Good morning. On this date in 1969, a heavily armed team of police raided a Chicago apartment and executed rising Black Panther leader Fred Hampton as he lay sleeping. Another Panther, Mark Clark, was also killed in the raid. Police said that the Panthers had attacked them, and they were cleared of all charges, but subsequent investigations disproved the claim. The city would eventually settle a civil suit with the families of the two men for $1.85 million.
Stat of the day: 60 percent — The first year after it equipped its officers with body-cams, the city of Rialto, California, experienced a 60 percent drop in police use-of-force incidents.
The big story…
- A Staten Island grand jury declined to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choking death of 43-year-old Eric Garner, who died during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes. At the NY Daily News, Harry Siegel provides details of two videos shot during the incident. They show Garner repeatedly insisting that he couldn’t breathe. Siegel writes, “Anyone unsure why so many people of color are upset with the police, and suspicious of the American justice system, put your politics down, open your eyes and watch the videos.”
- After the grand jury announcement, thousands of protesters took to the streets of New York, shutting down traffic at times. According to The Guardian, there were at least 83 arrests.
- Abby Ohlheiser, Elahe Izadi and Sari Horwitz report for WaPo that “Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. will… open a federal civil rights investigation into Garner’s death, a move that Garner’s family and activists have called for for months.”
- Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan recalls that NY Police Commissioner William Bratton fought a proposed law that would have made chokeholds like the one that killed Garner illegal. As it stands, NYPD policy prohibits their use.
- In Jasper, Texas, another grand jury exonerated two former police officers who were caught on a jail surveillance video brutally beating a woman they’d arrested for an unpaid traffic ticket earlier in the day. Patrick Michels has that story at the Texas Observer.
- At Cleveland.com, Adam Ferrise reports that the officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he played with a pellet gun at a city playground had been recommended for termination by another department. “He could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal,” read a letter by a deputy chief of the Independence, Ohio, police department. “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct the deficiencies.”
- Vox’s German Lopez writes that the Cleveland PD’s version of events in the Tamir Rice shooting “doesn’t match the video” of the incident. Among other discrepancies, the police claim that the officers told Rice to put up his hands three times, but the video shows they shot him within 2 seconds of making contact.
Other news…
Bending the curve –> Sarah Kliff reports for Vox that in 2013, health care costs grew more slowly than in any year since 1960.
Torture –> A long standoff over the release of a Senate report on CIA detentions and interrogations during the Bush era appears to have been resolved, and a 600-page executive summary is expected to be released soon. At Bloomberg View, Josh Rogin and Eli Lake detail where the battle lines where drawn and who ended up getting what they wanted.
Going local –> The Nation headlines, “From ALEC to the Heritage Foundation, a group of anti-labor stalwarts is looking to turn cities and counties into ‘right-to-work’ zones.” Moshe Marvit reports.
“Strange bedfellows” –> Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama both want to complete a huge secret trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. HuffPo’s Zach Carter and Sabrina Siddiqui report that the big roadblocks are liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
Will Mitch McConnell nuke the filibuster? –> At TPM, Sahil Kapur writes that it’s a distinct possibility that the new Republican majority in the Senate will get rid of the filibuster entirely.
He’s in –> Politico’s Maggie Haberman reports that outgoing Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley “has added New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign manager to his team as a senior adviser as he prepares for a White House run.”
“Camo-washing” nonprofits –> “Camo-washing” is how veteran Richard Allen Smith describes the “time-honored tradition” of brands going out of their way to associate themselves with the military. At The Guardian, Smith writes, “Mostly, camo-washing is an unethical marketing tactic that amounts to a mild annoyance for those who served. But camo-washing becomes more insidious when it involves corporations that prey on troops and their families. It becomes nauseating when non-profits that claim to actually help military members and veterans knowingly assist those same corporations earn absolution.”
Muzzled? –> Veteran journalist Nafeez Ahmed (to whom we’ve frequently linked) says he was wrongfully terminated by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s control of significant natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza. Ahmed had been guaranteed editorial control of his blog, and had written similar stories about petro-politics in Iraq without causing controversy.
Hey, it can happen to anyone –> Reuters: “The University of Texas at Austin has lost about 100 brains stored in jars of formaldehyde.”
You can get our Morning Reads delivered to your inbox every weekday! Just enter your email address below…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
