A small Mississippi city and its police department are being sued weeks after the police chief was fired after bragging about shooting and killing people in a racist and homophobic rant.
Five Black Mississippians have filed a federal lawsuit requesting a restraining order against the Lexington Police Department to prevent officers from infringing upon citizens’ constitutional rights, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by USA TODAY.
The lawsuit, filed by civil-rights law firm JULIAN, is intended to stop law enforcement in Lexington from “threatening, coercing, harassing, assaulting or interfering” with the city’s largely Black population, the group said.
The suit claims the department has a pattern and practice of using excessive force, making false arrests and retaliating against officers who report misconduct.
The suit names Dobbins and interim Chief Charles Henderson. Henderson and Lexington Mayor Robin McCrory did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Dobbins was unable to be immediately reached.
JULIAN is also calling for a federal investigation into “systemic, condoned racism in both the police department and in Lexington’s municipal government as a whole,” according to a press release.
After Dobbins was fired, Henderson told USA TODAY that his new administration would have zero tolerance for racism.
In our series of letters from African journalists, Ismail Einashe writes that many black people in Italy feel that racism is not taken seriously.
For Italian-Eritrean filmmaker and podcaster Ariam Tekle, there is no doubt that the recent killing of a disabled Nigerian street vendor, Alika Ogorchukwu, in Italy was a “racist murder”.
This is despite the fact that local police have ruled out racism as a motive for the 39-year-old’s killing in the seaside town of Civitanova Marche.
He was reportedly selling handkerchiefs when he was chased and beaten to death. None of those who witnessed the broad daylight attack appeared to intervene.
A suspect – a white man named as Filippo Claudio Giuseppe Ferlazzo – has been ordered to remain in jail as the investigation continues.
A police investigator said Mr Ogorchukwu was attacked after the trader’s “insistent” requests to the suspect and his partner for spare change.
Nevertheless, his horrific murder – caught on video – has firmly put the spotlight on racism in Italy.
In 2016 another Nigerian man, Emmanuel Chidi Namdi, was killed after defending his wife from racist abuse in the town of Fermo in central Italy.
Two years later, a far-right extremist shot six African migrants in a drive-by attack in a town about 25km (15.5 miles) from where Mr Ogorchukwu was killed.
When the police arrested him, he was wrapped in the Italian flag shouting “Viva l’Italia”, telling police he wanted to “kill them all”.
In fact this region of Le Marche has been governed since 2020 by the far-right party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy).
It is led by Giorgia Meloni, who could become Italy’s first female prime minister if she wins a snap election to be held in September.
The party, which is expected to emerge as the single largest, is part of a wider conservative bloc that includes the right-wing Lega (League), led by Matteo Salvini and the conservative Forza Italia (Forward Italy), led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Ms Tekle says black people in Italy regularly experience racist violence, police harassment and discrimination, and the rise of far-right anti-immigration parties has “normalised” racism.
Uluru—a monumental, cathedral-like rock that stands alone in the western deserts of Central Australia—may seem an unlikely place from which to reflect on the scourge of violence against Black Americans that stains the U.S. body-politic today.
But understanding the consequences of one event that happened far away in 1934 is a powerful reminder that the struggle to make Black lives matter and counter white supremacist violence transcends national boundaries.
In June 1931, Constable Bill McKinnon arrived in Alice Springs to take up his appointment as a police officer in central Australia. He was barely thirty—lean, brash, and tough—a no-nonsense raconteur with a sharp tongue and unyielding determination.
In 1934, after chasing down six Aboriginal men for the killing of an Aboriginal man that had taken place under tribal law, he cornered one man in a cave and shot and killed him at Uluru, a place that has long been sacred for the Anangu, its traditional owners, and is now spiritually significant for the entire nation.
In 1935, an Australian government Board of Inquiry, which exhumed the man’s body and eventually took his remains back to Adelaide, found that the killing was “ethically unwarranted” but “legally justified.”
Remarkably, McKinnon claimed that he had fired his pistol into the cave in “self-defense.” Now, almost 100 years later—after the discovery of new evidence that proves he lied to the Inquiry—the murder of one defenseless Aboriginal man in the heart of Australia highlights the entrenched inequalities in societies rooted in violence and oppression.
There’s a reason that so many Aboriginal people identified with George Floyd. Australia’s First Nations people—twelve times more likely to be incarcerated than white Australians—continue to see themselves as victims of state-sanctioned violence, often involving police.
Today, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 3.2 percent of Australia’s total population, yet they account for almost 30 percent of the country’s prison population.
Police killings have dropped since the Black Lives Matter movement started, UMass research suggests
Communities where Black Lives Matter protests have been held in recent years saw a subsequent drop in the number of police homicides, by as much as 15 to 20 percent, or roughly 300 fewer deaths at the hands of authorities, recent research from UMass Amherst shows.
The findings were first released in February and updated last month in “Black Lives Matter’s Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-Force” by Travis Campbell, a graduate student in UMass Amherst’s Economics Department.
Campbell said despite the national attention and discourse the protest movement has generated over the years, he was surprised to learn little research actually exists regarding its impact on law enforcement.
Also surprising was the result of his research, which is now being peer-reviewed, he said.
“Growing up, we’re always told that protests don’t do anything,” Campbell, 26, told Boston.com. “But there’s a pretty sizable literature showing that they actually do.”
The key findings
According to Campbell’s research, the decreases were recorded between 2014, when unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and 2019.
Campbell opted not to include 2020 in his data set due to the unusual set of circumstances the COVID-19 pandemic presented. (Protests and COVID-related shutdowns, he said, were likely more probable in Democratic-leaning cities. Lockdowns could have also resulted in fewer interactions between the public and police than in a typical year, he added.)
The result of protesting appears to be striking, his paper notes.
“The payoff for protesting is substantial; around every 5 of the 1,724 protests in the sample corresponds with approximately one less person killed by the police over the following years, depending on specification,” Campbell writes. “The police killed around one less person for every twelve hundred participants.”
Read the complete article at: Boston.com
Also read: N.J. cop called Black Lives Matter protesters terrorists. How the comments got her fired.
Health, rights situation critical among women and girls in conflict-scarred Dara’a
Health, rights situation critical among women and girls in conflict-scarred Dara’a
DARA’A, Syrian Arab Republic With the crisis in Syria soon to enter its ninth year the people of Dara’a Governorate face especially harrowing conditions, with hostilities killing civilians as recently as July
Dara’a residents continue to require life-saving aid, including the full spectrum of health assistance. The majority of health facilities are either partially or completely destroyed, and many health workers have exited the country.
In particular, there are critical shortages in the provision of reproductive health services from family planning to antenatal and postpartum care and newborn care. Child marriage leads to serious health risks The long grinding conflict has shattered the economy of Dara’a. The years of violence and deprivation have left women and girls especially vulnerable. Fatima first became a grandmother at age 27. Now, at age 29, Fatima expressed relief that the national hospital in Dara’a was able to provide maternal health care to her daughter. The girl only 13 years old was in need of safe childbirth services.After giving birth the girl was admitted to intensive care, and her son was placed in the hospital’s paediatric intensive care unit. UNFPA is supporting the hospital with maternal and newborn care equipment.
A Police Killing Without a Hint of Racism
They’d already begun drinking when one of the guests asked about an unmarked case in the corner. Was it musical instrument? No, a pellet gun. He used it at work. His job was to go hunt down birds that had flown into businesses including Walmart. Soon he was standing by his room’s window showing off his pellet gun to the man. Down below, two motel guests in the La Quinta Inn and Suites hot tub looked up and saw a man with a gun near a fifth-floor window. Someone called 911.
By the time six police officers gathered in the fifth-floor hallway, Daniel Shaver was intoxicated. The other man had already left and gone back to his own room. The woman was still there. When they were ordered out of the room by cops, Shaver appeared confused.
The case hasn’t attracted the higher degree of attention from the press, the public, or policing-reform activists, partly because body-cam footage of the killing has been withheld from the media and partly because the cop and the dead man were both white, rendering the killing less controversial than one possibly animated by racism. But it warrants more attention than it has received.