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AUSTIN WEEKLY news ■
Community leaders try bridging divide between police and residents
Vol. 31 No. 4
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January 18, 2017
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austinweeklynews.com
@AustinWeeklyChi
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Also serving Garfield Park
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Meet Shawn Fancher, page 3
More than the ‘face’ of a Trump meme By MICHAEL ROMAIN Editor
West Side political organizer Deborah Williams, an accountant by trade, sat spellbound at her desk inside of the Chicago Avenue office space she shares with Crystal Dyer, the owner of Gone Again Travel and Tours, which Dyer said is the first African-American owned brick and mortar travel agency in Austin. Williams was looking at her laptop while a roughly 2-minute clip, posted to Facebook, of a recent episode of the ABC sitcom “Black-ish” played on the screen. In the clip, the comedian Anthony Anderson’s character, advertising executive Andre Johnson (also known as Dre), is in a conference room with his co-workers, who have been going back and forth about how Donald Trump got elected. “All of them except Lucy (Catherine Reitman) voted for Hillary Clinton, and everyone is mad at some other group — black people, white women — for allowing this to happen,” according to a summary of the scene by TV Guide, which hailed the episode as the “first post-Obama work of art.” “Dre is silent until Leslie (Peter Mackenzie), his #NeverTrump Republican boss, asks him ‘why do you not care about what’s happening See WILLIAMS on page 9
WILLIAM CAMARGO/Staff Photographer
FIGHTING BACK: Veteran West Side community organizer Deborah Williams, shown in her Austin office last Friday, says Trump’s victory and looming presidency has reinvigorated her passion for grassroots activism.
Justice Dept.: CPD violates Constitution By MICHAEL ROMAIN Staff Reporter
Last Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice released a roughly 160-page report that contained anecdotes like this one, involving two teenagers and a police officer. One day, a girl and a boy, both 15 years old, were crossing the street at a light.
They had been given the right of way by a car that had stopped for them, but which had, in the process, caused a uniformed officer who was driving an unmarked car to abruptly brake before swiftly changing lanes to avoid the stopped car. The officer, according to the young girl’s account, got out of his vehicle and started yelling obscenities at her, “calling her a ‘f—ing idiot,’ among other things.”
After the girl told the cop that she and her peer had the right of way, the officer “pushed her in the back with both hands so hard she fell into a newspaper stand, after which he handcuffed her arms behind her back while she still wore her backpack, hurting her wrists, and did not loosen the cuffs when she complained.
Austin Chamber of Commerce on the move... 773.854.5848 • www.austinchicagochamber.com
See DOJ REPORT on page 4