is doing this."
How Does It Feel to be Stopped and Frisked?
Having been through this myself and having watched it occur over and over again it is simply another case of Walking while Black or Brown, Driving while Black or Brown, Shopping while Black or Brown...in other words - another day, another one of us gets fried.
The New York Civil Liberties Union reports these data:
Stop and Frisk Practices
The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices raise serious concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops and privacy rights. The Department’s own reports on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino.
An analysis by the NYCLU revealed that about 3 million innocent New Yorkers were subjected to police stops and street interrogations from 2004 through 2010, and that black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics. Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports:
In 2004, 315,483 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
279,754 were totally innocent (89 percent)
156,056 were black (50 percent)
90,468 were Latino (29 percent)
29,000 were white (9 percent)
In 2005, 399,043 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
351, 842 were totally innocent (88 percent)
196,977 were black (49 percent)
115, 395 were Latino (29 percent)
40,837 were white (10 percent)
In 2006, 508,540 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
458,104 were totally innocent (90 percent)
268,610 were black (53 percent)
148,364 were Latino (29 percent)
53,793 were white (11 percent)
In 2007, 468,732 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
407,923 were totally innocent (87 percent)
242,373 were black (52 percent)
142,903 were Latino (31 percent)
52,715 were white (11 percent)
In 2008, 531,159 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
465,413 were totally innocent (88 percent)
271,602 were black (51 percent)
167,111 were Latino (32 percent)
57,407 were white (11 percent)
In 2009, 575,304 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
504,594 were totally innocent (88 percent)
308,941 were black (54 percent)
179,576 were Latino (31 percent)
53,466 were white (9 percent)
In 2010, 601,055 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
517,458 were totally innocent (86 percent)
317,642 were black (53 percent)
190,491 were Latino (32 percent)
55,083 were white (9 percent)
During the first six months of 2011, 362,150 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
317,376 were totally innocent (88 percent)
184,186 were black (51 percent)
119,853 were Latino (33 percent)
33,805 were white (9 percent)
Just another day in the Big Apple.
Replay the same scene daily in neighborhoods and barrios across the U.S.
We have a blue wall to worry about daily - not just Wall Street.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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One of the earliest formal portraits of an African American - a well-known oil painting of a kufi-wearing free black man painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1819 - has been sold by the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Philadelphia Inquirer: Historic painting of African American sold as Philly history museum raises funds
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The striking portrait of Yarrow Mamout, an elderly Muslim and former slave living in Washington, is the most recent in a string of art and artifact sales made by the history museum, largely to finance its $5.9 million building renovation project.
Timothy Rub, Art Museum director, declined to discuss the painting's price, but other sources speculated that it would be at least $1.5 million.
Art Museum officials said eight paintings (including two Peale portraits) and a colonial side chair would be sold to fund the acquisition.
Yarrow Mamout is such "a rare and important painting" - the earliest known portrait of a practicing American Muslim - that the decision was made "to give up some works from our collection" to acquire it, Rub said. It is now on view at the museum.
Such sales of artworks from a collection fall within the ethical guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which approve of sales only when proceeds are used to acquire other art to enhance or focus museum holdings.
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A federal judge accused two state Republicans, called by federal prosecutors in a massive Alabama corruption case, of cooperating with the feds because of their “ulterior motives rooted in naked political ambition and pure racial bias.” TalkingPointsMemo: Federal Judge: Republicans Only Cooperated With FBI In Alabama Bingo Bribery Case Because They’re Racists
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State Sen. Scott Beason and former Rep. Benjamin Lewis, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson wrote, “lack credibility for two reasons.”
“First, their motive for cooperating with F.B.I. investigators was not to clean up corruption but to increase Republican political fortunes by reducing African-American voter turnout. Second, they lack credibility because the record establishes their purposeful, racist intent,” Thompson wrote.
The judge’s order, first reported by Birmingham News, continued:
Beason, Lewis, and their political allies sought to defeat SB380 partly because they believed the absence of the referendum on the ballot would lower African-American voter turnout during the 2010 elections. One of the government’s recordings captured Beason and Lewis discussing political strategy with other influential Republican legislative allies. A confederate warned: “Just keep in mind if [a pro-gambling] bill passes and we have a referendum in November, every black in this state will be bused to the polls. And that ain’t gonna help.”
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The black academic community has lost another beloved colleague. Rudolph Byrd, an Emory University professor whose scholarship focused on black literature, gender studies and civil rights, died yesterday in Atlanta. Atlanta Journal Constitution: Scholar Rudolph Byrd Dead at 58.
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Mr. Byrd, an Emory professor for two decades, died Friday at Emory University Hospital after a long-running fight with cancer. He was 58.
He had just finished writing a series of lectures about race and sexuality to be presented at Harvard University. He was writing a biography of author Ernest Gaines, developing a monograph of the early novels of Alice Walker and collaborating with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. on an anthology of African-American poetry.
"He was one of my best friends," Mr. Gates said Friday. The two met in a graduate seminar at Yale University nearly four decades ago, and their friendship grew into a working relationship. "Of all the people who write about African-American literature and culture, there is no one that I admired more, and whose work I valued more."
The two co-edited a new edition of the 1923 novel "Cane" by Jean Toomer. They published it this year with new research about Toomer's race, contending that archival evidence proved he was black. The New York Times described the research as an "intellectual grenade."
Mr. Byrd founded an institute at Emory named after the author and NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson and was chair of the department of African-American studies. He also founded Emory's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which provides financial support for undergraduates.
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Glimmers of hope in one the World's saddest nations. Economist: Hope is four-legged and woolly
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Where there are beasts, there is life, goes a saying in Somalia. Half of its people depend on livestock for their survival. This year they will export record numbers of animals. That seems improbable given that a famine is raging in south Somalia, which has seen over a million animals die of hunger and thirst. But the grazing in other parts of Somalia, especially the north, has been excellent and demand for livestock from abroad has never been higher. After banning Somali sheep and goats for many years, for allegedly being diseased, Jeddah in Saudi Arabia has once again declared them welcome.
For the first time since the collapse of Somalia as a unitary state in 1991, Saudi and Lebanese traders have ventured into the local livestock markets. Goats are mainly exported to Mecca for the annual haj pilgrimage. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that $250m-worth of animals will leave the port of Berbera and its more ramshackle rival, Bossaso, in the seven weeks before the haj in early November.
In the livestock market in Hargeisa, capital of the semi-autonomous region of Somaliland, sweaty goatherds press in on Adan Ahmed Deria, a trader. Hundreds of camels are being loaded onto lorries. Mr Deria nods to show that the price is fixed. “God willing,” he says, “I will buy 800,000 goats and sheep this year.” That is $52m of business, in cash, in a country where the economy has apparently collapsed.
Trade is set to grow further. Saudi Arabia wants to double its livestock imports from Somalia by 2013. The herders face fierce competition from Georgia, China and Paraguay, but halal butchers value the quality of Somali animals, which are raised by nomadic Muslims.
Somalis have hardly begun to tap the value of their animals. With about $50m in international help they could invest in watering stations, encourage communities to cure animal skins, make soap from bone marrow and fashion buttons from camel bone. They might also usefully improve transport by, say, building bridges over rivers prone to flooding, which would cut out rapacious middlemen.
Though the region suffers from rampant piracy, it mainly affects international shipping rather than locals. Last month pirates captured a livestock ship in the waters off Bossaso; they were killed within hours by irate traders and herders. Meanwhile, hijacked foreign freighters litter the coastline undisturbed.
As parts of the economy grow, Somalis increasingly look to the diaspora for loans. Its members are prominent in gold and metal markets across Africa.
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Why isn't this brave woman being hailed as a national hero? The Root: Gunman Kills Brooklyn Mom Who Saved Kids
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So we're wondering why the following story from a predominantly black neighborhood in New York City isn't getting more notice outside of the region, and plucking more heartstrings.
New York's Daily News is reporting the gut-wrenchingly sad story of a pregnant Brooklyn mother who died amid a hail of bullets on Friday afternoon as she tried to protect schoolchildren at Public School 298 in the borough's Brownsville section from a gunman perched atop a nearby roof.
Zurana Horton, the 33-year-old pregnant woman, was hit in the head in front of the Lucky Supermarket at Pitkin Ave. and Watkins St. after she threw herself over a group of children, cops and witnesses said.
"Moments before, she was seen hovering over several children to protect them," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said.
The second woman was shot in the arm and chest. The 31-year-old was listed in stable condition at Brookdale University Hospital. The 11-year-old girl, identified as Cheanne McKnight, a 6th-grader at P.S. 298, was being treated at Brookdale for a graze wound to the cheek.
A source said Horton, a mother of 13, had just picked up one of her kids from nearby P.S. 298. A teacher ran to her side and whisked at least one of her children into a nearby firehouse for safety.
If this horrifying episode, which has not yet resulted in an arrest, had happened in Manhattan's tony Upper East Side neighborhood instead of one of the poorest communities in New York City, news copters would still be flying overhead, and the networks would be all over it. Zurana Horton is a heroine who followed her instincts.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
We live in a world of conflicts so we made laws and aggreements so that conflicts are mediated and minimized.
But what happens when laws come in conflict themselves? We have laws that establish personal freedom and we have laws that restrict those freedoms. Which "law" takes supemacy?
What happens when law and order is so profound, that to merely stop and smell the roses is a potential criminal enterprise?
Letter to the Local Police
Dear Sirs:
I have been enjoying the law and order of our
community throughout the past three months since
my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous
photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to
our previous neighbors (with whom we were very
close) arrived in Saratoga Springs which is clearly
prospering under your custody
Indeed, until yesterday afternoon and despite my
vigilant casting about, I have been unable to discover
a single instance of reasons for public-spirited concern,
much less complaint
You may easily appreciate, then, how it is that
I write to your office, at this date, with utmost
regret for the lamentable circumstances that force
my hand
Speaking directly to the issue of the moment:
I have encountered a regular profusion of certain
unidentified roses, growing to no discernible purpose,
and according to no perceptible control, approximately
one quarter mile west of the Northway, on the southern
side
To be specific, there are practically thousands of
the aforementioned abiding in perpetual near riot
of wild behavior, indiscriminate coloring, and only
the Good Lord Himself can say what diverse soliciting
of promiscuous cross-fertilization
As I say, these roses, no matter what the apparent
background, training, tropistic tendencies, age,
or color, do not demonstrate the least inclination
toward categorization, specified allegiance, resolute
preference, consideration of the needs of others, or
any other minimal traits of decency
May I point out that I did not assiduously seek out
this colony, as it were, and that these certain
unidentified roses remain open to viewing even by
children, with or without suitable supervision
(My wife asks me to append a note as regards the
seasonal but nevertheless seriously licentious
phenomenon of honeysuckle under the moon that one may
apprehend at the corner of Nelson and Main
However, I have recommended that she undertake direct
correspondence with you, as regards this: yet
another civic disturbance in our midst)
I am confident that you will devise and pursue
appropriate legal response to the roses in question
If I may aid your efforts in this respect, please
do not hesitate to call me into consultation
Respectfully yours,
-- June Jordan
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The Front Porch is now open.
Grab a seat, sit down and rap with us for a while.