I think it's about time we get caught up on some stories broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher. I am your host, Ramsey's job.
He is Ramsey's job. I am q Ward. You my friends are listening to Civic Cycles.
Indeed you are, and there's a lot for you to stick around for. We mentioned last week, because it was our three year anniversary episode, that we had a lot of stories that we really wanted to cover. Well, I'll tell you what. We are going to cover them this week. Some of those stories include the when we mentioned this the black child that was nearly drowned by his group of white friends as they were saying that he was George Floyd because he couldn't breathe. We're talking about the
smash and grab optics and narratives. You know, we're seeing all these smash and grab robberies and you know, we know wrong is wrong.
And I've seen mass media build on that narrative.
Exact we started talking about it, so we're going to talk about that as well. We're also gonna spend a little time talking about Eddie Irizari. We didn't get a chance to talk about his story last week, and so we're gonna spend a little time talking about that. I also want to make sure that we get some time in to discuss the twenty three year old Janabi Candula who was killed in Seattle. I think she was crossing the street and the officer was kind of making fun
of her, saying that she had limited value. So we're going to talk about that story as well. And then we're going to spend the last part of the show talking about police training and a specific story where a police trainer was training a new recruit and shot her in the training classroom and how this narrative of police training can get caught away from us. And for those of you that follow us on social media, you know this has been something we've been talking about and battling
with the trolls on social media for some time. But did that officer survive that incident? She is gone first and foremost, though, it's time for some ebony excellence. This week's any Excellence is brought to you by Major Threads for Innovative Fashionable Sports, where checkmajorthreads dot com. I would go through this fast, but I think you this is a better fit for you. Why not give us some ebony excellence. We're talking about Dion Sanders Coach Prime.
If we weren't sitting seated in the studio right now, I would do some moves on Coach Prime's behalf. But instead, let's just get into this story. Dion Sanders knows the game of football and advertising like few others. Evidenced by two big wins. On September sixteenth, Sanders entered into a collaboration with Blenders I Wear to capitalize on shades that he often wears while patrolling sidelines at University of Colorado
football games. According to Blenders and Prime storefront, the shades retail for sixty seven dollars, but with a coupon, first time buyers get a fifteen percent discount. During an appearance on ESPN's First Take, Sanders handed out pairs to Stephen A. Smith, Molly Carum, and Shannon Sharp. He also gave shade to
Dwayne the Rock Johnson on ESPN's College Game Day. Johnson was serving as a guest on the show alongside the Coach, wearing a fresh pair as his surprise appearance on September fifteenth, As he was going to be appearing on WWE's SmackDown. Sanders also gave shade to the entire football team, and footage of this went viral. In the video, Sanders implied that the Colorado State University head coach j Norvale gave them ammunition when he criticized Sanders' habit of wearing sunglasses
and a hat during his interviews. Sanders told the team they had messed around and made it personal. Now we're going to kick their butt and it's going to be business but also pleasure. He then revealed to the team that his line of shades with Blenders Eyewear had done a one point two million dollars in sales in twenty four hours. Yeah, which is pretty impressive.
Yeah Yeah, and all that because well, I forget the guy's name, but he said that Sanders wasn't properly raised.
Yeah, his mama didn't raise him right.
Something like that, And so I feel like that's of any excellence. I want to make sure that we shout out Black Enterprise for that reading. And it is time to move on. So finally we get to talk about some of these really heartbreaking stories that have been in the media. The first one and the one that I think that we spent the most time kind of going back and forth about was the well. The headline reads, black kid invite invited by white friends to swim, then
held him under when he said he couldn't breathe. They called him George Floyd. So I'll read a bit from NBC News to kind of paint the picture for those of you who don't know. A white teenager was indicted on an attempted murder charge in massach Sits after he was accused of calling a black child a racial slur and repeatedly dunking him underwater as the child said he did not know how to swim. The fourteen year old suspect is accused of taunting the victim on July nineteenth
at Goose Pond in shape him. I believe that's how I say that, Court documents said another juvenile, also white, laughed and called the victim George Floyd, referring to the black man who died in Minneapolis police custody in twenty twenty. According to the documents, the implication being the kid was saying I can't breathe, and then you know, they were making fun of.
What I'm saying. Imagine the kids thinking that was funny, and the type of indoctrination that exists in their homes where they thought that was fun.
Right, And you know, while we're here, before we get to the next part of the story, I think that you bring up an excellent point. There's been this push to erode American history, black people, specifically in the plight of black people from American history. It's the attack on CRT that's what it's been dubbed, but.
Which is just a clever way to use vague language and misunderstood language so that people can lose sight of what they actually mean. So this critical race theory turn out there so that people can be distracted by something and we can introduce our own definition of it because people aren't familiar.
So here's where this becomes problematic because, as you know, the people that are centered in the middle of this debate, these are children, These are school children. And this is proof positive why understanding history is important. It is important to impart on children as they're forming social bonds and as there you know, becoming the men and women and people that they're going to become ultimately the capacity to do with what empathy they have what is right, and
they need the connective elements to connect themselves. And if they don't know what's offensive, what's hurtful, they don't understand the history. They hurt something and they prot it without understanding the weight of it. You end up with situations like this go ahead.
That's what makes it so criminal because the people behind this, they know that they know that these children are at the age and the time in their lives where their minds can be shaped the most. So they want to indoctrinate them with this very very false version of history and disguise it as them protecting them, when really they just want them to have a different version of history when they grow up. They want them to have a
different mindset. They don't want them to have or to use that natural empathy because that's a natural That's what I would think.
Yeah, you know what I mean.
I think that they are They're targeting the youth intentionally. Let's start at the education level with removing the idea that we've ever done anything wrong. You know, slaves did in fact benefit from correct.
Yeah? So no, no, okay, I was I was, I was saying yeah facetiously, but the answer is no, said listen for people that might believe that that there might be a moticum of truth there. Please understand that everything that slaves were quote unquote taught in the US, that had all been practiced in Africa already for eons, So
nobody had to come over here and learn anything. And if the cost of learning skills that benefited them was slavery, that's that cost is way too high, four hundred years slavery and uh subjugation.
Wait, if the cost is mass murder, trafficking, kidnapping, raping, and medical experiments and genocide like, that's that's.
Way to learn skills that we already had after Also, it's a slap in the face to the history of Africa. And I know that if you believe that slaves taught skills, you already don't know the history of Africa, and I
feel bad for you. But if you ever felt like creating a little bit more strengthening your relationship with your fellow man, in particular your African original human beings on this planet, those people learn the history of Africa, and then you will see how insulting that attempted that narrative, their attempting to spend is I want to. I want to shift back to this story and these kids too, because you you brought up an interesting point that the
human being's impulse is to be empathetic. Right now, I won't say that kids don't horse play. That's the thing. Okay, I won't say that kids aren't mean. That's the thing. Kids are learning how to be the people that they will.
In some of those cases, they're not trying to be mean. It's just the behavior that they do as horse playing, or as kidding around, or even in some cases, as trying to show someone that they like them. They just end up doing things that are mean because they don't they haven't really processed, you know, social interaction or the proper way to do those things exactly exactly.
Now, when you look at the way that these children were approaching this situation, a couple things jump out at me.
At least.
The first thing is, George Floyd's name has no value to these children right now. Say what you will about George Floyd, how he lived his life, whatever, whatever. There's a lot of people that say a lot of things. I realize that people are imperfect. That is the nature of life. We try to be better people every single day. But in George Floyd's last moments, the reason why there was this uproar was because he was choked to death over a potentially counterfeit twenty dollars bill, I want to say,
for eight minutes. So not only was he killed, he died in agony, wailing and screaming and calling for his mother while the police snuffed out his life. And when you think about the twenty dollars bill and you think about what the purpose of police is supposed to be like in the minds and hearts of the citizens, you know, protecting I don't know, the community from a potentially counterfeit
twenty dollars bill. By ending a man's life with your knee on his neck for eight minutes, watching everybody witness this public lunching while they stand around helpless because you have a gun. That doesn't really fall in line with my idea of public service and protecting and serving the community. That really seems more like very morbid and very I don't know if you're it's like demonic almost right. But again back to these children, there's no reverence there. It's
almost like it's something to be made fun of. And you know, when we get to the last story where the police officers laughing at the young woman who was killed. He's laughing at her. These kids are laughing at George Floyd's name.
Imagine what it took for those kids to even have his name as a reference for making fun of.
They know the story, but yes, it was not just gravity.
It's not just that they don't value it. They've been given that name in some context around in this kid he can't breathe, he's George Floyd like. So it's not like this is a namely herd that they don't associate with anything just black. They associated specifically with I can't breathe and they think that's funny. And I think that's something that's taught at the the parental level. Somebody had to plant that seed into their minds in that way.
And if the parents can't teach empathy and the schools can't create a pathway from real historical events and real harm that has been done to black and brown communities to a child's budding empathetic capacity, then we are headed for a society where we are more strained in terms of our relationships across our tribal and cultural lines, where we are less interactive, and I think everybody loses as a result of that. I want to finish reading this story, Andy,
We'll move on. The kid says water went into my mouth and my nose and I could not breathe, the victims said in a written statement to police. So I shouted out that I can't breathe over and over and tried to get his hands off me. The victim also said that as the teen and the other person continue to pull him under water, he started to feel lightheaded and almost vomited, according to his written statement and a police narrative, after he began to feel exhausted, he shouted,
he shouted for help. So again, kids are drowning, this guy calling him George Floyd, calling him racial slurs. And I think that that is that right there is where we need to revisit that conversation, in particular in places like Florida and Arkansas and Texas, I believe are the three states where they've really tried their best to rewrite history for the benefit of the parents of white children's sensibilities. Conservative white parent the conservative parents of white children, those
parents's sensitivities. That's what I'm trying to say. All right, let's move on. Let's talk a bit about the smash and grab shoplifting stuff that's been taking place. I'll say this first and foremost, those videos are intense, okay, And I'm not going to pretend like everything is okay with that and that there's a way to excuse that or anything like that. But what I will talk about is two things. One, it's not just black people doing that.
We've seen videos of non black people doing the same thing, going into Dick Sporting Goods a white folks with the white people hair, white skinned, white arms, you know what I'm saying, No masks, no wide open like just going in and getting what they got to get and bouncing right. And of course we've seen all of the videos of black people going into the luxury stores, right, and those
headlines I think hit a little different. And it's crazy because it seems like when the media pushes it, it's always the black people doing it, and when we come across the videos on like social media or when people send us links, it's to white people. In other words, when it's black people, the media picks it up, and when it's non black people, it just kind of feeds the statistics.
So an easier to sensationalize the black thugs that are short of terrorizing shopping centers and luxury you know, fashion stores.
Yeah, and so wrong is wrong no matter who's doing it. But the two things I want to say here is that it's not just black people doing that. There's groups of mobs of people that are not black, breaking in stores and getting what they can and leaving. And for proof, reach out to us on social media. It's aif, except we'll send you the videos we've got. It's there's a thing, and it's not like these are old videos or you know anything. We'd like that. This is the stuff that's
happening alongside everything else. There are people who try to get it how they live, I suppose, and we.
Have way more than enough content to show you guys just in general of people doing things that are deplorable black and white people. Though this is not a black problem. This is a criminal problem.
Yeah, and an economic problem because usually crime is it develops out of poverty, you know what I mean. That's just people are trying to come up and get as comfortable as they can, and some people resort to some desperate things that look a lot like going into a store and stealing. But if you remember during Hurricane Katrina, for those old enough to remember this, when black people went in the stores, they called it looting, and when white people went in the stores, they called it surviving.
Because nobody could go to the grocery store and buy food. Nobody can go and get the clothes that were dry, and nobody can go and get shoes and get you know, toilet paper and whatever. So the people that went to get what they could get, if they were black, they were looters. If they were white, they were survivors. Yeah, they were. They were just doing what they could to survive, and so you got to be careful was necessary to survive,
right right. The other thing I want to say, the other part of this is that what this does is it gives retailers the ability to justify raising prices and keeping prices high, and they can point at this criminal behavior that has this sort of black face on it, if you will, so that people aren't mad at the retailers raising the prices, and that people can look at, you know, everything that is not how do I say this, They can insulate themselves from the root cause of the
problem and say it's these people that are causing these problems in this country, right, And the retailers don't want to be the greedy hogs, capitalist pigs, so now they have a convenient scapegoat. But so they raise the prices. Black kids get blamed for this, and the fact of the matter is that most of the theft in these
stores is by employees. It also allows police to justify themselves, right, because you know, there's been this push to defund the police and reinvest in community resources to prevent the necessity of the crimes that would actually have a real impact on crime rates, not additional police, but this sort of behavior and this narrative and these videos allow police to
justify themselves. Finally, I want to share this. The CEO of Walmart says that he set himself the hype about smash and grab theft is overblown, and he's the person that also alluded to the fact that most of the theft that stores experience that would lead to the increased
prices is by employees or other shrinkage. Smash and grab stuff is very very rare, But if you've got security cameras and it can make it for a good headline, then then there's your headline there, and California is spending two hundred and sixty seven million dollars to combat it. I'm not going to say that that's good or bad because we don't want it. But I just don't want the narrative to be that black people are the only people doing this and they're the reason for all the
ills the community. Black people are doing this, and so is everybody else.
So the really interesting thing about that part, though, is when has there been such a swift and when have you seen a headline that said any county or you know, municipality or local or state or federal government was using close to three hundred million dollars to combat hunger or to combat homelessness that help its citizens. Yeah, we got three hundred million to spend in response to that luxury store got robbed, that assurance that will get all that money back.
If they spent that two hundred and sixty seven million dollars on homelessness, that might make a bigger impact on crime rates than anything. But they feel like this is a specific thing, and that's you got to play the media game in the political game. And I don't love that, but I need you, our listener, to be as informed as you can be, and to give you these additional perspectives, because without media like this, you might just get one
side of it. And our job is to be very critical of not just stories we hear, but of the media too. So finally, I want to share a bit about the police shooting of Eddie Irizari, who shot in the head while sitting in his car. And this is sort of the police were lying in their account because it was filmed by a neighbor and the film came out, So I'm just going to read this real quick. This
comes from Wikipedia. On August fourteen, Philadelphia police told the media that the incident began with officers pulled over a car that was driving erradically. Then as officers approached the car, Irizari stepped out of the car with a knife and the officers gave multiple commands from the drop, but Irizari lunch death the officers prompting the shooting. On August fifteenth, Philadelphia police changed their story, stating that Irazari was actually
in the car when he was shot Philadelphia. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw stated that officers body worn camera footage made it very clear that what was initially reported, what was not, what actually happened. On September eighth, twenty twenty three, Mark Dill, who fired the fatal shots, was charged with first degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, and simple assault, as well as reckless endangerment of another person and official oppression. Now,
what did the police department get for lying? But you know anything about that? Who knows? But I got to say again, the police are very good at covering up their own crimes. We only know about this because there was additional footage, and that is often the way it goes. So let's rethink policing and stick around for more, because we've got a lot more in store.