Opinion

A story in the New York Times reports that the district attorney in Brooklyn, New York has blacklisted seven police officers whose work is so flawed and so lacking credibility that their testimony is precluded from criminal cases. The story indicates that this is a common practice, but the names of the offending police officers are usually not publicized.

Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked choice for Kentucky Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, just won big in that state’s election. Cameron is the first African American to hold statewide office in Kentucky in decades. He is a staunch protégé of McConnell’s.

The history of Nubia is so sacrosanct that its name should not be sullied by applying it to inappropriate places. While there has been considerable improvement in the development of Dudley Square, it is still a work in progress.

The nationally televised Oct. 25 funeral services for the late Congressman Elijah E. Cummings paused partisan debates and revealed how a son of Baltimore worked tirelessly for his constituents and for this nation.

The city council must be a leader in bringing the entire Greater Boston region to solve our housing crisis collectively. We hope they will not let us down.

The concept of “freedom and justice for all” is too lofty a principal for many Americans to embrace. Evidence of this incapacity is the continued vandalism of the memorial to Emmett Till, even though it has been established that he was innocent of the alleged misconduct that provoked his lynching.

It’s said so often that it’s become almost a political urban legend that Trump could shoot someone in broad daylight with gobs of witnesses in the middle of New York’s Fifth Avenue and get away with it. During sparring in a New York court over Trump’s tax returns, his attorneys seemingly made that political fiction official. They brazenly said that he was immune from prosecution while in office.

Every legislative session, politicians discuss and debate proposed changes to the many policies that govern the nation’s institutions. Taxes, health insurance, education, criminal justice, child care, Social Security adjustments and farm benefits are some of the issues often on the agenda. Notoriously absent, however, is any real discussion on altering the culture of the municipal or state police.

In January 2019, when a jury brought back a guilty verdict against former Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke in the murder of Laquan McDonald, there were loud cheers that justice had been done; namely a white cop finally tried and convicted of the murder of an unarmed black man.

Suffolk Downs forces us to grapple with the central questions of gentrification: Who is this development for? What kind of city are we? Who belongs here?

One wonders what induces some whites to assault blacks violently even though there is not apparent provocation. Why would whites turn out for a lynching party? The simple assertion of racism does not answer the question. Conflicts stretching back centuries in the past have influenced the status of the Kurds in the Middle East, but there is little history of black violence against whites in America.

Some prosecutors may demand longer sentences for them to send a message, as one put it, that “prison is the only answer for entitlement and criminality.” That message will always crash hard against white privilege.