A shooting in Arizona, and "trainspotting" in Philadelphia.

 Tonight, once again, I have to do a blog post about someone in authority taking the life of a fellow citizen.

Let's go to what is becoming one of the most regressive states in the union: Arizona.

"PHOENIX — A Texas man fatally shot by a Mesa police officer in January was heard begging for his life moments before his death, according to a police report released Tuesday morning.

A witness and a transcription of officer video footage describe ****** saying “Please don’t shoot me” and “Please don’t shoot,” just before an officer later identified as Philip "Mitch" Brailsford unloaded his service weapon.

Brailsford has been charged with second-degree murder and was terminated from the Police Department.

On Tuesday, the Mesa Police Department released the police report, 911 calls and other material from its investigation of Brailsford's shooting of ******, who was unarmed, at a hotel in January.

Just wow. I redacted the name of the victim because to make a point.

Raise your hands if you thought that the victim was black.

Well he wasn't, and honestly, it really shouldn't matter.  His rights as a human being and as a citizen were violated, and he lost his life as a result.

"Shaver, 26, died after being shot in a hallway outside his room at a Mesa La Quinta Inn & Suites on Jan. 18. Brailsford was charged with one count of second-degree murder in a direct complaint by the County Attorney's Office on March 4.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said body-camera footage obtained from the officer was used in his office's review of the case. The fatal shooting was the result of unjustified deadly force, Montgomery said.

The county attorney's complaint stated Brailsford was "manifesting an extreme indifference to human life recklessly causing the death of another."

Shaver's widow, Laney Sweet, said earlier this month that she had grown more and more frustrated by the lack of details made available to the public, including the circumstances surrounding her husband's death, two months after it occurred. They are the parents of two young girls."

This might be a good time to quote that famous poem written by Pastor Martin Niemöller. "First They Came."

Finally, two train related incidents happened recently here in Philadelphia that has me seeing both the good and the bad in humanity.

The bad had to do with these out of control kids and their abhorrent and despicable behavior on the elevated train. Their behavior was sad on so many levels. Obviously they are living in an environment tat is not healthy.

I saw their mother and step-father tonight on the evening news, and they were actually blaming the behavior of their little hooligans on the guy filming them.

Look, Philly is a tough town with a lot of tough people. But these little guys are starting way too young.

Now the good:

"Two subway riders on Wednesday prevented an apparently suicidal man from jumping in front of a train on SEPTA's Broad Street Line.

Heather Redfern, a SEPTA spokeswoman, said the incident, which unfolded about 9:30 a.m. at the Race-Vine Station, delayed southbound service for 15 minutes until police could respond.
Police went to the station after they received a call that a person was threatening to jump in front of a train.

When they arrived, they found two people restraining the man on the platform, Redfern said.
Police took the man to a hospital for evaluation."

Nice. And, to be fair, here in Philly we tend to do stuff like this. It just never gets noticed cause we have such a bad rep. You know, booing Santa and all.  When you do stuff like that the rest of the country tends to view you in a bad light.

But hey, that was a long time ago. We are working on making ourselves better. I guess we can start by having a long talk with the parents of those children from the elevated train. 

*Pic from pinterest.

Failing schools and failing parents.

I see you Negroes pitching a hissy fit in places like Chicago and here in Philly over the school board in these cities deciding to close a bunch of public schools.

But my question to you Negroes would be this: Why now? Why are you just now coming to the realization that a proper [public school] education is important and that the school house is the most important part of our community?

A colleague of mine is five months pregnant with her first child, and she is already thinking about her unborn child's future. She was lamenting the lack of quality public schools (K-12) here in Philly in predominantly African American neighborhoods, and the lack of focus and interest that people (even well educated and professional ones) take in making sure that fine schools are available in their neighborhoods.

The black folks who can afford it ship their money -and their children- off to private schools and never look back. The folks who do send their children to the neighborhood schools are not as involved with their children's educational well being as they should be, and they never give the children's school a second thought until something like budget cuts comes along and smacks them in the face. I am not a fan of charter schools, but it's easy to see why the charter school movement is picking up steam across the country.

"Field, even in Chinatown the folks over there are making sure that their children have good neighborhood schools, and meanwhile in upper middle class neighborhoods in the city we are lacking. I am already worried about where my child is going to end up and whether my husband and I will be able to afford it."

I feel your pain my sister. I feel your pain. If your child isn't a genius and fortunate enough to hit the lottery and get into one of our better performing public schools, you are going to have to shell out the big bucks or be the only parent at PTA meetings at one of the lower performing schools. This is the sad reality that we are faced with in black America: Many of us just do not place as much importance as we should in a proper education.

At the end of the day, school closings may or may not save the cities money. I will leave that for others to decide. But the bottom line is that until we start showing more interest in our kid's education this is the type of games that will be played with our children's future. If you don't care about your own child's education, why do you think that some bureaucrat who is paid well over six figures to watch the bottom line will?

"'Every child in every neighborhood in Chicago deserves access to a high-quality education that prepares them to succeed in life, but for too long children in certain parts of Chicago have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed because they are in underutilized, under-resourced schools,'  Byrd-Bennett said.

'As a former teacher and a principal, I've lived through school closings and I know that this will not be easy, but I also know that in the end this will benefit our children."'

No it won't. Because they will still have the same parents.

Politics and shootings as usual.

It is politics as usual in here America. I see that Mitt has outlined his energy plan for these divided states of America, (more fracking, good luck with that) and the republican party platform is...well, exactly what we would expect with republicans: Taliban like in its ignorance. (American women are getting a beat down in this war.) 

Issac is still trying to make up his mind if he will slam Tampa next week, and I think that it is the sweetest of all ironies that the storm has a biblical name. Pray people, pray!

Anyway, enough of politics, I want to rain on your parade just a little bit while you continue to wave at the floats going down Main Street while you pursue your happiness.

Here in Philly we had another shooting last night; this one was so brazen and horrific that the police literally ran out of markers to mark the shell casings on the ground. A driver of a car was ambushed by a group of men who opened up on him. Dude was shot eight times and might actually survive. (They build em tough here in Philly.) But here is the thing, we have shootings-and killings- every day, so there was nothing unusual about some dude getting his wig split on a city street. What upset me about this story is the fact that these little urban terrorist were shooting their intended target in the middle of a residential neighborhood while decent law abiding citizens tried to relax in the comfort of their homes. Eight O Clock??!! You little Negroes done lost your minds! [Story]

I am going to repeat something I have been saying on this blog for years: some of you out here having these damn kids need to be put in jail right next to the little thug you spawned. (This is for you sperm donors as well.) 
If your situation in life is such that you can't take care of your damn self, well then when you get your freak on with the neighborhood Lothario, please try your damn best not to bring someone else into the world to share in your misery. That kind of crap is only going to bring problems for the rest of us down the road.   

          

 

Some parents should be left behind.

"If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.” ~Theodore Roosevelt~

Tabitha Allen needs a good kick in the pants.

"Tabitha Allen blames herself for her 10-year-old son's violent behavior. Growing up and living in a drug-infested, hooker-inhabited neighborhood, the 33-year-old mother of five is angry about life. "My anger reflects off my children," Allen explained one morning in the North Philadelphia rowhouse she inherited from her grandmother.

Her son - a thin, almost gaunt, boy with long eyelashes - punched a teacher last June at Kenderton Elementary School, a K-8 in Tioga. He knocked the glasses off her face and blackened her eye with a blow that packed unexpected power. As a 10-year-old, he had reached the minimum age to be arrested, and ended up with a simple assault charge in Family Court, where he was put on probation. He was removed from Kenderton and transferred to a classroom for disruptive elementary school students in Logan. Only last week, Allen said that her son was disciplined for having a BB gun at his new school. She said it was a misunderstanding and that the gun belonged to another student. [Source]

Tabitha Allen doesn't need a kick in the butt because she was born into unfortunate circumstances. She needs a kick in the butt for bringing five children into her world. A world where hope is hard to come by.

Tabitha Allen didn't give herself much of a shot, and she brought five kids along for the ride. Read the link to the Philly.com series about school violence that I provided. It will give you a wonderful insight into why Philly has 77 murders [and counting] so far this year.

"Tabitha Allen admits she wasn't on top of her children's lives the way she should have been, especially after her grandmother got sick and an aunt died. "I took my mind off my kids," Allen said. Allen, a high school dropout and unemployed, had all five of her children before she was 25. Two of her teenagers she describes as "Bonnie and Clyde." "They don't know how to walk away from stuff. They don't know how to let stuff go," she said. Her youngest, the 10-year-old who assaulted the teacher, takes after them, she said. So it was no surprise to her when she learned he had hit his teacher.

Earlier, the teacher had intervened when the boy hit a classmate. That led to a fist fight in the hall between the boy and the teacher, she said. Her son had been suspended repeatedly for fighting, she said. This time, he faced legal charges and landed on probation. Kenderton kicked him out and sent him to a disciplinary classroom at a K-6 school in Logan, about a mile and a half from his house. The classroom is run by Abraxas.

This year, there are 10 such sites based at elementary schools and serving 240 children in grades three to eight, said Wright, of the discipline office. Each self-contained classroom is staffed by a teacher and a behavior specialist. Students are evaluated after 30 days to determine if they can return to a regular school. In addition to academics, the students receive counseling and character-building courses. Allen said the school is too strict. When her son enters the school, he is patted down for weapons, she said. His classroom is in the basement, she said, and he is not allowed out for recess. "He ain't no convict. This isn't jail," she complained. Allen also said she was at a loss about how to help her son, who has ADHD and sees a psychiatrist.

She did her best to discipline her children, she said, and learned how to "beat them at their own game." When her son missed her imposed 10 p.m. curfew, she made him sit outside until 2 a.m. - in the cold. When her 13-year-old was locked up for trying to steal sneakers, she let him sit in jail for a while. She did the same to her 16-year-old daughter after she got into a fight and was detained. And when her 15-year-old son said he was going to kill himself, she hung a rope and told him how best to do it. "I said, 'It depends on how you jump,' " she said. "You got to jump right."

Allen struggles with her own anger. She said it comes from "life. Period. Me growing up in a neighborhood like this, seeing all the drugs." She pointed to her front door. "I got a whole hooker row right here on the corner," she said."

Tabitha Allen gives her ten year old son a 10 p.m. curfew! And people wonder why criminal lawyers do so well. *shaking head*

Uncle Al.

"In order to successfully exploit the population of nignoramuses whoactually do believe that the inordinate number of blacks killed by policeis not the result of committing crimes and stupid actions in the vicinity of armed police at a rate far above their prevalence in the general population for profit and political influence (power), Sharpington must publicly believe there ought to be more whites being shot by cops until the numbers of such shootings are between eight and nine times as many as those of blacks.In other words, I'm saying he (officially) wants *more* white people shot by cops, but he gets to avoid being a "racist" because he claims to believe more blacks are shot by cops than is warranted by the extra-criminal nature of the black population the police deal with every single day and must respond to if they want to go home alive every night instead of politically-correct heroes-of-the-revolution in-a-box.Sharpton is an exploiter of ignorant wishful-thinking . He happens to be fortunate (for him) to be the same basic color-scheme as those in whose group this type of oversimplification is rampant and so is taken as "letitimate" within the group who can be exploited by such sophist canards.In another time and another skin, he'd have made a fortune traveling around in a wagon selling snake-oil."

That was one of the answers given on yahoo answers to the question: why doesn't Al. Sharpton rally and plead for the cause of whites who are killed by police officers?

I thought about that, and I think I know at least one answer; there aren't any. I mean I tried to find such an incident, but I couldn't. Lord knows I wore out google searching, but nothing. No white man killed in a questionable shooting by police officers. So for now, one of A-merry-ca's crazy uncles in the attic, will be allowed to continue to embarrass the family.

But hey, it's late, and I must confess my search was not as thorough as it could have been. I am sure that someone reading this post will do the research for me and come up with at least one such incident. I bet there is one certain commenter who is searching right now :)

So the good Reverend and some other protesters were arrested today in New York for protesting the Sean Bell killings, and as is usually the case when the good Reverend is involved, folks are crying race hustle. Honestly, they just might be right. But I don't know what's in the Reverend's heart -although I do know that he loves the camera- so I don't want to assume that I know what his motives are.

But I will say this: lately the good Reverend could find lots of stuff to keep him busy right here in Philly. Over the past few days we have witnessed a gang in blue beat three unarmed men in a car, literally put some minority neighborhoods under siege and in fear, as SWAT teams storm from house to house looking for a cop killer. Ahh field stop it, if these young black thugs didn't commit such a disproportionate number of crimes in our country, the police would not be so involved with these types of clashes with them. That might or might not be true, but how can we tell? How can we tell that if the color of the skin of these perps were different the police reaction to them would not be different as well? A female colleague of mine asked me today, if I think police officers "would have dragged some white youths from their car like they did on that video." And I had to be honest with myself and with her, and say no. Which is why us black folks (Uncle Al or not) still march and write and protest when we see incidents like Sean Bell, Ronald Madison, Amadou Diallo,Khiel Coppin, Patrick Dorismond....(you get the point), taking place here in A-merry-ca. It's why Reverend Al, bad perm and all, has been allowed to thrive. It's why he can continue what some folks see as his race hustle here in the land of the free.

Sorry A-merry-ca, you can't blame anyone for folks like the Reverend, but yourself.