December 28 - Deeper Structural Racial and Economic Issues; The Militarization of Police Forces; "Dying While Black"; Another Failure to Indict a White Policeman Who Killed A Black Man Before the Eyes of the World

Full Program

Part 1

As we approach the New Year we examine one of the stories that sadly in many ways will define 2014, the rash of police shootings and the protests that have erupted across the country in response to a perception that there is no justice for black victims shot by white policemen and that we are far from a colorblind post-racial society. We begin with an interview on August 14 when protests were erupting in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman. Bree Carlson, the Director of the Structural Racism program for National People’s Action joins us to discuss the deeper structural racial and economic issues at play beyond the headlines.

Part 2

Then we speak with Elizabeth Beavers, the Legislative Associate for Militarism and Civil Liberties at the Friends Committee on National Legislation who has been lobbying Congress for the past year to block the Pentagon’s hand-out of surplus military weapons and hardware to police forces across the country known as the 1033 program that has resulted in the streets of Ferguson looking like a war zone. We spoke to Elizabeth on August 17 of this year.

Part 3

Then we go to an interview I did on November 25, 2014 with Vernillia Randall, Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Dayton, Ohio and the author of “Dying While Black”. We examined the sham and charade that was presented by the prosecutor who declined to indict the policeman who shot Michael Brown, and looked into the extent to which the fix was in from the beginning with a police-friendly prosecutor whose apparent aim all along was to exonerate Officer Wilson.

Part 4

Then finally, earlier this month on December 4 we spoke with Ekow Yankah, a Professor of Law at the Cardoza School of Law at Yeshiva University. He joined us to discuss another failure of a grand jury to indict a white police officer for killing a black man, in this case an NYPD policeman who used an illegal choke-hold, strangling a man to death in an incident that was recorded on video by a bystander. Yet the grand jurors who saw the same video as the rest of the world did, declined to indict the NYPD officer.