The "Grim Sleeper” Trial Highlights How Police Ignore Black Victims

http://newsone.com/3430009/grim-sleeper-trial-highlights-how-police-ignore-black-female-victims/

This is dreadful, 1000s go missing every year

"Grim Sleeper” Trial Highlights How Police Ignore Black Female Victims

Communities have criticized police for not closely investigating killings because of the victims' race.

Prosecutors successfully proved Lonnie David Franklin Jr. shot or strangled his victims between the years 1985 and 2007; his youngest victim was only 15 years old at the time of her death. The penalty phase of Franklin’s trial begins this Thursday.

Police called Franklin the “Grim Sleeper” because of an apparent 14-year gap between killings after one woman survived his attack in 1988. People in the community criticized police for not closely investigating the killings because of the women’s race.

On Monday’s edition of NewsOne Now, Roland Martin and his panel of guests discussed the “Grim Sleeper” case and law enforcement’s reaction to missing cases involving Black women.

NewsOne Now panelist Barbara Arnwine, President and Founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition, said, “It is so ironic and so wrong that we have these problems of African-American women missing [and] not being investigated well.”

“In fact, we know that in this country, thousands of Black women go missing every year … and we don’t treat it as an epidemic or a crisis and unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve heard this story,” said Arnwine.

“We’ve heard this story over and over again, whether it has been multiple rapes, multiple assaults, multiple killings, multiple kidnappings of Black women, but no one values our lives.”

Carmen Berkley, Civil, Human & Women’s Rights Director AFL-CIO, drew parallels between the “Grim Sleeper” case and the Daniel Holtzclaw serial-rape case: “We have to trust Black women, we have to trust our experiences in this country and when we say that there is a problem, people need to listen to us.”

Watch Roland Martin and the NewsOne Now panel discuss the “Grim Sleeper” case in the video clip:

Prosecutors successfully proved Lonnie David Franklin Jr. shot or strangled his victims between the years 1985 and 2007; his youngest victim was only 15 years old at the time of her death. The penalty phase of Franklin’s trial begins this Thursday.

Police called Franklin the “Grim Sleeper” because of an apparent 14-year gap between killings after one woman survived his attack in 1988. People in the community criticized police for not closely investigating the killings because of the women’s race.

On Monday’s edition of NewsOne Now, Roland Martin and his panel of guests discussed the “Grim Sleeper” case and law enforcement’s reaction to missing cases involving Black women.

NewsOne Now panelist Barbara Arnwine, President and Founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition, said, “It is so ironic and so wrong that we have these problems of African-American women missing [and] not being investigated well.”

“In fact, we know that in this country, thousands of Black women go missing every year … and we don’t treat it as an epidemic or a crisis and unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve heard this story,” said Arnwine.

“We’ve heard this story over and over again, whether it has been multiple rapes, multiple assaults, multiple killings, multiple kidnappings of Black women, but no one values our lives.”

Carmen Berkley, Civil, Human & Women’s Rights Director AFL-CIO, drew parallels between the “Grim Sleeper” case and the Daniel Holtzclaw serial-rape case: “We have to trust Black women, we have to trust our experiences in this country and when we say that there is a problem, people need to listen to us.”

Watch Roland Martin and the NewsOne Now panel discuss the “Grim Sleeper” case in the video clip:

http://newsone.com/3430009/grim-sleeper-trial-highlights-how-police-ignore-black-female-victims/

Barbara Arnwine wrote:“In fact, we know that in this country, thousands of Black women go missing every year … and we don’t treat it as an epidemic or a crisis and unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve heard this story,” said Arnwine.

“We’ve heard this story over and over again, whether it has been multiple rapes, multiple assaults, multiple killings, multiple kidnappings of Black women, but no one values our lives.”

So true, and every once in a while we revisit it. When pretty, virginal white girl, Natalee Holloway, went missing in Aruba the press went crazy with news coverage every day for a couple of months. Finally, someone counted up the number of black women who had gone missing during the same span of time, and they counted 8 - 10 identical incidents. But hey, they didn't look like this...



Proving that the press isn't interested in the fate of these women. They just want to post salacious pictures.