 and welcome to Sister Power. Today, our topic, justice discrepancies. And we're going to jump right into our hot topics. And our hot topics for this episode, we're going to talk about justice for Lidani Miani, critical race theory, and voter suppression. And we are so fortunate to have voices from our Hawaii attorneys. And we have our co-host Sequoia Carr-Brown, who is director and founder of Strange Proof. And we're going to start with you, Bridgette Bickerton. You are the attorney for the Lidani Miani family. Am I correct? Yes, I am. OK, can you just briefly give us an update where we stand now? Where is the, we want justice for the Miani family. And first of all, we would like to send our heartfelt condolences and sympathies to the Miani family. So just exactly where we are today. Well, we are in the midst of the civil lawsuit. We had a very, very disappointing decision by the prosecutor, Steve Aum, to not prosecute the officers who were involved in the shooting and who shot and killed Lidani Miani. There are a lot of problems with his analysis. And I think that those will come out, the specific problems and the specific factual inaccuracies. But right now, we're focused on pressing the civil lawsuit and obtaining further discovery and moving toward the trial in the case and getting justice to the extent that justice can be served through the civil lawsuit. We do believe that the officer should be prosecuted. And unfortunately, Aum decided not to. We think it was a wrong decision. It was a bad decision. Lindsey Miani, Lidani's wife, is very, very disappointed, as are a lot of people in the community. But we are focused on bringing some kind of justice through the civil lawsuit. OK. Well, the footage from the Wang's ring doorbell camera shows Mr. Biani had no intent. Honolulu Police Department had the footage within the time Miani was murdered. Why has the Honolulu Police Department false narrative of Mr. Biani propagated? All right. Well, I think we see in a lot of these police killings that there is a false narrative that propagated from the very beginning. The information about what happened is within the possession of the police department here. You know, the Honolulu Police Department, it's in the possession of the Chicago Police Department, it's in the possession of the St. Louis Police Department. Yet they control the narrative when they first announced a police shooting and a police killing. And we see it time and time again. There was an article out of some major, it might have been the Washington Post, that just described in detail how pervasive this practice is of assassinating people of color and black people twice. You know, once physically they take their life and they do it again in trying to demonize them when really video and other things show that police were out of step bound and they broke the law and they didn't follow policy in killing people and it's a terrible, terrible, horrific thing that happens. I think we've shown through the doorbell footage, through the unedited body camera footage and we'll continue to show through other facts as they're uncovered how innocent Lindani really was and how culpable the officers involved in his killing were and are. Was Mr. Miani a victim of anti-black tropes, presumptions of guilt? I think so, absolutely. You know, you see his demeanor when he approaches the house. He takes, he removes his shoes. He's wearing a traditional Zulu headdress as if he's going somewhere to seek some sort of spirituality. He apologized repeatedly and still, you know, you have assumptions by the Wangs and you have officers showing up using unlawful threat of force, an unlawful force against an unarmed man who is not harming anyone whatsoever. So absolutely, I do think that there was racism involved and that this would not have happened if he looked differently, if he weren't black, he would have been treated a lot differently. Why were the names of the officers not revealed? And if they're so honorable, then step up. Are they fearful due to the revealed footage of the Wangs fear? Well, I think HPD, like other police departments tend to wanna protect their own. I mean, they act like they're in a tribe that's above the law and that's above civilian society, so to speak. And so I think there was a desire to conceal their identities, to protect them. But we have identified two of the officers. We have named them in the lawsuit and we will be uncovering the identity of the third officer and adding him into the lawsuit as well. You know, one of the officers, and I don't know how widely this has been discussed in the community as of yet, but he was involved in a hit and run drunk driving accident back in 2016. And he was not reprimanded. He had an administrative proceeding and had his license, his driver's license revoked, but he was let off because no witnesses would come and testify. And he was out there on April 14th of this year and armed and is responsible for the killing of Mr. Mianni. And it's just atrocious how officers are not reprimanded, let alone charged for their crimes. Yeah. Well, you know, Andre, you're a civil rights attorney here in Hawaii. Is there anything people of color can do to protect themselves from bias killer cops? You have to be diplomatic. You know, you have to be diplomatic. You do have a right to record what's going on. The First Amendment is a constitutional case. But the first thing really is that the number of people in the community, black people, yellow people, white people, people of all colors and common nations, speaking out against a police brutality in Honolulu. We brought a couple of pictures of that. And a lot of that had to do with the gross murder of George Floyd and the commissioner of the Dirich, which was a new in America. While the police officers who killed Vendani Mianni have not been charged, the officers who killed every matter skycap have been charged and is a watershed insofar as that's the first time in 40 years that police officers have been charged with any sin in killing in Honolulu. And so I think that that is a reflection of the community demanding accountability. Yeah, you know, back to you, Bridget. Mr. Mianni apologized to the Wings for mistaking their home for the temple next door. So why did they call the police after the fact? Well, you know, we're not sure and we do suspect that he thought that he was at a temple. Either way, he was mistaken and he apologized. I don't know. I don't know. And I think the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter in the end. What matters is how the officers approached him and that they didn't even give him the respect, the decency or the legal announcement of who they were. And they refused to do it when he specifically asked them, who are you? Over and over and over. And I think that the focus really does need to remain on the officers. I think there are many problems with the Wings and their conduct and how they approach the situation, but we're a society of a lot of different people from a lot of different places. They weren't from here, they were tourists. This was his home. And officers have to be able to approach people. If you're gonna approach someone at night, announce yourself. There's plenty of common law that establishes that that is the law. You cannot approach someone at night with a gun and make a command to get on the ground without announcing that you're an officer and stating your purpose. And when it comes down to it, that is what they did wrong. He had all right to defend himself because as far as he knew, they were unarmed thugs who were there, they were the Bean Wang buddies for all he knew. And until they announced themselves as officers, he had a right to defend himself. Yeah, this is the Aloha State. Has the state Bridget downplayed this case to say it's the Aloha message for tourism because the city is packed here, Hawaii is packed with tourists? I think so. I think that's part of the problem. I think there's just a general sort of complacency against things like this and it's very unfortunate. I think a lot of people want to believe that Aloha pervades every single aspect of the society when it doesn't exist for all people who live here. So I think it's a mix of several different things and it is packed, it's more packed than I have seen it in the last 15 years. And I do think that if people knew that this happened, if people from the mainland knew that this happened to Mr. Mianni, they might think twice about coming here and they might have some conversations about, well, maybe we should go somewhere else. Maybe we shouldn't give our money to a state that is gonna refuse to do something about this. I like it. Andra, you wanted to chime in before Sequoia comes in? No, just it was clear to me that the manner in which the police officers approached Mr. Mianni was totally unprofessional. I do indeed believe was illegal police officers are supposed to declare themselves and state why they want to talk to somebody. In this particular case, I mean, we have a hysterical woman in the house, but Mr. Mianni still wasn't suspected of any crimes. I mean, wandering into a house and leaving after you've been asked to do so is not trespassing. You have to remain after they tell you to leave in order for a crime to be committed. So the manner in which the police officers approached Mr. Mianni was totally unprofessional to say the least and totally unrealistically threatening to Mr. Mianni. When you tell somebody to get down on the ground, you're telling them to be helpless, telling them to surrender when in fact he had not committed a crime. They should have asked to talk to him and wanna say we wanna talk to you about what happened here and not get down on the ground treating him like he was a non-person, a non-citizen or a person who had no rights. Yeah, you know, moving on to talk about critical race theory. Critics say opponents of critical race theory are purposely distorting its true meaning. So Sequoia, why are opponents reacting to CRT with intense rage? Okay. Well, first of all, we have to see this as the last effort with our lost cause, right? This is an agenda. This is all about the elections that are coming up in 2022 to 24. We're not gonna fall for the Oguido, okay? This is not an issue. We know what CRT is. We know that it's a graduate level. I'm not gonna go into what it is, but what it is not is a way to some kind of agenda to scare white people, like look out the boogeyman, the black people are coming to get you. Because there's nothing to do with this. This is all about deflecting us from real true issues. We need to work on our voter suppression fight about that. We need to work against the police brutality. We need to still get through this dang pandemic. So this is just all a non-issue for people who don't read. You know, you got your heel billy hordes. You wanna take this and one with it and terrorize school boards. This has nothing to do with that. What we need to do is to keep on doing what we do and empowering our children. We know that the result of this, we've seen this before. There will be a lot of backlash. We have teachers or students who will harass and bully our children in the classroom. They didn't care when they're bullying or creating modules that create like math problems around if you pick so many barrels of cotton, how many blah, blah, blah, right? But we got a center white who keep kids, they're being hurt, right? But it's okay to bully and mess with our children, right? So, you know, there was recently a case in high school where kids had a slave option of their fellow students in the class, you know, in their high school. No one was calling about MLK and I have a dream on that. But what's interesting, the irony of it all, Texas is the lead on this, right? They do our textbooks, all of this. So they pushed the CRT baloney. Then they have these parents putting up these, I have a dream, MLK judged by character, not color. And then what do they take out of the curriculum? There's no MLK, there's no Frederick Douglass, there's no Indian Inclusion Act, there's no talking about the labor of Cesar Chavez. So they're attacking people of color. There's nowhere in that legislation about CRT. So this is the deflection. It's all about breaking down, not putting our history in the books that should be there to show everyone's history. So we need to just push through this and keep empowering our children with various organizations like facinghistory.org. We've got brownmamas.org. We've got mamatrotter.org. We have Sisters Empowering Hawaii. I am launching a YouTube channel on August 4th. It's called Kid Power. And it's all about books that help empower and tell our history. We don't need to put it in these public school systems because we need to keep going and showing up and progress. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. Well, Andre. Andre. To say, I mean, I'm very afraid of its own history for the longest time. I mean, I may have been afraid of the history of the true world. I mean, when you go back to the 1800s, the law made it easier to black people to read. The laws that made it easier to educate people. This made it easy to oppress people. This made it easy to become a humanity of people. Boy, critical race theory is a college level class and you can analyze the functions of government and various institutions by the way in which they affect negatively or positively different races. That's not taught in grammar school. That's not taught in high school. People are fighting the teaching of a fuller version of American history. You need to read Laurent Bennett. They came before the Mayflower. You need to read Howard Zinn's The People's History of America. We've been to America for 200 years and it goes through ebbs and flows. When I was a junior in college as the black student union and I was vice president of the WTO with the administration building and the man that they give us a black studies program which they did and we graduated and moved on. The black studies program lasted about six years and they disbanded it. Because there weren't enough black students there to continue the fight for it. So what we're seeing here now, I believe is a phase. It's just a phase in the battle to fully. And it keeps on going. Texas and California are the two largest states that buy school textbooks. And that's where the battle is Texas being that conservative state that doesn't want to have actual educators on its textbooks board. They pay preachers and politicians. And these are the people that wanna eliminate the important historical lessons that can be taught. I mean, the Declaration of Independence. Everybody talks about Jefferson. They're witch slavery. And accusing England of forcing slavery upon Americans. And Jefferson, as we know, he owned about 500 slaves and had his favorite, Sally Hemmels, who bore him six kids. But even he understood that there would be a price to be paid for the slavery and the, which was in existence. I mean, you can't have a slave system without violence and murder, period. Well, you know, Bridget and Sequoia, what resources may we draw from to protect our children and community from inversive and hateful behaviors? Bridget. Well, from my perspective, call me up. I don't know if that incident that Sequoia mentioned about, you know, offering students a slave, who's your classmate? I'm not familiar with that. But if that happened here in Hawaii, call me. That should not go without being checked and being challenged. Other things that happen to people in the workplace, in the park, in public places and in accommodations, anywhere, if you feel that you've been wronged as a child, if you're a parent and you have a child and you feel that they've been wronged at school because of their race or their ethnicity or their status that's protected under the law, call me, call another attorney and we will help you. The more that people assert their rights and, you know, don't allow these things to continue to happen or make someone pay when they happen or make someone, you know, get a criminal charge and spend jail time when things like this happen, it'll be a deterrent. It will, until we reach in the people's pockets and until we force people to go to jail if they're breaking the law, they're going to continue to do it. So from my perspective, the legal system is a true mechanism to affect change. Well, that's comforting to know, to contact, you know, an attorney and that you'll take on these cases and moving on, Sequoia, let's talk about voter suppression. Has voter suppression happened in the past? Oh, yeah, just real quick, that case in a lethal Texas, the high school that held a slave trading game. So that was April of this year, April 13th that news came out, just horrific. All kinds of cases of teachers on Zoom when we were under the pandemic, getting caught with their mic on, saying horrible things about our students. So this is going on, this is real. What's the name of this, Sequoia? It's a lethal Texas. Okay. ALBO. Wow. But, and we have to follow the money on this CRT. This is like Heritage Foundation, Prager View, American legislators, legislative exchange council, Alec Koch brothers, big money in this, big money in hate. This is all about the election. This is just a deflection. So they don't want us to know our history, but we don't need people, we don't need to justify who we are as the people in our history. We know our history. And we don't need to have constructed white people trying to tell us how we're supposed, what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to live. So back to the voter suppression. Yeah, this is all connected. It's justice discrepancies, right? So we have our John Lewis Voting Rights Act coming down the line. We really need to start checking again, making sure that you are registered through vote.org, say see AbramsFairFight.com, make sure you're not being purged. There's all kind of, it's good at our Voting Rights Act of 1965, right? So all these different restrictions to prevent states from doing these Jim Crow era style ways of suppressing us and keeping us from voting. And it's not just people of color, it's also people with disabilities that are along this line. So basically what happens to us what happens to everyone else. We are the canaries in the coal mine with this. They see that our vote, black votes matter. And that's another organization. By the way, we should check out our viewers to check out. And we are on it though. We know what they're doing. They know that our power is very strong and they're trying to keep us away from the polls, but it's not gonna work. It's not gonna work. And Andre, I wanna come to you about our voter suppression. What is at stake if these oppressive bills are passed? Okay, those bills are designed to chip away at the large victory that people of good conscience have been able to mount in some states where the votes are close. It also comes down to making it more difficult and making it increasingly impossible for people to vote. The same old thing of the poll tax or the alphabet tax or count how many marbles are in this and how it gets just a new trick in a new day. The cure for it really is to put enough pressure it seems to be on Joe Manson these days to adjust the filibuster to protect the right of our nation to vote. I mean, a national holiday just to vote would be a big improvement because so many people have to work to vote. If you didn't have that, that would be a big improvement. Other improvements, it should be for people. The fact that Republicans, harder to vote should give people an idea that they may not be found. In fact, it may be totally incorrect and based upon totally fictitious facts. But anybody who wants to win by illegal means, I mean, it's not unusual and it has to be met with power. All right, so Bridget, what actions are needed to protect our civil rights? Well, I think there are a lot of different ways that we can come at this. A very disappointing thing that's happened in the last year was that I think eight or nine bills having to do with like the Breonna Taylor, the no knock warrant, there was legislation that just didn't pass. It was all shot down by our state legislatures and it's just unacceptable. We have to put more pressure on them because those civil rights do exist. And if our house and our Senate are unwilling to codify those rights, you know, it's a real problem. So that's a start. And as I mentioned, another vehicle is the justice system and taking things through the court, bringing claims against individuals and institutions that display systemic racism and refuse to abide by and allow people their civil rights. Yeah, we're in closing, you know, a minute for you, Sequoia, and a minute for Andre. You know, CRT is a key wedge issue in cultural divide. One minute closing, Sequoia, and Andre, please take this out. Okay, let's keep our eyes on the prize, beautiful people. You know, don't let these deflections, emotional, offices, issues, so-called issues, deflect you from what we need to do. Follow the money, alecexpose.org, A-L-E-C, expose.org will give you all the information you need to know about who the players are in terms of our legislators and corporations who do these performative acts of pretending like they care about us and our issues, but yet vote, you know, legislators to vote against those said issues. Just keep on empowering yourself and your community and your children and we'll be fine and we will reach that promised land. All right, and Andre, in 30 seconds or less. By young people who have picked up the mantle of the protest and be drive for freedom and motivated and for the young people who are getting involved in picking up the mantle of freedom. I mean, our generation of the so-called 60s, I mean, when you came through college you had to know how to turn a join out, basically. Because that was the power of the right or the power of the threat of the right. And as a result, there were more scholarships and more black people to see these, and I think these face. Well, thank you, Andre. People are on crime and all that stuff. Well, Bridget, Sequoia and Andre, thank you for your wisdom. I'm Sharon Thomas Yarbrough. This is Sister Parha Aloha.