Australia police in spotlight on Indigenous deaths in custody

Protests follow last week's death of 49-year-old woman in cell, the 441st since landmark 1991 royal commission on issue.

by Margarite Clarey

5 hours ago

Protesters held three minutes of silence for the 441 Aboriginal people who have died in police custody since 1991 [Margarite Clarey/Al Jazeera]

Brisbane, Australia – “Say her name!” yelled Ruby Wharton to a crowd of Black Lives Matter supporters in Brisbane, as hundreds took to the streets of the Queensland city following the death of a 49-year-old Indigenous woman in police custody.  

The 23-year-old activist from the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance collective was speaking on behalf of a community reeling from the loss of 441 Indigenous Australians in police custody since 1991. To date, not a single officer has been charged.

“This right here is not a protest, this is ceremony; this is lore; this is our responsibility,” she said, her anger and determination unshakeable. 

“The first point of cause for First Nations people when we mourn, is we sing them home,” Wharton said.

"Aunty Sherry", as protesters have named the Birri Gubba woman out of respect for Indigenous culture that precludes the naming of deceased people, was 49 years old, and a mother of three. She was found dead in a cell at the Brisbane police station in the early hours of September 10. Arrested on property and drug matters four days earlier, she had appeared in court a day after her arrest and remanded in custody until October 7.

Queensland Police Assistant Commissioner Brian Codd told journalists that a post-mortem examination appeared to indicate “that the death was by natural causes,” but that the circumstances remained under investigation. 

For a community that has long pointed to the mistreatment and neglect of Indigenous people in custody, his comments brought little solace.

Protesters sat on the street outside Brisbane police headquarters. Aunty Sherry was the 441st Indigenous person to die in police custody since a landmark royal commission in 1991 [Margarite Clarey/Al Jazeera] 

“We’ve seen this, four hundred and forty-one times now,” said Wharton. “Systemic racism always cancels out the truth. Time and time again, police investigate police.”

The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service says five Indigenous people have died in custody since June.

"This is a national emergency and we demand urgent national leadership," NATSILS co-chair Nerita Waight said in a statement. "This lack of accountability means that in practice there is no penalty for the death of our people in custody. More police officers involved in deaths in custody have been promoted than convicted, but there cannot be justice without accountability."

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprise only 3 percent of Australia's population, but they make up almost a third of adults jailed across the country.

The rates are even higher for Indigenous youth, who were 16 times more likely to be under youth justice supervision - in detention, or on bail, parole or probation - than non-Indigenous young people in 2018-19, according to the Australian Insitute of Health and Welfare, a government agency.

Human Rights Watch says the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the criminal justice system, which has increased by 9 percent since 2000, is often the result of minor offences like unpaid fines.

In a submission to the United Nations' Universal Periodic Review of Australia, which is set for early 2021, the rights group says the government has failed to heed the recommendations laid out in the 1991 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and calls for an end to the “mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in police cells and prisons”.

Cries for change

The Black Lives Matter demonstrations set in motion by the death of George Floyd in the United States have brought renewed scrutiny to Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous people.

Australian actor Meyne Wyatt posed for a photo with his packing room prize-winning self-portrait at the Art Gallery of New South Wales wearing a 'Justice for Aunty Sherry' mask. Wyatt is the first Indigenous artist to claim any part of the prestigious Archibald Prize, which has been running for 99 years [Joel Carrett/EPA] 

In June, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in solidarity with US protesters, to demand justice for Indigenous lives lost in custody.

The Birri Gubba woman’s death sparked new marches in the city and 18 protesters were arrested after scuffles broke out in front of police headquarters. More rallies are planned later on Friday.

Aboriginal resident Phillip Murrii said that despite years of protests, the situation was only getting worse for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 

“I’m a parent of a young daughter. She is more likely - after all of these years of us fighting on the street - to die, than I was at the same age. She is more likely to be imprisoned than I was at the same age. She is more likely to take her own life than I was at that age,” they said.

“Things are not getting better for our people; they are getting worse. 

"We are not getting on top of the system. The system is still on top of us. They still have their knees on our necks and they are still killing our people every day in this colony.”

New targets were set in June to reduce Indigenous incarceration rates under a long-standing government initiative to “close the gap” on contributors such as health, education and employment inequalities.

Wharton says change will not happen until First Nations values and laws are acknowledged and made part of the solution.

“We did not dream no dreaming; we came from that dreaming," she said, referring to the Aboriginal belief system on creation and the laws of existence.

Ruby Wharton addressed the crowd that gathered after the death of Aunty Sherry in police custody in Brisbane on September 10. She says the Indigenous community will not stop fighting for justice [Margarite Clarey/Al Jazeera]

"This is law, we live in multiple dimensions at the one time and we work to uphold our responsibility. When we bring those values to the front line and come up against systemic racism, based on a common and civil law legal system, what weapons have we got?

"The solution doesn’t exist in their system because that system don’t protect us,” she said.

Indigenous activists have renewed calls for the government to create a treaty process to negotiate with the clans and bring an end to Indigenous incarceration and deaths in custody. 

Meanwhile, Wharton said the community was not prepared to just sit around and wait for justice.

“We’ve said many, many names here," she said. "We come back, time and time again. No matter how many times you kick us we get back up. That’s what Brisbane bla(c)ks do.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/09/australia-police-spotlight-indigenous-deaths-custody-200918023411141.html

 

Black Mayors and Police Chiefs are Being Accused of White Supremacy

No black official is radical enough for Black Lives Matter.

Sat Sep 19, 2020 

Daniel Greenfield

 

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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

“I would have so much more respect for the Bail Fund if they had bailed him out and then let him stay in one of their homes,” Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins blasted the Massachusetts Bail Fund (MBF).

A statement from a DA blasting the MBF for freeing a rapist wouldn't usually be extraordinary, except that Rollins, whose campaign was backed by George Soros, was supposed to be different. Not only had Rollins run on a pro-crime platform promising not to prosecute shoplifting, breaking and entering, and resisting arrest, but she had reacted to the Black Lives Matter riots with a hysterical rant about her rage and the white community.

Rollins had dismissed the damage from Black Lives Matter riots because it "could be fixed".

And then the Massachusetts Bail Fund freed Shawn McClinton, a convicted sex offender, who had been accused of raping a woman a few weeks after he was let go, leading Rollins to snap.

The Massachusetts Bail Fund, whose motto is “Free them all”, really meant it.

The problem that Rachael Rollins, the first black DA of Suffolk County, a pro-crime black nationalist activist, ran into is a familiar one for a new generation of leftist politicians, many from an identity politics slate, who learned the hard way that they will always be out-radicaled.

It’s no longer enough to just support riots and property crimes, you have to support rapists too.

The Black Lives Matter wave destroyed the credibility and leadership of a new wave of identity politics Democrats who had seemed exciting until they were actually tested and failed miserably.

A few years ago, Jenny Durkan was being hailed as the first lesbian mayor of Seattle. Then she was besieged by a Black Lives Matter mob, and, after hailing CHOP as a new Summer of Love, had no choice but to shut it down. Carmen Best, Seattle’s first black police chief, was forced to resign after facing police defunding budget cuts that decimated her department.

Chief Danielle Outlaw, formerly Portland's first black police commissioner, who got away from the city's perpetual riots to become Philadelphia's first black female commissioner, discovered that there's no escaping the violence. Many of the cities at the center of the violence have tried appointing black police leaders and electing black DAs only to realize that doesn’t appease.

“The fact that I, as a very obvious African American female police chief, have been accused by those within that group or those who support that group, as being a supporter and protector of those who are believed to be white supremacists—if that's even the case—is ridiculous. Right?” Chief Outlaw had wondered back in Portland.

Chief Outlaw may have thought that she would leave that kind of craziness behind when she left Portland, but she was soon being accused of white supremacy in Philly when the police didn’t crack down on white business owners protecting their businesses from BLM rioters.

"We do not condone any acts of violence, and as an agency we don't take sides," she argued.

Lori Lightfoot’s victory was supposed to calm the radicals in Chicago who had bedeviled Rahm Emanual. The city, for the first time in its history, had a number of firsts, a black female lesbian leader, who represented everything that the identity politics slate wanted or could possibly want.

But the pandemic and the riots left her hopefully outmatched and outclassed. Like many other leftist city leaders, Mayor Lightfoot was forced to ban BLM rioters from rallying on her block.

Black Lives Matter activists were soon accusing Lightfoot of "creating problems in black and brown communities to protect white people" and having "bloodied people for their disobedience to white supremacy", by which they meant taking the minimum possible steps to stop the riots.

And so the black lesbian mayor of Chicago had officially become a white supremacist.

The speed with which the ‘firsts’ who break glass ceilings become the enemy is breathtaking.

Los Angeles DA Jackey Lacey went from being hailed as "the first woman and first African-American to serve as Los Angeles County District Attorney" to having her house besieged by Black Lives Matter racists and when her husband waved a gun to get them to leave, he, like the McCloskeys, was charged by the connivance of the Democrat machine.

Rep. Schiff, Mayor Eric Garcetti, and other Democrats quickly pulled their endorsements from Lacey. The first black female DA was now officially a racist oppressor of black people.

“A lot of the cases that people shout the loudest at me about are those cases where the man who was killed had a gun or was shooting someone or harming someone,” Lacey pointed out.

But, like the right to rape in Suffolk County, harming and shooting someone is a right in LA.

You can be the first black DA of Los Angeles, the first gay mayor of South Bend, the first lesbian mayor of Seattle, the first black female police chief of Portland, Philadelphia, or Seattle, you can even be the first black lesbian mayor of Chicago, and you still won’t be radical enough.

You can even run on a pro-crime platform backed by George Soros and it’s still not enough.

That’s because the problem isn’t racism: it’s radicalism.

If the problem really were racism, it would be solvable. But radicalism has no stopping point. As soon as a mayor, a DA, or police chief seems to fit the bill, they’re not radical enough.

Mayors, DAs, and police chiefs who try to actually do their jobs are the first to fall.

Just ask Danielle Outlaw, who was hounded out of Portland, or Carmen Best, who was forced to resign in Seattle. Checking the right identity politics boxes doesn’t matter if you’re not a radical.

But no amount of radicalism is ever enough. Just ask Rachael Rollins.

History is full of examples of revolutions where the radicals ate each other. The story of CHOP and of Portland’s over 100 days of rioting, the guillotines and people’s committees, is the familiar one of the French and Russian revolutions, of the radicals killing anyone less radical until there’s no one left except either a tyrant or a populace who is tired of the endless violence.

What the revolutionaries want is a society so unlivable that it even horrified a Soros DA.

When they say that they want to free all the criminals, they really mean it. And when they say that they want to defund the police, they mean that too. These aren’t bold slogans for anything more moderate as their defenders among the Democrats and the media have falsely insisted.

The most obvious symptom of a political movement’s descent into extremism is its inability to describe the problem. Extremism has no language for criticising its own extremism except by warning that it’s undermining the larger cause. And that’s been the Democrat response. The riots and the crime, they keep warning, are eating into Biden’s lead in some swing states.

That’s a compelling argument for those making it and a contemptible one to those it’s made to.

Not only the Democrats, but even the Left, and even the radicals are losing control of a movement that is turning on them for not being radical enough. And no amount of identity politics can stop the crackup of a movement that has lost its mind and its brakes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/black-mayors-and-police-chiefs-are-being-accused-daniel-greenfield/

Judge blocks 'politically motivated' changes to U.S. Postal Service ahead of election

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

By Karen Freifeld 

www.reuters.com 

(Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday blocked controversial changes to the United States postal service, saying they were “a politically motivated attack” that had slowed the nation’s mail and likely would slow the delivery of ballots in the upcoming presidential election.

   

 FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: A person holds a sign as U.S. Postal Service (USPS) workers rally on the steps of the James A. Farley Post Office in Manhattan calling for an end to mail delays, funding for the Postal Service and for the firing of U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in New York City, New York, U.S., August 25, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo/File Photo

U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian in Yakima, Washington, said he was issuing a nationwide injunction sought by 14 states in a case against U.S. President Donald Trump, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, and the U.S. Postal Service over July changes to the service.

The 14 states, led by Washington, had filed a motion for a preliminary injunction asking the court to immediately halt a “leave mail behind” policy that required postal trucks to leave at certain times, regardless of whether mail was loaded.

The states also asked for all election mail be treated as first-class mail, for the replacement of necessary sorting machines that had been removed, and for the postal service to abide by DeJoy’s commitment to suspend the changes until after the Nov. 3 election.

DeJoy, a Trump supporter, said in August that he would halt many of the cost-cutting changes he put in place until after the presidential election after Democrats accused him of trying to put his thumb on the scales to help Trump, which he has denied. A surge in mail-in ballots is expected because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the postal service,” the judge said after about 2 1/2 hours of arguments that Reuters heard by phone.

“They have also demonstrated that this attack on the postal service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.”

The judge said the preliminary injunction would essentially be issued as the states requested and he would file a written order with details, likely later on Thursday.

U.S. Postal Service spokesman Dave Partenheimer said while the agency was exploring its legal options, it was “ready and committed to handle whatever volume of election mail it receives.

“Our number one priority is to deliver election mail on-time,” Partenheimer said.

Lee Moak, election mail committee chair of the postal service’s board of governors, called any suggestion of a politically motivated attack on efficiency “completely and utterly without merit.”

At the hearing, Kristin Beneski, a lawyer for the Washington Attorney General, told the judge critical mail already had been delayed for weeks at a time, including ballots. She also noted reports that postal trucks had left for cross-country trips empty.

Attorney Joseph Borson, who represented the defendants, said the postal service was prepared to timely deliver election mail and that the problems have largely been resolved.

He also said that the states were required to bring the matter to the Postal Regulatory Commission, not the courts.

“The postal service has and will continue to do extraordinary efforts to ensure all ballots are delivered,” Borson said, but added there are “physical limits to what it’s able to do.”

Besides Washington, states joining the lawsuit include Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Similar lawsuits by states are pending in Pennsylvania and New York.

“Today’s victory protects a critical institution for our country,” Washington state attorney general Bob Ferguson said after the ruling. “Americans can now confidently vote by mail and have their voices heard.”

Reporting by Karen Freifeld; additional reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chris Reese and Aurora Ellis

 

 

 

‘527 years of humiliation’: Indigenous activists topple statue of ‘genocidal’ 16-century conquistador in Colombia

17 Sep, 2020 14:38

© Julian Moreno / AFP

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Angry activists destroyed a statue of 16th-century Spanish conquistador Sebastian de Belalcazar in Colombia. The incident follows a wave of similar attacks on historical monuments in the US.

Videos from the scene show activists pulling down the large equestrian statue on a hill near the western town of Popayan, cheering after it falls from a high plinth. They stood on the sculpture as it was lying on the ground and hit it with rocks. Police officers in riot gear were present but did not interfere.

According to reports, the activists were members of the Guambiano indigenous community, also known as Misak. Local community leader Martha Peralta said that Belalcazar was responsible for the “genocide” of the local population. She added that the destruction of the statue was “an act of courage after the 527 [years] of humiliation,” likely referring to the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1493.

She wrote on social media that the action was a way of “reclaiming the memory of the ancestors killed and enslaved by the elites.”

The incident follows a wave of statue-toppling that started in the US and has continued throughout several major Western nations, along with protests for racial justice. Black Lives Matter activists and their allies have been destroying and defacing statues of Confederate generals and other historical figures linked to slavery and colonialism. The movement became a topic of contentious debate in the US, receiving both praise and criticism for its messaging and methods.

Belalcazar led military expeditions into modern Colombia and Ecuador. He founded several cities, including Popayan, and played a major role in establishing Ecuador’s capital, Quito.

https://www.rt.com/news/500955-colombia-conquistador-statue-toppled/