"Witnesses describe the night Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire during protests after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha"
White supremacists can still get away with almost anything. For now.
by Gabrielle Gurley May 15, 2020
A protester carries his rifle at the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, April 30, 2020. Paul Sancya/AP Photo
In Jackson, Mississippi, one spring evening 50 years ago today, fed-up students threw rocks at drivers and set fire to a dump truck. Drivers often cruised .. https://books.google.com/books?id=6KY7CNAVffkC&printsec=frontcover .. on Lynch Street through their Jackson State College campus throwing bottles and rocks, and yelling, “nigger.”
The Jackson police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol arrived .. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED083899.pdf .. on Lynch Street. Bottles and rocks flew after firefighters put the blaze out, and shortly after the midnight hour on May 15, 1970, the officers began firing hundreds of bullets into campus buildings. A dozen injured students survived. James Earl Green, a high school senior, and Phillip Gibbs, a married junior with one child and another on the way, died .. https://books.google.com/books?id=YSLZDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover .. of their wounds.
The Jackson State killings inhabit the dark recesses of America’s repressed memories, grafted onto the killings during the May 4 Vietnam anti-war protests at Kent State in Ohio. But the events of May 15 began less in anti-war passion than in black rage against a terroristic white male power structure designed to keep African Americans servile and scared.
Guns are still among the tools that help keep this edifice standing. So equipped, white men can put on a badge and kill with impunity; they can shoot up a school, hunt down a black man jogging, or brandish weapons of war in the halls of government.
The bullet-riddled windows of Alexander Hall, a Jackson State College women’s dorm in Jackson, Mississippi, after two African American students were killed and 12 injured when police opened fire on the building, May 15, 1970. AP Photo
A couple of hundred mostly white men and a few women milled about in the rain on Thursday at the closed State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, their fury unleashed against their governor’s decision to take drastic action to save lives during the fiercest pandemic to hit the human race in a century.
The white men who want Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to relax stay-at-home orders that have cratered commerce brought along their assault rifles and handguns, as Michigan law allows them to do. One man carried an American flag with a doll and .. https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/05/fight-erupts-at-michigan-capitol-over-doll-with-a-noose-around-neck.html .. a noose attached to it. Nooses and Confederate flags have been the accessories of choice at several of the Michigan protests. These symbols appear to have talismanic powers that include paralyzing Republican lawmakers from prohibiting weapons inside the Capitol or its grounds.
At a late-April protest, these armed men made their way into the Capitol to yell outside the House Chambers and turn the Senate visitors’ gallery into a potential sniper’s nest. Stoic state police stood by while white men demanded access to House Chambers and screamed in their faces.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel issued .. https://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,4534,7-359-92297_99936-528708--,00.html .. a formal opinion that the Michigan State Capitol Commission had the authority to prohibit guns from the building. But with commission members beholden to their Republican overlords, they instead decided to “study” the idea of prohibiting firearms—as if discharging weapons in a legislative chamber required ballistics tests, perusal of autopsy reports that describe how AR-15 bullets can shred human flesh, or an extra night’s worth of sleeping on various blood-soaked scenarios.
After April’s display of legislating at gunpoint, an African American lawmaker, state Rep. Sarah Anthony, a Lansing Democrat, recruited .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protest .. a small group of well-armed black and Latino men and women to escort her into the building. Others lawmakers decided to wear bulletproof vests. Republicans, however, protected themselves this week by shutting down the whole building, while their colleagues on the other side of the aisle expressed dismay about the protesters.
“It’s very much a rally of a predominately white group that just is fighting against whatever they decided to fight against,” says Democratic state Sen. Jeremy Allen Moss of Southfield, who represents a suburban Detroit district, of the Thursday rally. “I don’t know if they were fighting against a strong female governor who was making a decision against reopening until it was safe, or if they were fighting against a perceived lack of power that white men have held in this country for a very, very long time. But it was very much not a fight against COVID-19.”
It goes without saying that the political and law enforcement response to large numbers of black and Latino men equipped with military-grade weaponry would be quite different. In 1999, when hundreds of Detroit residents—parents, educators, and activists—went to Lansing, all unarmed, to protest the state takeover of the city’s public schools, they were required to go through metal detectors .. https://www.michiganradio.org/post/quarantine-protesters-carried-rifles-protesters-1999-dps-takeover-went-through-metal-detectors . This spring, Michigan’s white reopeners walked right in. When the Black Panthers showed up at the State Capitol building in Sacramento, California, three years before the Jackson killings, state lawmakers quickly passed the Mulford Act, which prohibited public carrying of firearms. It was signed into law by Gov. Ronald Reagan.
- It goes without saying that the political and law enforcement response to large numbers of black and Latino men equipped with military-grade weaponry would be quite different. -
In the current Michigan pandemic episode of white supremacy, a white woman has taken the brunt of the abuse. Whitmer’s executive orders have provoked death threats, depictions of her as Hitler, and the lynched doll and other savage images. Attorney General Nessel, the first openly LGBTQ person elected to statewide office, has also received death threats. “I truly believe,” she says, “that if the exact same orders were issued by our former governor, a white male by the name of Rick Snyder, that we wouldn’t see these protests.”
Consider also that the protests would probably have unfolded differently or not at all if the Upper Peninsula rather than Detroit had emerged as the state’s COVID-19 epicenter. The resentment against the black city is fierce in “outstate” Michigan, hundreds of miles from the metropolitan area, says Moss, the state senator. They don’t recognize that what they perceive as harsh restrictions have so far spared them the fear and death that has gripped metro Detroit. “People feel that they are on the outside of the crisis looking in,” he says. Moss notes that “the win is that they are not suffering from the deaths that we were.”
White supremacy can still engender many bloody possibilities, just as it did on a college campus 50 years ago. Events, though, have shaved off some of the immunities for white men with guns. Oblivious about contracting COVID, the Michigan reopeners can return home with dreams of killing fields dancing in their heads. But if they make their dreams come true, neither they nor their spiritual leaders in Lansing and Washington will be able to direct or control the mayhem in a country where anyone can pack heat.
US authorities empanel grand jury into the death of black man Daniel Prude by Rochester Police
"Witnesses describe the night Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire during protests after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha"
Posted 2 hours ago
Daniel Prude, pictured left with his brother Joe, died in March after being arrested.(AP)
US authorities have moved to form a grand jury to investigate the death of Daniel Prude, a black man who died after Rochester police officers put a hood on him and pinned him to the ground to restrain him.
Key points:
* The death of Daniel Prude has prompted widespread protests New York State's third-largest city
* His arrest occurred in March but police body camera vision was only made public in September
*A medical examiner ruled Mr Prude's death a homicide caused by "complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint"
"The Prude family and the Rochester community have been through great pain and anguish," New York Attorney–General Letitia James said in a statement.
"My office will immediately move to empanel a grand jury as part of our exhaustive investigation into this matter."
Rochester, a city of 200,000 people in the north-west corner of the State of New York, erupted with protests this week after the Prude family released body camera footage from the arrest of Daniel Prude in March.
The footage shows a group of officers putting a mesh hood over Prude's head — apparently to prevent his spit from possibly transmitting the novel coronavirus — as he kneels naked and restrained on the street.
Police body camera video shows Daniel Prude, a black man, suffocating after a group of police officers put a hood over his head then pressed his face into the pavement for two minutes.(AP: Rochester Police)
The video footage also shows officers forcing Prude's face down on the ground.
Prude can be heard shouting, "Take this … off my face!" and "You're trying to kill me!" in response to the hood.
Officers are heard saying "Calm down" and "stop spitting".
The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide caused by "complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint", with intoxication by the drug PCP a contributing factor.
Rochester officials have faced questions over why the officers were not disciplined until the videotape became public five months later.
On Friday local time, the Rochester police union chief defended the officers, saying they followed their training in responding to Prude, who was having a psychotic episode.
There are widespread protests in New York State over Mr Prude's death.(AP: Adrian Kraus)
Kyle Rittenhouse shot his victims, but we can't call them that? What kind of justice system is this?
"Witnesses describe the night Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire during protests after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha"
The judge ruled that the men who were shot can't be called victims at trial. But they can be called looters. Is fairness and justice supposed to be one-sided?
Suzette Hackney USA TODAY Oct. 26, 2021
VIDEO - Judge: Can't show Rittenhouse link to Proud Boys
We talk a lot about the tenets of America's justice system: the right to due process and the presumption of innocence in all in criminal proceedings. We uphold the Constitution as the principle law of the land.
Until we don't.
Excuse my cynicism as I attempt to process Tuesday's ruling by a Wisconsin judge .. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/26/kyle-rittenhouse-trial-judge-victims/8557603002/ .. in the high-profile murder case of Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse faces trial next week for shooting three people, two fatally, during a protest against police brutality last year in Kenosha, about 40 miles southeast of Milwaukee.
Kyle Rittenhouse, left, and other armed men claimed to be protecting property owners from arson and theft during protests Aug. 25, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis.
Shot dead but not a victim?
Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder has decided those who were shot by Rittenhouse cannot be called "victims" until or if he is convicted of a crime.
Yet two of Rittenhouse's victims (yes, I'm calling them that) are dead. Gunned down with an AR-15-style rifle. But Schroeder will allow Joseph Rosenbaum, 36; Anthony Huber, 26; and Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, who was injured, to be referred to as looters, rioters and arsonists in open court.
Never mind that these victims – that word again – were never convicted (or even charged) of actual looting the night they were shot.
So tell me, what did they loot? Is there evidence to suggest they set things ablaze with criminal intent? Do videos exist showing them rioting?
How is it that they're not "victims" but they're "looters"?
Taking the most generous view of the judge's ruling – he called victim "a loaded, loaded word" – he was trying to ensure a fair trial. Where I stumble with that view is when I remember that fairness and justice aren't supposed to be one-sided.
As I see it, disallowing victim but permitting the use of loaded terms such as looter and rioter could sway a jury to feel sympathy toward Rittenhouse – his victims were up to no good, they were menacing criminals, they deserved it.
An undated booking photo of Kyle Rittenhouse, from the Antioch (Illinois) Police Department.
This is our justice system
What a disappointing and enraging start to a trial that in many ways defines who we are, what we champion and who we are willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
Due process. The presumption of innocence.
This is our criminal justice system. This is why people kneel during the national anthem. This is why thousands of individuals took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd. This is why many Americans demand systemic reforms.
This is a travesty, and we are all the victims.
National columnist/deputy opinion editor Suzette Hackney is a member of USA TODAY’S Editorial Board. Contact her at shackney@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @suzyscribe
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