The People's Record

TW: Police brutality - Judge tosses indictment in Ramarley Graham case, says grand jury was misled 
May 15, 2013

A judge has thrown out the indictment against an NYPD officer charged in the fatal shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old in his Bronx home last year, but said prosecutors can present the case again, NBC 4 New York has learned.     

Officer Richard Haste, 31, had been indicted on manslaughter charges in the February 2012 shooting death of Ramarley Graham and faced up to 25 years in prison. 

On Wednesday, a judge dismissed the indictment on a technicality, siding with defense lawyers who had argued prosecutors gave flawed instructions to the grand jury that indicted Haste.

The Bronx district attorney’s office couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. 

Graham’s family left the courtroom after the judge’s decision, cursing and calling the officer a “murderer.”

Graham was shot to death in the bathroom of his home on East 229th Street after police chased him inside.

Security video showed Graham entering his home, and police running after him. Police at the time said officers witnessed a drug deal and pursued Graham, believing he had a gun.

They went in and found him in the second-floor bathroom, and shot him in the chest. He died shortly afterward.

Police said later that Graham was not found with a gun.

Source

“This is an outrageous miscarriage of justice and an insult to the family and supporters of Ramarley Graham. We demand that a new Grand Jury is convened immediately and that the case is re-presented.” - Rev. Al Sharpton

Pictured: Ramarley’s parents, Franclot Graham & Constance Malcolm

Fast food strike wave spreads to Detroit, St. Louis
May 10, 2013

St. Louis, and last month’s in New York and Chicago, today’s work stoppage is backed by a local coalition including the Service Employees International Union, and the participants are demanding a raise to $15 an hour and the chance to form a union without intimidation.

Organizers say that over a hundred workers joined the St. Louis strike between Wednesday and Thursday. That included a group of Jimmy John’s workers who alleged that management humiliated them by requiring them to hold up signs in public with messages including “I made 3 wrong sandwiches today” and “I was more than 13 seconds in the drive thru.”

“Sometimes I walk for more than an hour just to save my train fare so I can spend it on Ramen noodles,” St. Louis Chipotle worker Patrick Leeper said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. “I can’t even think about groceries.”

A spokesperson for Jimmy John’s declined to comment on Thursday’s strike; McDonald’s and Wendy’s did not respond to inquiries last night.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the fate of the fast food strike wave carries far-reaching implications: Fast food jobs are a growing portion of our economy, and fast food-like conditions are proliferating in other sectors as well. Organizers say the fast food industry now employs twice as many Detroit-area workers as the city’s iconic auto industry. These strikes also come at a moment of existential crisis for the labor movement, a sobering reality that was brought into sharp relief in December when Michigan, arguably the birthplace of modern US private sector unionism, became the country’s latest “Right to Work” state.

Along with a shared significant supporter—SEIU—the campaigns in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have apparent strategies in common. Rather than waiting until they’ve built support from a majority of a store’s or company’s workers, they stage actions by a minority of the workforce designed to inspire their co-workers. Rather than publicly identifying the campaign and its organizers with a single international union, these union-funded efforts turn to allied community groups to spearhead organizing. Rather than training all their resources on a single company, they organize against all of the industry’s players at once. And—faced with legal and economic assaults that have weakened the strike weapon—these campaigns mount one-day work stoppages that are carefully tailored to maximize attention and minimize, but not eliminate, the risk that workers will lose their jobs.

Whether these strategies can ever compel a fast food giant to negotiate with its employees remains to be seen.

“After what I would consider well over three decades of wage suppression, workers in this particular industry—and then I think it’ll go to others—are realizing that their only way up the wage ladder is through their own organizations,” CUNY labor studies lecturer Ed Ott said Wednesday. Ott, a board member of the community organizing group that spearheaded the New York fast food strike, added, “The only way these workers are going to be able to advance these jobs is through unionization. And I think that idea has finally gotten traction.”

Update (9:15 AM Friday): According to the campaign, a walkout by twenty workers at Detroit’s 10400 Gratiot Avenue McDonald’s prevented the store from operating. Some workers brought in as strikebreakers to replace those striking workers chose to join the strike instead.

Organizers say that by day’s end, today’s strike could be the largest fast food work stoppage yet, topping last month’s 400-strong strike in New York.

Source

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Harlem, NY: Hands Off Assata Shakur!

WHAT: PRESS CONFERENCE & COMMUNITY/STUDENT RALLY IN HARLEM  

WHEN: THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013 @  11:00AM -12:00 NOON 

WHERE: ASSATA SHAKUR-GUILLERMO MORALES COMMUNITY & STUDENT CENTER @ CCNY - ROOM 3-201 (NAC BUILDING)

USE AMSTERDAM AVENUE ENTRANCE (BET.137TH & 138TH) 

WHY: TO DEMAND THAT THE U.S. GOVERNMENT & STATE OF NEW JERSEY RESCIND IT’S $2 MILLION “DEAD OR ALIVE” BOUNTY ON ASSATA SHAKUR AND THAT ALL EFFORTS TO SECURE HER CAPTURE BY ARMED MERCENARIES AND/OR EXTRADITION CEASE. WE FURTHER DEMAND THAT HER POLITICAL ASYLUM IN CUBA BE RESPECTED AND THAT LAW ENFORCEMENT IMMEDIATELY END THEIR OWN TERRORISM, HARASSMENT & DEFAMATION OF ASSATA’S NAME, FAMILY, FRIENDS, COMRADES & SUPPORTERS. ASSATA SHAKUR WAS FRAMED, NEARLY MURDERED AND RAILROADED BY THE GOVERNMENTS ILLEGAL 1970’S COINTELPRO  WAR ON THE BLACK COMMUNITY AND SHE MUST REMAIN FREE! 

WHO: Safiya Bukhari-Albert Nuh Washington Foundation, Universal Zulu Nation, UHURU Movement, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, The Black Souljahz, United Muslim Alliance, Students For Educational Rights/CCNY, Black Student Union/CCNY, New Black Panther Party, NYC-Jericho Movement, Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, Healing Drum Collective, Black Panther Commemoration Committee, Community Vision Council, NYC-Peoples Survival Program, Nosotros Los Polores, Radical Women, Ban The N-Word 

*NOTE: ENDORSED LIST INITIATED FROM MEMBER ORGANIZATIONS OF THE MORALES-SHAKUR CENTER. TO ADD OR REMOVE YOUR NAME CONTACT: Panthershepcat@aol.com    

INFORMATION: (212) 650-5008

HANDS OFF ASSATA!

(via bad-dominicana)

April 16, 2013 - from my email:

Hey folks!

New York fast food workers turn up heat in bid for better pay
April 4, 2013

Hundreds of fast-food restaurant workers in New York City are expected to walk off the job on Thursday in what organizers said would be their largest rally yet for better pay.

Employees from familiar chains such as McDonald’s Corp, Wendy’s and Yum Inc’s KFC are seeking to roughly double their hourly pay to $15. They also say they want the right to form a union without intimidation or retaliation.

As many as 400 workers from more than five dozen restaurants around New York City have committed to turn out for protests planned at various locations, said Jonathan Westin, director of Fast Food Forward, which organized Thursday’s actions and is backed by labor, community and religious groups.

That turnout would be twice as large as in November, when the city’s fast-food workers also walked off the job, Westin said.

And, he said, the majority of employees from some individual fast-food outlets have vowed to participate in Thursday’s actions.

“It’s going to be difficult for these businesses to operate this time,” Westin said.

The nearly $200 billion U.S. fast-food industry long has been known as a employer of teenagers and students.

But the 18-month “Great Recession” that began in December 2007 helped change that. It destroyed thousands of middle-income jobs and forced more adults to seek part-time, largely minimum wage work flipping burgers and manning fryers.

In his State of the Union address in February, U.S. President Barack Obama proposed raising the federal minimum wage as a way to help lift some workers out of poverty - a plan critics said would kill jobs by burdening small businesses with higher costs.

The state of New York is already on that path. Its recently passed budget included plans to raise the state minimum wage, now at $7.25, to $9 by the end of 2015.

But even with that 24 percent hike, New York’s minimum wage would remain below the roughly $11 hourly pay needed to lift a family of four above the poverty line.

Such pay-boosting efforts are welcome but not enough for workers struggling to make ends meet, said fast-food employee Joseph Barrera, who plans to join Thursday’s protests.

The 22-year-old says he has earned $7.25 per hour for the 10 months he has worked at a KFC restaurant in Brooklyn. Even with a side job as a freelance mechanic, he still stretches to cover rent on his basement apartment that has no windows or heat.

“Anywhere where the cost of living is very, very high, $9 is not enough. Everyone should be able to make a living wage,” Barrera said.

McDonald’s Corp, the world’s biggest fast-food chain by sales, in November said that the majority of its namesake U.S. restaurants are owned and operated by independent business men and women who offer pay and benefits competitive within the quick service restaurant industry.

Source

In related news, a McDonald’s job ad in Massachusetts requires a bachelor’s degree & two years of experience for a cashier job. 

fazstreetart:

D.C.

via

“And to them I say, leave us alone […] Do not grasp us by the wrist, we aren’t your property. Do not whistle at us, we are not dogs. You are not entitled to a smile, or a conversation, or our time, because women do not owe you anything simply because they are women, and you are a man.” - street artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

(Source: stoptellingwomentosmile)

NYPD’s controversial ‘Stop & Frisk’ policy ruled unconstitutional
January 8, 2013

A key part of the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” tactic has been ruled unconstitutional.

Manhattan Federal Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered police to refrain from making trespass stops outside private residential buildings — even though the landlord has given officers permission to do so as part of the NYPD’s “Clean Halls” program.

“While it may be difficult to say when precisely to draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional police encounters such a line exists, and the NYPD has systematically crossed it when making trespass stops outside buildings,” Scheindlin wrote in a 157-page ruling.

The New York Civil Liberties Union argued in an eight-day hearing in October that “Clean Halls,” which exists only in the Bronx, leads to people being hassled by cops and sometimes cuffed near their own abode for no legitimate reason.

The NYCLU’s legal challenge centers on the case of Jaenean Ligon.

In August 2011 the mother of three sent her 17-year-old son to buy ketchup for the family’s dinner.

Two plaintclothes cops stopped the teen outside the family’s building on E. 163rd St. in the Bronx. Two uniformed officers also arrived on the scene.

After frisking the youngster, one of the cops buzzed Ligon’s apartment and asked she come downstairs to identify her son. Ligon testified the request sent her into a panic because she feared the worst — that her son had been seriously hurt or killed.

NYCLU lawyers argued that Ligon’s experience was all too common in high-crime neighborhoods in the Bronx where the “Clean Halls” program is in place.

At least one Bronx prosecutor, Jeannette Rucker, expressed skepticism about the legality of the practice, as well.

Rucker notified the NYPD in July of last year that her office would no longer rubber-stamp trespassing arrests made outside Clean Halls buildings and public housing projects unless the arresting officer was interviewed.

In addition to immediately halting such trespass stops in the Bronx, Scheindlin ordered a Jan. 31 hearing to determine what other relief should be granted.

“For those of us who do not fear being stopped as we approach or leave our own homes or those of our friend and family, it is difficult to believe that residents of one of our boroughs live under such a threat,” she wrote.

Two other stop and frisk cases are pending.

Source

How NYC’s plutocrat mayor made 20,000 children homeless
December 9, 2012

There are 20,000 kids sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City, according to the city’s latest estimate, a number that does not include homeless kids who are not sleeping in shelters because their families have been turned away. Up to 65 percent of families who apply for shelter don’t get in, and their options can be grim.

“Some end up sleeping in subway trains,” Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, tells AlterNet. “Some go to hospital emergency rooms or laundromats. Women are going back to their batterers or staying in unsafe apartments.”

Families that make it into shelters are taking longer to leave and move into stable, permanent housing. Asked by reporters why families were staying 30% longer than even last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “… it is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”

“Is it great?” he elaborated a day later in response to outcry over his comments. “No. It’s not the Plaza Hotel … but that’s not what shelter is supposed to be and that’s not what the public can afford or the public wants.”

That deep-seated empathy for the poor also runs through the mayor’s policies, which have helped create a crisis that The New York Times has called ”an emergency.” Since the mayor took office, promising to slash the rate of total homelessness by two thirds in five years, the homeless rate in New York City has ballooned to 46,000 people sleeping in shelters, an increase of almost 40 percent. The administration blames the financial crisis, but as it turns out, there are ways to make the lives of the very poor tougher in the middle of a recession: you just need to subscribe to a governing philosophy that assumes the poor are both too lazy to get on their feet and working hard day and night to cheat the system.

Here is a guide to how the Bloomberg administration managed to increase family homelessness while using up a lot of public money.

1. Cut access to federal aid

For decades, Republican and Democratic mayors kept family homelessness down by giving homeless parents and their kids priority access to federal housing subsidies and rental vouchers. But in 2004, as part of the mayor’s five-year plan to combat homelessness, the administration knocked homeless families from the top of the massive waiting list for federal rent subsidies. Administration officials, offering no empirical proof, claimed that poor people were scamming the system by moving into shelters in order to get Section 8 vouchers. (Like many conservative fantasies involving scheming minorities, it’s no doubt true that someone, somewhere, cheated - but studies show this was not a widespread problem straining the system.)

The rate of homeless families who used federal subsidies fell to the low single digits. According to Giselle Routhier, policy analyst for Coalition for the Homeless, “In fiscal year 2010, at a time of then record homelessness, homeless families received only 2 percent of the 5,500 available public housing apartments and only 3 percent of 7,500 Section 8 vouchers.”

In place of programs that gave them access to permanent housing, homeless families got the gift of personal responsibility! First the administration introduced Housing Stability Plus, a subsidy that fell by 20 percent each year. HSP was mired in controversy following revelations that families were being exposed to hazardous conditions in their new digs: “[M]any formerly homeless families and their children have suffered from lead poisoning, lack of heat and hot water, vermin infestation,” according to a Coalition for the Homeless report.

The Advantage program, introduced in 2007, helped with a percent of families’ rents (requiring they work or take job training) but cut aid after either one or two years. When their subsidies ran out, families were supposed to find their own way into permanent housing. Instead, many found their way back to the shelter, because, as homelessness advocates point out, rents did not magically go down in New York. One out of three families whose Advantage assistance expired applied for shelter in 2011, according to city numbers crunched by Coalition for the Homeless.

2. Cut and run

Still, the administration touted the program as a success, defending it against homelessness advocates and city officials who pushed the mayor to give families priority in federal housing assistance. So it was strange that when the governor of New York cut half of Advantage’s funding in March 2011, the Bloomberg administration refused to make up the difference and just killed the program. Around that time the mayor suggested that poor families were pretending to be homeless to scam Advantage subsidies.“You never know what motivates people,” he said on his radio show. “One theory is that some people have been coming into the homeless system, the shelter system, in order to qualify for a program that helps you move out of the homeless system.”

When the city officially cut the program, 15,000 families who relied on Advantage to make rent were informed by letter that they had exactly two weeks to find other arrangements. An emergency court order forced the city to continue helping families in the program, but when the order was lifted in February 2012, the city abruptly cut off aid to tenants, saddling 7,000 households with full market rent for apartments they’d struggled to pay 30% to 40% on.

The inevitable return to the shelter of many former Advantage families helped push the number of homeless people sleeping in shelters up to 43,000 in 2012. “In the last 18 months, there has been no housing plan,” Markee tells AlterNet.

3. Spend money on temporary solutions

Instead, the administration is just frantically opening up more and more emergency shelters. The AP reports that 10 new shelters for single adults and families have opened in recent months to deal with the crisis. The administration plans five more before the year is over.

The problem with that is everything. Putting up a family in a shelter costs $3,000 a month — way more than a rental subsidy. Beyond that, studies have shown that not having a permanent place to live is destabilizing and harmful to kids, even if they end up in one of those NYC shelters that so impressed the mayor with their luxury. Homeless kids get sick more often and with stranger and more serious ailments than poor kids who have homes, suffering respiratory infections and digestive infections at significantly higher rates. The lack of safe, permanent housing delays normal development and homeless kids have higher levels of anxiety and depression, which often manifest in behavioral problems.

“If homelessness is hard on adults, for the young, it can be disastrous, starting a slide into a lifetime of problems,” a NYT editorial put it. (It’s not entirely clear what the long-term impact of Hurricane Sandy will be on the city’s homelessness rates. Right now, families who lost their homes in the storm are staying in hotels paid by the city and reimbursed by FEMA.)

4. Refuse to change course

The New York City Council has outlined a plan to revive programs proven to reduce homelessness. As Christine Quinn, Annabel Palma and Coalition for the Homeless director Mary Brosnahan wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed, “That means returning to the proven strategy of setting aside a reasonable share of open slots in public housing and marshaling valuable federal housing vouchers for those trapped in the shelter system. In addition, a new rental assistance program, modeled on the successful federal voucher program, must be created.”

An assessment of the plan by the City of New York’s Independent Budget Office found, “if a total of 5,000 families a year were moved out of shelter through priority referrals for NYCHA and Section 8, family shelter costs would be $29.4 million lower, of which $11.0 million would be savings of city funds.”

So far, the administration has rebuffed the plan. At a hearing in September, Department of Homeless Services commissioner Seth Diamond pointed, improbably, to job training programs as the way to address the city’s skyrocketing homelessness. One council member called it a “head-in-the-sand” approach.

Diamond reiterated the administration’s position that shelter residents should not be prioritized for housing aid.

Source

Students for a free Cooper Union reissue their demands
December 8, 2012

We, The Students for a Free Cooper Union, having occupied The Peter Cooper Suite on the top floor of The Cooper Union Foundation Building for more than 100 hours, have chosen to reissue our demands of the Cooper Union administration and guiding principles to the citywide higher education community and general public.

Over the past five days, we have received amazing displays of solidarity from Cooper Union students, faculty, alumni, and supporters around the world. Meanwhile, the college’s deadlocked administration has been shaken by community action and presence. Cooper Union has received positive attention as an institution, and the community’s numerous creative responses to tuition-based, expansionist models have stressed the necessity and preservation of free education. However, Jamshed Bharucha and his administration have yet to officially respond to our demands. Rather than addressing the pressing issues raised by student, faculty, and alumni, Bhaurcha’s administration has attempted to marginalize our voices along with the vision and mission of Cooper Union: to provide free education to all.

We now find ourselves in a space of unity and true democratic discourse among students, faculty, and alumni. Our peers have taken this opportunity to come together across disciplines, forming a unification committee, carrying out guidelines for peaceful protests, and crossing institutional boundaries.

To move forward with the support of the Cooper Union community and an assembly of New York City high schools, colleges, and universities, The Students for a Free Cooper Union have published 2,000 copies of our original communique and list of demands to be distributed at the Citywide Student/Faculty Rally on Saturday, December 8. The rally will begin at 11:00 AM in Washington Square Park with student and faculty speak-outs, followed by a march to Cooper Union at 3:00 PM. This celebration of free education and the student reclamation of higher education will conclude with a dance party.

The march from Washington Square Park to Cooper Union will be fun, family-friendly, participatory, and welcoming to those not well-versed in protest.

Our demands as follows:

1. The administration must publicly affirm the college’s commitment to free education. They will stop pursuing new tuition-based educational programs and eliminate other ways in which students are charged for education.
2. The Board of Trustees must immediately implement structural changes with the goal of creating open flows of information and democratic decision-making structures. The administration’s gross mismanagement of the school cannot be reversed within the same systems which allowed the crisis to occur. To this end, we have outlined actions that the board must take

• Record board meetings and make minutes publicly available.
• Appoint a student and faculty member from each school as voting members of the board.
• Implement a process by which board members may be removed through a vote from the Cooper Union community, comprised of students, faculty, alumni, and administrators.

3. President Bharucha steps down.

The biggest wave of job actions in the history of America’s fast-food industry began at 6:30 a.m. on Thursday at a McDonald’s at Madison Avenue and 40th Street, with several dozen protesters chanting: “Hey, hey, what do you say? We demand fair pay.”

From Walmart to fast-food, workers are demanding a living wage & the right to unionize! 

In rare strike, NYC fast-food workers walk out
November 29, 2012

At 6:30 this morning, New York City fast food workers walked off the job, launching a rare strike against a nearly union-free industry. Organizers expect workers at dozens of stores to join the one-day strike, a bold challenge to an industry whose low wages, limited hours and precarious employment typify a growing portion of the U.S. economy.

New York City workers are organizing at McDonald’s, Burger King, Domino’s, KFC, Taco Bell, Wendy’s and Papa John’s. Organizers expect today’s strike to include workers from almost all of those chains, with the largest group coming from McDonald’s; the company did not respond to a request for comment.

But employees were clear about their reasons for walking out. “They’re not paying us enough to survive,” McDonald’s worker Raymond Lopez told Salon in a pre-strike interview. Lopez said he decided to join today’s strike because “This company has enough money to pay us a reasonable amount for all that we do … they’re just not going to give it to us as long as they can get away with it. I think we need to be heard.”

Lopez, a 21-year-old who’s been at McDonald’s for two years, said he makes $8.75 an hour as a shift manager (organizers say this isn’t a supervisory position). He works at McDonald’s and at two other jobs – catering and doing leaf work – while paying off student loans, pursuing an acting career, and helping to support his family.

“Everything we do needs to be fast, needs to be perfect,” said Lopez, and “when you’re actually there for eight hours smiling like you’re on the Miss Universe contest, it’s not easy.” He said McDonald’s supervisors “make us work off the clock all of the time” and “there is a lot of verbal abuse.” Lopez recalled a supervisor telling him, “Hey, if you don’t want me to treat you this way, then give me what I want.’”

New York Communities for Change organizing director Jonathan Westintold Salon the current effort is “the biggest organizing campaign that’s happened in the fast food industry.” A team of 40 NYCC organizers have been meeting with workers for months, spearheading efforts to form a new union, the Fast Food Workers Committee. NYCC organizers and fast food workers have been signing up employees on petitions demanding both the chance to organize a union without retaliation and a hefty raise, from near-minimum wages to $15 an hour.

Jamel Mims on facing two years in prison for protesting Stop & Frisk
October 23, 2012

New York City teacher Jamel Mims faces up to two years in prison for nonviolently protesting the most controversial racial profiling policy in America today. Last year, he was one of the key members of a civil disobedience campaign to stop Stop-and-Frisk that boasted the iconic academic Cornel West as one of its leading advocates. Today, he stands on trial along with 12 other campaigners.

As discussed in last week’s State of the Left, the NYPD policy involves 1,800 instances of stopping and frisking citizens every day; in the last decade, 87% of people who are stopped are black or Latino; and about 9 of 10 are innocent of any wrongdoing. There is not even a hint of exaggeration in saying that certain sections of New York City are turned into police states for minority youth.

Enter Jamel Mims:

On Tuesday October 23, I will be on trial along with Carl Dix, who, with Cornel West, initiated the 2011 campaign of nonviolent protest to stop Stop-and-Frisk. We are facing up to two years in jail for non-violent protest at the NYPD 103rd precinct in Jamaica, Queens last year.

The stakes are undoubtedly high: this is the second stop-and-frisk protest mass trial resulting from the culminating action of the civil disobedience campaign that sparked citywide resistance to the policy.  The Queens District Attorney added a serious misdemeanor charge on us last month, and re-wrote our charges last week so that we’re charged with ‘acting in concert’ rather than as individuals.

The action last November  was the third such protest at New York City precincts with the most stop-and-frisks, this one taking place in the borough of Queens. We held a community rally and march through Jamaica, Queens, which ended at the 103rd Precinct.  As our march arrived at the precinct, it was completely barricaded on all sides – on lock-down in anticipation of the protest.  An officer slides open one of the metal grates and motions us inward so that we may protest at the precinct doors.  After minutes of chanting and singing outside of the precinct steps, 20 of us were arrested, quite quickly, but held for hours late into the next day.  For less than ten minutes of protesting stop-and-frisk outside of the doors 103rd precinct, which houses the NYPD officers who put fifty shots into Sean Bell, 12 co-defendants and I now find ourselves facing two years of jail time.

If anyone think this is just an empty threat, and they won’t convict or send us to jail, let me reiterate—the DA has twice bumped up the charges in the last month, and has made it very clear that the prosecutorial apparatus intends to place us behind bars. A year ago, those who had no first-hand experience of the humiliation of being illegally searched barely knew the practice occurred.  Those who got stopped and frisked thought there was nothing one could do about it. Now, the stop-and-frisk policy and the horrors it inflicts are going viral in mainstream society. Copwatch and videos of NYPD stops garner thousands of views, and nearly every day there are articles or opinion pieces about stop-and-frisk.  Potential mayoral candidates have even had to confront this, as politicians line up to claim their opposition to the policy, or express their desire to reform or modify it in the ongoing pursuit of public opinion.

In this watershed moment, when stop-and-frisk is opening a window into the daily plight of thousands, the very people who put their bodies on the line to put this issue into the spotlight and openly call out for its abolition are vigorously prosecuted and threatened with incarceration.  I refuse to accept this.  It’s unthinkable that the Queens District Attorney, who couldn’t make a case against the cops who murdered Sean Bell, is now throwing the book at nonviolent civil disobedience protesters.  In this light, the intended effect of this prosecution is insidiously transparent: to send a chilling effect through the movement against mass incarceration, and dampen the spirit of resistance it has ignited.  To put it quite simply: don’t speak up, and certainly don’t fight back.

Well, I’m speaking up.  And not just as someone who is passionate about the issue.  I speak as a target of police abuse, as a Fulbright Scholar whose scholarship was almost denied after being assaulted by Boston police while trying to leave a party. I speak to you as an artist and teacher whose work in New York City public schools has me witness the humiliation and degradation of the youth by the NYPD on a daily basis.  I speak to you as a committed opponent of the New Jim Crow, a system of mass incarceration that has 2.4 million mostly black and Latino men warehoused in prisons across the nation, with stop-and-frisk as a major pipeline into that system.

Most of all, I speak to you as someone who has cast their lot with those at the bottom of society: with those thousands of youth who are brutalized, targeted, harassed, and shuffled off behind bars — and is now facing years in prison for standing with them.

We fully intend to stop this railroading by bringing the political battle into the courtroom and putting Stop and Frisk on trial.  If we are allowed to be convicted and jailed without a massive fight, then the battle against stop-and-frisk and the spirit of resistance it has engendered will be seriously dampened. On the other hand, if people stand with us in this legal battle–if we meet and defeat their attempts to silence and punish us–then the movement will gain further initiative and pull many more people into the struggle against mass incarceration.

Source
Photo 1, 2

The United States police state imprisons all dissidents, from police brutality activists to government whistleblowers. 

We’re approaching Halloween in less than two weeks.

Adbusters put out a call to action with the following details:

Alright occupiers, trick or treat,

Let’s all go to Washington, DC, and have a Halloween night party!

Let’s celebrate the wonderful Coke/Pepsi presidential election now in progress … and the honest, feisty way our elected reps in Congress have conducted our nation’s business … pay tribute to the bold visions they’ve put forward.

At dusk on October 31, let’s gather on Capitol Hill, trick or treat Congress and party like we’ve never partied before.

Bring mask!

CJ HQ

PS And if you cannot make it to DC then party in front of the Bank of America in your community… outside your city hall… or in the squares.

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET
#OCCUPYMAINSTREET
#HALLOWEENPARTY

Here is the facebook event. Attend, show up (think of all the political costumes), and invite anyone you know around the east coast who might be interested in attending.

If you don’t have a place to stay or would like to hang out with some random Occupiers, then the folks at OccuFarm have kindly offered their land for out-of-towners to camp at: 

All occupiers from out of town are welcome to camp at OccuFarm. Go to my twitter page for details about OccuFarm. Message me with any questions. 

When you arrive at 8531 Riggs Road you will see two large cement culverts. Walk past them, then walk past the garage (straight behind it) and you are there. Here are some pictures:

• pic.twitter.com/mZwj49ZC
• pic.twitter.com/cxjbuc9r

@scrappleeggs on twitter for more info. 

NYPD beat homeless man in synagogue outreach center
October 17, 2012

The NYPD beat up a homeless man in Brooklyn last week as he resisted arrest for sleeping in a synagogue outreach center, where he had permission to stay. Surveillance video obtained by local news siteCrownHeights.info shows two officers brutally beating a shoeless and shirtless man, Ehud Halevi, who insisted he had permission to be in the center for troubled youth, ALIYA (Alternative Learning Institute for Young Adults).

Although sources confirmed with CrownHeights.info that Halevi had been sleeping in the space for a month with permission, one security guard, unaware of the arrangement, called the police. The guard later told the New York Daily News that he regretted making the call.

According to Gothamist, “[Halevi] was also pepper sprayed during the arrest, [and] was charged with assaulting a police officer, trespassing, resisting arrest and harassment. He’s currently out on bail and faces up to five years in prison for assaulting an officer.” The NYPD have yet to issue comment.

Watch the graphic video here.

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