Where we are...

David A Fairbanks

 

In the midst of all the noise in Baltimore lies a very old and never

to end fact, "Job Skills"

No civilization can expect to get past primitivism until there is a universal want for genuine opportunity for every one. Even a racist culture can acknowledge a need for job skills and jobs that pay a living wage, if only to advantage the racists.

 

The United States foolishly created irrational expectations for blacks in the 1960s only to allow millions of unskilled jobs to bleed away to Asia Mexico and Latin America. Millions ended up homeless or living with relatives. Drug abuse became a cheap way to sedate angry hearts and minds and led to a huge expansion of inmate population and the decline of once stable inner city communities.

 

There is no difference in intelligence or capacity to learn among the races. What there is as Studs Terkel spoke of in his famous book:  "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession" is an unwillingness to solve our problems in a lasting way. We are cheap and look for simplistic solutions. We defeat ourselves.

 

Urban civilization cannot last in a fury of bigotry and stupid politics, it will eventually be burnt down by a mob of disillusioned folk.

 

Martin Luther King once said "Riot is the voice of the unheard"

 

What is coming is a cynical 2016 campaign that is laced with racist appeals and then in 2017 the usual indifference and eventually the next explosion. 

 

When will America finally decide to be a serious nation that solves problems instead of evading them? 

Atlanta Journal

Hoping to Resuscitate a Portion of the City’s Heart

By RICHARD FAUSSET NY TTIMES

An entrance to the street-level stores, many of which are closed, at Underground Atlanta. Credit Kevin Liles for The New York Times

ATLANTA — There was a time in the 1960s when Underground Atlanta, a 12-acre complex of viaducts and storefronts in the heart of downtown, was billed as this city’s answer to Bourbon Street. In the 1980s, it was reimagined as a tourist-friendly "festival marketplace" full of novelty retailers angling to attract out-of-town conventioneers. When that idea faltered, there was talk of turning it into a casino.

Today, after languishing for years as a tacky, costly hole in the center of the city, Underground is due for its next major makeover, one based on a radical concept for this sprawl-loving metropolis: People might actually want to live downtown.

By September, a South Carolina development company is expected to complete its $25.8 million purchase of Underground. Plans discussed by the company, WRS, call for adding roughly 900 apartments and a supermarket, and renovating the cavernous below-street-level mall, home to a row of shuttered nightclubs and vendors hawking hip-hop CDs, $10 jeans and rhinestone cellphone cases.

A South Carolina development company is expected to complete a $25.8 million purchase of Underground by September. Credit Kevin Liles for The New York Times

These days, "there’s not really much attracting people to Underground," said Tre Tate, an out-of-work actor who was hanging out there recently.

Mr. Tate, 45, was standing on Upper Alabama Street on a late afternoon, near a Waffle House and a number of vacant retail spaces. He asked one passer-by for a dollar for bus fare.

The street is among a number of viaducts built a century ago to help manage the flow of traffic in what was then a booming railroad hub. The viaducts cover the ground-floor storefronts below, giving the zone its curious upstairs-downstairs character. For decades, developers and city leaders sought to capitalize on that design, imagining Underground as a one-of-a-kind destination for downtown visitors.

The new plan, said Kristi Rooks, a WRS project developer, will focus on attracting residents, now that this city, for so long defined by suburban development, appears to be looking inward.

In the 1970s, a decade characterized by white flight and suburban sprawl, the city of Atlanta shed roughly 70,000 residents. But recent population estimates suggest that the city is adding thousands of residents per year, with some looking for a more soulful urban experience, or at least a way to avoid a soul-deadening commute.

The population boom is helping drive other developments in the city, including the BeltLine, an unfinished 22-mile pathway for pedestrians, bikes and possibly public transit that follows old railroad lines; and Ponce City Market, a project that is transforming a historic Sears, Roebuck & Co. building into new retail, residential and office space.

"I don’t think that our idea is revolutionary," Ms. Rooks said of Underground. "I think that our timing is spot on. People want to be in urban centers, and they want that authenticity, and they want to be on transit. And that wasn’t always the case."

The sale, if completed, will come as a relief to the city government, which has been losing roughly $8 million a year on the property. It has also excited urban planners and city dwellers, who believe that Atlanta has for too long allowed its downtown to be dominated by government buildings, anonymous skyscrapers and tourist attractions like the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola museum.

　

Over the last decade, there has been an injection of life downtown, largely from the 32,000-student Georgia State University, which has expanded aggressively, building new residence halls and taking over office towers for use as classroom space.

There have been other signs of a reawakened neighborhood, with a clutch of old buildings around Underground recently converted into art galleries and loft-style office spaces. Ms. Rooks visited one of those spaces for a recent meeting, telling about 50 residents that the plan, particularly the supermarket, could serve as a catalyst for more residential development.

The Underground has fallen victim to changing retail trends and perceptions that the area is overrun by panhandlers and petty criminals. Credit Kevin Liles for The New York Times

"This is probably the only opportunity in downtown to get the retail uses that I think downtown desperately needs to be successful," she said.

Underground and the city blocks around it constituted one of Atlanta’s first commercial districts. The history of the area since then has reflected both the shared plight of American downtowns and the peculiarities of Atlanta, the economic capital of the Deep South.

The area was home to a number of saloons as early as the 1870s.

The first modern revival of the district came in the late 1960s and ’70s, as a night life center aided by liquor laws in Fulton County that were looser than those in many surrounding counties.

The second revival of Underground, as a tourist-oriented shopping mall, had some success, but eventually fell victim to changing retail trends and perceptions that the area was overrun by panhandlers and petty criminals.

White fear of a majority-black city also played a role. "Gradually, gradually, gradually, we’re getting over it," said Priscilla Smith, the executive director of Eyedrum, an avant-garde art and music gallery that recently relocated near Underground. "It’s awful. But it’s taken a while."

The recent meeting was sponsored by the Center for Civic Innovation, a nonprofit that calls itself "Atlanta’s City Lab." Kyle Kessler, president of the Atlanta Downtown Neighborhood Association, showed responses to a recent survey about the area around Underground. Among the most common were: sketchy, forgotten, blighted, scary.

Participants then talked about their hopes for the area, writing some of them on large sheets of paper.

They spoke of a neighborhood with more full-time residents of many races and income levels, and streets that did not become desolate after dark.

One participant, wielding a marker, boiled such comments down to a two-word phrase.

"REAL CITY," she wrote.

British MP George Galloway Loves to Hate the USA

Nico Hines The  Daily Beast

 

BRADFORD, United Kingdom — It didn’t take long. It rarely does. Forty-four seconds into his latest election debate, George Galloway had already pivoted to the war in Iraq. Describing the 2003 invasion as a "gigantic crime," the member of Parliament for Bradford West blamed the "most grotesque coalition in all history—the Bush-Blair gang."

In this lively mid-sized city in West Yorkshire, it turns out America-hating is a sure-fire vote-winner. Galloway, who’s been on good terms with most of the top U.S.-haters, from Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad to Hugo Chavez, is running for reelection, and he’s expected to win. But that tells you as much about the changing face of Britain as it does about this unlikely Scottish politician or diplomatic relations across the Atlantic.

In turbulent recent years, the controversial MP has been accused by a U.S. Senate subcommittee of profiting from the United Nations’s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq; been expelled from the Labour Party; hosted regular shows on Iran’s Press TV and Russia Today; attempted to redefine rape; and purred like a cat on the Big Brother reality show.

For most politicians, these résumé entries would be insurmountable problems. Not for George Galloway. Despite having no major party backing, he was comfortably elected MP for Bradford in 2012 and remains the clear favorite to be returned to the Houses of Parliament at next month’s General Election.

To make any sense of his enduring popularity, you need to visit his district.

He declared Bradford to be an "Israel-free zone," where Israeli academics and tourists were not welcome.

On Oak Lane in the city’s Manningham neighborhood a huge banner shows Galloway’s face beneath the name of his left-wing party, Respect, which grew out of the Stop the War coalition in 2004. The banner was fastened to the side of Punjab Halal Meat, a butcher that specializes in whole lambs available for around $100 apiece.

A few yards up the hill, Sohail Khokar, 26, was standing at the door of one of his family’s three barber shops. The Manningham district, he explained, used to be a vibrant area with a mixed community. "It’s all Asians here now," he said. Women are dressed modestly in the hijab, men in the shalwar kameez. In the whole city, over 20 percent of the population describes itself as Pakistani or British Pakistani, but the area has never had a Muslim MP.

The young businessman said Galloway had been instrumental in setting up a women-only gym in the neighborhood and was always checking in, asking how business was going. "George cares for what we care for," he said. And that doesn’t just mean day-to-day commercial life in the city. Galloway also stands against what he has described as "absolute Yankee domination" of the world.

His championing of the Palestinian territories and attacks on the invasion of Iraq have gone way beyond typical Western liberal critiques. He compared President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler and declared Bradford to be an "Israel-free zone," where Israeli academics and tourists were not welcome.

Debates about the Middle East and South Asia are seen as more than just foreign policy in Bradford. "They’re our sacred lands," said Khokar.

That’s music to Galloway’s ears. For 20 years he was an MP for Glasgow, where a tiny proportion of the population was excited about his pro-Palestinian campaigning. "Now that I’m the member of Parliament for Bradford it’s like being in heaven without having to die," he told The Daily Beast, "because everyone virtually in Bradford West constituency is with me entirely on the issue of Iraq, on the issue of Palestine. Hallelujah, I say. Don’t blame me for it."

"Muslims like me because I stand up for them; I don’t stand up for them because they like me," said Galloway.

He was kicked out of the Labour Party under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair for a series of attacks on the war in Iraq that were deemed to have encouraged British troops to defy orders and incited the Arab world to take up arms against Britain.

In 2005, Galloway stood as a Respect candidate in Bethnal Green and Bow, another area with a large Asian population, beating the Labour candidate who had supported the invasion of Iraq. Two years later, he was suspended from Parliament after an investigation into Oil-for-Food program links to his charity, which opposed United Nations sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime before the war.

Despite the suspension, Galloway’s political life would be revived in Bradford in 2012 where he breached another Labour stronghold. "I did say that Mr. Blair and New Labour would rue the day that they expelled me and I think they’ve rued it once or twice," he said.

Before the start of his third political life, he had already begun to diversify; hosting shows on Iran’s Press TV, Russia’s RT and Al-Mayadeen, a Beirut-based channel that has been linked to Hezbollah.

Galloway insisted there was nothing wrong with profiting from his appearances on these channels. "I don’t take money, I take wages," he said. "Every television presenter gets wages and so do I, and they’re declared in full in the parliamentary register. If Rupert Murdoch tomorrow offered me a show on Sky [Murdoch’s British TV network], I’d take it, the only proviso would be the same proviso I’ve made to all these stations, Al-Mayadeen, Press TV, RT. It’s the same proviso—don’t try and tell me what to say, don’t try and tell me what I cannot say. I am bound to tell you none of these three stations has never done that, but I don’t think Rupert Murdoch would make the same offer."

Just two weeks before Election Day, Galloway found time for a trip to London to tape a show for Al-Mayadeen about Venezuela and its relationship with the U.S.

In a small studio in West London, he looked into the camera and urged his viewers to "spread awareness of what the United States is up to here, know that what is happening in Venezuela today will be somewhere else tomorrow. Any government, even a British one, it might sound far-fetched, if Britain had a government like the government of [Nicholas] Maduro and Chavez before him, the United States would try and overthrow it. They have no limits—they don’t want people to come to know there is another way of doing things."

Two hundred miles north, Fizah Koser, 36, an estate agent from Bradford who was wearing a hijab, explained that Galloway is "the only voice we’ve ever had."

One woman who is battling to overturn that widely held belief is Naz Shah, Labour’s candidate standing against Galloway. Her extraordinary personal story includes a period of exile in Pakistan where her mother sent her at the age of 12. Shah said she was forced into an abusive arranged marriage at the age of 15.

The Labour candidate was eventually able to escape her tormentor but not before she’d had three children, and her mother had snapped and poisoned her own abusive partner with arsenic. Shah’s mother was convicted of murder in 1993.

Shah would appear to be as tough an opponent as you could imagine, but since winning the Labour selection she has suffered vile online abuse and discovered a murdered crow, with grass placed in its beak, in her backyard.

"If people want to play them tactics and want to go through an election using them kind of tactics that’s their choice, but it’s not what I’m going to be rising to," she told The Daily Beast.

Galloway’s associates have accused Shah of lying about her ordeal after the Respect MP sent an intermediary in Pakistan to uncover her marriage certificate. The document claims that she was 16, not 15, at the time of the wedding, which Shah disputes.

Shah declined to ask Galloway to call off his supporters. "That’s George Galloway’s choice," she said. "I want this election to be about Bradford West. Galloway came to town like a circus and he’s going to leave like a circus."

On Thursday, Galloway promised that defeat in Bradford would leave him free to run to be the next mayor of London. The circus will continue.

Marriage Proposals for Republican Candidates

By Amy Davidson The New Yorker

Kenji Yoshino, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., writes in his new book, "Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial," that when he and his husband, Ron Stoneham, were getting ready for their wedding, in 2009, they learned that, these days, most couples leave out "that tremulous moment where the official states, ‘If any of you can show just cause why these two may not be married, speak now, or else forever hold your peace.’ " The phrase in its traditional form, from the Book of Common Prayer, is actually "why these two may not be lawfully married," and it is meant to allow for the discovery of, say, a wife in another town, and not, outside of a romantic comedy, for the groom’s brother to announce that he thinks the groom really loves someone else—or, God forbid, for a filibuster by Ted Cruz. But Yoshino and Stoneham asked Judge Guido Calabresi, who officiated at their very lawful Connecticut wedding, to keep the line in, as "a subtle reminder to ourselves and our guests that many of our fellow citizens felt they had just cause to object to our marriage." Yoshino adds that he was quite sure no one would jump up, "though I did think wildly of that scene in Jane Eyre, when a stranger declares: ‘The marriage cannot go on.’ "

Perhaps the various Republicans considering a Presidential run, who have lately been asked if they would attend a same-sex wedding, have been engaging with similar thoughts. The question—which Jorge Ramos, of Fusion TV, first posed to Marco Rubio, and was then picked up by the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt—is a good one, as evidenced by the answers, which have ranged in tone from dogmatically alarmed (Rick Santorum) and sourly crimped (Cruz) to contorted (Scott Walker), upbeat but vague (Rick Perry), genial (Rubio), and fairly forthright (John Kasich), and have been consistently revealing. Perry said that he would "probably" go to one, but that he resented being asked what he and others have called a "gotcha" question—a description that is accurate only if "gotcha" has become a synonym for "requires candidate to think." More than that, the question requires politicians to think about what both their rhetoric and our laws mean in real life. It says something about Cruz, for instance, that he first dodged and then attacked the question, saying that liberals were trying to "twist the question of marriage" into a matter of "emotions and personalities"—something presumably distant from the institution. Liberals were also claiming that conservatives "must hate people who are gay," Cruz said, adding, "As you know, that has nothing to do with the operative legal question." Asking a politician how he thinks people should be treated is a pretty basic one; Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Chris Christie have avoided it this week, but they should make a point of saying how they would R.S.V.P.

For Santorum, a Catholic, attending a gay wedding is out of the question, because it would be "a violation of my faith." The puzzling thing is that, as a wedding guest, he wouldn’t be required to do anything but watch; he wouldn’t even have to deliver the flowers, which has been the complaint of gay-marriage-opposed florists pushing for "religious freedom" laws in various states. If just witnessing behavior that he views as dishonorable is against his religion, how did he ever manage to spend so much time in the halls of Congress? The question that Hewitt put to him was whether he would attend, specifically, the wedding "of a loved one or a family friend or anyone who you were close to"—not a casual acquaintance. Surely, Santorum has attended weddings of people who are not Catholics without feeling that the vow cast a spell on him, or induced him to engage in heresy. (Marco Rubio, who in response to Ramos’s question said he would show up, pointed out that, although he is Catholic, he goes to the weddings of divorced people all the time.) And yet it is the speaking of vows that seems to be the focus of anxiety: Scott Walker told reporters that, when one of his relatives had a same-sex wedding, he and his wife went to the reception, but he made a point of saying that they had skipped the ceremony.

Advocates of same-sex marriage might say that the centrality of the vow is precisely the point. The vow—the lawful vow—is the important thing to witness. Marriage is a state that is different from being unmarried, and it transforms and shelters a family, both parents and children, legally and socially. That is why civil unions and even the state-sanctioned marriages that, before the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned, lacked federal recognition—what Ruth Bader Ginsberg called "skim-milk marriage"—are inadequate. People like Walker might be willing to dance to a same-sex couple’s music and eat their cake, but if one of the partners falls ill, for example, just having had a reception won’t get the other one into the hospital room, or give him or her full parental rights to children they might raise together. Those circumstances are why several of the plaintiffs in the cases that the Supreme Court will hear next Tuesday brought their suits.

　

And that’s why Rubio’s answer, though far more open than Cruz’s or Santorum’s, was only a starting point. Rubio said that "of course" he’d go to the wedding—weddings are for going to, after all—an answer that underscores his instinct for connectedness, which may be his greatest political asset. He added, "Ultimately, if someone that you care for and is part of your family has decided to move in one direction or another, or feels that way because of who they love, you respect that because you love them." He chose to say "who they love" rather than "who they are"—he has said that he thinks homosexuality is a behavioral choice, and strongly opposes same-sex marriage. It is good to know that, unlike Cruz, Rubio sees love as a factor in how you deal with people. But he is more likely to lead people who oppose gay marriage, and who saw the interview, to question their opposition than he is to moderate his own position. To an extent, that is true of all of the major Republican candidates (even when they attend events hosted by gay businessmen, as Cruz did on Monday). They are still fighting marriage equality.

When is a piece of wedding cake just a wedge of sugar and cream and conviviality rather than a wedge issue? As I’ve written before, one of the big things that the marriage-equality argument has on its side, besides basic justice, is that people like going to weddings. They are a good thing in life. (It is a tragedy of cultural timing that the masterful montage scene in "The Wedding Crashers," which came out in 2005, just a year after Massachusetts became the first state with marriage equality, includes no same-sex weddings.) An invitation sets in motion a logical and emotional process. Weddings make you think about what marriage means; is that something that Santorum and other non-attenders are afraid of? John Kasich told CNN that when a close friend who is gay invited him to his wedding he said that he had to think about it. That involved, sensibly enough, consulting his wife. He said he asked her, "‘What do you think? You wanna go?’ She goes, ‘Oh, I’m absolutely going.’ " Kasich still opposes same-sex marriage, but, as far as going to a wedding, suddenly it was "pretty simple. I care about him. He cares about me. He invited me to something. I’m going to go do it. It’s not that complicated." And so, Kasich continued, "I called him today and said, ‘Hey, just let me know what time it is.’ " A time for him and the rest of us to mark in the calendar would be next Tuesday, at around ten in the morning, when the Supreme Court is called into session, and the Justices ask the lawyers what it means to be married. Afterward, there may be cake.

Freddie Gray in Baltimore: Another City, Another Death in the Public Eye

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and RON NIXON NY TIMES

BALTIMORE — In life, friends say, Freddie Gray was an easygoing, slender young man who liked girls and partying here in Sandtown, a section of west Baltimore pocked by boarded-up rowhouses and known to the police for drug dealing and crime.

In death, Mr. Gray, 25, has become the latest symbol in the running national debate over police treatment of black men — all the more searing, people here say, in a city where the mayor and police commissioner are black.

Questions are swirling around just what happened to Mr. Gray, who died here Sunday — a week after he was chased and restrained by police officers, and suffered a spine injury, which later killed him, in their custody. The police say they have no evidence that their officers used force. A lawyer for Mr. Gray’s family accuses the department of a cover-up, and on Tuesday the Justice Department opened a civil rights inquiry into his death.

But as protests continued Tuesday night — with hundreds of angry residents, led by a prominent pastor and Mr. Gray’s grieving family, chanting and marching in the streets — the death has also fueled debate on whether African-American leadership here can better handle accusations of police brutality than cities like Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., with their white-dominated governments.

"Unlike other places where incidents like this have happened, they understand what it means to be black in America," said City Councilman Brandon Scott, an ally of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and a frequent critic of Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.

"They understand how something like this can get out of hand very quickly," Mr. Scott said. "They understand the community’s frustration more than anyone else. But at the same time they also understand the opposite — they understand the need to have law enforcement in neighborhoods. So it puts them in a bind."

This week the mayor and police commissioner have appeared repeatedly in public promising a full and transparent review of Mr. Gray’s death. On Tuesday, the police released the names of six officers who had been suspended with pay, including a lieutenant, a woman and three officers in their 20s who joined the force less than three years ago. Officers canvassed west Baltimore, looking for witnesses.

Mr. Batts turned up in Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, chatting with residents and shaking hands. And Ms. Rawlings-Blake said in an interview that she had asked Gov. Larry Hogan for help in getting an autopsy on Mr. Gray performed by the state medical examiner made public, even piecemeal, as quickly as possible. The mayor said she supported the Justice Department inquiry.

Chanting "Black Lives Matter" and "Justice for Freddie," protesters marched Tuesday evening on the block where Mr. Gray was arrested. The Rev. Jamal Bryant asked for a moment of silence. Mr. Gray’s relatives — including his mother, her head shrouded in the hood of a sweatshirt — paused quietly.

Mr. Gray’s arrest, which was captured on a cellphone video that shows him being dragged, seemingly limp, into a police van, has revived a debate in this city over police practices.

"We have a very challenging history in Baltimore," Ms. Rawlings-Blake said, adding that she had worked hard "to repair a broken relationship" between black residents and the police. She called Mr. Gray’s death "a very sad and frustrating setback."

Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Mr. Batts had been talking about the problem long before the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August spawned national protests and the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. But the officials’ actions are doing little to assuage angry residents here. Rosa Mobley says she witnessed Mr. Gray’s arrest from her bedroom window, and heard him screaming as the police dragged him into a transport van. "We got this so-called black mayor, but she don’t care nothing about us," Ms. Mobley said as Mr. Batts pulled up in the neighborhood in a black SUV just before noon on Tuesday. "They don’t come around here. Just because we’re poor, we don’t need to be treated like this."

Because there are no national statistics on police-involved killings, it is impossible to say whether their numbers are increasing. But the growing prevalence of cellphone and police video, coupled with heightened scrutiny by the news media and the public after Ferguson, has focused intense attention on such cases, especially when officers are white and victims are black.

The police here did not release the racial breakdown of the six suspended officers. Now the Justice Department will look into whether they violated Mr. Gray’s civil rights. Such inquiries are not unusual; in Ferguson, the department did not find Mr. Brown’s rights were violated. However, a second broader Justice Department review of the Ferguson Police Department resulted in a scathing report detailing abusive and discriminatory practices by the city’s law enforcement system.

In Baltimore, police-community tensions date at least to 2005, when the Police Department, following a practice known as "zero-tolerance policing" made more than 100,000 arrests in a heavily African-American city of then roughly 640,000 people.

In 2006, the N.A.A.C.P. and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, alleging a broad pattern of abuse in which people were routinely arrested without probable cause. The city settled in 2010 for $870,000, agreed to retrain officers and publicly rejected "zero-tolerance policing." Ms. Rawlings-Blake became mayor that year.

In 2012 she brought in Mr. Batts, who had run the police department in Oakland, Calif. In 2013, he proposed that police officers wear body cameras to capture encounters like the one that injured Mr. Gray; plans are now in the works for a pilot project.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake has also eliminated a police unit that had a reputation for treating suspects harshly. Last year, she and Mr. Batts asked the Justice Department to investigate after The Baltimore Sun reported that taxpayers had paid nearly $6 million since 2011 in judgments or settlements in 102 lawsuits alleging police misconduct. That investigation is ongoing.

William Murphy Jr., the lawyer for the Gray family, said Tuesday in an interview that "the commissioner’s heart is in the right place," and that the mayor — whose father, Pete Rawlings, was a civil rights advocate and powerful Maryland politician — "understands police brutality and the extent to which it has a cancerous effect on our society."

But Mr. Murphy said they had inherited "a dysfunctional department" whose officers "had no probable cause" to arrest Mr. Gray, who was stopped early on the morning of April 12 after a police lieutenant made eye contact with him and he ran away. That lieutenant was one of the six officers who were suspended.

"He was running while black," Mr. Murphy said of Mr. Gray, "and that’s not a crime."

At a news conference Monday, Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said Mr. Gray "gave up without the use of force." Mr. Gray, who was apparently asthmatic, then asked for his inhaler, but he did not have one; he was conscious and speaking when he was loaded into the van to be taken to the police station, Mr. Rodriguez said.

In interviews on Tuesday, witnesses gave various accounts. Michelle Gross, who took cellphone video of the arrest, said she saw two officers standing over Mr. Gray as people said: "He’s just lying there? Why don’t you call an ambulance? Why don’t you get him some help?"

Another witness, Kiona Mack, who said she took the cellphone video that showed Mr. Gray being dragged into the van, said she saw officers "sitting on his back, and having his leg twisted."

Members of Mr. Gray’s family have said he suffered three fractured vertebrae in his neck and that his larynx was crushed, according to The Baltimore Sun; Mr. Murphy, the lawyer, said Mr. Gray’s spinal cord was 80 percent severed. Those details have not been confirmed by doctors or authorities, but experts on spinal cord injury said even less obvious neck trauma could be life-threatening.

"It doesn’t necessarily take huge force to fracture or dislocate a vertebra, and have a traumatic compression of the spinal cord," said Ben A. Barres, professor of neurobiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. "It gets worse very rapidly if it’s not treated." And, he said, "moving the person, like lifting him into a van, or even the ride in the van, could make the injury much worse."

The police have said they will complete their inquiry by May 1 and turn it over to the state’s attorney in Baltimore — Maryland’s name for local prosecutors — who will determine whether to bring criminal charges. Ms. Rawlings-Blake has said she will also convene an independent commission.

In Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, which is adjacent to a public housing development called the Gilmor Homes, people remembered him Tuesday as a likable young man who sometimes got into trouble with the law — Maryland court records show he had at least two arrests for drug-related charges since December.

Mr. Gray had a twin sister, and a brother who died, friends say, and he also suffered lead poisoning as a child. They are furious about his death, and particularly about police conduct.

"He wasn’t out causing any trouble," said Roosevelt McNeil, 26, who had known Mr. Gray since Mr. Gray was a child. "He had some arrests, but he wasn’t a big drug dealer or something like that. He was a great guy over all — he didn’t deserve to be handled like that. Why won’t the cops say how they ended up going after him, from that to him having his neck broken?"

Jason Grant contributed reporting from Baltimore, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Susan Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

 As often happens an 'absurd' moment defines a tipping point. This tragedy in Tulsa along with the shooting of Walter Scott may well be the electric charge that cause the United States to finally do something about a tawdry police culture that has prevailed for several decades. Casual racism, the willingness to vilify the poor and to enforce the rule of law as a child's game may finally be exposed and put to rest.
David A Fairbanks
Reno Nevada

Tulsa’s Killer Is Sheriff’s Sugar Daddy

The Daily Beast

Kate Briquelet and N. L. Nestel

 

The volunteer cop charged with fatally shooting an unarmed man plied the sheriff’s department with trips and gear, former officers say.

The Tulsa deputy charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting an unarmed black man was the sheriff’s sugar daddy—treating him to exotic cruises and fishing trips—former officers with the sheriff’s department told The Daily Beast.

Volunteer cop Robert Bates, 73, made national headlines after authorities released a video of the senior officer mistaking his gun for a Taser and killing Eric Harris, 44, during a bungled sting operation. "Oh, I shot him. I’m sorry," Bates can be heard on the police cameras after yelling, "Taser!"

Hours before the Tulsa County district attorney charged Bates with second-degree manslaughter on Monday, Sheriff Stanley Glanz defended the deputy—who is his longtime friend and served as his insurance agent and onetime election campaign chair.

"He made an error," Glanz told the Tulsa World. "How many errors are made in an operating room every week?"

Glanz also showed a Tulsa World reporter cellphone photos of him fishing with Bates, a millionaire insurance executive. "Bob and I both love to fish," he said. "Is it wrong to have a friend?"

Still, former officers with the sheriff’s department told The Daily Beast that Bates was a "pay to play" policeman. The businessman donated thousands of dollars worth of vehicles and equipment to the force.

"Bob Bates came on board because he had all this money," one former reserve deputy said, adding that the sheriff and other higher-ups would "go on these cruises in the Bahamas and in Mexico all the time."

"[Bates] foots the bill," the deputy added. "The sheriff just gave him free rein because he was treating him right. He bought his way into this position."

Another former full-time deputy said Bates was "getting glad-handed" around the office because of his wealth.

"This is your typical Southern good ol’ boys system," he said, adding that before the shooting Bates planned to take Glanz on a fishing trip to Florida.

Major Shannon T. Clark of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on the allegations.

The volunteer was such a familiar face that when the TV show Cops came to Tulsa in 2008, producers asked if Bates was undersheriff.

"I’m not going to respond to that," he said in an email to The Daily Beast. "His personal life has nothing to do with this story."

Bates’s attorney, Scott Wood, said the sheriff’s drug task force was outfitted with surveillance equipment paid for by the volunteer.

"The contributions that he made, especially to the drug task force, has made a giant impact and led to drug arrests," Wood told The Daily Beast, adding he was uncertain if Bates purchased the officers’ body cameras.

Regarding the luxury-trip allegations, Wood confirmed that Bates and sheriff’s department personnel vacationed together in the Bahamas. But he couldn’t say if Bates "paid their way there."

"You have to know Bob Bates," Wood said. "I know that he vacations in the Bahamas, I know that other members in the Sheriff’s Office have gone with him. But it would be like if we were college friends and we all said, ‘Let’s go there.’"

The volunteer was such a familiar face that when the TV show Cops came to Tulsa in 2008, producers asked if Bates was undersheriff.

"They were like, ‘Who is this guy? Is he the undersheriff or something?’" the insider recalled. "We said, ‘No, he’s just some new reserve.’"

Oklahoma watchdogs are questioning why Bates was involved in a deadly undercover weapons bust with an ex-con.

Bates could serve up to four years in prison for the manslaughter charge. And it’s not his only legal dilemma.

He is being sued in federal court for refusing to "vacate the premises" after selling his company, Robert C. Bates L.L.C., for tens of millions of dollars in 1999.

The new owner claims that when Bates finally left, he made off with "hundreds of files," court records show.

Roger Crow, a fellow reserve deputy since 1982, told The Daily Beast that he sees Bates at monthly meetings and at the city’s annual fair.

He said the department warns reservists about drawing the wrong weapon in training videos.

"It’s a tragedy," he said. "We’ve all gone through the training, but when it comes to what they call ‘the slip,’ when you think you’re harnessing your weapon—it happens. Even through the academy ... you think you’re pulling your weapon but you’re pulling out the Taser, unfortunately."

CLEAR AS DAY Daily Beast

The Man Who Watched Walter Scott Die

Mike Barnicle

How an immigrant from Santo Domingo shot a video that changed America.

Feidin Santana stood along a third-floor hallway at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York the other day, a shy smile on his face, bewilderment from the arrival of sudden fame swirling in his head because he used his smartphone on a sunny South Carolina Saturday morning to make perhaps the 21st-century version of the Zapruder film.

Santana is 23, in the United States not quite two years from Santo Domingo, where his family still lives. The other day, in the hallway, he looked like any of millions of the young in tan pants, blue shirt, light jacket and black sneakers, his smartphone in a coat pocket.

"I was on the way to work," he said. "That’s the way I always go. And I was on the phone talking."

He has a job as a barber in North Charleston, S.C. And he was talking about his daily route to the shop, a walkway alongside a fence and a path where there are no homes or businesses and hardly any people.

"I was just walking and talking when I saw the police and the man," Santana was saying. "I heard the sound of the Taser and I see the man on the ground so I got off my call and walked over closer to where I could see more better and I turned on my camera on my phone."

What Feiden Santana saw next and what he recorded has now been seen by nearly everyone in America who does not live in a cave. It is a film clip of cultural dynamite, the last seconds of life for a black man, Walter Scott, 50 years old, who was killed at the hand of a man wearing a badge, Michael Slager, a North Charleston police officer, who shot eight rounds at Scott as he ran away from someone he feared, a white cop.

"He was trying to get away," Santana said. "He was running away. I think he was running from the Taser. Then the police officer stood there and he took out his gun and he just shot him. Just kept shooting his gun. He shot him in the back."

On Santana’s film, Michael Slager assumes a pistol range position, a two-hand grip on his gun, a sight on the target, the running Walter Scott, and squeezes off those rounds with the precision of someone conducting a routine qualifying test. When Walter Scott finally falls to the ground, Slager approaches the victim with the slow stroll of a man walking up the 18th fairway. Then Slager, sudden urgency in his step, jogs back to where he began shooting to pick something up off the ground.

Santana, at some risk to his own safety, kept recording. Kept getting closer too. He films the arrival of a second cop. He films Slager returning to Scott’s body to drop an object thought to be a Taser, which might have bolstered his story that Scott grabbed the weapon from Slager and caused the police officer to fear for his own life. A potentially credible defense for a shooting.

Scott, of course, was dead on the ground. Santana went to work. The news came on and when Santana heard the initial reports he knew what he heard was not what he had seen. He sought to tell police that he had the evidence of what actually occurred but got the distinct vibe this was not something they wanted, so he wondered what to do next.

"I was saying to myself this was not what happened," he said, standing in the hallway last week, three days after The New York Times broke the story about Feidin Santana’s film.

"I was scared for myself and my family," he was saying. "I have a wife and a family back in Santo Domingo and now they were scared for me, too."

"I was scared for myself and my family," he was saying. "I have a wife and a family back in Santo Domingo and now they were scared for me, too."

So Feidin Santana became one more person who suddenly viewed police with some apprehension. And what he filmed quickly and predictably became one more step – a huge one, too – in the increasingly wide gulf between many African Americans and police departments employed to protect and serve all of us. Those few seconds of video, proof that Walter Scott was a homicide victim, has done more to widen the gulf between communities of color and those who wear a shield than a death in Ferguson or another in Staten Island or Cleveland.

This time it began with a broken taillight. Slager had stopped a car being driven by Scott because the taillight was out; either a revenue stop aimed at collecting a fine for the North Charleston coffers or a harassment stop. Either way, a dumb way to use the time of any cop. These things hardly ever occur in largely white, suburban areas of this country. And only rarely does it happen in big cities where cops are more professional, better trained and busy doing real policing.

But there’s another issue, an ugly aspect of life in the United States, especially in some big and medium-sized cities in the Midwest and Northeast: huge sections of urban America remain segregated by a cement wall of currency, not intent. Income discrepancy between blacks and whites remains a vivid reminder of inequality driven by income or lack of it. A lot of minority families simply cannot afford to buy a home or rent an apartment in places where decent jobs are available. A lot of white families and their children end up living in neighborhoods that resemble Helsinki, Finland, never knowing—really knowing—a black or Hispanic family. We are a nation inching closer and closer to going through our days knowing others just like us, only us.

Michael Slager shot and killed Walter Scott. And the damage he did to those in other police departments across the land is deep and will linger and it infects even those who have been in America for a short time.

"I was scared after I shot that video," Feidin Santana said the other day. "I’m still kinda scared."

After 8 Shots in North Charleston, Michael Slager Becomes an Officer Scorned

By FRANCES ROBLES, ALAN BLINDER and JASON GRANT　

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Michael T. Slager played cops and robbers as a boy in the Virginia woods, volunteered as an emergency medical technician after high school and earned an associate degree in criminal justice while working full time as a patrolman.

Before he was caught on video firing eight shots at the back of an unarmed fleeing man and then dispassionately handcuffing him as he lay dying, he received praise from his supervisors at the North Charleston Police Department and excelled in police training. He was also the subject of two formal complaints in five years.

The adults who watched Mr. Slager, now 33, grow up recalled him being a shy loner who struggled to adjust to his broken home, and had a hard time socializing. They remembered him more for what he was not — not much of an athlete, not a troublemaker and not someone who spent much time with friends.

A little more than a week ago he was just a police officer in a working-class city — a homebody whose patrol car was often parked in his driveway — with a wife, expecting their first child together. Now even the police union, which is not paying for his legal defense, has distanced itself from him.

Mr. Slager was recorded shooting a suspect eight times. Credit Charleston County Detention Center

His mother, Karen Sharpe, said her son seemed unaware of just how much attention those eight shots had garnered, and how much he had come to embody law enforcement gone awry.

"I think he’s scared to death," Ms. Sharpe said in an interview on Friday shortly after visiting her son at the Charleston County jail, where he is being held without bond. "He’s never been in this situation. Nobody ever thinks they’re going to be in this situation."

Mr. Slager was arrested and charged with murder on Tuesday, after state investigators said he had given inconsistent accounts about the shooting of Walter L. Scott, a 50-year-old forklift operator. It is not clear why Mr. Scott ran when Mr. Slager stopped him for a broken taillight on April 4. Mr. Scott told the officer that he was in the process of buying the 1990s-era Mercedes-Benz he was driving but had not yet registered it. Mr. Scott owed $18,104 in child support payments and fees, and an arrest warrant was issued for him in 2013, according to county records.

A video shot by a barber on his way to work shows a brief tussle between the two men. Mr. Scott broke free and ran. Instead of giving chase, Mr. Slager fired his service weapon eight times as Mr. Scott staggered and collapsed to his death in a grassy field behind a pawnshop just a mile from the officer’s home.

The video shows Mr. Slager dropping something beside Mr. Scott’s body. Most civil rights activists who watched the video believe the object was a Taser that the officer said Mr. Scott had grabbed.

The video has been viewed more than one million times on YouTube, but not by the officer’s mother.

The Police Department dismissed Mr. Slager on Wednesday, the day after his arrest.

"I can’t see him being a mean person, a bad person," Ms. Sharpe said. "He’s a very good person," she said. "He’s very generous. He likes to help."

Mr. Slager was born in Florida and moved with his family to Virginia and later to southern New Jersey, where he lived with his parents and a pair of sisters in a two-story, two-car garage home on a cul-de-sac in Mount Laurel. His father, an office worker at U.P.S., used to take the family out on his sailboat, but later went through rocky patches after a failed business venture, neighbors recalled. When his parents split up in the 1990s, Mr. Slager moved with his mother and sisters back to Florida, but he soon returned to live with his father in New Jersey.

His father hired a tutor to help the adolescent with his studies. The woman, a child advocate employed at a nearby school district, wound up marrying Mr. Slager’s father and moving in, neighbors recalled. The couple also divorced, and Mr. Slager’s father now lives in Doylestown, Pa.

"It’s very devastating," his father, Thomas Slager, said, declining to comment further.

What we know about Walter L. Scott, a black man who was fatally shot in the back by Officer Michael T. Slager.

▪ Mr. Scott was a father of four and engaged.

▪ Mr. Scott, 50, served in the Coast Guard in 1984 and received a general discharge under honorable conditions.

▪ He had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for minor offenses like failure to pay child support or to show up for court hearings.

▪ He was a forklift operator for Brown Distribution Center, a warehouse in Ladson, S.C.

Helga Shay, a former neighbor in Mount Laurel, a suburban township about 15 miles outside Philadelphia, said the shooting was a stark departure from Mr. Slager’s retiring nature.

"I see him as a child of divorce," Mrs. Shay said. "And I think that may have had an impact on him, if he was a sensitive person, and he struck me as kind of sensitive — shy and a bit quiet. He did want to talk to you and be polite. It didn’t come easy for him."

She remembered him washing the family’s cars, doing chores like yard work and being helpful to his parents.

"Just a nice kid, you know," said Nancy Thomas, another former neighbor. "He was a little shy," she added.

After graduating from Lenape Regional High School in 2001 at the age of 19, Mr. Slager volunteered at Mount Laurel Emergency Medical Services, where he took dozens of hours of emergency medical training, including CPR.

"I remember him being always very respectful to me — you know, he said, ‘Yes, sir, no, sir,’ and he did what was expected of him," his former chief, Fran Pagurek, said by phone. "We never had an issue with Mike while he was here."

He worked briefly as a waiter in New Jersey, and then in 2003, Mr. Slager joined the Coast Guard. He served for six years, mostly in Florida, before joining the North Charleston Police Department.

In 2010, the year he joined the Police Department, he married a woman with two children. They lived in Goose Creek, a suburb, where the children, a boy and a girl, played on a trampoline in the backyard when they were not being home-schooled by their mother, Jamie.

Mr. Slager told neighbors that he was waiting to be called for a government job out West. When he sold his house and moved last year, they assumed that was where he had gone. He had actually moved only 10 miles away, into a house on a busy street much closer to his job.

"Officer Slager on his first day of training was very enthused and ready to work," an officer, Dan Bailey, wrote in a March 2010 report. "He wanted to be involved."

He earned early praise for his handling of an encounter with an armed person and, in one instance, demonstrating "a great relationship with a citizen who was providing officers with information that a resident in a community had been shot at."

In 2013, a North Charleston man filed a complaint against Mr. Slager, accusing the officer of arriving at his house in pursuit of a burglary suspect and using a Taser on him on the steps of his own home.

City records show that the man, Mario Givens, told authorities that he had explained to Mr. Slager that the suspect he sought was 5-foot-5. Mr. Givens was 6-foot-3. The burglary victim, who was waiting outside in her car, shouted to the officer that Mr. Givens was not the burglar, according to the records.

Mr. Slager was exonerated, according to city documents.

"I was upset, because technically, they took a real long time to investigate," Mr. Givens said at a news conference on Thursday, where he announced intentions to sue. "They kept telling me: ‘We’re still investigating. We’re still investigating.’ "

Had the city followed up, he said, maybe Mr. Scott would still be alive, because Mr. Slager would have been removed from the force.

Mr. Givens declined to comment further on Thursday, and no one answered the door at his home on Friday.

Also in 2013, Mr. Slager received an associate degree in criminal justice from Trident Technical College, where he also studied civil engineering.

His wife is expecting their first child together in May.

"He went to all the baby appointments, all the ultrasound appointments," his mother, Ms. Sharpe, said. "It saddens me to know that he won’t be in the delivery room."

Mrs. Shay, the former neighbor, spoke on Saturday with the officer’s stepmother, who was crying and puzzled over the latest turn of events and wondering whether Mr. Slager had become "desensitized" after joining the Police Department.

"She and I are agreeing on the fact that we both believe that something happened in the training," Mrs. Shay said. "She agrees with me. I, from the beginning, thought this is not Michael at all."

Mr. Slager’s lawyer, Andrew J. Savage III, has said little about the case. "We are continuing our effort to methodically investigate all the facts and circumstances which led to Officer Slager’s arrest," said Mr. Savage, who took the case after the first lawyer quit after the shooting video surfaced. "We have a long way to go."

Frances Robles and Alan Blinder reported from North Charleston, and Jason Grant from Mount Laurel, N.J., and Doylestown, Pa. Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting from Charleston, S.C. Kitty Bennett contributed research.