Kamilah Brock, a former New York banker, has filled a suit against the city after she was detained for eight days in a mental health facility against her will. Brock says she was committed after trying to pick up her BMW, which skeptical police did not believe she owned. To add insult to injury, Brock was then charged a hefty sum by the hospital.
Ferguson is not the only town in America where this will hold true. Let people dig a little deeper across the USA, and you’ll find more towns doing the exact same thing.
going to jail for excercising your right to vote, that’s new. Here you don’t vote if you’re IN jail, because you’re not considered a citizen, it is suspended while you’re in, but once you’re out, you have every right and obligation to vote.
If you’ve lost your right to vote because you’ve been convicted of a felony (which shouldn’t happen anyway), shouldn’t that show up in a records system and prevent you from registering? We have bureaucracy for a reason.
The importance of “water is wet” studies should not be understated. Because now you have a study to point to when someone who doesn’t already know this asks you for a source, as opposed to relying on anecdotal evidence or “common knowledge”.
Nine states with a history of racial discrimination are more aggressively removing registered voters from their rolls than other states, according to a report released Friday.
After reviewing voter purges nationally from 2012 to 2016, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found that the mostly Southern jurisdictions that had once been required to get changes to voting policies pre-approved by the Justice Department had higher rates of purging than jurisdictions that were not previously subject to pre-clearance.
“Two million fewer voters would have been purged over those four years if jurisdictions previously subject to federal pre-clearance had purged at the same rate” as other jurisdictions, the Brennan Center estimated.
In Georgia, for example, 156 of the state’s 159 counties reported an increase in removal rates after the Voting Rights Act was changed. In 2016, advocates sued Georgia for making voter registration harder.In 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union sued a Georgia county and the state Secretary of State for its purge practices, too.
“There’s cause for concern when the purge rate goes up this much at the same time we’re seeing controversial, sometimes illegal voter purge practice, in addition to changes to other voting laws that make it more difficult to participate,” said Jonathan Brater, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program and one of the report’s authors.
The Brennan Center’s analysis found that election officials were purging voter rolls more aggressively nationwide, too, with some using imprecise or possibly illegal methods to do so.
Voter purges — cleaning up and pruning voter rolls down to remove inaccurate information — are a normal part of all election roll maintenance. But if purges are done too aggressively or with bad information, advocates warn, they can disenfranchise eligible voters, who may not know they’ve been purged until they go to the polls on Election Day and are unable to vote.
Brater said that under the Trump administration, “the Department of Justice has abdicated its responsibility to protect against bad voter purges.”
In 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court recently approved Ohio’s method for purging voters from the rolls. The Obama Justice Department had supported the challengers in the early stages of the court fight, but the Trump administration switched sides and supported the state.
I cannot stress enough the need to verify that your registration is still valid.
If you would report an undocumented immigrant to ICE you would have reported me to the Nazis and I don’t fucking trust you
A note:
I live in a state where you “have to” report anyone you suspect of being undocumented (that wonderful hellhole of Arizona). Now in practice this law has fallen far short, thank goodness. But if you live in such a place and they start enforcing it, here is how you get around it:
Assume everyone who doesn’t speak English is visiting.
Never ask about their job, because if they tell you they work here then you know they’re not visiting. You see them a lot for several weeks or months? Hm. Someone in the family must be ill. That’s terribly tough. They always dress in old, ratty laborers’ clothes? I feel you, my dude, I can’t afford new clothes either, and my dad has the fashion sense of an aardvark, so sometimes it’s not even about “affording” them. They say they’ve been here for years? You must have misunderstood. Spanish isn’t your first language, after all. First and last name? It never came up, or you don’t recall–you meet a lot of people.
And then, if you’re asked: no, you haven’t seen anyone residing illegally in the United States. Just people visiting.
Very good very important addition
Essentially, this is the civil society version of a work-to-rule strike.
Don’t do more than is expressly asked of you, and do what you are asked with such an intense attention to protocol that not asking you at all becomes more effective than even bothering.
In this case:
“Have you seen an illegal immigrant?”
“Could you describe an illegal immigrant, officer?”
*officer describes a person who is in the country without appropriate paperwork, or who has crossed the border illegally*
“No, sir, I haven’t seen any illegal immigrant.”
And this is correct. You have NOT seen an illegal immigrant, because you have no way of knowing if Jose Fulano is here legally or not. And since you can’t see his paperwork (or lack thereof), and did not personally see him cross the border illegally, you are only answering precisely the question asked.
Asking everyone to report anyone they “suspect” of being an undocumented immigrant is racist as fuck and anyone not white knows this and knows how this is being “enforced”. How many times do we need to see white women calling police to enforce white supremacy to finally understand that this kind of policy was set up for one reason alone?
to put a finer point on it, white people who speak European languages and not English are never gonna get reported.
Loki is the Philosopher King 