Philando Castile: Results from a broken taillight stop… Diamond Reynolds, the woman who streamed the aftermath of her boyfriend’s shooting death at the hands of Minnesota police live on Facebook, said Philando Castile lay dying in the car and no one came to his aid, according to a testimony on Facebook Live. She sobbed as she recounted what had happened, and talked about the need to unite to stop police officers from killing innocent people.
“He was licensed to carry,” she said in the haunting video. “And as he was reaching for his ID in his back pocket, the police bear arms. The police officer stopped us for a busted tail light that was not busted. They pulled us over on the side of the road and asked for license and registration. As he was reaching for his license and registration, he told the officer that he was licensed to carry and [had a firearm]… The police took four or five shots at him for no reason.”
She said her daughter was in the car and witnessed the entire incident.
“The police did this to me,” Reynolds sobbed.
Reynolds then said she was taken to jail and separated from her 4-year-old child. She said they were not fed or given water even though they were held for hours, and police “treated me like a prisoner.”
She said the police took her phone and took over her Facebook account. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/philando-castiles-sobbing-girlfriend-exposes-how-cops-treated-her-and-4-year-old-like-criminals/
Alton Sterling… 37, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Killed by officers and filmed by cell phone, as their cameras fell off.. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/alton-sterling-anger-as-us-police-shoot-and-kill-yet-another-black-man/
The case of a black man found hanging from a tree in Piedmont Park has been referred to the FBI, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said. “There were no discernible signs of a struggle or foul play,” Hannah said. A “Fulton County medical examiner concurred that the death was consistent with a suicide.”
Twitter users, many of them on edge in the wake of two recent videotaped shooting deaths of black men at the hands of police officers, weren’t buying it. The name of the deceased has been withheld at this time. http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/police-body-found-in-piedmont-park-a-suicide-victi/nrtJq/
Fresno cops caught on tape shooting unarmed 19-year-old lying on the ground http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/fresno-cops-caught-on-tape-shooting-unarmed-19-year-old-laying-on-the-ground/
Sniper Attack Leaves 5 Police Officers Dead, 7 Injured In Dallas The gunman, Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, who was killed by police, was an army veteran who said he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers,” according to the Dallas Police Department. Officers exchanged gunfire with Johnson after negotiating with him for several hours. They ultimately detonated C4 plastic explosive strapped to a bomb disposal robot, killing Johnson. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dallas-protest-shooting_us_577f0a0ce4b0344d514eb552
Michael Strickland, the right-wing agitator and Trump supporter seen in this video brandishing a gun at a peaceful Black Lives Matter rally, has been charged with two class A felonies after being arrested and initially released Friday morning on his own recognizance without bail. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/trump-supporter-who-waved-gun-at-black-lives-matter-rally-came-armed-for-a-massacre/
ISIS Bombs The Prophet’s Tomb In Medina, Second Holiest Site In Islam http://occupydemocrats.com/2016/07/04/breaking-isis-bombs-prophets-tomb-medina-second-holiest-site-islam/
Being murdered is no reason to forgive student loan, New Jersey agency says http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article87576072.html
Stephen has a ranty rant for us. https://www.facebook.com/stephen.griffith.965/posts/10206801942342828 The Inevitability of Dallas -By Stephen Griffith
When you take a section of a population, and subject them to harsher punishments and give them lesser access to a resource or social norm than what others have, you will engender ill will inside that section. However you typically will not have violent outbreaks, and the people inside said oppressed or at less lesser representated populace will still attempt to work inside the system to see it changed where they have equal treatment and rights as the rest do. When, however, you take that same populace which is being given unequal treatment, and instead of just subjecting them to less than what the people in power have, but then also openly kill members of that segment, while also showing that members of the “prefered” segment can act the same way or even worse and will not just be out and out shot, you have a boiling point. What happened in Dallas is a perfect result and an inevitable result of what has been happening here for the last several years.
Yes, not all cops will act the way these officers have. However, the fact that you have officers who do act like this, and that most of the time they do get away with their crimes, creates a sense of absolute hopelessness in the black community. While some will do nothing, and others will do what the protesters did in Dallas which is try to bring light to the issue and combat it with love, others take the extreme approach, and probably the only approach they feel they have left, and lash out against a system and people who they feel are attempting to hunt them down and kill them. When you have no alternative but to either lay down and accept that at any second you may be pulled over, stopped, or tackled by someone in authority, and then shot dead for no crime other than perhaps mouthing off, or looking dangerous, you will have a segment which will take up arms.
Is what happened in Dallas a tragedy, of course. However, it was also inevitable. Over the last decade we have seen harder line approaches to crime and especially against blacks mostly due to what is known as “broken window” policies. You see the same crime be handed down against a white person and a black person, and by the same judge, but you will see unequal sentencing with the black person getting the harsher one. We hear stories again and again of blacks being killed, either publically or in secret by police, while white people can wave their shotguns around, threaten police with them, and yet they are taken down with care and are alive. Hopelessness combined with the somewhat justified belief that a traffic stop may end with you being murdered by those who are in authority and should be there to protect you means you either lay down and accept that fate, or you fight against it.
I’d rather have seen these people keep acting within the system. Yes, change is slow, but all meaningful change is. Be the glacier, it is slow, but inexorable. Fast change tends to be violent, bloody, deadly, and short lived. So now we sit back and see what happens. Unfortunately the “snipers” in Dallas have changed the narrative in a dangerous way. They’ve also changed the story. While people will talk about the the members of the black community who were shot and killed by police, the major conversation now has shifted away from one tragedy to another. Do not forget what happened, and work for positive change always. It may be slow, it may take more than your lifetime, but don’t stop working and one day it will happen.
