De
VS, ‘the land of the free’*, het land ook ‘van de ongekende
mogelijkheden’, zoals het neerschieten van groepen mensen, het land
van de witten dat ondanks een eerste gekleurde president nog steeds
gekleurden medeburgers op grote schaal discrimineert, beledigt en vernedert, zowel door
medeburgers als door de overheid, neem het onevenredig grote aantal
gekleurden dat door de politie wordt vermoord, of gearresteerd……*
Ondanks dat de gekleurde bevolking tot een minderheid behoort,
zitten er onevenredig veel gekleurden in het achterlijk
geprivatiseerde gevangeniswezen van de VS…….. Het land waar je als gekleurde
burger veelal heel anders wordt berecht dan een witte burger en
dat bepaald niet in positieve zin….*
Nu
blijkt ook nog eens dat gekleurde families in overwegend witte wijken
regelmatig worden lastiggevallen door witte racistische buren, waar de politie amper of zelfs niet ingrijpt……
Lees
de voorbeelden van racistisch geweld tegen gekleurde burgers,
geschreven door Rahima Nasa en Rachel Klickhouse:
“GET
OUT”: BLACK FAMILIES HARASSED IN THEIR OWN HOMES
(foto uit 1942, er is intussen maar weinig veranderd in de VS…..)
JANUARY
10, 2019 FRIENDS
OF GREED 3HATE
CRIMES, PROPUBLICA, RACISM
United
States (ProPublica)
– In
Delano, Minnesota, a
black family’s home was broken into
in March 2017 and a warning was spray-painted on the walls: “Get
out.” The vandals left a note, too: “Next time it’s going to be
fire.”
In
Athens, Tennessee, the white mother of young biracial children
alleged that she’d been harassed verbally by a neighbor for a year.
For
close to two years, ProPublica has been compiling reports of hate
crimes and bias incidents as part of our
Documenting Hate project.
The database now houses a vast compendium of ugliness in America.
Killings, assaults, threats of terror — they are all there.
One
of the more common entries involves people being harassed or
threatened at their place of residence, often by neighbors, the
people who live next door or down the hall or around the corner. Of
course, this isn’t new. The integration of neighborhoods in the
U.S. has been as fraught as the integration of the country’s
schools.
Jeannine
Bell, a lawyer and author of “Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence
and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing,”
said no corner of the country has any claim of immunity from the
problem. She also noted that the total number of such incidents is
not reliably captured in any formal data set, ours or those kept by
federal and local authorities. That’s because, she said, many of
these incidents go unreported.
“A
lot of times, the people that are targeted don’t even know that
this is a crime,” Bell said.
The
Documenting Hate database has close to 6,000 entries — a mix of
news reports, tips, personal stories of bigotry and records collected
by law enforcement and some anti-discrimination groups. Among the
most common things reported are anti-Muslim acts, which accounted for
359 entries, and swastikas showing up in public places, which were
the subject of an additional 400 or so.
More
than 300 entries were reports of harassment or menacing at people’s
homes, targeting people of a variety of races and religions. The most
frequent victims were African Americans. Indeed, African Americans
are the most frequently victimized group nationally for hate crimes,
according to data from the FBI.
That
finding prompted us to send inquiries to the dozen or so police
jurisdictions that had reported the highest number of anti-black hate
crimes to the FBI’s hate-crime database from 2010 to 2016. Since we
couldn’t get incident reports from every one of those
jurisdictions, we also made requests to several police departments
where we’d received data that included anti-black hate crimes.
In
total, we were able to identify 639 incidents of anti-black violence
or harassment from the police reports we received. More than a fifth
of those reports, 138 in all, were incidents involving people being
targeted by neighbors or in their homes.
In
Columbus, Ohio, a man went to police because someone had been ringing
his doorbell or banging on his garage 25 to 30 times a night, almost
every night. When the man went outside, the suspect would call him
racial slurs from the darkness. The man and his family are the only
black residents of their cul-de-sac. No arrests were made and the
case is currently listed as inactive.
In
Toledo, at the north end of the state, a man was allegedly harassing
three black neighbors in his neighborhood, using “unwarranted
racist language,” according to the police report. One day, the
suspect saw a car with black occupants throw trash on the street.
Even though they had no relation to anyone on the block, the suspect
came over and dumped trash on a black family’s lawn, the report
said. “Since you all want to nigger up the neighborhood, I’ll
burn you and your nigger family out,” he allegedly told the victim.
Police went to the suspect’s home, but he didn’t answer the door.
A call to the Toledo police to check on the case was not returned.
In
Kansas City, Missouri, an African-American man went to police because
his neighbor had harassed him for three years. The suspect allegedly
stood in his driveway taking pictures of his home and waved a
Confederate flag. The man who filed the complaint wound up moving,
but he told police he was worried because he’d seen the man outside
his new home.
In
Oxford Township, Michigan, a couple — a white woman and a black man
— went to police because they said they couldn’t leave the house
without getting harassed by their neighbor, who called them racial
slurs. When police gave the neighbor a citation for disorderly
conduct, she ripped it up in front of the officer. She was
subsequently arrested for disorderly conduct and her case was turned
over to the local prosecutor’s office.
And
in Spokane, Washington, we got records on two cases of possible
neo-Nazis harassing their black neighbors. In one case, the neighbors
reported that a man with a swastika on his hand called them racial
slurs. He allegedly threw a brick at a woman, calling her a slur. In
another case, a black man said his white supremacist neighbor and
another man assaulted him in his garage while using racial slurs and
threatened him with a gun. “Nigger, you don’t deserve to be
breathing white men’s air,” they allegedly said. Later, the white
supremacist allegedly returned with two other men and yelled “heil
the KKK” and “white power” at the man, shortly before shooting
a gun at his home from a car. The victim told
The Spokesman-Review that
one of the suspects had called him racial slurs for months leading up
to the shooting.
According
to the Spokane Police Department, both cases resulted in arrests and
the suspects were charged with first-degree assault and malicious
harassment. In the shooting case, suspect Donald Prichard’s
criminal history record totals to 16 felony convictions,
which included
beating and sexually assaulting a woman. He’s
awaiting trial on Jan. 22. The second suspect in that case, Jason
Cooper, has 12 felony convictions, including unlawful possession of a
weapon and burglary, and he is awaiting trial on Feb. 25.
Many
accounts, both in our database and that resulted from our queries to
police departments, include frustration at what can seem like a lack
of police interest or action. In the case of the family targeted in
Delano, no one was ever arrested, and the family wound up moving
away. The mother in Athens said police told her there was little they
could do about verbal harassment, that it was a civil matter. The
authorities in Athens didn’t return a request for comment.
That
said, we did find examples where the authorities ultimately took
serious steps.
In
Grapevine, Texas, Dante Petty was harassed by his white neighbor,
Glenn Halfin, for over a year after he moved in. The harassment
became so persistent that he installed surveillance cameras outside
his home and a police officer was stationed outside for over a month.
The breaking point occurred when his neighbor left black baby dolls
with nooses around their necks hung outside his apartment.
Ultimately, Halfin was charged with a hate crime and convicted of
violating the family’s housing rights. He was sentenced to year in
state prison, the maximum punishment based on his guilty plea to the
misdemeanor charge.
“No
one should be afraid to go home at night,” said U.S. Attorney Erin
Nealy Cox on
the day of Halfin’s sentencing. Victims
of such harassment at their residences, it turns out, have an option
other than going to the local police. Harassing one’s neighbor also
violates the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal for
landlords and neighbors to interfere with someone’s right to
housing based on who they are. And there is an office at the
Department of Housing and Urban Development meant to handle such
cases.
Victims
can file a complaint with HUD within a year of the alleged violation.
Owners, managers and condominium associations may be liable for
neighbor-on-neighbor harassment if they fail to intervene when they
have a duty to do so. Criminal penalties can include fines and
prison.
According
to HUD statistics, there were 8,348 complaints of such violations in
2015, 8,350 in 2016 and 8,186 in 2017. Half or more of those cases
dealt with alleged violations involving people with disabilities. The
HUD statistics show that, historically, very few of the complaints of
any kind wound up with federal prosecutions.
The
number of prosecutions has gotten appreciably smaller in recent
years. In 2015, the Department of Justice closed 84 cases brought to
it by HUD regarding the Fair Housing Act. In 2016, there were only
12. In 2017, there were just five.
Calls
for comment from HUD were not returned because of the federal
government shutdown.
Meanwhile,
as the second year of Documenting Hate came to a close, reports kept
coming in.
In
June 2018, Hubert Roberts, of Clio, Michigan, complained to police
that his truck had been targeted by racists. A Nazi symbol was spray
painted on the truck, along with slurs and boasts of white pride. The
Genesee County Sheriff’s Office would not comment on the case,
other than to say no arrests have been made. When asked about the
current status of the case, the FBI told ProPublica, “Adhering to
DOJ policy, the FBI neither confirms nor denies investigations.”
Roberts
said that this wasn’t the first time he was targeted in the
community because of his race, either. He noted other instances of
being called racist comments, where he was told to “go back to
Africa,” while doing work on his yard.
“This
could have been an opportunity for some dialogue in this
predominantly white community,” Roberts said. “I just feel really
disappointed with our justice system.”
This
report prepared by Rahima
Nasa and Rachel
Glickhouse for ProPublica
============================
De VS, een heel ziek psychopathisch land, intussen bijna geheel is getransformeerd tot een politiestaat, een land waar democratie en burgerrechten geen betekenis meer hebben als je tot bepaalde bevolkingsgroepen behoort….. De VS, het voorbeeld van een ultieme klassenmaatschappij, die nog amper onderdoet voor een fascistische staat…….
* ‘Land of the free’, een gotspe als je ziet hoe de bevolking en zeker het arme gekleurde deel van de VS bevolking wordt behandeld….. Vrij om dood te gaan zonder een therapie te kunnen betalen, of vergoed te krijgen, die levensreddend kan zijn…. Vrij om niet te mogen stemmen als je tot bepaalde bevolkingsgroepen behoort….. Vrij om als gekleurde door een witte jury te worden berecht…… Vrij om als gekleurde of arme witte geen kans te krijgen om te studeren, daar de kosten daarvoor niet zijn op te brengen……..Vrij om als jongere in het leger te gaan, daar je verder geen kans hebt om ook maar iets op te kunnen bouwen, daar je nergens anders werk kan vinden….. Vrij om te demonstreren tegen zaken die jouw geboortegrond op gigantische manier vervuilen en dan de kans lopen te worden vermoord, met toestemming van de overheid……. (neem het verzet tegen oliepijpleidingen over grond van de oorspronkelijke VS bevolking, zoals de DAPL zaak) Vrij om te mogen worden neergeschoten door psychopaten met wapens…… (dagelijks vinden er meervoudige moorden plaats in de VS, dit vanwege de achterlijke wapenwetgeving in de VS….) Vrij om te worden uitgebuit, terwijl de welgestelden en grote bedrijven worden ontzien op belastinggebied…….. Vrij om te worden gediscrimineerd, beledigd en zelfs te worden vermoord (bijvoorbeeld door de politie) als je tot de gekleurde bevolking behoort, zoals bijvoorbeeld beschreven in het hierboven weergegeven artikel…….. Vrij om zelfs als je een misdaad niet hebt begaan, deze wel te bekennen, daar je anders een veel grotere straf krijgt opgelegd, middels het vermaledijde ‘plea bargain’ principe in de rechtspraak…… (ondanks dat plea bargain levert Nederland zelfs eigen burgers uit aan de VS……) Vrij om belasting te betalen voor oneindige oorlogen elders, waar de VS op grote schaal mensen vermoordt en daarmee terreur in eigen land creëert….. Vrij om te worden ontslagen of geen orders van de overheid te krijgen, als je je hebt uitgesproken tegen de massamoord op Palestijnen door de fascistische apartheidsstaat Israël….. Vrij om in tentsteden, autowrakken, of dozen te mogen ‘wonen’, daar je vanwege schulden uit je huis werd gezet en een ander onderdak niet kan betalen…….
Tom Elliott
onald