WASHINGTON (AP) — Six cities will participate in a federal pilot program aimed at reducing racial bias and improving ties between law enforcement and communities, Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday.
The cities are Fort Worth, Texas; Gary, Indiana; Stockton, California; Birmingham, Alabama; Minneapolis; and Pittsburgh.
The announcement of their selection came six months after Holder revealed the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, in the aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri, police shooting last August.
As part of the $4.75 million project, researchers will study data and conduct interviews to develop plans for curbing bias and strategies for building trust between residents and law enforcement. Separately, the Justice Department said it would offer extra training and help to communities that are not part of the project, which is part of the Obama administration’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative aimed at minority men.
Weeks of protests that followed the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer in Ferguson, exposed the frayed relations between that community and law enforcement and underscored the need for a nationwide initiative, Holder has said.
“What I saw in Ferguson confirmed for me that the need for such an effort was pretty clear,” Holder said in a September interview with The Associated Press in which he announced the project.
The department last week cleared the officer, Darren Wilson, of criminal civil rights charges in that shooting but also released a scathing report that detailed a slew of discriminatory policing practices in Ferguson and a profit-driven criminal justice system. Since that report, Holder said he has seen signs of progress and a community willing to create change. The police chief and city manager, for instance, both resigned in recent days.
He condemned the shootings of two police officers early Thursday in front of the Ferguson Police Department, calling it a “pure ambush” and the act of a “damn punk” that may have been intended to unravel progress that’s been made.
“Incidents like the one we have witnessed throw into sharp relief why conversations like the one that we’ve convened today and we’re going to be having — to build trust between law enforcement and the communities that they serve — are really so important,” Holder said.
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I would recommend that the DoJ just have the ruling Oligarchy’s corrupt security forces do the job we pay them for.
• Arrest those engaging in fraud and treason with their peddling Ayn Rand/Reagan Trickle Down/Supply Side Satanomics that is murdering the middle class and is giving material aid to al-Qaeda vis-à-vis al-Qaeda’s goal to weaken America economically.
• Arrest those who crashed the financial system.
• Arrest those conspiring to commit mass murder on a global scale with AGW.
The skyrocketing economic growth that would result from there terrorists and fraudsters being removed from society would create economic conditions that would go a long way towards squashing this “other” BS, i.e. racism, that Conservatives have used to divide the country.
Once working class Whites realize that it wasn’t “the Blah people” (as Rick Santorum claims to have called them) or “The Takers” as many other Conservatives call African Americans, that was stealing most of the wealth created by their labors, a lot of this racist BS will disappear.
Lee Atwater, the original Karl Rove, once he realized that he was going to meet judgment day in his immediate future, confessed that saying “Tax Cuts” was nothing less, or more, than yelling “N-Word, N-Word, N-Word.”
How did Missouri get missed?