The Faces of sessions by Ettenna G'Nal
While all the Russian ying yang has covered the news, the news has been a cover-up for the unlawful trumped attorney general sessions lawlessness across the land. The below headlines are covered by the Washington Post, to the New York Times and other leading papers that most don't read nor are covered by the media. The following news stories are not as significant to the mainstream media because they affect African Americans, Hispanics and people of color more than their white counterparts, which places them on the last of the coverage priority list. Once, finished reading the below articles, please continue reading excerpts from the following Frontline interview on author, civil rights advocate, attorney Michelle Alexander author of bestseller, "The New Jim Crow" on the link provided under her photo.
Michelle Alexander: “A System of Racial and Social Control”
APRIL 29, 2014 / by SARAH CHILDRESS Senior Reporter
"An exceptional growth in the size of our prison population, it was driven primarily by the war on drugs, a war that was declared in the 1970s by President Richard Nixon and which has increased under every president since. It is a war that has targeted primarily nonviolent offenders and drug offenders, and it has resulted in the birth of a penal system unprecedented in world history.
So America has a higher incarceration rate than other nations. Do they have a higher crime rate than other nations?
No. The United States actually has a crime rate that is lower than the international norm, yet our incarceration rate is six to 10 times higher than other countries’ around the world.
It’s not crime that makes us more punitive in the United States. It’s the way we respond to crime and how we view those people who have been labeled criminals.
You said it started with Nixon. Give me a sense of the progression and how through each president since Nixon the incarceration system has been ramped up, and sometimes in unexpected ways. …
Some of our system of mass incarceration really has to be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s, in the 1960s. …
Segregationists began to worry that there was going to be no way to stem the tide of public opinion and opposition to the system of segregation, so they began labeling people who are engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and protests as criminals and as lawbreakers, and [they] were saying that those who are violating segregation laws were engaging in reckless behavior that threatens the social order and demanded … a crackdown on these lawbreakers, these civil rights protesters.
This rhetoric of law and order evolved as time went on, even though the old Jim Crow system fell and segregation was officially declared unconstitutional. Segregation[ists] and former segregation[ists] began using get-tough rhetoric as a way of appealing to poor and working-class whites in particular who were resentful of, fearful of many of the gangs of African Americans in the civil rights movement."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/michelle-alexander-a-system-of-racial-and-social-control/
1. Jeff Sessions wants police to take more cash from American citizens
By Christopher Ingraham July 17 at 3:32 PM
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday said he'd be issuing a new directive this week aimed at increasing police seizures of cash and property.
“We hope to issue this week a new directive on asset forfeiture — especially for drug traffickers,” Sessions said in his prepared remarks for a speech to the National District Attorney's Association in Minneapolis. "With care and professionalism, we plan to develop policies to increase forfeitures. No criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime. Adoptive forfeitures are appropriate as is sharing with our partners."
Asset forfeiture is a disputed practice that allows law enforcement officials to permanently take money and goods from individuals suspected of crime. There is little disagreement among lawmakers, authorities and criminal justice reformers that “no criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime.” But in many cases, neither a criminal conviction nor even a criminal charge is necessary — under forfeiture laws in most states and at the federal level, mere suspicion of wrongdoing is enough to allow police to seize items permanently.
Additionally, many states allow law enforcement agencies to keep cash that they seize, creating what critics characterize as a profit motive. The practice is widespread: In 2014, federal law enforcement officers took more property from citizens than burglars did. State and local authorities seized untold millions more.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/17/jeff-sessions-wants-police-to-take-more-cash-from-american-citizens/?utm_term=.9add3dab2e7c
The new trumped laws of the land now includes stealing from a persons home and valuables justified through suspicion alone. Do they mean the suspicion of being Black? for the reported
Attorney General tells Minneapolis audience Trump administration will crack down on violent crime, immigration
'Capitulating to this trend is not an option for America,' Jeff Sessions says
By Stephen Montemayor Star Tribune JULY 17, 2017 — 3:05PM
Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed the summer meeting of the nation's district attorneys from around the country at the Hilton July, 17, 2017 Minneapolis, MN.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a national conference of prosecutors in Minneapolis Monday, previewing a tougher approach to violent crime and immigration from the Trump administration while vowing not to make law enforcement’s job “more difficult than it already is.”
In wide-ranging remarks, Sessions drew on local examples to make his case for a renewed approach to violent crime, drawing occasional applause from an audience of more than 250 people attending the summer meeting of the National District Attorneys Association.
Sessions pointed to a six-year rise in violent crime in Minneapolis, citing local police figures, and a surge in gunfire reports compiled by St. Paul police. A former U.S. attorney in Alabama, Sessions said he will be demanding a “substantial increase in federal gun crime prosecutions.”
“Capitulating to this trend is not an option for America, [and] it’s not an option for us,” Sessions said.
Read more at:
http://www.startribune.com/attorney-general-tells-minneapolis-audience-trump-administration-will-crack-down-on-violent-crime-immigration/435002213/
3. Eric Holder accuses Jeff Sessions of 'another extremist action' on asset forfeiture
by Josh Siegel | Jul 17, 2017, 7:15 PM
Week Twenty-One of the Trump White House
Eric Holder, who led the Justice Department under President Obama, criticized his successor Attorney General Jeff Sessions Monday for announcing a new policy to make it easier to seize the cash and property of suspected drug traffickers.
In a tweet, Holder wrote that Sessions' policy was "another extremist action."
"This is a reform that was supported by conservatives and progressives, Republicans and Democrats," Holder said.
Holder is referring to a Justice Department memo he issued in 2015 that limited a type of practice that allowed local police to share the proceeds of seized cash and property with the federal government.
The act of civil asset forfeiture has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans because in many instances, neither a criminal conviction or a charge is necessary for police to seize cash and property.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/eric-holder-accuses-jeff-sessions-of-another-extremist-action-on-asset-forfeiture/article/2628912
4. Attorney General Jeff Sessions Wants to Revive D.A.R.E. Program
Anti-drug curriculum has been criticized for being ineffective
By Althea Legaspi
July 11, 2017
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is advocating to reinstate the D.A.R.E. program, an anti-drug curriculum launched in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department, which has been criticized for being ineffective.
"D.A.R.E. is, I think, as I indicated, the best remembered anti-drug program today," Sessions said while speaking at the Drug Abuse Resistance Education International Training Conference in Texas on Tuesday, via NY Daily News. "In recent years, people have not paid much attention to that message, but they are ready to hear it again."
"We know it worked before and we can make it work again," he continued.
The program is already making a comeback in several communities, according to D.A.R.E.'s website, with Weymouth, MA, and Lake County, FL, among the areas to recently revive the program.
Sessions added that the Department of Justice would work together with state and local authorities, along with its enlisting D.A.R.E., to stop drug dealers.
"We need you," Sessions said. "We need D.A.R.E. to prevent them from finding new victims. We need your strong leadership to deny them new customers."
While D.A.R.E, has strong name recognition, its effectiveness has been disputed. The program typically involves uniformed police officers trained in the curricula speaking to students about the dangers of drugs while highlighting the advantages of being drug-free.
In a 1998 report to Congress, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service found that the program did not reduce substance abuse, citing the content and teaching methods and its use of police officers as possibly contributing to the weak evaluations. "No scientific evidence suggests that the D.A.R.E. core curriculum as originally designed or revised in 1993, will reduce substance use in the absence of continued instruction more focused on social competency development."
As Scientific American points out, "the program does little or nothing to combat substance use in youth." In its early 2014 report, it cited several studies that indicated that teens enrolled in the program were just as likely to use drugs whether they had gone through the D.A.R.E. program or not. However, Scientific American later reported that one of D.A.R.E.'s hands-on programs, "keepin' it REAL," which was shaped with the input of prevention specialists, has had positive results in studies.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-wants-to-revive-dare-w491886
5. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s claim that ‘criminals take notice’ of cities with sanctuary policies
By Michelle Ye Hee Lee July 17 at 3:00 AM
“When cities like Philadelphia, Boston, or San Francisco advertise that they have these policies, the criminals take notice. According to a recent study from the University of California Riverside, cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t.”
— Attorney General Jeff Sessions, speech on sanctuary cities in Las Vegas, July 12, 2017
In a speech about “sanctuary cities,” Sessions cited research from University of California at Riverside that does not actually support his point. There is little research looking at the impact of sanctuary policies on crime. It’s a difficult correlation to study; many factors affect crime, and state and local law enforcement do not always track inmate citizenship status.
We previously dug into the existing research on sanctuary cities and crime, including the one he mentioned, and did not find that criminals “take notice” when cities have sanctuary policies. Sanctuary jurisdictions release inmates after their criminal case is complete, and extensive research shows noncitizens are not more prone to criminality than U.S.-born citizens. Moreover, some sanctuary jurisdictions do cooperate with the federal government if they believe the inmate is a public safety threat.
What is Sessions talking about?
The Facts
There’s no official definition of “sanctuary,” but it generally refers to rules restricting state and local governments from alerting federal authorities about people who may be in the country illegally. Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, and state and local law enforcement can decide how much they want to cooperate with the federal government for immigration enforcement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can issue an “immigration detainer,” or a request to be notified when a noncitizen convicted of a crime is being released at state or local levels. ICE can then take custody of the offenders and figure out if they should be deported.
But some agencies decide not to alert ICE. Some fear that victims and potential witnesses may not come forward to report crimes if they are afraid of being reported to federal authorities for their immigration status. Others cite dwindling local and state law enforcement resources.
There are somewhere between 165 and 608 local and state government with “sanctuary” policies. But the jurisdictions differ in their approach. Some don’t cooperate at all, while others only do so in civil investigations, for felony convictions or for offenders otherwise deemed to be a public safety threat.
The August 2016 study by researchers at UC Riverside and Highlight College looked at about 80 jurisdictions and used FBI city-level crime data to see how violent and property crime rates changed after sanctuary policies were adopted. Then they compared each sanctuary city to a similarly situated, non-sanctuary city, based on census data and other variables.
According to the Justice Department, Sessions is citing this graphic in the study that shows that violent crime rates in cities with sanctuary policies are higher than violent crime rates in cities without sanctuary policies:
Sessions is presenting the data accurately, and making a “different conclusion based on the data as well as his experience and discussions with law enforcement officials throughout the country,” according to Justice Department.
But the researchers used this graphic to show that there is no correlation between violent crime and sanctuary policies. Here’s what they said in their research about this graphic:
“If the two lines for each year cross each other at any point, then the relationship between violent crime and city-type is not statistically significant. While there is a mild tendency to have slightly more crime in sanctuary cities, these effects are very small, and are not statistically significant. In general, the crime rate per 100,000 people differs between 100-200 incidents a year; however, again, these effects remain statistically insignificant.”
In October 2016, the authors summarized their research in Monkey Cage, a blog hosted by Washingtonpost.com. The authors acknowledged in that column that violent crime is slightly higher in sanctuary cities than non-sanctuary cities, but again, they warned about the statistic significance: “However, judging by the error bands — which capture the uncertainty underlying these estimates — the relationship is not statistically significant before or after a sanctuary policy is passed. We find similar results for property crime and rape.”
They added: “That is, a sanctuary policy itself has no statistically meaningful effect on crime.”
Researchers ran several other tests to find whether there was connection. One graph shows that there is no clear generalizable pattern about violent crime and whether the city has sanctuary policies or not.
After Sessions’s speech, the researchers wrote another column for Monkey Cage disputing the attorney general’s use of their data. One of the researchers, Loren Collingwood, assistant professor at UC Riverside, told The Fact Checker: “Our analysis, findings, and article are based on rigorous statistical methods, which are part and parcel of the interpretation. With academic research you must consider the point estimates and level of uncertainty (confidence bands) when making interpretations. Same thing should apply when formulating national policy.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/07/17/attorney-general-jeff-sessionss-claim-that-criminals-take-notice-of-cities-with-sanctuary-policies/?utm_term=.c4cd5675439f
6. Administration Officials, Including Sessions, Tour Guantánamo
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and ADAM GOLDMANJULY 7, 2017
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, visited the American wartime prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Friday in a gesture of support for continuing to detain terrorism suspects without trial there and to prosecute some before a military commission.
In a statement, Ian Prior, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the two officials would be “meeting with the people on the ground who are leading our governmentwide efforts” at the prison. He said it was important for Justice Department officials “to have an up-to-date understanding of current operations” there.
“Keeping this country safe from terrorists is the highest priority of the Trump administration,” Mr. Prior said. “Recent attacks in Europe and elsewhere confirm that the threat to our nation is immediate and real, and it remains essential that we use every lawful tool available to prevent as many attacks as possible.”
"..President George W. Bush opened the prison in January 2002 as a place to bring captives from the fighting in Afghanistan in the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and nearly 800 prisoners were eventually brought there. After the prison’s image became toxic around the world and the Supreme Court ruled that federal civilian courts had jurisdiction to review habeas corpus lawsuits by detainees there, the Bush administration began trying to close it, reducing its population to 242 men by the time Mr. Bush left office.
President Barack Obama continued that policy, ordering the prison closed within a year as one of his first acts upon taking office in 2009. But, as political winds shifted, that proved easier said than done, and he failed to complete the task. Still, by the time he left office in January, the detainee population had been reduced to 41 men.
By contrast, Mr. Trump vowed during the campaign to keep the prison open and fill it again, an aspiration that was echoed in the early draft executive orders. Some legal specialists have warned that it is not clear that the government’s wartime authority to fight the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks — that is, Al Qaeda — covers the Islamic State, and so bringing in a detainee tied to that group could create legal risks."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/us/politics/guantanamo-gitmo-jeff-sessions.html
Comentarios