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Congressman G. K. Butterfield Elected New CBC Chair By James Wright

Nov. 30, 2014

 Congressman G. K. Butterfield Elected New CBC Chair
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U. S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) is the new chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Afro American Newspaper

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) recently voted a former North Carolina jurist as its leader for the 114th Congress.

Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) was voted to lead the Congressional Black Caucus on Nov. 19. Butterfield, who was first elected to Congress in a special election in July 2004, is known on Capitol Hill to be a strong advocate for supporting broadband expansion in rural and minority areas and for quality health insurance access for all Americans.

“I am happy to pass the chairman’s gavel to my friend and colleague, Rep. Butterfield,” outgoing CBC Chair Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) said. “He has dedicated his life and career to advancing the priorities of the disenfranchised and overlooked, both in his home state of North Carolina as well as here on the Hill. I congratulate him on his election, and I look forward to supporting him in his new capacity as he continues to move our caucus forward.”

Butterfield is the 24th elected chair of the organization and will officially begin his duties on Jan. 6, 2015, when the 114th Congress is sworn in. Butterfield, who has spent most of his public career as a jurist, said that he is humbled by his election.

“I’m moved by the unwavering support the CBC has shown me throughout the years,” he said. “Each year they’ve continued to elect me to senior positions within the caucus, solidifying their confidence in me to steer and now lead the conscience of the Congress as chair. I do not take their endorsement lightly.”

A native of Wilson, N.C., Butterfield is a graduate of North Carolina Central University and its law school. He served as a Resident Superior Court Judge for the First Judicial Division, presiding over civil and criminal courts in 46 counties.

In February 2001, then Gov. Mike Easley (D) appointed Butterfield as an associate justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Butterfield authored opinions on such issues as the application of capital punishment, judicial sentencing procedures and eminent domain.

Butterfield lost his election bid to the court in November 2002, and he resumed his judicial career as a Superior Court trial judge.

Butterfield will have to work with a strongly partisan Republican House of Representatives and President Obama, who is in the last two years of his term. Nevertheless, he feels there are opportunities for the CBC.

“The new Congress provides a fresh start to address the issues that are important to all of us,” Butterfield said. “Members of the CBC come from every region of the country. While we each have our own priorities, we speak with a singular, powerful voice in our fight to deliver on the expectations of Americans—to have a government that works for all of us.”

In addition to Butterfield, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) was elected as first vice chair, Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.) as second vice chair, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) as secretary and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) as whip. Butterfield and the elected officers will lead 45 CBC members, the largest number in the organization’s history.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) was elected as co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a former CBC Chair, was elected whip and Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) got the nod for vice chair and liaison to the CBC. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), a former CBC Chair, was re-elected as the House Democratic Caucus Assistant Democratic Leader.

NEWS ANALYSIS: Policy Changes Could Hold Ferguson Accountable By Kami Chavis Simmons, Justin Hansford, and Spencer Overton

Nov. 25, 2014

Policy Changes to Hold Ferguson Accountable 
By Kami Chavis Simmons, Justin Hansford, and Spencer Overton  

News Analysis

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Spencer Overton, Interim President, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the St. Louis American

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The grand jury has made its decision. Now is the time for city, county, and state officials in Missouri to work to restore the legitimacy they lost through the events surrounding the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. Racially disproportionate stops, excessive court fines, police aggression, and other factors also suggest government is not serving all citizens equally.  This inequality is also reflected in Ferguson's political representation. Although 67 percent of Ferguson is African-American, most of its elected and appointed officials are White (its city manager, mayor, five of six city council persons, police chief, and 94 percent of police officers). A majority of students are Black in the school district Ferguson shares with neighboring Florissant, but six of the seven school board members are White. 

Ferguson was unwillingly thrust into the spotlight, but now it has the opportunity to become a model for reform. As Ferguson moves forward, several state, county, and local solutions could help restore trust and ensure Ferguson is more accountable to its residents. The following are some recommendations from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies:

  • Strengthen the State Racial Profiling Act. Missouri currently is one of the few states with a racial profiling act. Although it records racial disparities in police stops, it does not impose penalties. For example, the Missouri state attorney general’s racial disparity index found that in Ferguson blacks are more than twice as likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested. However, searches of Ferguson blacks produce contraband only 21.7 percent of the time, while searches of whites produce contraband 34 percent of the time. A state reduction of funding due to these disparities would give Ferguson officials financial incentives to change course.
  • Require Professional Liability Insurance. In addition to financial accountability for racial profiling, mandating professional liability insurance for police officers could create financial accountability for excessive force. For example, a plan could allow a city to pay the base rate for the insurance, but could make the officer accountable for any premium increase due to excessive complaints or lawsuits filed against that officer.
  • Enhance Use of Force Monitoring. Local, county, and state officials should develop or improve: (1) use of force procedures and internal investigations of use of force; (2) an early warning system to identify and track officers involved in use of force incidents or other citizen complaints; and (3) an independent citizen review board or independent law enforcement commission with subpoena power. The federal government already has launched a “pattern or practice” investigation which could result in similar reforms developed and implemented with federal oversight. State, county, and city officials, however, should take the lead and work to implement sustainable reforms immediately.
  • Increase City Manager Accountability. Ferguson’s unelected city manager serves as its full-time chief executive with the power to appoint, manage, and terminate city employees (including the police chief). In contrast, the elected mayor is a part-time city council member with some ceremonial duties. The city manager currently has an indefinite term, and can be removed only by a supermajority vote of the city council. Limiting the city manager to a definite term (e.g., four years) with citizen input and a majority city council vote for reappointment could make the city manager more responsive.
  • Change Election Timing. Whereas whites and blacks in Ferguson were almost equally likely to vote in the 2012 November presidential elections (55% of whites and 54% of blacks voted), whites were almost three times more likely than blacks to vote in the April 2013 municipal elections (17% of whites and 6% of blacks voted). Changing election timing for mayor, city council, and school board from April to the November presidential elections could save money, boost turnout of residents from all backgrounds, and make government more representative.

Other steps could boost accountability as well, including dash police vehicle and body cameras, a probable cause requirement for stops (higher than reasonable suspicion), and better hiring and training procedures. Local government could also be more representative by replacing at-large school board elections with single-member districts or ranked choice voting, early voting (including on weekends), same day registration, and compliance with federal law requiring voter registration at state offices. Further, officials should examine municipal consolidation, outsourcing police services to St. Louis County, and significant municipal court reforms.

Policy proposals are meaningless without effective community organizing. Engaged citizens are needed to develop a pipeline of representative candidates, to organize voter registration and mobilization, and to endorse representative candidates and distribute slates that flag them for voters in nonpartisan elections.
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Kami Chavis Simmons is a law professor and the Director of the Criminal Justice Program at Wake Forest University. Justin Hansford is a St. Louis University law professor. Spencer Overton is a GWU law professor and the Interim President of the Joint Center, a think tank that studies race. The professors are working on a Joint Center research report on policy options to make Ferguson more accountable to citizens.

Homelessness Rises While Temperatures Drop By Naeemah Z. Kelly

Nov. 24, 2014

Homelessness Rises While Temperatures Drop
By Naeemah Z. Kelly

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(TriceEdneyWire.com) - As temperatures drop across the nation, a half million homeless people – including men, women, children and families - are scrambling to find new options to shield off the cold. From coast to coast, the number of displaced individuals has risen exponentially – even in the nation’s capital.

“I usually stay out here until about Thanksgiving time but it’s been real cold out here early,” says 46-year-old Wallace Robn, an orange picker from Ocala, Fla. who moved to D.C. in 1994 in search of a better life.

Robn has been homeless and unemployed on and off for the last six years and prefers to stay in the northwest area of the city. His current set up is in between a storage trailer and a few unruly bushes on the side of Banneker Park.

During this interview, he had an old spa table and hospital blankets as a bed, a painter’s bucket as a toilet, and a thick blue economics textbook serving as his daily reading. He had on casual day clothes on top of his dress pants and a grey button-up shirt. His night clothes were the outermost layer meant to ward of the harsh winds of the season.

“I ain't got no problem and I don’t tell nobody I’m homeless. If I don’t find a place to stay because the shelters are all full or the workers won’t let me in then oh well...they don’t care; not even all these politicians,” he said, adding that he needs sustainable help and not just meager handouts.

D.C.’s largest shelter for families has been in the limelight for its bad conditions and lack of security for families; especially since the now 9-year-old Relisha Rudd was taken from D.C. General Family Shelter by a janitor last March.

In mid-October the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, Beatriz Otero, Department of Human Services Interim Director Deborah Carroll and Department of General Services Director Brian J. Hanlon made the city’s official plan public to put in “smaller, community-based shelters” that will replace DC General.

There is yet a set date for when the shelter will close because there are currently over 100 families and almost 250 children occupying the old hospital rooms. DC Councilman Jim Graham told WUSA9, “We’ll never get this place closed if we keep filling it up.”

Meanwhile churches and homeless advocates are doing their best to meet the needs of people who come to them for help.

“It’s very challenging in that it’s not enough facilities and not enough space to accommodate those who are homeless. Finding a place is very difficult when all the shelters are full,” says Jo Ann Holston, president of the Anchor of Hope for the Homeless Ministry at Greater Mount Calvary Holy Church, among the largest congregations in the District.

Especially since so many families lost their homes during the home mortgage crisis and jobs during the economic downturn around 2007, the face of the homeless is no longer the individual with mental illness or substance abuse problems.

“You see a family who last year had a home and this year they don’t,” Holston says.

The Metropolitan Washington Council of Government’s (MWCOG) 2014 report, “Homelessness in Metropolitan Washington, states, “11,946 people throughout the metropolitan Washington region indicated that they were homeless.” This is an increase of 3.5 percent from 2013 and an 18 percent increase since 2010.

Across the country, “Homeless people need subsidized homes they can afford. We don’t really have that...there’s been a tremendous increase in families. Women with children historically have been the fastest growing group since the 70s,” said Michael Stoops, a Community Organizer at the National Coalition for the Homeless. He said even though the District is one of America’s “hot spots” for homelessness, “...the latest national number of homeless people is 578,424. This is a 10 percent reduction since 2010.”

Calculating the national homeless rate is difficult because being homeless is very temporary for most Americans. Stoops said that out of that national number, “...30 percent of the nation's homeless live short-term in shelters, outside somewhere – even in cars. The other 70 percent of homeless people live long-term in shelters or transitional housing.”

Henry Plater, 63, works at Banneker Recreation Center, which is also a Hypothermia Shelter for Men in Northwest D.C. between November and March when the temperature is below 32 degrees. Plater has worked there for about 47 years and says he has noticed the increase of homeless people in the area.

“Risk Management says they’re not allowed to come in during the day but we try to not be judgmental or disheartening because nowadays you never know when you might be in that situation,” Plater said.

He said he has also seen a lot more children coming in for help more than before and out of the 30 to 50 men ranging from 20 to 60 years old that use the shelter, many have jobs in construction but just cannot afford their own place.

“These people need homes, cars, and really help maintaining a job. Not a couple dollars and one meal until they find the next one,” Plater says.

The troubling combination of miniscule incomes, rising housing prices, and the closing of shelters means there will not be an end to homeless children and families in the near future.

The good thing, says Holston, is that “the city is determined that no one will be left outside during this season. Someplace, somewhere will be found for you.”

MAIN STORY: Grand Jury Does Not Indict Officer Wilson, Ferguson Erupts by Rebecca Rivas

Nov. 25, 2014

Grand Jury Does Not Indict Officer Wilson, Ferguson Erupts
By Rebecca Rivas

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PHOTO: St. Louis American Newspaper

burning building

PHOTO: St. Louis American Newspaper

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from St. Louis American                                     

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - After three months of hearing testimony and viewing evidence, a St. Louis County grand jury chose not to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of unarmed Black teen Michael Brown Jr. St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert M. McCulloch announced their decision Monday, November 24 in a courtroom in Clayton, the county seat. 
The grand jury reviewed a 1,077-page St. Louis County police report and heard testimony from both Wilson and Canfield Green residents who witnessed the shooting on August 9. Police officials have said that Brown and Wilson had an altercation inside the police car, before the teen reached for Wilson’s weapon. However, according to some eyewitnesses, the teen had surrendered – with his hands up in the air – at the time of the fatal shooting, regardless of whatever altercation preceded it. 

McCulloch said many of the witnesses most familiar to the public gave testimony that conflicted with the physical evidence or changed their testimony, whereas witnesses whose testimony was found more credible by the grand jurors have never been interviewed by the media. 

Brown’s parents, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., were given a phone call on Monday briefly alerting them to the grand jury’s announcement, according to an MSNBC report. “While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change,”  the family said in a statement. Upon the news of the non-indictment late Monday night, a small unruly element in the crowd busted cars and set fires.

President Barack Obama quoted their statement in remarks from the White House after the decision was announced, but Unruly elements among the crowd in Ferguson had already started setting fires and trying to destroy police cars as Obama spoke.
This month, Brown’s parents were part of a delegation of human rights advocates and organizations who presented a 13-page brief on police violence at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. 

“The killing of Mike Brown and the abandonment of his body in the middle of a neighborhood street is but an example of the utter lack of regard for, and indeed dehumanization of, black lives by law enforcement personnel,” the brief stated. 

Anticipating an announcement from the grand jury this week, many schools near Ferguson cancelled classes, and the police established barriers in downtown Ferguson and Clayton to control protests. Many businesses in Ferguson and Clayton are boarded up as if preparing for an imminent natural disaster.

For months, protest leaders and area elected officials have tried to work with police to establish common ground rules – especially after law enforcement made international headlines for their aggressive use of force and military equipment during August protests. 

St. Louis City Mayor Francis Slay said that the Unified Command – which includes the St. Louis County Police, St. Louis Metropolitan Police and Missouri Highway Patrol – agreed to 11 of 19 “rules of engagement” established by the Don’t Shoot Coalition. The command agreed to avoid use of excessive force and to communicate with protest organizers to de-escalate the situation. But they did not agree to refrain from entering churches deemed as “safe houses” for protestors or avoiding the use of tear gas, riot gear or armed vehicles. 

Wilson is White, and Brown was Black. The Ferguson protest movement is diverse, but it focuses on a national pattern of White police officers shooting and killing Black males who are unarmed (or where there is controversy over whether they were armed). The group that has rallied around the accused police shooters is virtually all-White. 

This made the racial composition of the grand jury an issue of concern. The grand jury who heard the testimony in the Michael Brown Jr. case consists of nine White and three Black members. Seven are men and five are women. Nine of the 12 jurors had to agree on charges to hand down an indictment. Those charges could have included murder in the first degree or second degree, or voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. 

Throughout the protest movement, the chant, “Black lives matter,” has been a dominant thread. The movement has united “fair-minded citizens who want a society that guarantees the human and civil rights for all, not just those with the right skin color or the resources to pay for it,” said Jamala Rogers, a longtime activist and a leader with the group Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression. 

“On the other side are those who feel like the status quo that upholds white rights must be protected at all costs,” she said. 

Since August, the diehard faces on the protest frontlines have largely been African-Americans in their 20s – many who have taken a break from college or work to lead the movement fulltime. And longtime activists like Rogers – who have been fighting for an end to police brutality their entire lives – have provided a strong web of support, resources and leadership. 

Aside from leading the chants on the streets, the young leaders have also driven the movement on Twitter and social media. Every day, 20-year-old Ferguson resident Alexis Templeton posts on Twitter, “I hope no one kills you for being black today.” 
And she frequently voices another statement that has been shared among African Americans – from residents to Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson – since Brown’s death. 

“It’s not only problematic that you aren’t paying attention,” she states, “but it becomes more problematic when I don’t bring it to your attention.” 

Capt. Johnson said he feels has been quiet on issues of discrimination for too long, in a recent interview with The St. Louis American. In public forums with the Department of Justice, many Ferguson residents said for too long they have been quiet about corrupt and discriminatory practices among their local police officers. 

Longtime Ferguson resident Kimberly Hoskin and her mother Loistine said they were not surprised to hear about Brown’s death and the unrest that followed. 

“Ten years ago, we could have told you that they are going to kill someone and there’s going to be a problem because Ferguson does what they want,” Hoskin said at a September public meeting with DOJ representatives. 

Brown’s death has brought these issues of oppression to a boiling point, she said, and what you see now are the people finally speaking out.

#HandsUPDon'tSpend! Pastor Jamal-Harrison Bryant, Black Church Coalition Announce Economic Mobilization Protest

Nov. 24, 2014
#HandsUPDon'tSpend! Pastor Jamal-Harrison Bryant, Black Church Coalition Announce Economic Mobilization Protest
Pastor/Activist calls for economic mobilization regardless of the Darren Wilson verdict
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(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Dr. Jamal-Harrison Bryant, Pastor and Founder of Empowerment Temple Church and President of the Empowerment Movement, based in Baltimore, has announced the launch of a new national economic mobilization effort titled #HandsUpDon'tSpend.

According to a news release, "This strategic collaboration is anchored by faith-based denominations from across the country that have united to demonstrate the power of the African American dollar! The Empowerment Movement, a non-partisan organization, is supported by the AME Church, AME Zion, COGIC, Progressive, Bible Way Churches, Full Gospel, Gospel Music Workshop of America, CME, United Covenant Churches, Harvest Churches, Fellowship of International Word of Faith, Church of God, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Congressional Black Caucus."

According to Bryant, tens of thousands of people are expected to participate in the economic mobilization effort which "encourages supporters to refrain from spending during the most highly-anticipated shopping time of the year; Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, through Cyber Monday."

The intended message to those who join in the movement is, "Flex your power by not shopping during the busiest shopping period of the year - #HandsUpDon'tSpend!", Bryant says.

"Police brutality has no place in modern law enforcement. However, American history continues to repeat itself. Exactly one year after the death of Trayvon Martin, Black America is once again pleading for the justice system to uphold the principles of justice and equality for countless victims including Michael Brown, Eric Garner and John Crawford," Bryant said. "We have come to recognize that petitions and marching have not changed the landscape of our justice system," Bryant announced. "Neither has it changed the alarming rate of police brutality cases against African Americans in America. Therefore, we have decided to shift the impact of our power to what the government understands - the almighty dollar."

Bryant was heavily involved in the Trayvon Martin case as the families' advocate and spiritual advisor, the release states, adding that he serves in the same capacity for the family of Michael Brown.  In support of the #HandsUpDon'tSpend campaign the Empowerment Movement will also support the WalMart workers protest on Black Friday.

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