Great news thanks to the Black Lives Matter people

For the African American Group

On Tuesday night, two major Midwestern prosecutors lost their jobs after provoking nationwide rage with their handling of cases in which police officers killed unarmed young black people. In Illinois, the loser was Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez, who waited 13 months to bring charges against the Chicago police officer who shot Laquan McDonald 16 times in October 2014. In Ohio, it was Cuyahoga County district attorney Tim McGinty, who oversaw grand jury proceedings that led to no charges being filed against the officers responsible for the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.





Together the two results represent a major victory for the Black Lives Matter movement, whose organizers have now decisively demonstrated their ability to mobilize voters and change the direction of local politics. And while these two races were, technically, only Democratic primaries, the two candidates who won them are expected to take office with minimal or nonexistent opposition after the fall’s general election.

It’s rare for incumbent prosecutors to be voted out of office. According to one study, they win re-election 95 percent of the time, and typically they run unopposed. This is in part because most voters just don’t pay attention to prosecutor races, and usually don’t have a vivid sense of the office’s powers. As one local district attorney told me last year after completing a successful campaign, “Most people don’t know what the district attorney does.” In Cook and Cuyahoga counties on Tuesday, Democratic primary voters clearly had stronger opinions than usual about the work of their prosecutors—and they decided that they didn’t want Anita Alvarez or Tim McGinty doing the job anymore.

The challengers in the two races couldn’t be more different. In Cleveland, McGinty was up against one Michael O’Malley, who served as a deputy to McGinty’s predecessor. Though O’Malley used the Tamir Rice case against McGinty with enthusiasm, he took a restrained, cautious stance on it, criticizing McGinty for his approach to the grand jury proceedings but refusing to say whether he believed one or both of the officers involved had broken the law.

More at the link below

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2016/03/the_prosecutors_in_the_tamir_rice_and_laquan_mcdonald_cases_lose_their_primary.html#

The bottom line is this. You kill us, you mock us, you make fun of us, we get revenge at the voting booth. You have been warned.