Mike Hixenbaugh first knew things had changed when someone on a four-wheeler started ripping up his lawn after his wife placed a Black Lives Matter sign outside their home on the suburban outskirts of Houston.
Hixenbaugh is an award-winning investigative reporter for NBC News. He’s covered wrongdoing within the child welfare system, safety lapses inside hospitals, and deadly failures in the US Navy. But when his front yard was torn apart in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, he saw a story about race and politics collide at his own front door. So like any investigative journalist, he started investigating, and his reporting about the growing divides in his neighborhood soon led him to the public schools.
As more than a dozen states sue the Trump administration over its policies aimed at ending public schools’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, More To The Story host Al Letson talks with Hixenbaugh about how America’s public schools have become “a microcosm” for the country’s political and cultural fights—“a way of zooming in deep into one community to try to tell the story of America.”
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Over 20 years ago I wrote one of these columns examining the issue of “purism” versus “pragmatism” when it comes to organizing for systemic and desperately needed change in this world. I wrote about two essential ingredients that are sometimes in conflict.
One essential is conscious political organization motivated by principles and a genuine desire and plan for improving the lives of the disenfranchised and downtrodden, ending militarism and war, and stopping and reversing environmental devastation. But this alone won’t bring about change.
As a once-great revolutionary once said, “the masses make history.” It is only when large numbers of people identify with a movement for fundamental change and support it, verbally or actively, that we have any hope of winning political power and transforming society. In the USA that means not tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions, but tens of millions of people.
Is this possible? Yes. One big example is the 15 million votes independent socialist Bernie Sanders got in 2016. Another is the NY Times report that 16-25 million people all over the country took demonstrative action in the spring of 2021 after George Floyd was murdered.
We need to go about our organizing work in a way which doesn’t undercut either, which avoids the temptation to be so committed to being principled that one becomes purist and narrow, on the one hand, or to be so committed to being with and interacting with “the masses” that problematic positions are taken and political relationships are built that end up deflecting energies into reformist and dead-end approaches to change. We need reforms, yes, but our broader objective must be to build upon successful struggles for major reforms in a way that leads to truly revolutionary, justice-grounded, social and economic transformation.
Purism versus reformism—the twin dangers of serious efforts to bring about the kind of change that is so, so needed today.
What can be done to lessen these dangers, to increase the possibilities that more of us will keep our eyes, minds and hearts on the prize?
One is the building of independent and progressive organizations that are truly democratic in the fullest sense of the term. As difficult as the process of democracy sometimes is, it is also a way to keep the group as a whole and the individuals within it centered on the stated objectives. Democratic process, sooner or later, frustrates individual power plays on the part of any person in leadership who lets power go to his/her/their head and who becomes either purist or reformist as a result. These things have happened much too much historically, but in this third decade of the 21st century, there is a growing consciousness of this danger increasingly expressed in how more and more of us are going about our organization-building.
Another necessity is an explicit commitment to the testing out of theories and ideas in practice and a process of constant evaluation based upon input from the people the ideas are being tried out on. If an independent candidate is running for office, for example, and has what they think is a great platform but the vote totals are very low, perhaps the problem is that the issues being addressed, or the way they’re being expressed, don’t connect with peoples’ understandings. Since just about any issue can be addressed from a progressive standpoint, a much better approach is to identify what the issues are to speak about because of day-to-day listening to and communicating with working-class people and people of the global majority.
The same with forms of direct action. It may feel good and righteous to some to stand up to the police during an action, but if that is done in a way which makes it easier for the government and the corporate-dominated press to call us violent, that will not generate sympathy for our cause among the wider public. Expressing our sense of urgency and anger is a good thing, if done wisely. Expressing it without political consideration of an action’s impacts is not a good thing.
Ultimately, our ability as a movement to navigate between the dangers of purism and reformism comes down to how each of us live our lives. Do we live in such a way that, on a day to day basis, we are in touch with working class people, regular folks, those in need of change? Do those of us who are white ensure that, in some way, we have regular communication and interaction with people of color so that we are constantly reminded about racism and its pernicious effects? Do we make time for meditation, allow our conscience to make itself heard over the daily demands on our time and energies? Do we interact with others in a way which prioritizes listening and objective consideration? Do we struggle to keep from responding defensively when others make constructive, or not so constructive, criticisms of us?
In the words of the late Rev. Paul Mayer, “What history is calling for is nothing less than the creation of a new human being. We must literally reinvent ourselves through the alchemy of the Spirit or perish. We are being divinely summoned to climb another rung on the evolutionary ladder, to another level of human consciousness.”
After the 2020 uprising for Black lives, major banks pledged tens of billions of dollars toward racial equity efforts. Three years later, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) is demanding that major banks account for these pledges to determine whether they have actually made progress on these goals. On Wednesday, Pressley sent letters to the CEOs of Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, U.S.
New York City has agreed to a record-breaking settlement of more than $13 million in the civil rights lawsuit brought on behalf of nearly 1,300 people who were abused and arrested by police during the George Floyd uprisings of 2020 — one of the most expensive payouts ever awarded in a lawsuit over mass arrests. The lawsuit, brought by lawyers associated with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) – New…
The recent court-enforceable settlement agreement between the city of Minneapolis and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights could be a historic step in combating police brutality. However, the agreement fails to contextualize police brutality as a byproduct of poverty. By failing to recognize the role of poverty in over-policing, it disincentivizes the city, and the state from instituting long-term, anti-poverty measures, such as guaranteed basic income that would address a root cause of crime that in turn plays a role in police brutality.
The popular narrative that systemic racism solely explains police brutality is overly simplistic given that poor people are more vulnerable to police brutality than their more affluent peers. One study, for instance, found that Black men who make less than $49,000 were significantly more likely to report police use of force during their most recent street stop than Black men with incomes of $50,000 or more. Researchers also discovered that white women who make less than $49,000 experienced “significantly more police use of force than” than white women who make $50,000 or more. Systemic racism is a significant factor in police killings, but a complex interplay of gender, race, sexuality and socio-economic status affects a person’s chances of experiencing police brutality.
This phenomenon would seem to match data from Minneapolis. According to the Neighborhood Poverty Project, Philips, Cedar-Riverside, Central, Stevens Square, Downtown West, and Camden are neighborhoods with large numbers of people of color that are persistently poor. Seward, Como, Marcy Holmes, Near North, Willard-Hay and Hawthorne are also diverse neighborhoods with deepening poverty. The MPD Crime Dashboard reports that the same neighborhoods are the locus of most police involvement.
Consider this: George Floyd was killed in Central, while Amir Locke was killed in Downtown West, two of the neighborhoods that have the greatest concentrations of people of color and are persistently poor. What if we saw police brutality as a phenomenon of killing poor people, who are disproportionately people of color?
The Minneapolis City Council understands police brutality as a failure to provide a public safety system that meets collective safety needs, in addition to a police force that does not comply with human rights law. The city aims to eliminate police brutality with three overarching goals: Reducing the amount of force during police incidents; limiting police-citizen interactions; and interrupting violence before it begins.
The city has multiple pilot alternative response programs, which include a mobile behavioral health team that responds to mental health crises rather than law enforcement; 911 dispatch that assesses behavioral health calls; and non-police city staff that collect theft and property damage reports. Violence prevention programs send unarmed citizens to identify and calm conflicts before they lead to serious violence. MPD is prohibited from pulling people over for broken taillights and expired tabs, which are two of the most frequent ways that citizens interact with the police. MPD is also banned from using no-knock warrants, choke holds, and neck restraints.
Despite the bevy of reforms that will hopefully save lives, current policy fails to address the underlying issue of poverty — Minnesota needs to establish a guaranteed basic income program. While Minneapolis and St. Paul are currently piloting a GBI program, many other cities have successfully demonstrated the success of GBI in reducing poverty levels.
Since 1982, Alaska has given every citizen an annual check, which has led to a reduction in poverty rates by 2.3 percentage points on average between 2011 and 2016; about 25% more people would have fallen below the poverty threshold without guaranteed cash assistance
The Legislature this past session debated several tax reforms that could, at least partially, fund a GBI program. A ban on international corporate profit shifting via worldwide combined reporting and a fifth state income tax tier, which would establish a 10.85% tax rate on high-income Minnesotans, are among the ideas.
The Legislature passed a tax rebate and a highly progressive child tax credit, which are versions of GBI, but more needs to be done. With universal basic income, we can eliminate the reasons for police intervention, which primarily entail theft, property damage and other non-emergency crime. Reducing inequality alters the cost-benefit calculation of criminal acts by reducing desperation. Because cash transfers reduce poverty, they decrease the perceived benefits of crime, and consequently, violent police intervention.
Nahel M., a 17-year-old poor French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan origin, died of a single bullet fired by a French police officer at almost point-blank range on June 27. When I heard the news about the murder of young Nahel in the ghetto-ized suburb of Nanterre, shot at close range because he initially refused to stop his vehicle, my mind went back to the mainly Algerian-populated and…
The Department of Justice has released a scathing, 89-page report of the Minneapolis Police Department conducted after the police murder of George Floyd, shedding light on the culture of unlawful police violence and rampant racism that laid the groundwork for Floyd’s murder three years ago. The report, released Friday, finds that the Minneapolis Police Department, referred to as MPD in the report…
Watching the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols for me drove home a deeper understanding that policing as an institution can never be reformed, and that policing itself is structurally tied to inherent forms of repressive control, “legitimate” violence and surveillance. The activity of policing has embedded within it a normative construction of the social world that identifies what must be subdued.
Fort Pickett military base in Virginia formerly took its name from a pro-slavery Confederate general. However, on 24 March, the US will rename it after an American soldier decorated for heroism during World War II.
The Virginia National Guard installation is the first of nine American military bases slated to drop the names of figures who served the Confederate States of America. The base will be renamed to honour Van Barfoot, a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Barfoot received the Medal of Honor – the highest US military award for valour – for his actions against fascists in WWII. This included taking out two German machine gun nests, capturing 17 enemy soldiers, and destroying a tank.
Confederate echoes
Fort Pickett was previously named for Confederate major general George Pickett. He graduated last in his class from West Point and served in the Mexican-American war. Then, he resigned his commission to join the Confederacy. In an ill-fated attack at Gettysburg called “Pickett’s charge”, he was responsible for the deaths of more than half his own men.
Calls to rename the bases gained momentum during nationwide protests against racism and police brutality that were sparked by the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
In the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021, Congress required the establishment of a commission to plan for the removal of Confederate-linked “names, symbols, displays, monuments, or paraphernalia” from Defense Department property. It gave the secretary three years to carry out its recommendations. Then-president Donald Trump opposed the renaming effort. He vetoed the defense bill, but Congress overrode it.
More than nothing, less than enough
It is, of course, a good thing that a Confederate name is being dropped from a military base. It’s ludicrous that it took until 2023 to recognise that fighting to defend slavery should not be lauded. The same applies to all Confederate monuments in the US as it does statues honoring slavers in the UK. These are not ‘marks of history’. Rather, they are proof that our governments do not, or did not, believe that trading in Black lives should disqualify someone from honoured memory.
Bree Newsome was an activist who rose to prominence for removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse. Her words are just as applicable to this situation as they were then:
We can’t think just because we removed these things then the problem is solved. We have to have an honest conversation about history and the history of slavery. Removing the flag in South Carolina was one thing, but racism exists in South Carolina as policy and social practice. We have to look at policy and how we are interacting with each other if we are going to address racism.
There is indeed a fundamental difference between ‘diversity and inclusion’ work and anti-racism. The former, in effect, allows institutions to appear to be doing something about racism without actually addressing it in a way that might cause those in power any great discomfort.
The renaming of Fort Pickett is merely an example of these easy, comfortable actions. They are a fig-leaf offering – and necessary – but they are by no means enough.
Confederate legacy
We must recognise that moves like this are easy for governments to perform. They do no real work to counter the very present racism in society at large, or the military in particular. The US army has distinct and pronounced racism within its ranks. As Associated Press reported:
The military said it processed more than 750 complaints of discrimination by race or ethnicity from service members in the fiscal year 2020 alone. But discrimination doesn’t exist just within the military rank-and-file. That same fiscal year, civilians working in the financial, technical and support sectors of the Army, Air Force and Navy also filed 900 complaints of racial discrimination and over 350 complaints of discrimination by skin color, data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows.
This racism extends as far as white supremacist extremism. As the Conversation reported regarding military participation in the 6 January 2021 insurrection:
Of the 884 criminal defendants charged to date with taking part in the insurrection, more than 80 were veterans. That’s almost 10% of those charged.
More remarkable, at least five of the rioters were serving in the military at the time of the assault: an active-duty Marine officer and four reservists.
Service members’ involvement in the insurrection has made the spread of extremism – particularly white nationalism – a significant issue for the U.S. military.
In light of these facts, it is plain that the Confederate legacy of the US military is not present only in the names on its bases. Rather, it is riddled throughout the whole institution. The work to counter this deep-seated racism is far harder, far more necessary, and sadly far less likely from any government.
The city of Philadelphia announced on Monday that it will be paying out nearly $10 million to protesters and a community fund to settle a lawsuit brought by demonstrators who were brutalized by police as they rose up in opposition to that same violence in the summer of 2020. Philadelphia has agreed to pay $9.25 million to the roughly 350 protesters who brought suits against the city.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington, D.C. filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the U.S. government over the use of low-flying, military-grade helicopters used to disturb and disperse protesters during the 2020 uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of plaintiff Dzhuliya Dashtamirova, a participant in the protests who said that she…
After footage of George Floyd’s May 2020 death at the hands of Minneapolis police went viral, people throughout the U.S. began to think about alternative ways to promote community safety. Public schools that employ sworn law enforcement personnel, commonly called school resource officers (SROs), came in for particular scrutiny — and for good reason. Now, however…
Malik Miah reviews His Name is George Floyd, a new book that places George Perry Floyd Jnr’s life and death at the hands of police in the context of the racial history of the United States.
Six people in Atlanta have been charged with domestic terrorism for taking part in protests against a massive new police training facility known as Cop City. The protesters were taking part in a months-long encampment in a forested area of Atlanta where the city wants to build a $90 million, 85-acre training center on the site of a former prison farm. Conservationists have long wanted to protect…
Minnesotans voted to reelect the attorney general who prosecuted Derek Chauvin. The result holds important lessons for the Democratic Party on its approach to criminal justice.
Police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on May 25, 2020, shocking the consciousness of the entire United States. On May 25 of this year, President Joe Biden announced that he will instate an executive order which is a watered-down version of a police reform proposal that previously failed to pass in the Senate. The failed proposal would have altered “qualified immunity”, a doctrine that makes it difficult to sue government officials, including police. The proposal would have kept the doctrine intact for individual officers, but made it easier for police brutality victims to sue officers or municipalities.
This new executive order would merely create a national registry of officers fired for misconduct, in addition to directing federal agencies to revise use-of-force policies, encouraging state and local police to tighten restrictions on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, restrict the transfer of most military equipment to law enforcement agencies, as reported by the New York Times.
Two years ago, the video of the police-perpetrated murder of George Floyd sparked one of the largest protests in the United States. According to the New York Times, between 15 and 26 million Americans joined the Movement for Black Lives in over 550 locales. New legislation like the 2021 Justice in Policing Act was passed by Democrats in the House of Representatives, but stalled in the Senate. New calls to “Defund the Police” reverberated in marches and at city halls. At the climax of the uprisings, the nation glimpsed the possibility of a transformed society, one in which life-affirming priorities like housing, education and health care would be funded instead of police.
Where does the movement go from here? Truthout interviewed Amara Enyia, the manager of policy and research for the Movement for Black Lives, the massive nationwide collective that describes itself as having come together in 2015 “in response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against Black communities in the U.S. and globally” and that “launched the Vision for Black Lives, a comprehensive and visionary policy agenda for the post-Ferguson Black liberation movement, in August of 2016.”
Nicholas Powers:What is one of the biggest obstacles to change? We see now a reactionary pushback to the Movement for Black Lives and “Defund the Police,” and a retrenchment of older, more punitive ideas.
Amara Enyia: Well, I’ve seen governments not be responsive to the people, and one of the first steps that has to happen is people must harness their power and create systems that reflect their values. And replace the ones we have. One obstacle is to realize the way things are not the way they have to be.
Can you go into that a little more?
Sure. The first is when people are in survival mode, they don’t have the space to imagine. I mean, it’s just hard to talk about policy when you’re facing an eviction.
Second is the reinforcement by those in positions of power and authority that we have to accept the state of things. We internalize their notions, get stuck in a box — and yes, people get disillusioned. Third is the intentional mystification of policy. Like tax policy — it dramatically affects people’s lives, but the minute you go into the details, eyes glaze over.
Look at the tax system: It hurts low-income people of color because it values wealth over income. Or look at issues like redlining. In 2020, J.P. Morgan lent more to one white neighborhood in Chicago than to all the Black neighborhoods combined.
The thing is, we all engage in economic activity. Most people intuitively know the power dynamics that shape their lives, but the elites use an obscure language that only those with degrees can understand. It drives a wedge between those who create policy versus those affected by it.
It has been two years since the immense uprising of the George Floyd protests. What do you think led to such an explosion? What has been the lasting legacy?
We don’t know what one spark will do. We had already seen Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and too many more. And then in 2020 we had a pandemic. It was a confluence of circumstances that no one could have predicted.
The legacy of it is the fact that we have redefined the conversation and [organized to] challenge the billions that go into policing and redirect those resources to the issues that create crime. Out of that has come the Breathe Act [a visionary bill framework] where people are given health care, fully funded schools, youth activities and more…. It goes beyond policing. We need the resources to address what really makes us safe.
What are the obstacles to getting this practical legislation passed?
One of the biggest blocks is the desire for microwave solutions for a slow-cooked problem. Too many politicians want a solution slogan to rattle off in a commercial or campaign. It’s easy to say hire more police, buy more scanners, build more police stations. It plays well on TV. The reality is there has been a public policy failure over years. Too many politicians did not take the long-term view or even acknowledge where they failed. So they retreat to the same scrappy, cheap “lock ‘em up” slogans.
How can activists and progressive politicians challenge mass incarceration and policing?
We have to resist falling in line. We see the Eric Adams model here in Chi-Town with Lori Lightfoot who is a Black woman but uses the law-and-order rhetoric. We have to point out to the people that there’s a history. Look at the 1994 Crime Bill, remind them that it doesn’t work. We have to advocate for policy that addresses mental health, or say one [issue] that is often forgotten: environmental racism. What about lead exposure? Lead is a neurotoxin that can lead to impulsive behavior. Youth exposed to lead can become violent, but yet we attribute that to some violent gene in their makeup. Add to that disinvestment in youth programs and the lack of nurses or counselors in school. When they become adults, we throw them in jail.
I think of Laquan McDonald, who was murdered by the Chicago police. In a sense he was killed long before they killed him.
We have to stop pushing social problems onto the police. The only tools they have are a gun and the power to arrest.
What are some of the policy proposals that you advocate for to short-circuit this fall back into a default reliance on policing?
Increase funding for frontline violence prevention. These are workers who come from the community and have organic relationships. They know the people in the neighborhood.
Next, permanently fund the frontline prevention. How can they do their jobs not knowing if they will be supported one year to the next? To follow up on that, align federal, state and city resources to amplify the impact the social services can have… Follow up with expanding programs for the youth. Thirty years ago, we had arts, music and gardening activities; now they have nothing to do and are just left out there in the streets.
Most importantly, for those of us in the movement, learn from the people. We can get into our bubble, too. I talk to everyday people and listen to them. They know what they need.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for publication.
About 100 people gathered in the Brooklyn Center neighborhood north of Minneapolis on Monday to honor Daunte Wright one year after the young Black man was shot and killed by local police officer Kim Potter on April 11, 2021. Potter shot Wright during a traffic stop and was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two years in prison after claiming that she mistook her gun for her taser before shooting.
Wright’s killing set off a wave of protests and unrest in the suburb less than a year after the murder of George Floyd by police on a crowded Minneapolis street corner sparked a nationwide uprising against systemic racism and police violence.
On Monday, after a moment of silence marking the 20 years of Wright’s life, his immediate family placed candles on a memorial that now stands where Wright crashed his car and died after being shot.
Jeanette Rupert, a reverend, nurse and activist from Minneapolis who has supported families of those slain by police, told the crowd that change is being made through Wright’s legacy, and his life will not be forgotten.
“We will continue to make change and use our gifts to implement change,” Rupert said. “What are you going to do to make sure this family stays uplifted, and other families of stolen lives?”
About 10 miles away, the intersection where Floyd was brutally murdered by former officer Derek Chauvin as other cops looked on — and the birthplace of an uprising that would spread across the nation — remains a permeant memorial and meeting space free of police.
Banner and signs with Amir Locke’s name have been added to “George Floyd Square” since early February, when the 22-year-old became the latest victim of police violence in Minneapolis after being shot and killed by a SWAT team during a no-knock raid on an apartment where he was sleeping on the couch. Locke was not a subject of the police investigation and was sleeping while holding a gun he owned legally. Body camera footage of the raid and deadly shooting, along with an initial press released from police that wrongly identified Locke as a suspect, has enraged the community for weeks.
A sign honoring Amir Locke, the young Black man recently killed by police during a no-knock raid in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is now part of the memorial known as “George Floyd Square.”Mike Ludwig
The level of trauma suffered by the people of Minneapolis and its Black community in particular is palpable around the corner from George Floyd Square, where dozens of mock gravestones with the names of Black people killed by police across the country fill a large green space. Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Amir Locke, Sandra Bland, Tanya Blanding, Troy Robinson, Atatiana Jefferson… the list goes on.
George Floyd Square remains central to the movement in Minneapolis, and organizing meetings for activists and community members are regularly held there twice a day. Local activists told Truthout the meetings are an important organizing hub that has inspired multiple grassroots projects across a city that has emerged as a leader in the movement to end racist policing and violence.
The movement remains strong in Minneapolis despite dwindling media coverage, political setbacks and right-wing backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement on the national stage.
Daunte Wright’s immediate family gather to observe the one-year anniversary of Wright’s killing by police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.Mike Ludwig
Protesters responded to the killing of Locke by taking to the streets in the middle of winter, and residents of the city have spent the past two years debating proposals to defund and abolish the police department, raising deep questions about the systemic roots of poverty and violence, and who feels safer or less safe with police around, and why.
In November, Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have dissolved the Minneapolis Police Department into a new public safety department offering a slate of services and responders besides armed police. Proponents said the initiative would have removed institutional barriers to reappropriating police funding and directing it to other services, such as trained experts to respond to a mental health crisis or drug overdose instead of police.
Supporters said the debate over the ballot question was marred by misinformation but still received 60,000 or about 43 percent of votes. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who opposed the ballot question and has weathered blistering criticism for failing to prevent police violence, clung to office by a narrow margin after being challenged by two progressives who supported the proposal.
Mock graves representing Black people slain by police in a green space near George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on April 11, 2022.Mike Ludwig
Facing mounting pressure from activists over the failure of previous reforms to prevent the death of Locke and statements allegedly misrepresented changes to the city’s no-knock warrant policy, Frey recently placed a ban on no-knock warrants, which typically involve a team of police barging into a residence unannounced. However, under the new policy, police can still enter a residence after knocking repeatedly, announcing their presence and waiting 20 seconds during daytime hours or 30 seconds at night, according to reports.
Twin Cities activists remain frustrated by the pace of reform, and mistrust between residents (and especially residents of color) and the police remains high. However, activists are also building new forms of community safety without police, such as a crisis hotline that connects people with community resources and/or responders trained in first aid and mental health care. Regular meetings at George Floyd Square provide a space for coming together and organizing such efforts without waiting on politicians to act.
Back in Brooklyn Center, the friends, neighbors and activists who had gathered for Wright’s one-year memorial finished their prayers and released balloons into the evening sky after chanting Wright’s name three times. The sense of hope and togetherness was palpable; as Rupert explained, Wright lives on through his family and the “change-makers” who continue to organize for substantial police reform in Minnesota despite defeat at the ballot box in November. As the memorial came to an end, old-school hip-hop hits blared through speakers, and people formed lines and began dancing together in the street.
The images coming out of Bucha, Ukraine, are harrowing, almost surreal.
A quiet residential street filled with smashed and burned war machines, one appearing to have almost melted into the pavement beside a street sign pointing the way to the supermarket.
Civilians searching desperately for missing loved ones with no idea where or how to begin. In the chaos of this charnel house, anyone could be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere.
A Russian tank turret lies in an open field strewn with smaller debris, the tank it belonged to nowhere in sight, a testament to the unspeakable violence that had been visited upon this town.
A brightly colored schoolyard playground smashed and shredded by artillery shrapnel.
And the bodies, many face down in the street with hands bound, others evidenced only by feet sticking out of hastily prepared mass graves.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy places the civilian death toll in Bucha at more than 300 people. Many of the dead were tortured first. Some of the carnage came as Russian forces retreated from the region around Kyiv in an attempt to reset and restart their shambolic invasion. Spokesmen for Russia’s Ministry of Defense denied the accusations, calling them a “hoax” and claiming the killings took place after Russian forces left town, but an analysis of satellite imagery shows that many of the dead had been lying in the streets for weeks.
The worst, apparently, may be yet to come. Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, spoke on Ukraine’s national television network on Monday. “Venediktova said the number of victims in Borodyanka, around 23km west of Bucha, would be higher than anywhere else,” reports the Guardian, “but did not provide further details.”
“We can speak of Kyiv region because yesterday we got access to these territories and are currently working in Irpin, Bucha, Vorzel,” said Venediktova. “In fact, the worst situation with civilian victims is in Borodyanka. I think we will speak of Borodyanka separately.”
The bulk of photographs revealed to date were taken by press photographers who braved the war to capture those truths. They needed you and I to know what had happened there, and like any good journalist laboring under duress, they got the job done.
Joseph Galloway, widely considered the “dean” of war correspondents by his peers until his death in 2021, first confronted combat in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam in 1965. He described the experience to NPR’s Terry Gross:
Men next to me fell over with a bullet in the head. I was lying down as close to the ground as I could get, seemed like the right thing to do.
When I felt the toe of a combat boot in my ribs, and I sort of turned my head and tilted up and looked, and it was the battalion sergeant major, a man 6’3″ tall, a big bear of a guy. And he bent over at the waist and sort of yelled down at me so I could just hear him. And what he said shocked me. He said, sonny, you can’t take no pictures laying down there on the ground.
And I thought about that for a minute. And I realized he’s right. I can’t do my job down here. And the other thing that crossed my mind is I think we’re probably all going to be killed. And if that’s the case, I’d just as soon take mine standing up anyway. So I got up and went about my business.
Bucha has joined a long list of places where horrors have been visited upon the innocent, only to be exposed by the journalist’s pen or the photographer’s eye. My Lai, Srebrenica, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Rwanda, the Disappeared of Argentina. The difference between those tragedies and Bucha is the accelerated speed of the story of its plight going global.
“Bill Clinton regretted he did not respond to the murders of Tutsis in 1994,” reports Patrick Wintour for the Guardian, “saying he did not ‘fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror’. Srebrenica was arguably only the culmination of ethnic cleansing that had been going on for three years. My Lai, revealed two years after the event, only provided further momentum to a pre-existing US anti-war movement. The scale of the British repression of the Mau Mau rebellion was only truly documented decades afterwards by a Harvard historian Caroline Elkins in her book Britain’s Gulag.”
This time, it was different. The work of those journalists in the war zone of Ukraine rattled the world this week. Hopefully they will remind us all of the brutal human impact of war, beyond its politics.
To be sure, war photography can be used for ill — to whip up nationalism, xenophobia and militarism. But, given the right context, it can bring humanity back into the picture, and illuminate the deep and harrowing human toll of mass violence.
Reign of Terror situates the War on Terror as part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial and slaveholding behemoth.
Mariella Gedge-Rogers is facing prison after she was convicted of riot by Bristol Crown Court last month. The charge carries a maximum sentence of ten years and she’s due to be sentenced next week.
Mariella – a 27-year-old aerial performer – was arrested after a confrontation between police officers and Kill the Bill protesters on 21 March last year outside Bristol’s Bridewell police station. She said she handed herself into the police station voluntarily after a wanted picture of her had been circulated. She then pleaded not guilty to riot in court.
For the first time since her court case, she has spoken out publicly about the violence that she faced from officers.
Kill the Bill
Mariella told The Canary that she attended the Kill the Bill protest on 21 March to protect “the right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression”. However, she told us that “the energy changed” when the demonstration arrived at Bridewell Police station. She said:
I was kneed to the floor by police and dragged around the floor by another officer whilst three officers held me down and one stood on my hand with their boot, my head was on the curb I was in the gutter whimpering (this can been seen and heard on body worn footage used in court).
A video of the incident – circulated on Twitter – has received almost 10k views. You can watch it here:
Today police in #Bristol continued where they left off in London last week – attacking people who are protesting police violence and the plans to give them new powers.
Mariella showed us this picture of the injuries to her hand taken a week after the protest:
“Kneed to the floor”
Mariella has been found guilty of riot on the basis of videos taken later in the evening. The mainstream media has focused on an incident where Mariella hit an officer with her skateboard. Mariella told us that this incident happened after the incident when she was kneed to the floor by officers.
Mariella is a Woman of Colour. She said that being “kneed to the floor” was especially frightening in the light of the murder of George Floyd, who died of suffocation as a result of Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck.
Mariella said she found the experience “frightening”, and that it affected the way she reacted later on.
She said:
As a woman of colour and after being kneed to the floor by police (considering the murders that had happened around this time of year at the hands of police) this experience was very frightening and affected my mental health and the way I reacted during the rest of my time at the protest.
At the time of the protest at Bridewell, two young People of Colour had died following being detained by police in Cardiff and Newport. As The Canary highlighted in its coverage of the protest:
In January, 24-year-old Mohamud Hassan died after being detained at Cardiff Bay police station, not so far away from Bridewell. Five weeks later, 29-year-old Mouayed Bashir also died in police custody, this time in Newport. Police violence is felt disproportionately by People of Colour in the UK. Non-white people are twice as likely to be shot dead by the police, and a Person of Colour is more than twice as likely to be killed in police custody.
What happened to Mariella is – unfortunately – nothing new. The Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) accused the UK police of ‘institutional racism’ in the policing of the Black Lives Matter protests the previous year. Its report found:
Excessive use of force and disproportionate targeting of Black protesters, with baton charges, horse charges, pepper spray and violent arrests.
“I feared for my life”
Mariella told us:
I didn’t know if I would get back up. I feared for my life.
Mariella told us that the experience of being kneed to the ground made her act “out of character”:
I suffer with symptoms of PTSD from being mistreated by men in the past. [My actions] became out of character, I was upset about what was going on.
Mariella wanted to stress that she feels remorse that her later actions may have caused fear to police officers. She is seen on one officer’s body-worn footage saying “I know you’re a human being”.
“Emotions were running high”
Mariella described the backdrop to the March 21 Kill the Bill protest. She said:
Emotions were running very high at that time shortly after George Floyd’s murder by a serving police officer, the removal of the Colston [slave trader] statue from its plinth in Bristol, the kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard and the aftermath at her vigil at Clapham Common.
The Bristol demonstration happened less than a week after footage of police brutalising women at a vigil for Sarah Everard had gone viral.
“Traumatised”
We asked Mariella how she had been affected by the events of 21 March. She told us that she felt “traumatised”, and that she:
was made to feel like scum by the prosecution, when I am a normal person of society who was attacked. I’m at risk of doing 10 years in prison for riot – the most drastic public order charge… [This charge is] being used to make an example out of young protesters.
Mariella continued:
This charge is massively impacting my mental health and general wellbeing. As a young mixed-race woman, I fear a prison sentence could get in the way of my plans to begin my career in Circus arts.
Mariella said that she thinks the sentence she is facing is “hugely disproportionate”, particularly considering the police violence she faced.
I believe the prison sentence I’m facing is hugely disproportionate, especially after being assaulted by three policemen and dragged on the floor in the midst of the violence that took place that day.
At least 62 protesters injured
At least 62 protesters were injured by the police on 21 March. At least 22 of them sustained head injuries, and many of them were hospitalised. Avon and Somerset Police initially claimed their officers suffered broken bones and a punctured lung, but they later retracted this statement.
Geraint Davies MP is the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Democracy and the Constitution which investigated the policing of the protests in Bristol and Clapham. He said that the police:
massively overreacted at the time and were found out after they misled the press and tried to mislead our inquiry
His words echoed Mariella’s, when he said that the riot charges may be:
seeking to punish people in an excessive and disproportionate way, not just for protesting but for challenging the police
Bristol protesters have already been sentenced to over 55 years in prison
Mariella is due to be sentenced next week at Bristol Crown Court. She will be the 14th person to be sentenced for the events of 21 March. The 13 people who have appeared in court so far have received more than 55 years in prison between them.
In February 2022, Jasmine York became the first person to be found not guilty of riot for the events of 21 March.
Appeal planned
Whatever happens at her sentencing, people in Bristol know what really happened at Bridewell Police station, and have raised nearly £30k to support those facing prison.
Mariella is already planning to appeal her conviction. She concluded:
I’m hoping to be successful in appealing this charge or shortening this sentence in mitigation as I believe my imprisonment would not only disturb my home life but also cause pain to family and friends who need and care for me. I’d be more likely to have trouble getting back into a stable lifestyle after custodial. These impacts are far from having the desired effect.
Activists say the Minneapolis Police Department’s initial portrayal of the “no-knock” SWAT team raid that killed Amir Locke — and the portion of body camera footage released to the public — are the latest evidence that police and their backers are willing to distort the truth in a political effort to shield their embattled system from scrutiny.
Protesters filled the icy streets of the Twin Cities this weekend after Minneapolis police fatally shot Locke while executing a “no-knock” search warrant at an apartment on February 2. The surprise raid and deadly shooting represent the latest police-perpetrated killing of a Black man in a city where activists sparked nationwide uprisings against racist state violence and voters narrowly rejected a historic ballot referendum to dissolve the police department into a broader office of public safety.
Family members and civil rights attorneys say Locke was “executed” by the SWAT team that busted into the downtown apartment where the 22-year-old was sleeping on a couch around 7 a.m. The team was executing a search warrant for the police in neighboring St. Paul and opted for a “no-knock” entry — a controversial and deadly practice that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s campaign boasted about “banning” while running for reelection on a pro-police platform last year.
No-knock warrants are banned in some cities, and in 2020 Minneapolis adopted a policy meant to restrict and clarify when police can make an “unannounced entry” into a household. However, reporting in the wake of Locke’s killing revealed that no-knock warrants had clearly not been “banned” as Frey’s campaign and its supporters have claimed, and Minneapolis police have requested multiple no-knock warrants in 2022 alone, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Frey quickly placed a moratorium on no-knocks last week as his administration and the police department attempted to quell media attention, raising painful memories of initial efforts to downplay and obfuscate the 2020 murder of George Floyd and a long list of police-perpetrated killings in Minneapolis and beyond. No-knock warrants became infamous after the police-perpetrated killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, which — combined with Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis — fueled protests around the world.
“Cops lie; we know cops literally lie,” said Miski Noor, an organizer with the Black Visions Collective, an activist group pursuing police abolition in Minneapolis, in an interview. “We cannot get accountability, and that’s why we say they are functioning just the way they are supposed to — to control Black and Brown bodies and others who are disenfranchised.”
Lock was reportedly staying as a guest at a relative’s apartment when the SWAT team opened the door with a key obtained from the building’s management. Wrapped in a blanket, Locke apparently awoke to police shouting and pointing guns and bright lights as an officer kicked the couch. Locke was holding a handgun his family and attorneys say he was licensed to carry. He was shot dead within 10 seconds of the SWAT team entering.
In an initial statement, the police said the gun was “pointed in the direction of the officers,” but the video appears to contradict this claim, showing Locke stirring from his sleep with a gun pointed away from the body-worn police camera. During a heated press conference last week, Minneapolis Police Chief Amelia Huffman repeated the claim that officers announced their presence before entering the room, but the video shows an officer turning the key and entering the apartment as the SWAT team began yelling.
“Bodycam footage clearly shows that police failed to ask Amir Locke to drop the gun, to warn that they’d shoot, or to take any other actions available to them while they were executing a search warrant,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota said in a statement. “Instead, an officer chose to shoot and kill a man sleeping on a couch, who was still wrapped up in a blanket, within 9 seconds of entering an apartment.”
The police also referred to Locke as a “suspect” in their initial press release, but officials later confirmed that Locke was not named in the search warrant or a suspect in the homicide investigation that prompted the early morning home invasion. The police also included photos of Locke’s legally owned gun, angering activists and family members who say the police wrongly attempted to paint him as disobeying the law.
Huffman, Frey and the local media outlets that immediately trumpeted the city government’s version of Locke’s killing “repeated a well-worn pattern of dishonesty,” according to a statement from ISAIAH, a multi-racial coalition of faith-based communities in Minneapolis.
“There is really justified anger about not just the murder of Amir Locke, not just the fact that it was completely avoidable, but that actually resembles this pattern,” said JaNaé Bates, communications director for ISAIAH, in an interview. “There is a clear pattern that we see where MPD does something awful … then they put out a press release that lies about what actually happened.”
Bates is the former spokesperson for the campaign behind a 2021 ballot initiative that would have required city policymakers to make the kind of deep, structural changes to policing and public safety that activists demanded after the killings of Floyd, Locke, Daunte Wright, Philando Castille, and many others. The initiative would have abolished a quota for the number of police officers employed by the city, allowing for broader investments in other public safety interventions besides armed police, such as unarmed mental health responders and a stronger social safety net.
The ballot initiative garnered a significant 43 percent of the vote in November but did not reach the 51 percent needed to pass. Still, more than 62,000 voters supported a measure that would have been a first in the United States — outnumbering the voters who listed Frey as their first choice for mayor on the city’s ranked-choice ballots. Facing two opponents who backed the initiative, Frey stood with the police and opposed the measure, arguing that the current system could be reformed incrementally as new public safety services were developed on the side.
Although Frey’s reelection campaign touted the ban on no-knock warrants as evidence that policy reform is underway, his campaign scrubbed the claim from its website last week after Locke was killed in the no-knock raid. Frey admitted this week that his campaign’s language did not reflect the “necessary precision or nuance” of the 2020 policy change. Frey’s new moratorium still allows the police chief to approve no-knock raids in certain “dangerous” scenarios, according to the Minnesota Reformer.
“Back when Mayor Frey first said he banned no-knock warrants, we refuted that over and over again … but didn’t have as large of a bullhorn,” Bates said.
Bates said spending on police in Minneapolis has increased since 2020, when “defund the police” protests erupted after the murder of Floyd and others. The city continues to “overspend” on police officers while neglecting investments in other services, such as fire departments and the city’s Office of Violence Prevention, she said.
Noor emphasized that organizers are tired of rhetoric, obfuscations and minor reforms; they’re calling for large-scale transformation.
“To be Black in Minneapolis over the past few years has been a lot of grief, and I think I also feel an exhaustion in community, where we are just so tired of this in so many ways,” Noor said. “I think that, this is why we said reform isn’t enough. There is no reforming this murderous institution, there is no reforming the police. We catch them in lies.”
February 14 marks 18 years since young Kamilaroi man TJ Hickey died after being chased by police. No one has been charged; his family is yet to receive any justice, writes Isaac Nellist.
With a caravan of dozens of cars, protesters in St. Paul continue to demand justice for George Floyd as the federal trial begins for the three former Minneapolis Police officers who assisted Derek Chauvin while he murdered Floyd. Thomas Lane, Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao, all fired from the Minneapolis Police Department, face federal charges of violating George Floyd’s civil rights. Opening statements began Monday, January 24.
The two sex workers in Washington, D.C., suspected that the drunk, bearded man in the silver Nissan Maxima was a police officer. Standing outside the car on a December night in 2015, they could see his black boots and blue cargo pants. Then there was the way he held his gun as he pointed it at them. Exactly how a cop is trained to do, one of the workers thought, according to internal police records.
After they’d called 911 reporting that a belligerent man had solicited sex, threatened one of them with a gun and then accused them of stealing his phone, the Metropolitan Police Department officer dispatched to the scene ran the Nissan’s plates, the documents show. Sure enough, it belonged to Ronald Faunteroy, a fellow MPD officer.
The officer on the scene immediately notified Agent Charles Weeks, a 20-year veteran tasked with investigating his fellow officers. Weeks’ investigative notes suggest he threw himself into the case, seemingly dispelling any notion that there was a buddy-buddy culture within the department that would protect Faunteroy.
That very day, Weeks recorded video interviews with both of the sex workers who interacted with Faunteroy, according to Weeks’ investigative files. In the weeks that followed, he reviewed surveillance footage from two cameras in the area and interviewed every officer involved with the case. He acquired equipment records, incident reports, 911 audio, dispatch logs and property records. He had even photocopied the notebooks of the officers responding at the scene, scouring through their chicken-scratched notes to understand what exactly happened.
He’d pieced it all together. After a grueling two-hour interview, Weeks eventually got Faunteroy to confess. Faunteroy said he’d tried to pay for sex, the records show. After being denied, he’d pointed his MPD-issued Glock at a sex worker. He’d wrongly accused her of stealing his phone. And he’d lied about it all, Weeks later determined.
“You put the puzzle together,” Faunteroy told Weeks at the end of the interview. “You’re right.”
The Metropolitan Police Department swiftly took action, moving to terminate Faunteroy. The Internal Affairs Division determined that “a preponderance of evidence existed to sustain the allegations” that he violated D.C. laws and department policy.
Yet a powerful tribunal of three high-ranking officers, known as the Adverse Action Panel, overruled the department’s decision to fire Faunteroy. The officer in charge of the panel: Robert J. Contee, who has since risen to become chief of police. Faunteroy was stripped of his title of master patrol officer, a high-ranking patrol officer paid extra to “provide effective coaching, mentoring, and guidance to other officers,” but the department roster shows he’s since regained the title.
Internal records show that MPD’s Disciplinary Review Division sought to terminate at least 24 officers currently on the force for criminal misconduct from 2009 to 2019. In all but three of those cases, the records show, the Adverse Action Panel blocked the termination and instead issued much lighter punishment – an average of a 29-day suspension without pay. These officers amassed disciplinary records for domestic violence, DUIs, indecent exposure, sexual solicitation, stalking and more. In several instances, they fled the scenes of their crimes.
The disciplinary files, obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and WAMU/DCist, provide a rare glimpse into how police officers avoid accountability and remain on the force, even after the department’s own internal affairs investigators have determined they committed crimes. The records have never before been made public.
They show:
The department’s internal investigators concluded that at least 64 people who currently serve as MPD officers committed criminal misconduct.
The department sought to terminate 24 of those officers. In 21 of the 24 cases, the Adverse Action Panel reduced their sentence to a suspension or acquittal.
The department did not seek to terminate the other 40 officers, more than half of whom the Internal Affairs Division believed had been driving either drunk or recklessly. Other criminal conduct the department did not try to fire current officers for included recklessly handling a firearm, harassment, property damage, stalking and theft.
“These systems that MPD set up to punish or at least give officers their day in court when they committed an infraction, they don’t really work,” said Ronald Hampton, a retired MPD officer who has advocated for more accountability as a member of the city’s recently created Police Reform Commission. “It’s seated in the culture of the institution; it’s going to take more than setting up more systems within the organization to deal with it.”
Of the 24 criminal misconduct cases, the department believed that at least seven officers had committed domestic assault. All of them stayed on the force, six as a result of the panel’s decision. For instance, in November 2015, a pastor brought a woman to a crisis center to report that she had been repeatedly assaulted by her husband, a current police officer named Bai Bangura, according to the disciplinary files. “I know that he is going to try to kill me if I cause problems at his work,” she wrote in a note at the bottom of paperwork filed at the crisis center. In spite of statements from an internal affairs agent who testified that, based on her years of experience working domestic cases, she believed the victim to be caught up in a cycle of abuse, the panel unanimously agreed to override the department’s attempt to fire the officer. Instead, Bangura was suspended for 10 days and is still an officer with MPD.
Internal records show that MPD’s Disciplinary Review Division sought to terminate at least 24 officers currently on the force for criminal misconduct from 2009 to 2019. In all but three of those cases, the records show, the Adverse Action Panel blocked the termination. Credit: Tyrone Turner/WAMU
Other personnel files show that an internal investigation concluded that Officer Steven Ferris was arrested for simple assault in 2012 after Internal Affairs reported he confessed that he punched his wife so hard that he fractured a bone around her eye socket. Another officer, Jonathan Goodman, allegedly hit two women at a restaurant in 2010; when one of them said she was calling the cops, he pulled out his badge and replied, “Bitch, I am the police,” according to the files.
When one of them said she was calling the cops, he pulled out his badge and replied, “Bitch, I am the police.”
Officer DeVon Goldring allegedly ran over the mother of his child with his white Chevy Tahoe in 2009, according to the files. A hospital report describes black streaks on the inner part of the left side of her foot, ankle and calf: tire marks, an officer on the scene concluded. The department wanted to fire him, but a panel offered him a 21-day suspension instead.
Ultimately, the records show, Bangura’s wife told prosecutors that she didn’t want to pursue charges. Ferris’ wife didn’t cooperate with prosecutors who later brought charges against her husband; he was acquitted. Domestic violence victims are often reluctant to cooperate with prosecutors and internal investigators alike, so their cases can be difficult to prosecute both in criminal and administrative court. Federal law prohibits the purchase and possession of firearms and ammunition by people who have been convicted of domestic violence offenses, and had these officers been convicted in a criminal court, they all would have likely lost their job and their right to possess a gun. These cases were handled administratively; even though the department believed the officers had committed domestic assault, it continued to issue them a firearm.
Neither Contee, the police chief, nor the department would comment on Reveal and WAMU/DCist’s findings. We attempted to reach all of the officers named in this story for comment. Only one responded, Anderson Liriano, whom the department wanted to fire after an internal investigation found that he threatened to kill a sergeant at another police department in 2017. The Adverse Action Panel overruled the department and handed down a 15-day suspension. Liriano wouldn’t comment on the case against him but told Reveal and WAMU/DCist that the entire disciplinary process took too long.
“The way they do it, it’s unprofessional,” Liriano said. “They put you out and make you wait when all the facts are already there.”
Liriano and the other 20 officers remain with MPD today, patrolling the District in possession of MPD-issued firearms and authorized to use deadly force.
The ransomware hack contained thousands of scanned documents that were not readily searchable. Reveal converted those documents to text and searched for files that referenced officers potentially engaged in a “criminal or quasi-criminal offense,” language taken from MPD’s General Orders. We identified 75 cases in which the department investigated a current officer for criminal misconduct. While the Internal Affairs Division investigates officers for possible criminal activity, its decisions are purely administrative within the department; they are not the same as those in a criminal court.
Credit: Tyrone Turner/WAMU
When the department learns of an officer’s potential criminal misconduct, investigators with MPD’s Internal Affairs Division procure court records, conduct interviews and gather scores of pages of documentary evidence. Under department policy, if internal investigators find that an officer has likely committed a crime, whether or not they’ve been convicted in a court of law, the Disciplinary Review Division has the authority to recommend that they be removed from the force. Facing dismissal, accused officers may formally appeal their terminations to the Adverse Action Panel, a rotating three-person board made up of other officers typically holding the rank of captain or higher.
D.C. isn’t alone. Many law enforcement agencies have some version of this system, typically known as trial boards. Because the records are usually secret, it’s difficult to compare D.C.’s system to the inner workings of other departments. For MPD, these hearings are trial-like, administrative proceedings in which officers, usually represented by their lawyer, plead their case to the panel.
At the end of the hearing, the panel decides whether to reject the appeal or issue its own judgment and disciplinary recommendations. A panel’s decision not to fire an officer leaves the police chief with few options. The chief can send the case back to another panel but cannot dole out any punishment more severe than what the panel recommends.
This appears to be somewhat atypical for many of the nation’s largest police departments. For example, in New York, the head of the department, by law, makes the final disciplinary determination and penalty finding, regardless of the outcome of a departmental hearing. The same is true in Houston, Dallas, Phoenix and other departments around the country.
Mike Gottert, who served as the director of MPD’s Disciplinary Review Division from 2016 to late 2019, said he and many within the department’s management were frustrated by how infrequently officers ended up being fired after a panel hearing. “Obviously, when we recommend people to be terminated, we think they should be terminated,” he said. “We’d go through this whole process, and the panel would say no for whatever reason.”
Gottert provided additional records from his tenure that show the Adverse Action Panels overturned nearly two-thirds of all terminations his department sought.
He said the panels are not always impartial. Not only was there a “fairly good chance” that the officer in question had worked with a panel member, he said, but panel members are influenced by their own particular views on what they believe is a fireable offense, regardless of what MPD’s handbook says.
The role of trial boards in preventing the department from terminating officers for misconduct after extensive internal investigations has largely gone unnoticed. The hearings are technically open to the public, but the department does not publicly release a schedule and can postpone or close hearings to the public without notice.
“It is hard to argue you have an effective accountability system when this number of officers remain on the force, even though the agency itself thinks they should not be police officers,” Christy Lopez, co-chair of D.C.’s Police Reform Commission, said when shown our findings.
Harold Martin, an attorney in the D.C. area who for years represented police officers in criminal cases, said the system may not be perfect, but it’s “a system everybody can live with.”
“The key device for rooting out real serious police misconduct is the criminal justice system, because that’s the quickest way somebody can be terminated – based on a criminal conviction. … Once you get beyond that, it’s more of a question of a system created by contract negotiation.”
Earlier this year, the Police Reform Commission recommended 90 reforms to increase police accountability. One of those recommendations was making the Adverse Action Panel’s hearings more accessible to the public.
“Everybody I’ve spoken to who’s gone to one has explained how difficult it actually is to attend: to know when they are, to find the literal room,” said Naïké Savain, a Police Reform Commission member and policy counsel at the advocacy group DC Justice Lab. “They can claim that these hearings are public. But they’re not – not really, not in practice.”
“They can claim that these hearings are public. But they’re not—not really, not in practice.”
Naïké Savain, Police Reform Commission member
During a D.C. Council hearing on proposed police reform legislation in October, Contee, the police chief, told lawmakers that he has been frustrated by arbitration rules that have prevented him from firing officers. “Being forced to reinstate officers that MPD has already terminated is one of the worst tasks in my job,” he said.
But he also urged the council not to pass legislation that seeks to make police disciplinary records public and provide the city’s civilian oversight body, currently called the Office of Police Complaints, with unfettered access to police documents. Contee said the bill was unfair to officers and a violation of their privacy.
“How can we expect officers to respect constitutional rights if our city government disrespects theirs?” Contee asked. He also questioned expanding the power of the Office of Police Complaints – which, under the legislation, would need to include an ex-officio member of MPD, along with members who represent other groups particularly affected by policing in the District.
The legislation, Contee testified, “provides for no other qualifications for the board members – such as legal, labor or law enforcement experience or expertise, yet they are expected to review and advise on serious use of force, in-custody deaths, discipline and almost all police policy and training?” The D.C. Council has not voted on the legislation yet.
Ronald Faunteroy had asked to leave his shift four hours early to spend time with his family on that December night in 2015, according to Agent Charles Weeks’ internal report. At 11:51 p.m., he’d pulled out of the lower parking lot of the Second District headquarters. Three hours later, two surveillance cameras caught him driving in circles, five times, around a block known for being a hub of prostitution. Ten minutes after that, he backed into an alley and flashed his lights, according to the investigative report.
According to a description of the footage included in the internal affairs investigation, the video shows one of the sex workers approach Faunteroy’s car from the passenger side. The sex worker later told Weeks that she declined Faunteroy’s offer of $30 for oral sex because it wasn’t enough money. He drives off after less than a minute. But less than 10 minutes later, the surveillance video shows Faunteroy’s Nissan pull up on the sex worker, the report says.
She later told Weeks in an interview that Faunteroy was drunk and belligerent. He was slurring his words and accused her of stealing his phone.
That’s when Faunteroy pulled out his gun, she says. In the footage, Faunteroy is holding a dark object with his left hand.
“You can see my body, like, tensing up. … I’m yell – I’m like screaming at the top of my lungs right there,” she said while watching the surveillance footage with Weeks. She said she thought she was going to be shot.
Weeks tried to get an arrest warrant, but the U.S. attorney’s office – which prosecutes cases in D.C. – declined to prosecute the case. Weeks later recalled in his testimony during Faunteroy’s Adverse Action Panel that his exchange with an attorney at the office was “unprofessional.” He said the prosecutors kicked him out of the office after briefly viewing the footage and making a quick determination.
Now, it was time to interview Faunteroy. With a union representative alongside him, Faunteroy seemed nervous throughout the two-hour interview, according to a transcript of the interview included in the disciplinary files. He contradicted himself often and refused to answer even the most basic questions. He spoke at length about irrelevant details while claiming not to recall important moments of the night.
The pieces didn’t quite fit together for Weeks, and he said so, according to the transcript in the report. “We’re going around in circles,” he told Faunteroy. “I’m going to ask you straight up, what were you doing in that area?” He then went through everything he knew, laying out in detail Faunteroy’s whereabouts minute by minute.
Weeks then asked Faunteroy, for the final time, whether he pointed his weapon at the sex worker, and Faunteroy said yes. “You put the puzzle together,” he told Weeks in the interview.
Faunteroy was informed of the department’s decision to terminate him in April 2016. The next month, when the Adverse Action Panel convened, Faunteroy had rescinded his confession. Faunteroy’s new defense was simple: He got lost just before 3 a.m. in an area known for prostitution – a fact he testified that he did not know at the time. While trying to figure out where he was, a sex worker approached him. He later confronted her under the suspicion that she stole his phone and was armed, he told the panel. According to Faunteroy’s lawyers, there was not enough evidence to conclude he had either solicited prostitution or pointed his pistol at the sex worker. The only witnesses were the two sex workers, and neither were there to testify.
According to a description of the hearing, Contee – who at the time was a commander – had no questions for Faunteroy and instead used his time to comment about Faunteroy’s sense of direction. “It would be a sad day if we are not training our officers on how to get around from point A to point B,” he said.
He and the rest of the panel unanimously reduced Faunteroy’s termination to a 45-day suspension.
Mohamed Al Elew, Grace Oldham and John Turner of Reveal contributed to this story. It was edited by Soo Oh, Natalie Delgadillo and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
After a white cop fatally shoots someone, prison reformers often suggest hiring more Black cops or more women. But diversifying the police force won’t end police violence, and neither will milquetoast reforms that have been tried and tried again.
Benjamin Jancewicz, a Baltimore-based abolitionist, points out that around 62 percent of the American police force is white, and around 85 percent of cops identify as male. But that lack of representation is not where the issue of policing lies. Jancewicz asserts that police have an established culture of “oppression and dominance” that does not change even when the force has more women or BIPOC officers. “Baltimore,” he points out, “has a 40 percent Black police force” which has not affected the “already established culture of corruption and brutality.”
In 2015, Freddie Gray died in police custody after being brutalized by Baltimore cops, and the police violence and misconduct in Baltimore hasn’t ended there. This is because a system will not and cannot reform itself, especially “when you dump more money and more personnel into it,” according to Jancewicz.
How do we know when a reform is actually going to funnel more money and power to the prison-industrial complex? In an interview with Truthout, Sarah Fathallah, an Oakland-based abolitionist, points to a Critical Resistance framework that helps to determine if a proposed reform “is an abolitionist step that works to chip away at the scope and impact of policing, or a reformist reform that expands its reach.”
The framework guides us to look at reforms critically and ask: Does the proposal reduce funding to police? Does the proposal challenge the notion that police increase safety? Does the proposal reduce the tools, tactics and technology police have at their disposal? And does the proposal reduce the scale of the police?
When it comes to hiring more police officers as an attempt to diversify, we can immediately see that this reform will not lessen the scope of the prison-industrial complex.
Instead, Fathallah says, “Hiring more diverse cops often expands the funding and bodies police departments have at their disposal.” Fathallah saw this firsthand in Oakland, where the City Council voted to approve a police academy in September 2021, citing “discrepancies between the gender and racial makeup of the police compared to communities” to justify the need to hire even more cops.
Focusing on the identities of the police who are committing violence actually prevents us from taking aim at the real issues. Fathallah rightfully points out that these pushes for gender and racial diversity frame “police brutality and murder as individual issues to solve” while reinforcing the “‘bad apples’ narrative of policing, that the police are harmful because of individually blameworthy and racially biased police officers.”
Pushing this narrative is imperative for those who seek to preserve the existing power structures, because it wrongly suggests that huge social problems are actually the failures of individuals, rather than structures.
The violence and cruelty of the prison-industrial complex has been well-documented since its inception, and public consciousness is reflecting this reckoning. More and more people are becoming increasingly critical of the prison-industrial complex. In the summer of 2020, this criticism came to a head with the protests against police violence after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Brutal police violence and the horrors of incarceration never stop, but when examples of them are catapulted onto the national stage, people want answers and solutions.
Because policing and incarceration are inherently violent and racist institutions, prison-industrial complex abolitionists have been working to dismantle them in the hopes of creating a safer and more just world. Without the prison-industrial complex, abolitionists argue that we can divert resources to life-giving resources and services, rather than death-making institutions.
Prison-industrial complex reformers and preservationists generally argue that the system is “broken” — that it has problems that are ultimately solvable, but that maintaining its existence is imperative for public safety. The truth is that the prison-industrial complex is functioning exactly as it is meant to; its creation was never intended to provide justice, but instead it was born of the desire to maintain white supremacy and racial capitalism. When we reframe our understanding of the prison-industrial complex, it becomes clear that it is accomplishing its intended purpose.
In this context, it becomes clear that reforms, such as hiring more Black cops or more women cops — as well as proposed changes like bans on private prisons, body cams on cops and requiring that police verbally warn before shooting — will never solve the problem of police violence.
While police violence can be enacted by individual officers due to racial bias, it is not limited to that. Fathallah says it is also (if not more so) “the outcome of intensive over-policing and systemic criminalization of racialized poverty,” meaning diverse hires will not stop violence.
When concerned people focus on reforming the police and removing the so-called bad apples, policing is able to continue existing in much the same way. Fathallah mentions the phrase “preservation through transformation,” coined by Professor Reva Siegel that describes the phenomenon wherein a violent institution shifts and changes just enough to remain legitimate in the eyes of most.
Hiring diverse cops changes who is doing policing and what the police look like, but it doesn’t change what policing is. And it certainly doesn’t change the fact that the system is actually functioning exactly as it was designed to do.
The only way to stop police violence is to abolish the police. “Policing itself is a form of violence,” says Fathallah, “and violence is a fixture of policing, not a glitch in its system.” Once we acknowledge that truth, then we can see that no reform will change what police are and what they were created to be: protectors of a white supremacist state, of racial capitalism and of private property.
An interview with Derecka Purnell, the author of Becoming Abolitionists, about what makes communities unsafe—and how she went from calling 911 to fighting for abolition.
A few days ago, I was driving home from picking up mail from my university office. My GPS took me on a different route, probably the quickest. There were dark and winding streets. While driving, I noticed that my body began to tense. I found myself looking in the rearview mirror, hoping that the lights from the car in the back of me weren’t from a police officer’s car. I thought to myself: “Damn, I don’t want to be pulled over.” There are no witnesses. Then again, George Floyd had plenty. I mentally checked all the boxes: I don’t do drugs. No alcohol in my system. No broken tail lights. Registration is up to date. I’m doing the speed limit. And I don’t carry any weapons. So, why the fear? It became crystal clear: My Black body istheweapon; I amwhat is wrong and criminal.
I’m sure that this fear was infused with having just watched the recent video of unarmed Kyle Vinson, a 29-year-old biracial man who identifies as Black, who was pistol-whipped and choked by a white police officer in Colorado. Vinson was heard screaming, “You’re killing me!” While Vinson survived, think of the living hell, the trauma, that he will live with.
I had also recently watched the horrifying video of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old unarmed Black man, who was also stopped by Aurora, Colorado, police officers because he “looked suspicious.” What resonates with me are his last words, which included him saying that he couldn’t breathe, that he was an introvert, that he was sorry, and that he didn’t have a gun. Unlike Vinson, McClain died. Like Trayvon Martin, had he not looked “suspicious” to Aurora’s finest, I suspect that he would still be alive.
Add to this the indelibly fixed images of the video recording of the killing of George Floyd, and this is a perfect recipe for shared trauma. Being a Black man in the U.S. is a life filled with trauma. The simple act of driving home registered deep dread and panic of imminent death at the hands of those who are ostensibly there to “protect.”
I have watched the video of George Floyd’s death in its entirety at least once. In retrospect, perhaps once was too much. For me, watching it generates multiple states: rage, fury, anger, outrage, frustration, exhaustion, defeat, fear, pessimism, grief, sadness, trauma, and deep sorrow and pain. These states of being are not experienced serially, but simultaneously, more like an immediate influx.
All these emotions are grueling to hold in one Black male body. One gets the sense that one doesn’t truly have, as W.E.B. Du Bois claimed, the “dogged strength” to keep one’s Black body from being torn asunder. Part of what fuels this pessimism, pain and sorrow is that it is ongoing, perhaps without end.
The white State, along with its deputized citizens, are relentless, and skilled at maintaining white social and civic equilibrium, white normativity and white normalcy against the “chaotic” presence of embodied Blackness. Hence, there will be another unarmed Black body killed later today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the day after tomorrow’s tomorrow, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. The Latin, et cetera, communicates “that which remains.”
It is the to-be-killed Black male body that remains, the prone Black male corpse captured on video that remains, the tragic sense of certainty that there is a line of unnamed Black men who are targeted for death by the State and its functionaries that remains. Unnamed because we come to know their names only after their deaths. Then again, is there ever a before that is not always already an after? As scholar William Hart writes, “Trayvon Martin was dead before his deadly encounter with George Zimmerman. His execution (I use this loaded word intentionally) was a postmortem event; a ratification after the fact of the facts of black male being-in-America.”
In short, within such anti-Black male heart-rending situations, there is a type of death before physical death. Du Bois, in his deeply probing and heartfelt essay, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” suggests that the death of his first-born child has escaped the before of that type of death behind the Veil. He writes of his son’s physical death as an escape and as a mode of freedom. Du Bois writes, “Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and needs not to be wise. Sleep, then, child, — sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet — above the Veil.”
Is this what it means for us, Black men and Black boys, “to be” behind the Veil, that deep shroud that while not having a univocal meaning keeps us in “our place,” a place where the being of Black male existence is fundamentally unstable? While Du Bois is not hopeless, though he certainly knew what it meant to be unhopeful, one can feel the sheer weight of his pain and suffering (and yet a sense of joy) where he construes death as a site of refuge vis-à-vis the death of his first born. Du Bois is not bound by some morbid death wish; rather, he powerfully articulates the pain of being Black behind the Veil in a country which was/is predicated upon the ontological diminution of Black male existence. Du Bois writes, “All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart, — nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil, — and my soul whispers ever to me, saying, ‘Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.’”
As Black men, as Black bodies, we are, as literary scholar and intellectual Micaiah Johnson argues, the “un-killed,” which, for me, suggests a mode of existential temporal reprieve, a racially precarious mode of existence that isn’t simply precarious because all human beings are precariously finite by nature. The limit of our finitude is, as it were, accelerated by our being Black men, our finitude is sped up because of an epidermal and gendered distorted meaning that has been historically installed, reinforced through an anti-Black male framework that is predicated upon whiteness, though by no means limited to whiteness. The problem (or being a problem) is not because we are “monstrous” and “dangerous” Black men per se. Rather, our portrayal as the global “Black monster,” the frightening things of nightmares, is because of relational epistemic, libidinal, patriarchal, aesthetic, ethical, political, social, theological and material white hegemonic orders, and investments that we didn’t create. And yet, we suffer, we bleed, we weep, we mourn, we die, because we have socially inherited the death-dealing weight of the Black male imago vis-à-vis the white imaginary.
That inheritance, that indelible mark of “criminality,” often feels, though, as if it has weighed our bodies down forever. It is that feeling that I had in my car the other night — I am the problem, the forbidden. Du Bois understood the gravitas of an epidermis construed as a misdeed, a crime. He wrote, “I realized that some [white] folks, a few, even several, actually considered my brown skin a misfortune; once or twice I became painfully aware that some human beings even thought it a crime.”
The future doesn’t look any better, either. So, I am not an optimist. If in fact we are the un-killed, then we also cast a shadow forward, one that covers those Black men, Black boys, Black bodies, that have yet to be born, yet to become the un-killed. Notice how the un-killed captures something that is neither the plenitude of life nor the absolute nullification that is death. The prefix, “un,” means not. More specifically, the sense of “not” conveys how the Black body waits in line, so to speak, to be killed. To be within that mode of “not” is precisely not (quite) to be; one is paradoxically, but always terribly and revoltingly, both dead and alive. The Hamletian disjunction (“to be or not to be”) is too clear-cut, there isn’t room for a muddied, racially lived logics where, as a Black male, I am the being of not and the not of being. Hart calls this mode of being-not-being, “an in-between thing, a tertium quid.”
As Black men, we are taught to believe that it is through our agency that we are responsible for the psychic, cultural and historical debris and wreckage which surrounds our lives. These are lies, modes of projection, bad faith and scapegoating, where white people ritualistically escape what it means that their humanity is purchased at the expense of demonizing Black bodies, where the psychic architecture of civil society is what it is because some of us (too many to name) are Black. In this way, Black male racial embodiment is instrumentalized for the purpose of white America’s sense of itself as “virtuous” and “civilized.”
Our alleged self-generated debris and wreckage can best be stated in terms of someone else’s waste or refuse, which accurately signifies a foul-smelling odor of lies upon lies, a history of white shit that white people, through processes of mythopoetic obfuscation, fail or refuse to smell.
In this way, whiteness needs the Black male body for its own social ontological integrity, coherence and unity. Literary figure Toni Morrison is aware of this social ontological dependency and voraciousness that is marked through negation or the literary space of not. Through the conceptual lens provided here, I would argue in stream with Morrison that it is whiteness whereby “the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”
It is this not that resides at the core of whiteness, which forces a deep and important existential question: What is whiteness without that not, without anti-Black racism, without the Black man/person functioning, as literary figure James Baldwin would say, “in the white man’s world as a fixed star”? Perhaps the answer is painfully clear to white America — empty!
It is important to note that when I talk about whiteness, I am not speaking exclusively to those white people who identify with the KKK, the Proud Boys, neo-Nazism or the Boogaloo movement. To be white and to fight against white supremacy in its spectacular forms does not entail that one is exhaustively fighting against anti-Blackness. After all, one is still white. I would argue that to be a “good white” is more like the “benevolent” slave master who feeds me well, provides me with plenty of clothes, who doesn’t whip me, who advocates on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Yet, I would say to these “good whites”: You still don’t stop to see how my Blackness continues to function as the underside of your everyday white modes of being-in-the-world, how your unquestioned humanity is predicated upon my being as Black, as the “wretched,” the “sub-person.” I hear you. “But I am a poor white.” I get it, but that doesn’t complicate the binary. The binary remains. By your own standards, you are deemed a failed white person.
Note, though, that the conceptualization of a failed Black person or failed Blackness is not the same as a state of failed whiteness. Indeed, there is no “failed Blackness” within the white imaginary. To fail would imply that Blackness is somehow situationally inhibited to move forward based upon a real sustainable promise. Yet, there is something that is ontologically at stake here. Blackness and its relationship to failure would amount to more than a missed opportunity, more than having not received an economic promise.
Rather, Blackness is always already without genuine ontological (human) grounding. Blackness, ipso facto, is the site of nullification, where one’s humanity is not simply suspended, but structurally barred from the human (read: white humanity). After all, to be poor and white is still to be white. If one takes away poverty, whiteness remains intact. To be poor and Black is still to be Black. Take away poverty, Blackness remains intact; that is, one remains the wretched, the abject.
When I think about who I am as a Black man, I carry the history of Black people who have been murdered under death-dealing forms of anti-Blackness. When I think about George Floyd, I carry the memory of his death, the memory of his pain and suffering, the memory of him calling for his mama.
If you are white, what memories do you, or should you, carry? What is your relationship to the history of whiteness and its crimes against Black bodies?
Baldwin suggests part of the obstacle to answering these questions. He writes that “people who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”
I think that Baldwin is correct. So, let me make it clear: White people must help carry the weight of this trauma. It is white people who must tarry with the indifference of Derek Chauvin as he killed George Floyd.
To white people I say: Chauvin is your burden; carry him. I’ve already got too many postmortem Black men and Black boys to carry. Hell, I’m just trying to drive home in peace without that traumatic weight. How does whiteness, your whiteness, enable you to breathe, and to drive without fear? More powerfully and hauntingly: What if your being able to breathe is possible because some of us cannot breathe?
If this is true, and I have come to the nontrivial conclusion that it is, then the relationship is one of parasitism; you get to breathe in the capacity of those who are “spirit-eaters.” The consumptive, gastronomical implications are intentional. Our Black spirits (Latin, spiritus or breath) are ingested so that you might live.
To any white people who are reading this, I issue this challenge: Guilt is a nonstarter; it is too easy. Just breathe. Take in the air. Feel your lungs and your chest expand. The power and violence of whiteness is just that simple; it is that normal; it is that effortless; and it is that close and invisible. That is what whiteness provides — breath, life, “innocence,” humanity, bodily expansion into a white America, a white world meant for you. It is a space within which you get to stand your ground, and where Black men are reduced to lying face down on the ground.
14 October is George Floyd’s birthday. Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020 sparked widespread protests across the US and overseas.
Police officer Derek Chauvin was later convicted of Floyd’s murder. As the officer knelt on his neck, Floyd repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”. Soon those words became a global rallying cry against racist policing. The judge said Chauvin’s 22 year sentence was based:
on your abuse of a position of trust and authority, and also the particular cruelty shown
Commemoration
One initiative set up for the occasion is #TeachTruth Day. It’s purpose is to honor George Floyd’s birthday. The day consists of online teach-ins which are being held around the US to address systemic racism. Campaigners say it’s a:
National Teach-in for Truth About Systemic Racism & Sexism in U.S. Curricula
Meanwhile, supporters gathered by a statue of Floyd in New York to remember him:
And one twitter user posted images of Floyd with his children. As well as images of the protests which followed his death. Data from the time of the killing showed that Black Americans were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.
George Floyd should've turned 48 today. Happy Birthday to him & may he continue to to rest in peace. pic.twitter.com/cHNQC2hdgL
Since Floyd’s murder many reforms have been suggested. Some want a ban on chokeholds and implicit bias training for officers. Others want the police to be defunded. Elsewhere, national days of action began. And these included calls to decolonise education:
But, as another poster pointed out, the struggle is far from over. Some reforms have taken place within individual police forces. But these are largely ad hoc and do not seem to address the systemic problem of racism.
Tomorrow would have been George Floyd's 48th birthday. Derek Chauvin cheated him and his family of celebrating
Three other police officers present at the killing will be triedlater in 2021. While Derek Chauvin is currently appealing his 22 year sentence. Today will be a day to recall George Floyd’s life and legacy, but the struggle against racism and violent policing continues.
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