Black Lives Matter group protest in front of APD at high noon today
Yes when you live in a "college town" there are some unmistakable signs that summer is quickly coming to a close and our population is about to double with students flocking to our three institutes of higher education.
From the ubiquitous "Welcome Back Students" signs in shopkeepers windows to the downtown traffic jams created by a co-mingling of cars and college aged youth.
Political activism will pick up where it left off last spring with the current cause de jour being "Black Lives Matter." Today at noon a group of about 30 marched around and through the Town Common and set up shop in front of the Amherst Police Station at 111 Main Street.
They were pretty much ignored by APD, although not by the local bricks and mortar media or pedestrians in the downtown. Which, I suppose, is the general idea.
17 comments:
Colossal waste of time but the "activists" will continue to rattle an empty can as long as the MSM gives them their 15 minutes. How may black men/women have APD killed (zero) or brutalized (zero)? If anything they should protest UMPD or the District Attorney as to how they handled that Jason Vassell (SP?) thing a few years back….
I like this line from Barney Frank's recent memoir:
"If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good."
Rich Morse
Kind of ridiculous they're at the police station. Why not at the school where discrimination exists? Why not in Springfield? Amherst is such a diverse liberal town its kind of pointless.
Considering it's a sham group, let 'em scream till they are blue.
I think they are at the police station because the police, as a group, have killed many unarmed black people in the last few (hundred) years. They are less concerned about protesting to the middle class and elite because those folks both don't care and only indirectly kill black folks via their police and others.
The reason they are protesting now 50 years after the civil right movement was because the hippies and folks that participated last time were not effective.
What does not makes sense is replacing racism A with Racism B. Seems like those that would be inclusive would say that all lives matter, but in this context, that almost sounds like an insult to blacks.
Amherst may be diverse, but it is highly segregated, by age, race, income and more, which almost creates more problems than not being diverse (where there are rarely race issues). This may be why they are protesting locally. There is nothing for anyone who is listening to do to change this, but this may be the reason why they are protesting.
I would also suggest that folks that are effective and logical rarely protest, they go out and make a difference directly. There is no need to listen to the logic or expect results. It's called protesting, aka public complaining, it's what you do when you don't have the ability to actually make a difference, you complain.
Perhaps the thing to recognize is their admission via the protest that they are weak and unhappy and if we are compassionate, perhaps there is something each one of us can do different in the future to change things for the better, perhaps there is not or perhaps like the hippies and their cohorts, we will do the wrong things and still pretend we did the right thing....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddsowX6RsXo
-Squeaky Squeaks
p.s. FFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIILLLLLLLL...
Thank you for sharing this.
What a load of shit!! Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York studied police killings and reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were Asian and other races. Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones. Adjusted for the homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the hands of police,” he said. Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police. The investigative journalism website ProPublica came up with a similar percentage in an Oct. 10 article, reporting that 44 percent of all those killed by police were white, using FBI data from 1980 to 2012.
The news loves to report about black deaths but ignores white deaths. Did anyone hear about Gilbert Collar, an 18-year-old white student at the University of South Alabama, was shot and killed while naked, unarmed and under the influence of drugs by a black police officer. The officer, Trevis Austin, was cleared of wrongdoing in 2013 by a Mobile County grand jury in a case that received little media coverage outside Alabama. Mr. Collar’s parents filed a federal lawsuit last year against the officer.
Cut this black lives matter shit. It's nothing buy bullshit. If black lives matter than start educating yourselves, start a family instead of making babies like a machine; children who grow up in broken households. Work for a living and stop living off the system, selling drugs and committing crime. And buy a belt, you look stupid with your pants down to your knees.
"it's what you do when you don't have the ability to actually make a difference"
Everyone has the ability. Stop living off the system and dropping out of school. No one makes the difference for you. That is up to you to do.
Jason Vassell sliced 'n' diced two unarmed men for no legitimate reason. People don't realize that he went back to his room to get his knife and left his room, a place of safety behind three locked/lockable doors (the third being that of his room which he could have locked if he wanted to) and went out and tried to murder those two kids for no reason other than the fact that he didn't like something that they had said.
What more can you say?
Jason Vassell has nothing to do with this except as a confirmation of your rascist perspective, since you just randomly picked a black person that commited a crime. A crime that had nothing to do with police officers.
Y'all got trolled and are too dumb top see it...
Like sarcasm, Trolls require their own special font.
Ho hum...bah humbug. It's Caroline Gardner all over again. How boring. Now, 321 Lincoln avenue--that's news if mr. Morra can enforce the owner-occupancy requirement!! We will see.
He can. And he will.
It's probably very scary to be a young black person anywhere in the US right now, even scarier to be the parent of a young black person, whether the fear is justifiable or not.
I think that there are a lot more things going on that don't end in death that are violations of people's civil rights, and there are systems in place within our justice system that work adversely for some sub-groups of our society at a higher rate than others. A peaceful march saying "here is our cause" is a healthy and mature way for a group of young adults to express themselves in a democracy. What could possibly be anyone's problem with them?
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