‘Address the Black Culture!’ TV Debate on Spring Valley Confrontation Goes Off the Rails

A debate between conservative contributor Angela Box and New Black Panther Party leader Quanell X imploded on Tuesday, after Box suggested “black culture” was responsible for the viral altercation between a South Carolina cop and a high school student.

At the onset of the segment for a local Fox station in Houston, Box set the tone for the debate, telling Quanell X, “so in South Carolina this week, a police officer lost his job for doing his job by subduing an unruly student in a classroom.”

Box went on to say, as a teacher, she can “guarantee” the student “isn’t an innocent little lamb.”

“We’ve got to address the culture,” she told Quanell X, referring to “the disrespect of teachers, this Black Lives Matter movement, this perpetual chip on your shoulder against everybody that’s not like yourself.”

“Nobody supports a disruptive student in a classroom because it stops other kids learning,” Quanell X responded. But, he said, the cop deserves to be fired — and even indicted–for the violence he demonstrated against the student.

“Now, for you to say that we need to deal with the culture of black kids in schools, let’s deal with the culture of these crazy fanatic white boys who go in schools with guns and shoot and kill everybody,” Quanell X suggested. “The shootings in other cities across the America have all been crazy little white boys shooting up innocent people, so let’s study that culture,” he added.

Interrupting Quanell X, Box shot back that “the black community has been run by the Democrats for the last 60 years, and it’s destroyed the black family, destroyed initiative, destroyed self worth.”

“Black kids shoot each other all the time,” Box said. “Address the black culture, the perpetual chip on your shoulder, blame whitey,” she concluded.

“Show some manners, I didn’t interrupt you, show some respect,” Quanell X replied. “Don’t tell me a damn thing about the black culture and kids in school when it’s white boys who go in school and murder all kinds of innocent people. Don’t tell me that! We need to study these fanatic white boys!”

Box told Quanell X he “can have something to say” about inner city schools once he teaches at one.

“I went to inner city schools!” Quanell X replied, adding, “at the end of the day, there’s wolves in sheep’s clothing teaching at inner city schools.”

“How dare you say that to me,” Box said.

“It’s the truth when it comes to you!” Quanell X responded.

This isn’t the first altercation between Box and Quanell X. Earlier this year, Box filed a defamation lawsuit against Quanell X, claiming the activist painted her as a racist.

Did New York police lie about the death of Mohamed Bah?


NEW YORK — It was early afternoon when Hawa Bah summoned the ambulance. She had arrived the previous day from Guinea on her annual visit to see her son, Mohamed Bah, the favorite of her four children. She found him upset and depressed, but he refused to go to the hospital. So she called 911.

Instead of paramedics, however, police in tactical gear swarmed the red-brick Harlem building where Mohamed Bah lived in apartment 5D. Once inside, they opened fire. When Mohamed was finally loaded into an ambulance that day in September 2012, he was dying from eight gunshot wounds, including one to the head.

The three officers involved in the shooting were quickly cleared by a Manhattan grand jury. But Hawa Bah is now is urging authorities to reopen the investigation, joining a flood of families who view this year’s debate over police use of deadly force as an opportunity to demand justice for past shootings.

Buoyed in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, discouraged families that had put down their protest signs are picking them up again, while others are clamoring for vindication from the Justice Department, civil rights lawyers and police reform advocates say.

“We now know that when authorities want to be transparent and efficient with information, they can,” said Daryl D. Parks, a civil rights lawyer who represents relatives of Michael Brown, who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and Corey Jones, who was killed by police in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. “Most of the families now feel a little bit better, in that justice seems to be a little bit better had.”

Recently, Hawa Bah and her relatives gathered outside the Justice Department’s New York office, where they were joined by the families of other victims of police violence, including Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, who died last year after a New York police officer allegedly used an illegal chokehold while arresting him on Staten Island.

“My son’s case has gotten a lot of attention, but other cases, like Mohamed’s, have not,” Carr said. “All the mothers need to stand together to make sure our children get justice.”

A Justice Department official could not confirm the trend, saying the agency lacks “the capacity to statistically analyze” complaints about civil rights violations. Parks and others noted that there’s a high bar for persuading the Justice Department to pursue civil rights charges.

But Bah is hopeful: New information has raised serious questions about the police account of her son’s shooting.

For example, police have long said that they opened fire after Mohamed Bah stabbed officer Edwin Mateo with a 13-inch kitchen knife. But in a recent sworn deposition, Mateo testified that he could not remember being stabbed. Instead, he said, he cried out because he had been shocked by a fellow officer’s stun gun.

Other documents revealed that the knife was never tested for fingerprints and probably never will be: The knife was “contaminated,” police said, when an evidence warehouse was flooded during Hurricane Sandy. And the Bah family’s attorneys say the shot that struck Bah’s head came at a downward trajectory, which they say would be inconsistent to the officers’ claim that he was standing over them with a knife.

The information came to light after Hawa Bah sued the city, saying that the police version of the shooting was, at best, riddled with inconsistencies and, at worst, a coverup.

“It’s clear to us from the inconsistencies in the deposition testimony of these officers that they didn’t have enough time to get their story straight,” said Debra Cohen, a lawyer with the firm Newman Ferrara, who is representing the Bah family.

An NYPD spokesman declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Police declined to provide information about the shooting, including the incident report and the initial press release. Attorneys representing the officers involved in the shooting did not respond to requests for comment.

On the day he died, Mohamed Bah was 28, a student at a Manhattan community college and a local cab driver with no criminal record. His family described him as a loving and compassionate son, who escorted his mother to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty each year to celebrate his ability to immigrate legally.

During Hawa Bah’s visit in 2012, however, something felt off. When she tried to coax her son out of his small apartment, he refused and disappeared, barely dressed, into his bedroom. As he slumped into his bed, his mother went outside and called for help.

She first tried two private ambulance services, but the numbers didn’t work. Then she called 911, struggling to communicate in heavily accented English.

Hawa Bah said her son had mental problems, and the dispatcher promised to send an ambulance as soon as possible. Instead, officers from the NYPD’s specialized tactical unit responded, climbing five flights of stairs to the apartment where Mohamed Bah had barricaded himself.

“I said, ‘Please let me talk to Mohamed, he’ll open the door,’ ” recalled the mother, who met the officers outside the apartment building. “They said, ‘No, don’t worry about it.’ ”

What happened next is in dispute. Initially, police said Mohamed Bah opened the door and slashed at the officers as they tried to push him back into the apartment. Stun guns failed to subdue Bah, who tried to stab Mateo. That prompted Mateo to yell: “He’s stabbing me! Shoot him!” And the officers opened fire.

More recently, in sworn depositions, the officers gave a slightly different account: Mohamed was carrying a knife when he opened the door. Four officers pushed him back with tactical shields and tried to subdue him.

One officer fired a bean bag. Another tried a stun gun. A third also pulled his stun gun, aiming it over the shoulders of two other officers.

The wire from that gun struck Mateo, who fell to the ground and cried out in pain, Mateo said under questioning by Hawa Bah’s attorney. That prompted Mateo and two other officers to pull out their guns and start shooting.

“Mr. Bah wasn’t stabbing you while you were on the ground, was he?” the attorney asked.

“No,” Mateo replied.

“When you said, ‘He’s stabbing me. Shoot him,’ did you see Mr. Bah stabbing anybody?” the attorney asked.

“No,” the officer replied.

No matter the circumstance, police are rarely charged with a crime for killing someone while on duty. Of more than 800 fatal shootings this year, five officers have faced charges.

In November 2013, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance informed then-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly that a grand jury had declined to issue indictments in the Bah shooting, finding that the officers’ “use of deadly physical force was not unlawful.”

Bah’s story soon disappeared from the headlines, and the city moved on. This year, New York police have shot and killed seven people, according to a Washington Post database, tied with San Diego and Oklahoma City for the fourth highest number of fatal shootings in the nation.

After a spate of protests of police brutality, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) signed an executive order in July requiring a special prosecutor to review all fatal shootings and other deaths at the hands of officers — a move widely praised by activists. But the edict is not retroactive, meaning it will provide no relief for Hawa Bah.

She was there the day Cuomo signed the executive order, invited along with the families of other men who died at the hands of police. While the others wrapped Cuomo in hugs, she offered him only a stiff handshake.

“After I get justice for my son,” she told the governor, “then I will give you a hug.”

Politicians from President Obama to Chris Christie have been touting community policing. But it's a distraction from the real problem.

By Terrell Jermaine Starr November 3

The recent string of disturbing videos and angry protests exposing police brutality against black Americans have put an unprecedented level of pressure on politicians to deliver solutions. Black Lives Matter activists have urgently demanded concrete policies from leaders both inside the Beltway and on the campaign trail. But the most consistent political response to the excessive force that killed Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Walter Scott and many others has been decidedly gentle: community policing.

Community policing is a feel-good term, one so broad and nebulous that it seems difficult to oppose. While speaking at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference last week, President Obama touted it as the solution to crime in Chicago and Camden, N.J. Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told the Urban League in July that police brutality is unacceptable and offered community policing as the first solution to dealing with it. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a vocal proponent of community policing for decades, promoting it in her 1996 book “It Takes a Village.”

The Department of Justice defines community policing as a strategy for building trust between police and the community through cooperative efforts of law enforcement and local leaders, nonprofits, businesses and other entities. Various tactics, from body cameras to data sharing, all have been mentioned as aspects of community policing. None of those are bad practices.

But at its foundation, community policing demands more police on the streets. Obama said as much in his IACPC speech last week, and Clinton has professed that community policing needs “more officers on the streets to get to know those communities.” But in communities like mine, the predominately black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, putting more officers on patrol doesn’t lessen the chance of police brutality — it worsens it. As long as police know their badges empower them to operate with near-impunity, we don’t need more encounters with them; we need fewer.

This lack of law enforcement accountability is at the root of police brutality, and community policing doesn’t address it. It doesn’t assure me that a cop will be punished if he chokes my neighbor to death on the street corner during an arrest. NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold caused Eric Garner’s death during his arrest for allegedly selling loose cigarettes in July, wasn’t indicted and is still working as a cop. Given that, New York City’s announcement that it will hire 1,300 more cops to patrol neighborhoods like mine under the guise of community policing doesn’t bring me comfort; it makes me feel like my neighborhood is being occupied.

As Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told NPR earlier this year, popular notions of community policing often misrepresent what policing is. Elected officials suggest that law enforcement can be done in a “happy way,” when, in fact, it’s adversarial by nature. “The simplistic notion that the cops just have to be nice to people is silly, and that’s a lot of the conversation,” he said.

Lance Eldridge, a police officer in Craig, Colo., emphasized this idea in a 2010 essay for PoliceOne.com, noting that community policing “may be unintentionally fostering the very police state the philosophy was meant to discourage.” The practice puts police officers in positions where they aren’t needed, he wrote, heightening tension in situations that could be resolved civilly:

Having armed law enforcement officers encouraged by community policing, or directed by policy and practice, to mediate civil disputes, family issues, and social contracts may make officers appear more accessible to the public, but it also creates a slippery slope that places officers, and therefore their authority and integrity, in between and among citizens who otherwise may not request or appreciate their presence.

There’s no pleasure in seeing a cop in my community, gun and badge in tow, who has full power to control the dynamic of our interaction. Moreover, my cozy relationship with a beat officer wouldn’t prevent a cop like Eric Casebolt from throwing a 15-year-old girl to the ground after a neighborhood pool party. And even though Ben Fields was fired as a school resource officer last week after he was captured on cell phone video throwing a high school student out of her desk, another law enforcement agency could give him a badge.

As sincere as the philosophy of community policing might be, it’s not the solution to police brutality. The bad relationship between police and residents is not the cause of excessive force, it’s the result. The real cause is the fact that police officers are rarely, if ever, charged in connection to the people they kill. A Washington Post investigation found that only 54 officers had been charged in the thousands of fatal police shootings over the past decade. With those odds against police accountability, why would any marginalized community feel comfortable with more police patrolling their streets?

Obama is quick to say that African Americans aren’t making up stories about the abuse they endure during encounters with law enforcement. Still, neither he nor any of the candidates running for the White House has articulated a policy that assures those wayward cops will never work for another law enforcement agency again.

That’s what their calls for community policing fail to grasp: holding cops accountable.

Like any other law-abiding citizen, I want to walk around my neighborhood any time of the day and feel safe. But until I believe those officers who are sworn to protect me will be convicted for violating my civil rights, I would rather not see even more of them occupying my neighborhood under the guise of community policing.

Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera asserted on Tuesday that President Barack Obama should be focused on the “ghetto civil war” in black neighborhoods instead of trying to stop police brutality.

After President Barack Obama told NBC News that he was proud that his presidency had “helped to galvanize and mobilize America on behalf of issues of racial disparity and racial justice,” Fox News host Sean Hannity disagreed, arguing “just the opposite of what he said is true.”

“I, surprisingly, maybe agree with you,” Rivera replied. “I think the president has gotten involved in racial matters… only when the African-American person is portrayed as the victim, whether it’s Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown or any of the others.”

“He jumps in and the classic NAACP, ‘We are victims, woe is us, take care of this situation,'” he continued. “To me, the president has failed most profoundly in the area of race relations.”

“Yes, there is a terrible problem with police brutality, but it pales in comparison to the ghetto civil war that’s going on, this black-on-black violence is not to be ignored, it’s not to be minimized. And I have never seen the president get engaged when it’s an African-American killing another African-American or two gangs killing and an 8-year-old is killed in the crossfire.”

In fact, President Barack Obama highlighted the death of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton in his 2013 State of the Union Address. Pendleton was killed after being mistaken for someone else during a fight between two rival gangs. Both Pendleton and the gang members were black.

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke told Hannity that the president was “delusional” if he thought he was improving race relations.

According to Clarke, the country had been gradually healing race relations since slavery until Obama turned back the clock.

“President Obama came along with sandpaper, rubbed it raw and then poured salt in it to inflame it for political gain,” the sheriff opined.

Lawsuit filed in 2014 Akron police shooting death (warning: graphic images)

AKRON, Ohio — The mother of a 29-year-old man killed by an Akron police officer has filed suit against the city, saying that while the shooting was ruled justified, the officers had no reason to stop him and shoot him in the back.

The suit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Akron, states that Raupheal Thomas was "cooperative, affirmative, non-threatening, and non-suspicious" when officers Joseph Danzy and Edward Stewart tried to arrest him in November 2014..

At the time, the lawsuit states, Thomas was catching a ride with a friend and was waiting for another ride because his friend's car had a flat tire.

It also says that the officers used a stun gun when Thomas "attempted to free himself," and that they hit and kicked Thomas once he was on the ground. They shot Thomas when he was running away and "posed no imminent or immediate threat to anyone at this time," according to the lawsuit

Messages left for the police department and the city's law director were not immediately returned Wednesday.

The filing of the lawsuit marks the first time that Danzy has been named as the officer who shot Thomas. The city and Summit County Prosecutor's Office have repeatedly refused to release his name.

But the lawsuit, which includes claims of excessive force and unlawful search and seizure, offers a different account of events than Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh detailed in a July report ruling the shooting justified.

In the report, Walsh wrote that officers asked Thomas, who has several felony convictions, whether he had anything illegal on him, and Thomas got upset.

The report also says that Thomas, who was six feet, four inches tall and weighed 265 pounds, was high on methamphetamine when he fought with residents and eventually the officers. During the struggle, Thomas pulled out a gun.

An officer eventually pushed the gun upward and it went off. Danzy fired two shots after Thomas broke away and ran.

Attorney Nicholas DiCello, who represents Thomas' mother, said the lawsuit is backed up by videos shot from Danzy's car dashboard camera and a video shot by a neighbor.

The dashcam video (posted above) shows Thomas exchanging words with somebody who is off camera. Officers then move Thomas against the hood of the car, and Thomas puts his hands up.

Thomas then struggles and breaks free, and runs to the side of the car. Officers follow, with at least one drawing a weapon.

From there, any interaction between Thomas and the officers cannot be seen. About 30 seconds later, the video shows Thomas, while struggling to pull up his sagging pants, running away.

An officer appears to fire and Thomas falls to the ground.

"I think the fulcrum of this case, the legal analysis, would dictate that you're not able to shoot somebody in the manner this guy did, in the back," DiCello said.

The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge John Adams in Akron.

The lawsuit also names Akron police Chief James Nice and claims Nice failed to properly train his officers.

Police initially approached Thomas and his friend after an off-duty cop called officers about two suspicious-looking men standing on a sidewalk.

Neighborhood residents became wary of Thomas and his friend because of a rash of break-ins in the area.