ACLU Wants To Replace Hobbs Police Monitor

The American Civil Liberties Union wants to replace a court-appointed monitor assigned to ensure the Hobbs Police Department complies with the settlement of a 1999 racial discrimination lawsuit. ACLU attorneys this week filed a motion in federal court in Santa Fe seeking to remove Clarence Chapman, police chief for the University of California at Los Angeles, as monitor of a stipulated agreement with Hobbs police. The stipulated agreement stemmed from a 1999 class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of Hobbs' black residents, that alleged blacks were subjected to excessive force, warrantless searches and false charges. The settlement, signed in June 2001, required the Hobbs Police Department to improve internal reporting procedures, the investigation of officer misconduct, training and disciplinary procedures. In addition, Hobbs police agreed to collect racial data on arrests, searches, field stops for questioning, and incidents in which police used force on civilians. ACLU attorneys Richard Rosenstock and Daniel Yohalem argue that police data show the disparate treatment of black Hobbs residents has "grown, not lessened" since the settlement was signed.

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GOP defends Lott's intent; Democrats decry 'salute to bigotry'

Several black Republicans, while denouncing the remarks, yesterday defended Mr. Lott. Michael Steele, the lieutenant governor-elect in Maryland, said Mr. Lott's remarks were a "poor choice of words" but don't reflect his own experiences with the senator. "I know Senator Lott personally and understand him to be compassionate and a tolerant statesman," he said. Outgoing Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. of Oklahoma said the comments "went too far" but were appropriate to the forum. "I took his comments as complimentary humor that often accompanies personal tributes," said Mr. Watts, the fourth-ranking Republican in the expiring House of Representatives. "His comments were as serious as the venue at which they were delivered - at a birthday party."

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The New Black Panthers Protest Decatur shooting death of 57 Year Old Black Man

Members of a group called the New Black Panther Party protested in front of the Capitol and in Decatur on Monday, saying the shooting death of a black man in a Decatur raid was racially motivated police brutality.

Yusef Shabazz of Savannah, Ga., regional chief of the organization, said members traveled to Alabama at the request of Freedom Fighters 2000. That group in Decatur has called for an FBI probe into the fatal shooting of an alleged bootlegger by a Morgan County sheriff's deputy.

Investigators have said two deputies were justified in the June 30 shooting that killed 57-year-old James Hulett during a bootlegging raid at his home. A Morgan County grand jury last month decided no indictment was warranted in the shooting death.

Shabazz said the trip to Montgomery also served as a recruitment event as the group attempts to establish a chapter in Alabama's capital.

"Our purpose is to come here and give them a backbone," Shabazz said of the black communities of Montgomery and Decatur. "We're not nonviolent protesters. We don't believe in turning the other cheek."

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Hobbs Police Sued - Filing Says 15 Year Old Black Girl's Rights Violated

Originally published in the Albuquerque Journal (New Mexico) September 13, 2002 

Copyright 2002 Albuquerque Journal 

By Rene Romo Journal Southern Bureau


LAS CRUCES Hobbs police officers arrested a 15-year-old girl in June 2001 for advising her 12-year-old brother he had the right not to answer police questions about an egg-throwing incident, according to a civil lawsuit filed recently in federal court.

The lawsuit alleges that officers took the handcuffed girl to a police car, and as the crying boy approached to retrieve the family dog, police pepper-sprayed both the boy and his dog.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the minor children and their mother Gloria Mora, claims the two officers' actions amounted to a false arrest and imprisonment, battery and a violation of constitutional rights.

The suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages against the two officers, Darrik Lasater and Brian Dunlap; then-police chief Tony Knott; and the city of Hobbs.

Hobbs' acting police chief Donnie Smith declined to comment on the lawsuit, except to say that police dispute some of the claims. Smith said a formal response was being formulated.

The Hobbs Police Department conducted an internal investigation of the incident after the children's mother filed a formal complaint about police conduct.

The department's internal investigator concluded the complaint was "unfounded" and "without basis in fact," Smith said.

The lawsuit was filed last month by Santa Fe attorneys Richard Rosenstock and Daniel Yohalem, who argued a 1999 class-action suit against the city of Hobbs that alleged its police department engaged in racially discriminatory practices against black residents.

The May 2001 settlement of that suit required Hobbs police to receive at least 40 hours of training each year on appropriate arrest procedures and required the police department to maintain records on the racial makeup of all civilians contacted by individual officers during field contacts and arrests.

The new lawsuit is not related to the earlier class-action suit, Yohalem said.

According to the lawsuit, the Mora brother and sister were watching television at home about 9:30 p.m. on June 6, 2001, when the police officers arrived to ask them whether they had thrown eggs at a car earlier that evening. The children's mother was at work at the time.

The suit claims police questioning became aggressive, with Dunlap calling the boy a liar and demanding that the children tell him who had thrown the eggs. After the girl repeatedly told her brother he did not have to answer police questions, despite police warnings that she not do so, she was arrested, according to the suit.

The department's internal investigator found that "Jolene obstructed the investigation," according to the suit.

Norman Kelley: Michael Jackson Allegations Hit a Wrong Note

Michael Jackson's charge of racism in the recording industry is a double-edged sword. Foremost, it has spectacularly backfired on him. He has done something truly remarkable: made a recording company appear sympathetic, aided and abetted by a stumbling coalition that refused to act like a Dutch uncle.

By letting him make ad hominem attacks against Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola, the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network's ill-conceived music summit July 9 has allowed the recording industry to duck real issues and enjoy the spectacle.

When your enemy is destroying himself, Napoleon once said, do nothing. Jackson made it difficult for himself to get back his master recordings and dredged up old and new stories that undermine his issues and music issues in general.

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Hobbs Police, ACLU Settle Racial Discrimination & Police Brutality Suit

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Hobbs Police Department this week settled a class-action lawsuit that alleged widespread discriminatory practices against minority residents. The lawsuit, filed in March 1999 in federal court in Santa Fe, alleged that Hobbs police used excessive force, warrantless searches and maliciously filed false charges against residents to the point that black residents became "afraid to walk down the street or sit on their porches." The settlement agreement calls for improved police procedures in the use of force, detentions, searches, seizures and arrests. It also requires the Hobbs Police Department to pay $605,500 in damages as well as injunctive relief. Plaintiffs' lawyers viewed the settlement, agreed to Monday by Hobbs' representatives, as vindication for Hispanic and black residents who had endured an alleged "campaign of intimidation."

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2 Hobbs Officers Violated Rights - Black Men Win $18,542 in Fees

A federal jury on Friday decided that two Hobbs police officers violated the civil rights of two black men and awarded them a total of about $18,500 in legal fees. After four days of testimony, the jury of four men and four women found officer Rhonnie Shaw violated the rights of Michael Hodge during an arrest in 1996 and that Sgt. Mark Rhoads wrongfully arrested Chris Mackey in 1998.

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Running Hard in the Back of the Pack - Alan Keyes, Gun Lover

And Mr. Keyes did not disappoint. His speech was interrupted by applause more than any other candidate's, and his proposal that high school students be taught how to use guns went over well with the crowd of about 400, some of whom carried bumper stickers that read, "I love my country, I fear my government."

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Gary Webb: America's 'crack' plague has roots in Nicaragua war

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, an investigation by the San Jose Mercury News has found. This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America -- and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons. It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting "gangstas" of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles. The army's financiers -- who met with CIA agents both before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. -- delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.

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Gary Webb: ODD TRIO CREATED MARKET FOR CRACK

If they'd been in a more respectable line of work, Norwin Meneses, Danilo Blandon and ''Freeway Rick'' Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing. This odd trio - a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a driven ghetto teen-ager - made fortunes creating the first mass market in America for a product so hellishly desirable that consumers will literally kill to get it: ''crack'' cocaine. Federal lawmen will tell you plenty about Rick Ross, mostly about the evils he visited upon black neighborhoods by spreading the crack plague in Los Angeles and cities as far east as Cincinnati. On Friday, they hope, Freeway Rick will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But those same officials won't say a word about the two men who turned Rick Ross into L.A's first king of crack, the men who, for at least five years, supplied him with enough Colombian cocaine to help spawn crack markets in major cities nationwide. Their critical role in the country's crack explosion, a Mercury News investigation found, has been a strictly guarded secret - until now. To understand how crack came to curse black America, you have to go into the volcanic hills overlooking Managua, the capital of the Republic of Nicaragua.

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Gary Webb: War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans

For the last year and a half, the U.S. Department of Justice has been trying to explain why nearly everyone convicted in California's federal courts of ''crack'' cocaine trafficking is black. Critics, who include some federal court judges, say it looks like the Justice Department is targeting crack dealers by race, which would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Federal prosecutors, however, say there's a simple, if unpleasant, reason for the lopsided statistics: Most crack dealers are black. ''Socio-economic factors led certain ethnic and racial groups to be particularly involved with the distribution of certain drugs,'' the Justice Department argued in a case in Los Angeles last year, ''and blacks were particularly involved in the Los Angeles-area crack trade.''

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Norman Kelley: THERE'S A LOOPHOLE IN RACIAL PROFILING

THERE IS A POINT where the nation's war on drugs and the recent killing in Littleton intersect. The war on drugs has made the United States a quasi-police state, where specific classes or races are under constant suspicion or surveillance while others who may be dangerous are not.

Recently, New Jersey finally admitted that its state troopers were using the tactic of racial profiling despite Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's adamant denials regarding the existence of the practice. However, a recent report by the state attorney general confirmed its use. But the quasi-police-state techniques were more extensive than previously thought.

The New York Times reported that the Garden State's troopers had also enlisted workers at hotels and motels along the New Jersey Turnpike to tip them off about "suspicious guests who pay for rooms in cash, make frequent phone calls or simply spoke Spanish." We're talking about informers.

An isolated incident? Not really. This is all part of the war on drugs. As a matter of fact, it is the logical consequence of Operation Pipeline, a program that was instituted by the Drug Enforcement Agency. The program entails 301 police commands in 48 states that monitor the nation's highways, byways and municipalities in search of "mules" (drug couriers).

But what has happened, as Gary Webb detailed in his article "DWB" in the April issue of Esquire magazine, is that the program has zeroed in on blacks and Latinos even though guns and drugs turn up in whites' vehicles with the same frequency as the other two groups.

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