EthnicMajority

(Atlanta Journal Constitution) The U.S. Justice Department launched a civil rights investigation Thursday into whether Miami police officers engaged in a pattern of excessive use of deadly force in the fatal shootings of seven African-American suspects over an eight-month span.

Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, and Miami U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer said the probe will focus not on the individual officers but on whether the Miami Police Department's policies and practices on use of force led to violations of constitutional rights. The investigation is not criminal in nature.

"We're looking at systems. We're not looking at individual culpability," Perez told reporters. "We will follow the facts where the facts lead us. We will peel the onion to its core."

The shootings in inner-city Miami, from July 2010 to February 2011 and including two others that were not fatal, sparked outrage in the African-American community and led to protests at City Hall. The NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union, among others, demanded a federal investigation.

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(Media Matters) The right-wing media have repeatedly mischaracterized Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent reference to “my people” to claim that he is a “black nationalist” or that the Obama Justice Department is motivated by “racial bias.” In his statement, Holder actually took issue with the suggestion that a 2008 incident involving the New Black Panther Party was a more “blatant form of voter intimidation” than what occurred in the 1960s; Holder said the suggestion “does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all.”

Holder: Statement “Does A Great Disservice To People Who Put Their Lives On The Line, Who Risked All For My People, My Wife’s Sister.” During a congressional hearing on funding for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) repeatedly questioned Holder on the New Black Panthers case, alleging that the “case reveals a pattern in the department of refusing to enforce the law if white voters are being harassed.” Culberson also read sworn testimony about the case from former Democratic activist Bartle Bull, saying that, according to Bull, the incident “would qualify as the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, even going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.” Holder replied:

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(Fox News) Attorney General Eric Holder, just days after filing a federal lawsuit against Arizona’s immigration law, on Sunday floated the possibility of filing another court challenge on racial profiling grounds.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Arizona claimed the state was infringing on federal immigration responsibilities and urged the judge to prevent the law from going into effect at the end of July. Despite some officials’ claims that the law could lead to racial profiling, that concern was not cited as grounds for the suit.

However, Holder said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the federal government was leading with its “strongest” argument in the suit filed Tuesday and would not rule out a second suit months down the road — if the law ends up going into effect.

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(The Root) To his credit, the nation’s first black U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, has not shied away from discussing race and its impact on our criminal justice system. Shortly after he was confirmed, he famously said that ”in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards”–a statement for which he was roundly criticized, but for which he deserved praise.

Holder has done more than just talk about race. He has launched an examination of the criminal justice system, focusing on the effects of race and on ways to rid the system of racial bias.

The pervasive influence of race on the criminal justice system is well-documented and shocking. Earlier this year, in a case that challenged the systematic disenfranchisement of former felons in Washington State, Farrakhan v. Gregoire, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a watershed opinion that recognized ”compelling” evidence of racial bias in the state’s criminal justice system. The court found that, ”in the total population of potential ‘felons’[in Washington State]…, minorities are more likely than whites to be searched, arrested, detained, and ultimately prosecuted.” National statistical data bears that out: In 2007, African Americans represented 13 percent of the general population, but they comprised 39 percent of the nation’s federal prison population.

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