California

A police cover-up breaks down in Sacramento

  • February 28, 2017
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FOR JOSEPH Mann, suffering a mental health crisis while Black and homeless on the streets of Sacramento proved to be a death sentence. The execution was carried out last July by Sacramento police officers Randy Lozoya and John Tennis, who twice attempted to run over Mann in their patrol vehicle–and, when that failed, exited and gunned him down, firing 18 times and riddling Mann with 14 bullets. Yet Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert has since cleared both officers of any wrongdoing. That’s despite dash-cam video from the patrol car driven by Mann’s murderers, which captured their conversation leading…

Intersecting Criminalization: What Killed Ugandan Refugee Alfred Olango

  • October 8, 2016
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To flee from a war zone, only to be met with a fatal police bullet on the other side of the world: It’s an uncomfortable, truncated narrative of an abbreviated life. This was how Alfred Olango’s life concluded late last month, at the intersection of many forces of violence that converged at a San Diego suburb, in a scene that braided strands of war, policing, race and migration. A diasporic history caught up to him in the moment the police extinguished his life, but he had spent years in various states of escape. He was finally ensnared by a system…

Black Lives Matter Activist Convicted of Felony Lynching: “It’s More Than Ironic, It’s Disgusting”

In Pasadena, California, Black Lives Matter organizer Jasmine Richards is facing four years in state prison after she was convicted of a rarely used statute in California law originally known as “felony lynching.” Under California’s penal code, “felony lynching” was defined as attempting to take a person out of police custody. Jasmine was arrested and charged with felony lynching last September, after police accused her of trying to de-arrest someone during a peace march at La Pintoresca Park in Pasadena on August 29, 2015. The arrest and jailing of a young black female activist on charges of felony lynching sparked…