Public Support for the GRPD goes beyond the Conservative/Liberal binary

Some might ask: Who polices the police?

Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy

A few days ago, the Grand Rapids Police Officers Association posted on their Facebook page the image below, with this message that accompanied the picture:

Thanks to the Brann family for proudly displaying these banners. Their support of law enforcement is second to none and means so much to those that serve and protect.

The Brann Family, which owns Brann’s Steakhouse, hung these banners at one of their restaurant locations, as a show of support for the Grand Rapids Police Department.

Several local organizations and some individuals posted this image and expressed anger and disgust that the Brann family would proudly display such support for the GRPD. This is completely understandable, considering some of the recent actions of the GRPD, specifically as it relates to their treatment of Black youth, last Spring and this past December, specifically the case of 11 year old Honestie Hodges. 

The public support provided…

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New Brief Examines Injustice in U.S. Public Education Fifty Years After the Kerner Commission Report

“I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.”
– George Carlin

janresseger

Fifty years ago, on March 1, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders released what has come to be known as the Kerner Commission Report (named for the Commission’s chair, Otto Kerner, then governor of Illinois), which concluded that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”  This week, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of that report, the Milton Eisenhower Foundation published a new book-length report, Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report.  The new book is a multi-disciplinary assessment, to be accompanied by a series of academic conferences, beginning this week at the University of California at Berkeley, and—specifically on the report’s conclusions about public education—at George Washington University.

We can read about the new report’s findings about public education—from the chapter written by Stanford University’s…

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