Independent Police Monitor Issues Report on New Orleans' Stop-and-Frisk 
By Fritz Esker 

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Louisiana Weekly

The Independent Police Monitor has released the “Review of the New Orleans Police Department’s Field Interview Policies, Practices, and Data,” examining the “stop and frisk” procedures of the department that was catapulted into national spotlight after gross police misconduct during the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.

The report was originally intended to determine if the stop-and-frisk practices met legal standards. The stop and frisk procedure can be a tool for investigating potentially criminal activity, but it is vulnerable to abuse and violations of constitutional rights.

“We are looking very thoroughly at this issue,” said Susan Hutson, New Orleans Independent Police Monitor. “This report is important for the people of New Orleans because citizens complain of profiling and unfair targeting regularly…If the NOPD implements our recommendations, it will help to heal the police/community divide on this issue.”

The report could not fully determine if the NOPD’s policies met with legal standards. After requesting a review from the Office of the Inspector General, the monitor determined the data was flawed and could not be statistically analyzed.

Hutson said the data provided by the NOPD was too vague. Many of the incidents were entered into the system as resulting from catch-all descriptions such as “suspicious person” or “call for assistance.” Neither designation provided enough information to determine if the stop was legitimate.

Other issues arose, too. If a car was stopped and there were three passengers inside, the entries did not make it clear if one person in the car was searched or if all three were searched.

Aside from improving its data input and collection, the report also recommended that NOPD officers receive better practical training on when to implement the stop-and-frisk policy. There are gray areas on when to conduct searches and it can be difficult for an officer to know what the right choice is in the heat of the moment.

“The 4th Amendment is tough,” Hutson said. “You really have to look at a lot of cases to understand what it means.”

Other recommendations-invol­ved quality control measures. In making the report, Hutson’s team studied police forces in other cities. One recommendation is to hand out a receipt or a business card to any person who has been subject to a search. This way, the person has a record of the stop, the officer’s name, and why the search occurred.

Ursula Price, executive director of community relations for the New Orleans Office of Inde­pendent Police Monitor, said the community should continue to demand accountability for issues they are concerned about, asking for answers and identifying policies that they want to change. The recently released report was initiated because the public wanted an evaluation of the stop and frisk procedures.

“If the community is concerned about something, they should take up the mantle and demand change,” Price said.

The NOPD did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

March 18, 2013

NAACP President Sees End to Death Penalty in 10 Years
By Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The NAACP views it as “lynching’s cousin”. In a nutshell, that’s the reason that NAACP President/CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous predicts the end to the death penalty in America within the next 10 years.

“We’re moving fast,” says Jealous. “This is one of our top national priorities as it has been for the last 104 years. We were founded to end lynching and lynch mob violence and we have always seen the death penalty as lynching’s cousin.”

He envisions, “We could abolish the death penalty in the next 10 years. We have abolished it in six states in six years. It’s reasonable to believe we can abolish it in eight more [states] in the next eight years and then head to the Supreme Court and have it done within 10 years.”

Jealous’ projections came during an interview last week as he and other fellow death penalty foes celebrated the Maryland legislature’s vote to repeal executions in the state. The bi-partisan support bill, signed by Gov. Martin O’Malley, signals to the rest of America that the death penalty is not only cruel and unusual punishment, but racially disparate, Jealous says:

“The death penalty from its inception was linked to lynching in this country. Across the country, the death penalty is 40 percent Black. In Maryland, it’s 80 percent Black. It’s impossible to look at the death penalty in this country and not conclude that race is at play here.”

Maryland was another major battle won, but the war against capital punishment continues to rage. So far, the states of Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Maryland have repealed the death penalty. Colorado, Delaware, New Hampshire and Kansas are reconsidering their death penalty statutes this year.

Racial disparity is a key reason, but not the primary reason for opposition to the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), “chief among the concerns is the risk of executing an innocent person which can never be completely eliminated.”

Since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty in America, 1,295 people have either died by lethal injection, gas chamber, electric chair or firing squad.

According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty at NCADP.org, The 10 top reasons for the anti-death penalty movement are:

1. Executions are carried out at staggering cost to taxpayers.
It costs far more to execute a person than to keep him or her in prison for life.

2. Capital punishment does not deter crime.
States without the death penalty have much lower murder rates. The South accounts for 80 percent of U.S. executions, and has the highest regional murder rate.

3. States are unable to prevent accidental executions of innocent people.
The wrongful execution of an innocent person is an injustice that can never be rectified. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty, at least 138 men and women have been released from death row nationally – some only minutes away from execution.

4. Race plays a role in determining who lives and who dies.
Since 1977, blacks and whites have been the victims of murders in almost equal numbers, yet 80 percent of the people executed in that period were convicted of murders involving white victims.

5. The death penalty is applied at random.
 Politics, quality of legal counsel, and the jurisdiction in which a crime is committed are more often the determining factors in a death penalty case than the facts of the crime itself.

6. Capital punishment goes against almost every religion.
Almost all religious groups in the United States regard executions as immoral.

7. The U.S. is keeping company with notorious human rights abusers.
The vast majority of countries in Western Europe, North America and South America — more than 128 nations worldwide — have abandoned capital punishment in law or in practice. Year after year, only three countries execute more prisoners than the United States – China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

8. Millions of dollars could be diverted to helping the families of murder victims.
Funds now being used for the costly process of executions could be used to help families put their lives back together through counseling, restitution, crime victim hotlines, and other services addressing their needs.

9. Bad lawyers are a persistent problem.
Perhaps the most important factor in determining whether a defendant will receive the death penalty is the quality of the representation he or she is provided. Almost all defendants in capital cases cannot afford their own attorneys.

10. Life without parole is a sensible alternative to the death penalty.
Almost every state in the U.S. now has life in prison without parole. Unlike decades ago, a sentence of life without parole generally means exactly what it says – convicts locked away in prison until they die. Unlike the death penalty, a sentence of life in prison without parole allows mistakes to be corrected or new evidence to come to light.

Armed with these arguments, opponents project a new beginning is possible within a decade with help from the Supreme Court.

“We only have to abolish it in eight total more. We’re at 18. We only have to do it in a total of 26 before we go to the Supreme Court and make the argument that the punishment’s not just cruel, but unusual and therefore abolish it in the entire country,” Jealous says.

Maryland State Conference NAACP President Gerald Stansbury says the movement is about equal protection under the law. “This decision will make our justice system fairer and more effective. I hope it will inspire leaders in other states to follow suit.”

To Gov. O'Malley, it’s simply about humanity. “There’s no such thing as a spare American,” he said during a press conference following the vote. “Every life is important.”

Voter Laws Threaten Political Clout for People of Color By Cathy Cohen and Jon C. Rogowski Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from America’s Wire  (TriceEdneyWire.com) - In a democracy, few rights are as cherished as the right to vote.  Yet, in the United States people of color, mainly Latinos, African Americans, Asians and Native Americans, are finding that the more they demonstrate their civic responsibility by voting, the more obstacles that surface designed to weaken the power of their votes. Since 2008, when the nation elected its first African American president, there have been numerous efforts in various states to impact ballot access.  Legislatures in 19 states have tightened identification requirements for citizens who wish to vote.  Many of these new laws require citizens to show a state-issued form of photo ID. The New York University School of Law Brennan Center for Justice warned in 2006 that because identification documents are not distributed equally across the population, voter ID laws would significantly affect voter access for people of color — especially Latinos and African Americans — who possessed photo identification at considerably lower rates than whites. That prediction became reality last November.  A study conducted immediately after the 2012 election surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,500 young people between the ages of 18 and 29 with large oversamples of Blacks and Latinos.  Consistent with other national reports, the study sponsored by the Black Youth Project confirmed that a high voter turnout among youth. It also determined that young people of color—especially Black youth—were asked to show identification when voting at considerably higher rates than white youth. Even in states with no identification laws, 66 percent of Black youth and 55 percent of Latino youth were asked to show ID, compared with 43 percent of white youth. When nonvoters were asked to indicate the reasons why they did not vote, Black youth were three times as likely as white youth (17 percent compared with 5 percent) to say that they did not vote because they lacked the proper identification documents. The study provides compelling evidence that identification laws are applied inconsistently across racial groups, and appear to reduce turnout disproportionately among people of color. In the aftermath of the 2012 election,  also under attack is the principle of  “one person, one vote” established in 1964 when the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims that legislative districts must contain equal numbers of citizens. Several states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, recently considered or are considering measures to apportion their electoral votes by congressional districts in place of the winner-take-all system currently in place. Discussions of these proposals have focused, not incorrectly, on the implications for the outcomes of presidential elections.  But these proposals are designed explicitly to reduce the electoral influence of citizens living in densely populated areas—precisely those areas more likely to contain larger proportions of people of color—and increase the electoral importance of people living in more sparsely populated areas that take up larger swaths of geography. As Sen. Charles Carrico, who introduced the measure in the Virginia State Senate, explained, residents in rural areas “were concerned that it didn’t matter what they did, that more densely populated areas were going to outvote them.”  Under these plans, the gerrymandering of congressional districts ensures that Black voters in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania would have considerably less influence on the apportionment of the state’s electoral votes. For instance, the 538 blog recently reported that President Obama would have lost twelve of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes had they been apportioned by congressional district. Not only would this have distorted the voices of Ohio’s voters writ large (Obama received more than 100,000 votes more than Romney), but it also would have significantly weakened the influence of Ohio’s Black voters. Nearly percent of 65 percent of Black residents of Ohio are concentrated in the four congressional districts (mostly in the Cleveland area) in which Obama won. Along with weakening the political potency of urban voters generally, proposals to apportion Electoral College votes by congressional district seriously devalue the votes from people of color. This tension between individuals and geography is also found in the debate surrounding the current Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder. At issue is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires states with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices to receive federal clearance before changing electoral laws. In oral arguments on February 27, attorney Bert Rein argued on behalf of Shelby County, Alabama that this provision is “an inappropriate vehicle to sort out the sovereignty of individual states.” But the sovereignty of states should not be privileged over the equal protections constitutionally granted to individual citizens. Just as states like Ohio and Pennsylvania should not be allowed to weigh the votes of rural residents over votes from urban areas, neither should Alabama be excluded from provisions designed to protect Alabama citizens’ voting rights because Alabama’s sovereignty is judged to be more important than their citizens’ electoral voices. Rein is right, though, on at least one point. As he and some of the conservative justices on the Court pointed out, the South is not uniquely racially discriminatory.  Schemes to apportion Electoral College votes by congressional district, for instance, have been discussed mostly by states that are not required to receive federal preclearance. But this is not an argument for striking down Section 5. Indeed, any measure that limits ballot access or dilutes some group’s electoral influence in any state ought to be opposed. However, if states like South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and others currently subject to Section 5 have their way, significant numbers of people of color are especially likely to feel the negative consequences of new electoral laws. Keeping Section 5 in place will continue to help guard against attempts to limit the influence of people of color on Election Day. **** Dr. Cathy Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Jon C. Rogowski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Washington University.  Dr. Cohen and Prof. Rogowski work with the Black Youth Project. America’s Wire is an independent, nonprofit news service run by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. Our stories can be republished free of charge by newspapers, websites and other media sources. For more information, visit www.americaswire.org or contact Michael K. Frisby at This email address is being protected from spambots. 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Gunshot Investigated at Black Newspaper in Virginia

 Richmond Police Detective Dale Shamburg investigates gunshot damage to a window on the second floor at the Richmond Free Press building on March 4 as Free Press Editor/Publisher Raymond H. Boone pays close attention. The inset: Close-up of the bullet hole and shattered glass. PHOTO: Sandra Sellars/Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Richmond, Va. Police Department are investigating a gunshot to the window of the headquarters of the Richmond Free Press, a 21-year-old award-winning Black newspaper in the former capital of the Confederacy.

First discovered by Free Press staff members March 3, the nighttime vandalism also included ripped window blinds and scattered debris in the Free Press newsroom, the paper reported this week.

“Thankfully none of our staffers were on duty when our window was bullet-holed and desks were dotted with glass,” said Free Press Editor/Publisher Raymond H. Boone in an editorial published in the March 14-16 edition of the paper, known for its award-winning confrontations with political and economic power brokers on behalf of the poor and racially oppressed.

The editorial said Police Detective Dale Shamburg “suggested the shot came from a shotgun blast fired from a nearby parking lot across from the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the blast may have come from partygoers.”

Boone wrote that the criminal behavior mirrors “an uncivilized act that fits in the same category as past and ongoing schemes to shut down the Free Press.”

The newsroom blast is the latest in a string of destructive incidents targeting the Free Press since the newspaper opened in Downtown Richmond in 1992. They have been so plentiful and destructive that the authorities at the paper reported them to the FBI as well as the police.

Those incidents have included distribution boxes flattened by big-tire vehicles; Free Press editions burned in distribution boxes; racist messages scrawled on the front of the distribution boxes; boxes stolen and papers thrown into trash containers; and the fencing of boxes to block reader access to copies of the newspaper.

But, in the defiant tones reminiscent of Black newspaper editorials throughout history, Boone appears unfazed.

“Despite the consistent vandalism, the Free Press will remain unyielding in its commitment to stand strong for what’s right and to give an equally strong voice to the voiceless,” the editorial states. “The Free Press will not be intimidated. Neither will we bow to political and economic schemes viciously intended to control the Free Press.”