Van Jones AKA as Anthony Van Jones is well known here in California, he help started numerous community groups which represents hostile views against anyone not like him or his group’s view. His group is well known for baiting you into a heated debate and secretly video taping, editing it and then releasing it to the local press. They are also known for lawsuits and playing the “system”.
Jones is ego driven and loves the spotlight, for a person with a “green view”, he sports well made tailored suits. Beneath all that groomed public makeover, he’ll stab you and let you bleed out. And of course if you speak badly of him, you lied and distored his truth.
Why does mainstream media loves him, he speaks very well, looks good on camera, wrote a NY Times best seller, hangs with the elite from Hollywood and
is on the fast track to some elite position. Jones’s friends from the left will march with him and give him money. Jones will re-invent himself and come back demanding more-watch for it, he’s far from gone. Be safe.
Some local artices about Jones.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...type=printable
Police Watchdog Honored
He played key role in S.F. cop’s dismissal
KEN GARCIA
Thursday, March 12, 1998
(03-12) 04:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO – Bad cops have a way of leaving calling cards around: broken bones, lawsuits, repeat complaints. Sometimes a dead suspect.
So it was that police watchdog Anthony Van Jones saw some familiar signs when he picked up a newspaper nearly three years ago and read that a black crime suspect had died in the custody of San Francisco police. And then he came across a name that stopped him in his tracks: Marc Andaya.
``At the time I read that story, I had a file several inches thick sitting in my cabinet on Marc Andaya, and when I saw his name in connection with the Aaron Williams death, I made a commitment to myself that I was not going to rest until people knew about this police officer and his record,‘’ Van Jones told me this week.
A few things have happened since Van Jones picked up The Chronicle that day.
Marc Andaya is no longer on the police force. And in New York yesterday, Van Jones was one of four activists from around the world to receive the prestigious Reebok Human Rights Award for his work in the campaign to increase awareness about police brutality – and for his key role in bringing public pressure on the city’s police leaders to boot Andaya off the force.
Van Jones’ honor notwithstanding, the Williams/Andaya case was a classic lose-lose situation for almost everybody involved.
Williams was a burglary suspect arrested on the evening of June 4, 1995, after a violent struggle with numerous police officers. At a Police Commission disciplinary hearing, a number of witnesses testified that they saw Andaya kick Williams in the head after he was subdued and pepper-sprayed by officers on the scene.
Williams stopped breathing and died in a police van while being driven to the Richmond Police Station. Medical examiner Dr. Boyd Stephens concluded that Williams died, not from his beating, but from a drug-induced heart attack. Williams was a notorious crack cocaine abuser, and cocaine had been found in his system.
The Police Commission became the target of outraged criticism from the African American community for dismissing brutality charges against Andaya, even though it wasn’t until later that his lengthy record of excessive force complaints and lawsuits during his prior tenure in the Oakland Police Department was made known.
That’s where Van Jones, a Yale- trained lawyer and founder of Bay Area PoliceWatch, first came across him. In 1993, the Oakland Police Citizens Review Board found that Andaya had used excessive force against a black man and used racial slurs. In 1985, Andaya was suspended from the Oakland department for 30 days for choking a handcuffed suspect.
And the previous year, Andaya shot to death a person Jones described as a ``mentally ill, unarmed black man.‘’ Jones said Andaya shot him nine times. But Andaya was cleared of the charges.
Yet despite more than a dozen misconduct complaints, Andaya was hired by the San Francisco Police Department in 1994. His attorneys said the department was aware of his past record, but was hired anyway. And, his attorneys insist, he became nothing less than a political pawn when the African American community demanded his firing.
One of the problems in these cases was that at each point, the disciplinary boards were not aware of the previous complaints,'' Van Jones said. So after the Williams case came out, I was determined to put his record before the public.‘’
Ultimately, Andaya was fired for lying on his police application about his previous police record in Oakland – not for anything having to with the charges in the Williams case.
The case sparked the resignations of a number of respected police commissioners and stalled the process for reforming the Police Department’s disciplinary system, which has been criticized by residents as well as rank-and-file cops.
Officials of the Police Officers Association were widely criticized for steadfastly supporting Andaya. And the Office of Citizen Complaints was tarnished because the case added to its long list of cases in which wayward officers were rarely disciplined.
For his part, Van Jones was accused by Andaya’s attorneys of using political pressure to oust the officer after the evidence failed to sway police commissioners that Andaya’s actions had anything to do with Williams’ death.
The Aaron Williams case was a miscarriage of justice,'' said Katherine Mahoney, the former Police Officers Association in- house counsel. They couldn’t get him on excessive force. They couldn’t get him another way. So they just kept trying to find a way to fire him. It was a case of the relentless pursuit of one officer.‘’
Van Jones does not deny that political pressure played a key role in Andaya’s firing. Indeed, he said the biggest thing that happened in the case was that ``ordinary people got involved for the first time, and they were saying that they wanted good policing in San Francisco.‘’
There is wide disagreement over whether the events in the Aaron Williams case have made for a better police force in San Francisco or a more rigorous disciplinary process for officers accused of wrongdoing.
But Van Jones said he believes more people are concerned about the mechanisms of oversight and accountability in police departments around the country, and he now has an award that suggests a lot of people agree with him.
Got a story to tell? You can reach Ken Garcia at (415) 777-7152, fax him at (415) 896-1107, or send him a note at garciaksfgate.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...12/MN83052.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...type=printable
Rights award for S.F. crusader
Eric Brazil, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Wednesday, March 11, 1998
(03-11) 04:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO – Anthony “Van” Jones, the San Francisco attorney who spearheaded a high-profile police misconduct case that put the department’s disciplinary system on trial and resulted in the firing of a controversial officer, was honored Wednesday with a $25,000 Reebok human rights award.
Jones, 29, director of Bay Area Police Watch, attorney for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and creator of the first misconduct referral service in Northern California, is the first American to win one of the awards in the 10 years that they have been made.
The presentation was made at Columbia University in New York.
Jones, a graduate of Yale University School of Law and a San Franciscan since 1994, played a leading role in the aftermath of the Aaron Williams case, which embroiled the Police Department in controversy for more than two years.
Williams died in June 4, 1995, after being roughed up by several police officers during the course of his arrest as a suspect in a pet store burglary.
The San Francisco coroner said Williams died of heart failure brought on by acute cocaine poisoning. But a pathologist hired by Williams’ family listed 18 injuries he suffered in his struggle with police that contributed to his death.
In November 1996, after a series of volatile public hearings, the San Francisco Police Commission dismissed departmental charges against Officer Marc Andaya of using unnecessary force against Williams. Andaya was the lead officer in the arrest.
The commission’s vote was 2-2, and the result was unpopular with Williams’ family supporters and San Francisco’s African American community. Five other officers faced misconduct charges in connection with Williams’ death.
Last June, the Police Commission found Andaya guilty of lying on his job application and fired him.
In an article written shortly after the commission’s action, Jones said the lesson to be learned from the Williams case is that “the existing police system does not work. But we have seen what does work: ordinary people searching out the facts, telling the truth, mobilizing broad community concern and refusing to give up.”
Also honored with Reebok awards were peace activists Abraham Gebreyesus of Eritrea and Dydier Kamundu of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Jordanian journalist Rana Husseini.
Award winners were selected by a committee headed by former President Jimmy Carter and including Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, and Michael Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.<
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...1/NEWS8091.dtl
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/09/05/national/w212338D34.DTL&type=printable
Back to Article
Controversy over fiery remarks fells Obama adviser
By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, September 6, 2009
(09-06) 06:56 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) –
President Barack Obama’s environmental adviser Van Jones, who became embroiled in a controversy over past inflammatory statements, has resigned his White House job after what he calls a “vicious smear campaign against me.”
The resignation, disclosed without advance notice by the White House in an e-mail minutes into Sunday on a holiday weekend, came as Obama is working to regain his footing in the contentious health care debate.
Jones, an administration official specializing in environmentally friendly “green jobs” with the White House Council on Environmental Quality was linked to efforts suggesting a government role in the 2001 terror attacks and to derogatory comments about Republicans.
After the resignation, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama did not endorse Van Jones’ comments but thanked him for his service.
“What Van Jones decided was that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual,” said Gibbs. The president thanks Jones for his work and accepted his resignation, Gibbs said, adding that Jones “understood he was going to get in the way,” by becoming a liability to the administration. Gibbs spoke Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Jones issued an apology on Thursday for his past statements.
The matter surfaced after news reports of a derogatory comment Jones made in the past about Republicans, and separately, of Jones’s name appearing on a petition connected to the events surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. That 2004 petition had asked for congressional hearings and other investigations into whether high-level government officials had allowed the attacks to occur.
“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones said in his resignation statement. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”
Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee, told “Fox News Sunday” that he thought Jones “was brought down” and that his resignation was “a loss to the country.”
Jones said he has been “inundated with calls from across the political spectrum urging me to stay and fight.”
But he said he cannot in good conscience ask his colleagues to spend time and energy defending or explaining his past.
Jones flatly said in an earlier statement that he did not agree with the petition’s stand on the Sept. 11 attacks and that “it certainly does not reflect my views, now or ever.”
As for his other comments he made before joining Obama’s team, Jones said, “If I have offended anyone with statements I made in the past, I apologize.”
Despite his apologies, Republicans demanded Jones quit.
Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana said in a statement, “His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.” Missouri Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond said Congress should investigate Jones’s fitness for the job.
Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck repeatedly denounced Jones after a group the adviser co-founded, ColorofChange.org, led an advertising boycott against Beck’s show to protest his claim that Obama is a racist.
James Rucker, the organization’s executive director, has said Jones had nothing to do with ColorofChange.org now and didn’t even know about the campaign before it started.
Jones, well-known in the environmental movement, was a civil-rights activist in California before shifting his attention to environmental and energy issues. He is known for laying out a broad vision of a green economy. Conservatives have harshly criticized him for having left-wing political views.
Nancy Sutley, chair of the council, said in a statement released early Sunday that she accepts Jones resignation and thanked him for his service.
“Over the last six months, he had been a strong voice for creating jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources,” she said. “We appreciate his hard work and wish him the best moving forward.”
Associated Press writer Philip Elliott contributed to this report.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/09/05/national/w212338D34.DTL
