Washington Times – The legal watchdog Judicial Watch released an audio recording Thursday of a Department of Justice staffer urging Sanford, Fla., city officials and the minority advocacy group Dream Defenders to seek justice for Trayvon Martin, because “if a community perceives that there’s something wrong in the black community, there’s something wrong.”
“CRS is an arm of the department that we call the Peacemakers,” Thomas Battles, regional director of the DOJ’s Community Relations Service, said at a meeting at the Shiloh Church on April 19, 2012. “We work with communities where there is real or perceived racial tensions.”
“…When Trayvon happened, for many of us, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back,” he continued. “We had grown up in a state and environment where race is a way of life … We’re not from Sanford, but what Sanford represented to us was the very real problems going around this state and this country. We wanted to figure out how could we stand in solidarity, and how could we make this about not just justice for Trayvon, but using this moment and using the opportunity to honor his memory, to honor his spirit by working to bring down the various structures and the various systems that allow something like this to happen.” (read more)