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Turning Action Into Law to Stop Police Killings
Federal legislation related to police brutality and inspired by the spate of killings of unarmed African Americans, particularly men, will be making its way through Congress in 2015. The large demonstrations related to the #BlackLivesMatter movement are sure to mean even more bills in the 114th Congress. Many assume that the new Republican Congress will…
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Oh, and President Obama’s Request for Police Body Cameras? It Wasn’t in the Budget Congress Just Passed
Late Tuesday, the least productive Congress in history finally finished for the year as the Senate adjourned. There was one large chore lawmakers had to complete before departure—the passage of a $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government until January 2015—and they did, in fact, get it done. But the bill may have…
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What Today’s Movement Can Learn From the NRA
We’ve seen it before—the injustice, the reactions, and then the discussions and tweets after another tragedy makes its way into the headlines, and our consciousness. We work through hours of commentary, “think pieces,” marches, and then online petitions and panels. But what exactly should people be doing? Where should the energy go, and what should be…
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Body Cameras Are on the Way—but in Eric Garner’s Case, Would It Have Mattered?
“I can’t believe that in the 21st century in the United States of America, we can’t get a simple indictment for a murder of a man that was caught on videotape.” That’s what Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) told The Root in the wake of a Staten Island, N.Y., grand jury’s return of no indictment Wednesday…
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5 Not-So-Credible Events in Darren Wilson’s Testimony
A review of the grand jury testimony of Ferguson, Mo., police Officer Darren Wilson opens up a window allowing us to see how police testimony is treated in an investigation. In the case of the shooting death of Michael Brown, Wilson often gets favorable treatment even in several questionable and eyebrow-raising passages. If Brown’s family…
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Shouldn’t Black Leaders Ask How Immigration Reform Affects Black Unemployment?
How might President Barack Obama’s pending executive order on immigration affect black unemployment? And isn’t that a question black leaders should be asking right now? Even if you’re pro-immigration reform, the answer should be a full-throated and resounding, “Yes.” Obama’s executive order will allow more than 4 million noncitizens previously here without immigration status to obtain work…
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It Looks Like the Ferguson Grand Jury Decision Will Be Announced Monday
According to sources familiar with a Wednesday conference call that included key elected officials, the St. Louis County grand jury’s decision in the case of Ferguson, Mo., police Officer Darren Wilson is expected to be announced publicly Monday. And sources close to the investigation state that they are not expecting Wilson to be indicted. A number of key…
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Are Missouri Dems Pushing the DOJ to End Michael Brown Investigation?
Questions have been raised in Ferguson, Mo., about the role of that state’s senior U.S. senator: Did either Sen. Claire McCaskill or her staff communicate to the Department of Justice that it should end its Ferguson investigation after the local grand jury ends its own? It’s been widely speculated that the St. Louis County grand jury—empaneled by…
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Dems and Some GOPers Condemn Nebraska Willie Horton Redux Ad
A political ad aired by the National Republican Congressional Committee is being called out by many as racist. The ad, which has political circles buzzing and has gone viral, with more than 150,000 views on YouTube, has political observers pointing out that it’s effectively a duplicate of the infamous Willie Horton spot from 1988. That ad was…
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Obamacare Is Working, but No One—GOP or Dem—Is Running on It
Campaigning for president in 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama said: “Affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how.” What followed three years later? Scary claims from Republicans of “death panels,” “socialized medicine” and “government takeovers” of health care. And in 2009, health…
