Dozens of concerned citizens from all areas of Opelika filled the pews at St. James Missionary Baptist Church Monday evening to discuss an officer-involved shooting that occurred on Oct. 31, claiming the life of 56-year-old Bennie Lee Tignor, and to demand answers to questions posed by community members skeptical of information supplied by law enforcement.
Leading the conversation was St. James Missionary Baptist Church pastor and long-time Opelika politician District 83 Rep. George Bandy, who consistently called into question the transparency of the Opelika Police Department and the City of Opelika.
"There's some questions that I'm raising here tonight, and a statement that I'm trying to make," he said. “When people ask for information, I go ahead and call the mayor or chief of police and they tell me that it's been turned over to the SBI, the State Bureau of Investigations and so, therefore, they don't have any information that they can give out."
Bandy said he was unsure if any city leaders have seen footage of the dash cam recording of the shooting, but he feels, as an elected official, that it would have been beneficial to have had access to it to communicate its contents to his constituents.
"It would've been a great thing if we could've looked at the dash cam and we could've come out here tonight and told the people that what (the OPD) is saying is the truth. But we can't do that," he said, adding he requested to see the video but was turned down by the SBI due to the status of the open investigation.
Information he's received from the two alleged eyewitnesses, Tignor's girlfriend Betty Denson and her daughter, Shikeria Ligon, he said, doesn't match up with that provided by the OPD.
"The information that we've gotten from the two eyewitnesses is that there was no gun seen. So the dash cam needs to show a gun," he said. "(Officer Jared Greer's) word, I don't think, should be good enough." . . .
Here’s a story about Black Bottom LLC, in Detroit. If you don’t know this history, it is something that you ought to know. If you don’t know this group, then they are some folks you ought to check out.
Black Bottom was once a vibrant black oasis in Detroit, till it was demolished for a freeway. Now, young black visionaries in Detroit are experimentin…
The roar of internet response to what happened in Seattle on Saturday surprised even one of the activists behind the action. But in retrospect, it mak…
thestranger.com
Going after Sanders is super, super important because Sanders is supposed to be as far left and as progressive as we can possibly get, right? … [In Seattle] we have hordes and hordes of white liberals and white progressives and yet we still have all the same racial problems. So for us, locally in our context, confronting Sanders was the equivalent of confronting the large, white, liberal Democrat, leftist contingent that we have here in Seattle who not only have not supported BLM in measurable ways but is often very harmful and is also upholding the white supremacist society that we live in locally… What we didn’t know was that that idea—of the white liberal, the white moderate who’s complicit in white supremacy—that that idea would resonate with people nationally and internationally and spur into this larger conversation.
. . .
[On why she didn’t call the Sanders campaign in advance and ask to be a part of the Westlake event:]
Part of it comes out of my personal politics, and out of BLM politics. Everybody keeps saying that black people need to be respectable, that they need to ask permission, that they need to work with the timetable that’s been given to them. And I absolutely just rebuke and deny all of that… The un-respectability, and the tactic, the way we went about it—every single part of it was very intentional. . . . Black people don’t need to be respectable, black people don’t need to go on your timetable, black people don’t need to reach out to Bernie Sanders. If anything, Bernie Sanders should have been courting—before he went to any other major city—he should have been courting BLM. And even at that point, I haven’t seen any politician that’s done anything for black lives. I don’t have any need to meet with them, period. I haven’t seen anybody really willing to step it up. So, there’s a lot of ways that politicians are trying to get activists swept up in rhetoric, and sitting around the table, sitting around the table to do nothing but repress movements, and so the work that I do in particular is agitational work. Is agitating the political scene, so that people are having these conversations and politicians are forced to do their own work, and do their own reforms, because of work that I’ve done on the ground.
. . .
I don’t have faith in politicians. I don’t have faith in the electoral process. It’s well documented that that doesn’t work for us. No matter who you are. So my gaze is not toward politicians and getting them to do something in particular. I think they will change what they do based off of what I do, but that’s not my center. My center is using electoral politics as a platform but also agitating so much that people continue to question the system they’re in as they’re doing it, and that we start to dismantle it. Because I refuse to believe that the system that we’re in is the only option that we have. And so we hear people saying—Bernie supporters—”Well, he’s your best option.” It’s like, If he’s our best option then I’m burning this down. I think it’s literally blowing up—this is why the respectability thing is so important—is that you blow it up so big, and so unrespectably, that you can show people the possibilities outside of the system that they’re stuck in. And so that’s why I do agitation work.
So I’m not for any politician. But I’m definitely for anything that pulls people further left, anything that gets people asking more questions, and gets us closer to actually dismantling the system that has never, ever, ever, ever done anything for black people and never will. So I’m really trying to see my people get free by any means possible.
Editor's note: This post was last updated at 9:30 p.m. Staff writers Charles Scudder, Sarah Mervosh and Naomi Martin report.
Sarah Mervosh @ crimeblog.dallasnews.com
McKINNEY – The police officer whose aggressive response to an unruly teenage pool party ignited a national controversy resigned Tuesday, leaving many here feeling relieved but disappointing some police supporters who considered the man a "hero."
McKinney Police Cpl. David Eric Casebolt, a 10-year veteran of the department, voluntarily stepped down amid an internal police investigation and surging public pressure, including death threats.
The officer's terse, two-word resignation did not include an apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing, said McKinney Police Chief Greg Conley, who on Tuesday condemned Casebolt's actions as "indefensible" and "out of control."
. . .
Tuesday's developments came four days after Casebolt, who is white, was captured on video cursing, pulling out his weapon and slamming a 15-year-old black girl to the ground. Casebolt, 41, will keep his pension and benefits, but could face criminal charges pending an investigation, the chief said Tuesday.
Well, that’s 1 down, 899,999 to go. Meanwhile, over on the Cop Humor Facebook Community page — a cesspool of cranky old man these kids today! grumping, blue-fascist appeals to following orders, bizarre racist and homophobic tangents, and look at how much I do for you entitled whinging, all of which qualifies as Humor only in the most tenuous, formalistic sort of sense — we have the following genuinely delightful thought experiment.
WHAT IF … ALL COPS TOOK THE NEXT 30 DAYS OFF AND JUST DID THIS?
Oh, well, please don’t stop on my account. Do it.
I’m serious.
Seriously, take as much time as you need. No hurry. Don’t feel like you have to come back, ever.
A St. Louis County grand jury on Monday decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police Officer Darren Wilson in the August killing of teenager Michael Brown. The decision wasn't a surprise — leaks from the grand jury had led most observers to conclude an indictment was unlikely — but it was unusual. Grand juries nearly always decide to indict.
Or at least, they nearly always do so in cases that don't involve police officers.
Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.
Wilson's case was heard in state court, not federal, so the numbers aren't directly comparable. Unlike in federal court, most states, including Missouri, allow prosecutors to bring charges via a preliminary hearing in front of a judge instead of through a grand jury indictment. That means many routine cases never go before a grand jury. Still, legal experts agree that, at any level, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to fail to win an indictment.
If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn't get one, something has gone horribly wrong, said Andrew D. Leipold, a University of Illinois law professor who has written critically about grand juries. It just doesn't happen.
Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. As my colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don't have good data on officer-involved killings. But newspaperaccountssuggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven't indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. . . .
Protesters in Seattle, Washington react to the announcement of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson (November 24, 2014)
I'm not invested in indicting Darren Wilson though I understand its (symbolic) import to many people, most especially Mike Brown's family and friends. Vincent Warren of the Center on Constitutional Rights speaks for many, I think, when he writes:
Without accountability, there can be no rule of law. If Wilson is not indicted, or is under-indicted, the clear message is that it is open season on people of color, that St. Louis has declared that Darren Wilson is not a criminal but that the people who live under the thumbs of the Darren Wilsons of this country are. It would say to the cry that "Black lives matter" that, no, in fact, they do not.
I understand the sentiment that Warren expresses. Yet I don't believe that an indictment of Wilson would be evidence that black lives do in fact matter to anyone other than black people. Nor do I think his indictment would mean that it was no longer open season on people of color in this country. If we are to take seriously that oppressive policing is not a problem of individual "bad apple" cops then it must follow that a singular indictment will have little to no impact on ending police violence. As I type, I can already feel the impatience and frustration of some who will read these words.
? It feels blasphemous to suggest that one is disinvested from the outcome of the grand jury deliberations. "Don't you care about accountability for harm caused?" some will ask. "What about justice?" others will accuse. My response is always the same: I am not against indicting killer cops. I just know that indictments won't and can't end oppressive policing which is rooted in anti-blackness, social control and containment. Policing is derivative of a broader social justice. It's impossible for non-oppressive policing to exist in a fundamentally oppressive and unjust society. . . .
The pattern after police killings is all too familiar. Person X is shot & killed. Person X is usually black (or less frequently brown). Community members (sometimes) take to the streets in protest. They are (sometimes) brutally suppressed. The press calls for investigations. Advocates call for reforms suggesting that the current practices and systems are !!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;broken' and/or unjust. There is a (racist) backlash by people who "support" the police. A very few people whisper that the essential nature of policing is oppressive and is not susceptible to any reforms, thus only abolition is realistic. These people are considered heretic by most. I've spent years participating in one way or another in this cycle. . . .
So, to those in Ferguson, there are ways of channeling your concerns constructively and there are ways of channeling your concerns destructively. . . . Those of you who are watching tonight understand that there's never an excuse for violence . . . .
Barack Obama, President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the largest and most heavily armed military force in the world, got onto the television to tell us that there’s never an excuse for violence just as heavily-armed police throughout Ferguson began launching teargas against everyone in sight on the streets. Of course, when he said violence he meant violence by protesters. It is eerily reminiscent of Lyndon Banes Johnson in July 1967, going on national television to announce that We will not endure violence. It matters not by whom it is done or under what slogan or banner, — saying this at the height of the Vietnam War, and on the specific occasion of his decision to send U.S. soldiers and tanks down Woodward Avenue.
The police are irresponsible and unaccountable. That is what makes them the police. Unless we hold them accountable. The law, for its part, will never curtail the racist violence of the law. Only social accountability for police officers, not legal processes, can do that.
