A cop ran over a boy for not having the proper lighting on his bicycle and now the taxpayers are being held liable — not the cop.



Sacramento, CA — As TFTP previously reported, the Sacramento police department released the body and dashboard camera footage from an incident last July in which an officer attempted to cause grave injury to a child by running him over with his cruiser. The child’s crime? He was riding his bicycle without the proper lighting. Now, the taxpayers are going to be held liable for this cop’s actions.

Oakland attorney John Burris filed the lawsuit this week citing a a “string of recent excessive force incidents” by Sacramento police. The lawsuit alleges the officer’s use of excessive force, assault, battery and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

The deeply disturbing video shows a police officer pursuing a 16-year-old boy for riding his bicycle without the proper front-facing light. When the cop tried to stop the child, the child kept peddling.

https://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-bicycle-video-improper-light

By Jonathan Metzl
Posted May 4, 2019 at 9:39 AM

It’s time to talk about what it means to be white in the United States.

That’s what I was trying to do last weekend at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., when I was interrupted by a group of white nationalists. Ironically, the protesters’ chant — “This land is our land” — served only to reinforce my point.

For too long, many white Americans have avoided this conversation, and we’ve done so for a reason: We don’t have to see the color white. Race scholars often argue white privilege broadly means not needing to reflect on whiteness. White is the default setting, the assumed norm. A white American does not have to think about being white when walking down the street — while people marked as not-white are often noticed and surveilled. White people have the superpower of invisibility.

Yet with the rise of President Donald Trump’s brand of resentment politics, American whiteness is increasingly hard to overlook. Trumpian rhetoric defines white identity not by shared values but by shared resentments. Whiteness, in this telling, is under siege. Walled behind Trump’s claim that the country is “full,” and his equivocations on white extremism, lies the notion that immigrants and citizens of color are usurping the privileges of whiteness. This narrative is then amplified by increasingly emboldened white nationalists like the ones who sought to shout me down last weekend.

Trump did not invent insecure whiteness. He is only a skilled manipulator of the fears at its heart.

For the past eight years, I’ve studied how these politics of racial resentment have profound negative consequences for working-class white communities. I traveled across Southern and Midwestern states to track the everyday effects of anti-government, anti-immigrant politics and policies. Time and again, I found that the material realities of working-class white lives are made worse not by immigrants and citizens of color — but by GOP policies that promise greatness but deliver despair.

https://www.pjstar.com/opinion/20190504/metzl-its-time-to-talk-about-privilege-being-white-in-america

BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
MAY 03, 2019 02:40 PM, UPDATED MAY 03, 2019 03:40 PM

This is a column about saving whiteness. It’s precipitated by an incident last Saturday at a bookstore in Washington.

Seems that author Jonathan M. Metzl was giving a presentation when a group of white nationalists barged in. They formed a phalanx between him and the audience, and one of them harangued the crowd with an electric bullhorn, something about the white working class being asked to “trade their homeland for handouts.” The group chanted “This land is our land.” They filed out, to a chorus of boos.

We will pass lightly over the irony of Woody Guthrie’s words of harmony and inclusion (“This land is your land, and this land is my land, from the California to the New York island ...”) being repurposed as a white supremacist manifesto. Let’s deal instead with Metzl’s book, the one this group tried to shut down, thereby giving it greater visibility and increased sales.

One of his more compelling illustrations involves “Trevor,” a 41-year old white former cabbie in Tennessee whom Metzl describes as “yellow with jaundice,” hobbling on a walker, with hepatitis C and an inflamed liver, dying, yet resolutely opposed to the Affordable Care Act, even though it might provide medical treatment he desperately needs and cannot otherwise afford. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told Metzl. “I would rather die. We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article229995244.html#storylink=cpy