‘Where was our independence?’ The persistent questions about the IPCC’s Mark Duggan investigation

  • March 14, 2016
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Last week the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report into the death of Mark Duggan exonerated the officers involved – and was immediately condemned by the family as a ‘whitewash’. IRR News analyses previously unreleased internal documents that shed new light on the IPCC’s investigation in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI)[1] reveal the IPCC chose to withhold ballistics information from the public for several days following the shooting. This withheld information was of vital public concern as it proved that a bullet lodged in a police officer’s radio was from…

Traveling While Black: I Was Racially Profiled and Locked Up in Israel

  • March 3, 2016
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Detroit activist and writer Kristian Davis Bailey was en route to a West Bank conference to talk about Black and Palestinian solidarity when Israeli police accused him of drug smuggling. Here, he reflects on the trauma of his arrest and insists that it’s nothing compared to what Palestinians face. For two months I have been silent about an unexpected and traumatic experience: my racial profiling, arrest and incarceration by the state of Israel in mid-December. I was on my way to Birzeit University in the West Bank to speak about the Black Lives Matter movement and the connections Black youth…

Forced reforms, Mixed results

  • February 13, 2016
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In Detroit, the Justice Department forced reforms on police after officers fatally shot 47 people in five years, including six who were unarmed. The overhaul took 11 years and eight police chiefs. In Los Angeles, Justice intervened after police officers in an anti-gang unit were accused of beating and framing people. The reforms cost taxpayers an estimated $300 million. In New Orleans, Justice stepped in to overhaul the police department after officers over 17 months shot 27 people, all of whom were black. The changes­ have fueled departures from the ranks and deterred some officers from pro­active policing. ABOUT this…

Policing the Police

  • February 13, 2016
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Could Ferguson Win Its Case Against the Justice Department? February 11, 2016/ by Sarah Childress Senior Digital Reporter, FRONTLINE Enterprise Journalism Group A few weeks ago, it seemed like Ferguson, Mo. might actually enter into an agreement to overhaul its police and city court. City officials had reached a tentative agreement with the Justice Department in January to implement widespread reforms, including retraining police officers, restructuring the city court and removing rules in the city code that police had used almost exclusively to penalize African-Americans. Now, change in the city that helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement following the police shooting…

Minneapolis Activists Continue Fight Against Systemic Racism and Police Violence

  • January 18, 2016
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Nekima Levy-Pounds watched the scenes of officers slaying unarmed Black men replayed, one after another, in major cities across the United States, including New York, Charleston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Cincinnati. During all of them, she clung onto one hope: to never see the same stories unfold in Minneapolis, where she raises her 11-year-old son, heads the local NAACP and participates in the local Black Lives Matter movement. However, it’s clear that Minneapolis, too, is home to the kind of police violence that has inspired protests from Ferguson to Baltimore and led to the birth of Black Lives Matter, a…

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