NEW YORK (AP) — From the White House to the streets of some of America’s biggest cities, the New York chokehold case converged with the Ferguson shooting and investigations out of South Carolina and Cleveland to stir a national conversation Thursday about racial justice and police use of force.
A day after a grand jury cleared a white New York City officer in the death of a Black man, civil rights leaders pinned their hopes on a promised federal investigation. Demonstrators protested for a second night in New York, carrying replicas of coffins across the Brooklyn Bridge, and turned out in such cities as Denver, Detroit and Minneapolis. And politicians and others talked about the need for better police training, body cameras and changes in the grand jury process to restore faith in the legal system.
“A whole generation of officers will be trained in a new way,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed as he and his police commissioner outlined previously announced plans to teach officers how to communicate better with people on the street.
President Barack Obama weighed in, saying one of the chief issues at stake is “making sure that people have confidence that police and law enforcement and prosecutors are serving everybody equally.”
Even before the decision in the Eric Garner case came down, racial tensions were running high because of last week’s grand jury decision not to charge a white officer in the shooting death of Black 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Other cases were added to the mix on Thursday:
— In the tiny South Carolina town of Eutawville, a white former police chief was charged with murder in the 2011 shooting of an unarmed Black man. Richards Combs’ lawyer accused prosecutors of taking advantage of national outrage toward police to obtain the indictment more than three years after the killing.
— In Cleveland, the U.S. Justice Department and the city reached an agreement to overhaul the police department after federal investigators found that officers use excessive force far too often, causing deep mistrust, especially among Blacks. The investigation was prompted chiefly by a 2012 police ar chase that ended in the deaths of two unarmed people in a hail of 137 bullets.
Just last week, protesters took to the streets of Cleveland after a white police officer shot and killed a Black 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be pellet gun.
At a news conference in New York after a night of protests led to 83 arrests, the Rev. Al Sharpton called the state-level grand jury system “broken” when it comes to police brutality cases and urged federal authorities to fix it.
“The federal government must do in the 21st century what it did in the mid-20th century,” he said. “Federal intervention must come now and protect people from state grand juries.”
Still, federal civil rights cases against police officers are exceedingly rare.
In the past two decades, only a few such cases have reached trial in New York — most notably the one involving Abner Louima, who was sodomized with a broom handle in a police station in 1997. Several other high-profile cases didn’t come together.
That’s largely because federal prosecutors must meet a high standard of proof in showing that police deliberately deprived victims of their civil rights through excessive force, said Alan Vinegrad, who as a federal prosecutor handled the Louima case.
Federal intervention “doesn’t happen often and it shouldn’t happen often,” said James Jacobs, a constitutional law professor at New York University Law School. “They should only step in when the local prosecution was a sham.”
Activists have claimed that the grand jury investigation of Garner’s death was indeed a sham. An amateur video showed Officer Daniel Pantaleo putting Garner in an apparent chokehold, and the medical examiner said the maneuver contributed to the death.
But Pantaleo’s attorney, Stuart London, expressed confidence Thursday that his client won’t face federal prosecution.
“There’s very specific guidelines that are not met in this case,” London said. “This is a regular street encounter. It doesn’t fall into the parameters.”
Acting at the Staten Island district attorney’s request, a judge released a few details Thursday from the grand jury proceedings — among other things, it watched four videos and heard from 50 witnesses, 22 of them civilians. District Attorney Daniel Donovan didn’t ask for testimony, transcripts or exhibits to be made public.
But London offered some details, saying the officer’s testimony focused on “his remorse and the fact that he never meant to harm Mr. Garner that day.”
Pantaleo admitted he heard Garner say, “I can’t breathe,” but believed that once he got him down on the ground and put him on his side, he would be revived by paramedics, London said. The officer also testified that he “used a takedown move and any contact to the neck was incidental,” the lawyer added.
London said the grand jury also heard from other officers who described how Pantaleo had tried in vain to talk Garner into complying with them — something not seen on video.
“Let’s make this easy. You’ve been through this before,” the officer said he told Garner.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the Garner case and others like it around the country have a “corrosive” effect and cause many to lose faith in the criminal justice system.

By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer

CHICAGO — A summer jobs program that engaged mentors to help troubled kids stay on track is linked with a big reduction in youth arrests for violent crimes.
The results suggest that a low-cost public program can reap big benefits. But they also support arguments that employment alone cannot resolve poverty-related ills.
Study author Sara Heller, an assistant criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the research offers one possible way to prevent violence among disadvantaged youngsters, and it’s a strategy that other cities should consider. “It means adolescence isn’t too late” to change destructive behavior, Heller said.
The study was released Thursday by the journal Science.
Working with the University of Chicago Crime Lab and police data, Heller studied the city’s eight-week program the year it launched, 2012, and followed participants for up to about a year after their jobs ended. They were compared with a control group of teens not involved in the program.
About 1,630 kids were involved, all from violence-prone Chicago schools. Most were Black and from low-income families. They were randomly assigned to the jobs program or the control group.
Kids in the program worked 25 hours a week as camp counselors, community garden assistants, office clerks and similar jobs. They earned minimum wage — $8.25 an hour, or an average of $1,400 for the summer, received bus passes if needed, and one daily meal. The cost to the city was $3,000 per kid.
Participants all had job mentors, adults who kept in close contact and helped them work out transportation troubles, conflicts with supervisors or family struggles that could have kept them from going to work and being successful on the job.
About half the jobs participants also got lessons from counselors in managing social and emotional difficulties, and setting goals. This extra help didn’t affect the rate of violent-crime arrests, which was about the same as the jobs-only group.
In the end, there were 43 percent fewer violent-crime arrests among the jobs group during the follow-up than among the control group.
Adjusting for factors involved in the study design, violent-crime arrests among the jobs group totaled 37, or an average of about 5 arrests per 100 participants. By contrast, violent-crime arrests totaled 82 in the control group, or about 9 per 100 kids. The crimes were mostly assaults.
There was no difference between the two groups in arrests for crimes involving property or drugs, although rates were low.
Heller said previous research also found employment has little effect on non-violent crime. Reasons are unclear but violence often results from “interpersonal conflicts,” which Chicago’s program aims to help kids overcome, she said.
Patrick Owens says he had run-ins with the law and wasn’t doing well in school until he got involved in the summer program two years ago. Now 19 and a freshman at Central State University in Ohio, he says job mentors helped set him straight.
They offered motivation, and the program “gave me something to look forward to,” Owens said. “It made you want to work harder to just do something positive for yourself.”
Robert Apel, a Rutgers University expert in the link between employment and crime, said the study results “are certainly encouraging, and worth close scrutiny.”
Previous evidence on summer jobs programs is scant but suggests they don’t have promising results, partly because they tend to offer more menial tasks than in the Chicago program, he said.
But Apel said what made the Chicago jobs program a success might have had little to do with the work, and may have been the mentoring.
Dr. M. Denise Dowd, an ER physician and injury prevention researcher at Children’s Mercy Hospitals in Kansas City, said the mentors likely provided crucial guidance to keep kids on the job and regulate disruptive behavior. Knowing there’s an adult who cares can give at-risk kids resilience to deal with adversity, Dowd said.

By Eric Tucker
Associated Press
WASHINGTON –The Obama administration issued guidelines Monday that ban federal law enforcement from profiling on the basis of religion, national origin and other characteristics, protocols the Justice Department hopes could be a model for local departments as the nation tackles questions about the role race plays in policing.
The policy, which replaces decade-old guidelines established under the Bush administration, also will require federal agencies to provide training and to collect data on complaints.
Civil rights advocates said they welcomed the broader protections, but were disappointed that the guidelines will exempt security screening in airports and border checkpoints and won’t be binding on local and state police agencies.
“It’s so loosely drafted that its exceptions risk swallowing any rule and permit some of the worst law enforcement policies and practices that have victimized and alienated American Muslim and other minority communities,” Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement. “This guidance is not an adequate response to the crisis of racial profiling in America.”
Though the guidelines – five years in the making – were not drafted in response to recent high-profile cases involving the deaths of Black individuals at the hands of white police officers, they’re nonetheless being released amid an ongoing national conversation about standards for police use of force, racial justice and the treatment of minorities by law enforcement.
“Particularly in light of certain recent incidents we’ve seen at the local level – and the widespread concerns about trust in the criminal justice process which so many have raised throughout the nation – it’s imperative that we take every possible action to institute strong and sound policing practices,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, referring to the August shooting by a white police officer of an unarmed Black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, and the chokehold death weeks earlier of a man in New York City.
Holder, who has made the release of the guidelines a priority before leaving the Justice Department next year, called the guidelines a “major and important step forward to ensure effective policing” by federal law enforcement.
The policy extends a ban on routine racial profiling that the Justice Department announced in 2003 under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Civil rights groups have long said those rules left open too many loopholes by allowing an exemption for national security and by failing to extend the ban to characteristics beyond race and ethnicity. The new guidelines would end the carve-out on national security investigations and widen the profiling ban to prohibit the practice on the basis of religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity.
The rules cover federal agencies within the Justice Department, including the FBI. They also extend to local and state officers serving on task forces alongside federal agents. Some activities of the Department of Homeland Security also are covered, such as civil immigration enforcement, but border and airport security screening are exempt along with interdictions at ports of entry.
The policy was laid out in a memo to law enforcement that provides concrete examples of law enforcement actions that would and would not be permissible. The memo makes clear that agents may take race, ethnicity and other factors into account during investigations in limited circumstances. Those include if they’ve received specific information linking a person of that characteristic to a particular crime or threat to homeland security.
Still, their practical impact remains to be seen, especially since local police officers are the ones primarily responsible for traffic stops, 911 emergency calls and day-to-day interactions with the communities they patrol. Though not binding on local agencies, the Obama administration views the guidelines as a road map, with Holder encouraging local law enforcement officials to adopt the federal policy.
The administration would welcome “any decision that’s made by local law enforcement to apply these policies at the state and local level as well,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Monday.

NAACP Statement on DOJ’s Updated Racial Profiling Guidance

BALTIMORE, MD – On Monday, the Attorney General of the United States issued an update to the 2003 U.S. Department of Justice guidance regarding the use of race by federal law enforcement agencies.  The NAACP has long supported the clarification of ambiguities, closing of loopholes, and elimination of provisions that allow for racial or other forms of discriminatory profiling. As such we strongly commend Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S. Department of Justice for expanding the characteristics it protects in the 2003 guidance beyond perceived race and ethnicity, to now also include gender, religion, national origin, gender-identity and sexual orientation. We are also pleased the guidance has been expanded to include state and local law enforcement officers participating in official federal law enforcement task forces. This new racial profiling guidance also expands many areas of protection by eliminating many of the deeply problematic broad carve-outs for law enforcement activities that weekend the much needed protections in the 2003 guidance, with a few exceptions.
In addition to the U.S.D.O.J. specific provisions, the policy also applies some of the expanded anti-profiling requirements to many of the Department of Homeland Security responsibilities for the very first time. This includes all U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and their enforcement activities wherever they may occur. It includes law enforcement activities performed by the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Border Patrol, Federal Air Marshalls, and DHS officers protecting federal buildings.  As we commend DOJ and DHS on the many much needed improvements in the guidance, we look forward to working with the administration to address a number of reforms to the 2003 guidance still needed, including protections in the area of language, disability (including HIV status), housing status, occupation, and socioeconomic status.
From Cornell William Brooks, the President and CEO of the NAACP:
“We welcome the revisions and updating of the 2003 guidance on the use of race by federal law enforcement issued by Attorney General Holder.  This guidance is a major and important step forward to ensure effective policing by federal law-enforcement officials, but it is one piece of many necessary long-term systemic criminal justice reforms. Now, we call on the Obama Administration to urge adoption of this guidance at the state and local law enforcement levels in all cases and not only cases where they are working with Federal task forces along with other reforms including providing specificity in data collection and training and mandating that law enforcement officers, who violate the guidance, be held criminally liable. We have painfully witnessed both in Ferguson, MO, and Staten Island, NY along with communities across the country the dangers of high levels of racial profiling, police discrimination and no accountability. Therefore, while we are encouraged by this step forward in updating this guidance, there is still significant progress to be made to end racial profiling once and for all.”
From Hilary O. Shelton, Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau and Senior Vice President for Policy and Advocacy:
“We are pleased to see this much needed improvement and expansion of the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2003 Racial Profiling Guidance. Since the beginning of the Obama administration we’ve met with Attorney General Holder and many officials at the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security with the hope of seeing a new guidance that would modernize, strengthen and expand anti-racial profiling protections for all Americans. This new guidance moves the Nation a long way forward in doing just that. In short, it expands the definition of racial profiling and protections covered in the 2003 Guidance, of perceived race and ethnicity to now include gender, religion, national origin, gender-identity and sexual orientation. It also expands federal government agency accountability beyond the Justice Department to now include many of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security officers such as, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Border Patrol, Federal Air Marshalls, and DHS officers protecting federal buildings. We look forward to continuing our work with the Administration to see the U.S. Department of Justice Racial Profiling Guidance full implementation and further improvement.”

By PHILIP MARCELO, Associated Press

BOSTON — Minority students at three prestigious law schools say they want to delay final exams because they’ve been busy protesting grand jury decisions in the deaths of unarmed Black men at the hands of white police officers in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, and haven’t had time to study.
Student groups at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center and Columbia Law School say demonstrations and rallies over the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases have prevented many students from adequately preparing for exams.
Cities across the country have seen large-scale demonstrations since grand juries in both cases recently decided not to indict the police officers in the men’s deaths. A medical examiner says Garner, who had asthma, died after being placed in a chokehold by an officer on Staten Island. Brown was shot by an officer in a St. Louis suburb.
At Harvard Law School, a coalition of student groups representing Asian, Black, Native American and other minority students says many students have been compelled to take action because the “national tragedy” implicated a judicial system they had chosen to join by studying law. They criticize administrators for largely staying on the sidelines.
“We led rallies, held vigils, and published an oped. You were silent on this issue,” the coalition wrote in a letter issued over the weekend. “We petitioned the government, served as legal observers, created spaces of solidarity, drafted model legislation, and marched through the streets of Boston and Cambridge.”
Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, with Yale Law School Dean Robert Post, penned an op-ed that ran in the Boston Globe on Tuesday. In it she called for criminal justice system reforms.
Minow also is hosting a Wednesday campus discussion in which faculty and students are expected to participate.
University officials at Harvard, Georgetown and Columbia have said students can petition to have their exams rescheduled and the requests will be considered individually, a process their policies already provided.
Columbia and Harvard also are offering students special sessions with trauma counselors, mental health professionals and professors to talk about the lack of indictments in the Brown and Garner cases in the coming days.
“Our practice of individualized consideration, among other things, allows us to connect with students and provide them the support they need when they are suffering trauma severe enough to warrant deferral,” wrote Ellen Cosgrove, dean of students at Harvard Law.
Officials at the three schools did not specify how many students have sought or been granted the exam exceptions. And none of the schools has issued a general postponement of end-of-semester exams.
But the Harvard Law School coalition, on its website, notes that a campus-wide delay is not without precedent: In 1970, the faculty voted to delay all exams in response to demands by students participating in anti-war protests.
At Columbia, officials urged students to remain focused on the serious issues the cases raise.
“Focusing on routine matters such as exam schedules … diverts attention away from the real issue that should be examined now: how to ensure a criminal justice system that protects fairness, due process, and equality,” the school said in a statement.

ATLANTA, Ga. (BlackNews.com) — The King Center will recognize President Bill Clinton for his extraordinary work with The Clinton Foundation, including his bi-partisan efforts with the Clinton Global Initiative, by presenting him with one of the Center’s highest honors, the Salute to Greatness Awards. The award is given during the Annual Salute to Greatness Awards dinner. “The dinner is our primary fundraiser and provides an opportunity for The King Center to recognize an individual and a corporation that reflects excellence in leadership and a commitment to social responsibility in the spirit of my father,” stated King Center CEO, Dr. Bernice A. King. The dinner will take place on Saturday, January 17, 2015, at 7 p.m. in Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency Hotel.
The 2015 corporate honoree is Kaiser Permanente. The award will be accepted by its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Bernard J. Tyson. Kaiser Permanente is being presented this award because of its outstanding philanthropic efforts and commitment to diversity in the workplace, including the service that their employees provide through the corporation’s Community Giving Campaign.
The King Center will also present two Coretta Scott King A.N.G.E.L. (“Advancing Nonviolence through Generations of Exceptional Leadership”) Awards at the dinner. This award annually recognizes a young leader (ages 12-25) and a youth organization/initiative that exemplifies exceptional leadership in the areas of peace, social justice and nonviolent social change. The 2015 youth recipient will be 13-year-old, Mr. Aidan Thomas Hornaday, founder of Aidan Cares, for his commitment to helping those in need through philanthropic and humanitarian efforts, while “teaching a generation to give,” and encouraging parents to teach their children to give. The award recipient for the youth initiative is the Tangelo Park Program, established by Mr. Harris Rosen. The initiative was selected “…because it is one of our nation’s most dynamic and creative philanthropic projects and is a powerful example of how focusing humanitarian efforts, in a single geographic location, helps to transform lives,” stated Dr. King.
Information concerning sponsorship opportunities and tickets for the Salute to Greatness Award Dinner is available on The King Center’s website at www.thekingcenter.org or you may call 404-526-8911 for further details. Also, please reach out to The King Center if you are interested in learning more about our educational and training initiatives.

by Jesse J. Lewis, Sr.

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson stood by his controversial comparison of the United States to Nazi Germany in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Asked by Blitzer whether he would amend or take back his comment’s, Carson said, “Absolutely not.”
Carson noted that the Third Reich was “using its tools to intimidate the population,’ and said that ‘we now live in a society where people are afraid to say of what they actually believe.”
He suggested that the U.S. “government is using instruments of government, like the IRS, to punish its opponents.”
He was also asked about comments that Obamacare was the “worst thing” that’s happened in the U.S. “since slavery.” Carson said whether the health care reform law was worse than other crises that have gripped the nation, like the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 or the Great Depression, is “not the point.”
Carson’s unapologetic, outspoken style has contributed to his meteoric rise within the conservative movement and the Republican Party more broadly, and he’s begun to raise his profile nationally as he contemplates a 2016 presidential run.
We all know that Carson is Black, and as long as he keeps saying that Barack Obama as President is the worst thing that ever happened to this country, his ratings will continue to increase among the right-wing Republicans. He will not get any Black or Hispanic votes, but if he continues to bad mouth President Obama, he can get rich.

 WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Conference of Mayors President and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson issued the following statement in response to the grand jury’s decision in New York City:
“The nation’s Mayors extend our sympathies and our prayers for the Garner family. Mayors know better than anyone that the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown are not isolated incidents.
“Similar tragedies have taken place in small and large cities, north, south, east and west for decades.
“This is our chance to make this right. As the leaders of the nation’s cities, we are committed to working with leaders in Washington and across the nation to bring communities together to deal with the greater issues of race and poverty, and the growing economic and cultural divide we see in some of our neighborhoods today.
“There’s nothing wrong with expressing concerns as long it is done peacefully and with purpose.
“We need a continued national dialogue that doesn’t stop once the news coverage has stopped.
“President Obama is leading the way, and we all should follow without losing sight that this country is the world’s greatest democracy. To remain so, we must respect our laws and the rights of all Americans.”