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Ferguson Tag

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on December 29, 2014 33 Comments
Kids these days. Students who neglected their studies to protest the Michael Brown grand jury decision were disappointed when their appeal to the administration for special accommodations during finals was rejected. According to Fox News Cleveland:
Over 1,300 Oberlin students signed a petition for college administrators asking for understanding and “alternative modes of learning” as they continue to cope with what’s happening across the country. They asked for the normal grading system to be “replaced with a no-fail mercy period,” and said “basically no student …especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.” In response, Oberlin President Marvin Krislov said that he understands their concerns and that he and the Academic Deans took the request seriously, however “we are in firm agreement that suspending grading protocols is not the way to achieve our shared goal of ensuring that students have every opportunity and resource to succeed,” he said in a statement. Administrators did offer students some assistance in the form of counseling and other support services. They also added increased flexibility in terms of students making “incomplete requests.” They also extended the deadline for students to change from “a grade to the pass/no pass” option.

Posted by Amy Miller on December 23, 2014 8 Comments
Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson is making moves to hold accountable the organizers of this past Saturday's "Black Lives Matter" protest at the Mall of America. Officers were present on-site, and once the chanting started, moved to close almost 100 stores and several entrances to the mall. I say "moved to" as opposed to "were forced to" because the shutdown occurred as soon as the protests began, and there were no reports of some sort of violent instigating event; but perhaps it's a good thing the officers moved so quickly, based on how mall employees describe what happened next: From CBS Minnesota:
Nate Bash works at one store near the rotunda, which he didn’t want us to name. “You had people yelling and screaming inside the mall that wanted out and you had people yelling and screaming outside the mall that wanted in,” he said. “I would say the mall was less than half as busy as it should have been considering what day it was.” “This was a powder keg just waiting for a match,” said Johnson.
Police officers are busy using social media in an attempt to single out the organizers (arresting every single protester would be chaos, and not worth the trouble;) their goal is to target the organizers and participants who encouraged others to come to the mall even after officials made moves to emphasize that the Mall of America is privately owned, and those disrutping business would be asked to leave. Officials don't yet know how much money was lost during the shutdown, but they're throwing around words like "staggering," so I'm willing to assume that losses were well worth the effort to track these people down and file a lawsuit.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 21, 2014 9 Comments
On October 25, 2014, I wrote about how anti-Israel activists attempted to co-opt and hijack the Ferguson protests and riots and turn the anger towards Israel, Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge. The activists gathered under the "Palestine2Ferguson" banner and Twitter hashtag. One of the key anti-Israel activists was Bassem Masri, a Palestinian-American who attempted to instigate confrontations between police and protesters, as he livestreamed the protests. [caption id="attachment_104112" align="alignnone" width="550"]Bassem Masri Ferguson Resistance is in our blood(Bassem Masri, on right)[/caption] Fast forward to the execution of two NYPD police officers, Wenjian Lu and Rafael Ramos, on December 20, by Ismaaiyl Brinsley. The killer wrote on Instagram in his final post:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 15, 2014 53 Comments
As we reported, a coalition of student groups at Harvard Law School demanded exam delays due to student trauma over the Ferguson and Eric Garner grand jury refusals to indict. There was withering criticism, including here. HLS refused to budge, but did agree to counseling, meetings, and other steps. William Desmond, a third year HLS student who also is a Law Review Editor, defends the demand for an exam delay in The National Law Journal, Delaying Exams Is Not a Request from 'Coddled Millennials' (h/t Drew M.). Here's an excerpt:
... In essence, law students are being told to grow up and learn how to focus amidst stress and anxiety—like “real” lawyers must do. Speaking as one of those law students, I can say that this response is misguided: Our request for exam extensions is not being made from a position of weakness, but rather from one of strength and critical awareness. Although over the last few weeks many law students have experienced moments of total despair, minutes of inconsolable tears and hours of utter confusion, many of these same students have also spent days in action—days of protesting, of organizing meetings, of drafting emails and letters, and of starting conversations long overdue. We have been synthesizing decades of police interactions, dissecting problems centuries old, and exposing the hypocrisy of silence.

Posted by Amy Miller on December 14, 2014 19 Comments
Yesterday, as they often do, thousands of protesters descended on Washington, DC to protest police brutality against black men. The rally, led by Al Sharpton and attended by high-profile activists in the black community, focused on promoting a "black agenda," and railed against the typical enemies of the progressive community: the Koch brothers, establishment politicians, and the Republican party. To close the rally, Reverend Jamal Bryant of Empowerment Temple in Maryland offered one of the angriest, most divisive prayers ever uttered in public. Via the Daily Caller:
Dispatch angels right now of protection around our sons from psychopathic, sociopathic police officers. I pray right now that you will convince prosecutors who have, in fact, given up the law for popularity. We pray that you will disrobe judges who are elected, but have not been appointed by your glory. We’re going to march in 2016 until we have righteous Congress people, righteous Senators, and a righteous President. God, we don’t want just black elected officials, we want a black agenda. We want to make sure that ‘our lives matter’ is not a slogan, but it is a lifestyle. Let us march on. And God, for every person who opposes justice, every person who opposes righteousness, we came to remind them – we know when they are sleep, we know when they’re awake, we know when they been good or bad, and because they been bad please send Black Jesus for goodness sake. Amen and God bless you.
Watch:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 14, 2014 20 Comments
Does it really matter who it was? Could have been anyone. It was Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal. And no, it wasn't because of the high fees. Via The Blaze:
Billionaire investor and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel was forced offstage at the University of California, Berkeley, on Wednesday after Ferguson and Eric Garner demonstrators barged into the room and took over. Protesters banged on doors of the lecture hall where Thiel was speaking, causing the audience to grow more and more uneasy as the noise continued to get louder. Then, a male student inside the lecture hall stood up, yelled “F*** you” at Thiel and left.
Business Insider further reports:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 12, 2014 25 Comments
College Insurrection and others recently reported how the President of Smith College apologized to the student body for using the term "All Lives Matter" rather than "Black Lives Matter." A Cornell engineering student just tweeted to me about a similar statement from the Chief of the Cornell University Police, Kathy Zoner, in an all campus email. https://twitter.com/TTimeOnThe19th/status/543545839927693312 I checked my own email, and sure enough, there it was: Cornell Police #ALLLIVESMATTER That original message from the week before was:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 12, 2014 23 Comments
You thought it was bad that law students at Columbia, Harvard, Georgetown and Berkeley demanded exam delays because of the failure of grand juries to indict in the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner? Sit down. Harvey Silverglate, civil liberties lawyer and co-founder of the FIRE, tweets a link to a Volokh Conspiracy post: https://twitter.com/HASilverglate/status/543529885248282625 The original story is from the UCLA Daily Bruin, Law school exam question on Ferguson shooting draws criticism:
Some students at the UCLA School of Law have expressed concerns after a professor asked an exam question this week relating to the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo. The exam, given by Professor Robert Goldstein in Constitutional Law II, asked students to write a memo related to the Ferguson shooting. Some students who took the exam said they found it difficult to write about the incident in terms of the first amendment while ignoring issues such as police brutality.... Hussain Turk, a second-year law student who took the exam, said he thinks the question was problematic because he thinks exams should not ask students to address controversial events. He added that he thinks the question was more emotionally difficult for black students to answer than for other students.

Posted by Amy Miller on December 08, 2014 14 Comments
The slacktivists at Columbia Law School have found a new way to exploit the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner to the very convenient benefit of race card hustlers everywhere--- they're canceling finals. That's right. One of the finest law schools in the country is allowing the collective #outrage of its flock of immature, untested baby lawyers to completely derail the academic integrity of its exam system. Via Power Line Blog:
The grand juries’ determinations to return non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases have shaken the faith of some in the integrity of the grand jury system and in the law more generally. For some law students, particularly, though not only, students of color, this chain of events is all the more profound as it threatens to undermine a sense that the law is a fundamental pillar of society designed to protect fairness, due process and equality. ... The law school has a policy and set of procedures for students who experience trauma during exam period. In accordance with these procedures and policy, students who feel that their performance on examinations will be sufficiently impaired due to the effects of these recent events may petition Dean Alice Rigas to have an examination rescheduled.
They're also providing counseling and developing a speaker series to encourage open dialogue. I'm not quite sure what the powers that be at Columbia are smoking, but whatever it is, it has made them forget what it actually takes to be a lawyer. I'm not sure how many of you reading this have ever gone through law school, but part of the educational process is reading things that some may find upsetting. My first internship involved criminal appeals in a Detroit court, and all I'll say is that I saw things. Upsetting things. Things that make you angry. But I did the work and learned from it because that's part of the job.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 07, 2014 11 Comments
Yes, I agree that #BlackLivesMatter. So do all other lives, including the lives of police (of all races) who keep us from the abyss. Remember Officer David Smith never lived to tell about enraged perp who stole his service gun. Someone started a hashtag, #PoliceLivesMatter. Seems worth retweeting some of these tweets, don't ya think?

Posted by Leslie Eastman on December 07, 2014 13 Comments
Professor Jacobson may be taking a much needed sanity break from the Saturday Night Card game, but the social justice warriors continue to draw from the bottom of the deck. The most shocking aspect of one of the race-based demonstrations that occurred Saturday: It was in the heart of one of the most elite, "culturally sensitive" centers of the country -- Hollywood.
Hundreds of people taking part in a nationwide protest against police brutality staged a die-in Saturday in the same busy Hollywood intersection where a man allegedly armed with a knife was shot and killed by Los Angeles police officers the previous night. As they marched through the streets of Hollywood during the afternoon hours, demonstrators chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe,” refrains heard around the nation in protest following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the choke hold death of Eric Garner in New York. Both men died at the hands of police. Protesters also staged a “die-in” at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and North Highland Avenue, where less than 24 hours earlier, police fatally shot a man after law enforcement officials said he did not comply with officer orders. The demonstrators blocked traffic in the area and essentially shut the busy intersection down for a time.
A photo spread via Twitter will give you a sense of the scene. LI #34b

Posted by Amy Miller on December 04, 2014 16 Comments
The photograph featured above surfaced shortly after a grand jury in Missouri refused to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown. In a sea of memes, photoshops, and Twitter commentary, the picture went viral alongside its companion photograph (courtesy of Politifact): politifact-photos-Ferguson_sign_original Two different photographs, one very clearly photoshopped to provide some social commentary on a quickly spiraling situation. Predictably, the photograph enraged some, delighted others, but no one with two brain cells to rub together believed that the "rob a store" version of the photograph was real. Politifact, however, dove in headfirst to provide us with an analysis no one asked for (emphasis mine):

Posted by Andrew Branca on December 03, 2014 17 Comments
Bill O'Reilly focused on the ongoing Ferguson Grand Jury kerfuffle in his opening segment last night, revealing in stark detail the contrast between the reasoned perspective of those accepting the facts and evidence presented to the Grand Jury as well as their decision and the inanity of the reason-free "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" crowd. First up was a audio recording of former NBA player Charles Barkley speaking on a radio program (2:05):
We have to be really careful with the cops, man, because if it wasn't for the cops, we'd be living in the wild-wild west in our neighborhoods.  I think we can't pick out certain incidents that don't go our way and act like the cops are all bad.  I hate when we do that. Think about it, you know how bad some of these neighborhoods would be if it wasn't for the cops?
Then was then contrasted with the ramblings of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the National of Islam (2:35):
As long as they kill us and go to Wendy's and have a burger, and go to sleep, they gonna keep killing us.  But when we die and they die [applause] they soon we are going to sit at a table, and talk about it. We're tired. We want some of this earth, or we'll tear the God-damned country up.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 02, 2014 27 Comments
The Dellwood Market, near Ferguson, has been looted three times, on August 10 and 17, and again after the non-indictment announcement in November. Here's one of the times, on August 17: The owner was on Hannity tonight, and said he's probably going to call it quits after 25 years. He just can't take it anymore. Dellwood Market Ferguson Owner Hannity 2 Very sad. The Hannity segment video below:
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