WARFREEZONE

Opinion | Good Riddance to One of America’s Strongest Police Secrecy Laws - The New York Times : "New York took a step toward reform with the repeal Tuesday evening of a state law known as 50-a, a decades-old measure that has allowed the police to keep the disciplinary and personnel records of officers secret. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to sign the bill. "New York’s 50-a is one of the strongest police secrecy laws in the country, the spoils of the unfettered political power New York police unions have enjoyed. "For generations, the law has been used to keep officers accused of misconduct, as well as the departments they work for, from public scrutiny. "Activists and police reformers have fought to repeal the law for years. Just a year ago, those efforts went nowhere. The State Legislature, even under a new Democratic majority, declined to change or repeal it. Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose administration has interpreted 50-a more strictly than his predecessors, sa...

Video evidence increasingly disproves police narratives : "Civil rights lawyer Michael Avery, who is the board president of the National Police Accountability Project, said false claims by the police had long been known to inner-city communities. "'But what is happening now with video, this is getting out into the larger world, into the media, into white communities, suburban communities, and people outside the affected communities are becoming more aware of what’s going on,' he said. 'It’s a completely different situation.' "When he started practicing law 50 years ago, Avery said, claims of misconduct were hard to prove because it was often one person’s word against 'an officer and the officer’s buddies.' "The habit of police giving false testimony is so widely known in New York that it has long been nicknamed 'testilying.' Officers are rarely held accountable because they enjoy broad legal protections, and prosecutors almost never...

Georgia Voting Meltdown Leads to Uproar: ‘I Refuse Not to Be Heard’ - The New York Times : "Georgia’s statewide primary elections on Tuesday were overwhelmed by a full-scale meltdown of new voting systems put in place after widespread claims of voter suppression during the state’s 2018 governor’s election. . . . "With Republican-leaning Georgia emerging as a possible battleground in this year’s presidential election and home to two competitive Senate races, the voting mess rattled Democratic officials and voters, with some blaming the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state for hastily instituting a new voting system without enough provisional ballots in case the voting machines did not function."

Michelle Alexander in the New York Times -- "America, This is Your Chance" : "We cannot solve a problem we do not understand. Donald Trump would not be the president and George Floyd would not be dead if, after the Civil War, our nation had committed itself to reparations, reconciliation and atonement for the land and people that colonizers stole, sold and plundered. Instead, white people who enslaved blacks were granted reparations for the loss of their 'property' while formerly enslaved blacks were given nothing — not even the 40 acres and a mule they were promised. Ever since, our nation has been trapped in a cycle of intermittent racial progress followed by fierce backlash and the emergence of new and 'improved' systems of racial and social control. These cycles have been punctuated by various movements, uprisings and riots, but one thing has remained constant: A majority of whites persistently deny the scale and severity of racial injustice that pe...