“Police departments cannot be at war with the communities they serve,” said Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.  “The criminal-justice system is not really broken. It’s producing the results it was designed to produce, and those are the wrong results. We have to change the way we think about crime,” said Chicago…

As the debate on criminal-justice reform continues to swing in the direction of sensible reforms, new legislation introduced in Congress Thursday continued the trend. Two big justice-reform bills offered in the House and Senate signaled that the “tough on crime” era of bad policy (which may have polled well for Election Day, but filled jails)…

Why did Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) stun colleagues and announce that he would resign from Congress and the speakership? Was it because he focused on the wrong priorities, from his party’s perspective? No. Was it because he ignored the national debt or didn’t want to defund Planned Parenthood? No.   The real…

If you’ve never been to CBC Week before, you need to know, first off, that you better have your planning game tight. Every year in Washington, D.C., at the Washington Convention Center, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation hosts its Annual Legislative Conference, four days of what is, beautifully, way too much important discussion to handle.…

This week, video of Black Lives Matter activists meeting with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became a shocking “must-see” event, but not for the reasons some might think. Not shocking because activists talked to Clinton. Not shocking because of the tactics Black Lives Matter activists have used to confront candidates on the presidential trial.…

A day after an aide apologized to Black Lives Matter organizers on his campaign’s behalf, presidential wannabe Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) publicly dissed the apology, telling Chuck Todd on Meet the Press Sunday that it wasn’t necessary. BuzzFeed’s Darren Sands reported Saturday that Sanders’ African-American outreach director, Marcus Ferrell, emailed a group of activists asking…

Lions? Yes. Humans? Not so much. Four Democrats in the U.S. Senate were lightning-quick to offer legislation to prevent what happened to Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe from happening again. Who says you need a powerful union or an army of lobbyists in politics to move an agenda? The next question is, will a bill for…

It’s a shocking turn of events, or at least a shocking turn of phrase. On Thursday a Republican leader in Congress actually said something on criminal-justice reform that two years ago would have been unthinkable.  He bashed our own dysfunctional system. “We’ve got a lot of people in prison, frankly, that don’t really in my…

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama’s top adviser Valerie Jarrett did a 30-minute interview with Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute. Isaacson asked Jarrett about Obama’s reticence on race.  “Some of us feel there was an opportunity throughout this presidency to really deal passionately, vocally and without putting a muffled hand in front of the face on…

On a day when many Republicans and Democrats in South Carolina found common ground in agreeing that the Confederate flag adjacent to the Statehouse should be removed from its perch and placed in a museum, a congressman from Alabama had a different view.  Speaking to radio host Matt Murphy on Monday, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.)…