Unjust Magazine 2018 Summer Debut Issue

Tribute To Malcolm X

Tribute To Colin Kaepernick

Blacks & Whites Are Worlds Apart

Stephon Clark Killed By the Sacramento Police Dept.

Nationwide Police Killed Nearly 1,000 People in 2017

Homicide in America

DMV Shootings Leave Black Students Asking Why

Philadelphia Police are Investigating The Arrest of Two Black Men At Starbucks

Poverty in America

Immigration May Be On Hold In Congress

The U.S.A. is the World Leader in Incarceration

Unjust Magazine is Published By Greg X and M.O.R.E. (MOVE ON RACISM EVERYWHERE)

If you were black like me Would you act like me If you see the police Attacking your people in the streets Leaving only a memory and a grieving community that we see repeatedly on TV Or an obituary that reads In memory of a person we loved and the newspaper story reads another unarmed Black teen killed by police in 2018 because he was Black like me44

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All writers work must contain your full name, age, city and state you live, and a cover letter telling us about yourself, and a phone contact number.

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Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 to February 21, 1965) My Mentor You Will Always Be Remembered

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Malcolm X articulated concepts of race pride and black nationalism in the 1950s and '60s.

Malcolm X was a minister, human rights activist, and prominent black nationalist leader who served as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam during the 1950s and 1960s.

Malcolm X exhorted blacks to cast off the shackles of racism "by any means necessary," including violence.

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Throughout his life, Malcolm was an activist.

As he remarked in 1964, anything I get in, I'm in it all the way." In his evolution from hustler to convicted robber to Black Muslim to revolutionary internationalist, he was never content to hypothesize or simply talk about what he wanted; he was concerned with the concrete strategies for action which would enable a goal to become a reality.

Constantly evolving, never stagnating.

Malcolm continually revised his outlook to accommodate existing conditions.

The first of these changes was his conversion to the Black Muslim faith, while in Charleston prison serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery, Malcolm became a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammed, the "messenger" of Allah.

The intense racial pride of the Muslims, their strict moral code, and their tight discipline gave Malcolm a positive self-image. For the first time, he felt pride in himself as a black man.

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The Muslim teachings enabled him to see his apparent failure in life as being a result of his oppression as a black man in white American society. After his release from prison in 1952, Malcolm joined the Muslim movement and became a top minister by the early sixties.

His weekly lectures as minister of Temple Number 7 in New York City, which dealt with black history and the death of white society, drew ever flowing crowds.

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Malcolm began to see that it was not the "evil" of the entire white race, but the oppression perpetrated by a certain segment of the white race, which kept the black man in chains. It became apparent to him that religious mysticism and supernatural explanations of oppression, whether they be Black Muslim or Christian, put forth no program for actually changing the conditions faced by an oppressed people. The Muslim faith had served its purpose for Malcolm it had provided him with confidence in his own dignity as a black man.

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Malcolm X embarked on an extended trip through North Africa and the Middle East.

The journey proved to be both a political and spiritual turning point in his life.

He learned to place the American Civil Rights Movement within the context of a global anti-colonial struggle, embracing socialism and Pan-Africanism.

Malcolm X also made the Hajj, the traditional Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, during which he converted to traditional Islam and again changed his name, this time to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

After his epiphany at Mecca, Malcolm X returned to the United States less angry and more optimistic about the prospects for peaceful resolution to America's race problems.

"The true brotherhood I had seen had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision," he said. "America is the first country ... that can actually have a bloodless revolution."

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By the time of his historic "Message to the Grass Roots," one of his last speeches as a Muslim, Malcolm had already developed a Third World perspective. The content of the speech, carefully put into terms which he deemed acceptable to a militant black audience, was solidly anti-imperialist. He called for unity among all peoples of color "on the basis of what we have in common," namely, exploitation by the international capitalist system. By this time, Malcolm had long since discarded the race analysis of the Muslims, and realized that the enemy was not the white race per se, but the whites who happen to constitute the international ruling class.

Malcolm was now calling for revolution instead of condemning it as impossible. He realized that the domestic black struggle was only one facet of the world revolution against imperialism. Through his fledgling Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) Malcolm was hammering home to American blacks the message that they were part of a world-wide struggle, a struggle in which they were in the majority as peoples of color.

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Tragically, just as Malcolm X appeared to be embarking on an ideological transformation with the potential to dramatically alter the course of the Civil Rights Movement, he was assassinated.

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, the revolutionary black leader, was killed by assassins' bullets as he began a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, fifty weeks after he had broken with the Black Muslims and had begun to emerge from a Black Nationalist approach to a Third World internationalist approach, he was shot down.

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04/21/2018 Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award Transcript of speech From Colin Kaepernick It is only fitting that I have the honor of Eric Reid introducing me for this award. In many ways, my recognition would not be possible without our brotherhood.

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I truly consider him to be more than a friend, Eric, his wife, his children they are all a part of my family.

Not only did he kneel by my side during the national anthem throughout the entire 2016 NFL season, but Eric continued to use his platform as a professional football player to protest systemic oppression, specifically police brutality against Black and brown people.

Eric introducing me for this prestigious award brings me great joy.

But I am also pained by the fact that his taking a knee, and demonstrating courage to protect the rights of Black and brown people in America, has also led to his ostracization from the NFL when he is widely recognized as one of the best competitors in the game and in the prime of his career.

People sometimes forget that love is at the root of our resistance.

My love for Eric has continually grown over the course of our ongoing journey. His brotherhood, resilience, and faith have shined brightly in moments of darkness.

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My love for my people serves as the fuel that fortifies my mission, and it is the people’s unbroken love for themselves that motivates me, even when faced with the dehumanizing norms of a system that can lead to the loss of one’s life over simply being Black.

History has proven that there has never been a period in the history of America where antiBlackness has not been an ever present terror.

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Racialized oppression and dehumanization is woven into the very fabric of our nation the effects of which can be seen in the lawful lynching of Black and brown people by the police, and the mass incarceration of Black and brown lives in the prison industrial complex.

While America bills itself as the land of the free, the receipts show that the U.S. has incarcerated approximately 2.2 million people, the largest prison population in the history of humankind.

As police officers continue to terrorize Black and brown communities, abusing their power, and then hiding behind their blue wall of silence, and laws that allow for them to kill us with virtual impunity, I have realized that our love, that sometimes manifests as Black-rage, is a beautiful form of defiance against a system that seeks to suppress our humanity.

A system that wants us to hate ourselves.

I remind you that love is at the root of our resistance.

It is our love for 12 year old Tamir Rice, who was gunned down by the police in less than two seconds that will not allow us to bury our anger.

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It is our love for Philando Castille, who was executed in front of his partner and his daughter, that keeps the people fighting back.

It is our love for Stephon Clark, who was lynched in his grandma’s backyard that will not allow us to stop until we achieve liberation for our people.

Our love is not an individualized love it is a collective love.

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A collective love that is constantly combating collective forms of racialized hate. Chattel slavery, Jim Crow, New Jim Crow, massive plantations, mass incarcerations, slave patrols, police patrols, we as a collective, since the colonization of the Americas have been combating collective forms of systemic racialized hate and oppression.

But I am hopeful. I am inspired.

This is why we have to protest. This is why we are so passionate. We protest because we love ourselves, and our people.

It was James Baldwin who said, to be Black in America, “and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” My question is, why aren’t all people?

How can you stand for the national anthem of a nation that preaches and propagates, “freedom and justice for all,” that is so unjust to so many of the people living there? How can you not be in rage when you know that you are always at risk of death in the streets or enslavement in the prison system?

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How can you willingly be blind to the truth of systemic racialized injustice?

When Malcolm X said, “I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.� I took that to heart.

While taking a knee is a physical display that challenges the merits of who is excluded from the notion of freedom, liberty, and justice for all, the protest is also rooted in a convergence of my moralistic beliefs, and my love for the people.

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Seeking the truth, finding the truth, telling the truth and living the truth has been, and always will be what guides my actions. For as long as I have a beating heart, I will continue on this path, working on behalf of the people.

Again...Love is at the root of our resistance.

Last but certainly not least; I would like to thank Amnesty International for The Ambassador of Conscience Award. But in truth, this is an award that I share with all of the countless people throughout the world combating the human rights violations of police officers, and their uses of oppressive and excessive force. To again quote Malcolm X, when he said that he, “will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth,” I am here to join with you all in this battle against police violence.

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Colin Kaepernick hasn’t played an NFL game this season, but he’s still been garnering plenty of accolades. Sports Illustrated on Tuesday night presented the free agent quarterback with its Muhammad Ali Legacy Award, which celebrates “individuals whose dedication to the ideals of sportsmanship has spanned decades and whose career in athletics has directly or indirectly impacted the world.

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After eight years of Barack Obama as the nation’s first black president –an event that engendered a sense of optimism among many Americans about the future of race relations – a series of flashpoints around the U.S. has exposed deep racial divides and reignited a national conversation about race.

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A new Pew Research Center survey finds profound differences between black and white adults in their views on racial discrimination, barriers to black progress and the prospects for change. Blacks, far more than whites, say black people are treated unfairly across different realms of life, from dealing with the police to applying for a loan or mortgage. And, for many blacks, racial equality remains an elusive goal.

An overwhelming majority of blacks (88%) say the country needs to continue making changes for blacks to have equal rights with whites, but 43% are skeptical that such changes will ever occur. An additional 42% of blacks believe that the country will eventually make the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights with whites, and just 8% say the country has already made the necessary changes.

A much lower share of whites (53%) say the country still has work to do for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites, and only 11% express doubt that these changes will come. Four-in-ten whites believe the country will eventually make the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights, and about the same share (38%) say enough changes have already been made.

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These findings are based on a national survey by Pew Research Center conducted Feb. 29-May 8, 2016, among 3,769 adults (including 1,799 whites, 1,004 blacks and 654 Hispanics). The survey – and the analysis of the survey findings – is centered primarily around the divide between blacks and whites and on the treatment of black people in the U.S. today. In recent years, this centuries-old divide has garnered renewed attention following the deaths of unarmed black Americans during encounters with the police, as well as a racially motivated shooting that killed nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

The survey finds that black and white adults have widely different perceptions about what life is like for blacks in the U.S. For example, by large margins, blacks are more likely than whites to say black people are treated less fairly in the workplace (a difference of 42 percentage points), when applying for a loan or mortgage (41 points), in dealing with the police (34 points), in the courts (32 points), in stores or restaurants (28 points), and when voting in elections (23 points).

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By a margin of at least 20 percentage points, blacks are also more likely than whites to say racial discrimination (70% vs. 36%), lower quality schools (75% vs. 53%) and lack of jobs (66% vs. 45%) are major reasons that blacks may have a harder time getting ahead than whites.

More broadly, blacks and whites offer different perspectives of the current state of race relations in the U.S. White Americans are evenly divided, with 46% saying race relations are generally good and 45% saying they are generally bad. In contrast, by a nearly two-to-one margin, blacks are more likely to say race relations are bad (61%) rather than good (34%).

Blacks are also about twice as likely as whites to say too little attention is paid to race and racial issues in the U.S. these days (58% vs. 27%). About four-in-ten whites (41%) – compared with 22% of blacks – say there is too much focus on race and racial issues.

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Blacks and whites also differ in their opinions about the best approach for improving race relations: Among whites, more than twice as many say that in order to improve race relations, it’s more important to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common (57%) as say the focus should be on what makes each group unique (26%). Among blacks, similar shares say the focus should be on commonalities (45%) as say it should be on differences (44%).

When asked specifically about the impact President Barack Obama has had on race relations in the U.S., a majority of Americans give the president credit for at least trying to make things better, but a quarter say he has made race relations worse. Blacks and whites differ significantly in their assessments.

Some 51% of blacks say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations, and an additional 34% say he has tried but failed to make progress.

Relatively few blacks (5%) say Obama has made race relations worse, while 9% say he hasn’t addressed the issue at all.

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Among whites, 28% say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations and 24% say he has tried but failed to make progress. But a substantial share of whites (32%) say Obama has made race relations worse. This is driven largely by the views of white Republicans, 63% of whom say Obama has made race relations worse (compared with just 5% of white Democrats).

When asked about their views of Black Lives Matter, the activist movement that first came to national prominence following the 2014 shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, roughly twothirds (65%) of blacks express support, including 41% who strongly support it. Among whites, four-inten say they support the Black Lives Movement at least somewhat, and this is particularly the case among white Democrats and those younger than 30.

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Across the survey’s findings, there are significant fault lines within the white population – perhaps none more consistent than the partisan divide. For example, among whites, Democrats and Republicans differ dramatically on the very salience of race issues in this country. About six-in-ten (59%) white Republicans say too much attention is paid to race and racial issues these days, while only 21% of Democrats agree. For their part, a 49% plurality of white Democrats say too little attention is paid to race these days, compared with only 11% of Republicans.

And while about eight-in-ten (78%) white Democrats say the country needs to continue making changes to achieve racial equality between whites and blacks, just 36% of white Republicans agree; 54% of white Republicans believe the country has already made the changes necessary for blacks to have equal rights with whites.

Trends in key economic and demographic indicators provide some context for the experiences and outlook of blacks today. While there has been clear progress in closing the white-black gap in some areas – particularly when it comes to high school completion rates – decades-old black-white gaps in economic well-being persist and have even widened in some cases.

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According to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2014 the median adjusted income for households headed by blacks was $43,300, and for whites it was $71,300. 3 Blacks also lag behind whites in college completion, but even among adults with a bachelor’s degree, blacks earned significantly less in 2014 than whites ($82,300 for households headed by a collegeeducated black compared with $106,600 for comparable white households).

The racial gap extends to household wealth – a measure where the gap has widened since the Great Recession. In 2013, the most recent year available, the median net worth of households headed by whites was roughly 13 times that of black households ($144,200 for whites compared with $11,200 for blacks).

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Blacks and whites are divided on reasons that blacks may be struggling to get ahead Despite these economic realities, when asked about the financial situation of blacks compared with whites today, about four-in-ten blacks either say that both groups are about equally well off (30%) or that blacks are better off than whites financially (8%). Still, about six-in-ten (58%) blacks say that, as a group, they are worse off than whites.

Among whites, a plurality (47%) say blacks are worse off financially, while 37% say blacks are about as well off as whites and 5% say blacks are doing better than whites.

Blacks and whites with a bachelor’s degree are more likely than those with less education to say blacks are worse off financially than whites these days. Roughly eight-in-ten (81%) blacks with a four-year college degree say this, compared with 61% of blacks with only some college education and 46% of blacks with a high school diploma or less.

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Personal experiences with discrimination A majority of blacks (71%) say that they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Roughly one-in-ten (11%) say this happens to them on a regular basis, while 60% say they have experienced this rarely or from time to time.

Among blacks, men and women are equally likely to report having personally experienced racial discrimination, and there are no large gaps by age.

There is an educational divide, however: Blacks with at least some college experience (81%) are much more likely than blacks who never attended college (59%) to say they have been discriminated against because of their race.

Experiences with racial discrimination are far less common among whites, but a sizable minority (30%) of white adults report that they have been discriminated against or treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Only 2% say this happens to them regularly and 28% say it occurs less frequently. Whites who say they have a lot of contact with blacks are more likely to say they’ve been discriminated against because of their race than are whites who have less contact with blacks.

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College-educated whites are especially likely to see their race as an advantage: 47% say being white has made it easier for them to succeed. By comparison, 31% of whites with some college education and 17% of those with a high school diploma or less say their race has made things easier for them. White Democrats (49%) are also among the most likely to say that their race or ethnicity has made it easier for them to get ahead in life.

For many blacks, the cumulative impact of discrimination has had a markedly negative impact on their lives. Four-in-ten blacks say their race has made it harder for them to succeed in life. Roughly half (51%) say their race hasn’t made a difference in their overall success, and just 8% say being black has made things easier.

There is a sharp educational divide among blacks on the overall impact their race has had on their ability to succeed. Fully 55% of blacks with a fouryear college degree say their race has made it harder for them to succeed in life.

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More than four-in-ten blacks (48%) and whites (46%) say that working with community members to solve problems in their community would be a very effective tactic for groups striving to help blacks achieve equality. But the two groups disagree about the effectiveness of some other tactics.

In particular, while nearly four-in-ten (38%) black adults say working to get more black people elected to office would be very effective, just 24% of whites say the same. Blacks are also more likely than whites to say it would be very effective for groups working to help blacks achieve equality to bring people of different racial backgrounds together to talk about race (41% vs. 34%). Similarly, blacks see more value than whites in organizing protests and rallies, although relatively few blacks view this as a very effective way to bring about change (19% vs.

7% of whites).

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Stephon Clark The unarmed black man who was fatally shot by Sacramento Police On March 22, 2018

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SACRAMENTO — Two police officers, 10 minutes, 20 bullets. Another young black man dead, this time in his grandmother’s backyard in California’s capital.

In the 10 days since Stephon Clark, 22, was fatally shot by officers investigating a vandalism complaint in his south Sacramento neighborhood, protesters have stormed City Hall and taken to the streets in anger. In a city that is mostly white and Latino, the killing, they say, is a sign of a police force that treats black residents with disdain and unfairly targets their neighborhoods.

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Questions about excessive force hover over the case.

A police helicopter was sent to a routine call. Officers fired 20 times at Mr. Clark. The police have also been accused of not giving Mr. Clark, who was unarmed, enough time to put his hands up and of waiting too long to call for medical help.

Adding to the scrutiny is the fact that the police muted their body cameras in the minutes after the shooting and can be seen on camera talking animatedly while Mr. Clark lay dead on the ground.

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The shooting has reignited the kind of protests against police killings that spread over the past several years in cities like Ferguson, Mo.; Baton Rouge, La.; and Milwaukee. Last week, protesters here shut down traffic on Interstate 5 and blocked the doors to a Sacramento Kings basketball game.

“Everybody knows that we’re getting killed regularly out here; that’s the buildup to this,” said Tanya Faison, who founded the local chapter of Black Lives Matter.

One thing that police shootings prove is that we know that guns are ubiquitous. There is an assumption that all suspects are armed.

The mood was decidedly hopeful in August, when Daniel Hahn took over the Police Department as the first black police chief. Mr. Hahn defended his department in an interview on Wednesday and said that every officer had undergone training to discourage race-based discrimination, as well as deescalation training. Though he said he could not discuss the case, he acknowledged: “Race permeates everything we do in our country. To think anything else would be naïve.”

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In Sacramento and elsewhere, unarmed black men continue to die at the hands of law enforcement officers: In the space of 10 days, two more unarmed black men died at the hands of police — one in Sacramento, another in Houston — and two Baton Rouge police officers escaped being charged in the 2016 shooting death of another black man.

The incidents have revived outrage over an issue that nationwide protests shined a spotlight on in 2014: the disproportionate number of unarmed black men killed by police.

The earlier shootings energized the Black Lives Matter movement. President Obama and his Justice Department helped defuse tensions by investigating some of the shootings and finding systemic racial bias in police departments in cities from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore to Chicago. And for a time, Americans sat up and paid attention.

But promises made back then have mostly fallen by the wayside. And it is as tragic as it is inexcusable that so little has changed.

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Only there was no gun — just a cellphone found by the body of the father of two, who was killed in his grandmother’s backyard. Timothy Davis, president of the Sacramento Police Officers Association, asserted that “the shooting was legally justified” and that Clark “took a shooting stance and pointed an object at the police officers.”

Actually, the shooting is still under investigation, and no conclusions have been reached. One of the officers commented minutes after the shooting that Clark “kind of approached us hands out and then fell down.” Nothing about a “shooting stance.”

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Another question: Why did body cam audio go mute minutes after the shooting?

Clark’s death is no singular event. Days later in Houston, another unarmed black man, who’d been standing in a busy intersection with his pants down, was shot by an officer seconds later. No body cam this time. But the man's family reported that he’d been depressed since his two children drowned.

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Police Shot & Killed Nearly 1,000 People in 2017

For the third year in a row, police nationwide shot and killed nearly 1,000 people, a grim annual tally that has persisted despite widespread public scrutiny of officers’ use of fatal force.

Police fatally shot 987 people last year, or two dozen more than they killed in 2016, according to an ongoing Washington Post database project that tracks the fatal shootings. Since 2015, The Post has logged the details of 2,945 shooting deaths, culled from local news coverage, public records and social-media reports.

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While many of the year-to-year patterns remain consistent, the number of unarmed black males killed in 2017 declined from two years ago. Last year, police killed 19, a figure tracking closely with the 17 killed in 2016. In 2015, police shot and killed 36 unarmed black males.

Experts said they are uncertain why the annual total shows little fluctuation — the number for 2017 is almost identical to the 995 killed by police in 2015.

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Some believe the tally may correspond to the number of times police encounter people, an outcome of statistical probability. Other experts are exploring whether the number tracks with overall violence in American society.

“The numbers indicate that this is not a trend, but a robust measure of these shootings,” said Geoff Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force. “We now have information on almost 3,000 shootings, and we can start looking to provide the public with a better understanding of fatal officer-involved shootings.” 49

National scrutiny of shootings by police began after an unarmed black teenager from a suburb of St. Louis was fatally shot by a white police officer in August 2014. The death of 18-year-old Michael Brown sparked widespread protests, prompted a White House commission to call for reforms, galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement and led many police agencies across the nation to examine their use of deadly force.

The attention may have helped police reduce the number of unarmed people shot and killed each year, according to interviews with experts and police departments. Officers fatally shot 94 unarmed people in 2015, but that number has been lower in the past two years, with 51 killed in 2016 and 68 in 2017. “The national spotlight on this issue has made officers more cautious in unarmed situations,� said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank. Wexler also said the training that his group developed for dozens of departments to deescalate police encounters with civilians may be having an impact.

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“We are giving officers more options like slowing the situation down and using time and distance to gain a tactical advantage,” he said.

While the number of black males — armed and unarmed — who have been killed has fallen, black males continue to be shot at disproportionately high rates, the data shows.

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Black males accounted for 22 percent of all people shot and killed in 2017, yet they are 6 percent of the total population. White males accounted for 44 percent of all fatal police shootings, and Hispanic males accounted for 18 percent.

Other patterns also held steady in 2017, according to The Post database.

Police again most frequently used fatal force after encountering people armed with knives or guns, killing 735, a number nearly identical to the 734 armed people killed in 2015. The number was slightly lower in 2016, with 693 killed while armed with either type of weapon.

White males continued to account for the largest group of people killed while armed with guns or knives, at 330 of those killed. Black males armed with guns or knives were fatally shot in 160 cases last year.

Mental health again played an outsize role in the shootings: 236 people, or nearly 1 in 4 of those shot, were described as experiencing some form of mental distress at the time of the encounter with police.

In the vast majority of those cases, 88 percent, the deceased people had wielded firearms or other weapons, including a machete, a sledge ax and a pitchfork.

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In November, Oklahoma City resident Dustin Pigeon, 29, threatened to set himself ablaze. A police officer shot Pigeon five times after he refused to drop a lighter and lighter fluid, according to prosecutors.

In an unusual outcome, prosecutors charged the officer with second-degree murder in the death of Pigeon, saying that Pigeon was unarmed and had posed no threat to the officer.

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Of all the people shot and killed by police in 2017, one of the youngest was 14-year-old Jason Pero from the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe. In November, Jason called 911 to report a man with a knife and then gave a description of himself. Holding a knife, Jason lunged at a sheriff’s deputy, who shot and killed him, according to news reports.

The oldest person killed by police was 91-yearold Frank Wratny of Union Township, Pa., who was shot in March after he confronted police with a gun at his home. Police were responding to a 911 call from a woman who said Wratny had fired at her, according to news reports.

Meanwhile, the number of police officers feloniously killed in the line of duty in 2017 stood at 46, a decline from the 66 recorded in 2016, according to the FBI. Since the shooting of Brown, some police departments said they have made headway in efforts to reduce the number of people they fatally shoot.

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For a third consecutive year, The Post documented more than twice the number of deadly shootings by police that were recorded on average annually by the FBI. In response to the shooting data compiled by The Post and others, the FBI in 2015 promised to start better information gathering about all police encounters that lead to deaths. This month, the agency said it will launch the new nationwide data collection system.

But the new system will have some of the same limitations that has led the government to annually undercount by half the number of fatal shootings by police. As before, data submissions under the new program will be voluntary.

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Key Findings: 27% of U.S. police killings between January 2013 December 2017 were committed by police departments of the 100 largest U.S. cities.

Black people were 39% of people killed by these 100 police departments despite being only 21% of the population in their jurisdictions.

Only 1 of the 100 largest city police departments did not kill anyone from Jan 2013 - Dec 2017 (Irvine, CA).

48% of unarmed people killed by the 100 largest city police departments were black. These police departments killed unarmed black people at a rate 4 times higher than unarmed white people.

Rates of violent crime in cities did not make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people. For example, Buffalo and Newark police departments had low rates of police violence despite high crime rates while Spokane and Bakersfield had relatively low crime rates and high rates of police violence.

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Homicide in America

The collective homicide toll for America’s 50 biggest cities dipped slightly in 2017, a USA TODAY analysis of crime data found.

The FBI won’t publish its annual comprehensive crime report until later this year, but an early review of police department crime data shows that killings decreased by at least 1% in large jurisdictions compared with 2016.

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The modest decrease in killings comes after FBI data showed back-to-back years in which homicides rose sharply in large cities. (Homicides in cities with 250,000 or more residents rose by about 15.2% from 2014 to 2015, and 8.2% from 2015 to 2016.)

There were 5,738 homicides in the nation’s 50 biggest cities in 2017 compared with 5,863 homicides in 2016, a roughly 2.3% reduction.

Las Vegas Police reported 141 homicides for 2017 in its official tally but did not include the Oct. 1 mass shooting at an outdoor country music concert that left 58 dead. If those deaths were included in the department's tally, the national big city homicide toll fell by 1.1%, the USA TODAY review found.

Even with the sharp rise in homicides in the two years prior to 2017, the national murder toll continued to hover near historic lows.

The national decrease in killings in 2017 was largely driven by double-digit percentage dips in some of the nation’s biggest cities, including Chicago (14.7%), New York City (13.4%) and Houston (11%). In fact, the New York Police Department reported that its annual murder tally fell below 300 for the first time and the city notched its lowest per capita murder rate in nearly 70 years.

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New York, which hit its nadir in the midst of the crack-cocaine epidemic when it tallied more than 2,200 murders in 1990, boasts that the nation’s largest city is now the safest it’s been since the Dodgers played in Brooklyn and a pizza slice set you back 15 cents.

While New York and others boasted of significant progress, other large cities saw a big surge in killings in 2017.

Baltimore is the big city with the highest per capita murder rate in the nation, with nearly 56 murders per 100,000 people. At 343 murders in 2017, the city tallied the highest per capita rate in its history.

Columbus tallied 143 murders — 37 more than 2016 and the most the city has seen in a single year.

In both cities, officials blamed the rise in homicides on gangs and drug activity.

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“In New York, they concentrated on the right neighborhoods, they’ve invested well in predictive analytics and technology,” said Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the LSU School of Public Health and Justice.

“The other part of what we’re seeing nationally might be a story of haves and have-nots. While some departments have made the investments, other police departments are still in the backwater of policing.”

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Chicago saw its murder tally dip to 650 in 2017 from 762 in the prior year. The murder toll remains high in the Windy City — near levels of violence the city endured in the late 1990s — but police officials there say they believe investments in technology are beginning to help officers stem the violence.

Dozens of chiefs and senior police officials from departments across the country gathered in Chicago late last month to trade notes on how to best use technology in the crime fight.

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said investments in technology are undoubtedly paying off. But his city’s department, like many others, will also have to continue to focus on improving relations with residents to further reduce the homicide toll, he said.

Chicago is one of many big departments that has seen its relationship strained in poor and minority communities in the aftermath of a series of controversial police-involved shootings across the country in recent years.

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Some crime experts and law enforcement officials believe the fractured relationships could have had some impact on driving homicide rates in jurisdictions, such as Chicago and Baltimore, in recent years.

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Baltimore Shootings Leave Black Students Asking Why Their School Shooting Didn’t Receive the Same Awareness as White School Shootings.

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Imani Holt was just 10 when she saw a neighbor get fatally shot by a triggerman riding a bicycle. The African-American girl from a gritty section of Baltimore was so traumatized by the drug-fueled bloodshed she refused to leave her family’s apartment for weeks.

In the eight years since, Holt has seen the chaotic aftermath of two more deadly shootings and has lost seven high school classmates to the daily drip of gun violence.

Like many black teenagers in neighborhoods hobbled by generational poverty, she is scrutinizing the national gun control debate intensely, frustrated because her community feels ignored but also cautiously hopeful that the massacre in Florida may bring about change closer to home.

“I feel really bad that they lost those kids in Florida.

But, like, we go through shootings all the time. It’s just that our shootings happen day by day. Because it happens on the regular up here, the world says it’s really not that important,” said the 18-year-old Holt, a junior at Excel Academy, an alternative high school across the street from a cluster of West Baltimore’s boarded-up row houses.

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Christina Martin, a 17-year-old who lost two schoolmates to gun violence this year at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Washington, noted that the victims in the affluent Parkland community were mostly white and Latino. None were AfricanAmerican.

“We should have got the same attention in return,” said Martin, who is black.

The gun violence toll is unrelenting in parts of Baltimore — a city that reached a grim milestone last year when the per-capita homicide rate rose to 56 killings per 100,000 people. That’s the highest rate among the country’s 30 biggest cities.

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Philadelphia Police Investigates Arrest of Two Black Men in Starbucks

The Philadelphia Police Department is investigating an incident captured on widely circulated videos this week in which officers arrested two black men as they sat in a Starbucks coffee shop and other patrons objected that the men were doing nothing wrong and appeared to be targeted merely for their race.

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Cell phone footage that onlookers filmed of Thursday’s incident shows the two men sitting quietly at a table and talking for several minutes to police officers who have apparently been called to the store. They are then put in handcuffs and marched out.

Other customers, including a middle-aged white man, try to intervene. The white man tells police the pair have done nothing wrong, that they are allowed to be there, and that the officers are only trying to remove them because they are black, which an officer denies.

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“Does anyone else in this place think this is ridiculous?” the white man asks. Other customers can be heard agreeing with him.

The Philadelphia Police Department said on Friday evening that an internal investigation was underway and it would not comment until that was complete.

Starbucks Corp said in a post on Twitter that it was aware police removed two “guests” from one of its Philadelphia stores and that it was also investigating, with the help of police and customers, what led to this “unfortunate result.”

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Melissa DePino, an author who posted video of the arrest, said she was told later on Thursday that the two men, both real estate brokers, were released without charge.

She said staff at the Starbucks called police because the two men had not ordered anything while waiting for a friend to arrive. She said white customers were “wondering why it’s never happened to us when we do the same thing.�

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The identity of the two arrested men was not immediately clear and they could not be reached for comment.

Police departments across the United States have come under criticism for repeated instances of killing unarmed black men in recent years, which activists blame on racial biases in the criminal justice system.

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On January 24, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Angus Deaton, a Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist, in which he claimed that millions of Americans — specifically, 3.2 million to 5.4 million, depending on the poverty line used — “are as destitute as the world’s poorest people.” This is simply wrong.

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To the extent that this empirical claim, by an esteemed Princeton scholar, leads policymakers to reduce international aid, or causes charitable donors to redirect their money away from the world’s most impoverished people, it is also dangerous.

Deaton flirts with the idea of redirecting money in his piece. “In my own giving, I have prioritized the faraway poor over the poor at home,” he writes. But recently, as the result of “insightful new data,” he has “come to doubt both the reasoning and the empirical support” for that view. He similarly questions why the World Bank, USAID, and Oxfam prioritize non-Americans (even as he also notes, “None of this means that we should close out ‘others’ and look after only our own”).

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Shameful levels of poverty do exist in the United States It is true that America has serious problems of poverty and inequality. These inequities have resulted in quite shocking outcomes for America’s poorest. For example, 34 percent of households surveyed in Lowndes County, Alabama, recently tested positive for hookworm. Hookworm transmission occurs by way of feces and is easy to avoid if one has modern sanitation, but in the same county, 42 percent of the sampled households were exposed to raw sewage within their home. This is a national disgrace, and it highlights the dire plight of America’s poor.

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Nevertheless, it is incorrect and misleading to draw an equivalence between poverty in America and poverty in low-income countries. It is only through the misinterpretation of poverty statistics that one can equate the two. Let me explain how Deaton is misusing data here (and he is not the only one to make this error).

Let’s start with the purely economic side of poverty.

In order to measure poverty, we need to survey people and record how much they “earn.” There are two main ways of doing this. The first, common in low-income countries, is to ask people about their consumption and then derive a dollar figure from their answers. The second approach, more common in high-income countries, is to simply ask people about their income.

There are many problems in comparing data across these different types of surveys. The largest is that poor people in rich countries often receive many noncash benefits that boost consumption without boosting income — for instance, in the US, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

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In one analysis, the non-cash benefits provided to American households with near-zero income increase their household consumption by an average of about $20 a day.

A very well-regarded book on the analysis of household surveys notes that “survey-based measures of income are often substantially less than survey-based measures of consumption [4] even in industrialized countries.�

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The World Bank, which runs many of these surveys, has noted the dangers in comparing income and consumption-based poverty figures. In one report, its experts observe that many of the people who “declare zero income on a survey” have “a consumption level that is not zero.”

Nevertheless, people keep making this mistake. For example, Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer, of Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan, have claimed that millions of Americans live on less than $2 a day, the threshold used by many international agencies for determining extreme poverty.

They use income-based surveys to measure poverty and ignore programs like SNAP. (When Laurence Chandy, now of UNICEF, and Cory Smith, now an MIT PhD student, redid Edin and Shaefer’s calculations using a more comparable consumption survey, they found that almost nobody in the United States lives on $2 a day.)

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Even if the extreme poverty level in America is set at $4 a day, Deaton’s claim doesn’t hold up Deaton makes the same fundamental error: His American poverty figures measure income, but the poverty figures for poor countries measure consumption. Citing the Oxford economist Robert Allen, Deaton also argues that the extreme poverty line for Americans should be higher than $2 a day, perhaps even as high as $4 a day, because “[t]here are necessities of life in rich, cold, urban and individualistic countries that are less needed in poor countries.” For instance, people in warm countries may not need housing, he says, and “a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing and transportation.”

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These are debatable claims (and Allen’s work on the subject has come under a lot of scrutiny), but even if we grant a higher $4 a day poverty line for Americans but use apples-to-apples consumption-based poverty measures, then it turns out that America still has only a tiny fraction of its population in extreme poverty.

The fact that anyone in the US lives on less than $4 day is a genuine tragedy, but Deaton’s count of 3 million to 5 million Americans in extreme poverty is off by an order of magnitude.

There are also problems with Deaton’s claims regarding the health of Americans. Anne Case (also of Princeton) and Deaton have claimed to find “a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013.” Deaton repeats this claim in the new op-ed. But a closer look at the data reveals that rising mortality rates appear to be confined to middle-aged, white, non-Hispanic women, especially those in the American South.

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It’s a bit curious why we talk so much about the health problems of non-Hispanic white people, and so little about the fact that African Americans still have lower life expectancy than whites, despite making major health gains.

Regardless, America could do much better on health, and Case and Deaton’s results are worthy of serious attention. Still, Deaton generalizes these issues in misleading ways.

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Economic measures — even the accurate ones don’t capture every aspect of poverty Finally, the very act of living in America provides many benefits that are not generally captured in poverty measures but that enable one to live a better life. America is not experiencing civil war.

The American political system is highly imperfect and under stress, but it is considerably better at protecting liberties, providing services, and enabling representation than the political systems in many low-income countries. These often intangible benefits help people lead fuller lives, even if they are often not considered when discussing poverty, and they overwhelmingly lean in America’s favor.

America’s wealth also means that it can help the poor within its own borders without cutting foreign development aid — an idea Deaton seems to put on the table — which only amounts to about 1 percent of the federal budget in any case. It can do so by reorienting some of the remaining 99 percent of the federal budget to better help the poor, by reorienting portions of state and local resources, and by raising revenue in ways that lean relatively more on the rich.

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Immigration May Be on Hold in Congress, but the Trump Administration Continues to Restrict Legal Immigration Over a year ago, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated and set out to make good on campaign promises that would deport illegal immigrants and seek funds4

By Charles C. Foster

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Over a year ago, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated and set out to make good on campaign promises that would deport illegal immigrants and seek funds to construct a wall on the southern border. Now, after a year of presidential action on immigration, details of the president’s restrictive agenda have emerged.

Even as both sides of the aisle, and indeed President Trump himself, have expressed broadbased support for legal immigration and Dreamers, and a majority of the country seems to support more ameliorative immigration policies, the Trump Administration continues its heavy-handed approach to legal immigration, treating immigration as a zero-sum game.

Over the past year, the immigration bar has experienced a number of unexpected onslaughts on legal immigration, each of which might and should be reversed by thoughtful, bi-partisan Congressional action.

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Travel Ban: The Trump Administration’s initial travel ban, banning the entry of all citizens from six predominantly Islamic countries, was enjoined in several U.S. District Court proceedings, including President Trump’s new proclamation of Sept. 24, 2017. On Nov. 13, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the travel ban to be enforced except with respect to aliens with a “bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

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Dec. 4, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction completely, upholding the ban on nationals from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen and Somalia from being issued immigrant or non-immigrant visas. Exempt are existing Permanent Residents or anyone already admitted into the United States, dual nationals and those already granted asylum or admitted as refugees, Iranians coming to the U.S. to study or for training on F, M and J nonimmigrant visas and certain Venezuelan government officials and their families.

“Extreme Vetting.” As promised, the Trump Administration has taken significant steps to implement so-called “extreme vetting,” implying that existing vetting was not already extreme. In reality, all visa applicants are already subject to multiple vetting procedures through every state, local, national and foreign database.

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Another Trump Administration Memorandum, which eventually led to a new regulation, required that visa applicants provide far more information, including travel, employment and address history for the last 15 years, sources of funding for the travel, and social media platforms and handles for the last five years.

Such “extreme vetting” will undoubtedly create longer delays for applicants.

“Buy American, Hire American.” President Trump issued Executive Order “Buy American, Hire American” dated April 18, 2017, stating his intention to reform the H-1B visa program. While legislative action is required to substantively change the H-1B law, the Department of Labor (DOL), in response to the directive, announced that it would strenuously increase H-1B audits and investigations for violations of the H-1B visa program. It is also likely that prior to the next so-called “H-1B visa lottery” starting on April 1, 2018, the Trump Administration will prioritize which H-1Bs are given the opportunity to be adjudicated for one of the limited 65,000 H-1B visa numbers plus an additional 20,000 for advance degree graduates of U.S. universities.

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On Dec. 14, 2017, DHS announced that it intends to abolish the 2015 provision that allows spouses of H-1B high-skilled visa holders waiting for green cards to obtain an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) as H-4 dependents. Worse, this executive order has made the Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) far more prone to challenge visa petitions in general on highly technical grounds and to issue unnecessary Requests for Evidence (RFE).

No Deference to Prior Decisions. The CIS also announced that it was rescinding its long-standing deference policy whereby CIS adjudicators give deference in deciding petitions extending temporary work visa status to the prior approval of the original petition in cases covering the same position and employer. As a result, H-1B and L-1 extension petitions will be treated like de novo petitions, thus requiring extensive documentation, again often resulting in repeated RFEs.

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International Entrepreneur Rule. On Dec. 1, 2017, the U.S. District Court ordered DHS to implement the Obama administration’s International Entrepreneur Rule, which gives the DHS discretion to grant an initial stay up to 30 months to facilitate a qualified entrepreneur’s ability to enter the U.S. to oversee start-up entities.

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Potential Discrimination and Fraud Action. The DOJ announced on Oct. 10, 2017, that pursuant to a Memorandum of Understanding between the DOJ Civil Rights Division and the Bureau of Consular Affairs of the U.S. Department of State (DOS) to protect U.S. workers from discrimination, information on employers that may engage in unlawful discrimination through employment-based visas such H-1B, H-2A and H-2B visas may be shared.

Enforcement would be through the anti-discrimination provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibits citizenship and national origin discrimination. Furthermore, in February 2017, the DHS Employees’ Rights Section (IER) launched its Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative aimed at bringing enforcement action against companies that discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of foreign visa workers.

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The 90 Day Rule regarding misrepresentations based on conduct in the U.S. On Sept. 1, 2017, the DOS provided new guidance to U.S. Consular officers providing that if an alien engaged in conduct inconsistent with his or her nonimmigrant status within 90 days of entry, the Consular Officer or CIS may presume that the applicant’s representations were willful misrepresentations. Such conduct includes engaging in unauthorized employment, enrolling in a course of academic study and marrying a U.S. citizen or Lawful Permanent Resident. The presumption applies even though a nonimmigrant’s plans may have changed or evolved after original admission.

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Unfortunately, these highly restrictive developments are just a preview of coming attractions, which will bring less certainty and more instability to businesses and foreign national employeesand their families. At every juncture the Trump administration is taking action to further restrict legal immigration under the premise of the Buy American/Hire American executive order that presumes legal immigration, is a zero-sum game.

Given the high-level influence of well-known immigration restrictionists that have been appointed to key policy positions within the White House and the three immigration agencies, these broad-based attacks through regulatory changes and informal policy changes are accelerating.

Congress will need to take up the immigration debate again and see it through to its proper conclusion to achieve sensible, fair-minded immigration reform that considers the economic needs of our growing economy.

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The US is the world leader in incarceration, but not all Americans are incarcerated equally. Here are some staggering statistics about just who’s in prison in America.

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A staggering 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the US – a 500% increase over the last 40 years.

The boom doesn’t come from rising crime but rather changes in law and policy, initiated by President Nixon, which led to a dramatic increase in the number of people punished with prison time.

As the number of incarcerations soared, prison industrialists saw an opportunity to capitalize and started bidding for the right to incarcerate Americans, leading to a ‘profit before welfare’ attitude to inmate populations that often include the mentally ill and vulnerable.

The prison industrial complex, which is in part operated and funded by public companies (and the public), could very well keep growing under the auspices of a pro-incarceration and pro-private prisons administration.

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Here are some fast facts about incarcerated AmericansJ 1) Many people shouldn’t be in prisons A rapid increase in inmates has resulted in overcrowding in prisons, fiscal burdens on states, and the rise of private prisons where abuse and neglect are shockingly prevalent. Yet growing evidence suggests mass incarceration does not prevent crime.

Indeed, a 2016 report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, concluded that 40% of the US prison population – 576,000 people – are behind bars with no compelling public safety reason.

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2) Race plays a huge part People of color account for 37% of the US population, yet they represent 67% of the prison population. Black men are nearly six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, and federal courts imposed prison sentences on black men that were 19% longer than those imposed on similarly situated white men between 2011 and 2016.2 Meanwhile Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white men and face sentences 5% longer than white counterparts according to the same report.

These racial disparities are also prevalent in youth facilities. As of October 2015, there were 48,043 youth being held in juvenile facilities and 44% of these were African American. Work to cut the number of teenagers sent to juvenile facilities in favor of intervention and rehabilitation has resulted in a successful 50% drop in the last decade, with no negative impact on public safety.

3) Most felony convictions happen without a trial Many serious convictions don’t get heard in court because proceedings stop when the accused agrees to make a guilty plea, usually in return for a reduced sentence.

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Plea bargains make up 94% of state felony convictions, and some 97% of federal ones, according to a report by The Atlantic. Estimates for misdemeanor convictions are even higher, prompting widespread concerns that too often the accused are coerced into pleading guilty or not told their full options.

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4) Almost half a million people are locked up for drug offenses Almost 1 in 5 incarcerated people were locked up for drug offenses according to a 2017 report. Yet research shows sending drug offenders to prison doesn’t affect use. With marijuana now legalized in California, the city of San Francisco plans to impart change by wiping out cannabis convictions dating back decades, enabling formerly convicted felons to vote, apply for some jobs, and regain a variety of other rights.

5) Immigrants in federal prison make up 22% of inmates The population of foreign-born people in the US is around 13.5%, yet, as of June last year, 22% of inmates in federal prison were non US citizens. Such inmates were either deemed to be in the country illegally or facing upcoming deportation proceedings.

6) Many women in prison are mothers or domestic abuse victims There are 219,000 women behind bars in America – many of whom are mothers and victims of domestic abuse.

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As many as 90% of women in jail for killing men had been battered by those men, yet women who have committed such crimes typically average 15 year sentences. In contrast, their male counterparts (who are less likely to use a weapon) are given more lenient sentences of between two and six years.

80% of women in jails are mothers, and incarceration can lead to isolation and trauma for children left behind. Even worse, many states still shackle women during labor and even while giving birth.

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In 2016 the Obama administration vowed to phase out the use of private contractors to run federal prisons, but in February of last year the US Justice Department reversed this order, prompting renewed concerns about the human rights of inmates when the driving factor is profit.

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