P. Diddy is responsible for breaking a lot of artists. However, those shitty deals that were worked out between Puff and those artists never puts them in the best position. From Black Rob, Loon, to Shyne, the Bad Boy roster has seen their share of prison cells due to their stagnant music careers and ambitious attempts that fail to get their brands back to where they once were. Most recently, G. Dep, the artist responsible for the hit, “Let’s Get It,” the track that resulted in the production of a video featuring the introduction of the “Harlem Shake,” has placed his bid to live in one of the many luxurious prison cells in the US.

More specifically, G. Dep aka “Ghetto Dependent” and who’s known to the judge and jury as Trevell Gerald Coleman, has admitted to another murder while on trial for murder. This is unfortunate because his career seemed so promising almost a decade ago but then he (Dep) fell into the “where is he now” category, as most artists with sucky ass deals usually do. Apparently, the murder he’s confessed to committing took place almost 20 years ago. Some things should just stay in the past, but is murder one of those things?

Check out MTV for more on this developing story…

One thing is for sure, when Samuel L Jackson speaks, you listen. Jackson has something to say about gun violence and shockingly enough, he gets his point across without any expletives. We can play the Blame Game or we can just #PutTheGunsDown

I remember when the Baptist church used to vote the Pastor out. Now they’re getting rid of democracy and bringing out the big guns if they ain’t feeling ‘em? Well, at least that’s what Daniel Logan of Polk County did when he disagreed with the song selections the Pastor chose. Yep, pretty petty!

When we’ve got choir members scrapping with the Pastor at rehearsal, putting the guns down is an understatement. We must do away with guns as the means to the end of all disputes.

#PutTheGunsDown #WheresTheLove

This Labor Day weekend, while we were celebrating peace in our Milwaukee community, the exact opposite was happening on one LA’s biggest college campuses.

I assume Dr. Dre and hip-hop is to blame for this weekend’s shooting of USC students over a pricey pair of headphones that are really just ‘aight’. This guy gets caught stealing and starts blasting! Please peep the 1:55 mark to really be blown away!

I wonder if Jay-Z has ever been called a nigga in Paris. Or if Martin Margiela referred to Kanye as a nigga, would he still associate himself with that brand? I came across some young people in Cali that weren’t letting the N-Word slide at all when verbally assaulted at the Super Uno Market on the corner of Vernon and Van Ness. They didn’t even resort to violence, which is something that we don’t hear enough of.

Are you afraid to take stake in your community?

The NYPD is on Facebook and for a very specific reason. So much for mob meetings that stem from Facebook. Oh and no more bragging about the lick you just hit to your friends. They’re prepared to put a stop to that. They’re gonna, most likely, find the hippest young cop on the squad and sit them down at a desk and peak in on your conversations with hopes that they understand the lingo enough. Hopefully, the criminals on Facebook are smart enough to at least use lingo when broadcasting a crime. They ususally aren’t.

See full story on MASHABLE.

Not all cops are bad!

He said it best! Tupac speaks out on teen violence and the aftermath suffering that mothers experience, “If she [the mother] is strong enough to keep going and make a difference than I can be strong enough to make a difference. What we need to do as a community is start to take back control of our communities. I understand it’s always going to be drug dealing. And I understand it’s always going to be violence but, we  just need to regulate it so we can at least have a peace resolve. Or else we gonna all die..we all gonna to be destroyed.”

Quantez Devonta Mallory, Horace Damon Coleman, Emmanuel Benjamin Boykins and Tracen Lamar Franklin were  the teenagers accused of stomping Tillman to death in the November 2010 attack at a house party.  According to a report in the Atlanta Journal Constitution- Douglas County District Attorney David McDade says he consulted Tillman’s family before telling the defendants that they have until June 8, 2011 to make a guilty plea or risk the death penalty at trial.

Please watch the video to witness the heart-breaking story told from a mother’s eyes.

While some try to distract you, I humbly request your IMMEDIATE ATTENTION: Please regain your passion for community involvement or perhaps even discover the importance of having it. There are elected officials that would encourage The People to focus on President Obama’s “citizenship status” rather than on the fatal murder of a NY college graduate stemming from an altercation on Facebook; this social network dispute preceded the stabbing of the woman over a $20.00 debt! We’ve got to wake the hell up and engage our youth to become active stakeholders in their future!

This is one of those posts that serves as a solution. Demetrius Martin, A young man who lost his father at a very young age, took a proactive approach by reaching out to kids in similar situations so they’d have the comfort in knowing they aren’t alone. #thatswhatsup

This bus driver went too far, putting his hands on an elderly woman. Even though she was breaking the law by smoking a cigarette on the bus he did not have to push her off the bus and give her a couple jabs. I mean come on, she is an elderly woman for god’s sake! She was not a threat to the bus driver or anyone else on the bus. The right thing to do was to call the police and wait until authorities escorted her off the bus. This bus driver really needs to be fired for handling the situation the way he did.

A 9-year-old girl was killed today while walking to the grocery store…sounds familiar. Every day, we lose thousands of children and youth to unimaginable gun-wars. Our government has never been so adamant about anti-violence until a member of their personal parliament was affected.

Don’t get me wrong… Any loss of life is tragic and the AZ shooting was another example of a senseless act of murder. But tragedy happens daily in our inner-cities.

During a meeting at the White House last year, I was told that miniature – i.e., child-sized – caskets were not an URGENCY to the House and Senate. I beg to differ…homicide rates in the US are 4 times that of the UK, 12 times that of Japan. Over 10,000 Americans die from gun violence every year, add on suicides/accidentals and it’s 20-30,000!

Eugene Robinson (Washington Post) said it best, “we have a murder rate that’s the shame of the developed world.”

The fact of the matter is elected officials aren’t the only parties we should be flying half staff for. WE THE PEOPLE should fly half staff everyday… every time WE THE PEOPLE lose someone to violence whether on home soil or not.

CJ and AR

What is there to do for a teenage kid in Milwaukee?

Well, they cut after school programs, and there are no jobs so they can’t go to work. The YMCA is expensive so not all families can afford to be a member.

Mayfair Mall is one of the most popular malls near Milwaukee County. It was the only place where young people could go and hang out until the mall came up with a policy that was discriminatory towards youth in 2007. No one under the age of 18  was allowed in the Mall without a parent and  I.D. was required to enter the mall, except on Sundays.

Here it is 2011 and a new generation of young kids starts a so-called riot and makes police shut down the mall. Police say that shots were fired in the parking lot, teens were getting caught shoplifting and mobs of kids were in the parking lot running and jumping on cars. Okay, Maybe the young kids maybe were out of hand. But shots being fired ain’t nothing new. These kids hear gunshots everyday. Just because shots were fired does not mean it was a young person did it. It could have been anyone. I believe the mall was just having too many incidents in one day and blew them all out of proportion to make it look big. Hey, find these kids something to do other than goof off at the mall.

My new New Orleans-based homie, Dee-1 checks in with 99Problems and breaks down the snitching concept in an interesting way. Dawg is ill and is saying a lot more than most.

A relieved Chris Brown poses with a certificate that expresses the completion of his Domestic Abuse class. We support progress over here @ 99Problems. Keep it up!

Columbus’s murder rate seems to follow an unfortunate pattern. Every two or three years, it spikes, and unfortunately this is one of those years. This morning, on the Columbus eastside, a 47 year old man was shot in the head, and sadly, he did not make it. Although the official police report has not been released, the initial report suggests that the incident was likely a robbery. This most recent homicide brings the years total to 101. That is a staggering number, and even more so when taken into consideration that there is still an entire month left in the year, and last year’s total was short of 90. 101 might not seem like a large number until it is taken into account that each one of those 101 represents a human life.

I can certainly sympathize with the family of the victim, being that this has been a tragic year for my family as well, as we were forced to bury one of our own. However, I find myself questioning the circumstance and how people have become so callous that another human life could be considered expendable in order to support their own. Every time I hear about a killing, I am overwhelmed with a feeling of disbelief. I have grown up with people who committed some unspeakable crimes, and I have seen how, as time passed, unspeakable crimes were committed against them.  Be it because of having been murdered or being sentenced to prison for committing a murder, I have lost family members and friends forever, because they could not escape the vicious cycle of generational poverty and the violence that inevitably accompanies it.

Having intimately known people who have lost or taken a life, I am able to see the humanity on either side of the issue. I was fortunate enough to have found an outlet, where as, so many others will not be so fortunate. This means that I am living proof that those outlets have and still do exist. So while I still have breath, I make it my personal responsibility to be someone who others can look to when they feel they have no place else to go.

S/o to Kali Akuno for the assist

(Oakland, CA) – Three groups who have actively been working toward justice for Oscar Grant – ONYX, The New Years Movement and the General Assembly for Justice for Oscar Grant – are denouncing an announcement today by the defense team for former BART officer Johannes Mehserle that they are seeking a retrial in the shooting death of unarmed Oscar Grant, III.

Citing a 2008 case from Kentucky, Michael Raines said that Prosecutor David Stein was inaccurate in saying that “in a million Taser draws”, there had never been a mistake like this one. But Prosecutor David Stein was right on the money.

“The question raised here, is did this officer pull his Taser out two times before accidentally shooting the man in Kentucky?” asked Cephus Johnson A.K.A Uncle Bobby. “In the case of Oscar, Mehserle took out his Taser twice. Oscar took a picture of him holding that Taser, so Mehserle knew exactly where it was and he knew where his gun was too. He chose to pull his gun. There is no comparison here.”

At every junction in this case, there have been attempts by the defense to justify the actions of Mehserle and blame the victim for the crime of the perpetrator. And although Mehserle was convicted of mere involuntary manslaughter, the family of Oscar Grant – and indeed the community at large continues to believe he was murdered.

“He is comparing apples and oranges,” said Lesley Phillips, a member of the New Years Movement. “The man in Kentucky didn’t die, he wasn’t beaten by the police prior to the shooting as Oscar was and we have no way of knowing if that shooting was an accident either.”

America has a long history of looking the other way when innocent civilians are wounded or killed by police – particularly if those innocent civilians are of color. In fact, Johannes Mehserle is one of only two police officers in the history of California to ever be convicted of killing a civilian in the line of duty. A gross imbalance when compared to the hundreds of innocent lives lost at the hands of law enforcement each year across the nation.

“There is no logical reason for a new trial,” said Michael Walker, a member of ONYX and active on the Oscar Grant case. “A new trial will be looked at by the community as another attempt by the defense to manipulate the facts of the case and allow Mehserle to go free for his crime. It will also be viewed as a slap in the face to the remaining survivors of that night – the friends of Oscar Grant who were on the platform to witness the unprovoked and unwarranted execution of their friend.”

Wednesday, August 25th I received an accidental call from Raymond Moore, a friend of mine whom I attended MEC middle school with. He had meant to call someone else but connected with me for 43 seconds. And he said that he’d get back with me about working on some music. It had been a grip since I had seen him but it was good hearing from him because we were real close. Everyone literally loved him because he was a cool dude and he laughed at all my jokes in school and forcing me to tell more!

I just got word that he was killed last night as a result to gun violence. We are less than 24hrs away from celebrating our 6th Annual Put The Guns Down Festival in Milwaukee. I’ll be there but I’m in no cake mood. I feel like we’re gonna be doing more acknowledgment of those that we lost than the celebrating of lives that still exist. I want to remain positive but its hard. We’re losing our loved ones everyday and prayer seems to be the only solution. But God don’t help those that don’t help themselves. But we need HELP!

Please keep his family among the many other recipients of news regarding the death of their loves ones in your prayers & thanks!

Clark County Metro gang unit is currently investigating a Las Vegas Valley shooting. Tuesday, three teens were gunned down at a Winchester Community and Community Center, injuring two boys and one girl. Clark County Police Department says that the shooting could have been prevented, however, the area had not been patrolled for gang activity since April.

In Las Vegas there are not enough metro officers to police the streets and all the areas where crime occurs. Also, metro police officers respond to their own service calls instead of other areas, therefore, many locations are not patrolled, particularly parks.

Clark County Park Police Association President Tim Polk told ABC Action News that violent incidents have increased in Clark County parks and the association’s 15 employees no longer patrol those areas.

Unfortunately, that means more youth being gunned down and dying in the streets because of lack of enforcement and patrol.

Authorities are currently looking for at least two suspects and say that there is a good chance the shooting was gang related.

I’m not sure what to think about this video. I am kind of disturbed that I am so amused by it. But after I really thought about it (and watched it again,) I became aware of the creativity that went into it’s production and how it really is catchy. But when I considered the fact that this “funny” video is actually based on a young lady being violated, I was again reminded of the manipulative influence that media has on our thought processes. It is not hard at all to watch this video 50 times and still be tickled on the fiftieth time, but each time the video is viewed, the viewer is seeing the story of someone else’s trauma put in the form of an entertaining clip.

The video:

The original news report: