Let me guess, there is an election coming up?
"Backers seek expansion of civil rights death law" Associated Press September 22, 2014
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — There has been only one prosecution under the Emmett Till Act, even though the law was passed with the promise of $135 million for police work and an army of federal agents to investigate unsolved killings from the civil rights era.
Still, proponents want to extend and expand the act in the hope it is not too late for some families to get justice.
In nearly six years since the signing of the law, named for a black Chicago teenager killed after flirting with a white woman in Mississippi in 1955, only one person has been prosecuted: a former Alabama trooper who pleaded guilty in 2010 to killing a black protester in 1965.
The government has closed the books on all but 20 of the 126 deaths it investigated under the law, finding many were too old to prosecute because suspects and witnesses had died and memories had faded. And Congress has not appropriated millions of dollars in grant money that was meant to help states fund their own investigations.
Never seems to matter much when they bring "former Nazis" before the bar.
Hoping to spur more action, the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference have passed resolutions asking the federal government for more thorough reviews and to spend the money authorized in 2007.
So where did the money disappear to?
I mean, all across this government money disappears in the form of waste, fraud, and abuse, and yet the $y$tem rolls along like there is no tomorrow (maybe there isn't, huh?).
The law expires in 2017 unless Congress extends it.
Let it lap$e.
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Forget about the past:
"Clergy arrested in protests of Ferguson police" by Monica Davey and Alan Blinder | New York Times October 14, 2014
FERGUSON, Mo. — Protesters, including religious leaders, were arrested Monday as they stepped forward into a line of officers in riot gear outside Ferguson’s Police Department, a day when organizers promised numerous organized shows of civil disobedience around the St. Louis region over questions about police conduct.
In addition to the initial march on Ferguson police headquarters, protesters blocked the entrance to a major employer, held a loud rally inside St. Louis City Hall, disrupted business at a Ferguson shopping center and a Walmart, and tried to crash a private fund-raiser for a St. Louis County executive candidate.
It looks good on the surface until you realize that religious leaders are often working with the government these days, right down to telling their flock to obey government in a crisis.
All told, more than 50 people were arrested, including 42 taken into custody at the Ferguson police station, the Associated Press reported.
Clergy members and others said they wished to meet with Ferguson police officers inside the station, then stepped forward, after saying they were prepared for arrest if they could not.
Among the first taken into custody was Cornel West, an author and former Harvard University professor who teaches at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. West told the line of officers, “We’re here because we love the young folks.”
I think he is a well-meaning man, but his position of prominence means he has been accepted in elite circles and won't cross a certain line.
As they arrived at the Ferguson station, which has been the scene of testy nightly protests since the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in August, the religious leaders of numerous faiths stepped forward to a line of waiting police, offering to “take their confessions,” and pray with them.
**********
Protest leaders have provided few details of their larger plans, except to say that they would be employing a strategy used by demonstrators in North Carolina. Last year, people there began staging weekly protests known as “Moral Mondays” in response to actions by the state government.
First I've seen of those in my Globe.
The protests in Raleigh, the state capital, led to hundreds of arrests and served as a template for similar, smaller demonstrations across the South.
WTF?
In St. Louis, not far from the neighborhood where another black teenager was killed last week by a white off-duty police officer, hundreds of protesters marched for blocks through fog, then announced they were staging a sit-down on the campus of Saint Louis University.
At the university, a protest leader said into a megaphone shortly before 2 a.m., “As of right now, this is our spot.” Standing beside the clock tower on the campus of Saint Louis University, he continued, “We’re not going anywhere.”
I'm not faulting it per se, and it reminds me of Occupy; however, the coverage is just a bit too positive and reeks of controlled protest.
***********
The group — which included the president of the NAACP, Cornell William Brooks, and West — had marched for more than an hour. Many protesters left after organizers announced plans for a sit-in and called for food and tents.
Although police officers, wearing riot gear and standing in a line, had confronted protesters as they walked along Grand Boulevard, the officers ultimately stepped away and allowed the crowd to walk on....
The region has been on edge after more than two months of demonstrations. In recent days, the displays of anger spread to the city of St. Louis, where protesters have appeared at the symphony hall, outside baseball playoff games, and near the neighborhood where another black teenager was killed last week by a white off-duty police officer.
No kidding? Saw none of those on the broadcasts.
Over the weekend, tensions mounted between the police, who were dressed in riot gear, and a group of demonstrators who held a sit-in at the entrance of a St. Louis store and refused to move.
Seventeen people were arrested on accusations of unlawful assembly, pepper spray was used by some officers, and Samuel Dotson III, chief of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, said he had seen a rock thrown at an officer and heard of other rocks being hurled.
Although some protesters spoke of plans for nonviolent demonstrations Monday, organizers warned that frustrations had intensified because of the police response Sunday morning.
“Instead of de-escalating rising tensions in the city, Chief Dotson’s comments are inciting anger and making matters worse,” the organizers of many of the protests said in a statement early Sunday.
Maybe that was the point, to provoke.
The protesters, they said, “showed the best of our democracy, and the St. Louis police demonstrated the worst of their out-of-control law enforcement agency.”
Doesn't look much like democracy anymore.
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Related: Two from Jamaica Plain church arrested at Ferguson protest
Btw, that other kid that got killed also deserved it:
"Test shows gunshot residue on St. Louis suspect" October 15, 2014
ST. LOUIS — Police union leaders said the lab test by the Missouri State Highway Patrol dispels allegations that Vonderrit Myers didn’t shoot at the officer on Oct. 8, initiating a fatal exchange of gunfire. The shooting led to a new wave of protests in St. Louis, two months after a white officer in neighboring Ferguson shot and killed an unarmed black 18-year-old, Michael Brown.
St. Louis Police Officers’ Association business manager Jeff Roorda also cited other evidence against Myers during a news conference, including social media photos that he said appeared to show Myers holding three guns, one of them a 9mm Smith & Wesson.
Myers’s family contends that he was unarmed and that the officer, who was in uniform but who was off-duty and working for a security company at the time, mistook a sandwich that Myers was holding for a gun.
The shooting set off a new round of intense protests similar to those in Ferguson after Brown’s death. Both Brown and Myers were black. Both officers are white....
We got it. I suppose it both were the same color it wouldn't be so bad.
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Also see: Is Frein a Fake?
How goes the search?
I guess that's enough divisive swill for now.
