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Back the Badge

 

‘Back the Badge’ May Back Civilians into a Corner

April 6, 2017 – Last month, Mississippi’s Republican governor signed a controversial new bill manufactured to empower state law enforcement, potentially setting the stage for new, harsher sentences for people that police accuse of crimes of violence against law enforcement.

House Bill 645—which is now law—declares that “every person convicted of a crime of violence … upon a peace officer, emergency medical technician or first responder while such person is acting in his or her official capacity … shall, upon conviction … be punished by a term of imprisonment of up to three times that authorized by law for the violation, or a fine of up to three times that authorized by law for the violation, or both.”

The bill was largely supported by white legislators who claim the law exists solely to discourage violence against emergency workers or law enforcement. Attorneys who frequently defend suspects caught up in police bureaucracy, however, see it a differently.

“(The law) gives far too much latitude for (police) to interpret frustration or freedom of speech in a way that could violate the constitutional rights of individuals, just because they disagree with law enforcement,” said attorney Chokwe Antar Lumumba. “I want to see people protected in every walk of life, including law enforcement officers, but people forget that law enforcement officers are people, too. They have good and bad days, just like us.”

Lumumba, who is running for mayor of the city of Jackson, said police are human, and are therefore just as capable of misrepresenting incident accounts as any suspect, and could exaggerate police/civilian encounters to look like a crime of violence. Without proper vetting from an attentive defense team, many angry or vindictive officers’ overblown descriptions could easily reach a jury and sway it. This likelihood increases in a justice system, like Mississippi’s, that pits a woefully-inadequate public defense system against a well-funded prosecution team.

More than 10 years ago, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) issued a report revealing how legislators’ refusal to contribute to the defense of the poor “created a system that consistently ranks among the most poorly funded in the nation.” According to the 2003 LDF report, Assembly Line Justice, inadequate indigent defense funding “[leads] to a poorly organized, patchwork system.”  Since 2003, only a handful of Mississippi counties now have an office staffed by one or more full-time public defenders. Instead, most counties contract part-time defenders who have their own day jobs running private practices, or they appoint private attorneys to represent defendants on a case-by-case basis. Many of these private attorneys admit that they do not have the resources to compete with a full-time prosecution team.

Several black and Democratic lawmakers opposing the legislation during debate a few months ago referenced multiple accounts of police racial profiling black citizens.

Rep. Chris Bell giving accounts of racial profiling. Photo credit: Jackson Free Press

Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, hinted at bill advocates’ disingenuous police support when white lawmakers repeatedly failed to approve his amendment to the bill giving law enforcement officers a 10 percent raise. White lawmakers were also unwilling to add additional charges against police found guilty of covering up any crime against a person or persons and shot down Greenville Rep. John Hines’ amendment to do just that.

The white House majority passed the bill and voted down black lawmakers’ every attempt to amend it, including Jackson Reps. Earle Banks and Adrienne Wooten, and Belzoni Rep. Rufus Straughter—all of whom are Democrats.

The shift to further empower and embolden police officers in Mississippi follows the mood of Republican President Donald Trump, who may view the massive nationwide protests of his many discriminatory decisions as a threat to his presidency. Trump described massive marches against him in November as “Very unfair,” on Twitter, and then dismissed protestors as “professional protesters, incited by the media,” and allegedly funded by shadow groups—none of whom he has managed to unmask, despite considerable White House access to information and resources.

Trump’s White House also adopted a hardline policy against suspects targeted by police by endorsing opposition to “the dangerous anti-police atmosphere;” an atmosphere that the president has also never managed to prove exists. With his new “Standing Up for Our Law Enforcement Community” declaration, Trump proclaimed that the government’s job “is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter.” Some critics have taken that as an outright threat to protestors.

To learn more about Mississippi criminal justice bills, click here.

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Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors. For more information about the Mississippi NAACP or news stories, call 601-353-8452 or log on to www.naacpms.org. Like us on Facebook by searching Mississippi NAACP and follow us on Twitter @MSNAACP.

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NAACP Calls for Moratorium on Charter Schools

August 17, 2016 – The NAACP unveiled strong new resolutions at its national convention in Cincinnati.  One of its loudest was a demand for a nationwide halt on new charter schools.

The NAACP has been opposed to charter schools for two years, but this year organization delegates voted for an outright moratorium on privately managed charter schools, after acknowledging what they consider to be numerous civil violations by charter schools’ privately appointed boards.

“Charter schools have contributed to the increased segregation rather than diverse integration of our public school system,” claims the NAACP’s 2016 resolution, which was voted on and approved in July.

Delegates agreed that charter schools have the ability to pick and choose their students through “disproportionately high use of punitive and exclusionary discipline,” which tosses out underprivileged students who don’t perform as well as affluent youth do on some tests and helps give charter schools an unfair performance edge over public schools in test scores.  Delegates also agreed that, unlike public schools – which MUST accept even problem students – charter schools can boost enrollment of high-performing students with more stringent entrance requirements.

Critics often use the tiered charter school system in New Orleans as an example.  The University of Minnesota Law School Institute on Race and Poverty issued a 2010 report revealing that in 2009, 87 percent of all white students in New Orleans attended the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) or Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) charter schools, while only 18 percent of African Americans and Latinos attended those same schools.  Instead, 75 percent of African-American and Latino students attended the Recovery School District (RSD) schools that same year.  Nearly all RSD schools qualified as high-poverty schools, while the OPSB and BESE sectors contained the lowest shares of high-poverty schools.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, LatinoJustice, and the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College argue that the most effective tool of separation that charter schools use is standardized testing.  Louisiana education consultant and researcher Raynard Sanders told the MSNAACP in 2013 that he shared that view.

“Standardized tests as a means of measuring student success don’t work well because it is such a narrow measurement process.  It’s just a snapshot, really,” said Sanders.  “By using that instrument of measurement, you hurt students who don’t do well on it, not because they don’t have the ability, but because they have limited resources in their lives, mostly related to poverty.  They don’t do so well on standardized tests.”

Sanders said that he was also familiar with charter schools’ punitive and exclusionary discipline.

“Once the kids are in the school, you may have to commit to 100 hours a year of volunteer time, or pay extra fees, or any number of conditions,” said Sanders.  “Let’s say you’ve got a parent working two jobs and you can’t meet those conditions.  You end up with a very select group of kids, rather than the kids who are most challenged.  The schools are doing the choosing, not the parents.”

Mississippi, which has a decades-long problem with school segregation, now has laws making it easier to open charter schools in the state.  Lawmakers passed the Charter Schools Act of 2013, which diverts public money to charter schools through two funding streams: ad valorem tax funds from local school districts and per-pupil funds from the Mississippi Department of Education.

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a July 11 suit seeking to close the existing charter schools and stop any more from opening.  The suit, representing seven Jackson Public Schools parents, argues that charter schools violate the state constitution by forcing cash-strapped school districts to share meager property tax collections with charter schools that they neither supervise nor control.

“Traditional public schools,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “will have fewer teachers, books, and educational resources.  These schools will no longer be able to provide Mississippi schoolchildren the education that they are constitutionally entitled to receive.”

The suit explains that the funding provisions of the Charter Schools Act of 2013 cost JPS school­children “more than $1.85 million in state per-pupil funding and ad valorem tax revenue in the 2015-2016 school year alone.”  That JPS money could have otherwise funded 42 teacher salaries, 18 new school buses, guidance counselors for 6,870 students, or vocational education programming for 6,672 students.

Currently, two charter schools, Reimagine Prep and Midtown Public Charter School, are operating in Mississippi.  Both schools are located within the boundaries of the Jackson Public School District.  A third school is slated to open inside the JPS district either this year or next year.  The Southern Poverty Law Center argues that JPS could lose up to $4 million during the 2016-2017 school year because of these three charter schools.

The Mississippi NAACP is in accord with the National NAACP’s July statement supporting the suit.

“The landscape of public education has room for new ideas,” state NAACP President Derrick Johnson said.  “However, innovation must not come at the expense of our state’s traditional public school system.  We must endeavor to improve our public education system, not destroy it.”

 

Source: MS NAACP State Conference

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Money Woes Mount Under GOP Super-Majority

August 17, 2016 – In a state already laboring under severe deficits, Mississippi’s Republican super-majority continues to implement deep budget cuts, the latest of which directly threaten some of Mississippi’s most vulnerable citizens.

“I’m very concerned about the plight of the poor, who are the first to suffer,” said Jackson Rep. Kathy Sykes.  “It may not hit everybody at first, but it is coming.  Poor people are the canaries in the coalmine.  We’re the first to suffer, and then it tends to spread.  The shame is that a lot of the folks who are or will be affected are the same people who voted for these elected officials who are insensitive to their plight.  This should be a wake-up call to all Mississippians that they need to hold all of us accountable.”

A Department of Revenue document reveals that the state generated $887.8 million less than anticipated by revenue estimates from April 2015.  Critics like Sykes and Rep. David Baria, D-Bay St. Louis, say multiple tax cuts during the last four years of Gov. Phil Bryant’s term are a major contributor to the slow revenue.

The Sun Herald reported that Bryant and the legislature approved more than $300 million in tax breaks and credits, including a $126 million reduction in business inventory taxes, as well as alterations to the state’s method for calculating business taxes.  Added to those cuts are multiple sales tax breaks for developers, as well as a series of “tax-free holidays.”

Despite the fact that the tax giveaways were driving down revenue, Bryant quickly signed yet another tax cut this year — one of the biggest in the state’s history — amounting to nearly $415 million in revenue loss over the next 12 years.  The tax cut created by Senate Bill 2858, which is now law, not only destroys the state’s franchise tax, but also reduces personal income taxes paid by individuals.  And while the new law eliminates more than $400 million in revenue, its benefits to individual taxpayers are marginal.  Under the law, the state will exempt the first $10,000 of earnings from state income tax.  Mississippi residents earning $16,000 or less will only save an average of $14 a year, while those earning more than $150,000 will save about $270 annually.

Even though Bryant made two separate mid-year budget cuts and the state raided the Rainy Day Fund for $45 million while managing to grab a massive one-time payment from a Mississippi Attorney General’s Office settlement, the slashed revenue has forced legislators to revise revenue estimates downward twice just since April 2015.  As a result, nothing could stop the state from going into June with about a $200 million shortfall.

More recently, Mississippi legislators voted in a June special session to allow the governor to raid the state’s “Rainy Day” cash reserves of another $50 million to cover the shortfalls.  While Republican legislators killed bills tapping the same reserve to fully fund education or Medicaid in previous sessions, they held no such reservation drawing on the $350 million fund to cover tax cuts.

Despite the Rainy Day raid, the state is still facing a series of cuts in valuable programs affecting the disadvantaged.  Many Mississippi community colleges, which serve middle- and low-income students, now have to raise fees as state college funding has fallen by $5 million this year.  Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, for example, is looking at a 20 percent hike in tuition fees, while Hinds Community College will go up about 4 percent.

The Mississippi Library Commission, which offers education and internet service to many low-income or poverty-level people, now faces lay-offs, reduced hours, and possible closures as it contends with $1 million in cuts.

Making matters worse are about $8.3 million in cuts to the state’s mental health system, resulting in the closure of about 100 beds at Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield and East Mississippi State Hospital.  The cuts will also result in the elimination of special instruction services to almost 130 mentally ill children up to age 3 at Ellisville State School, and the closure of Male Chemical Dependency Units at MSH and EMSH, offering prison as the most likely substitute for addiction-related problems.

Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves offered his particularly chilling motivation behind the painful cuts, saying the various mental health programs weren’t curing anybody.

“… we have programs we’re spending money on that aren’t working,” Reeves told online news organization Mississippi Today. “You should have asked the Department of Mental Health:  The program they’re shutting down, 750 patients they had last year, how many of those have repeated a similar program either in the Department of Mental Health or outside the Department of Mental Health?”

Reeves’ opinion runs counter to professional opinion that many forms of mental illness cannot be cured so much as treated, often requiring a lifetime of medicine or therapy.

Sykes said some Republicans who voted in favor of the tax cuts regretted their decision to support these efforts, but were powerless to vote any other way.

“In private conversations with some of my Republican colleagues, they are getting concerned about the pressure they’re feeling to vote a certain way.  The moderates, in particular, are really beginning to express concern,” Sykes said.  “They’re told to toe the party line, and they can’t be sensitive to the needs of their own people.  They’re powerless.”

She would not name any of the “moderate Republicans” because she feared the label, itself, would work against them in their next primary.  She, like other Democrats, complains that Bryant is a lame duck plodding through his last term, so he can afford to ignore the pain of his own voters, and he can use his campaign war chest to influence other elections by “primarying” Republicans who do not do what they are told.

“That’s why (GOP) moderates can’t adopt an open stance on issues that bother them,” Sykes said.  “This really isn’t democracy anymore.”

 

Source: MS NAACP State Conference

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Neighbors Breathe a Bit Easier

August 17, 2016 – More than a year ago, the Mississippi Sierra Club, the MSNAACP, and coastal activists managed to convince a powerful and obstinate electric company to convert one of the most dangerous coal-burning plants in the country to natural gas.

Mississippi Power built the Jack Watson coal-burning plant near Gulfport in 1957.  Since that time it has been the second heaviest emitter of dangerous sulfur dioxide in the nation.  Neighbors, many of whom were black or minority, wanted the plant closed, converted, or cleaned.  Kathy Egland, an NAACP environmental advocate and Gulf Coast resident, helped organize many of the louder community voices against the plant.

“We had residents complaining of a high use of allergy medicine or greasy airborne deposits on their cars.  If this residue was sticking to cars, just imagine what it was doing to your lungs.  But we couldn’t get anywhere with Mississippi Power.  They were rich, powerful and didn’t care.”Picture1Kathy Egland, Gulfport NAACP member and chair of the National Board Environmental and Climate Justice Committee, stands in front of a power plant she fought to convert from coal.

 

Fortunes changed over the last five years, however, as the company fell under the black cloud of another one of its projects: an expensive new lignite-burning project set for Kemper County that soon proved to be an albatross around Mississippi Power’s financial neck.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but that Kemper deal was gonna kick their butts all up and down the state of Mississippi,” said Mississippi Sierra Club Director Louie Miller, who also advocated heavily against Jack Watson.  “That boondoggle put them in a hole they might never get out of, and made them vulnerable and desperate enough to come around on Jack Watson.”

In 2010, the two Republican members of the three-member Public Service Commission success­fully outvoted the lone Democrat on the commission, and they approved a new $2.88 billion price tag for Mississippi Power’s proposed Kemper plant project.  Ratepayers would ultimately foot the multi-billion-dollar bill.

The PSC’s eagerness to concede to this exorbitant price tag may have had something to do with direct influence they received from then Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who desperately wanted the Kemper plant to happen, as evidenced in the letter he sent to the commission at the height of its deliberations.  Barbour’s influence also seems to be more than political, as one of the lobbyists for Mississippi Power’s parent company, Southern Company, was Washington firm Barbour, Griffith & Rogers — notably, one of the firm’s founding partners was Haley Barbour.

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Gov. Haley Barbour sent this letter to PSC members, urging them to support a project favoring a company that his lobbying firm represented.

 

The Mississippi Sierra Club filed a lawsuit in Harrison County Chancery Court immediately after the PSC vote, calling the commission’s decision to approve the price tag “arbitrary” and “capricious.”  Soon after, project delays and costs began to spiral out of control.  Project setbacks compounded the cost, as they put at risk the millions of dollars in federal tax credits the company first used to help sell the idea of building the plant.

The ever-shifting price tag kept rising repeatedly to thump rate-payers, eventually arriving at its most recent projection of $6.6 billion.  Each of Mississippi Power’s 186,000 customers is now conceivably on the hook for $35,000 to pay for the plant, since the company’s sole source of revenue is energy payments from its rate-payers.

The sheer cost of the plant also triggered an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and prompted Moody’s Investor Service to downgrade the company’s credit.

Facing trouble at every turn, Mississippi Power decided to settle its litigation with the Sierra Club in 2014, agreeing to convert to natural gas the remaining two coal-burning units at Jack Watson and an additional facility at Plant Greene County in Alabama.  They also agreed to retire several other units in Mississippi and Alabama.

Egland praised the conversion, but acknowledged that it probably would not have happened without the tough new federal emissions standards imposed by President Barack Obama and the Kemper-related lawsuit.

The conversion marks a reversal in a national trend of mixing poor and minority neighborhoods with pollution.  Even though African Americans are responsible for 20 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than whites per capita, 71 percent of them live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards, according to the Black Leadership Forum.  Another 78 percent of the population lives within 30 miles of a coal-fired plant.

African Americans are also almost three times more likely than whites to die or be hospitalized from respiratory diseases like asthma, possibly connected to air pollution, according to the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative.  It’s one of the reasons the National Equity Atlas concludes that neighborhoods with high concentrations of low-income families and people of color are more likely “to be exposed to environmental hazards, putting them at higher risk for chronic diseases and premature death.”

 

Picture11http://nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/Air_pollution%3A_Exposure_index/By_race~ethnicity%3A35886/United_States/false/Risk_type%3ACancer_and_non-cancer

 

Black clouds of coal smoke no longer billow out of the converted Jack Watson plant, and Egland said she and neighbors can feel the difference in the air.

“There are people I know in the area who now have drawers filled with allergy medicines, bottles, and inhalers that they haven’t gotten a chance to use because the main culprit is no longer there,” Egland said.  “The people don’t win as much as they should, so when it happens, we sure notice.”

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NAACP Press Statement: HB 1523 Found Unconstitutional

2016/07/01 – The Mississippi State Conference NAACP applauds the ruling issued by U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves on the true nature of H.B. 1523, deceptively named “Religious Freedom” law, as unconstitutional. H.B. 1523 was an attempt to legitimize discrimination and superimpose the rights and beliefs of some citizens over the rights and beliefs of others. “That is not how our society, how our state, or how our Constitution works,” stated President of the MS State Conference NAACP Derrick Johnson.
The court’s decision exposes the weak justifications and insidious purposes of the law. The law, by its own language and intent, sought to force a whole class of Mississippians into a second-class citizenship. Though plainly targeting the LGBT community in an attempt to win-back perceived lost ground, H.B. 1523’s sweeping language of discrimination also attacked single parents and any sexually active, unmarried adult making any of these citizens punishment-free targets for discrimination.
“The opinion and order issued by Judge Reeves rightfully condemns the State’s attempt to legislate hate and discrimination,” stated Johnson. Just as a person’s “sincerely held religious beliefs” were not found to be an adequate justification for past legislative discriminatory acts regarding race or gender, the “Religious Freedom” law and its purported reasons are also insufficient and ring hollow under any scrutiny.“There will always be someone who feels differently, thinks differently, believes differently than you,” Johnson said. “When that happens, it is not the state of Mississippi’s job or place to take sides. That’s what H.B. 1523 called for. It was a law designed to tell some Mississippians that my beliefs are worth more than your rights.”

Source: Mississippi State Conference NAACP