Civic Cipher 041622 Following Up On Injustices (Part 1)

to follow up for that story. We're also going to follow up with the story from Buffalo Buffalo, New York where an elderly man was put to the ground by the police. We're going to find out what's slaves with that, and we're going to talk about what it means to be Black and seek housing in this country a little later on in the show, So you definitely want to stick around for that one as well. I know, and I do want to say this right now, Patrick Leoya,

there's a story there. It was killed by the police, shot in the back of the head. We are going to wait a little bit before we cover that story, but we acknowledge that that's something that we need to talk about, so just bear with us. We're not going to do that this week. We are going to follow up with that one very soon. But yeah, a lot to stick around for this show. We just need to kind of pace ourselves with certain things, and so this

is what we're going to do. Now. We like to start things off around here on a positive note with the feature we call Ebony Excellence, and if you're ready for that, Q, let's jump into it, shall we We shall? So today we're going to talk about a man named Christian Smalls. This comes from ABC News and I'll read it. Christian Smalls was fired from his Amazon warehouse job in twenty twenty after leading a protest over fears working conditions could lead to a coronavirus outbreak at the Staten Island

New York facility. Now Smalls has a new job, president of the Amazon Labor Union. Smalls's Amazon story begins in twenty eighteen when he says he helped open the New York warehouse while employed as a supervisor for the online retailer. That's when you founded the ALU, bringing together a scrappy group of former and current warehouse workers. It was that Staten Island group that made history on April first, after going head to head with Amazon in a union boat

and winning. This marked the first successful US organizing effort in the retail giant's history. Now, for those that don't know, Amazon is famously anti union, And if you don't know, unions, for the most part, exist to protect the workers. It's basically a union of the workers and they use their collective bargaining power to convince the company to provide better working conditions or you know, higher pay, or you know

things like this. You know, we're greater than the sum of our parts, and that's sort of the mentality behind a union. Well, this man, Christian Smalls, is a black man. I've seen his interviews. He wears a bandana sometimes he looks not too dissimilar from me. And from Q and he has taken on this huge retail giant and lobbied on behalf of the workers and one so far. And if that's not ebony excellence, I don't know what is.

And so we will take this moment to shout out the man named Christian Smalls for riving out there in the corporate world.

We discussed this sense of entitlement, this sense of uh, this perceived sense of authority over black and brown bodies and in black and brown agency that often comes from a Karen in the midst of her breakdown and other non melanated individuals as well. But you know, for that episode, we were talking about this and sort of what it feels like to be on the other end of that, because that's a tough thing to kind of navigate. You know, all the women in the movies are blonde haired, blue eyed.

You know, everyone's coming to rescue or find a bad guy, you know, so we're taught that this is the this is this is the type of person that society loves the most, and it is definitely not us. So we have to kind of know where we stand in those type of situations, and therefore they can be very intimidating to be a black person being accused. It doesn't matter if you did it or not, but being accused of violating to one degree or another a white woman.

something that we have to be aware of. On another episode, Kean, I remember this, we talked about what it feels like to walk down the street at night in my own neighborhood and there might be a white woman out taking a walk at the same time, and I'll cross the street just to give her the whole side of the street, so she doesn't feel threatened, because if she feels threatened, there's a very real chance that I could be in danger just because she feels a certain type of way.

So I'm saying this to establish exactly how we many of us, I should say, not not all of us, but exactly how many of us have come to deal with Karens. You know or would be Karens.

a musician, in the Arlow Hotel. Poncetto said she thought he had her phone, but investigators later determined he did not. Oh that was so satisfying. I remember that video of the incident quickly went viral, with many accusing Poncetto of racially profiling the team, an accusation that she has denied.

The incident also occurred as continued calls for racial justice and police reform were the highest they'd been in years due to the deaths of black people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of law enforcement officials. Now here's the part that I think you need to hear about, Q. The plea deal requires Poncetto, who's twenty three years old, to follow the probation terms for a separate case in California, attend counseling, and avoid further criminal incidents.

If she doesn't comply, Ponsetto could go to prison for up to four years, prosecutor said. But if she successfully follows those terms, she can replead the felony charge to a misdemeanor charge of aggravated harassment in the second degree. Now around here we call that a slap on the wrist, right, and around here we like to reframe the conversation or the scenario around Okay, what if the perpetrator was black

and the victim was white. Now with that said, Q, I'd love for you to jump in and tell us what we already know you're gonna say.

are often ah almost legal entrapment. Right. I need you to agree that you did this crime that you're saying you didn't do, and we'll make sure you don't go to prison for as long cool cool not say you did this, and then we're going to give you the charges from this other thing that you also did. And if very thing is cool in a little bit of time, we're just like you ain't do either one of them. How do you feel about that? Rams?

makes an excellent point. You know, if you listening to us today, or me talking into this microphone, or anyone we know accidentally takes someone's life, there is a degree of accountability that comes into question immediately. But oftentimes with police officers, you know, their the leniency is it's asinine,

and it's so unfair and it's so hurtful. So we mentioned last week that I went through and I tried to compile a list of officers who had been convicted of an on duty killing going all the way back to nineteen sixty five. And I believe that I know for a fact, we came up with less than one hundred. You know, I want to say that on one list, we found thirty eight and that was an exhaustive list. On another list, we found somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe forty five.

But last year there was I think eleven hundred, year before that, nine eighty, you know, and so forth and so on. Going all the way back, you begin to see very easily that that number easily gets into the five digits, maybe even into six digits of police killing. And we're talking about less than one hundred of people convicted. This means that every single human being that police execute

is that's done justifiably. And if that is the case, then we really need to rethink what policing means, and what public safety means, and what criminal justice means, because that margin of error is entirely unacceptable. I'm saying that because, as we know, the majority, or rather a significant amount more than what is a reflection of the population. So what am I trying to say comparatively speaking, it disproportionately affects black people, So a lot of those bodies are

black and brown bodies. People just getting executed by the police. Now, this is not a news story for us around here, but this might be something that's new for you. Now, I digress. Following up with this story, I wish that there was a little bit more to it than just to slap on the wrist and her admitting that it was a hate crime. Granted is documented publicly. I mentioned that as sort of the silver lining with the Kim

Potter case. You know, it's documented that she was wrong, but in terms of actual punishment or justice or whatever, it feels very hollow.

us to this. She came in the studio and interviewed under a different name, like for some other topic that she was supporting our show. We'd interview the lady, have a whole show, probably give her a hug, you know, take her around the corner to the spot where I get my cucumber lemonades, and have no idea who she was es. So she kind of lived in the anonymity of that and have her record essentially as sponged of it as well. It just seems really, really unfair.

the officers cleared of wrongdoing all Right. Two Buffalo police officers who shoved a seventy five year old man to the brown during a protest in twenty twenty have been cleared by an arbitrator who said the use of force was quote absolutely legitimate, legitimate end quote, because the man who was hospitalized with the head injury was quote not an innocent bystander end quote. The forty one page ruling from the arbitrator, Jeffrey Shellick or Celchik Sorry, was issued

on Friday. It came nearly two years after a widely viewed video taken by WBFO local radio station, showed the two officers, Robert McCabe and Aaron Turgalski, shoving the man, Martin Gugino, who was attending a protest in June twenty twenty after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The video, which fueled outrage during the summer of unrest over police violence, shows mister Gugino stagger backwards and land hard on the sidewalk with blood immediately leaking from behind his right ear.

His lawyer, Melissa d. Weisserath, said he was hospitalized for about a month and suffered a fractured skull, a brain injury, and hearing loss. Mister Seltchik based his findings on a three day hearing in November. Mister Gugino, he wrote, did not respond to a subpoena to appear at the hearing, and quote in effect refused to testify end quote on his own behalf all right, here we go.

thing aggressive in the video was the officers. It was the only thing. They're militarizers, wearing uniforms, they have weapons, they have batons, they have shields, and all dressed in black. There's a line of a marching and a man standing there with his phone and granted he's in front of them, and it looks like he's trying to either ask a question or you know, you know, whatever whatever he's trying to do, but it's not aggressive at all. And then

the guy just pushes him out of the way. He falls backwards and he hits his head and then blood comes out of his ear. It's so sad to watch. And then they're saying, no, that's that's totally fine. It's his fault and we see with our own eyes and they're able to determine that. All right, go ahead, cue, what are you go?

like it's his lawyer's opinion that these things happened. And I thought it very simultaneously maddening and hilarious that part of the justification was and I quote, and I'm laughing because I'm so angry. I would rather laugh than punch through my computer screen. He made odd physical gestures within a foot of the officers, And if you rewatch the video, you'll find yourself trying to figure out what in this

case is being classified as an odd physical gesture. I am a single, singular person being approached by an army of officers that are in essence about to assault me. But I'm the one being accused of doing something odd, Like I said, Man, it's like the Jedi mind trick, like, hey, you guys just shove that.

what they do. In fact, I'm supportive of police. I just support the police in a very different way. I support them by charging them with doing better do it all the time. I think that we all can be better. Ramses can be better. I can be a better father, can be a better friend, I can be a better brother, you know, And I charge everyone around me with the same, especially when I pay all this money in taxes, I kind of you know, it goes to the police force.

So you know, it's just interesting how folks don't realize, well, you know, a lot the police really do a lot more harm in black and brown communities than they do in other communities, and so maybe folks can justify that. Now, I do want to follow up with one more story before we move on. This one came from Sean King. This is compliments of Qus shared the video with me.

There was a video that we saw on Instagram of police officers opening the doors to their vehicles as they were interacting with the suspect or whatever the case is. They were blasting Disney music very loudly, and the reason for that was so that the Disney music would trigger a copyright violation on social media, which would prevent the videos that people who are the onlookers and recording on their phones making sure to keep the police honest, making

sure that those videos would not go viral. This was the point, and they admitted it in the videos. It's interesting now. We did an episode, you know a while back, where we talked about how police will move their vehicle in the line of sight of folks filming police encounters, or will physically stand put place their bodies in the way of folks filming the interaction. And they'll say, you know, I need this space to conduct my investigation or you

know whatever. But we can see that they're physically doing that to prevent someone from getting a good angle of the engaging officers interaction with a suspect, you know, And those things also feel very unfair, and it feels like very sinister, underhanded. You know, why blast Disney music in the middle of the night in a neighborhood when everyone's sleeping. They all came out. It was like, yo, can you turn your music down? If you're not hiding anything. I

would it's we are trying to keep everyone honest. And it's never lost on us that the police are the ones with the guns. All of them have guns. We have cell phones. You win, right, But this posturing and this you want to talk about odd movements, odd physical gestures, you know what I mean? Those are the sorts of things I'm gonna put my body in the line of the camera and so forth. So I just wanted to

follow up with that one as well. So yeah, right, there are a few follow up stories for us, just to bring everyone up to speed.