Philadelphia

Philadelphia Police Shot 400 People In 7 Years: DOJ Report

March 25, 2015 Simon McCormack, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Criminal Justice, Philadelphia, police brutality

Philadelphia police officers were responsible for 400 civilian shootings over the last seven years, according to a new report from the Department of Justice. The report also found that there was “an undercurrent of significant strife between the community” and the police. New training on when officers should use force and how to de-escalate situations is needed, the DOJ found. Bloomberg noted that 400 shootings in seven years is an average of about one shooting every week. Philadelphia Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey asked the DOJ to conduct its investigation and he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that many of the DOJ's recommendations have already been implemented.

Tate-Brown’s Mother Calls For Peaceful Protest

March 21, 2015 Joel Mathis, www.phillymag.com Resist! Black Lives Matter (BLM), Philadelphia

A day after a protest in her son’s name erupted into a violent skirmish at a community meeting on policing, the mother of Brandon Tate-Brown issued a statement rejecting violence and calling for peaceful protests. “Ms. Brown-Dickerson rejects all forms of non-peaceful protest,” said the statement issued by Brian Mildenberg, the attorney for Tanya Brown-Dickerson. “Ms. Brown-Dickerson rejects all form of violence. Ms. Brown-Dickerson calls for peaceful protests in the manner of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” The statement also called for a toning down of rhetoric directed at Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and District Attorney Seth Williams.

Philadelphia Police Continue To Stop Tens Of Thousands Illegally

March 2, 2015 ACLU, www.aclu.org Educate! Philadelphia, police brutality, Stop and Frisk

The ACLU of Pennsylvania and the law firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, LLP, filed a report today as part of the monitoring process of the 2011 consent decree in Bailey v. Philadelphia, a lawsuit filed in 2010 alleging that Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) officers had a pattern and practice of stopping and frisking pedestrians without reasonable suspicion that the person was involved in criminal activity and disproportionately stopping African-Americans. Today’s report shows that despite having almost four years to improve its stop and frisk practices, the PPD continues to illegally stop and frisk tens of thousands of individuals. Today’s report is the fifth filed with the court and court-appointed monitor since the consent decree was put in place. According to the report, 37 percent of the over 200,000 pedestrian stops in 2014 were made without reasonable suspicion, and thus a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Of the frisks, only 47 percent were made based on reasonable suspicion.

Grumpy Cat Claws Comcast

February 28, 2015 Christopher Zara, www.ibtimes.com Resist! Comcast, FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality, Philadelphia

Grumpy Cat is giving a big middle claw to Comcast. In celebration of the Federal Communications Commission’s newly approved open-Internet rules, net neutrality supporters on Friday flew a 2,000-square-foot banner featuring the Internet’s favorite feline over Comcast Corporation’s 58-story headquarters in Philadelphia. The massive banner featured a photo of the ubiquitous Internet meme Grumpy Cat along with the phrase, "Comcast: Don’t Mess With the Internet." The phrase was followed by the hashtag #SorryNotSorry. The splashy stunt was sponsored by Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and Free Press, three organizations that have been aggressively campaigning for rules that prohibit broadband providers from throttling content or offering Internet “fast lanes.”

Penn Students Attempt To Confront Comcast’s David Cohen

February 27, 2015 Media Mobilizing Project, www.popularresistance.org Resist! FCC, Net Neutrality, Philadelphia, Student Activism

Today, at the opening session of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) Board of Trustees Winter Full Board Meeting, more than a dozen Penn students conducted a direct action aimed at David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President of the Comcast Corporation, and Chairman of the Penn Board of Trustees. Captured on video - students interrupted the meeting, dropping a banner that read #Don’tBlockMyInternet, in front of the Penn trustees in attendance. Students demanded that Comcast stop its advocacy and lobbying against Title II net neutrality at both the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and in Congress; they also spoke out against Comcast’s push to merge with its biggest competitor, Time Warner Cable. They challenged David Cohen for missing the meeting, prioritizing his efforts to advance Comcast's agenda over the public interest.

Law Silencing Prisoners Violates Freedom Of Speech

February 5, 2015 Carey Shenkman, www.philly.com Educate! Freedom of Speech, Philadelphia, Political Prisoner

Any state legislature would have a hard time dreaming up a more unconstitutional measure than the one outgoing Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett recently signed into law. The so-called Revictimization Relief Act allows victims of personal-injury crimes to sue convicts to silence any speech that allegedly "perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime" or causes "mental anguish." This vaguely defined gag order is a textbook violation of the First Amendment. Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, and is now, from prison, a prolific journalist and author. The legislature passed the "Muzzle Mumia Law" to censor academic and political speech.

Court: SRC Had No Right To Cancel Teacher Contract

January 24, 2015 Kristin A. Graham, www.philly.com Educate! Education, Labor Unions, Philadelphia, Teachers

Commonwealth Court judges ruled Thursday that the School Reform Commission does not have the power to cancel union contracts, restoring health-care cuts that were to save the Philadelphia schools $54 million annually. The unanimous ruling appeared to strike down a core operating belief of the SRC. PFT president Jerry Jordan called the decision "a very big victory" that affirmed the union's position that contracts must be negotiated, not imposed, and that the state law that created the SRC did not give it the power to wipe away collective bargaining. Chairman Bill Green said that the SRC and its attorneys had not yet decided whether to appeal the ruling, but that some action could come next week.

Citizen Of The Week: Liz Arnold

January 14, 2015 Larry Platt, www.thephiladelphiacitizen.com Resist! Environment, Fracking, Philadelphia

Last May, during a deadly dull gubernatorial primary debate, one of the few moments of high drama and actual substance came when 30-year-old activist Liz Arnold commandeered the stage at Drexel University. While candidate Allyson Schwartz was formulating a talking points-inspired response to a question from moderator Larry Kane, Arnold calmly walked onstage and positioned herself between the candidates and Kane. “You have all failed the leadership test,” she scolded. “We want to know why they’re not answering Pennsylvanian’s questions about fracking. This is a list of 1,700 families who have been harmed by fracking. Why won’t you good candidates answer these important questions?” Strangely, security didn’t immediately storm the stage. “I only had a couple of lines prepared, so I had to wing it,” Arnold recalls.

Penn Student Questioned In Dorm By Police Over Ferguson Posts

December 15, 2014 Dustin Slaughter, www.phillydeclaration.org Resist! Ferguson, Philadelphia, police brutality, Student Activism, Surveillance

Recent organizing and demonstrations around the issue of police accountability in Philly, set in motion by grand jury decisions in Ferguson, MO and Staten Island, NY not to indict police officers who gunned down unarmed African American men, have taken a new, though rather historically familiar, twist. Laura Krasovitzky, a University of Pennsylvania student organizer, tells The Declaration that she was visited on the morning of December 8th by a Philadelphia Police Department detective, who she soon learned was in the Homeland Security Bureau, asking about posts in a Facebook group.

Philadelphia Police: 600 Lawsuits, $40 Million In Damages

October 24, 2014 Todd Feathers, www.muckrock.com Educate! Philadelphia, police brutality, Police the Police

The city of Philadelphia has paid out more than $40 million in damages and settlements as a result of nearly 600 misconduct lawsuits brought against the police department since 2009, according to data provided by the cities under public records requests. The numbers dwarf comparable statistics in other major cities for which MuckRock obtained the same data. For example, the cities of Indianapolis, San Francisco, San Jose, and Austin settled or lost a combined 122 police misconduct cases - compared to 586 cases in Philadelphia. As of the 2010 census, those four cities had a combined population more than double Philadelphia’s estimated 1,526,006 residents.

Philadelphia’s School Reform Debacle

October 9, 2014 Sarah Jaffe, www.salon.com Educate! Education, Human Rights, Philadelphia

The latest move by Corbett and the Philadelphia School Reform Commission (SRC), which replaced an elected school board after the 2001 takeover, is to unilaterally cancel the city’s contract with the 15,000 members of the Philadelphia Federation of teachers. Monday morning, the SRC held a surprise meeting—announced, not on their website as usual, but with an advertisement in the legal section of the newspaper over the weekend. Normally, said Kati Sipp of the Pennsylvania Working Families Party, the commission meets on Thursday evenings, at a time when parents and students can attend, rather than at a time when school is in session and many parents are at work. “It was clearly designed to not be a public event,” Sipp said.

Judge Upholds Occupy Philly Lawsuit Against Police

May 24, 2014 Maryclaire Dale, www.lancasteronline.com Resist! Occupy, Philadelphia

Occupy Philadelphia protesters can go forward with a lawsuit accusing police of unlawful arrest, retaliation and other civil rights violations, a federal judge ruled Thursday. More than two dozen protesters sued after they were acquitted of criminal charges stemming from their November 2011 clash with police. The confrontation came as city officials urged the protesters to move after seven weeks outside City Hall. Philadelphia police arrested the protesters even though they complied and marched through downtown, the lawsuit said. They were charged with conspiracy, failure to disperse and blocking a roadway. In Thursday's ruling, U.S. District Judge Berle Schiller upheld most of their claims, including retaliation, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. He dismissed their excessive force and illegal search claims for lack of evidence. "You can't tell people to do something, and then when they comply with an arguably illegal order to begin with, arrest them, and charge them, when they're simply exercising their constitutional rights," Lloyd Long III, a lawyer for the protesters, said Thursday. A city solicitor did not immediately return a call for comment. However, in court papers, she said the lawsuit failed to specify which officers and plaintiffs were involved in each of the various allegations.

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