Campaign Successfully Stalls Vote on Funding Controversial Chicago Police Compound

Public comment at the proceedings was shut down. Activists and residents in attendance, who objected, were swiftly thrown out of the meeting. They planned to sue the city for allegedly violating the Open Meeting Acts.

Kevin Gosztola
By Kevin Gosztola
Top photo | An artist's rendering of the city of Chicago's planned $95 million public safety training campus in West Garfield Park, to replace the city's police and fire training academies. (Photo: Chicago City Hall)

A coalition of activists led by young black people succeeded in postponing the vote on a funding measure for a $95 million police training academy, which the city of Chicago plans to build on the west side. Alderman David Moore and Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa exercised their right to defer and publish the ordinance for the compound. That

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Civilian Police Review Boards: Toothless Testaments to Institutional Racism

Civilian review boards fail to stop the bleeding in their communities thanks to their institutional toothlessness. Their lack the authority to subpoena police or investigate police abuse leaves them at the mercy of police to self-investigate.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
Erica Bailey, daughter of Aaron Bailey, wipes a tear during a news conference, Oct. 31, 2017, in Indianapolis. Two Indianapolis police officers won't face criminal charges for the June shooting death of Aaron Bailey, who crashed his car while fleeing from a traffic stop, a special prosecutor announced Tuesday. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

INDIANAPOLIS -- The rector at Christ Church Cathedral here, Steve Carlsen, was crestfallen when a special prosecutor in November declined to indict either of the two police officers who fatally shot a church volunteer in late July of last year. Forty-five-year-old Aaron Bailey was unarmed when he crashed his car into a tree in the wee morning hours

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The Black Faces in High Places Supporting America’s Police State

The system is made to put as many victims through its maw as possible and all the photographic evidence in the world won’t stop it unless inconvenient truths are told. One of the worst is the reliance on the collaboration of black people who help keep the police state running.

Margaret Kimberley
By Margaret Kimberley
Notorious Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke gets on an elevator after arriving at Trump Tower, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The worst hate group in the United States is not the Ku Klux Klan or any self-proclaimed alt-right group. The most racist, vicious, and deadly menace to black people in this country is law enforcement. The police, courts and prisons exist primarily to keep as many black people under control as possible. All other claims of usefulness are phony and

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Nuttier than a Fruitcake: White America’s Racial Psychopathy

With a cartoonish bigot in the White House, state terror that is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, and epochal inequality, there is, as of old, a whiff of insanity in white Americans’ racial attitudes, a hint of a nation coming unglued, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.

Jon Jeter
By Jon Jeter
A group of President Donald Trump supporters is seen from the media van traveling in the president's motorcade en route to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Feb. 3, 2018. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Were it not, perhaps, for Stanley Kubrick’s deft direction, the fight scene in the 1960 Hollywood classic Spartacus might well have been laughable rather than iconic. At nearly six-feet-four-inches tall, the African gladiator Draba, played by the former pro football star, Woody Strode, towered over Kirk Douglas’s eponymous character. The two

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California Community Fights for Accountability After Police Kill Unarmed Black Man in Hail of Bullets

“How is it that a young black man shoplifting, or selling cigarettes, or supposedly in a stolen vehicle is shot and killed, yet a young man kills 17 people and is taken away alive?”

Elliott Gabriel
By Elliott Gabriel
Friends and family of Diante "Butchie" Yarber mourn as protesters filled the parking lot of the Barstow (CA) police department on Tuesday April 10, 2018. Yarber was shot and killed by a Barstow Police Department Officer on April 5.(James Quigg/Daily Press via AP)

A California community is drawing increasing attention to the police killing of Diante “Butchie” Yarber, a 26-year-old black father of three who was shot to death as he sat inside his car in the parking lot of a Barstow Walmart on April 5. In dramatic video filmed of the incident, which occurred in broad daylight, police can be heard rapidly

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Police Killed More Americans Last Year Than Mass Shooters

Some 590 Americans were killed in mass shootings last year, that figure almost pales in comparison to the number of Americans subjected to gun violence by police.

Ebony Slaughter Johnson
By Ebony Slaughter Johnson
Newly minted NYPD Officers attend the New York City Police Graduation Ceremony for the Graduating Class of December 2017 held at the Beacon Theater on December 28, 2017 in New York City. (Photo: Mpi43/MediaPunch/IPX)

This spring, an estimated 800,000 Americans gathered in Washington, DC to participate in the “March for Our Lives” organized by the teenage survivors of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida. Thousands more attended 800 sister marches across the nation and around the world for gun reform. Gun control is often portrayed as a “white” issue, but

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