Are you willing to be arrested for civil rights?

You have to give it to Al Sharpton. He led a display of civil disobedience in New York City in order to send a wake-up call to the nation about police brutality. Here is what CBS in New York is reporting:

"NEW YORK (CBS) ― The Rev. Al Sharpton and more than 200 others were arrested Wednesday amid a series of protests throughout the city, part of a response to the acquittals of three New York City undercover detectives in the 50-shot killing of Sean Bell.

Hundreds took to the streets in Manhattan and Brooklyn as part of the citywide "slowdown" effort led by Sharpton and his National Action Network. Police arrested those who took part in acts of civil disobedience by blocking the streets and entrances to the Triborough, Manhattan, and Brooklyn bridges.

Sharpton was arrested without incident at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, along with Bell's fiancé, Nicole Paultre Bell, and the two shooting victims who survived, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman.

Bell's parents were also arrested.

They were all released from police custody about four hours later, said Sharpton's spokeswoman Rachel Noerdlinger.

Hoping to avoid future instances of civil disobedience, Gov. David Paterson is scheduled to meet privately with Sharpton and the Bell family on Thursday in New York City.

The governor had expressed surprise at last month's acquittal because of the number of shots fired.

One of the arrested protesters told CBS 2 HD on Wednesday the protests go far beyond Bell's death alone.

"We have to stand up for something or we'll fall for anything. It's not just about Sean Bell, it's about every man that's been injustly killed in America," he said. "The point to make to the people is to get their attention. It could be their son tomorrow or their daughter tomorrow."

Police estimate about 216 people were taken into custody overall."

Check out the rest of Sharpton Arrested In Citywide 'Slowdown' Protests

How many of you are willing to be arrested for standing up for what you believe in?

Nailing cops is "virtually impossible"?

Check out Verdict in Bell Shooting No Big Surprise by Earl Hutchinson. The following is an excerpt:

Even before the first witness was called in the Sean Bell trial, a defense attorney for one of the three officers charged with gunning down Bell flatly said that he thought his client and the other two officers would be acquitted in the killing of Bell. This was not typical attorney bluster. The defense attorney was right.

At first glance, there was good reason to think that he was off base in his prediction and that the cops that fired the volley of shots that killed Bell would be convicted. An anguished New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg publicly questioned the shooting. Two of Bell's companions gave eyewitness testimony that the officers acted like Wild West cowboys and opened up without warning. And most importantly Bell was unarmed and seemingly posed no threat to the officers.

But expectations, witness testimony, seemingly unimpeachable evidence, and the official condemnation of the deadly shooting by city officials obviously weren't enough. There's equally good reason why it almost never is.

The rest can be read here: Verdict in Bell Shooting No Big Surprise
"In"justice system...seems like we never win

Sean Bell murderers acquitted

I'm simply without words. Read the story on CNN here...

An Open Letter to Bob Johnson: America's Favorite Dope Boy

In the words of the great Detective Alonzo Harris a la Training Day: my nigga!

I don’t know how you accomplished such a noteworthy feat or how your accomplishments have gone with such little notoriety, but you, sir, are an American Icon. You managed to sell the potential future of an entire race to Viacom, the drug culture, and creative mediocrity for a few billion dollars and all in the chorus of the soft applause and congratulatory whispers of Black America’s elite. It’s comparable only to Denzel Washington shooting Idris Elba in broad daylight on 125th street. Truly gangsta! My nigga!

First, you changed the conversation by removing any content that had the remote chance of expanding the knowledge base of your core viewers—Black youth. BET Tonight with Tavis Smiley? Canceled 2001. Teen Summit? Canceled summer 2003. BET Nightly News? Canceled 2005. What programming do you put in its place?

Hits from the Street—two hours of comedic cooning with a guy wearing spandex, a cape, and topped off with underwear on the exterior of his outfit.

106 & Park the original and 106 and Park part deux—two hours of the same videos we’ve all seen 200 times. The prior hosted by the Predator and a women he would never have. The latter hosted by a southern belle being chased by a random simp who, like his predecessor, will never have his lady of choice. Young teens may not be properly prepared for college or have any desire to change their environment, but they can surely “superman that ho.”

College Hill—a show not about the rigors and importance of higher academia, but rather one more focused on the sexual trysts and sophomoric behaviors of young, Black college students without once noting that their experiences are no different that those of their white counterparts.

Uncut—beautiful women parading like immature girls while shaking their asses for often broke rappers who will likely never make a video that will ever play anywhere but Uncut. Black Jesus? Really? Please click here for Uncut’s best of…

And the list goes on: Access Granted; Baldwin Hills; Beef; Cita’s World; How I’m Livin’; Lil’ Kim’s Countdown to Lockdown; and Spring Bling not to mention syndication of The Parkers, The Wayans Bros., and In Living Color. Oh, my! Please, by no means, can we forget about the genius of the Bet Awards! You ripped off every crappy MTV show you could and made a shitty, Black version of it. How did you manage to completely remove any quality programming and replace it all with absolute garbage with such little resistance? You’re my idol! My nigga!

And what about your work on Debra Lee? That was beautiful! A multi-millionaire, Harvard graduate who has fallen completely in line with your tactics and continued to drive your company into the depths of social destruction. She, along with all of your other cohorts (far too many to name) have depicted Black life to be little more than music, sex, bling, drugs, and crime. How’d you pull that one off? It’s as if you did that Agent Smith thing from the Matrix—stuck your forefingers directly into their sternums and snatched their souls right from bodies. That’s some Mortal Kombat, Shang Tsung shit! My nigga!

More over, you have helped to make each and every Black citizen—be they opposed to the mediocrity of the television station that bears the name of an entire people or not—a tacit participant of your non-sense. Guilt by association—genius! Our inability—rather, our refusal—to challenge BET’s programmatic strategy is far from puzzling. Sure, most decent Blacks are bewildered by your choices and desperate for positive images, but that’s juxtaposed against the fact that a Black person has finally developed wealth. Not rim money, not diamond grill money, not blow it at the club money, not Gary Coleman “damn homey, what the f&@k happened to you” money, but legitimate wealth. You found that part of us that wants you to succeed even at our own peril. My nigga!

You are the ultimate dope boy! You exemplify the corner boy. You destroy our neighborhoods with your full out assault on our people and we allow you to do it. Partially out of fear, partially because we benefit from your practice, partially because we know we have not provided you with the base you need to do better, partially because we take joy in your success. You’re the reason we revered Marlo’s psychotic leadership and mourned Stringer Bell’s death. You’re the reason we celebrated the Nicky Barnes NYT Magazine cover. You’re our guilty pleasure that hides in the shadows of our conscience.

You deal death sir, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. You sustain the urban drug culture that daily destroys lives, engulfs entire communities, and eradicates the strength of our culture. You are the megaphone for drug lords and thus enable them to continue their trade with little community resistance by allowing the publicists of the drug kingpins (rap artists) an unregulated platform by which they may spew their self-hated consequently influencing weak-minded adults and impressionable youth. I’d do you the honor of calling you a drug kingpin, but, in reality, you are but an intermediary. Your wealth does not compare to that of the Colombian coca planters you represent or those prison industrial complex benefactors whose interests you protect. Make no mistake Robert L. Johnson you are a murder. You benefit from the death of your people in the same way as those who stand on the corner. The blood of our children are on your hands, too. Moreover, to share the wealth, you’ve helped to pour that blood on our hands as well. You’ve helped to make us all murders and thieves. We’ve stolen our own futures.

But you gotta get that gwap right! Dolla, dolla bill nigga!

My nigga!

One Nation Behind Bars

One Nation Behind Bars
By Kevin Lawrence Pitts

“There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville

Americans often times fail to recognize or even realize the signs of fissures and fractures in the American democracy. A recent example of a small fissure in American democratic ideals was the publishing of a study on recent imprisonment data conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Center which stated that “more than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.” With an estimated 2.3 men and women in prison/jail America leads the entire world in the overall percentage of citizens that it incarcerates.

At this junction, the facts are very clear, we have mired ourselves in a “War on Drugs”, which was declared in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, that has responsible, in large part, for imprisoning millions and filling our prisons and jails with the bodies of racial minorities. For instance, in the mid-1990s, 7% of African-American males were incarcerated, and the rate of imprisonment for African-American males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight. What makes these statistics even more perplexing is that the vast majority of these African-American males can be classified of “non-violent” offenders. As author Daniel Lazare highlighted in his Nation article entitled, “Stars & Bars”, “In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession…accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent.”

The health of our democracy depends upon our ability to take heed of the rights and dignity of all citizens, even those who have violated our nation’s laws and in this regard we have failed. In what began as reasonable efforts in the past decades to curb the rise of drugs and violence in urban centers across America, has devolved into a war on the lower income communities. This “war” has ripped apart homes, destabilized neighborhoods and has created an even more cyclical and vicious deterioration of entire cities of black and brown citizens.

And the tax payer continues to pay for America’s unhealthy and unwarranted obsession with being “tough on crime”. A New York Times article on the Pew Report highlighted that, “In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 percent increase when adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the Pew report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.”

The financial burden of the prison industrial complex continues to grow and as a nation we must not only ask what will be the final financial cost but what will be the final moral cost for imprisoning so many. Many of whom, upon release will be locked out of the legitimate job market and often more hardened criminals than when they entered the system.

There has been no real significant decrease in violent crime that can be directly tied to our nation’s lust for John Wayne style “eye for an eye” justice yet the imprisonment rates continue to climb. There needs to be a shift in policy and public sentiment that balances the need to punish and detain those offenders who rip apart the community with gun violence, intimidation, and poisonous drugs with the need to reinvest in these offenders through illegitimate and purposeful rehabilitation behind bars. We were brave enough to start the “war on drugs” and start this title wave of imprisonment, let’s be brave enough to re-conceptualize where the war has gone wrong and have the heart to admit that our democracy can no longer stand for such gross injustice.

Hot Topic: The Wire

Recently, Time, published an article written by the writers of HBO's hit television show The Wire. Entitled, The Wire's War on Drugs, the article discusses how the writers view the governments "War on Drugs" as a failure and they charge us to end it. The following is an excerpt:

"We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they’ve invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could."

Click here to read the rest of the article.

As The Wire comes to a close, what will viewers take from this real-life drama. Will people view it as entertainment or as a look into the lives of inner city youths? And if they do choose the latter, will people be moved to change anything?

HOT TOPIC: Excessive Force: Police on Trial for Sean Bell's Death

This is an update to the case of Sean Bell; the groom to be, who was shot by the NYPD after his bachelor party. The facts of the case are disturbing, he was shot at 50 TIMES and killed. For those unfamiliar with the 2006 case this is an eye-opener; for those who are familiar, just a little reminder and update. What do you think? How are we going to combat police brutality in our communities? (R.I.P. Sean Bell)

Lend us your thoughts here at RIGHTEOUS MINDS.

The article is here:

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/headlines/belltrial225