Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
In 2021, the G-7 countries of Canada, Germany, France, Japan, the UK, and Italy with a combined population of approximately 437M people, had a total of 78 police killings between them. The United States of America with some 333M people had somewhere around 1000 people killed by law enforcement officers. The most conservative of the databases, The Washington Post, has the number killed in 2021 at 860. The website MappingPoliceViolence.org has the number of police killings at a whopping 1136 and every killing is documented.
In the 13 days since the beginning of the new year, police have already killed some 9 people. The Washington Post database shows that since the murder of Michael Brown 7 years ago, cops have killed a further 6842 people.
As someone who has been following this gruesome, bloody trail, I’m not surprised by the numbers; what I find absolutely shocking is that the mainstream media has largely ignored the mass slaughter of Americans by American cops. On his program on 1/13/2022, Jake Tapper managed to do a segment about the admittedly high number of cops killed in 2021 without mentioning how many people they themselves sent to early graves. Silence means consent.
What also is not particularly shocking is that when reporters and on-air personalities do condescend to spend some of their precious time to inform their readers/listeners/viewers about issues having to do with police violence, it’s almost always covered from the viewpoint of the poor besieged cops who have but a few seconds to act to defend themselves against perceived attacks. You know, cops valiantly defending themselves against melanin... or mental illness...or speech… or cell phones…or subway sandwiches …or little baby girls just living their lives ...
Given all the aforementioned, it is with something akin to pleasure that I share the video below of Ari Melber clearly understanding the assignment. We need more of this type of reporting...much more.
From the transcript:
First, this recent activism and scrutiny alone are not bending the curve of police shootings in America. That`s just a fact. We`re not talking about whether we like it or not. But that`s what this year and that chart shows.
Now, an observer might have thought or hoped that a year like the one we just lived through would impact some officers` conduct. But when it comes to shootings, in the aggregate, it did not.
Second, some valid policy reforms are also failing to bend that curve. Whether we like that or not, we should know the evidence. So there are more body cameras, which can add to the type of mechanisms that law enforcement oversight needs. But, in this past year, as I showed you, they`re not reducing shootings.
Tonight. In fact, among some of the few examples we chose out of the many available, we saw stories where police just unilaterally turned off their body cameras.
Now, part of my job on the news is to just be straightforward. Have you ever seen surveillance video at a bank which could just be flipped off by any visitor or bank robber? That would kind of defeat the point. So, when videos do incriminate the police, what happens? Well, even when they exist, the departments often hide them.
Let me tell you, I was watching that video with my mouth open, as I’ve never heard a presenter on a mainstream media outlet — with the exception of Lawrence O’Donnell — speak about police brutality in quite the way Ari Melber did. He pulled no punches.
So what can we do to bend the curve of police shootings? What in heaven’s name can we do to get cops to stop shooting at and killing people just because they can? It doesn’t seem likely that any transformative police reform legislation will be passing the senate any time soon. Beautiful, hardworking, creative members of Support the Dream Defenders wrote and promoted a number of bills that if they were to be signed into law would for sure make a huge difference in how cops conduct themselves when interacting with the public. We have the legislation ready. We’ve had the marches and protests. What else can we do?
French police killed 26 people last year and the French media forced Macron to address police brutality. It wasn’t the protest that did it; rather it was the tone of the coverage about the reason for the protest. Here, our media is intent on and content with talking about “Democrats wanting to defund the police.” How can we force the media to talk about police violence?
How about a pressure campaign directed at the major personalities at ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, CNBC, and CNN? Let’s say that for 7 days we all tweet at these movers and shakers in the mainstream media.
For example:
What do you think? Are you in? Tell us in the comments and we’ll decide on the best week to do this. And let us also let @AriMelber know that his effort was noted and appreciated...though, it cannot be a one and done. This has to be just the beginning of the fight for a sophisticated police force worthy of a G-7 nation in the 21st century.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Many residential and commercial properties in major cities across the U.S. were built decades ago and don’t have modern insulation or heating and ventilation systems.
They also rely on fossil fuels to provide them with energy, accounting for about 29% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to a July 2018 Center for Climate and Energy Solutions analysis.
Baird told CNBC earlier this year that an estimated 100 million buildings across the country waste $100 billion annually on fossil fuels. Those greenhouse gases are a major contributor to climate change and air pollution in Black and brown communities across the country and the world.
Buildings like the one in which Baird grew up are the leading cause of global CO2 emissions, according to a 2018 International Energy Agency report.
“There’s so much energy that’s being wasted in low-income communities across the country because the buildings are so old,” Baird said.
That pollution contributes to health disparities for Black Americans and often causes them to spend a lot more on energy bills.
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The first Black woman to lead the US Attorney's Office for Massachusetts was sworn in Monday as she faces an uptick in threats against her following a contentious confirmation process.
The violent and often racist threats against Rachael Rollins have been reported to authorities, and she is seeking protection from the US Marshals Service, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The threats escalated shortly after the Senate narrowly voted to confirm her to the post in December, according to one source.
The threats against Rollins have prompted calls for the Justice Department to do more to protect people of color in the federal judicial system, which has become increasingly diverse. Rollins joins the most diverse class of US attorneys in the department's history.
Dozens of faith leaders and community organizations penned a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland in December, including the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, associate pastor for the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Brown said US marshals should have provided her security as soon as she was confirmed.
"We have been through an era where others have been killed because of the stances that they were taking," Brown told CNN, adding that women of color are bearing the brunt of such violence. "I believe the threats are coming because the atmosphere feels like they can easily target women of color."
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In eastern sierra leone six shoeless men thwack shovels into a bank of reddish earth and heave the dirt into a stagnant pond. They hope to find diamonds. Even if they do, they will not strike it rich. The men are paid about $0.90 a day by a backer who bought the licence to mine and who keeps 70% of anything they find. The remainder adds up, on average, to about $135 a year each, says one. Ibrahim, a 25-year-old wearing a sodden sock to protect his foot from the metal shovel, is a third-generation miner. He does not earn enough to send his children to school. “If I cannot support my children to be educated, how can I be sure they will not come here, too?” he asks.
Like Ibrahim’s family, many African economies have relied too much on raw materials for too long. The un defines a country as dependent on commodities if they are more than three-fifths of its physical exports. Fully 83% of African countries meet that threshold, up from 77% a decade ago. Some depend on produce such as tea, but most rely on mining or on pumping oil. When commodities crashed in 2015, foreign direct investment (fdi) and growth tumbled and have yet to fully recover.
Broad averages obscure some of the progress that has been made to diversify economies. Over the past decade resources have become less important to gdp. The share of commodities in goods exports from the continent as a whole has fallen, too. And in countries such as Botswana and Malawi, services have grown strongly. Even manufacturing is rebounding.
Yet Africa has a long way to go if it is to break free of the resource curse. In countries rich in diamonds or oil, political power can be a licence to loot. So unscrupulous folk are tempted to grab and hang on to it by any means available. Resource-rich countries are more likely to suffer dictatorships, and also tend to have more and longer civil wars. In Sierra Leone, for example, diamonds fuelled a bloody conflict that dragged on for 11 years.
Commodity prices leap and fall, leading to booms and busts. In Sierra Leone the normally sober imf, excited by two new iron-ore mines and high prices, forecast growth of 51% for 2012. That spurred the government to splash out. But gdp that year grew by 15%. In 2014 iron-ore prices plunged and the mines closed. The economy, which was also hit by Ebola, shrank by 20% in 2015. “When the mine stops, it’s bad for business,” says Idrissa, who sells bags in Lunsar, a mining town.
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On Nov. 5, 2021, Twitter announced it was halting trending topics in Ethiopia due to the ongoing threat of violence in the country, which has been embroiled in a year-long civil war. The escalating conflict, originally between Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region and the national government, has left thousands dead and displaced millions. Previous reports, and a trove of documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, have illustrated how social media is fueling ethnic-based violence in Ethiopia.
Twitter trends have, in fact, played a significant role in the communications strategies for both parties since fighting broke out in November 2020. Although the predominant language in Ethiopia is Amharic, English-language tweets about the war have frequently trended in-country.
Groups from across the political spectrum created click-to-tweet campaigns to ensure hashtags such as #TigrayGenocide and #NoMore trended, primarily targeting diaspora members as telecommunication access was originally restricted in Tigray. These types of operations have also successfully manipulated Twitter Trends in Nigeria and Kenya.
Taken together, this evidence suggests removing Trends in Ethiopia could make a difference and “reduce the risks of coordination that could incite violence or cause harm,” as Twitter stated. However, our investigation into English-language conversations on Twitter about the conflict before and after Trends were removed found no discernible change in the volume of tweets or the prevalence of toxic and threatening speech, meaning the Twitter intervention may not have worked as intended.
At NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, we collected tweets mentioning various popular hashtags related to the conflict, including #nomore and #tigray from Nov. 1, 2021, through Nov. 8, 2021.
Although there are several potential ways in which Twitter’s intervention could work, our investigation focused on two possibilities based on the platform’s hope that removing Trends would reduce coordination leading to incitement of violence: 1) An overall reduction in tweets about the conflict, because individuals would not be able to find new hashtags via trending topics, and 2) a reduction in the level of toxicity and threat in conversation about the conflict.
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