Across the United States, there are police departments that still look like Ferguson, Missouri, a largely white police force protecting a mostly Black/Brown community.

Kansas City.com

The killing of an unarmed black 18-year-old by an officer in a nearly all-white police department in suburban St. Louis refocused the country on the racial balance between police forces and the communities they protect.

But an analysis by The Associated Press found that the racial gap between black police officers and the communities where they work has narrowed over the last generation, particularly in departments that once were the least diverse.

A much larger disparity, however, is now seen in the low number of Hispanic officers in police departments. In Waco, Texas, for example, the community is more than 30 percent Hispanic, but the police department of 231 full-time sworn officers has only 27 Hispanics.

Across the United States, there are police departments that still look like Ferguson, Missouri, a largely white police force protecting a mostly black community.

After rioting followed the shooting of Michael Brown there, Attorney General Eric Holder noted the lack of black police on the city's payroll. "Police forces should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve," Holder said.

Holder on Thursday announced a Justice Department investigation into the practices of the city's police department. Holder said he and his department had heard numerous concerns from people in Ferguson about police practices, a history of "deep mistrust" and a lack of diversity on the police force.

"If we have a basis to believe that part of the issues out there, should we find any, is a lack of diversity on the police force, that is something clearly that we will look at, make recommendations with regard to," Holder said.

But the situation in Ferguson is less common than it was 20 years ago. In most cases now, underrepresented minority populations in police departments are found in places such as Anaheim, California, West Valley City, Utah, and Providence, Rhode Island, where there are large Hispanic populations, yet few Hispanic officers.

Less common today are the circumstances in cities such as Ferguson, Chester, Pennsylvania, and Maple Heights, Ohio, where most of the sworn officers are white and are protecting largely black communities.

In Anaheim, for instance, where the police department is among the least racially balanced in the nation, the police killings of two Latino men in 2012 set off weeks of angry protests. While more than half the community is Hispanic, only 23 percent of the sworn police officers are.

"There's a huge gap between community and police," said Theresa Smith, a member of the Anaheim Community Coalition, which aims to improve police oversight. Police shot and killed Smith's son in 2009. "You can't bridge that gap if people don't trust you."

The AP compared Census Bureau data about a community's racial and ethnic makeup with staffing surveys by the Justice Department for more than 1,400 police departments from 1987 and 2007, the most recent year for which the data are available. The AP then analyzed how different a department's racial makeup was from the population it served.

The AP found that since 1987, black representation on police forces has improved, such as in New Orleans and in East Orange and Plainfield, New Jersey.

At least 49 departments had a majority Hispanic population, yet more than half of the police department was white. That's nearly five times as many departments than in 1987, when the largest disparities disproportionately involved black police officers and residents.

Efforts to improve relationships between police departments and communities date to the 1950s and 1960s, when some departments started creating community relations units.

Among the most balanced police departments in diverse cities are in Miami Beach, Florida, Oak Park Village, Illinois, Pasadena City, California, Bexar County, Texas, Cambridge, Massachusetts, New Orleans, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

One benefit of diversity is to avoid the perception of discrimination, said Anthony Chapa, executive director of the Hispanic American Police Command Officer Association.

But a diversified police force does not solve all problems.

The AP found that even in cities where police departments reflect the communities they protect, there still are issues with racial discrimination. Police may not be able to hire their way out of problems.

New Orleans, for example, is among the most racially balanced departments in the country. Yet in 2011, the Justice Department found that it discriminated against African-Americans. There are similar concerns in the Hispanic community.

The executive director of Puentes New Orleans, Carolina Hernandez, said her group has been working with local police to bridge the divide between officers and the Latino community. "If you're here to protect and serve," she said, "it's hard to accomplish that when the community automatically doesn't trust you."

The U.S. government recognized the importance of recruiting more minority police officers as early as 1968, with that recommendation from the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, convened by President Lyndon Johnson after deadly riots in a series of cities the previous year. But it would be years before police departments made real efforts. Some departments still struggle with it today.

"It is one of the challenges that I inherited," said Adrian Garcia, the sheriff in Harris County, Texas. The first Hispanic sheriff of the sprawling county that includes Houston, Garcia said his department is not representative of the community. But he's trying to change that.

"I call myself the chief recruiter," Garcia said. "I have to talk to the community and let them know what we want their sons and daughters to serve the community."

Garcia said he does not think a police department that does not look like the community it protects is more prone to discrimination than more racially diverse departments.

"But it leaves that perception," Garcia said. "As long as the community can point and say, 'There's no one that looks like me, and as a result, I feel like I was treated unjustly,' it opens up the argument that maybe the policies are shortsighted in how you work with a diverse community."

the white folks @ Wash Post Correct "the Jobs Report" - White Supremacy is Everywhere - not just in a few places

WashPost 

Detroit is a model for how wealthier white Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer non-white Americans

Huff Post 

Detroit is the largest city ever to seek bankruptcy protection, so its bankruptcy is seen as a potential model for other American cities now teetering on the edge.

But Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.

Judge Steven W. Rhodes of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan is now weighing Detroit's plan to shed $7 billion of its debts and restore some $1.5 billion of city services by requiring various groups of creditors to make sacrifices.

Among those being asked to sacrifice are Detroit's former city employees, now dependent on pensions and health care benefits the city years before agreed to pay. Also investors who bought $1.4 billion worth of bonds the city issued in 2005.

Both groups claim the plan unfairly burdens them. Under it, the 2005 investors emerge with little or nothing, and Detroit's retirees have their pensions cut 4.5 percent, lose some health benefits, and do without cost-of-living increases.

No one knows whether Judge Rhodes will accept or reject the plan. But one thing is for certain. A very large and prosperous group close by won't sacrifice a cent: They're the mostly-white citizens of neighboring Oakland County.

Oakland County is the fourth wealthiest county in the United States, of counties with a million or more residents.

In fact, Greater Detroit, including its suburbs, ranks among the top financial centers, top four centers of high technology employment, and second largest source of engineering and architectural talent in America.

The median household in the County earned over $65,000 last year. The median household in Birmingham, Michigan, just across Detroit's border, earned more than $94,000. In nearby Bloomfield Hills, still within the Detroit metropolitan area, the median was close to $105,000.

Detroit's upscale suburbs also have excellent schools, rapid-response security, and resplendent parks.

Forty years ago, Detroit had a mixture of wealthy, middle class, and poor. But then its middle class and white residents began fleeing to the suburbs. Between 2000 and 2010, the city lost a quarter of its population.

By the time it declared bankruptcy, Detroit was almost entirely poor. Its median household income was $26,000. More than half of its children were impoverished.

That left it with depressed property values, abandoned neighborhoods, empty buildings, and dilapidated schools. Forty percent of its streetlights don't work. More than half its parks closed within the last five years.

Earlier this year, monthly water bills in Detroit were running 50 percent higher than the national average, and officials began shutting off the water to 150,000 households who couldn't pay the bills.

Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown Detroit, you wouldn't know exactly when you left the city and crossed over into Oakland County -- except for a small sign that tells you.

But boundaries can make all the difference. Had the official boundary been drawn differently to encompass both Oakland County and Detroit -- creating, say, a "Greater Detroit" -- Oakland's more affluent citizens would have some responsibility to address Detroit's problems, and Detroit would likely have enough money to pay all its bills and provide its residents with adequate public services.

But because Detroit's boundary surrounds only the poor inner city, those inside it have to deal with their compounded problems themselves. The whiter and more affluent suburbs (and the banks that serve them) are off the hook.

Any hint they should take some responsibility has invited righteous indignation. "Now, all of a sudden, they're having problems and they want to give part of the responsibility to the suburbs?" scoffs L. Brooks Paterson, the Oakland County executive. "They're not gonna' talk me into being the good guy. 'Pick up your share?' Ha ha."

Buried within the bankruptcy of Detroit is a fundamental political and moral question: Who are "we," and what are our obligations to one another?

Are Detroit, its public employees, poor residents, and bondholders the only ones who should sacrifice when "Detroit" can't pay its bills? Or does the relevant sphere of responsibility include Detroit's affluent suburbs -- to which many of the city's wealthier resident fled as the city declined, along with the banks that serve them?

Judge Rhodes won't address these questions. But as Americans continue to segregate by income into places becoming either wealthier or poorer, the rest of us will have to answer questions like these, eventually.

How Non-White North Carolinians Are Bracing For The Nation’s Worst Voter Suppression Law

ThinkProgress

North Carolina officials are mailing out absentee ballots today as the state looks towards a neck-and-neck Senate race that could determine which party controls Congress. But voters in the state will have to contend with new restrictions—passed by the State Senate just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act.

To combat both these limitations and the low turnout and apathy that regularly plagues midterm elections, civil rights activists have mobilized across the state to register as many voters as possible and convince them of the importance of casting a ballot this fall.

“A lot of people are registered to vote, but they don’t know exactly what they’re voting for,” said Jasmine Wright, a student at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, and one of dozens of organizers across the state with the North Carolina Moral Freedom Summer. “They basically just vote in national elections. But we’re starting to get them to wake up and understand that midterm elections are just as important as the national ones.”

Wright, who told ThinkProgress that her team has registered about 500 people so far, said she and others are already concerned about the impact the voter ID law will have on African Americans and students, because a college ID will not count under the new law.

“When they bring that law into play, that’s going to stop a lot of people who live and work in this area from voting,” she said. “I go to an HBCU [historically black college/university] and we get a lot of students coming from out of state. That’s going to be one of our biggest problems.”

Though the strict voter ID provision won’t go into effect until 2016, a judge’s ruling will allow cuts to early voting days, a ban on certain kinds of voter registration drives and the elimination of same-day voter registration.

The bill also open the floodgates to more dark money in a race that has become the most expensive in nation, by raising the caps for donations and eliminating transparency requirements that tell voters who sponsored the ad playing on their televisions.

The law passed under the leadership of Republican House Speaker Thom Tillis, who is now running against Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan for her seat in the US Senate.

At a press conference following a debate between the two candidates this week, Hagan touted her own record of urging protections for voting rights, and criticized Tillis for his role in “making voting more restrictive in North Carolina.”

“He passed the most regressive voting law in the country!” she said. “They’re trying to deter people from exercising their constitutional right. People died for that right and now they want to take it away. It’s just wrong.”

56 percent of North Carolinians voted early during the 2012 election, according to the non-partisan North Carolina Center for Voter Education, and the majority of those voters were African American.

Local groups are also raising concerns that the cuts have been distributed in discriminatory ways, accusing officials of rolling back early voting in counties with high voter turnout among African Americans.

MaryBe McMillan, the secretary-treasurer of the North Carolina chapter of the AFL-CIO, said her organization will be pouring efforts and resources into increasing turnout as the election moves into its final weeks.

“We are going to register voters. We are going to turn out the vote,” she told the crowd at a rally on Labor Day in Charlotte’s Marshall Park. “We will not rest, we will not be quiet. Our right-wing politicians are in for a rude awakening, because you can only hold folks down for so long before they rise up.”

Federal judge orders Ohio to restore early voting

Jurist

A federal judge ruled [order, PDF] Thursday that an Ohio law that cut down the 35 days of early in-person voting violates the US Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. US District Court Judge Peter Economus ordered Ohio to restore the full 35 days, including the "golden week" where residents can register to vote and cast early ballots on the same day. The lawsuit was filed after the state legislature in February approved a law that truncated the 35 day period to 28, and eliminated the "golden week." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the suit on behalf of the Ohio Chapter of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters of Ohio [advocacy websites], arguing that it would suppress minorities and the impoverished. Judge Economus agreed, finding that the plaintiffs demonstrated a strong likelihood that the legislation would decrease the amount of opportunities for African Americans to participate in the electoral process. "This ruling will safeguard the vote for thousands of Ohioans during the midterm election," said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project [statement]. "If these cuts had been allowed to remain in place, many voters would have lost a critical opportunity to participate in our democratic process this November. This is a huge victory for Ohio voters and for all those who believe in protecting the integrity of our elections." Early voting in Ohio is scheduled to begin on September 30.

New lethal injection procedures expected in Oklahoma

Jurist

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin [official website] announced [press release] a series of new protocols Thursday that are expected to take effect for state executions. Here announcement followed a report [text, PDF] issued by the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety [official website] on Thursday detailing the findings of the prolonged execution of Clayton Lockett last April. Lockett's execution took approximately 43 minutes and witness accounts state the prisoner showed signs of intense pain. The botched procedure resulted in a suspension

Neely Fuller on the radio 9/3: "If white supremacists are involved in the Iraq Chaos and non-white people are being harmed it is a white supremacy operation"

Minister Farrakhan responds to Mike Brown shooting in Ferguson: "You're Going to Die Anyway. So Why Not Stand Up?"

Record 92,269,000 Not in Labor Force; Participation Rate Matches 36-Year Low

CNSNews

A record 92,269,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in August, as the labor force participation rate matched a 36-year low of 62.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The labor force participation rate has been as low as 62.8 percent in six of the last twelve months, but prior to last October had not fallen that low since 1978.

BLS employment statistics are based on the civilian noninstitutional population, which consists of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home.

In August, the civilian noninstitutional population was 248,229,000 according to BLS. Of that 248,229,000, 155,959,000—or 62.8 percent--participated in the labor force, meaning they either had or job or had actively sought one in the last four weeks.

The 92,269,000 who did not participate in the labor force are those in the civilian noninstitutional population who did not have a job and did not actively seek one in the last four weeks. Because they did not seek a job, they did not count as “unemployed.”

Up to 2,100 Photos of US Soldiers Abusing [non-white] Prisoners May Soon Be Released

Vice

Would the release of 10-year-old detainee abuse photographs, such as one depicting US soldiers pointing a broom handle at a hooded detainee's rectum, incite terrorist organizations and threaten national security?

That's a question government attorneys will have to answer next week when they explain to a federal court judge why as many as 2,100 unclassified photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi and Afghan captives should continue to be concealed from the public.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case, which resurfaced last week, is part of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) long-running lawsuit against the US government to obtain documents about the treatment of detainees in custody of the CIA and military.

Last week, US District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein scheduled a hearing on the matter for September 8 and said he would allow the government to submit additional evidence to justify the withholding of the pictures before he renders a decision. But he also signaled that he may ultimately order the Department of Defense to release the abuse photographs, stating in a 21-page ruling that the government did not submit evidence to back up its 2012 claims that releasing the photographs would endanger national security and the lives of US military personnel.

"The government has failed to submit to this Court evidence supporting the Secretary of Defense's determination that there is a risk of harm," Hellerstein said, "and evidence that the Secretary of Defense considered whether each photograph could be safely released."

* * *

Barack Obama inherited dozens of George W. Bush-era open-records lawsuits pertaining to Bush's post-9/11 interrogation program involving CIA prisoners and the treatment of detainees by US military personnel at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. [MORE]

Legal, political questions surround Obama’s delayed immigration action

Aljazeera 

The latest chapter of this year’s long and winding immigration saga has Barack Obama’s administration delaying taking unilateral action to remove the threat of deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants, after vowing to do just that by the end of the summer.

After it became clear that a legislative solution was almost certainly dead in the 113th Congress, administration officials were said to be preparing wide-ranging changes to the way immigration laws were enforced. Although the White House has discussed few details in public, advocates were hoping for temporary legal relief and work permits for law-abiding undocumented migrants who had established roots in the United States — a population that could number in the millions.

However, under pressure from vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this year and with control of the Senate at stake, the administration is now considering delaying an announcement of any changes until after the midterms, if it undertakes action on immigration at all.

But that may come as no surprise, given the legal and political matters involved in the perennially explosive issue of what to do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

Legal scholars have debated for months whether the president would be overstepping his authority in granting such a broad reprieve, with conservative lawmakers admonishing the administration for not enforcing the nation’s laws and saying that further executive action amounts to a power grab.

Students to Boycott Newark Public Schools

ColorLines

When Newark public school students return to class this Thursday, some children will be missing their first day. A local parents' group announced last week that some 600 parents have pledged to keep their children out of classes to protest the district's sweeping new reform plan, One Newark. Campaign leaders have described the boycott as move of desperation for a community that has felt steamrolled by the high-powered reform agenda and the state control that has governed their schools for two decades.

One Newark has been billed as a massive overhaul of the struggling school system. Under the plan, which was approved last December, the district will close, phase out or reformulate roughly one-third of its schools. Students will no longer be assigned to their neighborhood schools. Instead, a complex algorithm will match families with schools of their choice across the district.

The plan, which focuses elementary and middle schools, has had a rough rollout over the past couple of weeks. Parents who were invited to register their children for school have waited in line for hours, CBS reported. New Jersey's News 12 found a family with five children who were assigned to five different schools.

"The superintendent announced this plan as an opportunity of choice, but what it's turning out to be is an opportunity of chance," says Sharon Smith, a co-founder of Parents United for Local School Education (PULSE). "At some point parents don't have a chance to get into their schools of choice, or even into a school at all."

The boycott is only the latest battle in a long-running feud that pits teachers' unions and progressive education advocates against education reformers such as Superintendent Cami Anderson, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and U.S. Senator and former Newark mayor Cory Booker.

Yvonne Ng on the "Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video"

Racism Is Real. The 'Conversation' Isn't.

Bloomberg Review

The shooting and subsequent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, like the killing of Trayvon Martin or countless incidents before it, will not produce a "national conversation" on race. If Americans can elect a black man president without ever having such a conversation -- we've done so twice -- we're not about to have one over the umpteenth violent death of a young lower-class black male.

Regardless, a conversation -- on any topic -- requires shared predicates and vocabulary. You can't have a conversation about global warming with interlocutors who contend that thousands of scientists around the globe, speaking different languages and working for different governments and unaffiliated institutions, are co-conspirators in a vast enterprise for no apparent gain. You can't have a conversation about government's impact on the economy with people who believe that the federal government spent $800 billion -- dropping it from helicopters or otherwise -- without creating a single job. And you can't have a conversation about race with people who believe that claims of racism are inherently bogus, or who have convinced themselves that Democrats, the president very much included, intentionally encourage black dependence on government for political reasons. The common denominator among those views is a crude form of denial -- a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of experience outside the universe of talk-radio claptrap.

David Frum's new article in Foreign Affairs echoes Tom Edsall's insight that contemporary politics has become a do-or-die battle over diminishing resources, with older, whiter, conservative Americans determined to prevent the flow of government benefits away from them and toward a younger cohort. For some conservatives, that contest is defined by race. Here is how Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg summed up the racial anxiety of evangelical and Tea Party Republicans (whose perceptions were starkly different from those of moderate Republicans) in focus groups he conducted: "Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities." Thus the crucible of Obamacare. In effect, legions of conservatives have reasoned that the Affordable Care Act is not a response to a problem previously addressed by every other advanced nation; nor is it the culmination of a more than half-century-long project of the Democratic Party -- one that began back when segregationist Democrats controlled the Senate. Instead, they conclude, it is an effort designed to generate dependency and transfer wealth from whites to browns.

In a 2013 poll, 61 percent of white conservatives and 56 percent of whites ages 65 or older agreed that discrimination against whites would increase due to rising racial diversity. That's hardly grounds for a warm embrace of a multiracial future. As Edsall and others have noted, political scientists have found an increase in racial resentment among white conservatives since Obama -- the nation's demographic change incarnate -- was elected. 

In a May YouGov poll, only 14 percent of Republicans deemed past discrimination a "major factor" in lower average wealth levels among blacks. (Aggressive impediments to wealth creation were a major theme of Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay that same month.) Only 8 percent of Republicans agreed that discrimination "in getting a quality education" is currently a problem for blacks.

Consider that. In a nation where even middle-class wealth is often inherited, and the fortunes of Rockefellers, Fords, Kennedys and Mellons are famously known to endure through generations, 45 percent of Republicans said that 250 years of enslavement followed by more than a century of legally and socially enforced economic and political disenfranchisement are simply "not a factor" impeding black wealth creation. Another 35 percent of Republicans polled said that the history of discrimination was only a "minor factor." So 350 years of official discrimination followed by decades of diminishing, but still discernible, racism produced no great economic ills.

You can impose all the caveats on this you like. Blacks, too, possess varying degrees of racial animus. And liberals, of course, have their own blinders, delusions and prejudices. But a belief that white advantage in American society -- including a median household wealth gap of around 20-to-1 between whites and blacks -- is exclusively a product of the character failings of blacks is a kind of lunacy. Americans frequently dismiss turmoil in the Middle East by noting that religious and tribal tensions there were centuries in the making. But here, massive barriers to black success disappeared when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed civil-rights legislation?

Two months after Obama's pivotal, political March 2008 speech on race, Washington Post reporter Kevin Merida wrote a story about Obama campaign volunteers encountering explicit racism while soliciting support. When Merida sought comment from the campaign, it responded with a bromide about "the core decency, kindness, and generosity of Americans from all walks of life." The deflection was political, yet honest in its way. Indeed, we are mostly a decent, kind and generous folk. Just don't try to have a conversation with us about race.

Colbert says Ferguson Race Soldier Cop "just doing his job when he shot unarmed black teenager with his hands up"

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