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Black History Month And Racist Police Violence
February is Black History Month in America. And on the very first day of Black History Month this year, Tyre Nichols, a young Black man, was laid to rest in Memphis, Tennessee, having been murdered by police officers of the Memphis police department, as he simply tried to get home.
I find it almost impossible to keep track of all the hundreds of cases of racist police violence against innocent Black and brown men and women in America. At the moment our nation is transfixed and in a state of great anger and anguish over the brutal murder of Tyre Nickols in Memphis, Tennessee. And the killings keep coming. In my city, Los Angeles, we’re outraged by the police murder of Keenan Anderson, the cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder, Patrice Cullers. Both murders were filmed, and so once again the American people saw with their own eyes just how violent and despicable the police can be; and how indifferent the offending police officers are to the fact that what they are doing is being captured on film for all the world to see.
Now, the overwhelming percentage of victims of police assaults are people of color who’ve been murdered, or otherwise brutalized by white cops. But as the Nichols case demonstrates, police violence is so ingrained in policing in America that Black cops, too, often do not hesitate to employ gross violence in the course of their policing.
What accounts for this epidemic of cop killings of people of color in America? Is it connected to America’s history of Black enslavement? And, if requiring the police to be filmed while making arrests has not ended police violence, what will it take to finally end this epidemic of racist policing?
Guest – Attorney Carl Douglas is a partner in the law firm, Douglas/Hicks, one of Keenan Anderson’s family attorneys who’ve just filed a $50 million dollar claim against the City of Los Angeles for what the LAPD did in the Keenan Anderson case. Attorney Douglas, after working 6 years as a Public Defender, then spent 12 years in the Los Angeles law firm of famed, and now deceased, anti-police abuse attorney Johnnie Cochran. And now, his own law firm, the Douglas/Hicks law firm, specializes in police misconduct and other civil rights cases, criminal defense work, as well as personal injury and employment discrimination cases. In short, he is a true “lawyer for the people”.
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CIA Spied On Julian Assange Embassy Visitors: Lawsuit Update
We speak today with New York City attorney Deborah Hrbek who along with her law partner Margaret Ratner Kunstler are suing the CIA, its former Director Mike Pompeo, and the Company they contracted with to spy for them on Julian Assange and his visitors including attorneys at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange lived there for seven years having been granted political asylum by the Ecuadorian government. The CIA contract employee DC Global copied information off of their cell phones and computers when they visited their client Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
They are demanding an injunction forbidding the CIA to use the private information they stole from their devices. The CIA says that it has every right to do what it did because the plaintiffs had no right to expect privacy.
Julian Assange is one the greatest journalist of our time. His exposures of American war crimes, corruption in the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and CIA spying on us using our cell phones and smart TVs was the most embarrassing revelations ever revealed about the American war machine and it’s diplomatic corps.
In retaliation the US establishment and its institutions including both political parties and the intelligence agencies took their revenge on Julian by first smearing him, according to a Defense Department directive, and then threatening him with being charged as a spy under the Espionage Act so that he had to take refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Then former President Donald Trump indicted Assange for espionage and had their British collaborators remove him from the Ecuadorian Embassy and put him in London’s Belmarsh, a notorious maximum-security prison, where he has been tortured daily for the last three years by being held in solitary confinement and denied adequate medical care.
The United States and its servant the British Crown Prosecutorial Service trashed the rule of law throughout the entire extradition proceeding. They lied about the conditions of confinement Assange would face in United States. Even the trial judge thought he might kill himself. The extradition order is eminent.
Guest – Deborah Hrbek is a founding partner at Hrbek Kunstler, a Manhattan entertainment law firm that has represented WikiLeaks in media law matters since 2015. In the course of her work with WikiLeaks journalist and filmmakers she has visited Julian Assange many times, both at the Ecuadorian Embassy at London where he was there as a political Ashlee and in recent years in Belmarsh prison, a maximum-security prison where he has been incarcerated since April 2019. Hrbek is one of the plaintiffs in “Kunstler versus the CIA”, an action that seeks to hold the US government accountable for its illegal activities in connection with its prosecution of Julian Assange.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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