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Black Kos, Week in Review: 15-year-old Jaheim's life mattered. Say his name. [1]
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Date: 2022-10-21
"I’m Black and I’m proud. I am his voice and I will be heard. Justice for Jaheim NOW.”
Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
Fifteen-year-old Jaheim McMillan is dead. The schoolboy was shot in the head by a trigger-happy Gulfport, Mississipi police officer mere seconds after he [cop] arrived on the scene.
From the GoFundMe page set up to help with expenses:
Jaheim McMillan is a 15 year old boy who attended Gulfport high school as a freshman. A incident occurred on October 6, 2022 around 2:30 where Jaheim was shot at multiple time by a cop and once in the head after holding his hands up he was also unarmed!! He had a McDonald’s bag and keys a witness said. After being shot in the head he was handcuffed and left there bleeding out the head with no medical attention. The cop left him there went to check the other boys who were already handcuffed on the ground. The officer ignored the law and public safety laws...
From his bereaved father:
“He came out the dollar store with his hands up, and they shot him in the head,” Mateen said. “And then I’m hearing that he seen them... He was sitting in the car and he seen the police pull up with guns, so he got out the car and ran in the store- well, tried to run in the store- and they shot him in the head. The video I seen on Facebook is basically, the man is saying that my son didn’t do anything. He had his hands up, so why did y’all shoot him?”
As we have said many, many times before, the problem is not only law-enforcement officers’ total and wanton disregard for life — especially the lives of Black, Brown, & Native folks — it’s also the cozy partnership that they have developed with news outlets. John Oliver did an insightful piece on crime reporting on his October 11, 2022, show.
Even smaller police departments can have Public Information Officers, or PIO’s, and as this one proudly notes, his press releases can make it straight to air. Something major happens, whether it’s a shooting or some major car accident, whatever it is. You go back to your office. You type up this long press release, and you send it out to the public and all the news agencies. Within minutes, you have reporters from all over the country calling you. There’s something strangely satisfying that when you put out that press release, hours later, you’re watching the news, and every station that’s talking about your story is literally reading your press release word for word. (my bold)
I was reminded of that quote when I read CNN's report of the murder of the Mississippi teenager:
Law enforcement officers responded to a 911 call on October 6 of multiple people in a vehicle brandishing firearms, Gulfport Police Chief Adam Cooper said at a news briefing this week. When police arrived and made contact with the vehicle, members of the group left the vehicle and attempted to flee, he said. An officer then fired at an armed suspect – identified by police as Jaheim McMillan – who pointed a weapon in their direction, Cooper said. McMillan, 15, was struck in the head and later died after being taken off life support, according to a news release from civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is retained by McMillan’s family.
You’ve just read reason number one why we continue to have cops murdering and brutalizing hundreds of people every frigging year. When I tell you that these journalists have blood on their hands? Note the normalizing, enabling language used to justify the murder of a child. This is the first report that the public will have about this young Black boy and the cop who took his life. Already we are told that he was a suspect, that he fled while brandishing a gun and thus deserved everything he got… that the hero cop saved the day by taking him out.
x Shame on you both, @MelAlonsoCNN & @HannahSarisohn, for using language designed to normalize police violence, & worse, for passing off police media releases as news.
https://t.co/GA2LdxjsSd — JoanMarDK (@JoanMarM) October 19, 2022
“Eyewitness BERATES OFFICER for shooting Jaheim with nothing in his hands and POINT BLANK!”
In direct contradiction to the police report, here’s an eyewitness account from a white man determined to use his white privilege on behalf of a murdered Black child:
x EXCLUSIVE: Our team obtained cell footage of the aftermath of police shooting of 15 year-old Jaheim McMillan by Gulfport Mississippi Police.
Eyewitness BERATES OFFICER for shooting Jaheim with "nothing in his hands" and "POINT BLANK!"
Chief says "End of year" for bodycam pic.twitter.com/0ysMhJBERO — Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) October 17, 2022
Jaheim by the numbers
Jaheim is one of 11 children aged 18 years and under to be killed by police since the start of 2022. One of at least 804 people killed by American cops in 295 days. One of 74 Black people killed (though, that number is misleading because the race of a whopping 569 people is said to be either unknown or other).
For some odd reason, the Gulfport Police Department is still refusing to release the body cam footage. I wonder why? Could it be because the footage would provide irrefutable proof that this was a murder?
Jaheim deserved better. Jaheim’s parents and other loved ones deserve better.
Over 800 people killed in less than 300 days and the media is deafeningly silent. This cannot be ok.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A couple of years into the pandemic, Shirley Neville had finally had enough of her shoddy internet service.
“It was just a headache,” said Neville, who lives in a middle-class neighborhood in New Orleans whose residents are almost all Black or Latino. “When I was getting ready to use my tablet for a meeting, it was cutting off and not coming on.”
Neville said she was willing to pay more to be able to Zoom without interruption, so she called AT&T to upgrade her connection. She said she was told there was nothing the company could do.
In her area, AT&T only offers download speeds of 1 megabit per second or less, trapping her in a digital Stone Age. Her internet is so slow that it doesn’t meet Zoom’s recommended minimum for group video calls; doesn’t come close to the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of broadband, currently 25 Mbps; and is worlds below median home internet speeds in the U.S., which average 167 Mbps.
“In my neighborhood, it’s terrible,” Neville said.
But that’s not the case in other parts of New Orleans. AT&T offers residents of the mostly white, upper-income neighborhood of Lakeview internet speeds almost 400 times faster than Neville’s—for the same price: $55 a month.
The Markup gathered and analyzed more than 800,000 internet service offers from AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and CenturyLink in 38 cities across America and found that all four routinely offered fast base speeds at or above 200 Mbps in some neighborhoods for the same price as connections below 25 Mbps in others.
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The 2022 midterm election is poised to be a pivotal moment in contemporary politics. Every seat in the House of Representatives and 35 seats in the U.S. Senate will be voted upon, as will key down-ballot races. Thirty-six states will elect a governor and other positions that control state legislatures, like secretary of state and attorney general. Midterm election victors will undoubtedly shape the future of controversial issues like reproductive rights and affordable health care.
Black voters are a linchpin of the midterms – and they know it. Data from the recent Survey of Black Voters, a joint effort of theGrio and KFF, shows that Black voters understand how important they are as a voting bloc and the power they wield for Democrats. Eighty-three percent of Black voters said they were “absolutely essential” or “very important” for the Democratic Party to win elections. And, they’re not wrong.
In the 2020 presidential election, Black voters showed their collective strength in battleground states. In states like Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the majority of Black residents live in metro hubs (Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia in these particular states). But, suburban Black voters who live in areas surrounding metro cities are just as vital. Take Atlanta, for instance.
The Black and white populations of Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, were the same, according to 2020 census estimates — 44% each. (Today, Fulton County is 41% Black and 38% white.) Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton counties, which border or closely surround Fulton County, have all seen their Black populations increase and white populations decrease over the past decade. In 2020, Georgia went blue for the first time in 28 years.
“While some political pundits and journalists attributed Georgia going Democrat to white suburbs, Black voters were the real key,” said an analysis of the 2020 election by the Brookings Institution.
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The populations of Kinshasa, Nairobi and Lagos will grow at least 80% in the coming decades, according to a new report. Bloomberg: Where the Rapid Rise of Megacities Is Unsustainable
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With 10 billion people expected to cram into urban areas by mid-century, the world will add at least 14 new megacities — many of which are at risk of threats including food and water insecurity, conflict and high crime rates, as well as climate-change related disasters like flooding and drought.
These growing cities, each with populations surpassing 10 million by 2050, add to 33 existing megacities. But ecological threats and lack of societal resilience make their rise — and the rapid pace of urban expansion more generally — unsustainable, warns a report published Wednesday by the global think tank Institute for Economics and Peace.
The fastest-growing cities will be in sub-Saharan Africa, projected to be home to 2.1 billion people over the next three decades. The region includes five of the 20 most at-risk emerging and existing megacities, according to the report. Among the most unsustainable are Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Nairobi, Kenya; and Lagos, Nigeria, all of which could see their metro area populations grow by at least 80%.
Nairobi, Kenya
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY PORCH
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