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Remembering Kenneth Harding: No stop ‘n Frisco!
July 11, 2012
When Kenneth Harding, 19, couldn’t show police a Muni transfer to prove he’d paid his $2 fare on July 16, 2011, he ran, they shot him in the back and for an agonizing half hour, instead of trying to save his life, they trained their guns on Kenneth and the crowd while the young man slowly bled to death and the crowd screamed in horror. Knowing that the police murder of Kenneth Harding was the outcome of the routine, though unofficial, police practice of stopping and frisking young men of color, why would San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, a former civil rights attorney, consider importing New York City’s disastrous stop-and-frisk policy?
The mass incarceration of the Black community: an interview with Michelle Alexander, author of ‘The New Jim Crow’
April 4, 2012
Professor Michelle Alexander’s new book “The New Jim Crow” is a monumental, well researched piece of work that presents documented facts in down to earth English about the mass incarceration of Black people within the United States’ national concentration camp system. At one point in “The New Jim Crow,” Professor Alexander presents evidence that more Black people are enslaved behind bars today than were enslaved on the plantations in 1850, before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
Michelle Alexander on California’s ‘cruel and unusual’ prisons
June 14, 2011
On May 23, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision ordering California to release tens of thousands of inmates from its overcrowded prisons on the grounds that their living conditions – including lethally inadequate healthcare – were so intolerable as to be “cruel and unusual punishment.”
New NYPD data shows record number of stop-and-frisks in 12-month period
February 19, 2009
New data from the New York City Police Department shows the final total of stop-and-frisks for 2008 to be a record 531,159. Over 80 percent of them were of Black and Latino New Yorkers.
Newly released NYPD data shows shocking disparity in stop-and-frisks
January 16, 2009
From 2005 to 2008, approximately 80 percent of NYPD’s total stops made were of Blacks and Latinos, who are more likely to have physical force used against them than Whites.