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Groups affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement are giving a huge Mothers Day gift to women in jail: freedom.

Agroup of organizations including Southerners on New Ground, the Movement for Black Lives, Color Of Change has raised over $250,000 to bail more than 30 women out of jail this week, according to the Nation.

The women have not been convicted of crimes. Rather, they have been awaiting trial and cannot afford to pay bail, The Nation reports.

The groups efforts are culminating in an event it callsNational Mamas Bail Out Day as it seeks to draw attention to the arrests and subsequent jailing of people who are accused of committing low level offenses.

There are around 450,000people who are jailed without being convicted of crimes, according to areport from Marketplacethat came out last October. Under former President Barack Obamas administration, the Department of Justice argued that it is unconstitutional to hold defendants in jail because they cannot afford to meet bail.

Marbre Stahly-Butts, a leader inthe Movement for Black Lives, one of the organizations involved, said thatNational Mamas Bail Out Day is what is being done in the immediate term to address concerns about bail payments.

Stahly-Butts told the Nation,

We have to be doing that.But we also can be collecting our resources to make a direct impact on the material conditions of our people who are in cages right now.

According to the Nation, the Mothers Day initiative is a result of a January meeting ofblack-led organizations focusing on bail reform.

In Memphis alone, the Black Lives Matter chapter located in the city worked to raise $35,000 to bail women out for Mothers Day. Organizer Erica Perry told local Memphis station News Channel 3,

Were asking our community members to think how they spend Mothers Day, how they celebrate and honor the women who they love.

If the Black Lives Matter movement is successful in this latest initiative, there are a number of mothers who might be celebrating in much more comfortable a fashion than theyd imagined.

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Joseph is a Senior Writer, Editor and early member of the Elite Daily team. He studied Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University and will probably call Jersey home forever.

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Black Lives Matter Groups Bailing Out Women For Mother's Day - Elite Daily

Rozonda Chilli Thomas, a member of the all-black female hip-hop group TLC, came under fireon social media when she insisted that all lives matter instead of aligning her views with the Black Lives Matter movement.

During a May 9 interview that made waves Wednesday on social media, Thomas faced questionsfrom UKs Channel 4 News about being a black female in America, as well as herthoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement.

Another issue thats been highlighted in both the USA and the UK is the Black Lives Matter movement, reporter Jasmine Dotiwala began. Did you guys feel strongly about it when it was kicking off in America? Did you go on any marches? Did you go on any anti-Trump marches?

Thomas answered:

I personally didnt go into any marches, or anything like that, but for me, all lives matter, you know what I mean? Because there is a time when different groups are targeted for different things, you know what Im saying? So, I just think that, just the whole you know what happened with the police brutality against these young black boys and stuff like that, all of that kind of stuff is wrong, even if it was a caucasian teen kid that this was happening to or whatever. Its just not right.

She said that law enforcement sometimes takes things too far and that those in law enforcement should be vetted more heavily.

Some people take that authoritative position, and go crazy with it obviously, Thomas said. I think that before people are hired in these positions, they need to do some kind of better background check on them, or mental stability kind of check on them to see if they can really handle being in a position like that.

Tionne T-Boz Watkins another member of TLC and a former Celebrity Apprentice contestant added her two cents about policemen, claiming that copsstick together: That color sticks together too, blue, they stick together. Theyre not going to tell on each other.

Watkins also noted that she doesnt care about President Donald Trump, noting that his presidency doesnt affect her life.

I dont care about Donald Trump, Watkins said. God is my president, so I just feel sorry for people it affects, but I dont care about him.

When asked if they think Trump is a scrub, T-Boz laughed before adding, It doesnt bother me I worked on Celebrity Apprentice when he wasnt president and I wasnt too fond of him then. So I dont care really.

Twitter users disagreed a lot:

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Social media rips black pop star for disagreeing with Black Lives Matter movement - TheBlaze.com

The Black Lives Matter movement is working to have an impact on the lives of black women in dozens of jails across the country this week by providing them with their freedom, just in time for Mothers Day.

The women have not been convicted of crimes, but they remain in jail because they have been unable to pay the bond or fines that would allow them to go home to their families as they await trial.

The Nation reports that organizers with Southerners on New Ground, the Movement for Black Lives, Color of Change and other groups have raised more than $250,000 for what theyre calling National Mamas Bail Out Day.

Many of the women are in jail for low-level offenses like loitering or small-scale drug possession. The groups, which are continuing to raise funds, will pay for their release.

As The Nation notes, black women make up 44 percent of women in jails, and nearly a third of women in jail nationwide have serious mental-health issues.

The Mothers Day bailout will free at least 30 women in Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and other cities nationwide. The idea for it came from a January gathering of 25 black-led organizations that wanted to collaborate on bail reform.

From The Nation:

Mary Hooks, co-director of the Atlanta-based LGBTQ organizing project SONG, offered an idea shed been developing with other activists who had noticed the disparate impact that money bail and jail-related fines and fees has on LGBTQ communities. Hooks campaign ideawhat she describes as using our collective resources to buy each others freedomwas welcomed by the larger group. And because event organizers emphasize the ways race, class, and gender identity all play a role in criminalization, they have an expansive understanding of who qualifies as a mother. When we talk about black mamas, we know that mothering happens in a variety of ways, Hooks said. Whether its the mothers in the clubs who teach the young kids how to vogue, or the church mothers who took care of me. Women who are birth mothers and chosen mothers are eligible to be bailed out.

Arissa Hall, a national Mamas Bail Out Day organizer and project manager at the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, told The Nation that Mothers Day, with its idealized notions of family and womanhood, is the right moment to force an examination of women in jails.

All mothers are not celebrated, Hall said, adding that this is especially true of women who struggle with poverty, addiction and mental-health issuesin other words, the women who fill our jails.

Black moms especially have not been granted that title of motherhood, Hall continued, going on to describe how slavery shredded kinship bonds. Black women, she noted, have historically taken on caretaker roles that have put them in charge of other peoples children and away from their own.

Hall has been researching the way bail works in the cities and counties where the organizers plan to help women out.

Its a myth that folks dont come back to court when released on their own recognizance, she told The Nation, explaining that upward of 95 percent of people helped by bail funds return to court for their scheduled appearances. People will come back to court regardless of whether or not bail is set.

In Halls experience, what it takes to get people to their court dates is phone-call reminders and bus or train fare.

Bail corrupts the concept of justice in that the people who cant pay to get out of jail will eventually resolve their cases through a plea, Hall said. We dont force our court system to do what its actually supposed to do, which is give people a fair trial.

Read more at The Nation.

Monique Judge is a journalist, womanist and big hair enthusiast who drinks way too much coffee and has an unending love for words.

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Black Lives Matter Activists Bail Black Women Out of Jail for Mother's Day - The Root

The Chicago Tribune reports that the past 14 months have been the Windy City's most violent in two decades, with more than 4,300 people shot and over 760 killed.

Nurses at city hospitals are suffering from compassion fatigue, and everyone from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on down promises to stop the carnage.

Talk is cheap. Will cops and city government get their act together to fight crime? Unfortunately, they have no reason to.

That's because the public fails to hold public leaders accountable for performance. As Patrick Wolf and I show in "Cops, Teachers, and the Art of the Impossible," there is no statistical relationship between a city's homicide rate and whether the mayor keeps or fires the police commissioner. Indeed as one police expert told us it, no prior researcher even bothered to study this since "there is absolutely no correlation with the homicide rates and police commissioner tenure. Everybody knows that."

Top cops get fired for scandals or because mayors dislike them, not when their officers fail to protect the public they are sworn to protect and serve.

Nor do police leaders get fired for police brutality. My co-author Ian Kingsbury finds no relationship between the number of citizens killed by law enforcement officers and the size of Black Lives Matter protests.

That's tragic, because cops can do better. Recently retired New York Police Department Commissioner William Bratton proved it. Bratton led NYPD under current Mayor de Blasio and back in the 1990s under then Mayor Giuliani.

Bratton gained fame for "broken windows" enforcement of minor offenses, and for using real time crime data to mass cops at trouble spots. Yet other cities tried those with little luck. Three largely unrecognized factors led to NYPD's success.

First, even before Bratton NYPD had talent since it recruited nationally rather than just locally, hiring the best. Second, Bratton highlighted precinct leaders who cut crime, making NYPD a learning organization. Third, leaders who didn't learn were shown the door. Bratton replaced two-thirds of precinct commanders with better leaders. Few police commissioners have such power over personnel, and none use it to fight crime rather than reward cronies.

Bratton's reforms brought years of double digit homicide declines. From 1993 to 2014, New York's homicide rate fell from 27 per 100,000 people to 4 per 100,000, about 50 percent below the national average. By 2014 New York had the fewest killings since anyone began counting a half century earlier. In 2015 The Economist ranked New York the 10th safest major city globally. From 1994 to 2014, about 1,300 fewer New Yorkers were murdered annually compared to 1993.

Police shooting of civilians also plummeted. NYPD's 35,000 officers kill about a dozen people annually, nearly 90 percent fewer than in 1970 and 75 percent below the national norm.

Reforming NYPD likely saved over 25,000 lives, disproportionately black lives something Black Lives Matter activists were too busy calling for Bratton's ouster to notice.

Activist politics combine with city hall politics to explain why no one copies NYPD. Mayor Giuliani fired Bratton as soon as the popular top cop became a political threat. Within NYPD, Bratton's change agent personality won few friends. Only a commissioner who didn't mind making cops and mayors mad would copy Bratton.

That means that police and city leaders in Chicago and elsewhere will talk nice and keep their jobs, while doing nothing to make black lives matter. That depresses those of us who want to heal racial divides, and make American cops the best in the world.

Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read ourguidelines on submissions.

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The trouble with police, and Black Lives Matter - Washington Examiner

As various movements have sprung up like flash mobs to protest against Donald Trump's election to the White House, a question gradually occurred to me: Where's Black Lives Matter?

Ever since the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was born after a jury acquitted neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012, the loosely formed movement has turned up repeatedly to protest fatal shootings of unarmed black men and other racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system.

But since President Trump's election, we have seen new eruptions of racially suspicious police incidents, but not of major protests.

Last week, for example, we saw a suburban Dallas police officer charged with murder for allegedly firing his rifle into a car full of black teens, killing a 15-year-old boy.

Last month we saw the stunning video of a group of black boys, ranging in age from 12 to 14, being detained by police officers, with at least one officer aiming his gun at the boys.

Yet, as much as these disturbing stories made national news, they did not spark the major protests we have seen elsewhere. Why?

A Washington Post reporting team came up with one answer after interviewing what they described as "more than half a dozen leaders" in the Black Lives Matter movement.

The movement has entered a new phase, the team was told. It is focused more on policy than on protest, all in response to President Trump.

"There are less demonstrations," said Alicia Garza, one of three women credited with coining the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. "People are channeling their energy into organizing locally, recognizing that in Trump's America, our communities are under direct attack."

Indeed, that makes a lot of sense at a time when Trump's election seems to have changed everything about how we Americans view the world.

But I think the energy and enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter street protests peaked sooner than that. I think it happened last July when five police officers in Dallas were killed by an African-American sniper at a Black Lives Matter protest. Ten days later, three more police were killed by an African-American man in Baton Rouge, La., following street protests over the shooting of another black man.

No, I don't believe it is fair to blame peaceful protesters for the shootings of the officers any more than I think it would be fair to blame Republicans for every deranged right-wing shooter who also happened to vote for the GOP. Still, it's a little harder to criticize President Trump for his various inflammatory remarks, if you dodge accountability for any anti-police tone in your own protests.

Loosely organized flash mob movements with weak leaders and vague agendas have become a trend in the Twitter age. But these leaders tend to lack control over their members, their message and their momentum.

Lack of organizational discipline leads to embarrassments like the foolish protesters in St. Paul who chanted, "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon," while marching behind police officers at the Minnesota state fairgrounds two years ago. Conservative commentators still replay that video today.

Everybody seems to have an opinion about what Black Lives Matter should do with itself. Here's mine. I think it's time for the movement to move up from protests to planning, policies and programs. Protests have a lot of romantic appeal but they're no substitute for an agenda, firm goals and a plan to get there.

Conservative media have pinned all manner of racist beliefs on Black Lives Matter, yet the movement has not put much of a priority on appointing official spokespeople to push back.

On the contrary, members of today's young, self-styled "woke" (politically conscious) generation, I have found to my chagrin, too often think it is beneath them to arm themselves with knowledge and employ the simple art of persuasion to win people to their side. "It's not my job to educate you" I have been told by some righteous activists in a form of intellectual snobbery that is bound to lead to failure.

Indeed, a lot of people find it easier to call for dialogue than to actually engage in one. That's changing. Some Black Lives Matter activists have organized a formal agenda and leadership development programs, just for starters. Leaders matter. Whether things go right or wrong, somebody has to be where the buck stops.

Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.

cpage@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @cptime

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Can #BlackLivesMatter move up in the age of Trump? - Chicago ... - Chicago Tribune