Law & Justice

Disturbing exchanges were uncovered between a Jefferson County assistant chief and a recruit during an unrelated investigation. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

• Court documents described a pattern of ‘racist and threatening’ messages from the assistant chief Todd Shaw, who was fired in November.
• Related: To Protect and Serve ~ Norm Stamper
• Related: Weekend Read - It’s past time for white supremacy to die.

Jamiles Lartey, the Guardian

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Mon 22 Jan 2018 | The former acting chief of a Kentucky police department instructed a police recruit to shoot black teenagers on sight if caught smoking marijuana, according to court documents.

“Fuck the right thing. If black shoot them,” assistant chief Todd Shaw wrote in response to a younger officer’s query, part of what the Jefferson County attorney’s office described as a pattern of “highly disturbing racist and threatening Facebook messages” from Shaw.

Jamiles Lartey is a reporter for Guardian US. 

Full story … 

Related:

To Protect and Serve ~ Norm Stamper, Kirkus Reviews

• How to Fix America’'s Police
• A vivid, well-written, vitally important book.
• Related: Special Report | Curbing Police Brutality
   

Related:

Weekend Read - It’s past time for white supremacy to die, Heidi Beirich, Southern Poverty Leadership Conference (SPLC)

• This weekend we're bringing you an editorial by our Intelligence Project Director Heidi Beirich from our latest Intelligence Report, reminding us that if we want to reverse a trend that saw hate groups rise for the third year in a row, we must dismantle the white supremacy that's embedded so deeply in American society.
• Related: Hate Groups Attack Southern Poverty Law Center, and Some Journalists Pile On

Former US Attorney John Ashcroft

It seems to me incredibly relevant that the communities likely to be subjected to discriminatory and arbitrary national security policies are black and brown communities … . That it seems that the rights of those individuals maybe don’t weigh quite as heavily as the rights of others, and that’s something we have to confront.

Rachel Meeropol, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

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June 30, 2017 | This week on CounterSpin: After 9/11, hundreds of non-citizen Muslim, Arab and South Asian men should be locked up and treated as suspected terrorists, despite no evidence of terrorist connections. That policy came from the highest levels of government; that’s why a suit brought on behalf of some of those men sought damages from top officials, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft. The Supreme Court has just denied the men’s right to sue those officials. What does that mean for accountability when powerful people make unconstitutional policy? We’ll hear from Rachel Meeropol, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. (MP3)

Transcript: Janine Jackson interviewed Rachel Meeropol for the June 30, 2017, episode of CounterSpin about the Supreme Court’s rejection of an unlawful detention lawsuit. This is a lightly edited transcript.

If We Don’t Have Accountability, There’s Nothing to Stop it From Happening Again <https://fair.org/home/if-we-dont-have-accountability-theres-nothing-to-s...

Rachel Meeropol is a Senior Staff Attorney and Associate Director of Legal Training and Education at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she works on prisoners' rights, Muslim profiling, criminalization of dissent, and First Amendment issues.

Full story … http://fair.org/home/rachel-meeropol-on-illegal-detentions-dan-zukowski-...