Background Briefing: June 10, 2020

On By gram

 

Is Georgia’s Election Debacle the Trump GOP’s Strategy for November?

We begin with the outrageous election debacle in Georgia yesterday after which the Republican Secretary of State offered up “my dog ate my homework” excuses for why the new voting machines crashed and mostly black citizens queued up for hours in the heat and the rain to vote while in white neighborhoods there were no lines.  Could this be the election strategy that Trump’s Republican Party are adopting for November where they brazenly offer excuses for rampant vote suppression by blaming voting machines, poll workers, the coronavirus or extra-terrestrials descending in UFOs to abscond with the votes? Aklima Khondoker, the Georgia State Director of All Voting is Local, who worked as a staff attorney and senior manager for the Voting Access Project at the ACLU of Georgia, joins us to discuss the thuggish contempt Trump’s new Republicans have for voting rights and their shameless abandonment of democratic ideals and the danger that they could get away with it in November if they are not stopped.  The question then becomes how do you stop them since naming and shaming will not work? We explore local options as well as the need for a national strategy on the part of Democrats who should make this their top priority otherwise they will be entering a rigged casino in November where they will be robbed, beaten and tossed in the back alley.

 

The Feasibility of Defunding the Police

Then we examine the feasibility of defunding the police which is a call from the grassroots that politicians from Nancy Pelosi to Bernie Sanders are not listening to. Dennis Kenney, a Professor at the John Jay College of the City University of New York who has 45 years of experience in criminal justice having served as a police officer, a project director for the Police Foundation and Director of Research for the Police Executive Research Forum, joins us. We discuss how the public have turned against the police and while so much of the police focus is on petty crime as 50% of murders and rapes go unsolved, policing can be improved not so much with technology but with better personnel and improved community relations.

Police Reforms in Camden, New Jersey as a National Model

Then finally we speak with Robert Hennelly, a contributing writer for Salon and a political analyst for WBGO in Newark, New Jersey who has an article at Insider NJ, “In Gordon Fatal NJSP Shooting, Disclosures Prompt More Questions”. We discuss the shooting of an unarmed 28 year old black man by a New Jersey State Trooper and look into the police reforms in Camden, New Jersey which are now being looked at as a model for police reform nationwide.