Don Buckley lost his job driving a Chicago Transit Authority bus almost two years ago and has been looking for work ever since, even as other municipal bus drivers around the country are being laid off.

At 34, Buckley, his two daughters and his fiancee have moved into the basement of his mother’s house. He has had to delay his marriage, and his entire savings, $27,000, is gone.

“I was the kind of person who put away for a rainy day,” he said recently. “It’s flooding now.”cBuckley is one of tens of thousands of once solidly middle-class African-American government workers – bus drivers in Chicago, police officers and firefighters in Cleveland, nurses and doctors in Florida – who have been laid off since the recession ended in June 2009.

Such job losses have blunted gains made in employment and wealth during the previous decade and undermined the stability of neighbourhoods where there are now fewer black professionals who own homes or who get up every morning to go to work.

Full story…

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.

Full story…

Now, a civil rights group wants a federal investigation of the Illinois state police based largely on the data collected under the law, which was sponsored by Barack Obama when he was a state senator.

After examining the data, the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union says state troopers ask to search the cars of black and Hispanic drivers more often than those of white drivers, in cases where police have no legal grounds to search the cars on their own without the driver's consent. But state police are more than 2.5 times as likely to find illegal items (such as alcohol, drugs or stolen property) when searching the vehicles of whites compared to those of Hispanics. Alcohol is the most common item police find among all groups, the ACLU claims, but whites are the most likely to have drugs and drug paraphernalia.

The complaint is not focused on specific allegations of prejudiced behavior. What it alleges is that state officials hardly look at racial profiling information at all. The law requiring the collection of traffic stop data created a panel to review the results, but the slots were never filled and the group never met. "Nobody does anything with the data," says Harry Grossman of the Illinois ACLU. "We are the only ones that have done anything."

Full story…

The decision by the City Attorney's Office to charge Officer Garth Haynes "is demonstrative of the disparate treatment" that African Americans routinely encounter in the criminal-justice system, the Black Law Enforcement Association of Washington said in a statement issued Monday.

Haynes was charged last week with fourth-degree misdemeanor assault for stomping on the head of a man who had been handcuffed by officers responding to the brawl outside a Ballard bar in December. While not condoning Haynes' actions, the association accused the City Attorney's Office of not "approaching these type of cases in a fair and consistent manner."

Full story…

Recently a recorded conversation of two LAPD officers was released where they were being dismissive of complaints of racial profiling. One argued that he “couldn’t do [his] job without racially profiling.”

An independent study conducted by a Yale Law scholar in 2008 found that for every 10,000 residents in Los Angeles, about 3,400 more blacks are stopped than whites. Blacks are also 127 percent more likely to be frisked, 76 percent more likely to be searched and 29 percent more likely to be arrested than stopped whites. Still, they were 42.3 percent less likely to be found with weapons after being frisked, 25 percent less likely to be found with drugs and 33 percent less likely to be found with other contraband.

The LAPD dismissed the study, with Police Chief William J. Bratton commenting, “We live in an imperfect world. There are many issues and questions for which unfortunately there are no perfect answers. This issue of bias and profiling is one of those issues…This department does not engage in racial profiling.”

Full story…

Not according to the Department of Justice, which recently sent a letter to the LAPD raising concerns that the department still has a “culture that is inimical to race-neutral policing.”

Here’s an LA Times article about DOJ’s warning letter.

As evidence of the purported problem, the DOJ cited two LAPD officers whose conversation with a superior was unknowingly recorded, LAT reports.

“So, what?” one officer said, when told that other officers had been accused of stopping a motorist because of his race. The second officer is heard twice saying that he “couldn’t do [his] job without racially profiling.”

Full story…

Gov. David Paterson formed the panel last year after the January 2008 death of Mount Vernon officer Christopher Ridley and the May 2009 death of New York City officer Omar Edwards. Both were black and killed by other police officers who were unaware they were cops.

The task force examined police-on-police confrontations around the country, finding 26 killings during the past three decades. The panel also found numerous other officer-on-officer confrontations that did not lead to a fatality.

The review of the confrontations found that “inherent or unconscious racial bias plays a role in shoot/don’t-shoot decisions made by officers of all races and ethnicities,” the report said.

Ten of the officers killed were off duty, including Edwards and Ridley. And nine of the those were minorities. The last white off-duty officer to be killed by an on-duty colleague died in 1982, the task force found. The report didn’t find any obvious racial or ethnic pattern among officers who were killed while on-duty.

Full story…

So I asked my barber, who has had his own run-ins with the cops, which side he was taking. To my surprise, he also sided with the police officer. This, in spite of his acknowledgment that Gates committed no crime and the officer not having any justifiable reason to arrest him (which was borne out by the Cambridge Police department immediately dropping all charges against Gates).

Then I realized that, like most polls, the answers depend on how you ask the question. My barber explained that he sided with the police officer because he thought Gates got what was coming to him by challenging the cop, which he thought was utterly idiotic. In other words, his interpretation of the question was “who acted more stupidly” in this incident, and he knew only one of the participants had the power to arrest the other.

So this week CNN published its own poll, specifically asking who acted “stupidly”: Gates, Crowley, and President Obama. In its reporting, the Boston Globe botched its reporting of the survey results, saying that “58 percent of whites surveyed blamed Gates for the confrontation, 59 percent of blacks faulted Crowley”. Not true. If you look at the survey, it shows that 59% of blacks think Crowley acted stupidly and 58% of whites think that Gates acted stupidly. But the “blame” question is clearly different and more complicated to answer than the actual survey “stupidly” question. Even 44% of blacks think Gates acted stupidly.

When the survey goes on to ask who the public “sympathizes with more”, this is where the answers divide along racial lines. Blacks side with Gates 61% to 19% versus whites, who side with Crowley 45% to 29%. The African American answer is no surprise, but I think caucasian answer is illuminating. Even though 58% of whites think Gates acted stupidly and 58% think Crowley did not act stupidly, 29% still sided with Gates and another 26% did not side with Crowley.

I think the “teachable moment” here has less to do with race relations than it does the public’s attitude toward law enforcement. We would all acknowledge that being a police officer is one of the toughest jobs around and that they take more than their fair share of verbal abuse on a daily basis, however like any other profession, they have their share of “bad apples”. I don’t think Crowley is a bad apple, but when a significant percentage of white America sides with an African American for speaking out even though they think it was a stupid idea, that tells me there are more bad apples than the nation’s local police departments care to admit.