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The vast majority of mayors in American cities do not support sweeping changes to the funding of their police departments, and most say last year's racial justice protests were a force for good in their cities, according to a new survey of more than 100 mayors from across the U.S.

Eighty percent of the mayors who responded to the Menino Survey of Mayors say they believe their police budgets last year were "about right." Most mayors said they did not support reallocating many, or some of their police department's resources and responsibilities.

The findings come in the early days of the Biden administration, as the president seeks to make good on campaign promises to rein in police abuse and dismantle systemic racism. The country's divisions over race, criminal justice and policing are some of the most significant domestic challenges facing Biden's administration.

A Wisconsin prosecutor announced that no charges will be brought against the white Kenosha police officer who shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, several times at close range in August.

Kenosha police officer Rusten Sheskey, who is white, shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back after Blake slowly walked away from officers and toward the driver's side of a parked vehicle. He opened the door and leaned inside. Investigators later said a knife was recovered from the floorboard of the driver's side.

The activation of the Wisconsin Guard also on the heels of Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian and police Chief Daniel Miskinis announcing what they called "precautionary community safety measures" designed to keep the public and demonstrators safe and guard against "unlawful activity."

Companies including Microsoft Corp. MSFT -1.10% , U.S. Bancorp, Uber Technologies Inc. UBER -1.91% and Intel Corp. INTC 0.39% are asking the law firms they hire to detail how many diverse lawyers they employ and whether those lawyers are assigned meaningful work.

When his Chicago-based company set out this spring to buy for-profit online educator Walden University in a $1.5 billion acquisition, Mr. Patterson recruited experienced Black law partners in the three specialty areas he needed: mergers and acquisitions, finance and regulatory law.

About 2% of partners at U.S. law firms and less than 5% of attorneys in the lower ranks are Black, figures that have barely budged for decades, according to the National Association for Law Placement, or NALP.

The Black Lives Matter movement got a favorable ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.

The justices tossed out a federal appeals court decision that allowed a Black Lives Matter protest organizer to be sued by a police officer injured by an unknown assailant

The officer, who suffered injuries to his brain, jaw and teeth, also sued Black Lives Matter. That was tossed out on the theory that BLM is a social movement and cannot be sued.

A Texas man who appeared to claim on social media accounts to be the “Trump train” driver who rammed a vehicle last week in a Joe Biden campaign caravan also had been videotaped driving through Black Lives Matter protesters in Texas this summer.

President Donald Trump has hailed the harassing drivers as “patriots.” Cisneros retweeted Trump’s message “I love Texas” over a video of the highway confrontation.

The black Ford F-150 pickup that collided with the Biden campaign car appears to be the same one Cisneros drove through a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in San Antonio in June. 

The sheer volume of conspiracy theories — including QAnon — and deceptive claims are already playing a role in stunting Biden’s growth with Latino voters, who make up about 17 percent of the state’s electorate.

“It’s difficult to measure the effect exactly, but the polling sort of shows it and in focus groups it shows up, with people deeply questioning the Democrats, and referring to the ‘deep state’ in particular — that there’s a real conspiracy against the president from the inside,” he said. “There’s a strain in our political culture that’s accustomed to conspiracy theories, a culture that’s accustomed to coup d'etats.”

Florida’s Latino community is a diverse mix of people with roots across Latin America. There’s a large population of Republican-leaning Cubans in Miami-Dade and a growing number of Democratic-leaning voters with Puerto Rican, Colombian, Nicaraguan, Dominican and Venezuelan heritage in Miami and elsewhere in the state. Many register as independents but typically vote Democratic

The department statement noted that these cities were highlighted as they meet key criteria, such as forbidding "the police force from intervening to restore order amid widespread or sustained violence or destruction", as well as seeking to disempower or defund police. Refusing to accept federal law enforcement assistance is also a factor.

All three cities have seen major protests since the death of unarmed black man George Floyd in May.

Few police officers are ever charged with murder or manslaughter when they cause a death in the line of duty, and only about a third of those officers are convicted.

Union protections that shield police officers from timely investigation, legal standards that give them the benefit of the doubt, and a tendency to take officers at their word have added up to few convictions and little prison time for officers who kill. On top of that, misconduct and poor judgment do not always amount to criminality.

Though state statutes vary, officers are generally permitted to use deadly force if they reasonably perceive imminent danger — a standard that has been criticized as overly subjective and prone to racial bias.

Following signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.

“We knew there would be violence,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, about the Jan. 6 assault. Endorsing tactics like militiamen with assault rifles frightening state lawmakers “normalizes violence,” she told journalists last week, “and Michigan, unfortunately, has seen quite a bit of that.”

The chief organizer of that protest, Meshawn Maddock, on Saturday was elected co-chair of the state Republican Party — one of four die-hard Trump loyalists who won top posts.

“I remember him saying: ‘History will be written Before Covid and After Covid.’ And I thought, he’s got something here. It began to sink in that this was different from anything I’ve ever encountered in my 30-year career at the British Library, and that we should do something about it.”

For the past year, that has meant gathering interviews with thousands of NHS workers, archiving websites, recording TV and radio channels, and collecting poetry and audio diaries, sometimes with partner organisations. It will build, he hopes, into a national archive of Covid-19 reminiscences, and an “amazing resource” for future researchers.

It is not just the Covid pandemic that can make these feel like unusually significant times. Populism, Trump’s rise and (perhaps) fall, Brexit, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo protests, mass movement of refugees, the increased might of both China and India and many other issues have contributed to a sense of humanity having reached a historic moment, all while the climate crisis rages with ever more urgency.

last year, as the progressive movement in Georgia was on the cusp of historic electoral triumph, Mr. Calhoun, a small-town lawyer whose family had long roots in the state, suddenly abandoned the Democrats. And not only that, he pledged to kill them.

“I have tons of ammo,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter three months before storming the U.S. Capitol with a pro-Trump mob. “Gonna use it too — at the range and on racist democrat communists. So make my day.”

Some Black residents of Americus, Mr. Calhoun’s hometown, were not shocked that a person so worldly could end up doing something like this. “The Jekyll and Hyde effect,” said the Rev. Mathis Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter.

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.

“All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

What Pastor Scott worries about most, though, is that this pandemic is going to take away the church she and her husband, Robert, have spent more than a decade building between their shifts as corrections officers.

A tiny church serving a vulnerable corner of American society is having a life-or-death moment that will never show up in the data. And it’s doing so with little help at a time when the government and economists are hailing all that’s being poured into the economy and calling for more.

Concerns about deficits, debt, and inflation have been set aside. The consensus these days has rallied around a whatever-it-takes approach that, though focused on businesses and markets, has included social programs setting new benchmarks for economic impact.

This Moment of historic holding to account, of looking inward, deserves a commensurate, totalizing event that explains what is being reckoned with, demanded and hoped for, an experience that rubs between its fingers the earth upon which all those toppled monuments had so brazenly stood. The Moment warrants a depth of conversation the United States has never had. It demands truth and reconciliation.

In 1968, in the wake of the racial conflagrations roiling American cities during the mid- to late 1960s, Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois presented the findings of his so-called riot commission, whose politically moderate and racially uniform makeup (two of its members were Black; there was one woman) was strategically cast for ho-hum results. What it delivered to President Lyndon B. Johnson was, instead, shockingly, comprehensively grim. The United States, the commission concluded, is a hopelessly divided nation that has locked its Black citizens in impoverishment and swallowed the key, that good white folks were out-to-lunch and therefore as culpable as the white supremacists were malignant.

When it was published as a book early in ’68, the report became a best seller. But it ought to have been part of a one-two punch. Part two should have been a televised, multipart presentation of the commission’s intensive effort: its conclusions, considerable field work and still-bracing historical contextualizing put before the public, alongside the disgruntled, despondent, enraged, hurt Black Americans whose circumstances swell the report. The country watched the cities burn but never met the human beings who lived in them.

I believe that there is a sizable minority of people who are basically good, kind people who are offended or threatened by the BLM movement because they see it as an attack on them rather than as a cry for dignity and equal treatment.

The slogan "Black Lives Matter" is understood by many of these folks as meaning ONLY Black Lives Matter.  I have to admit to initially being inclined to feel that way, particularly when public figures who responded with "All Lives Matter" were pilloried for having the audacity for saying such an obviously true thing.

 I have come to think of it this way, "UNTIL Black Lives Matter, it's not true that All Lives Matter."