policing
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Baltimore H.S. Principal Trying to Teach His Son a Lesson About Police Interactions Gets Verbally Abused by Cop
A Baltimore high school principal is speaking out about an incident with a white county cop in which the officer degraded and demeaned him in front of his son. Vance Benton, who heads up Patterson High School in East Baltimore, wrote a letter to county officials about a July incident not far from his house,…
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Officer-Involved Killings Now a Leading Cause of Death for Young Men in America
It’s a data point as American as it is macabre, but a new study has identified police killings as a leading cause of death among young American men. The research, recently published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, finds officer-involved deaths (shootings, chokeholds, and other uses of force) to be the…
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Black Homebuyer Finds KKK Application in Cop’s Home—Sheds New Light on Shooting Death of Black Man in 2009
Rob Mathis was ready to make an offer on the house—a grand five-bedroom home sitting on 22 acres in the small town of Holton, Michigan. But during a recent tour of the property, a quick rundown of the home’s decor put Mathis and his wife, Reyna on edge: A NASCAR-decorated garage housing two Confederate flags,…
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Jazmine Headley, Violently Arrested for Sitting on the Floor of a Human Resources Building, Sues New York City
Her screams were bloodcurdling. Last December, exhausted after a three-hour wait at the Human Resources Administration (HRA) building in Brooklyn, where she’d gone to address an issue with her childcare benefits, Jazmine Headley decided to sit on the floor next to her then-1-year-old son’s stroller. Not long after, HRA staff and NYPD officers demanded she…
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Black Man Walked With Rope by Mounted Police Has Mental Illness, According to Family: ‘They Don’t Care to Know the Whole Story’
Family members of Donald Neely, the 43-year-old homeless man who was handcuffed and led by a rope by two white Galveston, Texas, officers on horseback last weekend, said he has struggled with mental illness for years—and that his condition was well documented. Neely—whose arrest went viral after photos of him walking down the street, flanked…
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A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist Was ‘Swatted’ but Survived. Here’s What He Has to Say About That
Leonard Pitts Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald, was laying in his bed in Bowie, Md., early on Sunday morning when he woke up to a phone call. It was the police. The police told him they received a 911 call that he had murdered his wife. They instructed him to come…
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Black Patient Arrested After Security Guard Accuses Him of Attempting to Steal an IV and Sell It on eBay
A video of a black Freeport, Ill., patient being arrested while taking a walk outside a hospital has gone viral after he shared the incident on Facebook. The video shows Shaquille Dukes, 24, walking outside FHN Memorial Hospital on June 9, wearing a hospital gown and attached to an IV. According to Dukes, who had…
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NYPD: It’s Not Racist When a Cop Calls You the N-Word
If you think that headline is clickbait, it’s not. It actually paraphrases the official New York Police Department’s training manual. An official investigation into complaints of biased policing against the NYPD’s officers reveals, among other things, that the outfit doesn’t consider cops using racial slurs as evidence of bias; that the vast majority of people…
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Julián Castro Wants to Stop Police Brutality by Getting Rid of Qualified Immunity
“Qualified immunity” refers to one of the most powerful federal laws that protects police officers from personal liability in cases of deadly force. But if Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro has his way, the doctrine will be scrapped if he becomes president. Last week, Castro introduced his “People First Policing Plan” which outlines how he…
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Police Pocketing Innocent People’s Money: Report Shows Huge Racial Gap in South Carolina Civil Forfeitures
A new investigative project from the Greenville News and Anderson Independent Mail analyzing civil forfeitures in South Carolina reveals that police departments across the state have netted millions of dollars from state residents—the vast majority of them being black men. Despite accounting for just 13 percent of South Carolina’s population, black men composed 65 percent…