When a friend told me this morning that the National Fraternal Order of Police, our nations’s largest police organization, with over 325,000 members, had endorsed Donald Trump for President, I thought that it had to be a hoax. “There’s no way,” I thought, “that they could support a candidate who has repeatedly promoted violence at […]
This evening I attended the Unity Town Hall at Eastern Michigan Union, during which Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, Black Lives Matter Organizer Myles McGuire, Wahstenaw County Sheriff Jerry Clayton, Mark Fancher of the Michigan ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, and Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie sat before an audience of about 250, responding to questions about civil […]
Following are my extremely rough, admittedly incomplete notes on tonight’s meeting of the Ypsilanti Police-Community Relations / Black Lives Matter Joint Task Force. If you were also in the audience, and have something to add, please leave a comment. And, of course, feel free to weigh in on whatever you read below. As you’ll soon […]
Last year, in response to high profile instances of police violence against people of color across the country, and the corresponding rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, our City Council established a task force to explore ways in which the Ypsilanti Police Department might evolve to better serve all the members of our community. […]
I’d been working on something about the killings of Alton Sterling and Philander Castile. My premise was pretty simple… While it’s certainly appropriate to focus our anger at the police, I was going to suggest, we can’t lose site of the fact that there are larger forces at play. We can’t just blame the police […]
