It’s definitely indisputable that the issue of gentrification is becoming more prevalent as the days go by. I love the last line of the article in which a concerned resident states that they do hear that Brooklyn is getting better, but then she asks for who? Because she’s definitely not witnessing the change. I feel like that is something many people can relate to. Many politicians claims that they are working in behalf of the community and that they are trying their best to get the rights to the people, but at the end of the day we don’t see much of that change/work they claim to be doing for the benefit of all. I do believe in the power of the masses and I think that if all of the residents of Brooklyn being affect by this issue come together to get their messages across, they can accomplish a lot. At least they will be able to avoid unbearable situations like the one Maria Najera had to go through. Living in a place without a leaky roof and/or dangerous conditions isn’t a luxury, it’s a right we should all have. They key factor while striving for a change is organization and being well-educated about the topic to be able to provide viable solutions for the city as well as the tenants. Nonetheless, it’s never useless to think about other alternatives to make a change, what else can be done?

Link: http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/37/43/dtg-rent-stabilization-law-anti-gentrification-rally-2014-10-24-bk_37_43.html

The logic used to explain the faults in the judicial paradigms we rely on in our society was extremely interesting in Reel Time/Real Justice, and very telling of not only the racism it allowed for in the case of Rodney King but also how it extends into todays legal landscape. The most poignant case made was the narrative nature of legal proceedings, which according to the ideologies explained in this piece are approached outside of racial contexts, allowing for the aforementioned narratives to imply individual suspicion without the inclusion of the overt racial prejudices from which these suspicions are born. The piece illustrates that the evidence that makes up these narratives is always up for interpretation and deconstruction, and that this malleability makes for a legal process that resembles the political sphere in which those reliant on its infallibility are instead subject to the stories born out of their situation and the subsequent marketability of said narratives. That is to say, given the racist societal views prevalent during Rodney Kings time, it was easy to take obvious evidence suggesting racially charged police aggression and sell it as an angry and defensive black man, and all it took was the legal re structuring of the narrative. The same way that selling a scared white cop protecting himself from a black thug is easier to sell to certain juries than a racist killer.

Reel Time / Real Justice examines the Rodney King case and the resulting LA riots through a lens of racial struggle. It seeks to question if objectivity was really found when the case was first addressed. The article suggests not, and I would agree. The video depicts a man, surrounded by officers, getting beaten and kicked long after he was knocked down and restrainable. By definition, that’s excessive force. The video was dissected and taken out of context, and the jury disagreed. This is where the article’s premise, for me, started to fall apart. The jury may have come to the wrong conclusion, but I disagree with the article’s reason why. Disaggregation in the courtroom is the idea; the Rodney King case, in court, is a question of what happened in that instance, not what happens overall. Attempting to rule according to popular opinion is half the reason that OJ Simpson was acquitted, because no one wanted LA to burn again. And attempting to justify the ensuing riots as a community’s attempt to make ‘peace’ costly is invalid: it’s vengeance, and not even vengeance on the guilty parties. I understand it’s a counter-narrative, but it’s too far gone to be viable.

Question: What’s your take on the article? Do you agree with the lens? How would you interpret the Rodney King case?

Reel Time/Real Justice discusses the case of Rodney King, an African American man, who was brutally beaten by police officers. This violent act was caught on camera, and was analyzed thoroughly to determine whether this was a case of police brutality or if the police officers were justifiably protecting themselves. In court, a decision was made stating that the police did not use excessive force. Racial profiling and police brutality are still problems we face in today’s society. Some examples in today’s news include Eric Garner, who was put in a illegal chokehold by police which led to his death, and Freddie Gray who suffered a spinal injury when the police restrained him and who also died from his injuries.  A high percentage of those facing racial discrimination are young black and Latino men. This is causing much tension between communities and the law enforcement. We do not know when and if racial profiling will stop occurring, but we can create more laws and regulations that will ensure that people who are stopped by police actually show suspicious activity when they are being stopped, and that the police officers are not using brutal force when they are doing their job.

How do you think we can stop racial profiling from occurring?

“Our nation is moving towards two societies: one white, one black-separate and unequal,” this statement comes from the Kerner Commission during 1967 race riots. Formal equality is supposed to give equality through neutral and objective rule. Some may say formal equality in a sense could have prevented the Rodney King, however it is just an inciting idea. Instead, today we see many cases like that of Rodney King. Rodney King was beaten with what many would have agreed was excessive the Los Angeles Police, but those same police officers were later acquitted on the premises that they were using reasonable force. This bears a strong resemblance to the recent death of Eric Garner, which like in Rodney King’s case was recorded with the police officer not being indictment. It is clear that social injustices are linked to race and power. Why hasn’t the government used the findings of the Kerner Report?

In Reel Time/ Real Justice, the article discusses the brutal beating of Rodney King, an African American, by Los Angeles police officers. Subsequently, the police officers were acquitted from criminal charges leading to outcry by Los Angeles inhabitants. These outcries for justice were dismissed as “riots by mobs” in the media and even by the United States president. The Rodney King case showed how deeply interconnected power and race were. When the video of the brutal beating of Rodney King was first released, very few could argue that they did not find the video abhorrent and clearly demonstrates discriminatory attitudes of police officers toward African Americans. However, in the courtroom, the clearly excessive force used by police officers on Rodney King became “ reasonable exercise of force necessary to restrain a prisoner”. Rodney King became the offender and the police were simply doing their jobs. The solution to such cases may seem like formal equality through affirmative action and other legislation that addresses race as a cause of police brutality and other injustices.

Question: What legislation has been proposed to address the issue of race in many forms of social injustices?

I think the strangest idea to me presented in the “Reel Time/Real Justice” article by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gary Peller is the concept of disaggregation. In the case of Rodney King, they took the video that captured his beating and broke it down into components. In these components, these still shots of the scene, they explained what the officers were doing in each shot and how each part of the beating was justified as actions to subdue aggression. When you watched the tape as a whole, the racism was easily sighted, but by breaking it into components, the evidence was presented to a jury in a way that seemed justified. The more shocking discovery was that, this concept wasn’t something new. The idea of disaggregation was also present in the Richmond vs. Croson case of 1989.  It seems as if people in general see blatant racism and understand it, but instead of addressing it, they choose to break these events down in a way that takes the racism out of these situations.

This week’s reading showed how much inequality exists in our society. Authority always have power and control and people of color are segregated against. “Reel Time/ Real Justice” further proves what we read last week about LA policing and cruelty.This reading brought up an even bigger issue of videotaping that has recently been thought of as a solution to document what the police do. However, even with King’s incident being caught on tape, the judge still ruled in the favor of the police. Even though the video seemed to show otherwise, King was still seen as a threat rather than the victim. The jury ignored clear evidence of brutality to acquit the police. Even though there is supposed to be legal equality, there is actually racial power. This just further shows and was stated in the reading that “blacks in LA live in a different world from whites, they and the police are foreign to each other.” Instead of this point of view, the police need to be part of the community. The issue of inequality is further discussed in “The Prison Fix” where the author shows the reality of what prison really is. He shows that people are in there for non serious such as drugs and don’t get released as promised and instead get abused by correction officers.

Do people feel protected or more fearful of the police/ authority?

California’s “justice system” is so ingrained with institutional racism that it astounds me.  How is it that a group of policy makers decided that putting people in cages would help the state out of its economic slump? Other countries have done well without further instituting racism and raising spending on incarceration. It is so ingrained in American culture to hold on to our very racist past that these are the solutions that the government comes up with. The United States lags behind the world in areas such as education, healthcare, and maternity leave, but leads the world in defense and incarceration spending.

Recently, I went to a conference where I learned that many Scandinavian countries have universal healthcare despite the main population’s extreme racism. This surprised me because America is the same, if not less racist, but does not have this health equity. I asked the speaker about this and learned the key difference: Scandinavian countries, like Sweden, realize their need for minority and immigrant workers and respect this need, whereas, America does not. Whether or not this is entirely beneficial, is hard to say. However, it does get rid of institutional racism and, perhaps, prevents things like the prison industrial complex.

Question: What attempts have been made to combat the prison industrial complex?

The article by Crenshaw and Peller discusses how even though there was video evidence of a beating that was done by the police, the law failed to convict them of excessive force. This is an all too familiar case, as made public in recent news about the deaths of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and others. It is now new that racial profiling is leading to such arrests and in some unfortunate cases, excessive police violence. As we did see in our class presentations by the Stop and Frisk group, African American and Latino men are amongst the ones who are stopped and suspected of crimes the most. Even in the article, the authors discuss Rodney King, who was also a victim of police brutality and the justice system did not serve justice like it should have.

Question: Is there ever going to be any resolution to this problem, or is history just going to keep repeating itself?