person:michael brown

ce qui se passe à Ferguson mérite quelques secondes d’attention. Depuis 2014 les militant.e.s là-bas qui ont impulsé le mouvement #BlackLivesMatter meurent les uns après les autres. De mort violente.
L’hypothèse d’une série d’exécutions commises par un groupe de tueurs suprémacistes blancs ne peut plus être étouffée, même si la police et la justice s’y emploient fermement.
Police, the FBI and Homeland Security have monitored black activists throughout the country, especially after Michael Brown’s killing.” D’autres témoignages glaçants et des précisions importantes dans cet article du média indépendant Black Agenda Report.

The Fight for Justice Takes Its Toll on Ferguson Activists | Black Agenda Report
►https://www.blackagendareport.com/fight-justice-takes-its-toll-ferguson-activists
▻http://www.blackagendareport.com

Darren Seals, one of the two activists who were shot and found in burning cars, had said in a November 2014 Facebook post that he had been shot before. Some activists in St. Louis also often suffer from depression and isolation, and have limited access to therapy and other resources.

St. Louis is one of the most segregated cities in the US, with Delmar Blvd. dividing the more affluent white population from neighborhoods that are up to 98 percent black in North St. Louis. The Ferguson protests in 2014 were a flash-point, but “there’s a long history of this kind of violent reaction to black folks in St. Louis generally, and certainly violent reaction to protesters,” said Blake Strode, the executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm that has worked on dozens of cases of police brutality.

“St. Louis has the highest murder rate in America.”

Besides the unexplained deaths, Ferguson activists have experienced myriad threats to their physical and mental well-being. In 2014, one young activist, Josh Williams, was arrested after lighting a garbage can on fire while protesting the police killing of another black man, Antonio Martin, according to activists. He was convicted a year later, after pleading guilty for arson, burglary, and theft, and sentenced to prison for eight years. He told Vice News that his harsh sentence was to make an example out of him, and that prison guards verbally abuse him with racist slurs.

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/768521

#AP #black_lives_matter
#the_hate_you_give

Puzzling number of men tied to #Ferguson protests have died
▻https://apnews.com/436251b8a58c470eb4f69099f43f2231

Two young men were found dead inside #torched cars. Three others died of apparent suicides. Another collapsed on a bus, his death ruled an overdose.

Six deaths, all involving men with connections to protests in Ferguson, #Missouri, drew attention on social media and speculation in the activist community that something sinister was at play.

Police say there is no evidence the deaths have anything to do with the protests stemming from a white police officer’s fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, and that only two were #homicides with no known link to the #protests.

De l’Influence des États-Unis sur le national-socialisme – Fragments sur les Temps Présents
▻https://tempspresents.com/2019/01/14/de-linfluence-des-etats-unis-sur-le-national-socialisme

https://tempspresents.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/capture-decran-2017-06-30-a-18.05.04.png

La parution rapprochée du Modèle américain d’Hitler de James Q. Whitman et du Nazisme dans la civilisation. Miroir de l’Occident de Jean-Louis Vullierme nous donne le prétexte de revenir sur l’influence des États-Unis sur le national-socialisme. Encore aujourd’hui, il est difficile d’admettre que le système juridique et la politique raciale des nazis aient pu être influencées par une grande démocratie. Pourtant, ce pays ne fut pas qu’une nation tolérante et accueillante pour les persécutés d’Europe et d’ailleurs. Il fut aussi une nation raciste qui a cherché à préserver son « sang », comprendre celui des Pères fondateurs, blancs, anglo-saxons et protestants.

Des politiques de quotas, les Quota Law, furent mises en place pour restreindre l’arrivée d’immigrants venant du Sud et de l’Est de l’Europe, surtout entre 1914 et la fin des années 1920. Une politique de ségrégation, les « lois de Jim Crow », racialisèrent les populations afro-américaines entre 1865 –la fin de la Guerre de Sécession– et les années 1960. Et cela sans parler de l’extermination des populations amérindiennes qui finirent parquées dans des Réserves. Pour justifier ces politiques, des essayistes et des universitaires théorisèrent l’inégalité des races et justifièrent cette politique raciale de promotion du sang nordique. De fait, les États-Unis étaient les leaders de la législation raciale au début du XXe siècle. Certains sont restés dans les mémoires comme Madison Grant, l’auteur du Déclin de la grande race, ou comme Lothrop Stoddard, celui du Flot montant des peuples de couleur, des ouvrages encore réédités aujourd’hui par des éditeurs d’extrême droite.

Surprenante, Camélia Jordana publie une chanson contre la violence policière, en anglais, Freddie Gray. Le clip inclut aussi des références à Adama Traoré, Trayvon Martin, et d’autres :
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfk17qVtjSY

A ajouter à la compilation de plus de 160 chansons consacrées aux flics, keufs, condés, poulets, cognes, porcs, cafards et argousins :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/576637

#Musique #Musique_et_politique #Camélia_Jordana #USA #France #brutalité_policière #violence_policière #Freddie_Gray #Adama_Traoré #Trayvon_Martin #Michael_Brown #Mohamed_Boukrourou #Zyed_et_Bouna

In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing ? | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is-seeing-still-believing

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bdc8daca965f9460b7f78b0/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/181112_r33195.jpg

In a media environment saturated with fake news, such technology has disturbing implications. Last fall, an anonymous Redditor with the username Deepfakes released a software tool kit that allows anyone to make synthetic videos in which a neural network substitutes one person’s face for another’s, while keeping their expressions consistent. Along with the kit, the user posted pornographic videos, now known as “deepfakes,” that appear to feature various Hollywood actresses. (The software is complex but comprehensible: “Let’s say for example we’re perving on some innocent girl named Jessica,” one tutorial reads. “The folders you create would be: ‘jessica; jessica_faces; porn; porn_faces; model; output.’ ”) Around the same time, “Synthesizing Obama,” a paper published by a research group at the University of Washington, showed that a neural network could create believable videos in which the former President appeared to be saying words that were really spoken by someone else. In a video voiced by Jordan Peele, Obama seems to say that “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit,” and warns that “how we move forward in the age of information” will determine “whether we become some kind of fucked-up dystopia.”

“People have been doing synthesis for a long time, with different tools,” he said. He rattled off various milestones in the history of image manipulation: the transposition, in a famous photograph from the eighteen-sixties, of Abraham Lincoln’s head onto the body of the slavery advocate John C. Calhoun; the mass alteration of photographs in Stalin’s Russia, designed to purge his enemies from the history books; the convenient realignment of the pyramids on the cover of National Geographic, in 1982; the composite photograph of John Kerry and Jane Fonda standing together at an anti-Vietnam demonstration, which incensed many voters after the Times credulously reprinted it, in 2004, above a story about Kerry’s antiwar activities.

“In the past, anybody could buy Photoshop. But to really use it well you had to be highly skilled,” Farid said. “Now the technology is democratizing.” It used to be safe to assume that ordinary people were incapable of complex image manipulations. Farid recalled a case—a bitter divorce—in which a wife had presented the court with a video of her husband at a café table, his hand reaching out to caress another woman’s. The husband insisted it was fake. “I noticed that there was a reflection of his hand in the surface of the table,” Farid said, “and getting the geometry exactly right would’ve been really hard.” Now convincing synthetic images and videos were becoming easier to make.

The acceleration of home computing has converged with another trend: the mass uploading of photographs and videos to the Web. Later, when I sat down with Efros in his office, he explained that, even in the early two-thousands, computer graphics had been “data-starved”: although 3-D modellers were capable of creating photorealistic scenes, their cities, interiors, and mountainscapes felt empty and lifeless. True realism, Efros said, requires “data, data, data” about “the gunk, the dirt, the complexity of the world,” which is best gathered by accident, through the recording of ordinary life.

Today, researchers have access to systems like ImageNet, a site run by computer scientists at Stanford and Princeton which brings together fourteen million photographs of ordinary places and objects, most of them casual snapshots posted to Flickr, eBay, and other Web sites. Initially, these images were sorted into categories (carrousels, subwoofers, paper clips, parking meters, chests of drawers) by tens of thousands of workers hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Then, in 2012, researchers at the University of Toronto succeeded in building neural networks capable of categorizing ImageNet’s images automatically; their dramatic success helped set off today’s neural-networking boom. In recent years, YouTube has become an unofficial ImageNet for video. Efros’s lab has overcome the site’s “platform bias”—its preference for cats and pop stars—by developing a neural network that mines, from “life style” videos such as “My Spring Morning Routine” and “My Rustic, Cozy Living Room,” clips of people opening packages, peering into fridges, drying off with towels, brushing their teeth. This vast archive of the uninteresting has made a new level of synthetic realism possible.

In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a program in Media Forensics, or MediFor, focussed on the threat that synthetic media poses to national security. Matt Turek, the program’s manager, ticked off possible manipulations when we spoke: “Objects that are cut and pasted into images. The removal of objects from a scene. Faces that might be swapped. Audio that is inconsistent with the video. Images that appear to be taken at a certain time and place but weren’t.” He went on, “What I think we’ll see, in a couple of years, is the synthesis of events that didn’t happen. Multiple images and videos taken from different perspectives will be constructed in such a way that they look like they come from different cameras. It could be something nation-state driven, trying to sway political or military action. It could come from a small, low-resource group. Potentially, it could come from an individual.”

As with today’s text-based fake news, the problem is double-edged. Having been deceived by a fake video, one begins to wonder whether many real videos are fake. Eventually, skepticism becomes a strategy in itself. In 2016, when the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, Donald Trump acknowledged its accuracy while dismissing his statements as “locker-room talk.” Now Trump suggests to associates that “we don’t think that was my voice.”

“The larger danger is plausible deniability,” Farid told me. It’s here that the comparison with counterfeiting breaks down. No cashier opens up the register hoping to find counterfeit bills. In politics, however, it’s often in our interest not to believe what we are seeing.

As alarming as synthetic media may be, it may be more alarming that we arrived at our current crises of misinformation—Russian election hacking; genocidal propaganda in Myanmar; instant-message-driven mob violence in India—without it. Social media was enough to do the job, by turning ordinary people into media manipulators who will say (or share) anything to win an argument. The main effect of synthetic media may be to close off an escape route from the social-media bubble. In 2014, video of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner helped start the Black Lives Matter movement; footage of the football player Ray Rice assaulting his fiancée catalyzed a reckoning with domestic violence in the National Football League. It seemed as though video evidence, by turning us all into eyewitnesses, might provide a path out of polarization and toward reality. With the advent of synthetic media, all that changes. Body cameras may still capture what really happened, but the aesthetic of the body camera—its claim to authenticity—is also a vector for misinformation. “Eyewitness video” becomes an oxymoron. The path toward reality begins to wash away.

#Fake_news #Image #Synthèse

WOW ?

«Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful)»

by Marc Ribot (feat. Tom Waits)
from the album ’Songs Of Resistance 1942 - 2018’
▻https://youtu.be/50GvkAO0OIg

Can the Manufacturer of Tasers Provide the Answer to Police Abuse ? | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/can-the-manufacturer-of-tasers-provide-the-answer-to-police-abuse

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b742d1654dc0a50659fa5b0/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/180827_r32572.jpg

Tasers are carried by some six hundred thousand law-enforcement officers around the world—a kind of market saturation that also presents a problem. “One of the challenges with Taser is: where do you go next, what’s Act II?” Smith said. “For us, luckily, Act II is cameras.” He began adding cameras to his company’s weapons in 2006, to defend against allegations of abuse, and in the process inadvertently opened a business line that may soon overshadow the Taser. In recent years, body cameras—the officer’s answer to bystander cell-phone video—have become ubiquitous, and Smith’s company, now worth four billion dollars, is their largest manufacturer, holding contracts with more than half the major police departments in the country.

The cameras have little intrinsic value, but the information they collect is worth a fortune to whoever can organize and safeguard it. Smith has what he calls an iPod/iTunes opportunity—a chance to pair a hardware business with an endlessly recurring and expanding data-storage subscription plan. In service of an intensifying surveillance state and the objectives of police as they battle the public for control of the story, Smith is building a network of electrical weapons, cameras, drones, and someday, possibly, robots, connected by a software platform called Evidence.com. In the process, he is trying to reposition his company in the public imagination, not as a dubious purveyor of stun guns but as a heroic seeker of truth.

A year ago, Smith changed Taser’s name to Axon Enterprise, referring to the conductive fibre of a nerve cell. Taser was founded in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Smith lives; to transform into Axon, he opened an office in Seattle, hiring designers and engineers from Uber, Google, and Apple. When I met him at the Seattle office this spring, he wore a company T-shirt that read “Expect Candor” and a pair of leather sneakers in caution yellow, the same color as Axon’s logo: a delta symbol—for change—which also resembles the lens of a surveillance camera.

Already, Axon’s servers, at Microsoft, store nearly thirty petabytes of video—a quarter-million DVDs’ worth—and add approximately two petabytes each month. When body-camera footage is released—say, in the case of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man killed by police in Sacramento, or of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, this past fall—Axon’s logo is often visible in the upper-right corner of the screen. The company’s stock is up a hundred and thirty per cent since January.

The original Taser was the invention of an aerospace engineer named Jack Cover, inspired by the sci-fi story “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle,” about a boy inventor whose long gun fires a five-thousand-volt charge. Early experiments were comical: Cover wired the family couch to shock his sister and her boyfriend as they were on the brink of making out. Later, he discovered that he could fell buffalo when he hit them with electrified darts. In 1974, Cover got a patent and began to manufacture an electric gun. That weapon was similar to today’s Taser: a Glock-shaped object that sends out two live wires, loaded with fifty thousand volts of electricity and ending in barbed darts that attach to a target. When the hooks connect, they create a charged circuit, which causes muscles to contract painfully, rendering the subject temporarily incapacitated. More inventor than entrepreneur, Cover designed the Taser to propel its darts with an explosive, leading the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to classify it a Title II weapon (a category that also includes sawed-off shotguns), which required an arduous registration process and narrowed its appeal.

A few years after Tasers went on the market, Rick Smith added a data port to track each trigger pull. The idea, he told me, came from the Baltimore Police Department, which was resisting Tasers out of a concern that officers would abuse people with them. In theory, with a data port, cops would use their Tasers more conscientiously, knowing that each deployment would be recorded and subject to review. But in Baltimore it didn’t work out that way. Recent reports in the Sun revealed that nearly sixty per cent of people Tased by police in Maryland between 2012 and 2014—primarily black and living in low-income neighborhoods—were “non-compliant and non-threatening.”

Act II begins in the nauseous summer of 2014, when Eric Garner died after being put in a choke hold by police in Staten Island and Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, of the Ferguson Police. After a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson—witness statements differed wildly, and no footage of the shooting came to light—Brown’s family released a statement calling on the public to “join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.”

In the fall of 2014, Taser débuted the Officer Safety Plan, which now costs a hundred and nine dollars a month and includes Tasers, cameras, and a sensor that wirelessly activates all the cameras in its range whenever a cop draws his sidearm. This feature is described on the Web site as a prudent hedge in chaotic times: “In today’s online culture where videos go viral in an instant, officers must capture the truth of a critical event. But the intensity of the moment can mean that hitting ‘record’ is an afterthought. Both officers and communities facing confusion and unrest have asked for a solution that turns cameras on reliably, leaving no room for dispute.” According to White’s review of current literature, half of the randomized controlled studies show a substantial or statistically significant reduction in use of force following the introduction of body cameras. The research into citizen complaints is more definitive: cameras clearly reduce the number of complaints from the public.

The practice of “testi-lying”—officers lying under oath—is made much more difficult by the presence of video.

Even without flagrant dissimulation, body-camera footage is often highly contentious. Michael White said, “The technology is the easy part. The human use of the technology really is making things very complex.” Policies on how and when cameras should be used, and how and when and by whom footage can be accessed, vary widely from region to region. Jay Stanley, who researches technology for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the value of a body camera to support democracy depends on those details. “When is it activated? When is it turned off? How vigorously are those rules enforced? What happens to the video footage, how long is it retained, is it released to the public?” he said. “These are the questions that shape the nature of the technology and decide whether it just furthers the police state.”

Increasingly, civil-liberties groups fear that body cameras will do more to amplify police officers’ power than to restrain their behavior. Black Lives Matter activists view body-camera programs with suspicion, arguing that communities of color need better educational and employment opportunities, environmental justice, and adequate housing, rather than souped-up robo-cops. They also argue that video has been ineffectual: many times, the public has watched the police abuse and kill black men without facing conviction. Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State Los Angeles, who is active in Black Lives Matter, told me, “Video surveillance, including body cameras, are being used to bolster police claims, to hide what police are doing, and engage in what we call the double murder of our people. They kill the body and use the footage to increase accusations around the character of the person they just killed.” In her view, police use video as a weapon: a black man shown in a liquor store in a rough neighborhood becomes a suspect in the public mind. Video generated by civilians, on the other hand, she sees as a potential check on abuses. She stops to record with her cell phone almost every time she witnesses a law-enforcement interaction with a civilian.

Bringing in talented engineers is crucial to Smith’s vision. The public-safety nervous system that he is building runs on artificial intelligence, software that can process and analyze an ever-expanding trove of video evidence. The L.A.P.D. alone has already made some five million videos, and adds more than eleven thousand every day. At the moment, A.I. is used for redaction, and Axon technicians at a special facility in Scottsdale are using data from police departments to train the software to detect and blur license plates and faces.

Facial recognition, which techno-pessimists see as the advent of the Orwellian state, is not far behind. Recently, Smith assembled an A.I. Ethics Board, to help steer Axon’s decisions. (His lead A.I. researcher, recruited from Uber, told him that he wouldn’t be able to hire the best engineers without an ethics board.) Smith told me, “I don’t want to wake up like the guy Nobel, who spent his life making things that kill people, and then, at the end of his life, it’s, like, ‘O.K., I have to buy my way out of this.’ ”

#Taser #Intelligence_artificielle #Caméras #Police #Stockage_données

Opinion | The Pragmatic Left Is Winning - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/opinion/columnists/left-sanders-ocasio-cortez-primaries.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/08/10/opinion/10goldberg/10goldberg-facebookJumbo-v2.jpg

On Tuesday, Rashida Tlaib, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won her primary in Michigan, and she is now overwhelmingly likely to become the first Muslim woman in Congress. In a referendum, people in Missouri voted 2 to 1 to overturn an anti-union “right to work” law passed by the Republican legislature. In an upset, Wesley Bell, a progressive city councilman from Ferguson, Mo., effectively ousted the longtime St. Louis County prosecutor, who many civil rights activists say mishandled the investigation into the police shooting of Michael Brown, the African-American teenager whose 2014 killing set off riots.

So it was strange to see headlines in the following days arguing that the left wing of the Democratic Party had hit a wall. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s movement failed to deliver any stunners Tuesday night,” said CNN. “Down Goes Socialism,” announced Politico Magazine, despite the fact that Tlaib’s victory doubles the D.S.A.’s likely representation in Congress. “Socialist torchbearers flame out in key races, despite blitz by Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez,” said a Fox News headline.

In part, this spin might just be the inevitable backlash to Ocasio-Cortez’s sudden celebrity. Her primary victory was thrilling and hard-earned, and she’s a charismatic and rousing spokeswoman for her values. But her overnight anointment as the new face of the Democratic Party has created absurdly outsize expectations of her power as kingmaker.

In truth, there’s nothing surprising about left-wing candidates losing their primaries. The happy surprise is how many are winning. Unsexy as it sounds, the real story of progressive politics right now is the steady accumulation of victories — some small, some major — thanks to a welcome and unaccustomed outbreak of left-wing pragmatism.

The new generation of left-wing activists, by contrast, is good at self-multiplication. The Democratic Socialists of America alone has done more to build left political power since the 2016 election than the Green Party did in the 18 years after Nader helped elect George W. Bush.

Just as the Christian Right did in the 1990s, the new electoral left — which also includes groups like Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party — is trying to take over the Democratic Party from the ground up. These activists have, significantly, focused on races for prosecutor, which is a way to create immediate local criminal justice reform. (In Philadelphia, left-wing organizers last year helped elect civil rights lawyer Larry Krasner as district attorney. Among his reforms is the end of cash bail for many misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.)

It’s true that several candidates endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders lost on Tuesday, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s gubernatorial primary and Brent Welder in a congressional primary in Kansas. But it’s testament to how far left the Democratic Party’s center of gravity has moved that the winners in those two races — Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Sharice Davids in Kansas — could be considered establishment.

Whitmer supports a $15 minimum wage, marijuana legalization and statewide universal preschool. Davids, a Native American lesbian, former mixed martial arts fighter and lawyer, is running as a bad-ass feminist. One of her ads shows her training in a boxing gym. “It’s 2018, and women, Native Americans, gay people, the unemployed and underemployed have to fight like hell just to survive,” she says. “And it’s clear, Trump and the Republicans in Washington don’t give a damn.”

It’s certainly true that Davids’s campaign put more emphasis on identity and representation, while Welder, a 2016 Sanders delegate, stressed populist economics. The Democratic Party will likely be weighing the precise balance between those progressive priorities for a long time. But the point is, they are all progressive priorities. After Davids’s victory, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted her congratulations: “Your win is an incredible inspiration to so many, myself included.”

#Politique_USA #Politique_identité

Queer History in the Divided City: A New Approach to Digital Mapping – NOTCHES
▻http://notchesblog.com/2018/04/24/queer-history-in-the-divided-city-a-new-approach-to-digital-mapping

http://i0.wp.com/notchesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MappingLGBTQStLouisfeature1.jpg?fit=640%2C400

Our approach to this project was catalyzed by recent events in St. Louis. In 2014, the world watched as Ferguson, Missouri—a northern suburb of St. Louis—erupted in flames after a police officer murdered unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown. The media coverage of the Ferguson uprising communicated internationally what many St. Louisans had long known: theirs was a divided city, and nothing about the region could be understood without attending to its long and persistent history of racial segregation. One of a number of projects funded by Washington University’s Divided City Initiative, Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis makes this local knowledge visible in maps, in documents and images, and in interpretive essays. We provide a few examples from the project below.

#cartographie #LGBT

How poverty became a #crime in America | Peter Edelman | Opinion | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/06/how-poverty-became-crime-america

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/407d9049bd4ebcdd7f9114d49385ba91b34a0b71/0_0_3200_1921/master/3200.jpg?w=1200&h=630&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&bm=normal&ba=bottom%2Cleft&blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly91cGxvYWRzLmd1aW0uY28udWsvMjAxNy8xMC8wNi9vcGluaW9uc19vdmVybGF5LWZhY2Vib29rLnBuZz90ZXN0&s=b7c2621b24214262f990078589a0ff45

In the United States, a system of modern peonage – essentially, a government-run loan shark operation – has been going on for years. Beginning in the 1990s, the country adopted a set of criminal justice strategies that punish poor people for their poverty. Right now in America, 10 million people, representing two-thirds of all current and former offenders in the country, owe governments a total of $50bn in accumulated fines, fees and other impositions.

The problem of “high fines and misdemeanors” exists across many parts of the country: throughout much of the south; in states ranging from Washington to Oklahoma to Colorado; and of course in Ferguson, Missouri, where, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, revelations about the systematic criminalization of the city’s poor black residents brought these issues to national attention.

As a result, poor people lose their liberty and often lose their jobs, are frequently barred from a host of public benefits, may lose custody of their children, and may even lose their right to vote. Immigrants, even some with green cards, can be subject to deportation. Once incarcerated, impoverished inmates with no access to paid work are often charged for their room and board. Many debtors will carry debts to their deaths, hounded by bill collectors and new prosecutions.

#Etats-Unis #pauvreté #guerre_aux_pauvres

Number of fatal shootings by police is nearly identical to last year - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/number-of-fatal-shootings-by-police-is-nearly-identical-to-last-year/2017/07/01/98726cc6-5b5f-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2017/06/30/Investigative/Graphics/2300fatalforce-map.jpg?t=20170517

Police nationwide shot and killed 492 people in the first six months of this year, a number nearly identical to the count for the same period in each of the prior two years.

Fatal shootings by police in 2017 have so closely tracked last year’s numbers that on June 16, the tally was the same. Although the number of unarmed people killed by police dropped slightly, the overall pace for 2017 through Friday was on track to approach 1,000 killed for a third year in a row.

The Washington Post began tracking all fatal shootings by on-duty police in 2015 in the aftermath of the 2014 killing in Ferguson, Mo., of Michael Brown, who was unarmed and had an altercation with the officer who shot him. The ongoing Post project has documented twice as many shootings by police in 2015 and 2016 as ever recorded in a single year by the FBI’s tracking of such shootings, a pattern that is emerging again in 2017.

Since Brown’s killing in Ferguson, other fatal shootings by police, many captured on video, have fueled protests and calls for reform. Some police chiefs have taken steps in their dep
artments to reduce the number of fatal encounters, yet the overall numbers remain unchanged

Police shootings 2017 database - Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/img/fatal-force-promo.jpg

THE APPEARANCE OF BLACK LIVES MATTER
▻http://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter

http://namepublications.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/JR-Eric-Garner.jpg

DOWNLOAD The Appearance of Black Lives Matter ▻http://namepublications.org/download/1197

“Police killings captured on cell-phone video or photographs have become the hallmark of United States visual culture in the twenty-first century. In this book, I examine this transformation of visual culture from the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 to the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017. As a person designated “white” by the color line in the United States, I do so from the perspective of anti-antiblackness. I study the formation of the space of appearance, that space where we catch a glimpse of the society that is to come—the future commons or communism. The first section analyses such spaces created by abolition democracy in Haiti, during Reconstruction and at Resurrection City in 1968. The second section considers the “persistent looking” used by Black Lives Matter protests from Ferguson on, especially “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” the die-in and the turning of backs. I then explore a simple form of visual activism, cropping photographs of crime scenes to exclude the fallen and broken bodies. It reveals the space of nonappearance, the no one’s land where people die in America. In the third section, I use the archive created by the grand jury hearings into the death of Michael Brown to map this space of nonappearance and how it is sustained by white supremacy. At present, that space is imagined as co-extensive with the boundaries of the republic. I still want a space in which to appear that doesn’t reproduce white supremacy, that doesn’t represent a prison, in which there isn’t expropriated labor, and there isn’t genocide. What would that look like? This book is a toolkit for doing that imagining.”

A limited edition print book with artwork by Carl Pope will also be released later this year.”

New Footage Michael Brown on the Day He Was Killed Shows How Easy It Is for Cops to Paint Victims as ’Bad Guys’ | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/human-rights/new-footage-michael-brown-day-he-was-killed-shows-how-easy-it-cops-paint-v

http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/story_images/michael_brown.jpg

Last weekend, a new development emerged in the story of the 2014 killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, whose death sparked unrest across the nation. Previously unreleased footage of Brown inside the convenience store that the police claimed he had robbed before he was confronted by Darren Wilson, the former officer, contradicts the story the police department pushed about Brown’s actions that day.

The original narrative that emerged from many eyewitnesses in the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, which was later contradicted by others, was that Brown, who was slated to attend college in a few weeks, put up his hands and then Wilson blew holes through him anyway. But Ferguson law enforcement officials quickly pushed back with the “Mike Brown was no angel” narrative, releasing a video that appears to show Mike Brown robbing a local convenient store before Wilson stops him. This shows Brown snatching what appears to be store property and exiting the store; however, the newly released video clearly shows an earlier exchange, not a robbery.

These people control the narrative, and they use that power to demonize victims of police force in a constant effort to deflect negative attention away from themselves. Six Baltimore police officers were charged for their involvement in Freddie Gray’s spinal cord injury death in 2015, and therefore we knew everything about Freddie Gray’s criminal record before the first officer even took the stand. As if a few petty arrests in a man’s past justify the police chasing him down with no signs of criminal wrongdoing and arresting him. Many members of the public quickly accepted that narrative of “Freddie the Bad Guy” over the fact that he should not have been in the back of the police van in the first place. He shouldn’t have been bothered, and he shouldn’t be dead now.

#ferguson #fake_news #post-truth #police #racisme

Des joueurs de la NFL (Ligue nationale de football américain) se retirent de la tournée de propagande en Israël
Michael Brown | Publié le 11 février 2017 sur The Electronic Intifada |
Traduction : Jean-Marie Flémal
▻http://www.pourlapalestine.be/des-joueurs-de-la-nfl-se-retirent-de-la-tournee-de-propagande-en-isr

(...) Mais, au cours d’une semaine de revirements soudains, Dave Zirin écrivait dans The Nation que, malgré les informations médiatiques disant que Bennett se rendrait en Israël, le joueur avait « confirmé que ce n’était pas le cas ».

Zirin faisait remarquer que d’autres joueurs cités dans un article du Times of Israel concernant la visite prévue « avais remis leur participation en question ».

Vendredi soir, trois des joueurs cités comme participants potentiels – Martellus Bennett, son frère Michael Bennett des Seahawks de Seattle et Kenny Stills des Dolphins de Miami – avaient refusé le voyage.
Des joueurs se désistent.

Dans une lettre ouverte publiée jeudi après-midi par The Nation, des activistes, des écrivains et des athlètes, dont Angela Davis, Alice Walker, John Carlos et Craig Hodges, ont invité les joueurs de la NFL à reconsidérer leur participation au voyage. Plus tard, Harry Belafonte et Danny Glover ont également signé la lettre.

Ils ont félicité les athlètes d’utiliser leur renommée « pour mettre en lumière et soutenir les diverses luttes, y compris celle de Black Lives Matter », et ont également félicité toutes les personnes qui avaient annoncé qu’elles ne se rendraient pas à la Maison-Blanche.

Ils ont insisté pour que les joueurs ne permettent pas qu’on les utilise comme des éléments d’une campagne de propagande « visant à aider le gouvernement israélien à normaliser et blanchir sa négation permanente des droits palestiniens ».

Le même jour, le joueur de la NFL et militant des droits Michael Bennett a tweeté qu’il n’irait pas en Israël.

Dans une déclaration ultérieure publiée vendredi soir sur Tweeter et Instagram, Michael Bennett a déclaré qu’il « ne serait pas utilisé » par le gouvernement israélien. Et de rappeler que feu Muhammad Ali, l’un de ses héros, « avait toujours soutenu fermement le peuple palestinien ».

« Je veux être une ‘voix des sans-voix’ », a ajouté Bennett, « et je ne puis le faire en participant à ce genre de voyage en Israël. » (...)

#BDS

Policing Is a Dirty Job, but Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/policing-is-a-dirty-job-but-nobodys-gotta-do-it-6-ideas-for-a-copfre

After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this...

#Vidéos de #violence : de la #modération de #Facebook_Live (m’est avis qu’ils vont repenser vite fait le dispositif) ▻http://mashable.france24.com/medias-sociaux/20160708-facebook-videos-police-noirs

La vidéo de Latisha Reynolds a pu être retirée après qu’un ou plusieurs utilisateurs l’aient rapportée à Facebook, puis mal interprétée par un modérateur. ▻https://www.facebook.com/100007611243538/videos/vb.100007611243538/1690073837922975

[Document hallucinant, Mme Reynolds préfère documenter plutôt qu’accompagner son mec dans ses derniers instants.]

Mais près avoir "enquêté" – et décidé que la vidéo était finalement "d’intérêt général" – Facebook l’a remise en ligne, cette fois-ci avec un avertissement. Encore une fois, ce ne sont que des suppositions, il pourrait aussi s’agir d’autre chose, par exemple d’un système de filtrage automatique.

[Facebook et « l’intérêt général », tout un programme.]

Le PDG de Facebook Mark Zuckerberg s’est exprimé sur l’incident, même s’il n’a pas fait de commentaire sur le fait que la vidéo ait d’abord été supprimée. "Les images que nous avons vues cette semaine sont choquantes et bouleversantes, et elles mettent en lumière la peur avec laquelle des millions de nos membres doivent vivre chaque jour".

Cf. « Quand un comté afro-américain du Mississippi choisit sa #police » ▻https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2015/12/KEMPF/54396 (via @benoitb)

Depuis la mort de Michael Brown, adolescent afro-américain tué par un policier blanc en août 2014 à Ferguson, la question des #violences_policières et racistes se trouve au cœur du débat public aux Etats-Unis. Pourtant, les candidats du comté de Hinds ont soigneusement évité ce thème. Non pas en raison d’un manque d’intérêt des citoyens : M. Williams, M. Charles Lewis et Mme Rankin, par exemple, sont intarissables sur les vexations que leur inflige la police. Etre « un Noir au volant » constitue en soi une infraction pour de nombreux officiers, assurent-ils d’une seule voix. Interrogé sur le sujet pendant la campagne par les deux jeunes animateurs noirs d’un talk-show local, M. Mason a montré qu’il n’avait rien d’un militant antiraciste et tout d’un policier : « Si vous conduisez et qu’on vous demande de vous arrêter, faites-le, coupez la radio, éteignez le moteur. Normalement, le policier va s’avancer poliment vers vous. La pire chose que vous puissiez faire est de lui dire : “Pourquoi vous m’arrêtez comme ça ?” »

À suivre : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/507620

cc @pguilli

[Vidéo] BET Awards 2016 : le discours puissant de Jesse Williams sur le racisme | Etat d’Exception
▻http://www.etatdexception.net/video-bet-awards-2016-le-discours-puissant-de-jesse-williams-sur-le-

http://www.etatdexception.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/bet.jpg

Jesse Williams a reçu ce dimanche un prix lors de la soirée des BET Awards 2016 pour son engagement humanitaire. Rendu célèbre par son rôle dans la série Grey’s Anatomy, l’acteur et activiste a pris position pour le mouvement Black Livres Matter, mouvement lancé par trois Afro-Américaines après le meurtre en 2014 de Michael Brown à Ferguson (Missouri).

Puissant et émouvant, le discours tenu par Williams aurait sans nul doute été critiqué et qualifié de « communautariste » en France. Dans un pays où il est si difficile de parler de racisme et où évoquer la question de l’hégémonie blanche reste tabou, on imagine mal de tels mots prononcés lors d’une soirée grand public de remises de prix.

Parce que, justement, ces mots sont de ceux qui inspirent, nous avons choisi de les retranscrire et de les traduire en français pour les rendre accessibles à un public francophone. « Ce n’est pas parce que nous sommes magiques que ça veut dire que nous ne sommes pas réels ». Sublime !

Holocaust survivor and activist for justice Hedy Epstein dies at 91
Activism Mondoweiss Editors on May 26, 2016
▻http://mondoweiss.net/2016/05/holocaust-survivor-activist
▻https://o.twimg.com/2/proxy.jpg?t=HBhUaHR0cDovL21vbmRvd2Vpc3MubmV0L3dwLWNvbnRlbnQvdXBsb2Fkcy8yMDE

he following obituary for Hedy Epstein was sent to us by Dianne Lee. Epstein was a friend and mentor to us at Mondoweiss, and she will be sorely missed.

Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein , 91, died at her home in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, on May 26, 2016. An internationally renowned, respected and admired advocate for human and civil rights, Hedy was encircled by friends who lovingly cared for her at home.

Born August 15, 1924, in the Bavarian region of Germany, her lifelong commitment to human rights was formed by the horrific experiences she and her family endured under the repressive Nazi regime.

Un article sur le chanteur Prince et la politique :

Un Prince engagé
Dror, The Dissident, le 5 mai 2016
▻http://the-dissident.eu/10558/un-prince-engage

#Prince #Musique #Musique_et_politique #shameless_autopromo

Chansons politiques de Prince disponibles sur albums :
–Partyup (1980) : anti guerre
–Ronnie, Talk to Russia (1981) : anti guerre
–Annie Christian (1981) : anti corruption
–Sign ‘O’ the Times (1987) : anti pauvreté
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfASW6ibR-8

Chansons plus rares :
–Hello (1985) : anti pauvreté
–Animal Kingdom (1998) : protection animale
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKQm3syBAQU

#Prince #Musique #Musique_et_politique

Debtor’s Prison in America Today - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/debtors-prison/462378

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2016/02/DebtorsPrison/lead_960.jpg?1455910200

For failing to pay parking tickets, court fees, and other petty municipal citations, black residents of Greater St. Louis are ending up behind bars.
Andrey_Popov / nimon / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

In 1846, Dred Scott began his infamous legal battle in what is now called the “Old Courthouse” in downtown St. Louis. Scott had traveled with his master from Missouri to Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, neither of which recognized slavery. Having lived for an extended period in free territory, Scott argued that state law supported his claim to freedom. But the Missouri Supreme Court disagreed. The court’s message to Scott was clear: Perhaps you can live freely elsewhere, but not here.

More than a century and a half later, the St. Louis region continues to distinguish itself as one that is hostile to its poor black residents. Since the killing of Michael Brown in August of 2014, St. Louis and its neighboring municipalities have been frequently cited for legal and moral failings in the region’s municipal justice system. A report released by the Department of Justice last year profiled these failings in great detail, as did a white paper released by the local nonprofit law firm ArchCity Defenders in 2014. (Blake Strode, one of the coauthors of this story, is currently on staff at ArchCity Defenders.)

More recently, the Department of Justice filed suit against the City of Ferguson after the city council rejected a proposed settlement that sought to bring reforms to the police department and municipal court. The lawsuit outlines myriad constitutional civil-rights claims ranging from violations of Equal Protection and Due Process to patterns of unlawful arrest and excessive force. Some of these claims focus on the city’s court, detention, and bail practices, claims similar to those already pending against Ferguson in a class-action lawsuit filed last year by ArchCity Defenders, St. Louis University Law Clinic, and the civil-rights organization Equal Justice Under Law.

Cleveland officer who fatally shot Tamir Rice will not face criminal charges | US news | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/28/tamir-rice-shooting-no-charges-cleveland-officer-timothy-loehmann?CMP=t

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/00fcfefc84e0c7db1237b6ac5f28740acac48c6f/0_79_2000_1200/2000.jpg?w=1200&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=82880f20c2e60844eceee15f66e61829

The white police officer who fatally shot Tamir Rice, an African American 12-year-old, will not face criminal charges, it was announced on Monday – more than a year after the shooting in Cleveland.

A grand jury declined to indict officer Timothy Loehmann, who opened fire on Rice less than two seconds after arriving at a park where the 12-year-old was playing with a toy gun on 22 November 2014. Loehmann’s partner, Frank Garmback, will also face no charges, Cuyahoga county prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced at a press conference.

#crime #violences_policières #impunité #racisme

Angela Davis : « De Ferguson à Paris, marchons pour la dignité ! »
31 octobre à Paris
▻http://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/191015/angela-davis-de-ferguson-paris-marchons-pour-la-dignite

Une transformation historique est en cours dans les métropoles occidentales. Depuis 2013, les États-Unis traversent une vague de contestation profonde des institutions policières et judiciaires. À la suite de la mort de trois hommes noirs – Trayvon Martin, puis Michael Brown et Eric Garner entre les mains de la police –, un mouvement a vu le jour pour réclamer la justice sociale et raciale, sous le nom de « Black Lives Matter ».

 

« Les vies des Noirs sont importantes », dit littéralement le slogan. Cet énoncé prescriptif dénonce une politique systématisée qui veut que la vie d’une personne africaine-américaine soit moins importante que celle d’une personne blanche. La violence à l’encontre des Africains-américains ne se manifeste en effet pas seulement par des brutalités isolées, mais par une discrimination systémique au sein des institutions judiciaires et policières : les crimes racistes commis par les forces de l’ordre (et parfois par des citoyens blancs) restent impunis, sont sciemment couverts par les instances de répression et sont socialement validés par les arbitrages judiciaires.

 

Cette réalité est un secret de polichinelle. En faire le récit relève du lieu commun, mais il faut des milliers de personnes dans les rues pour l’imposer dans le débat public. Et c’est ce qui s’est produit : en deux ans, la question des violences policières est devenue incontournable dans le paysage médiatique et politique étatsunien. Ce tournant est le fruit d’initiatives multiples, des marches contre les violences policières jusqu’aux interpellations de candidats électoraux, en passant par une occupation résolue des réseaux sociaux, blogs et plate-formes numériques. Cette vague contestataire est l’un des mouvements les plus prometteurs depuis Occupy Wall Street pour ceux qui luttent en faveur de la justice sociale et de l’égalité.

Hell You Talmbout (Say Their Names)
Janelle Monáe and the Wondaland Records lineup (Jidenna, Roman GianArthur, Deep Cotton, St. Beauty, and George 2.0), 14 August 2015

Hommage à Walter Scott, Philip White, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Freddie Gray, Aiyana Jones, Sandra Bland, Kimani Gray, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Miriam Carey, Sharonda Singleton, Emmett Till, Tommy Yancy, Jordan Baker, Amadou Diallo... victimes de la violence policière, n’oublions pas leurs noms...

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SttWb9mDp3Q

▻https://soundcloud.com/wondalandarts/hell-you-talmbout

#Musique #Janelle_Monáe #Black_Lives_Matter

Le meurtre de Michael Brown par un policier à Ferguson devient une oeuvre d’art exposée dans une galerie à Chicago

Life-size depiction of Michael Brown after shooting is at center of Chicago art exhibit :

▻http://m.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/life-size-depiction-of-michael-brown-after-shooting-is-at/article_0d59d430-2974-5716-ac77-a885f51204de.html?mobile_touch=true

http://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/c/ed/ced505c0-0e15-5bc1-a63e-5fa7f558138e/55a13f276f542.image.jpg?resize=699%2C394

An art exhibit that opened Friday at a gallery in Chicago features a life-size replica of Michael Brown lying face down after his death, according to a TV report.

The exhibit at the Gallery Guichard is titled “Confronting Truths: Wake Up!” and features the works of New Orleans-based artist Ti-Rock Moore.

Among those works, according to a report by WGN, is “a life size portrayal of Michael Brown as he laid in the streets of Ferguson for hours after he was shot by a white officer almost one year ago.”
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Other pieces include a black Statue of Liberty and a noose dangling from a neon sign.

The exhibit runs through Aug. 10, a day after the one-year anniversary of Brown’s death.