California has 75 hate groups, the largest concentration of hate groups in the nation. A new report gives a breakdown of hate crimes reported in the state last year.
L.A. County deputies shot and killed Anthony Weber during a foot chase on Feb 4, 2018. They said they spotted a handgun tucked into his pants, but investigators never recovered a weapon.
Californians of color are more likely to be subjected to traffic stops and to be booked on arrests related to failure to appear or failure to pay. In Bay Area counties, African-Americans are four to 16 times more likely to be booked on arrests related to failure to pay an infraction ticket.
A sober New York Times headline last weekend described what many assume has been a dramatic change in fortune for Black Lives Matter, the de facto civil rights movement of the day. “Black Lives Matter Was Gaining Ground,” it read. “Then a Sniper Opened Fire.”
“Racism doesn’t take a break when it rains and neither will we,” Priscilla Ocen, a professor at Loyola Law School, announced over a loudspeaker outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles Tuesday. Before her stood a crowd of about 200 people, mostly lawyers and law students, who braved a downpour to protest state violence from South L.A. to New York City, culminating in a four-minute-and-thirty-second “die-in” — representing the four-and-a-half hours that police in Ferguson, Missouri, let Michael Brown’s dead body lie in a street.
“I think it’s a really important thing to stand up to the injustice that we’re seeing around the country,” said Mona Iman, director of Taslimi Foundation, which works to defend human rights in Iran. “This wave of killings of unarmed black men is just so disturbing,” she told me, “and when you feel the frustration and you feel the anger at what’s happening in the world,
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