Hate Crime: Boys Pour Gas On A Child And Set Him On Fire 'You Get What You Deserve, White Boy.'

By Susan Duclos

It is being called a hate crime, via NY Daily News:

A 13-year-old boy who police say was doused with gasoline and lit on fire last week while walking home from school is recovering from first-degree burns to his face and head.

The boy was just two blocks from his home in Kansas City Tuesday when two teenagers began to follow him and then attacked him, his mother, Melissa Coon, said.

Police have described the suspects as black 16-year-olds, while the victim is white.

"We were told it's a hate crime," Coon told KTLA.

"They rushed him on the porch as he tried to get the door open," Coon told KMBC. "(One of them) poured the gasoline, then flicked the Bic, and said, 'This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, white boy.'"

By lighting the gasoline, the second attacker "produced a large fireball burning the face and hair" of the boy, according to a Kansas City Police Department report obtained by KCTV.

"It was pretty bad stuff," Detective Stacey Taylor told the TV station, adding that police are concerned the boy may have suffered damage to his eyes and lungs.

Coon said her son put out the fire with his shirt and called 911 himself. He was rushed to the hospital and was treated for his injuries.

Read the rest.

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Feds neglect sex/violent crime prosecutions in Indian Country.

Not that I approve of the way the DOJ intervenes in Indigenous affairs when it does, but this is unacceptable. The Director of the Office for Tribal Justice for the Justice Department on Indigenous affairs is Tracy Toulou. Complain about this to him. The contact info there is: 

 U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Tribal Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

 

202-514-8812

cc all copies of your correspondence with them to the reporter covering this at the New York Times, which just published the article below, so he can get a sense of how the public is responding to the DOJ's neglect. This guy Timothy Williams has done some good reporting - check him out here.

Here's the link to the Justice Department's data on crime and justice in indigenous communities. Keep in mind that's also an arm of the propaganda campaign about how great Eric Holder and the DOJ are - don't believe everything you read there as an objective "fact".


Not everything about the incidence of violence in Indian Country - or the rest of the nation, for that matter - can or should be addressed with police and prosecution - by then, someone else has already been hurt. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence has a lot of excellent resources about alternative justice systems, prison abolition, and violent crime from the perspective of survivors of oppression. 

 We need to build a better library of resources and knowledge here on tribal justice, too. Folks with resources more specific to Indigenous communities and justice are encouraged to drop me a line so I can pass them on. I'm Peggy at prisonabolitionist@gmail.com.

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Higher Crime, Fewer Charges on Indian Land

NEW YORK TIMES

February 20, 2012

 By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Indian reservations across the United States have grappled for years with chronic rates of crime higher than all but a handful of the nation’s most violent cities. But the Justice Department, which is responsible for prosecuting the most serious crimes on reservations, files charges in only about half of Indian Country murder investigations and turns down nearly two-thirds of sexual assault cases, according to new federal data. 

The country’s 310 Indian reservations have violent crime rates that are more than two and a half times higher than the national average, according to data compiled by the Justice Department. American Indian women are 10 times as likely to be murdered than other Americans. They are raped or sexually assaulted at a rate four times the national average, with more than one in three having either been raped or experienced an attempted rape. 

The low rate of prosecutions for these crimes by United States attorneys, who along with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation generally have jurisdiction for the most serious crimes on reservations, has been a longstanding point of contention for tribes, who say it amounts to a second-class system of justice that encourages law breaking. Prosecutors, however, say they turn down most reservation cases because of a lack of admissible evidence. 

Brendan Johnson, the United States attorney for South Dakota, said the government in recent years has deployed extra prosecutors and F.B.I. agents to Indian Country. And the Justice Department says it is seeking to make its decisions more transparent. Impatience on reservations is understandable, Mr. Johnson said. 

“If I had the rates of crime in my community that they do, I’d be mad, too,” he said.

But tribes say they are rarely told why reservation cases are not pursued by the government. 

“One of the basic problems is that not only are they declining to prosecute cases, but we are not getting the reason or notification for the declination,” said Jerry Gardner of the Tribal Law and Policy Institute in West Hollywood, Calif., which works with tribes to develop justice programs. “The federal system takes a long time to make a decision, and when it comes to something like a child sexual assault, the community gets the message that nothing is being done.” 

Under federal law, tribal courts have the authority to prosecute tribal members for crimes committed on reservations, but cannot sentence those convicted to more than three years in prison. As a result, tribes usually seek federal prosecution for serious crimes. 

Frustration has grown so acute that some tribal members have sued the government for declining prosecutions and for what they say is the related issue of sloppy police work. 

Last month, a federal court in Montana allowed the family of Steven Bearcrane of the Crow Reservation to sue an F.B.I. agent who Mr. Bearcrane’s parents say conducted a flawed homicide investigation into their son’s death at 23. The lawsuit also said the United States attorney’s office has a practice of rejecting criminal cases in which the victims are Native Americans. 

The Justice Department said it has made headway in resolving conflicts with tribes, pointing to a directive to United States attorneys to work more closely with tribal leaders and to the Tribal Law and Order Act, approved by Congress in 2010, which sought to strengthen tribal law enforcement systems. 

But Tao Etpison, former chief judge of the Tonto Apaches in Arizona, said federal prosecutors typically live, work and try cases hundreds of miles from Indian Country. And at times, according to federal data, the Justice Department declines to prosecute violent reservation crime because local United States attorneys have said they lack sufficient resources. “These crimes are very serious for the reservation, but the prosecutors really don’t see it from a reservation perspective,” Mr. Etpison said. 

Federal prosecutors in 2011 declined to file charges in 52 percent of cases involving the most serious crimes committed on Indian reservations, according to figures compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which uses the Freedom of Information Act to recover and examine federal data. 

The government did not pursue rape charges on reservations 65 percent of the time last year and rejected 61 percent of cases involving charges of sexual abuse of children, the federal data showed. In contrast, the Justice Department declined 20 percent of drug trafficking cases nationwide, according to the federal figures. 

Once federal prosecutors do decline a case, they seldom hand over evidence to tribal courts, according to the Government Accountability Office. An office report last year also found that federal prosecutors fail to tell tribes that they have declined cases until after the tribe’s statute of limitations has expired. 

Federal prosecutors, however, say they seek to provide as much information as possible to tribes about cases they decline, though they are often limited because the cases may be reopened later. 

Kerry J. Jacobson, an assistant United States attorney in Wyoming, said undertaking tribal prosecutions while the government decides whether it will file charges would create more problems than it would solve. 

“We can’t turn over our evidence while we are doing our investigation,” she said. “And I don’t want victims of sexual assault to have to testify twice.” 

Much of the time, however, victims do not testify at all. 

On the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, Mr. Etpison, the former tribal judge, said federal prosecutors had declined to pursue at least 40 sexual assault cases in recent years, most of them involving children. 

Thomas W. Weissmuller, a former chief judge for several tribes, said he presided over a trial on the Swinomish Reservation in Washington State in which a 31-year-old man was accused of pouring root beer schnapps into the root beer of a girl who had recently turned 13. The girl, unaware of the alcohol, drank the soda and passed out. The man covered her face with her own clothes and raped her. 

Mr. Weissmuller said that in spite of a DNA match and statements from two relatives who interrupted the attack, federal prosecutors did not file charges. 

Though convicted of rape in tribal court, the man served only one year in jail — the maximum penalty in the tribal system at the time. The Justice Department declined to discuss the case. 

“I don’t know why it wasn’t prosecuted federally,” Mr. Weissmuller said. “I believe it was a very clear-cut case.”

300 Occupiers Arrested In Oakland California

By Susan Duclos

Occupiers are tired of being ignored has beens so decided to get rowdy, burning flags, destroying equipment, vandalizing and generally breaking as many laws as they could to get arrested and drum up some attention.

Via Wapo:

Dozens of police maintained a late-night guard around City Hall following daylong protests that resulted in 300 arrests. Occupy Oakland demonstrators broke into the historic building and burned a U.S. flag, as officers earlier fired tear gas to disperse people throwing rocks and tearing down fencing at a convention center.

[...SNIP...]

Quan said that at one point, many protesters forced their way into City Hall, where they burned flags, broke an electrical box and damaged several art structures, including a recycled art exhibit created by children.

She blamed the destruction on a small “very radical, violent” splinter group within Occupy Oakland.

“This is not a situation where we had a 1,000 peaceful people and a few violent people. If you look at what’s happening today in terms of destructing property, throwing at and charging the police, it’s almost like they are begging for attention and hoping that the police will make an error.”

Since Barack Obama incited the original Occupy movement and Democratic politicians embraced, encouraged and supported them and San Fran Nan Pelosi herself "blessed" them... I say give them all the attention they want to remind voters of the divisive class open warfare Barack Obama has pushed for in this country.

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#OWS News: Police Dismantle Philadelphia, LA Occupier Encampments

By Susan Duclos

In the latest police effort to dismantle unlawful encampments erected by Wall Street Occupiers, Philadelphia and LA police swept through and cleared out the two sites where protesters had recently been set up tents.

Philadelphia:

Police swarmed around City Hall and rousted Occupy Philadelphia protesters from their encampment overnight, more than two days after a deadline passed for them to leave.

The occupiers responded by roaming around Center City, scattering and regrouping with police following their every move in a chaotic night of cat-and-mouse that ended before daylight.

"The Dilworth occupation is over," Mayor Nutter said at a news conference just before 7 a.m.

Crews were using bulldozers and other heavy equipment to clear up debris and fire hoses to wash down the plaza as he spoke.

He called the police operation to clear the plaza "tremendously well planned and executed."

He said at least 50 people were arrested, 44 of them in a 5 a.m. face off on North 15th Street behind the Inquirer and School District buildings.

Los Angeles

Police in riot gear and biohazard suits removed anti-Wall Street activists from an encampment outside the Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday, arresting an estimated 200 people.

Overnight on the East Coast, about 100 Occupy protesters in Philadelphia swiftly and peacefully vacated their camp but later 52 were arrested around the city on charges ranging from obstructing a highway to aggravated assault on a police officer, officials said.

In Los Angeles, busloads of police closed in on the 8-week-old Occupy LA camp after midnight and declared the hundreds of protesters congregated on the lawn, sidewalks and streets around City Hall to be an unlawful assembly, ordering them to disperse or face arrest, in line with an eviction order from the mayor.

This follows weeks of crackdowns in cities across the country, the most widely publicized was in New York when police evicted Occupiers from Zuccotti Park, where it all started, and a court decided protesters were not legally able to set up encampments in the Park but they were free to protest there as long as they followed Park rules.

There has not been much reported news from that location since the Zuccotti Park Occupiers were disbanded.

No doubt this has been a relief to New York City which the AP has reported $7 million had been spent by taxpayers in "police overtime and other municipal services', all associated with costs to the taxpayers of New York because of the Occupiers.

In Oakland where another highly publicized crack down dismantled their tent city, the city had already had a nearly $58 million budget gap and taxpayers were nailed with $2.4 million responding to the protests.

Without the encampment, SFGate reports that Occupiers have hit their "second phase" which is to "provoke confrontations" in order to stay in the news, but this has "turned off many people who lament the cost of extra policing and the damage done by vandals."

While many liberals have lamented polling that showed the general public agrees with certain concepts generated by the Occupy movement, that has not translated into support for the movement itself because of the constant strife, public reports on death threats from Occupiers and supporters, violence, public urination and defecation by Occupiers, provoked confrontations instigated by Occupiers, unsanitary conditions in which the Occupiers created with their tent cities, diseases running rampant throughout those tent cities, etc...

Mid November the Democratically leaning Public Policy Polling found that 45 percent of voters oppose the Occupiers with 33 percent being supportive of their goals. A month before that PPP found 36 percent opposed and 35 percent were supportive. In just one month, according to the PPP polls, Occupier antics cost themselves 2 percent support and gained themselves 9 percent more opposition.

Two days ago, November 28, 2011, Rasmussen found that 55 percent of likely voters now hold an unfavorable view of the Occupiers, with 39 percent holding a "somewhat favorable view."

Occupiers outstayed their welcome like a house guest that never leaves. The longer they stay the less support they are getting.

You can find all WuA's Occupier antics posts at the class warfare label page here.

#OWS News: 2 Months In And Over 4,500 Occupiers Arrested To Date

By Susan Duclos

According to NYT City Room the number of arrests of Occupy protesters nationwide is now said to be more than 4,500 just a little over 2 months since the protests began.

Nothing "manufactured" about that narrative.

And they wonder why public support is eroding....

You can find all WuA's Occupier antics posts at the class warfare label page here.

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#OWS: November 17, 2011 is the day that Occupiers became terrorists.

By Susan Duclos

Liberals wonder why support for the Occupy Wall Street movement is fading after two months. Some even claim it is because of the negative reporting by the media and claiming that there has been a "Manufactured Narrative," associated with the Occupy movement and the Occupiers participating.

The problem with those excuses are the videos of violence, those aren't fictional, nor manufactured. Rape is real. Disease is real. Violence is real. Death threats are real. Photos of Occupiers defecating in public are real.

November 17, 2011 is the day that Occupiers became terrorists.

The second definition for "terrorist" according to Dictionary.com is:

2. a person who terrorizes or frightens others.

The video below is from yesterday, the so-called "day of action" for the Occupiers and they crossed a line when they deliberately terrorized children. School kids being brought to school as Occupiers kicked, screamed, yelled and chanted "Follow those kids". (Source- CBS New York)

In the middle of thousands of protestors yelling and chanting — some kicking and screaming – CBS 2’s Emily Smith found little school kids trying to get to class. Nervous parents led them through the barriers on Wall Street. The NYPD helped funnel the children, anything to ease their fears while some protestors chanted “follow those kids!”

“These guys are terrorists, yelling at little kids,” one father said.

“For them it’s horrible. They’re afraid of all the crowds. We’re not even able to get through. They’re just, he’s … very afraid now,” a mother added.

One protester followed a father and his little daughter all the way down the block.

The media isn't creating the narrative. The "right" isn't creating the narrative.

The actions of the Occupiers are creating the narrative and the whole world is watching them do so.


You can find all WuA's Occupier antics posts at the class warfare label page here.

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Arizona crime rates released (2000-2010)

I find it interesting that the rates of violent crime in Arizona have been increasing so dramatically in the past two years. Since 2009, though, the rates of felons being sent to prison for violent crimes actually dropped.  Sounds to me like either the prosecutors and judiciary have gone soft on rapists and murderers, or - more likely - the cops are just too busy raiding worksites and chasing immigrants to pay attention to solving the crimes that really matter here...that might explain the MCSO's poor performance in recent years in this respect (their murders are down, but how's their clearance rate these days?).

-------------from the AZ Republic------------

Arizona eclipses U.S. in 10-year crime dip, analysis says

by Bob Ortega - Oct. 12, 2011 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

Despite recent increases in the rates of murder and rape, over the past 10 years, Arizona's reported crime rate has dropped by nearly a third, according to a new analysis of FBI crime data released Tuesday by the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission.

The 32.4 percent decrease in reported crime easily outpaced the 18.9 percent nationwide drop over the same time period. The biggest single driver of Arizona's decline was a 60 percent drop in the rate of motor-vehicle thefts from 2000 to 2010.

Although the rates of most reported crimes fell more sharply than the national average over the decade, Arizona's rate for each of the seven types of crime in the FBI index remains above the national median.

The crimes tracked include four categories of violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) and three property crimes (burglary, larceny theft and motor-vehicle theft).

The analysis shows that, recently, Arizona's rates of murder, rape and aggravated assault have increased.

Arizona's rate of rape, after falling for four straight years, shot up 31.9 percent from 2008 to last year. That jump led the rate to climb by 10.4 percent over the decade, even as the national rate fell by 14.1 percent.

The justice-commission report does not attribute the rise to any particular cause. But that jump in reported rapes doesn't necessarily mean there has actually been an increase in rapes, said Dean Kilpatrick, director of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, in Charleston, S.C.

Because rape is so underreported - fewer than one in five victims contacts the police, he said - a successful program to encourage victims to step forward may increase the percentage of rapes that are reported, whether the actual number of rapes is rising, falling or flat.

"If you have good rape-crisis centers, if the police are seen as giving victims a fair shake, better counseling and advocacy, you may get an increase in reporting because victims feel they'll be treated well," he said.

The Phoenix Police Department can't say why the rate is up, said Sgt. Trent Crump, a spokesman. But, he said, in recent years, the department has worked hard to improve cooperation among police, prosecutors, rape counselors and victims advocates.

"We have a forensic-nursing program now to make the examinations less stressful for victims, and we're doing everything we can do to create an environment in which victims feel comfortable coming forward," he said.

Myra Ferell-Womochil, director of community-based services for the Northland Family Help Center in Flagstaff, said the Flagstaff police also have worked hard to educate officers on how to handle sexual-assault cases.

She said education programs run across the state by Arizona's Department of Health Services that teach about consent, healthy relationships and rape prevention may be helping. And, because alcohol use is often a factor, her center has worked with bar owners to educate staff on making bars safer.

The sex-assault statutes in Arizona and most other states don't track precisely with the FBI's definition of rape as "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will," said Phil Stevenson, the director of the commission's Statistical Analysis Center.

The FBI includes attempted rape using force or the threat of force but doesn't include sex assaults on males, statutory rape or other sex offenses. The FBI is reviewing its definition of rape and will consider changes to it this fall, according to the bureau's Criminal Justice Information Service.

Crump said that in up to 75 percent of the sexual-assault cases in Phoenix, the victim and assailant know each other. "We don't want people to automatically assume these are stranger attacks," he said. "We don't currently have a serial rapist hitting an area."

Arizona's murder rate over the 10 years fell 12.7 percent. But from 2009 to 2010, the rate increased 18.5 percent. At 6.4 murders per 100,000 people last year, Arizona's rate remained one-third higher than the national rate of 4.8 per 100,000.

Crump noted that the 2009 murder rate of five per 100,000 residents was the lowest in more than 20 years. Even the 2010 rate is lower than any year from 2000 to 2007.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said that, in his jurisdiction, murders and rapes are both down so far this year compared with this point last year, with eight murders in 2011 compared with 26 up to this point in 2010.

"We had a lot of our murders in the desert. One reason in our area we're not getting so many murders is the drop in illegal immigration," he said.

The rates of aggravated assaults and robberies both fell by roughly a quarter over the decade, giving Arizona an overall drop in the rate of violent crime of more than 23 percent.

From 2009 to 2010, the rate of aggravated assaults rose 4.5 percent. Property crimes fell more sharply - 33.3 percent - led by a 30.2 percent drop in larceny theft, which includes shoplifting, pickpocketing and the theft of bicycles, and the dramatic plunge in motor-vehicle theft.

The drop in vehicle crime can be credited to a decade-old change in how the state tackled that crime, said Brian Salata, executive director of the Arizona Automobile Theft Authority. Previously, few thieves were aggressively prosecuted.

"All we were doing was knocking off low-level players and not really solving the problem," Salata said.

In 2002, Arizona's vehicle-theft rate was nearly 2 1/2 times the national average. Counties agreed to assign specially trained prosecutors to deal with vehicle-theft cases, and they began pushing harder for thieves to roll over against others in their organizations to get plea bargains, Salata said.

That made it easier to cripple theft rings and criminal cartels, he said. By requiring anyone reporting a vehicle theft to sign a sworn affidavit, cities and counties slashed cases of insurance fraud. Improvements in vehicle security also helped.

While Arizona's vehicle-theft rate was still 40.9 percent higher than the national median last year, Salata said the rate is continuing to drop this year.