Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 126

Women on Britain's Front Lines

NEWS BRIEF Prime Minister David Cameron has lifted his country’s ban on women serving on the front lines of the British military. He made the announcement Friday at the NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland, saying, “It is vital that our armed forces are world-class and reflect the society we live in.”

Women had been able to serve in some positions, but not in ground-combat roles where the primary aim was “to close with and kill the enemy.” The infantry positions they could hold were mostly support roles, like medics, or bomb-disposal experts. Last year, Cameron said he wanted to open ground-combat positions to women, something that not all military leaders have agreed with, as the BBC :

In April former Army chief Colonel Richard Kemp said introducing women into such roles would be a "foolish move" that would be "paid for in blood".

Writing in the Telegraph, Col Kemp, who led the British forces in Afghanistan in 2003, argued: "This foolish move will reduce the capability of the infantry, undermine our national defences and put lives in danger."

The announcement comes after an 18-month review that investigated whether women were physically able to take on front-line roles, and if lifting the ban would damage morale. When the study was completed, it found neither to be an issue. Soon after, the head of the army, Chief of the General Staff, Nick Carter, gave his support for women serving in infantry roles.

There are some 7,000 women in the British army. A defense expert with the BBC said that of those, about 5 percent were believed to to be able to pass the infantry’s tests.

At Least Three Police Officers Killed in Dallas

Updated at 11:54 p.m. ET

Two gunmen shot ten police officers in Dallas, Texas, during a protest on Thursday night, killing at least three of them. The death toll makes this one of the deadliest days for police in the history of American law enforcement.

“Tonight it appears that two snipers shot ten police officers from elevated positions during the protest/rally,” Dallas Police Department Chief David Brown said in a statement. “Three officers are deceased, two are in surgery, and three are in critical condition. An intensive search for suspect is currently underway.”

Dallas Area Rapid Transit said four of the officers were from its police department, including one of the fatalities, on its official Twitter account.

Four DART police officers were shot in downtown Dallas. 1 deceased, others not life-threatening. No IDs yet. Updates via twitter.

— dartmedia (@dartmedia) July 8, 2016

The shootings occurred during a protest against police killings earlier this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. Hundreds rallied in downtown Dallas, near the corner of Main Street and Lamar Street. Local news footage captured what sounds like several gunshots being fired, and the crowd scattering.

#BREAKING: Our cameras captured several shots ring out during a protest in Downtown Dallas pic.twitter.com/OWOBOOI8Jg

— FOX 4 NEWS (@FOX4) July 8, 2016

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said more than one officer had been shot in Dallas, but did not have further details on the number or their condition.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the police officers who were shot in #Dallas tonight. Awaiting further details.

— Dan Patrick (@DanPatrick) July 8, 2016

Dallas police are searching for at least one shooter in the city’s downtown. No motive has yet been established and it’s unclear whether the shooting was related to the protest.

The Dallas Police Department tweeted photos earlier Thursday night of officers peacefully mingling with protesters at the demonstration.

Demonstration in #Dallas @ Belo Garden Park pic.twitter.com/IUx5IaERSB

— Dallas Police Depart (@DallasPD) July 8, 2016

We’ll update this story with more information as it becomes available.

The Two Men Who Shaped the Story Of Alton Sterling's Death

There’s a strong chance no one beyond Baton Rouge, Louisiana, would know of Alton Sterling’s death if it weren’t for a convenience-store owner wary of police and a former gangster nicknamed Silky Slim.

But because of these two men, in one video, the world watched the view from inside a car at the Triple S convenience store’s parking lot as officers tackled Sterling to the ground. Then the second video, from a different angle only a few feet away, showed the officers stick a gun in the 37-year-old man’s chest and shoot him several times; it cut out shortly after one officer rolls off Sterling’s bleeding body. The second video came from the store’s owner, Abdullah Muflahi, who knew Sterling for years and let him sell CDs on the property. The first video, the one that caused the initial wave of outrage, came from a group, founded by Arthur “Silky Slim” Reed, that chases police-scanner chatter.

Reed, his bio says, grew up on the outskirts of Baton Rouge near the Mississippi River. In the 1980s, he became involved with gangs, work that ultimately landed him in prison. After he was released, Reed was in a car crash that killed everyone but him, which he took as a sign from God to change his life. Reed’s nonprofit, Stop The Violence, Inc., began as a way to dissuade young people from gang violence. One program he developed puts volunteers in cars with police scanners that help them find shootings––or, as was the case Tuesday, confrontations that could lead to shootings. Reed’s group then strings the footage together in hopes the images will scare young people away from gangs.

This is why, after midnight, a cellphone held in a car parked at the Triple S convenience store caught two officers as they yelled at Sterling to get on the ground. Reed will not say who shot the video of Sterling’s death (he said it was not him), but he told the The Washington Post that, after some deliberation, he and his team uploaded it to social media Tuesday around 5 p.m.

Normally, police would keep any surveillance footage from the public until the investigation is complete. But by releasing it, Reed shifted the narrative from the version likely to have been offered by the  Baton Rouge Police Department. Indeed, on Wednesday the U.S. Department of Justice opened an outside investigation into the shooting.

Muflahi, the convenience-store owner, also kept his video secret from officers. While Reed’s footage is jumpy, taken from the driver’s side of a car parked a couple spots away, Muflahi’s video tells the same story but offers a clearer, closer angle. Muflahi is almost on top of the officers as they kneel on Sterling, their arms tangled. Then one officers shouts, “You fucking move––I swear to God.” A moment later, Sterling lies bleeding from his chest, and the officer rolls off, then sits up and pauses, as if in shock. Reed’s footage might have helped lead to an independent investigation by the Justice Department, but Muflahi’s angle seems much more likely to help determine if Sterling tried to reach for a gun hidden inside his pocket, which the officers noticed seconds before they shot him.

Muflahi released his video Wednesday afternoon through a lawyer, Joel Porter, who told The Advocate he kept it from police because he doesn’t trust them. Instead of giving up the potential evidence for police to use, Muflahi released the video to The Advocate, as well as to the FBI.

“There is additional footage,” Porter told The Advocate. “We’ll let Baton Rouge city police create a narrative, and then we will knock it down inch by inch.”

The High Price of War

An average of 20 U.S. veterans a day killed themselves in 2014, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on suicide, the leading cause of death among veterans.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 55 million veterans records between 1979 and 2014 from all 50 states.

“One veteran suicide is one too many, and this collaborative effort provides both updated and comprehensive data that allows us to make better informed decisions on how to prevent this national tragedy,” said David Shulkin, the department’s under secretary for health, in a press release Thursday. “We as a nation must focus on bringing the number of veteran suicides to zero.”

The final report will be made public later this month, but the department on Thursday released several of its findings, including that 65 percent of all veterans who committed suicide in 2014 were 50 years or older. The report also found the risk of suicide to be greater among veterans than civilians; since 2001, adult civilian suicides increased 23 percent, while veteran suicides increased 32 percent. In the same period, the rate of suicide among male and female veterans increased, whether they used services provided by the department or not. But the analysis suggests access to care made a difference: The rate of suicide among male veterans who used veterans affairs services increased 11 percent, and increased 35 percent among those who didn’t. The rate of suicide among female veterans who used the services increased nearly 5 percent, and increased 98 percent among those who didn’t.

The new analysis appears to be significantly more comprehensive than the department’s previous report on suicide among veterans. In 2013, the department reported that 22 veterans died of suicide every day on average, but that number was criticized as being misleading because it came from data in 21 states.

The Second Amendment's Second-Class Citizens

The shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile share several striking, stomach-churning similarities: They were black men, killed by police, in deeply segregated communities. Both killings were captured on video, a product of an age in which anyone can tape an encounter with police—and increasingly, anyone, especially anyone black, realizes doing so may be important.

But both Castile and Sterling also shared one other thing in common: Both men were apparently carrying guns when they were killed.

According to Lavish Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend who was in a car with him when he was shot and posted a Facebook video of the aftermath, the officer asked Castile for his license and registration. As he reached for his wallet, he also told the officer than he had a concealed-carry permit and a gun. Reynolds said the officer told him not to move, but as Castile tried to put his hands up, he was shot and killed.

Sterling, meanwhile, was outside a store when police came. A gun was reportedly found in his pocket after he was shot and killed. The store’s owner Abdullah Muflahi, who knew Sterling, said that Sterling was not reaching for the gun, and videos don’t show any evidence that Sterling was reaching for his gun.

On social-media, many are already asking why the Second Amendment did not protect Sterling and Castile, and why gun-rights advocates like the National Rifle Association are not speaking out on their behalf. In each case, there are complicated legal questions, and many of the details remain unclear, but it is true that gun-rights groups like the NRA and its allies have typically pushed for laws that would allow citizens broader freedom to bear arms than currently permitted. It is also the case that the interpretation of the Second Amendment has for decades been deeply intertwined with the ways the law protects—and more often fails to protect—African Americans in comparison with whites, a history that begins in earnest in the 1860s, flares up in the 1960s, and is again relevant today.

The Sterling case is the more complicated one. Sterling was a convicted felon, and thus probably was not legally permitted to have a gun. While Louisiana allows open carry of handguns for anyone legally allowed to possess one, concealed carry requires a permit, for which Sterling would have been ineligible. Sterling had allegedly been displaying the gun, which is the reason why police were called.

The crucial point is that the police couldn’t have known when they arrived on the scene whether Sterling’s gun was completely legal or not. An additional irony is that, according to Muflahi, Sterling had begun carrying the gun because he was concerned about his own safety—that is to say, for the very reasons that gun-rights advocates say citizens should be able to, and many argue should, carry guns.

The Castile case looks more straightforward, based on what’s known now. Assuming Castile’s permit was valid, he was placed in an impossible position by the officer. Unlike Sterling, who seems to have been resisting arrest (a fact that in no way justifies an extrajudicial execution by officers), Castile was attempting to comply with contradictory imperatives: first, the precautionary step of declaring the weapon to the officer; second, the officer’s request for his license and registration; and third, the officer’s command to freeze.*

Some activists contend that white men in the same situations would never have been shot. It’s an impossible counterfactual to prove, although there’s relevant circumstantial evidence, such as the fact that black men are much more likely to be shot by police than any other group. Raw Story rounds up stories of white people who pointed guns at police and were not shot. Castile’s shooting is reminiscent of a 2014 incident in which South Carolina State Trooper Sean Groubert pulled a black driver over in Columbia. Groubert asked the man, Levar Edward Jones, for his license and registration, but when the driver turned to get them, Groubert promptly shot him without warning. Groubert seems to have feared—however irrationally—for his safety when Jones reached into the car, but what was Jones supposed to do? He was complying with the officer’s instructions. (Groubert later pled guilty to assault and battery.)

The two shootings give a strong sense that the Second Amendment does not apply to black Americans in the same way it does to white Americans. Although liberals are loath to think of the right to bear arms as a civil right, it’s spelled out in the Bill of Rights. Like other civil rights, the nation and courts have interpreted it differently over time—as an individual right, and as a collective right. But however it’s been applied, African Americans have historically not enjoyed nearly the same protection as their white fellow citizens.

As Adam Winkler wrote in The Atlantic in 2011, one crucial testing ground for a personal right to bear arms came in the aftermath of the Civil War. Blacks in the South encountered a new landscape, one which they were ostensibly free but vulnerable and beset by white antagonists:

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

In response, General Dan Sickles, who was in charge of Reconstruction in South Carolina, decreed that blacks could own guns. State officials ignored him, so Congress passed a law stating that ex-slaves possessed “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.” In the words of the Yale constitutional-law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

Black Americans again prominently asserted their right to bear arms during the 1960s. In 1964, Malcolm X was famously photographed holding a rifle as he looked out a window. The image was often misinterpreted as a statement of aggression, as though he was preparing a guerrilla assault. In fact, Malcolm was exercising his own right to own a gun for self-defense, concerned that members of the Nation of Islam—which he had recently deserted for Sunni orthodoxy—would try to kill him. (His fear was, of course, vindicated the following year, when Nation members did murder him.)

In 1967, Black Panthers began taking advantage of California laws that permitted open carry, walking the streets of Oakland armed to the teeth, citing threats of violence from white people and particularly white cops. When people were pulled over, Panthers would arrive on the scene—to ensure that justice was done, they argued, or to intimidate the cops, the cops contended. In response, Republican state Assemblyman Don Mulford introduced a bill to ban open carry. The Panthers then decided to go to the state capitol, heavily armed, to exercise their right.

As theater, it was an incredible gesture. As politics, it was a catastrophe. The sight of heavily armed black men brandishing rifles galvanized support for Mulford’s bill, which promptly passed and was signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. It set off a spree of gun-control laws that only began to be rolled back years later—leading to the current regime of permissive laws.

“The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative,” Winkler wrote.

Signs of that shift are visible around the nation now. In Texas, gun owners (largely white) staged an open-carry rally on the capitol grounds in Austin in January, an echo of the Panthers’ rally in Sacramento. (Even some gun advocates looked askance at that move.) Meanwhile, the Panthers’ tactic of carrying guns and watching the police has an echo in the rapidly spreading practice of filming encounters with the police, just as happened in the Sterling and Castile shootings. Black Americans may not enjoy the full protection of the Second Amendment, but technology has offered a sort of alternative—one that may be less effective in preventing brutality in the moment, but has produced an outpouring of outrage.

One common thread through all of these cases is the constant threat of state violence against black Americans: from un-Reconstructed Southern officials; from California police; and today, from police around the country.

Gun advocates frequently argue that more guns, and more people carrying guns, produce a safer society. This, and the contrary claim that they undermine public safety, depend on statistics. But anecdotally, both Castile and Sterling represent cases in which carrying a gun not only failed to make the men safer, but in fact contributed to their deaths. The NRA has not made a public statement on either case, and a spokesman did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

In any case, the American approach to guns is, for the moment, stable. The courts, and particularly the Supreme Court, have inched toward much broader gun rights, including a suggestion of a personal right to bear arms. The death of Justice Antonin Scalia may, in the long term, produce a more liberal court, but that will require reversing years of precedents. In the meantime, spates of mass shootings and a slightly increase in violent crime have produced highly vocal calls for gun control, but there’s little reason to expect those efforts to succeed. To date, they have almost universally failed. In fact, the last few years have brought ever looser gun laws. Quick changes in gun laws, regardless of whether they’re desirable, are a remote possibility. As a result, the most relevant question right now is not whether gun laws should change, but whether existing gun laws apply equally to all Americans—and if not, why they don’t.

*This article originally stated that Castile had a legal obligation to declare his weapon to the officer. In fact, in Minnesota, holders of concealed carry permits need only declare their weapons when asked to do so by an officer. We regret the error.

Drake's Crucial Political Awakening

Rap has not been silent on police brutality. There are examples after examples after examples in the past few years to suggest that this genre, in this time, is as politically charged a popular art movement as has existed.

But the biggest rapper alive, a 29-year-old Torontonian whose chart domination at the moment is matching records set by Michael Jackson’s Thriller phase, has said very little about the issues that have motivated the Black Lives Matter movement. The rare exception came on 2015’s “Charged Up,” when he invoked law-enforcement violence mostly to try and win his beef with the rapper Meek Mill: “Cops are killing people with their arms up / And your main focus is trying to harm us?” He also devoted a few lines of “6PM in New York” to “how we need protection from those protectin’ the block.” But in general the absence of politics from his lyrics and his public statements squared with some defining traits of Drake’s success—baroque self-involvement and cunning business sense.

But now, the killing of the 37-year-old Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge police officers, caught on video, has spurred Drake to join the category of rappers vocalizing concern. On Instagram he wrote:

I am grateful to be able to call America my second home. Last night when I saw the video of Alton Sterling being killed it left me feeling disheartened, emotional and truly scared. I woke up this morning with a strong need to say something.

It’s impossible to ignore that the relationship between black and brown communities and law enforcement remains as strained as it was decades ago. No one begins their life as a hashtag. Yet the trend of being reduced to one continues.

This is real and I’m concerned. Concerned for the safety of my family, my friends and any human being that could fall victim to this pattern. I do not know the answer. But I believe things can change for the better. Open and honest dialogue is the first step.

My thoughts and prayers are with the Sterling family and any family that has lost someone to this cycle of violence.

Be safe out there. More life.

It’s not a pointed and policy-specific call for action. But it is, poignantly, the words of someone shocked into voicing their conscience. The language here indicates that Drake is self-aware about having kept quiet on the subject till now: “I woke up this morning with the strong need to say something,” “It is impossible to ignore ...” “dialogue is the first step.” Backlash has mounted lately against the platitude of sending “thoughts and prayers” to fix injustice, but the fact remains that speaking out on any topic of controversy, especially this one, has costs. Drake has finally decided to pay them.

Writing for The Guardian earlier this year, the Yale professor Daphne A. Brooks marveled at how “the most robust moment of resistant … black popular music that we’ve ever had” is so heterogenerous—spanning from D’Angelo’s sensual R&B to Beyonce’s stadium pop to Kendrick Lamar’s knotty rap narratives. The diversity of sounds all trained on one cause, she said, is as “capacious as ‘blackness’ itself.” Drake joining the fray expands the palette further.

His music is a new and potent rendering of hip-hop’s classic tropes around escapism and climbing the social ladder; his songs are foremost about material success, sex, and pride, rendered with of-the-moment references to social media and globally connected culture. Perhaps part of his appeal has been in how the universe of his songs was one where his slogan YOLO—“you only live once”—was celebrated without invoking the grim context that black people can lose their lives to police while face-up on parking-lot pavement, or sitting in their car with their girlfriend and her child. But for Drake to speak out now is a sign that even his bubble can be pierced. It could be a spur to yet-wider political mobilization, giving his song title “Charged Up” new meaning.

The Human Toll of the Baghdad Bombing

NEWS BRIEF When a van packed with explosives blew up outside a shopping mall in Baghdad this weekend, a small group of people closest to it were killed instantly. But it was the flames from the blast that would push the death toll of the attack to nearly 300, making it the deadliest attack in Iraq in more than a decade.

The latest count of fatalities, announced by Iraq’s health ministry Tuesday, is 292 people, according to Reuters. The first reports of casualties of the attack, which occurred in the city’s Karrada district just after midnight Sunday, said about 90 people were killed. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombing.

The explosions created a fire that engulfed the Hadi Center, a multi-story building with clothing stores and eateries where many were shopping for presents for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Emergency workers have spent the last few days pulling charred bodies from the debris, pushing the death toll higher.

Dozens of people inside burned to death or suffocated, officials said. Poor building conditions may have worsened the fire and prevented people from escaping, BuzzFeed’s Borzou Daragahi reported Wednesday, citing Lieutenant General Abdul Ameer al-Shammari, the head of Baghdad’s security forces:

… he said the area around the shopping center was filled with “flammable materials” and that the paneling used for the building’s facade contributed as much, if not more, to the higher death toll.

“The fire exits were closed specifically in that mall, and big numbers of people were in a café watching a football match,” Shammari said in a television interview late Tuesday night.

Sajad Jiyad, an Iraqi analyst living in Baghdad who was in Karrada at the time of the attack, wrote in a blog post Tuesday that the conditions of the building and the surrounding area were “everything needed for an inferno”:

The only way in and out of the building was through the single front entrance. The entire building was clad in plastic based panels, even more combustible than the aluminium based ones blamed for large fires in Dubai hotels this year. Fire safety inspections are rare and weak, and the mall was full of stores with flammable goods with little quality controls. In front of the mall the sidewalk was packed with vendors selling cheap clothes on the ground, perfect material for fires to consume. Next to them were mobile stalls selling falafel and fast food, with deep fryers and several gas canisters underneath. To the side were hundreds of crushed cardboard boxes and discarded packaging ready to be collected by the cleaners in the morning.

Many Iraqis have blamed the government for failing to secure the capital. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was pelted with rocks when he visited the site of the attack this week.

Death by Police

Updated on July 7 at 10:05 a.m. ET

It wasn’t until recently that it became easy to find a number to go with the gruesome reality that black people—and black men in particular—live with every day: the ever-present threat of police violence.

Police officers fatally shot nearly 1,000 people last year, according to The Washington Post’s ongoing count. Halfway through 2016, police have shot and killed 506 more. “Unarmed black men are seven times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire,” the Post wrote last year.

And though it seems overly clinical to talk about hundreds of civilian deaths as a number; there’s power in knowing that number. The Washington Post’s impressive tracking work represents the professionalization of an effort that first bubbled up on individual blogs and among smaller advocacy groups.  

Of course, this is just one count. The Guardian’s tally is 561 deaths, including 526 shootings. And that discrepancy suggests that as important as these efforts have been, in the absence of a comprehensive federal effort to track such shootings, the full scope of the problem remains unknown.

Still, attempts to track police shootings are meaningful. Coupled with video footage of police violence against black people—grainy, raw, and deeply disturbing in ways that are foreign to many white people but all too familiar to people of color—new technology is forcing Americans to confront life-and-death realities of inequality in the United States.

And as technology helps drive a national conversation about race and police violence, much of that conversation is taking place in digital forums: in tweets and in Facebook posts, and in self-published essays. “It’s the incessant threat of daily life,” the journalist Justin Ellis wrote in an essay in 2014, “the feeling that at any given moment, in any day at any time, everything I have could get snatched away as I’m going through the motions of being me.”

Black Lives Matter has organized its movement largely on social media, which is also where videos of police shootings are published and shared. The larger question is what happens now? Heightened awareness of a drumbeat of killings—including two this week—leaves many people feeling angry, exhausted, and powerless. Counting the number of dead and watching videos of them die doesn’t prevent it from happening again. In one in five fatal shootings, the names of the police officer responsible is never disclosed. Even when they are, many officers face no consequences.

Yet there may be reason for hope. Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and a scholar who has done much thinking and writing about online activism, has written about the importance of monitoring what he calls the equitability of activism in both the digital and physical realms.

“‘Monitoring’ sounds passive, but it’s not—it’s a model for channeling mistrust to hold institutions responsible, whether they’re the institutions we’ve come to mistrust or the new ones we’re building today,” he wrote in a blog post last year. “When the Black Panthers were founded in Oakland, CA in the late 1960s, they were an organization focused on combatting police brutality. They would follow police patrol cars and when officers got out to make an arrest, the Panthers—armed, openly carrying weapons they were licensed to own—would observe the arrest from a distance, making it clear to officers that they would intervene if they felt the person arresting was being harassed or abused, a practice they called ‘Policing the Police.’”

This kind of monitorial citizenship, he says, benefits hugely from technology—whether it involves building a dedicated website for counting fatal shootings by police, forming an organization to videotape crime, or leveraging digital networks to share footage of a deadly police confrontation. As Zuckerman puts it in his blog post, “it allows many people working together to monitor situations that would be hard for any one individual to see.”

“The one stance that’s not acceptable as far as I’m concerned,” he added, “is that of disengagement, of deciding that you’re powerless and remaining that way.”

The Aftermath of a Shooting Live-Streamed In Minnesota

NEWS BRIEF Police in Minnesota shot and killed a black man Wednesday night who had been pulled over for a broken taillight, the aftermath of which was live-streamed by his girlfriend who sat in the passenger seat beside him .

The man was pulled over in a suburb of St. Paul around 9 p.m., by an officer with the St. Anthony Police Department. The video shows the man’s car stopped along the road, him leaning back in his seat, his white shirt covered in blood. Beside him a woman who says she’s his girlfriend calmly narrates what happened, while a frantic officer stands outside the driver’s-side window with his gun drawn, yelling, “I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up!”

The man was identified by friends as Philando Castile, a 32-year-old cafeteria supervisor at a local Montessori school.

As The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, the woman said just before Castile was shot:

… the officer “asked him for license and registration. He told him that it was in his wallet, but he had a pistol on him because he’s licensed to carry. The officer said don’t move. As he was putting his hands back up, the officer shot him in the arm four or five times.”

Castile was taken to a local medical center, where he later died.

Around midnight, a small protest started at the scene where Castile was shot, and by 2 a.m. it had moved to the governor’s residence, the Star Tribune reported. About 100 people stood outside the gates, shouting Castile’s name, as well as that of Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man killed in November by Minneapolis police.

The scene outside the Governor's mansion in St. Paul https://t.co/jfncjzH6et #PhilandoCastile @StarTribune pic.twitter.com/Q9dLHqC9jq

— Leila Navidi (@LeilaNavidi) July 7, 2016

No Charges for Hillary Clinton

NEWS BRIEF The Justice Department won’t pursue criminal charges against presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of state, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Wednesday.

“Late this afternoon, I met with FBI Director James Comey and career prosecutors and agents who conducted the investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State,” Lynch said in a statement. “I reviewed and accepted their unanimous recommendation that the thorough, year-long investigation be closed and that no charges be brought against any individuals within the scope of the investigation.”

The decision marks the legal end of an extensive probe into whether Clinton intentionally or negligently disclosed classified information on an unsecured system during her time at the State Department.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey lambasted the presidential candidate as “extremely careless” but said “no reasonable prosecutor” could bring a criminal case against her.

In a message on Twitter shortly after the announcement, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the matter was “resolved.”

With the AG accepting Director Comey's recommendation, this case is resolved, no matter Republicans' attempts to continue playing politics

— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) July 6, 2016

That may be overly optimistic. With Republicans eager to use the scandal as proof of her unfitness for the presidency, the case’s closure is unlikely to end the extensive political damage to Clinton. And in a move that will keep the scandal in the news cycle for another day, Comey will testify before the GOP-led House Oversight Committee Thursday on his agency’s decision not to recommend charges.