Tag: John DeBerry

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News The Fly-By

Proposal Could Prohibit Racial Profiling in Tennessee

The decisions by two separate grand juries to not indict the officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have inspired a bill that would prohibit all Tennessee law enforcement agencies from racially profiling citizens.

Sen. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), who is co-sponsoring the bill with Rep. John DeBerry (D-Memphis), said the precise details of the policies would be left to each police and sheriff’s department as long as they prohibit the detention, interdiction, or other disparate treatment of individuals based on race.

“Six in 10 white Americans have quite a lot of confidence in the police, but only three in 10 African Americans do,” Kelsey said. “The Racial Profiling Prevention Act is not intended as an attack on law enforcement but rather an attack on discrimination. Having a clearly written policy prohibiting racial profiling will help officers do their jobs better and have confidence that they are following the law.”

If passed, each law enforcement agency would be required to adopt a written policy by January 1, 2016.

The proposed bill comes on the heels of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement of recently enforced anti-profiling guidelines that ban federal law enforcement agencies from using race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation as a factor during investigations, unless deemed relevant to a particular case.

Holder was in Memphis on December 9th to participate in the My Brother’s Keeper local summit — an event inspired by President Barack Obama’s new initiative of the same name that seeks to increase the country’s number of successful black men.

The five-hour summit took place at the Hattiloo Theatre and brought together representatives from the city, Memphis Police Department, Shelby County Schools, and various nonprofit agencies.

Attendees participated in sessions about education, community outreach, employment, health care and justice.

The summit’s moderator, Douglas Scarboro, said it’s extremely important to place more focus on establishing ways to help young minority males overcome systemic barriers that could hinder success.

“Over the years, we haven’t had enough intentional effort around men and boys of color and helping them be all that they can be,” said Scarboro, the city’s executive director of talent and human capital. “I think it’s extremely sad that we’ve had the instances that we’ve had with Michael Brown and more recently with a number of individuals across the nation. I think what’s the saddest is regardless of the standard of life, I think every African-American male has a story about some kind of interaction, whether correct or incorrect, [with the police].”

During the summit’s final session, Holder condemned racial profiling, reflected on personal encounters with law enforcement, and discussed the new anti-trafficking guidelines.

Afterward, Holder traveled to the National Civil Rights Museum, where he encountered a crowd of people protesting police brutality and racial profiling.

As he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the same place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, Holder was questioned through a bullhorn by Paul Garner, the organizing coordinator for the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center.

Garner inquired about several things including state and local officers being required to adhere to the new anti-profiling guidelines and officers wearing body cameras.

“We’re waiting to see what kind of concrete steps are going to be taken by this administration, and how these new ideas and these new concepts about community-police relations will be applied here in Memphis,” Garner said. “If we’re going to talk about solutions, we also have to talk about history. We have to take into consideration a whole history of racism.”

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News The Fly-By

Knocked Up and Locked Up?

CREDIT: Photowitch | Dreamstime.com

As they are currently written, two bills in the state legislature could lead to assault or criminal homicide charges for pregnant women who use illegal drugs.

But the sponsor of one of these bills (HB1519), Rep. John DeBerry (D-Memphis), vowed this week to work on his bill’s language so that there’s “no room or intent to simply incarcerate people rather than getting them the help they desperately need.”

The other bill, SB1391, is sponsored by Sen. Reginald Tate (D-Memphis), and it’s on the calendar to be heard in committee this week. Tate did not return calls to the Flyer for comment.

Critics of both bills, as they are written now, say they’re seeking to criminalize pregnant women and that the bills could have a negative effect on the care the baby receives.

“These women need supportive programs. Punitive measures will only make women not seek prenatal care. They will lie to their doctors [about their drug use], and it could lead to unwanted abortions by women who are afraid of getting prosecuted and convicted,” said Allison Glass, the statewide organizer for Healthy and Free Tennessee, which promotes reproductive health and sexual freedom.

It’s concerns like these that convinced DeBerry to give the bill another look. After meeting with Glass and hearing from others, he’s considering removing language that allows assault and criminal homicide charges. The bill was recommended to DeBerry by the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference, but DeBerry said he doesn’t believe the district attorneys’ goal is to prosecute women.

“If those are the red flags in the bill for a lot of these women’s groups, then I’ll either take that out or I’ll take the bill off notice,” DeBerry said.

Last week, he rolled the bill. And now he says he’ll roll it again until the language is reworked.

“My sole intent is to save these women’s lives and those of their unborn children,” DeBerry said. “There is absolutely no intent on simply trying to incarcerate them. But some women’s groups were afraid, even with the drug court’s record, that someone will use this as some kind of stick against pregnant women.”

As it is written, DeBerry’s bill does allow a woman to avoid prosecution by attending and completing a long-term addiction recovery program either before the child is born or after delivery. He said drug court programs in most counties would be able to help women who could not afford to pay for drug treatment.

“This bill is seeking to protect the woman and the child,” DeBerry said. “It’s for when you have a person who obviously has emotional and psychological issues to the extent that they’re poisoning their own body and their child’s with these drugs.”

But Glass questions the effectiveness of drug treatment for women who are essentially forced into rehab.

“People who are familiar with addiction know that the addict has to make the choice to want to get help,” Glass said. “There’s a big question of how effective it is if you are forcing a person to go through a program.”

A change.org petition against both bills has garnered several hundred signatures as of press time. Karen D’Apolito of Nashville, vice-president of programs for the National Parinatal Association, opposes the bills as written and hopes to see more emphasis on treatment rather than criminal charges. She also said, despite popular belief, babies cannot be “born addicted.”

“If a baby has withdrawal, we can treat that,” D’Apolito said. “But babies cannot be born addicted. They’re exposed but not addicted.”

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Jeanne Richardson Soldiers On in a New District

CREDIT: JB

State Representative Jeanne Richardson (above, in video) was in her element on Friday at the intersection of Cooper and Young, conducting a press conference in tandem with City Councilwoman Janis Fullilove and Arkansas state representative Kathy Webb, the first openly gay woman to be elected to an official position in that state.

You have to give Jeanne Richardson points for coping. Imagine, first of all, having your birth name mispronounced so universally that you end up accepting the mispronunciation as the name itself.

“Jeanne” is meant to be pronounced like “Gene.” But the double ‘n’ led so many people, from her early teachers on, to sounding her name in two syllables, like “Jean-ie,” that that’s who she finally became.

Then, having been elected to the state House of Representatives from relatively liberal Midtown District 89, she became, arguably, the most liberal member of the legislature, on both social and economic issues. One of her daughters, noting that her 2010 opponent used just that phrase about her as a pejorative, expressed concern about the attack line, whereby Richardson told her, quite proudly, “Honey, I am the most liberal member of the legislature!”

But when Tennessee Republicans, as the state’s new majority party, laid their redistricting plans late last year, they in effect abolished Richardson’s constituency, shifting District 89 to Middle Tennessee and leaving her to find a (relatively) comfortable district to run in against another Democrat.

That turned out to be District 90, the majority-black bailiwick of John DeBerry, an African-American minister and businessman whose votes on social issues are as conservative as any Republican’s. The District also encapsulates numerous progressives and a significant gay population, though, and Richardson’s candidacy was as much a draft by this constituency as a willed action on her part.

With Elvis and granddaughter Frances at a recent fundraiser

  • JB
  • With “Elvis” and granddaughter Frances at a recent fundraiser

Campaigning hard with limited resources, Richardson saw DeBerry receive a Commercial Appeal endorsement she had hoped to get, and 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, who has epitomized pragmatic liberalism in these parts for decades, chose not to endorse in the District 90 primary, claiming friendships for Richardson, DeBerry, and a third candidate, Ian Randolph.

But she has numerous endoresements from prominent Democrats and active independents, both black and white, as well as from such staple organizarions as the Sierra Club, The Tennessee Education Association, and the Firefighters Association. And the Tennessee Equality Project is resolutely in her corner.

At one of her recent fundraisers, Richardson became philosophical about her efforts on behalf of gay rights. Not only were these rights worth defending in themselves, she said. So long as they were kept alive, artificially, as issues, they would be used as screens to obstruct citizens’’ views of economic inequalities. It was an almost Marcusian view of political realities.

Richardson soldiers on, against what she knows are long odds, and, though she is not loath to cite what she regards as wrong-headed DeBerry votes (against gay adoption rights, for example), she made a point on Friday of commending him for supporting the efforts of blogger/County Commission candidate Steve Ross, who dates her daughter Ellyn, in exposing the Election Commission’s widespread early-voting glitches.

See also this weeks’ Election Preview.)