An ‘Unforgettable’ legacy Grammy-Award winning singer Natalie Cole passes at 65.
2015 Newspaper of the Year!
Page C1
St. LouiS AmericAn The
CAC Audited JANUARY 7 – 13, 2016
Vol. 86 No. 40
stlamerican.com
COMPLIMENTARY
‘Trying to weed out the bad cops’ State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed and state Rep. Shamed Dogan announced the Fair and Impartial Policing Act on Monday, January 5.
Nasheed, Dogan, ACLU announce Fair and Impartial Policing Act By Rebecca Rivas Of The St. Louis American
Photo by Wiley Price
Two African-American state legislators – a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican – teamed up to file legislation on Monday, January 5 that would expand and “add teeth” to the state’s 15-year-old racial profiling law, they announced at a press conference. The new law – called the Fair and
Impartial Policing Act – would add penalties for “biased policing practices” on both an individual officer and department level. It would also add pedestrian stops to the racial profiling information that officers must track. “We have a very serious problem,” said state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed (D-St. Louis). “This is not an attack on law enforcement. It’s a piece of legislation where we are trying to weed out the bad cops. This act
Fifth graders Tavion (left) and Jamyia (right) at North Side Community School work on their robotics project with Connor, a student volunteer from John Burroughs School.
is for the good of law enforcement.” In drafting the act, Nasheed and state Rep. Shamed Dogan (R-Ballwin) worked with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Missouri, the Don’t Shoot Coalition and other community organizations. “Racial profiling is already illegal, but we just haven’t been taking action on it,” Dogan said. In 2000, Missouri passed a law that made law enforcement agencies internally prohibit the practice of routinely stop minorities for traffic violations, “as a pretext for investigating other violations of
See ACLU, A6
AuguSt 4, 1947 – JAnuAry 3, 2016
Photo by Maurice Meredith
Leon Henderson, then president of Cardinal Ritter College Preparatory High School, with youth from the school.
‘His legacy is unbreakable’ Photo by Wiley Price
‘Tough love’ gets results at North Side Community school got perfect score on 2014 report card from DESE By Rebecca Rivas Of The St. Louis American In his early years at North Side Community School – a high-performing charter school in North St. Louis city – fifthgrader Cormelo would come to school with a stomach aching from hunger, said his grandmother Rochelle Jones. Cormelo’s mother, who is a college graduate, had gotten mixed up in an abusive relationship and was having trouble getting
n “The tough-love approach is to minimize time-wasting behaviors. Time wasted is time lost.” – Principal Stella Erondu, North Side Community School
Cardinal Ritter College Prep mourns President Emeritus Leon Henderson American staff
stable home for Cormelo, but she said his school – located at 3033 N. Euclid Ave. – is a big reason why he is currently an A student. “Cormelo is an example of an AfricanAmerican male who can survive a lot of the hardships without being medically treated, if you just nurture that child,” said Jones, who is also now the president of the school’s Parent Teacher Organization (PTO). “The school has the resources there, once they know what’s going on.” While some schools tend to put children living in abusive environments on medication, Jones said North Side has worked with him since he enrolled in first grade to ensure his academic achievement. Cormelo is among the nearly 400 pre-
Leon Henderson, retired president of Cardinal Ritter College Preparatory High School, passed away in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday, January 3, 2016 due n “I thank God for to complications of amyotrophic lateral the opportunity to work with him sclerosis (ALS). He was 68. and to call him “Leon was a dynamic my friend and my person who had a vision that was servicebrother.” based. His faith in the Lord compelled him – Carmele Hall, to sacrifice in order to Cardinal Ritter serve appropriately,” College Prep’s first said Preston Thomas, president former Cardinal Ritter basketball coach and longtime friend. Thomas said his friend talked about the “young folks” as if they were his own children and “he understood that we are only as great as our resources, which is, and always will be, our
See NORTH SIDE, A7
See HENDERSON, A6
back on her feet, Jones said. Jones and her husband now provide a
EPA to build firebreak at West Lake Underground chemical reaction still smoldering near radioactive waste in North County By Véronique LaCapra Of St. Louis Public Radio After two years of delay, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced on Thursday, December 31 that it will move ahead with plans to build a firebreak at a controversial landfill complex in north St. Louis County.
A high-temperature chemical reaction has been smoldering underground at the Bridgeton Landfill since late 2010, about 1,000 feet away from tons of radioactive waste buried in the adjacent West Lake Landfill. The landfills’ owner, Republic Services, first agreed to build a firebreak in late 2013, but the EPA delayed its construction, saying
more tests were needed to determine the extent of radioactive contamination. The EPA has not yet released the results of those tests or a map showing the boundaries of the radioactive waste at the landfills, but an agency spokesperson said it would do so early in 2016. In a statement, EPA Acting Regional Administrator Mark Hague called mitigating the
potential impacts of a “subsurface smoldering event” at the landfills a “top priority” for the agency. “We are now working through the highly complex details of implementing our decision and the associated legal steps,” Hague said. See WEST LAKE, A7