radiofree.asia

Category: Policing

  • On Juneteenth, Here Are 5 Ways to Be a Better Ally

    Juneteenth marks a seminal moment in American history. The celebration, which takes place on June 19, commemorates the emancipation of those who were enslaved in the U.S. 

    While chattel slavery’s end is often tied to President Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1,1863, 250,000 slaves in Texas didn’t learn of their freedom until June 19, 1865 — when Union General Gordon Granger arrived with an army to liberate them and announced that “[the] people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Since then, Juneteenth (short for June 19th) has become known as the country’s second independence day. 

    Liberation is core to the Innocence Project’s mission. In commemoration of Juneteenth, we offer five ideas for being a better ally in the struggle for racial justice and criminal justice reform, drawn from our five pillars of work: Exonerate, Improve, Reform, Support, and Educate.  

    Exonerate

    The Innocence Project works to free and exonerate wrongfully convicted people and to reform the systems that lead to these injustices.

    Similarly, it’s important for allies to proactively engage in breaking down systemic barriers that prevent vulnerable people from receiving fair and equal treatment by the country’s policing systems and criminal legal institutions. 

    Racial disparities within our criminal justice systems — from the stark difference in the arrests of Black and white people to the disproportionate sentencing of Black and brown people — highlight the extent of the discrimination. According to an ABC News analysis of 2018 arrest data voluntarily reported to the FBI by thousands of police departments across the country, for instance, Black people were, on average, five times more likely than white people to be arrested. Furthermore, a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Black women and men, along with American Indian and Alaska Native women and men, were more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Black men, for example, were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men, while American Indian women were between 1.1 times and 2.1 times more likely to be killed by police than white women. 

    The injustice has also manifested in the treatment of Black and brown defendants in court. According to a 2017 report from the United States Sentencing Commission, for example, Black men convicted of crimes continued to receive longer sentences than similarly situated white men. Black and Latinx people are also more likely than white people to be denied bail, face a higher cash bail, and be detained as a result of not being able to post bail, the Sentencing Project notes. More concerningly, Black people are the most likely to be wrongfully convicted for crimes they didn’t commit, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. 

    Addressing some of these issues begins with holding those in power accountable and making sure that people who are pushing for fair and equitable criminal justice systems are in those positions of power. Raising concerns at community board meetings or taking part in civilian review boards establishes a level of police oversight. Moreover, voting for candidates with a commitment to reform who are looking to fill local judiciary, prosecutor, or attorney general positions can help ensure that criminal legal systems are guided by those who better understand the impact of the law on marginalized communities.

    Improve

    In addition to providing the wrongly convicted with legal representation, the Innocence Project works through legal systems to improve the law and its practice. Attorneys take a range of approaches to help establish legal precedent in areas that are prone to inaccuracies (such as the use of unreliable forensic evidence and eyewitness testimony). Addressing these root causes of injustices is part of the organization’s larger endeavor to improve the systems for everyone and particularly those who are most vulnerable. 

    In the fight to improve criminal justice systems on a broader scale, allies need to first understand that the perception and treatment of arrested individuals too often depends on how they look and where they come from. For instance, people who live in neighborhoods with high levels of punitive police surveillance and fewer financial resources (many of whom are working-class people of color) are more likely to be arrested multiple times and experience racism. Those who live in higher-income neighborhoods and can hire their own attorneys, on the other hand, are more likely to be given a second chance by law enforcement. 

    Being a powerful advocate for criminal justice reform involves learning about racial and class biases. Allies who want to improve criminal justice systems might start by strengthening their understanding of how racial discrimination, classism, and the legal systems intersect in the U.S. and how they have, in turn, marginalized at-risk populations. 

    Reform

    The Innocence Project engages in policy work, collaborating with Congress, state legislatures, and local officials to pass laws and policies that limit wrongful convictions. The work touches on issues including — but not limited to — police deception, misapplication of forensic science, proper compensation for exonerees, and access to post-conviction DNA testing. Reforming these issues through large-scale advocacy guarantees that everyone — not just the organization’s clients — are afforded a degree of justice. 

    Allies should consider how they can broaden their allyship to help those outside their personal circle. Recent racial violence across the U.S., alongside increasing political polarization, has highlighted a desperate need for reform in every facet of American society. Police murders of Black and brown people, for instance, have drawn attention to the lack of guidelines and laws that hold law enforcement accountable. In response, advocacy groups, together with local and state officials, have worked together to revamp police practices. In May, for example, Illinois passed legislation that banned the use of deceptive police tactics in the interrogation of minors. The law was rooted in the work and expertise of the Innocence Project, the Illinois Innocence Project, the Office of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. Similar bills have also been introduced in New York and Oregon.   

    Pushing for national reform on issues like police and prosecutorial accountability — whether in the form of signing petitions, urging local officials to support a bill, or raising awareness through grassroots campaigns — benefits everyone. 

    Support

    The Innocence Project fights for the exoneration of its clients and provides support for exonerees who have spent many years behind bars and may struggle with rebuilding their lives upon their release. The organization’s social work department addresses exonerees’ needs on an individual basis, ranging from locating family numbers to finding housing. 

    One of the Innocence Project’s major efforts involves mandating restitution to freed, innocent individuals for the time they spent imprisoned. This year, for example, the organization helped lead efforts in Montana and Idaho to compensate those who were wrongfully convicted $60,000 and $70,000 respectively for each year of imprisonment. The Innocence Project also pushed both states to award wrongfully convicted people $25,000 for each year spent on parole or probation. 

    Supporting exonerees or backing organizations that provide the necessary resources to underserved populations is a critical role that all allies can play. This support, which can take many forms including fundraising or volunteer work, can go a long way in making criminal justice systems more equitable. 

    Educate

    The work of the Innocence Project’s science and research team largely informs the organization’s reform efforts. Not only does the team push for a science-based evaluation of common forensic techniques and the inclusion of scientific evidence that may have been previously unavailable, it also provides resources on wrongful convictions to researchers and lawyers. 

    In allyship, education is critical as well. Being an effective ally consists of not only taking action but also proactively educating oneself. It is important to note that it is not the responsibility of those who have faced or are facing injustices in the criminal justice systems to educate allies about their experiences — allies should recognize the power they have to undertake that education themselves.

    For those who are looking for a good place to start, consider one of the Innocence Project’s reading lists on wrongful convictions here.

    The post On Juneteenth, Here Are 5 Ways to Be a Better Ally appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Police in UK schools will only serve to criminalise vulnerable pupils

    Kids of Colour and the Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP) have launched a petition calling on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) to halt plans to place more police officers in local schools. The No Police in Schools campaign is also calling for the local authority to remove existing school-based police officers (SBPOs).

    Police in Manchester schools

    Kids of Colour and NPMP are calling on GMCA to halt plans to introduce more SBPOs into Manchester schools, and to remove existing officers. This is based on concerns that police in schools will disproportionately impact working class children of colour, “create a climate of hostility and suspicion”, and bring more children into contact with the criminal justice system.

    Speaking to The Canary in February, co-author of Decriminalise the Classroom and NPMP member Dr Laura Connelly said:

    As our No Police In Schools Campaign makes clear, teachers, parents, young people and community members have grave concerns about school-based police officers. Our own community consultation of over 500 people in Greater Manchester shows that SBPOs have a range of negative consequences that are felt most acutely by those from working-class and Black and ethnic minority communities.

    She added:

    We are deeply concerned that police will bring into the school setting the institutional racism and police violence already experienced in over-policed communities. They will foster a culture of low expectations.

    Calling on the local authority to invest in supportive rather than punitive measures, Kids of Colour and NPMP said:

    If GMCA is truly interested in keeping young people safe, instead of investing in police in schools, it should invest in school counsellors, youth workers, teachers, and community infrastructure.

    The UK’s school-to-prison pipeline

    As set out by NEU vice-president Vik Chechi-Ribeiro, the “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to the systematic direction of pupils towards incarceration through educational exclusion and criminalisation. This is a product of harsh disciplinary policies that confront routine school-based behavioural issues with ‘zero tolerance’, and the presence of police, security, and surveillance in schools. This contributes to greater suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement, and arrests for violations of school rules. The presence of police in schools disproportionately impacts working-class pupils from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds, groups which already experience over-policing.

    Police in schools is a growing issue nationwide. More than 650 police officers are working in British schools, with many assigned to sites in areas of high deprivation. We have seen the devastating and disproportionate impact of police in US schools on Children of Colour, particularly those with disabilities. In spite of fears that police in schools will criminalise vulnerable pupils, authorities increased the number of police working in London schools by 19% between 2016/17 and 2019/20. In February, London mayor Sadiq Khan suggested further funding for SBPOs.

    Responding to this, Connelly said:

    The additional funding would be better invested in mental health support in schools, counsellors, teaching and support staff, and community infrastructure. It is this investment, rather than more policing, that will help to keep our young people safe.

    Towards an education system that supports pupils

    Police in schools will not solve the complex issues that impact young people’s lives. In most cases, they will exacerbate them. Schools and communities need solutions that actively challenge the root causes and consequences of social problems. As Kids of Colour and NPMP have highlighted, “young people need support, not suspicion”. This begins with investment in communities, and in education, youth, social, and mental health services. The coalition is calling on supporters to sign and share their petition, and for people to join the No Police in Schools campaign to help build an education system that supports pupils rather than traumatises them.

    Featured image via NeONBRAND/Unsplash

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Policing and Militarism Go Hand in Hand. We Must Abolish Both.

    Members of the national guard stand outside the Hennepin County Government Center

    Policing and militarism are a two-headed monster that protects and upholds the foundation upon which racial capitalism was built — exploitation of the lives of poor Black and Brown people.

    Although much attention has been placed on recent expansions of police militarization, these threads have long been intertwined. For Black Americans, police have always acted as an occupying force within our communities. But during the 1960s, a decade of unprecedented Black radical resistance, the lines between police and military and national defense became even more blurred.

    On December 8, 1969, the SWAT unit of the Los Angeles Police Department raided the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Los Angeles, California. Four days prior, the Chicago Police Department had violently raided the home of and assassinated Fred Hampton, the chairman and leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, based out of my hometown of Chicago. It is in the legacy and practice of militarism that SWAT teams were created — as a means to decentralize and suppress Black resistance.

    As a Black femme abolitionist and organizer from the west side of Chicago, I fight in the spirit of Fred “Baba” Hampton, in a movement that is built upon the community-based power around which the Panthers mobilized to combat militarism, colonialism and occupation.

    The attack on the Black Panther headquarters in 1969 was one of the first publicly known uses of newly emerging SWAT teams, but they quickly spread. Throughout the past two decades, SWAT units have become more heavily armed and funded and used all too regularly as a tactic of instant response in predominantly Black cities, particularly in response to uprisings. The 1033 Program, created as a part of the 1977 National Defense Authorization Act, allows the Department of Defense to supply local authorities with its military-grade equipment. War weaponry, such as assault rifles, riot gear, grenade launchers and military tanks, is awarded to police departments and used to perpetuate harm against Black and Indigenous people putting their lives on the line to oppose colonization, white supremacy and policing.

    The facts are simple: When masses of Black people mobilize, gangs of police move in, and terrorize.

    Since the start of the 1033 Program, around 10,000 law enforcement agencies have received around $7.4 billion worth of equipment.

    This equipment funds the type of raids that killed Breonna Taylor, it funds teargas being used against Black people in Kenosha and Minneapolis, it funds the batons the Chicago Police Department uses to beat youth in the streets, it funds the water cannons used at Backwater Bridge at Standing Rock. It funds the murder of millions at the hands of policing, war, militarism, colonialism and imperialism. It is a never-ending cycle of violence.

    Given all of this, calls to defund police and end wars are bigger than just targeted demands; they are calls to invest in life, abundance and an abolitionist world in which we don’t depend on the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex or policing to sustain our communities.

    This struggle is very personal to me. I am an abolitionist from a city that spends $4.8 million a day and about $2 billion a year on policing — and a city in which taxpayers spend about $38 million yearly to arm, aid in and fund apartheid, genocide and state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians.

    Militarism is a strategy of using violence to keep people in positions of power in control and to maintain the racial, economic and other social hierarchies that uphold this power.

    $4.8 million a day is the allowance police are given daily to uphold militarism in Chicago.

    Divesting from education, mental health services, violence prevention that addresses the root causes, housing, and all other necessities of life keeps the racial, economic and social hierarchies in place that justify the supposed need for police.

    This is why in this same city the yearly budget for mental health services is around $9.4 million — equal to less than two days of the police budget.

    This is why the budget for substance abuse treatment is only 2.6 million — a half-day worth of police budget on any given day. And only $1.5 million is spent yearly in violence prevention — a proactive way to combat violence without the reactionary nature of police.

    This is why in 2013, my elementary school and nearly 50 others — all of which were located on the predominantly Black South and West Sides of the city of Chicago — were closed down in one of the largest public school closures of United States history. The city claimed the closures were due to lack of funding, but four years later, the city proposed spending $95 million to build a police training academy in my neighborhood — where they previously closed schools that they supposedly could not afford to keep open.

    It is why, as a 12-year-old in 2013, I went to community hearings begging then-mayor Rahm Emanuel to keep my elementary school open. It is why five years later, I joined #NoCopAcademy, a youth-led campaign against the city-proposed policy academy — and for a change in notion that community safety is directly tied to policing. And it is why, today, I am organizing around demands to defund police and to get the cops — who are being prioritized for funding above education — out of Chicago Public Schools.

    It is why, as I joined other #NoCopAcademy organizers on the day of the vote over whether to build the police academy, I was beaten in the stairwells of city hall, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot awarded the Chicago Police Department with a new $95 million police school. The violence perpetrated against my being was accompanied by the violence of more resources being poured into state-sanctioned violence.

    It is why my voice was ignored in 2013, and again in 2019 when the cop academy was approved. Now, as I scream Rekia Boyd’s name in the street, chant in her legacy and demand divestment from the institution which was responsible for her death, I am again ignored.

    The 2022 fiscal budget under President Joe Biden requests $753 billion in national security funding. This is a 1.6 percent increase that includes $715 billion for the Department of Defense. In 2016, the military utilized about $610 billion. Just as national defense budgets continue to increase drastically year by year, local police department budgets continue to rise as wars are waged in poor Black communities via hyper-policing, surveillance and police torture.

    Many of my closest comrades from the hood experience trauma from witnessing and experiencing police violence and torture. For nonwhite people — for people who live in hoods flooded by police and abandoned in every other way, and for those of us who watched our sisters and brothers be tortured and targeted by police on a daily basis — conversations about “defund,” “divest” and “abolish” are not new. They are demands, necessities, discussions we’ve been having in our communities for years, and even decades. And for Black Chicagoans, this is about our lives. This violence happens daily. We don’t need another video of Black trauma. We didn’t need to see George Floyd, or Rekia Boyd, or Adam Toledo, or Laquan McDonald or Breonna Taylor be murdered to know policing is violence. We didn’t need to see genocide, war and crisis unfold in Palestine, Yemen or Nigeria to know militarism is violence.

    Police and the military operate under the same practices of militarism. Police move into external communities and occupy. Military forces move into external communities and occupy. The idea that Black and Brown communities need “law and order” and that these institutions implement it alongside safety is flawed. Safety for Black, Brown and Indigenous people doesn’t look like more police. It looks like access and abundance, because when you think about the safest place in the world and the places where you feel most safe, it is very likely that they are places with the most resources and the least police.

    As campaigns to defund and divest from death and to fight for liberation continue, the struggle for an abolitionist world lives on through every chant at an action; every ancestor that shows us the way; every community relationship we build; and all the steps we take to become a global community connected in love, liberation and abundance.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Campaigns to Defund Police Have Seen Major Wins — and They’re Not Stopping

    Hundreds march while protesting the grand jury decision to not charge the police officers who shot and killed Breonna Taylor, on September 23, 2020, in downtown Los Angeles, California.

    During last year’s uprisings against the ongoing anti-Black violence of police, “defund the police” emerged as the demand and rallying cry. Today, as we mark one year since George Floyd was murdered in the Cup Foods parking lot in Minneapolis by police, abolitionist organizers are still issuing that call, waging fights to defund police and invest in their communities — and experimenting with more holistic ways to keep communities safe.

    In the past year, defund police campaigns have seen material wins, gained traction and grown in numbers. As Interrupting Criminalization’s recent report The Demand is Still Defund breaks down, over $840 million dollars were cut from local police departments and $160 million of community investments were won by defund police organizers across the country in 2020. These wins include: the first cut to the Minneapolis Police Department’s budget in 20 years, a 20 percent reduction in the Seattle Police Department’s budget, a budget cut and hiring freeze for the Salt Lake City Police Department, the passage of a Los Angeles County ballot measure requiring 10 percent of unrestricted county funds to be reinvested into community programs and not police, and many more.

    In Durham, North Carolina, the city’s Community Safety and Wellness Task Force had its first official meeting in April and is planning how to allocate the city’s $1 million commitment toward alternatives to police. This task force was won in 2019 through the organizing of the Durham Beyond Policing coalition (DBP), which initially formed in protest against Durham’s plans to construct a new $71 million police headquarters in 2016. DBP organizer Manju Rajendran, who sits on the new task force, explained: “It would be a failure to use that space to perpetuate the same mistakes where we try to gently bend policing to make it friendlier. We are proposing something that has not been done yet, which is dismantle the policing and prison systems.”

    The sentiment that we have a responsibility to create transformative solutions beyond minor reforms sums up a guiding principle behind abolitionist and defund police organizing. Defund organizers like Rajendran are clear that police killings will not end without taking resources away from the police because power is the heart of the problem. Police have too much power and Black and other marginalized communities have too little.

    Interrupting Criminalization’s report affirms the wins of the movement in the short period of the last year, but warns against taking all police budget cuts at face value. The 50 largest cities in the U.S. cut 2021 police budgets by 5.2 percent in total, but many in the context of across-the-board cuts to city budgets. In other places, money was “cut” but then still ultimately given to police in another way. In Dallas, for example, where protests lasted daily for over 120 days last year through the hot summer, $7 million was cut from the police overtime budget but police were then given a similar amount to what had been cut to buy “non-lethal weapons” — a category that includes pepper spray, batons and tasers, which have actually been used by police to kill and severely injure, like in the police killing of Dominique “Damo” Franklin who was fatally tased by a Chicago police officer in 2014.

    “Defund the police” has always been shorthand for a two-part demand: It is just as much about investing in thriving communities as it is about divesting from policing. Organizers of the local In Defense of Black Lives Dallas coalition surveyed hundreds of Dallas residents last year to create a People’s Budget in favor of cutting Dallas Police Department’s budget by $200 million and reinvesting in community care. Their current demands include funding for a non-police violence prevention office, mental health programs, emergency housing, economic development, recovery for the impacts of the pandemic and the unprecedented winter storm that hit the U.S. South this year, as well as decriminalization of poverty. The summer before George Floyd was murdered, an influx of state troopers was deployed to Dallas to address community violence, resulting in daily police harassment of local residents. On top of this, the winter storm resulted in deaths, displacement, economic hardship, damage to people’s homes and exorbitant debts to exploitative gas companies. In Defense of Black Lives Dallas’s platform is about defunding police in order to offer real solutions that get at the roots of interconnected problems of policing, structural violence and community violence. Mercedes Fulbright of In Defense of Black Lives explains that the coalition wants to “focus more on the affirmative, liberatory vision” in this year’s efforts.

    Regardless of indications of growing public support for reallocating funds from police at least in certain places, many decision-makers, including many self-proclaimed “progressives” have been hostile targets for defund organizing. In Chicago, where there is a robust movement behind demands to defund police, the city’s official 2020 budget survey filled out by tens of thousands of residents showed that 87 percent of Chicagoans favored reallocating police funds toward other programs. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, however, has rooted herself firmly in opposition, not only claiming that she would never defund the police, but actually giving the Chicago Police Department (CPD) hundreds of millions of Chicago’s COVID relief dollars instead of channeling them toward needed programs to support struggling residents. In Atlanta, after the police murder of Rayshard Brooks last June, progressive city council member Antonio Brown proposed reallocating a third of the $218 million police budget toward social services. Hundreds of residents gave public testimony calling for defunding the Atlanta Police Department. The council deliberated for two days, but ultimately struck the proposal down.

    When policy makers oppose defunding the police, one of the most common arguments they use is the idea that we need police in order to address crime, harm and violence. The reality is, however, that the “solutions” we get by funding police are not really solutions at all. For example, many local police departments contract with ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection technology which is advertised as a tool for addressing gun violence. However, not only is ShotSpotter ineffective in doing what it claims to do, it adds to the problem of gun violence. According to the MacArthur Justice Center, “the ShotSpotter system sends police on thousands of unfounded and high-intensity deployments, which are focused almost exclusively in Black and Latinx communities.” Eighty-six percent of the time an armed officer is deployed by ShotSpotter, no crime is reported at all. The least violent outcome of a program like ShotSpotter is that public dollars pay an officer to attend to a false alarm and a private company’s profits. The more violent outcome is that someone gets killed, like 13-year-old Adam Toledo, who was killed by a police officer in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood after ShotSpotter detected shots and officers pursued Toledo with guns drawn.

    Despite some narratives, those of us advocating for abolitionist approaches including defunding police are actually deeply concerned with violence and addressing the root causes of both structural and interpersonal violence with thoughtful, holistic and transformative change. We simply cannot afford to continue resourcing a system that so consistently kills our people.

    Given that many policy makers remain committed to this deadly system, one important piece of the work of visionary movements is pushing those unwilling to meet movement demands out of power. Black organizers in St. Louis recently celebrated creating the conditions in which the incumbent mayor decided not to run for reelection, making way for young, Black progressive Tishaura Jones to win and pass a budget amendment to defund St Louis Metropolitan Police Department by $4 million in her first days in office. Other examples of this work include campaigns like Chicago’s #ByeAnita campaign which helped oust State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in 2016, and the less successful #StopLightfoot campaign that intervened in the campaign of current Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Other campaigns are creating political consequences for progressive politicians outside of campaign cycles. In Chicago during last year’s budget cycle, when city council members flip-flopped on movement demands of communities that helped get more progressive candidates in their seat, those same communities called them out. In the case of formerly DSA-backed Council Member Andre Vasquez, Chicago’s DSA chapter publicly broke ties with him over his vote in favor of a pro-cop austerity budget.

    While policing does remain the status quo, it is not a stable one. The truth is that part of police power is the stronghold they have on our imaginations. This happens through education, media, and the communications and press teams included in the bloated police budgets we want to cut that run smear campaigns of Black victims of police murder. That said, enormous numbers of people have come into the work of imagining safety beyond policing due to movement efforts of the last year and continue to be welcomed into participatory campaigns. “There’s everyday people looking for homes within coalitions like ours,” says Fulbright of In Defense of Black Lives Dallas, describing how more and more people are looking to join abolitionist groups. Opening one another’s eyes to the possibility of a better world in the face of fear and uncertainty is the important work of visionary movements, and the defund police movement has arguably done this work very well in the last year.

    One year ago this week, many of us watched videos of a Minneapolis police station burn to the ground, wondering what would come of the political moment we were in. While there is still no shortage of unfinished business for the abolition movement, hundreds if not thousands of new and old campaigns, organizations and neighborhood crews have advanced fights to defund police in what has felt like the longest year ever. Looking toward the summer of 2021 and beyond, abolitionists are positioned to be engaged in deep community building, making sharp demands, continuing to protest, manifesting concrete wins, and offering a vision for a society with a different set of priorities that can benefit us all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The promise of the policing bill is emboldening cops to violently target protesters

    Content warning: this article contains descriptions of police violence that some readers may find distressing

    You may already know that the police are likely to get sweeping new powers to arrest protesters when the Police Bill is passed. But these potential new powers seem to have already given police across the country new confidence. We’re seeing more and more reports of people being attacked by police while on demonstrations, while legal observers monitoring the situation are being increasingly targeted. It seems that the promise of the new bill is all that the police need to give them the green light to increase their violence against demonstrators.

    Reports of police assaults across the country

    Bristol, Manchester, London, and Cambridge have all seen scenes of police violence at protests since March.

    Of course, it was Bristol that made mainstream news headlines when police vans were set on fire by demonstrators during the city’s first Kill The Bill demonstration. But as The Canary reported, it was the police who provoked people by charging at the crowd with batons and dogs. Avon and Somerset police continued to attack Bristol protesters at subsequent demonstrations. More than 60 people reported injuries, including at least 44 incidents of people being attacked by either shields or batons. Indeed, footage showed police officers repeatedly bringing the edges of their shields down onto sitting protesters’ heads.

    In Manchester, footage from one Kill the Bill demonstration on 3 April shows police officers slamming a woman’s head into a police van and then folding her body in half to restrain her as she shouted for help. The woman reported:

    my head was smashed into the van wing-mirror with such force that it was folded back against the van, and I saw bits of black plastic coming off it. I later heard that were was glass on the floor below me. I briefly blacked out at this point, my legs gave way, and I wet myself. I had been pushed and pulled between officers who were mostly male and a lot larger than me.

    Meanwhile, the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) reported that another woman was attacked:

    Manchester’s Mayor Andy Burnham has…demanded an explanation from the police after officers dragged a young woman through the city centre with her underwear exposed while arresting her. There have been accusations that the Manchester Tactical Aid Unit is out of control after officers kicked and hit protesters sitting on the floor at another Kill The Bill protest.

    Reports of choking

    Also in Manchester, the city’s riot police are being investigated after choking a young student in what Netpol called a “shocking unprovoked assault”. The student reportedly almost lost consciousness in the attack. He had been leaving a demonstration and shook his head at the police just before he was assaulted.

    And in Cambridge, the Coalition for Vaccine Justice reported that a 17-year-old boy was also choked by police while demonstrating outside AstraZeneca’s offices. The boy had joined a number of protesters to call for the drug company to waiver its patent on its coronavirus vaccine. A witness said:

    I know the look of adrenaline-fuelled anger, and it was all across the face of the police officer just before he lunged at the young man’s throat.

    Targeting legal observers

    Meanwhile, police across the country are targeting legal observers on protests. In Manchester, three legal observers have lodged complaints against the police. According to Netpol:

    [there is] one allegation of sexual assault after a male officer grabbed a female legal observer’s chest.

    In London, four more legal observers were also targeted and arrested at a Kill The Bill demonstration. The legal observers were sent by Black Protest Legal Support (BPLS), an organisation led by Black and Brown lawyers to monitor the policing of protests. Liberty is taking action against the police on behalf of those arrested. BPLS said:

    We are deeply concerned by the Met’s impunity at protests and the sharp impact this has on racialised communities. From Mangrove in 1970, to Black Lives Matter last year, to the police’s harassment of Black activists in recent weeks – the arrests subject to challenge, of predominantly BBRG Legal Observers, are but another example of decades’ worth of racialised policing at protests.

    More power will make them more violent

    When the Police Bill passes through parliament, the police are likely to act with greater violence at demonstrations, safe in the knowledge that the law will protect them. We need to fight right to the end to prevent this Bill from going ahead. Kill The Bill.

    Featured image via Eliza Egret

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Police officers fined after breaching coronavirus rules with indoor gathering

    A number of police officers have been issued with fixed-penalty notices after an indoor gathering in Shetland breached coronavirus restrictions.

    Call the cops

    The gathering occurred in a property in Russell Crescent, Lerwick, at around 6.15pm on 14 May while the island was still in Level 3 of Scotland’s measures. Six people were issued with notices and Police Scotland confirmed a number of officers had been among them.

    A spokesperson said:

    Officers were called to a report of a gathering in breach of coronavirus regulations within a property in Russell Crescent, Lerwick, at around 6.15pm on Friday May 14.

    Six people have been issued with fixed-penalty notices and the gathering was dispersed.

    It was not until Monday 17 May that most of Scotland’s islands moved to Level 1, which allows indoor gatherings to take place with up to six people from three households.

    As a result of the incident, superintendent Maggie Pettigrew said:

    The vast majority of people in Shetland have been sticking to the rules to suppress the spread of coronavirus and I would like to thank our community for this. It is extremely disappointing that a small number of police officers were involved in a gathering in breach of the regulations on Friday.

    Their actions undermine the sacrifices you have all made in the last year and I appreciate many of you will be upset about this incident.

    They have been given fixed-penalty notices and reminded of their responsibility to set an example to others.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The farcical spycops inquiry is a multi-million pound ‘cover-up’

    The latest set of hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry concluded on 13 May, but victims of police spies have expressed their anger at what is a farcical, excruciatingly slow “cover-up”.

    Beginning six years ago, the inquiry was set up to investigate the actions of police spies since 1968, as well as the units that ordered the officers to spy. Fraught with delays and deliberate obstruction by the police, it’s set to become one of the longest inquiries in British history. Vital police files are being withheld from the victims who were spied upon.

    Towards the end of April, the inquiry announced that the next set of hearings, which will continue to cover the period of 1968-1982, won’t take place until 2022. For the victims who were spied upon in the 2000s, this means it will be 2025 before they give their evidence: a full decade after the inquiry began.

    “Continuing nightmare”

    Canary editor Emily Apple was spied upon by undercover police officer Jason Bishop between 2001 and 2005, while involved in anti-militarist activism. She is one of the inquiry’s many core participants still waiting to receive files from the police which would, potentially, show her exactly what information Bishop gave to his bosses.

    She said that the news of further delays is “deeply traumatic” and argued:

    So far the inquiry only seems to care about the distress the inquiry has caused to undercover cops, not to us, the actual victims of police spying. Not knowing what my files say, or when they will be released is a continuing nightmare. I know it’ll be a traumatic experience to read what the police hold on me, especially relating to the officers who I know were spying on me when my child was young and coming with me to meetings and protests.

    Adding to victims’ trauma

    Apple went on to talk about the massive effect that undercover policing has on a victim’s mental health. She said:

    I already suffer from PTSD as a result of policing. This delay only exacerbates this. I know that I was spied on since at least 2000 by numerous spycops, but it’s going to be at least 2025 – and probably later – that I’ll get to understand why this happened. This will be at least ten years since the inquiry was set up.

    This is disgusting behaviour from the inquiry that totally ignores the trauma that core participants have faced not only since the inquiry started, but since we first learned the depth of the spying operation against us through the work of activists and journalists.

    There are hundreds of victims like Apple, who have become friends with undercover officers. They have trusted them, let them into their homes, and allowed them to spend time with their families. And there are more than thirty women who have been deceived into romantic relationships with undercover cops and systematically abused by the police. The inquiry should by putting these victims first. Yet time and again it shows that protecting the police is its priority.

    Apple went on to say:

    It is us, the people who were spied on who are the victims in this inquiry and we are being treated with utter contempt.

    Release the files immediately

    The inquiry will continue to plod on at snail’s-pace, but not until 2022. We have watched as it continues to protect the anonymity of the undercover police who abused women. And we have seen how it glosses over police corruption. Meanwhile, the evidence that has been heard has shown that the police’s intelligence-gathering is extremely flawed.

    The inquiry has had six years to gather evidence. Apple and other core participants are demanding that their files are immediately released so that they can begin to reclaim their lives. This is the very least the state can do.

    Featured image via Emily Apple

     

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Jonathon Seed has been disbarred from the PCC election. Now it’s time to expel him from the Tory party.

    Jonathon Seed, the Swindon and Wiltshire Tory candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), is currently making headlines after being disbarred from the election. ITV News has revealed that Seed has a historic drink driving offence, which makes him ineligible to stand. It’s unclear whether the Conservative Party knew of the offence. Seed insists he declared it, while ITV understands that the Tories were not aware of the conviction.

    Seed is an ex-army major and ex-fox hunt master. Animal rights campaigners have worked tirelessly for the past year, giving extensive reasons why Seed was not fit to run for PCC. Wiltshire Hunt Sabs and Bath Hunt Saboteurs told The Canary:

    Without the constant scrutiny and campaigning by Bath and Wiltshire sabs, this wouldn’t have come to light. Jonathon Seed certainly thought no-one would look into a role that no-one previously cared about.

    But it’s disgraceful that it has taken this long for the Tories to disbar Seed. Campaigners have previously documented many other reasons why the man should have been disqualified, and all were ignored. Earlier this year, it was even revealed that Seed had failed to mention his connection to an organisation campaigning to repeal the hunting ban in his register of interests.

    Robert Pownall, founder of anti-hunting organisation Keep The Ban, told The Canary:

    It is frankly disgusting that it’s taken a historic drink driving charge for Jonathon Seed to withdraw himself from proceedings. Why on earth was somebody with such an extensive history of wildlife abuse even allowed to stand for Police and Crime Commissioner in the first place?

    Serious questions must be asked of Wiltshire Conservative Party as to how and why Jonathon Seed was deemed a suitable candidate for the role.

    Wildlife abuses

    Back in March, The Canary extensively covered Seed’s history of fox hunting, as well as his current close ties to the barbaric sport. Seed was master of two local hunts for 20 years, from 1992 to 2012, while fox hunting with hounds was made illegal in 2004. When Seed was master of Avon Vale Hunt, he insisted that hunting foxes was “important for freedom“, and was determined to get the ban “overturned in due course”.

    During his time as hunt master, Seed was was accused by hunt saboteurs of being violent. Wiltshire Hunt Sabs and Bath Hunt Saboteurs previously told The Canary:

    When Seed was hunt master of the Avon Vale, from around 2000-2012, they were an exceptionally violent hunt. Sabs were often ridden at by Seed on his horse, and sabs were injured as a result of being sent flying by him. He had a hotline to his “Welsh militia” who he would call in to assault and abuse sabs and monitors on a routine basis.

    Meanwhile, in 2013, two Avon Vale men pled guilty to interfering with a badger sett the year before, while they were under Seed’s watch. Charges against Seed for the same incident were dropped.

    This is not the first time Seed has hidden the truth

    Seed’s drink driving conviction is not the only thing that the councillor has kept quiet about while campaigning to be PCC. Earlier this year, a leaked document revealed that Seed was listed as one of This is Hunting UK’s (TiHUK) regional coordinators in 2018. TiHUK is an organisation whose main aims include repealing the hunting ban. And yet, Seed’s register of interests completely fails to mention his involvement with TiHUK. In fact, Seed has stated:

    My declaration of interests has always been correct and up to date throughout my time as a councillor.

    This brazen willingness to hide the truth is shocking, highlighting that Seed can’t be trusted, not just as a PCC, but also as a councillor and Tory party member. Wiltshire Hunt Sabs and Bath Hunt Saboteurs told The Canary:

    The Conservative Party surely can’t stand behind a candidate bound to bring constant controversy, but more than that it’s election fraud. It’s a criminal offence, and he could go to prison. He can’t possibly continue to be the public face of a political party.

    Meanwhile, Wiltshire’s other PCC candidates are calling for a criminal investigation into Seed.

    The public is footing the bill

    Of course, the public had already voted for Swindon and Wiltshire’s PCC candidate before the controversy against Seed came to light, and the results are being counted right now. If Seed receives the most votes, another election would need to be held.

    Pownall argues:

    The question is why the British taxpayer should have to fit the bill for the re-run of this election and why the Conservative Party should even be allowed to stand another candidate.

    Seed needs to be expelled

    Although Seed admits that he is disappointed that he isn’t running for PCC, he is still keeping his prestigious Tory councillor position. He said:

    I will continue with my work as a local councillor and within the local community, to which I have dedicated my life for the past 20 years.

    With his family ties to barbaric fox hunting practices, his business ties to the hunting industry, and his habit of hiding the truth, it’s clear that Seed can not be trusted in any positions of power. What will it take for him to be sacked from his council role, too?

    Featured image via Jonathon Seed / screengrab

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Two-tier policing has allowed Dublin’s inner city problems to ‘fester’

    Previously ignored research into policing in Dublin makes for scandalous reading. Because it reveals a potentially “sinister” two-tier policing system operating in Dublin’s north inner city. This system allows people with money to use their influence to get a better response from senior gardaí, whereas people without money can’t do the same.

    And the belief that “police don’t give a fuck” about inner-city Dublin could hold some truth. Because five years after the publication of this research, An Garda Síochána‘s [Irish police force] still hasn’t responded.

    Former garda (Irish police officer) Eunan Dolan conducted this research as part of his 2016 professional doctorate in criminal justice at the University of Portsmouth. Dolan interviewed a broad selection of local people, politicians, and gardaí living and working in the inner city. And sadly, since completing his doctorate, he told The Canary ”not a whole lot has changed”.

    Policing is not the solution to the problems of Dublin’s north inner city. They’re much more deep rooted. But the manner in which policing protects an already heavily resourced business community while allowing problems to “fester and develop” in its working-class community, is an outright scandal.

    C district, the “defence of privilege”

    Dolan’s research roughly covers a 10km squared area of Dublin’s north inner city. In policing terms, this is C district and its main garda station is Store Street. In 2016, it had a population of around 72,000 and is home to O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, and the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC). Dublin city has a population of just over one million people. The report notes that:

    Within its boundaries all facets of modern urban life can be observed from extreme poverty to extreme wealth.

    And while there were efforts to renew the poorer parts of this district, they were:

    efforts to sell the city for private investment

    Which in turn:

    could have an impact on how policing is carried out. The distribution of a public policing service in a deeply divided urban area presents police managers with choices.

    This turned the north inner city into a:

    city…(where)…that defence of privilege leads to the reactionary urbanisation of gentrification, involving the recommodification of previously working-class neighbourhoods for middle-class consumption…meanwhile, the city’s working class… and homeless populations experience, a deepening villianisation…through interlocking scripts of violence, drugs and crime.

    Community opinion

    A community worker had a damning assessment, saying there was “selective policing”, while a youth worker described it as “no policing”.

    The community worker also said:

    It has become kind of endemic now by kids that are… two, three, four, five years of age – six…are looking at the damage that is being done on a daily basis by the thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-year-olds, and it has become a kind of cycle now, especially, in the Sheriff Street [working class part of C district] stretch.

    You can do anything you want to do, to whoever you want to, what you want – there will be no comeback. There will be no charge either police wise or Dublin City Council wise… the attitude is a sure, ah fuck, it is only Sheriff Street… That police don’t give a fuck!

    An anti-drugs worker blamed the chronic heroin problem on a lack of policing in certain areas:

    possibly because there is more political pressure being put on them (the Gardaí) to do certain things in certain areas

    They also said the lack of registered voters allows politicians to neglect the area because:

    nobody from the political perspective is going to drill down to find out what is going on

    Two-tier policing

    C district has large business and residential areas. There’s an affluent and a working-class residential area. But here’s the worrying part. There’s a much closer relationship between gardaí and the business community than between gardaí and working-class residents.

    In December 2013, the chief superintendent said gardaí carried out 13,904 drug-related stop and searches “in the O’Connell Street area”. A Dublin city centre business association was then interviewed for an article which covered these figures. According to Dolan:

    The thrust of the article was that due to all this Garda activity, O’Connell Street was a safe place to do business, as was reflected in the headline “O’Connell Street, one of the safest, says garda chief”

    However, around that same year in Sheriff Street, two primary schools said:

    The general level of lawlessness has reached an all-time high and drugs are being sold openly outside the school in front of the children. Each weekend stolen cars are burned out on the street and twice part of a wall and railings were rammed and demolished.

    And despite the number of stop and searches, there were just 1,336 controlled drug offences detected. That’s a detection rate of around 10%. So what purpose or who exactly are those stop and searches serving?

    According to the research says, local residents believe policing in their area is much different to the financial district:

    open drug dealing in the community was being ignored whilst issues in the IFSC were dealt with straight away

    Community first

    A city councillor said gardaí tolerate drug dealing and antisocial behaviour to monitor it and stop it spreading to other areas. Whereas a CEO of a local business organisation described policing in the area as “excellent” and “very successful”. Another CEO described an operation on O’Connell Street to target drug dealers as “bloody marvellous”. This difference in perception is striking.

    Dolan told The Canary, that policing needs to attune itself to the needs of the community. But this mixture of police harassment and neglect is anything but attuned. And if resources exist to police the business community, surely there are resources to address the chronic needs of the working-class community.

    And it gets worse

    A long-time resident of the area said gardaí won’t interfere with crime as long as it stays on working class streets and away from the financial district. They said:

    I think because we are the back of the finance, keep them contained there, in that little street, as long as they don’t go near the financial centre, you’re okay. I have noticed that, in a lot of stuff, people who do stuff in the financial, they come after them, if they do it in Sheriff Street, it’s okay.

    A local school principal discussed how openly drug dealing happens. They said:

    drug-selling is so open here… I was coming back from a meeting and a parent of one of the pupils in school, he said:’ hi-ya [teacher’s name] as he was selling drugs to somebody. …

    I think there is a group kind of attitude by everyone in society that we [in Sheriff Street] should just be left; we are reckless, we are lawless down here. …

    I don’t think that would be happening in the better off areas…We are [on] prime real estate here… Is there something bigger at play?

    A “sinister” development

    An opposition TD (Irish MP) for the area said:

    it seemed to me, just watching the scenario, there was a period of time, while An Garda Síochána stood away from the situation and allowed it to fester and develop, and then, an initiative was taken to move-in and clean up the area. I always had the sense, and I know it is reflected in this area that, it had more to do with business interests in the city, rather than, residents of the city.

    Then, even more worryingly, they added:

    I couldn’t tell you the number of times people who live in that area would say, listen, there is a character down here dealing drugs. We see them, all the neighbours see them, the kids see them, and you could set your clock by them. They know their routine, yet the Gardaí are staying off them; this is in the mind of the community….

    From a community perspective, they read the message as either, the Garda Síochána doesn’t care or that they are prioritising other places, and other things they might be doing. Or – and this can be really the most sinister reading of all – what is the relationship then between these guys who are at this behaviour and the Gardaí.

    It’s about the land

    Professional people working in the area also feel two-tier policing is at work. They believe because the land is so valuable, people in power are allowing the area to decline. This in turn would push out the community. A cleric said the aim is to:

    slowly strangle the non-middle and nonupper- class to death and that big money is behind this

    Moreover, a local youth worker said there’s a concerted effort to allow the area to deteriorate so it will eventually be handed over to developers. Dolan attributes this to “core policies of neo-liberalism”.

    Another researcher described it as a:

    new phase of capital accumulation in the city that excludes the working class on many levels, economic and social and cultural

    Garda admissions

    One civilian member of An Garda Síochána said even correspondence was divided because:

    Correspondence from the businesses would go directly to the superintendent and they themselves would draft a reply, whilst other correspondence will be sent to a sergeant and the superintendent would not see it, unless it was about a particularly serious matter

    They added:

    because the business community have a louder voice

    A garda inspector revealed why this bias towards business might exist when they said:

    I come from a business background myself

    While one garda believed policing in O’Connell Street was different because:

    people from so-called good areas of Dublin or Ireland go through there, and people like that have the influence in the country, they don’t want to see drug dealers or drug addicts hanging around in the streets. Whereas nobody has any real reason to visit Sheriff Street, nobody cares what goes on in there.

    Another garda described the power of business people:

    if they are unhappy with the policing in the area, they would go to the media and politicians, with whom they pack a fair punch…someone will say to me, if you can’t do it, we will find someone who will

    Extremely concerning

    Finally, another garda told Dolan:

    they expected to be sanctioned if they failed to police the “low-level low impact” issues on O’Connell Street, in the same way that they would be sanctioned for failing to properly investigate murders and serious crime in the residential area.

    So in their eyes, responding to low impact crime in the business district is equal to responding to murder in a working-class area.

    The Canary contacted An Garda Síochána for comment on all of Dolan’s findings. A spokesperson said:

    An Garda Síochána does not comment on third party materials.

    Classist policing as normal

    Over forty years Dolan was a garda, garda sergeant, and detective superintendent in C district. His research paints a “sinister” picture of profit before people. Yet when he submitted his doctorate to the garda research unit five years ago, he got no response.

    So unless people attune themselves to this working-class community’s needs, two-tier and neo-liberal policing will continue.

    Featured image via YouTube – Tom O Mahony & Wikimedia – Kaihsu Tai

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Bristol Police and City Council accused of ‘failure’ to support victim of racial harassment

    A Bristol resident has told The Canary about experiencing two years of racial harassment from her neighbours. She alleges that in spite of video and photographic evidence of the abuse local agencies, including Avon and Somerset Police and Bristol City Council, have treated her and her partner with contempt, and have taken little action to support them as the victims of a race hate crime.

    Two years of racial harassment

    The Bristolian told The Canary about suffering two years of racial harassment and intimidation from her neighbours, including mocking her, placing objects with subliminally racist messages outside their house, and making monkey noises at her. She is a mixed-race woman who’s experienced racist abuse in the past. She lives in Brislington, a predominantly white suburb of Bristol with a history of race hate crimes and attacks.

    According to the Brislington resident, her garden has become a “no-go area”. Sharing her experience of feeling unsafe in her own home, she told The Canary:

    I just keep the doors and windows shut all summer.

    ‘Openly biased’ police officers

    Regarding Avon and Somerset Constabulary’s treatment of the case, the Brislington resident told The Canary about the “appalling”, “aggressive”, “arrogant”, and “totally biased” attitude of Broadbury Road police officers who attended the scene. On a number of occasions, she heard officers “laughing and joking” with her racist tormentors next door. She alleges that another officer told the victim that her racist aggressors are “great people”. In an email to Bristol City Council, inspector Paul Bolton-Jones dismissed the severity of her allegations, explaining that with the “exception [of] the allegation of the monkey noises”, the case is a straightforward neighbour dispute.

    A spokesperson from Bristol Copwatch told The Canary:

    In some cases, white officers attending the scene seemed to either side with the racist abusers, or were actively defensive when issues of race were raised.

    They added:

    If making monkey noises at someone doesn’t qualify as racial harassment, what does in the eyes of Avon and Somerset police? The officers at Broadbury road police station are comprehensively failing to support someone who has come forward to complain that they are being racially harassed.

    Regarding her racial harassment, the Brislington resident told The Canary:

    They’ve never taken it seriously.

    She added:

    Before this I had total faith in the police. … I never realised how openly biased they are.

    Collective failure

    Stand Against Racism and Inequality (SARI) has been working with the Brislington resident since April 2020. They have pushed for a coordinated response to the allegations of racially motived harassment. However, as exemplified by the alleged unsupportive police response, this has been unsuccessful.

    Although SARI sent the neighbour’s letting agents D W Smith & Co letters explaining that their client is “at high risk of being racially abused again”, they have not acted to deescalate the situation. The Brislington resident contacted Bristol City Council “out of sheer desperation” but says she received a “cold” response.

    A spokesperson from SARI told The Canary:

    This has been a long and protracted case and has been very difficult to resolve. So many of the incidents [SARI’s client] has reported are underhand and can be seen as micro-aggressions. We say such abuse can be like death by a thousand cuts as it chips away at people gradually ruining their life.

    Mediate, move, or put up with it

    SARI, Avon and Somerset Police, and Bristol City Council have told the Brislington resident that they are not able to resolve the situation as it stands. Rather than taking decisive action, these agencies offered the victim “two options” – to mediate with her racist aggressors or to move home. The Brislington resident told The Canary that this felt like each agency placed the onus on her to resolve her neighbours’ abusive behaviour. She added that the responses she received from these agencies made her feel like “a problem” for not wanting to move home or mediate with her racist aggressors. She explained:

    I had a Zoom meeting with SARI, the council and the police. And they told me that if these men were kicking a football around the street it would be classed as anti-social behaviour. But making monkey noises… in their own home, that’s not.

    Insisting that they “would never penalise clients who choose not to go for this option”, a spokesperson from SARI told The Canary:

    It is very hard to take criminal or civil action when people make noises or say things inside their home. You must prove their intent to target. Ultimately, however, we know that the situation has led to our client feeling under siege and like a prisoner in her own home. Such cases can take a long time to tackle effectively as intention is hard to prove and evidence.

    They added:

    whilst mediation can be a good way forward with neighbour based cases – we appreciate that victims of hate crime often don’t feel safe to mediate with their abuser.

    In a joint statement, Avon and Somerset Police and Bristol City Council said:

    These cases are often complex and sufficient evidence for prosecution or other enforcement action can be difficult to gather.

    They added:

    When we don’t have the evidence for enforcement action, dialogue through mediation is often the most important tool we have to establish the facts and find solutions, whilst continuing to record and investigate any further reported incidents.

    Expressing her dismay at the lack of policies in place to deal with cases like hers, the Brislington resident told The Canary:

    Bristol City Council needs to be exposed for its lack of race relations policies. They’ve got Black Lives Matter on their website. It’s just a logo, Black lives do not matter.

    Parallels with the racist murder of Bijan Ibrahimi

    A spokesperson from Bristol Copwatch highlighted that this case is particularly concerning given its striking parallels with the events that led up to the brutal murder of Bijan Ebrahimi – another Brislington resident. In 2013, Lee James – Ebrahimi’s neighbour – beat him to death and set his body alight.

    In the seven years leading up to Ibrahimi’s murder, Avon and Somerset Police failed to record “at least 40” of the 73 racially motivated incidents he reported. According to the mutli-agency report which was published after Ebrahimi’s death, the police and Bristol City Council treated him like a “problem”, rather than the victim of multiple race hate crimes. Meanwhile SARI only supported him until 2011. The report asserts “that there was a collective failure of both Avon and Somerset Constabulary and Bristol City Council to provide an appropriate and professional service to Bijan Ebrahimi”. As set out in the 1999 MacPherson report, it identifies institutional racism as:

    The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

    It concludes:

    There is therefore, based on the above definition from The Macpherson Report, evidence of both discriminatory behaviour and institutional racism on the part of Bristol City Council and Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

    A spokesperson from SARI told The Canary:

    We know Bijan’s case all too well and have supported his family since his murder in 2013. Bijan suffered horrific assaults, threats, malicious allegations and still was not believed as he should have been. We never want that to happen again and that is why we do not close cases even when incidents appear low level and are hard to resolve.

    No lessons learned

    Regarding the multi-agency failures that led up to his murder, Independent Police Complaints Commissioner Jan Williams said:

    Bijan Ebrahimi self-identified as a victim of race hate crime, but was never recognised as a repeat victim of abuse who needed help. Instead, his complaints about abusive neighbours were disbelieved and he was considered to be a liar, a nuisance and an attention seeker.

    In 2017, Police and Crime Commissioner Sue Mountstevens said that she is “satisfied that the constabulary has recognised the mistakes that were made and put in place wide-reaching changes which are already embedded today”.

    Bristol Copwatch is concerned that the police and council are following the “same pattern of behaviour” in dealing with the Brislington resident’s case. A spokesperson set out that neither agencies seem prepared to take action to protect the victim. They added that officers at Broadbury Road station – the same station that failed Ebrahimi – have attempted to actively defend the victim’s racist tormentors. They told The Canary:

    Despite conducting reviews and making promises to change, it seems that neither Avon and Somerset Police or Bristol City Council have learnt any lessons after the racist murder of Mr Ebrahimi.

    Calling for urgent change, the Brislington resident told The Canary:

    there’s going to be a tragedy because people can be crushed up mentally, honestly, the strain of it. Like in Broomhill [where Ebrahimi’s murder took place], or someone doing something to themselves, because the strain is immense.

    An institutionally racist police force?

    According to SARI, they currently have “400 active cases […] ranging from bricks through the window, to attacks on children at school to murder”. Bristol has seen a rise in race hate crimes in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. These include an attacker deliberately driving into a young NHS worker, and the brutal murder of Mikhael Hanid.

    In spite of the area’s high incidence of race hate crimes, a 2016 report revealed that Avon and Somerset Police was ranked the worst of Britain’s largest forces at responding to hate crimes. And a 2019 freedom of information request revealed that although individuals have lodged 160 allegations of racism against the force since 2014, only 1% of outcomes were upheld.

    In a joint statement, Avon and Somerset Police and Bristol City Council said:

    Complaints of racially-aggravated harassment are always taken seriously and we work together to record concerns, investigate and support those affected. Where evidence supports further steps we work together to take enforcement action in line with legislation.

    They added:

    Local organisation Stand Against Racism and Inequality have supported the family during this process and we welcome the opportunity to work with them to find solutions where possible.

    SARI told The Canary:

    We are working with the Council and police as much as we can to ensure the situation is taken seriously. We are also looking at a number of other options that we hope will make a difference.

    Living in fear

    In the meantime, the Brislington resident’s neighbours’ behaviour is escalating. She lives in fear that local agencies won’t provide sufficient support until it’s too late.

    Featured image via Oli Woodman/Unsplash

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Police officers charged for allegedly sharing ‘selfies’ of double killing scene

    Two police officers have been charged with misconduct over allegations that they shared photographs of the scene of a double murder. It’s previously been alleged that the officers took ‘selfies’ with the victims.

    “Inappropriate”

    PC Deniz Jaffer, 47, and PC Jamie Lewis, 32, of the Metropolitan Police have been charged after an investigation into pictures which were taken and circulated of sisters Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46. The sisters were stabbed to death at Fryent Country Park in Wembley, North-West London, in the early hours of 6 June 2020.

    Social worker Henry, from Brent in North-West London, and photographer Smallman, from Harrow in North-West London, had met friends the previous evening to celebrate the elder sister’s birthday.

    The Independent Office for Police Conduct watchdog carried out a criminal investigation into allegations that the officers took “non-official and inappropriate photographs” of the crime scene before sharing them on WhatsApp. This has previously been reported by the BBC as an allegation that the officers:

    took selfies next to their bodies.

    The Crown Prosecution Service said on 28 April that both men will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in May charged with one count each of misconduct in public office.

    Danyal Hussein, 18, of Guy Barnett Grove, Blackheath, South-East London, is facing trial in June, accused of the sisters’ murders.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Big Corporations Strike Racial Justice Pose While Continuing to Fund Police

    Minneapolis police officers in riot gear overlaid with logos from Target, Starbucks, AT&T, Facebook and Amazon

    As protests for racial justice erupted around the globe last summer following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, many activists called upon corporate America to step up and fight for racial equality in the workplace and beyond, bringing to light a long history of discrimination toward workers of color. The push prompted a series of sweeping apologies and broad action plans, shifting the goalposts for what would be expected of corporations in their relatively new status as “corporate citizens.”

    Nearly a year later, many major corporations have assumed a similar posture following Chauvin’s conviction on murder charges, reminding the American public of their purported commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Amid mounting evidence that many police departments routinely display both implicit bias and outright racism, reports show that corporate America continues to pour millions of dollars into the police.

    One way corporations funnel money into law enforcement is through police foundations. As nonprofits, police foundations allow police departments to raise unregulated slush funds from undisclosed sources, generally meaning corporations or private foundations associated with wealthy families or individuals. Police have historically used this money to expense weaponry and special equipment that is not covered by their municipal budgets.

    “Police foundations are really good at hiding what they’re actually spending their money on,” Arisha Hatch, vice president of Color of Change, told Salon. “These foundations exist completely off the books.”

    According to Nonprofit Quarterly, there are about 251 police foundations across the U.S. A report last year by the government watchdog LittleSis found that a whole host of well-known corporations have been intimately involved with police foundations throughout the nation.

    One notable example is AT&T. Last year, Sludge found that AT&T was “an active donor” to the Seattle Police Foundation, which according to IRS filings amassed more than $1.5 million in contributions and grants in 2019 alone. Gothamist reported in 2019 that AT&T made an appearance as a “deep-pocketed donor” at the New York City Police Foundation, which collected $9.2 million in contributions and grants over the fiscal year ending in June 2019. Because these foundations are not subject to typical IRS disclosure laws, neither of them reported how that money were spent.

    AT&T is also a “Platinum Partner” of the National Sheriffs’ Association, a pro-police lobbying group that fights to preserve the 1033 Military Surplus Program, a government-run initiative that distributes surplus military-grade weaponry and supplies to police departments throughout the nation. In order to become a Platinum Partner, a corporation must donate at least $15,000.

    Asked about the company’s relationship with law enforcement, an AT&T spokesperson told Salon that the company supports “many civil rights organizations” and is “working with them to redefine the relationship between law enforcement and those they serve to advance equitable justice for all Americans.”

    Kevin Walby, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg, told Salon that any company that makes strong rhetorical commitments to racial equality should not donate to police foundations at all, saying that in doing so, “they are actually backstopping very racist policing practices.”

    Target is another corporate giant with deep ties to the police. On Tuesday, Target CEO Brian Cornell postponed a speaking event in anticipation of Chauvin’s verdict, later telling his employees in an internal memo: “The murder of George Floyd last Memorial Day felt like a turning point for our country. The solidarity and stand against racism since then have been unlike anything I’ve experienced. Like outraged people everywhere, I had an overwhelming hope that today’s verdict would provide real accountability. Anything short of that would have shaken my faith that our country had truly turned a corner.”

    One might assume such concern for racial justice would translate to the company’s spending habits. However, according to government watchdog LittleSis and Sludge, the Minnesota-based retail giant has donated to at least nine police foundations since 2015, including those in Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles. Back in 2014, Target quietly donated $200,000 to the Los Angeles Police Foundation so that its affiliate department could gain early access to surveillance software engineered by Palantir, a company accused of whitewashing systemic racism with its supposed data-driven solutions to policing. Target has also supplied thousands of dollars in grant money to various law enforcement agencies throughout the country. The company reported that by 2011, it had given “Public Safety Grants” to over 4,000 law enforcement agencies. In that same year alone, Target said it had distributed more than $3 million in grants to “law enforcement and emergency management organizations.”

    A Target spokesperson declined to provide more recent figures on grant money. The company also declined to clarify whether its relationships with police foundations remain active, instead providing the following statement: “We also believe that team members and guests should feel safe in their engagements with law enforcement. We support holistic changes in policing that advance more equitable, community-centric policing that is grounded in innovative law enforcement reform best practices.”

    Numerous tech giants, including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, also support the police in ways outlined above. Amazon, for example, which claimed to “stand with [its] Black employees, customers, and partners” following Chauvin’s verdict, has supported the police in a variety of different ways. In 2019, the tech giant reportedly donated up to $9,999 to the Seattle Police Foundation. A company representative told Salon that the company has not donated to the Seattle Police Foundation within the last two years. Salon was unable to confirm this, since the foundation reportedly scrubbed all information pertaining to its corporate sponsors shortly after LittleSis released its report.

    Additionally, Amazon board member Indra Nooyi serves as a trustee on the board of the New York City Police Foundation, according to digitally archived information on the foundation’s website from last year.

    Meanwhile, AmazonSmile, the company’s charity initiative — which allows Amazon to donate 0.5% of proceeds from a sale to the buyer’s chosen charity — has helped pass along donations from customers to numerous police foundations, including those in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Cleveland. (This relationship has been publicly advertised via Twitter.)

    A company representative said that Amazon defers to guidance from the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Southern Poverty Law Center on what organizations meet AmazonSmile’s eligibility requirements. These requirements state that eligible organizations cannot “engage in, support, encourage, or promote … intolerance, discrimination or discriminatory practices based on race.” Just this year, however, the SPLC published a feature calling racial bias in policing a “national security threat.”

    Neither the Seattle Police Foundation nor New York City Police Foundation responded to Salon’s request for comment.

    Coffeehouse giant Starbucks has visibly attempted to go above and beyond in demonstrating its commitment to racial justice. Last year, at the height of the racial unrest following George Floyd’s death, the coffee chain said it would distribute 250,000 shirts bearing the “Black Lives Matter” slogan to employees, flouting its existing ban on any apparel that “advocate for a political, religious or personal issue,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Just this year, Starbucks invested $100 million in “small business growth and community development projects in BIPOC neighborhoods.”

    Following the Chauvin verdict, Starbucks the company released a statement from CEO Kevin Johnson, which read in part:

    Today’s jury verdict in the murder trial of ex-police officer Derek Chauvin will not soothe the intense grief, fatigue and frustration so many of our Black and African American partners are feeling. Let me say clearly to you: We see you. We hear you. And you are not alone. Your Starbucks family hurts with you … We will be here for our partners in the Twin Cities and for each and every BIPOC Starbucks partner as we try to understand the systemic wrongs that lead to inequality.

    One might argue these “systemic wrongs” have been exhibited by the Seattle Police Department. In a 2019 “Use of Force” report released by the Seattle Police, the department revealed that it used force against Black residents at a disproportionately higher rate than white residents. According to the report, more than 31 percent of cases of police force used against males involved Black males, even though they make up around 7 percent of the city’s population. A subsequent “Disparity Review” that year found that residents of color were frisked at higher rates than white residents, even though white people were statistically more likely to be carrying a weapon, and that Seattle officers drew their guns in encounters with residents of color at a higher rate than with white residents.

    In that same year, Starbucks donated two grants totaling $15,000 to promote “implicit bias training” within the Seattle police and help the department host its “2019 banquet gala,” a spokesperson told Salon. The company also “contributed $25,000 to the New York City Police Foundation to help provide protective equipment such as masks, gloves and hand sanitizer, and coordinated the delivery of meals to precincts.” The representative did not say whether there were any accountability mechanisms in place to ensure the money was used appropriately, but did note that the company does “not currently have any funding with the Seattle Police Foundation.”

    When corporations like Target and Starbucks give money to police foundations, it not only presents an ideological contradiction; it also presents a conflict of interest within the department itself, noted Walby, of the University of Winnipeg. “We only hear about donations” to police “when corporations want to celebrate them,” he said. “They want that halo effect. However, there are lots of instances in which the transfers and purchases aren’t made public. It’s an even bigger problem if they’re spending it on money that pertains to the corporation.”

    In 2014, for instance, the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the Los Angeles Police Foundation received $84,000 in donations from stun-gun maker TASER International (now known as Axon) prior to TASER’s contract with the LAPD. In another case, Motorola, a donor to the New York Police Foundation, was later awarded several NYPD contracts, as reported by Politico in 2017. “There’s a real potential for private influence in public policing through police foundations,” Walby said. “It’s appropriate to call this money dark money. Because we can’t really see this money going in. We can’t really see this money going out.”

    As the negative impact of police violence and criminalization becomes increasingly apparent in communities of color, Walby and Hatch argued, continuing to donate to police undermines corporations’ claims to awakened social consciousness. “Police departments across this country have plenty of money,” Hatch said. “They are well-resourced in a way that undermines other programs that could lead to safer and healthier communities.”

    “Any money for police reform just enhances the power base of police as an institution,” Walby said. “The institution can’t change conduct that is institutionalized. The funds should be given directly to community and social development groups, groups that actually have a chance of creating something like equality in our world.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Police apologise and pay damages to protesters supporting Bristol’s ‘Colston Four’

    Avon and Somerset police have issued an apology to four protesters they arrested for peacefully demonstrating in support of the ‘Colston Four’. The force has recognised that its blanket ban on protests and subsequent arrests of protestors was “unlawful”.

    On 25 January, Avon and Somerset Police arrested Ros Martin, Paula Richardson, Rolland Dye and Taus Larsen. The force issued them with fixed penalty notices (FPNs). It had issued a blanket ban on protests, warning that demonstrators could be given a £10,000 fine. Exercising their right to peaceful protest, the four individuals demonstrated outside Bristol magistrates’ court. This was to express solidarity with the Colston Four, the people accused of toppling slave trader Edward Colston’s statue during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

    Unlawful arrests

    Martin and Richardson wrote messages of solidarity on the pavement using chalk. Dye held up a placard, and Larsen cycled around the area playing music. According to Bhatt and Murphy solicitors, they all “wore masks and practised social distancing”.

    In February, Martin told The Canary that police immediately arrested her. Moreover, they failed to follow recommended practice to engage, explain, and encourage those breaching lockdown rules to disperse. Martin said:

    I was alone at the time, there was no other protester, I had a mask on and socially distanced, wrote three words and was immediately arrested.

    In a statement made after Avon and Somerset police’s apology, Larsen said:

    The whole thing was ridiculous. I wasn’t posing any risk to the public, but the police put me in a position which increased the risk to me and to the officers dealing with me.

    Following a legal challenge, Avon and Somerset Police acknowledged that the force’s blanket ban on protests was unlawful. The ban was in breach of Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights which protect freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. As a result, the arrests and FPNs were also unlawful.

    According to solicitors Bhatt Murphy:

    The correct approach would have been to consider whether the individual protest was safe to proceed in its particular circumstances.

    ‘Vindicated’ in their right to protest

    A statement Avon and Somerset Police issued on 22 April said:

    we now accept we misinterpreted the regulations and that the arrests and the issuing of FPNs were unlawful.

    It added:

    We have apologised to them and explained officers’ actions were motivated purely by a desire to protect the health of the public at the height of the pandemic.

    The force has cancelled the fines for the four protesters. And it has payed compensation for their wrongful arrests in a “substantial” out of court settlement.

    Martin said:

    In the week that justice has been served for George Floyd, it is vital that the right to peaceful protest in support of the Colston 4 has prevailed. It is fundamental to our democracy. The locking up of peaceful protestors should never happen.

    Alex Raikes, director of Stand Against Racism and Inequality (SARI), said:

    It is welcome that the Chief Constable has apologised and that justice has been done for our clients. SARI supports peaceful, safe protest as it has been a key aspect throughout history for upholding and protecting human rights.

    What could this mean for other protests?

    Tony Murphy of solicitors Bhatt Murphy concluded:

    The Chief Constable’s acceptance that an outright ban on protest will never be lawful, including during a pandemic, is important. My clients regard chalking messages of solidarity on the pavement as a peaceful, safe and lawful form of in-person protest.

    According to lawyer Gus Silverman, this could be the first time a police force has admitted to unlawfully arresting protesters under coronavirus regulations. This is a significant ‘legal first’ in the wake of ‘brutal‘ policing of Kill the Bill protests in Bristol and elsewhere under coronavirus regulations.

    Featured image via Channel 4 News

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • We Are Fighting for a World Where Ma’Khia Bryant Would Have Lived

    Ohio State University students stage a sit-in demonstration on April 21, 2021, in reaction to the police shooting and killing of Ma'Khia Bryant, 16, the day before.

    Sixteen-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant’s TikTok is going viral. In one particular video, her eyes sparkle. For a cheeky moment, her smile is wide. As she listens to Bryson Tiller, she is styling her hair and reveling in her Black girl adolescence. Devastatingly, now, millions of people are mourning the loss and remembering the life of this Black teenage girl killed in Columbus, Ohio.

    Nicholas Reardon of the Columbus Division of Police shot her four times on Tuesday. As many were celebrating the Minneapolis jury’s decision to convict Derek Chauvin for his murder of George Floyd while others insisted that a conviction would not build a more just world, Ma’Khia died in a local hospital. Her killing is a reminder of the urgency of the ongoing struggles against a murderous system that disproportionately kills Black people and for a world where Ma’Khia would still be with us today.

    Protests started almost immediately at the foster home where Ma’Khia was shot. They have continued since — at the police headquarters and the Ohio State House.

    On Wednesday, students at Ohio State University occupied the student union and held 16 minutes of silence in her memory before they marched downtown. They are renewing their demands from last summer’s student government petition — which garnered over 17,000 signatures — calling on Ohio State University to cut its contracts with the police department, to divest from military gear and to invest in student life. The campaign to remove police from Columbus city schools also released a statement condemning the local police and honoring Ma’Khia.

    We still don’t know much about Ma’Khia, or even who called 911 from a neighborhood in southeast Columbus. In fact, most early reports about Ma’Khia misspelled her name. The only major things we know about this specific police-perpetrated murder are that someone called the police to report being attacked, Ma’Khia had a knife in her hand when police arrived and Reardon shot Ma’Khia multiple times within seconds of arriving.

    Given these scant details coupled with the police body camera footage that shows Reardon shooting at close range into a crowd of Black people, many people have already concluded that the police acted rightly. A growing number of people are arguing that the killing of this 16-year-old girl is justifiable, even though the body camera footage includes no indication that the police ever asked her to put the knife down. The footage includes no indication that the police attempted to break up or deescalate a fight between children.

    Proclaiming the killing of Ma’Khia as justifiable requires erasing the long and inglorious history of police violence against Black people. It normalizes police violence against and criminalization of Black children. More specifically, we must understand her death in the context of the recent history of the Columbus Division of Police’s interactions with Black communities.

    Just last week on Monday, April 12, Columbus police killed 27-year-old Miles Jackson as he lay in a hospital bed in the emergency room of a local hospital. On December 20, 2020, officer Adam Coy of the Columbus Police Department killed Andre Hill as Andre left a friend’s house. Two weeks before Hill’s killing, Columbus police killed 23-year-old Casey Goodson, Jr. as he returned home from running family errands.

    In December 2018, a Columbus police officer killed 16-year-old Julius Tate Jr., allegedly for attempting to sell a stolen item — and then prosecutors charged his 16-year-old girlfriend Masonique Saunders for Julius’s murder. Masonique was not even present when police killed Julius. But the police alleged that Masonique was Julius’s accomplice, and prosecutors relied on that allegation to charge Masonique through the “felony-murder rule.” Masonique pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and serving a three-year sentence in juvenile detention for a murder she did not commit.

    These are just some of the names of Black people recently killed and criminalized by police in Ohio’s capital city. It’s important to understand what policing of Black communities looks like in Columbus to begin to grasp why so many Ohioans are protesting and chanting in solidarity with Ma’Khia, calling for everything from police reform to police abolition.

    The everyday violence of policing warrants our attention and frankly, our rage. And yet, it often feels like a steep uphill battle to discuss how police criminalize, target, harm, and kill Black girls and women all over the U.S. The hesitancy some folks have around mobilizing around Ma’Khia because she had a knife and was engaged in a fight is at least partially rooted in our collective inability to see Black girls as vulnerable and in need of protection.

    This invisibility prompted the release of the #SayHerName report by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Andrea Ritchie and the African American Policy Forum. It’s not hard to imagine a police officer responding to a violent situation involving white teenage girls in a less lethal way. We’ve seen video after video of police de-escalating scenarios with armed white people who are acting violently, even threatening the lives of police officers. But that’s not what policing offers Black girls like Ma’Khia.

    Yet Ma’Khia deserved more than somewhat less-violent policing. She warranted care and investment. She deserved a full life.

    Policing is never about care. And that is why so many are demanding that we rethink the meaning of public safety. Police do not make us safer. Police do not make Black children safer. Not at school. Not on university campuses. Not at home. As the body camera footage shows, police escalate. The killing of Ma’Khia is yet another painful reminder of why a growing number of people are focusing their energies on building alternatives to policing and demanding that we defund the police. It’s a reminder why so many people are agitating to remove the police from our homes, communities, and schools — and eventually abolish policing altogether.

    Ma’Khia Bryant isn’t a mythical, perfect victim, nor does she need to be for us to unequivocally affirm that her death was unnecessary. She’s someone who forces us to contend with our values and challenge our continued investment in a system of policing that sees killing a Black girl with a knife as the only reasonable and effective response. The question we need to ask is not whether Reardon had the legal right to kill her, but rather: Didn’t Ma’Khia and the other people involved in the altercation deserve to live? Someone in that altercation called for help. We believe in a world where everyone involved lives to share their stories and their needs. We are fighting to build a world where Ma’Khia’s needs, and the needs of the girls around her, are met. We are fighting for a world in which Ma’Khia could still be making TikTok videos and showing off her hair-styling techniques. She should be here to see her video go viral.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cities Drop Most Charges Against BLM Protesters as Cops Fail to Provide Evidence

    Portland police officers search for stragglers after dispersing a protest against the killing of Daunte Wright on April 12, 2021, in Portland, Oregon.

    At least 90 percent of charges against Black Lives Matter protesters in a dozen jurisdictions have been dropped, dismissed or not filed, according to an analysis by The Guardian. Such a high percentage suggests that the police may have been arresting people simply to suppress dissent.

    In Houston and Los Angeles, The Guardian found, 93 percent of charges were either dropped or never filed; in some cities like Dallas and Philadelphia, that number rose to 95 percent of charges dropped or never prosecuted. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, 100 percent of 127 cases related to peaceful protesting were dropped.

    The extremely high percentage of protest-related charges ultimately being dropped or dismissed suggests that police may have been using arrests as a tactic to prove that the protests were unruly and unlawful. As political commentators from both parties disparaged the movement for racial justice, media outlets kept tallies of arrests from the protests.

    Arresting more people and racking up charges, even if they’ve now been shown to be baseless, became a way for police to justify officers’ violent and deadly behavior.

    “What they try to do is spin it and say ‘Look at how unlawful protesters are as is evidenced by all of these arrests that we’ve made,’” Tyler Crawford, director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild, told The Guardian. “Then they hope people have stopped paying attention after six, 10, 12 months when prosecutors say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to drop these charges because these people shouldn’t have been arrested.’”

    Arrests at the Black Lives Matter protests helped fuel a false version of events being pushed by people like former President Donald Trump. Trump painted protesters, not police, as violent and called for “law and order” — a call the right latched on to during the presidential election.

    Even though activists across the country pointed out last year that it was the police who initiated violence at most protests, the right wing has still taken the opportunity to pass anti-protest bills aimed at punishing and suppressing demonstrators.

    The charges analyzed by The Guardian bolster the idea that protester suppression was the end goal. Though police sometimes used curfews as excuses to cruelly tear gas protesters and disperse crowds in 2020, officers rarely filed charges for low-level transgressions like curfew violations, the publication found. Instead, officers filed felony charges like assault and looting with no evidence, ultimately forcing the charges to be dropped or dismissed.

    In Detroit, where 93 percent of charges have been dropped, one district court judge dismissed more than 100 cases because the police refused to provide basic evidence like body camera footage. Perhaps more egregiously, most tickets issued by Detroit police were written by officers who were not even at the protests and thus could not have witnessed the alleged crime, according to National Lawyers Guild and Detroit Justice Center attorney Rubina Mustafa.

    Police often forced these charges onto people. In many instances across the country, police “kettled” protesters by corralling demonstrators into a closed area, not allowing them to leave, and then charging them with refusing to comply with orders to leave or for violating curfew. The thousands of arrests and charges made during last year’s protests served to fill out police departments’ false narratives, even as they forced protesters to defy orders.

    The high proportion of charges being dropped is also a stark illustration of how left-wing protesters are punished or face the threat of punishment much more often than right-wing protesters. An analysis of protests from last year found that police are three times more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than right-wing ones.

    There’s evidence that protest suppression, especially against left-wing protesters in the U.S. and internationally, is getting worse. A recent letter filed by 400 leading experts shows that people demonstrating for the climate movement, for instance, are being criminalized for protesting.

    Meanwhile, state legislators, largely Republicans, are filing a stunning number of anti-protest laws. Some bills criminalize protesting in what appears to be a stark infringement of First Amendment rights to assembly and freedom of speech that the right wing pretends to revere. Others propose legal protection for people who run over protesters with their vehicles or shoot them.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • After Daunte Wright’s Death, Pressure To Get Police Out Of Traffic Enforcement

    After she heard that police had killed Daunte Wright during a traffic stop outside of Minneapolis, Eilanne Farhat said she first reacted with “deep exhaustion, heartbreak, and sadness.”

    Then she was disturbed. Farhat, executive director of Take Action Minnesota, told The Appeal she was struck by how frequently stories of police killings of unarmed people, often people of color, have made headlines in recent years. 

    Since 2015, at least 135 unarmed Black men and women have been killed by police during traffic stops, according to a January investigation by NPR. Now, after Wright’s death and other recent violent encounters between Black people and police, experts and advocates say it’s past time for cities to move traffic enforcement away from law enforcement.

    The post After Daunte Wright’s Death, Pressure To Get Police Out Of Traffic Enforcement appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Chicago Police Officer Shot 13-Year-Old Adam Toledo With His Hands in the Air

    Chicago Police Officer Shot 13-Year-Old Adam Toledo with His Hands in the Air

    Protesters in Chicago took to the streets to condemn the police killing of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Latinx boy, after bodycam video released by the Chicago police showed Toledo had his hands up in the air when a police officer shot him dead on March 29. Police initially described the incident as an “armed confrontation,” but the video shows Toledo raised his hands after being ordered to do so. He was killed within 20 seconds of the officer leaving his car to chase him down a dark alley following a report of gunshots in the area. “A Chicago police officer murdered Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old. There is no other way to describe what we saw in the video,” says Rey Wences, a community organizer based in Chicago’s Little Village. We also speak with Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez, a Chicago alderperson, who says city officials spent weeks disparaging Adam Toledo before releasing the bodycam footage. “Lori Lightfoot ran as a reformer. She ran on transparency,” Rodríguez-Sanchez says of Chicago’s mayor. “She’s doing exactly the opposite of that.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: A warning to our viewers: The following story contains graphic descriptions and footage of police violence.

    Protesters took to the streets of Chicago Thursday night to condemn the police killing of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Latinx boy. Police bodycam video released by the Chicago police shows Adam had his hands up in the air when a police officer shot him dead March 29th. Adam was a seventh grader at Gary Elementary School. The Chicago police initially described the incident as an “armed confrontation,” but the video shows Adam raised his hands after being ordered to do so. He was killed within 20 seconds of the white officer leaving his car to chase him down a dark alley following a report of gunshots in the area. The shooting took place on Chicago’s West Side in the largely Latinx neighborhood of Little Village. The Toledo family’s attorney, Adeena Weiss-Ortiz, described the killing as an “assassination.”

    ADEENA WEISS–ORTIZ: By now, all of you have seen the videos of Adam Toledo. They are especially moving, saddening, distressful, to see a 13-year-old boy shot at the hands of an officer. For those of you with children, you can relate to some of the pain that the Toledos are feeling today. Those videos speak for themselves. Adam, during his last second of life, did not have a gun in his hand. The officer screamed at him, ‘Show me your hands!’ Adam complied, turned around. His hands were empty when he was shot in the chest at the hands of the officer. He did not have a gun in his hand, contrary to the reports made earlier today.

    AMY GOODMAN: The police officer who shot Adam Toledo has been placed on administrative duty. Eric Stillman had four use-of-force reports and three complaints filed against him since 2017.

    This comes as Chicago police have faced intense scrutiny since 2014, when a white officer shot and killed Black teenager Laquan McDonald, and police were accused of a cover-up.

    We go now to Chicago, where we’re joined by two guests. Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez is a Chicago alderwoman and Rey Wences is a community organizer based in Chicago’s Little Village.

    We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Rey, let’s begin with you. You’ve been in the streets. In fact, you went to Adam’s elementary school. Is that right? You, too, went to Gary Elementary School. Talk about what you understand took place and what you’re calling for.

    REY WENCES: Yes. What I understand took place is that a Chicago police officer murdered Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old. There is no other way to describe what we saw in the video, as a cold-blooded murder.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the progression of when you heard that Adam was killed and then how the police bodycam footage was released, in addition, what the mayor said.

    REY WENCES: Yes. I live in Little Village. This community is pretty close. There’s many groups that just communicate via different text message groups and things like that. So, the night that Adam was murdered, the community already knew that something had happened. Myself, I live in a block a couple of blocks away where he was murdered. And the reaction was instant. Community members already knew that the Chicago Police Department would try to cover this up.

    It is also disgusting, the way in which the city has managed this. Shortly after finding out that Adam had been murdered, we also found out that his mom had gone to the Chicago police district office, District 10, to report that Adam had been missing. And it took two days for his mother to find out that he had been murdered by the Chicago Police Department.

    So, the reaction and the feeling in the community is of outrage, anger, disgust. And really, what we’re asking for is the same thing that we’ve been asking for years. Since Laquan McDonald was murdered and before, we’ve been asking to defund the police, to invest in our communities. And when the city — when the mayor goes on a press conference and cannot answer the question of how the city could have prevented this, that means that she’s not listening to the people that have been telling her, “Defund the police.” These are the reasons why people get murdered, because they think that more training will save lives, but actually it’s the complete opposite, as we have seen.

    AMY GOODMAN: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot spoke at a news conference Thursday ahead of the release of the police bodycam footage of the officer fatally shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

    MAYOR LORI LIGHTFOOT: Even as our understanding of this incident continues to evolve, this remains a complicated and nuanced story. And we all must proceed with deep empathy and calm and, importantly, peace. … As the investigation into the police shooting that took Adam’s life continues, I urge everyone: Reserve judgment until the Civilian Office of Police Accountability — that’s COPA — has done its work.

    AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot speaking yesterday.

    MAYOR LORI LIGHTFOOT: We have to do more, starting with reforming the Chicago Police Department’s policies, and particularly the foot pursuit policy. I said this in August of 2018, and here we are now in 2021. Foot pursuits put everyone involved at risk — the officers, the person being pursued and bystanders. We have to do better.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. I want to bring in Chicago Alderwoman Rossana Rodríguez. If you can respond to the release of the footage, and what you learned from this footage — clearly, the city was preparing, the mayor was preparing the city for it — that was different from what you understood happened before?

    ALD. ROSSANA RODRÍGUEZ-SANCHEZ: Well, absolutely, it was a very different — very different story, once we had an opportunity to see the video. And I feel like, for almost two weeks, we kept hearing arguments disparaging the character of a 13-year-old, talking about two sides, talking about the feelings and the trauma of officers. And when we had the opportunity to finally see the video, what we saw was a very scared 13-year-old kid that was complying with the orders of the officer, that was raising his hands. And it has been devastating for all of us. We feel a little bit more broken today in the city.

    AMY GOODMAN: Rossana Rodríguez, you’re a mom, as well?

    ALD. ROSSANA RODRÍGUEZ-SANCHEZ: I am. I cannot watch that video without seeing my child’s face on it, because that could be any of our children that are outside in the community.

    AMY GOODMAN: You think about the way young people are treated who are white versus Black and Latinx. I think of Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, who had a long gun, who was given water by police, who gunned down two Black Lives Matter activists. And even as people pointed to him and the police were there, he was able to walk away. He gunned them down and killed them.

    ALD. ROSSANA RODRÍGUEZ-SANCHEZ: Oh, absolutely. The lack of respect for the lives of people of color nationally by police, but particularly in the city of Chicago, what we have seen, it’s incredible. This would not have happened in a white neighborhood in Chicago. This would not have happened in a wealthy white neighborhood. A young person in that context would have been given the benefit of the doubt. And that did not happen with Adam. Adam was executed without even being given a chance to fully comply with the orders of the officer.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, what are you calling for, as an alderwoman in Chicago?

    ALD. ROSSANA RODRÍGUEZ-SANCHEZ: So, we have been making a really big push in the city of Chicago with other socialists and progressives to reallocate money from police and put it into services for our communities and into resources for our communities. It seems to me that this city — and nationally, but particularly in Chicago — we continue to be obsessed with punishment, obsessed with deploying the police to communities. COVID has hit us, and the service that we have readily available to provide to people was police. Police was doing wellness checks. The mayor of Chicago spent $281 million reimbursing the police for COVID expenses, at a moment when there is so much need.

    If we don’t want young people to be in gangs, then we need to give them the resources that they need. We need to meet the needs of communities. And it is unquestionable that we are spending $1.7 billion in police in Chicago to have these results. The Chicago Police Department has not complied with a consent decree for the third year in a row. They have missed the majority of the deadlines for the consent decree trying to reform itself. The Chicago Police Department has demonstrated that it is resistant to reform.

    And the only way forward now is to reduce contact with the public, to defund police so that we can fund the services that are actually going to keep our communities healthy and whole and are going to be able to heal our communities. One of the things that I introduced was Treatment Not Trauma, which would deploy clinicians and EMTs to deal with mental health emergencies and nonviolent emergencies, just like the CAHOOTS model in Eugene. We’re being fought on this. And there’s no need to. The mayor allocated $1 million for a pilot for emergency crisis response, when what we’re seeing in cities like L.A. or New York is $23 million, $25 million allocated for this kind of work. It is impossible to heal this city if we continue putting money into the police.

    AMY GOODMAN: And what about Lightfoot’s response, appointed as president of the Chicago Police Board by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel before she became mayor?

    ALD. ROSSANA RODRÍGUEZ-SANCHEZ: Lori Lightfoot ran as a reformer. She ran on transparency. She’s doing exactly the opposite of that. We have a unity ordinance right now that could create a civilian police accountability board. She’s resisting it. She doesn’t want it, even though she ran on it. So, I am incredibly disappointed in this mayor. And we’re going to continue to fight to get transparency despite of the mayor.

    AMY GOODMAN: Adam’s mother, Elizabeth Toledo, released a statement about her son. She said, “He had a big imagination and curiosity since he was a little baby. He was goofy and always cracking jokes, making everyone laugh. He loved animals and riding his bike. Adam was really into zombies. And the zombie apocalypse. He even had this zombie apocalypse bag packed and ready to go.”

    Rey Wences, if you can talk about the narratives that were put forward before this video was released, in the last weeks, to demonize him, particularly around gangs?

    REY WENCES: Yeah. I mean, just listening and reading the statement that the mom gave, it really breaks my heart.

    The ways in which Adam has been characterized in the last two weeks have been really disturbing. There were many instances that media, even local media, played into this by basically questioning his humanity, asking why he was out there at 2:30 in the morning. And the reality is, is that this is an ongoing narrative about young people, about Black and Brown boys in neighborhoods like Little Village, like North Lawndale, like Englewood, where it’s dangerous to be a young boy and be out.

    You know, part of this community has also been organizing against the gang database, because we know just how entrenched this idea of, like Rossana was saying, punishing is in the Chicago Police Department and how they surveil us. And what happened to Adam is the culmination of just a lot of things that have been happening in this neighborhood.

    AMY GOODMAN: Rey, what are the plans, as we wrap up, for the weekend in terms of protests in the streets?

    REY WENCES: Yes, we’re taking the streets. We’re going to Logan Square, which is the neighborhood where Lori Lightfoot lives. This is the message that we’re sending to Lightfoot: She must resign. So should the superintendent. There’s just no room for reform, and there will not be room for reform. We are calling for abolishing the police, and we are calling for the funding of our communities and divesting from police.

    And part of the reason why we’re doing this is because things like this will happen, continue to happen, if change doesn’t come. Adam was two weeks ago. But before Adam, there was Mike. Before Mike, there was Trayvon. And we can come back as to Rekia Boyd and Laquan McDonald. This city is failing young people. And we must take the streets and demand justice for Adam, but also justice for our communities. This is not fair.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Of course, we will continue to cover this. Rey Wences, community organizer based in Chicago’s Little Village, and Chicago Alderwoman Rossana Rodríguez, both of them speaking to us from Chicago.

    When we come back, we look at how one of Derek Chauvin’s expert witnesses, the former medical examiner of Maryland, is being sued by the family of Anton Black, a teenager killed by police in Maryland. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • You will never walk alone: the Hillsborough disaster remembered

    It’s 32 years since 96 men, women, and children died at an FA Cup semi-final on 15 April 1989. It became known as the Hillsborough disaster. The tragedy would come to symbolize Thatcher-era Britain – a byword for class war, corruption and gutter press lies.

    All of those who died that day were Liverpool fans. In the aftermath, the right-wing gutter press and other sections of the British establishment launched a war of slander and obfuscation against the city and its people. This included false accusations that fans had tried to steal from those who lay injured and dying. And that a police officer trying to administer first aid was beaten up.

    Establishment lies

    But the 2012 Hillsborough report laid to rest many establishment lies. Because it found that crowd management plans had been inadequate and too focused on potential fan disorder. It was also discovered that South Yorkshire police (SYP) and police lawyers had altered initial statements:

    Some 116 of the 164 statements identified for substantive amendment were amended to remove or alter comments unfavourable to SYP

    The report said that many of the worst headlines about the disaster, such as drunken violence by fans, had emerged from the police and a local MP, but that the claims were not borne out by the evidence:

    Yet, from the mass of documents, television and CCTV coverage disclosed to the panel there is no evidence to support these allegations other than a few isolated examples of aggressive or verbally abusive behaviour clearly reflecting frustration and desperation.

    Families speak out

    Margaret Aspinall, the chair of the recently disbanded Hillsborough Family Support Group, recently spoke to the Liverpool Echo. Her son James died at Hillsborough, and she urged families to “stay strong” and said that her “thoughts go out to all of the families and survivors”.

    In 2016, an inquest ruled that the 96 had been unlawfully killed. Yet in 2019, a court ruled that the police commander David Duckenfield was not guilty of gross negligence.

    As The Canary reported at the time, the daughter of one victim told the judge:

    With all due respect, my lord, 96 people were found unlawfully killed to a criminal standard. I would like to know who is responsible for my father’s death because someone is.

    Solidarity

    In January 2021, it was reported that two police officers and a solicitor would face trial in relation to the Hillsborough disaster. According to the Liverpool Echo, each will “face a charge of doing acts with intent to pervert the course of public justice”.

    For the Hillsborough families, justice has not yet been delivered. We stand in solidarity with them today.

    Featured image via Linksfuss/Wikipedia

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • AOC Blasts Police Department’s “Accident” Excuse in Daunte Wright’s Death

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) blasted the police department of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, this week for suggesting that the police-perpetrated killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was merely an “accident.”

    At a press briefing on Tuesday, the police department released the body camera footage of Wright being shot in his car. In the video, Kim Potter, the officer who shot Wright (and has since resigned), is shown pointing her gun at close range at Wright while shouting “taser,” before shooting him.

    Police Chief Tim Gannon, who also resigned from the department on Tuesday, described Potter’s action as an “accident.” Ocasio-Cortez disparaged that assertion on Tuesday night, explaining that Wright’s death was emblematic of deeper problems with policing in the U.S. altogether.

    “Daunte Wright’s killing was not a random, disconnected ‘accident’ — it was the repeated outcome of an indefensible system that grants impunity for state violence, rewards it w/ endlessly growing budgets at the cost of community investment, & targets those who question that order,” the congresswoman wrote on Twitter.

    In a second tweet immediately following her first one, Ocasio-Cortez continued to explain her view, pointing out that no reforms could change the system of policing enough to prevent killings like these in the future.

    “Cameras, chokehold bans, ‘retraining’ funds, and similar reform measures do not ultimately solve what is a systemic problem,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That system will find a way — killings happen on camera, people are killed in other ways, retraining grows $ while often substituting for deeper measures.”

    Indeed, the so-called reforms that Ocasio-Cortez describedin her tweet do not address the underlying problems that exist in policing. For example, increased police training won’t teach officers to be more sympathetic to cries of help from their victims when they’re struggling to breathe, which is what happened to Eric Garner and George Floyd.

    Instead, many have advocated for defunding or divesting from police departments, and using the money usually allocated to policing to improve conditions for communities typically targeted by police.

    “We must consider what it would mean to remove policing from all areas of life,” Lacino Hamilton, a formerly incarcerated individual and activist, wrote last year. “That it is an opportunity to build a more caring, more inclusive, and a more economic and politically just society.”

    “Funneling so many resources into law enforcement instead of education, affordable housing, and accessible health care has caused significant harm to communities,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote last summer.

    A growing number of voters support at least partial defunding of the police. A Data for Progress poll published this month found that 65 percent of voters in the U.S. support “reallocating some of law enforcement budgets to support such non-police first responder programs.”

    Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t the only one critical of the claim that Wright’s death was a mere accident. Upon hearing that rationale from the Brooklyn Center chief of police — who also has since resigned under pressure — Wright’s family members expressed outright skepticism on Tuesday.

    “An accident is knocking over a glass of milk. It’s not an accident to take your gun out of the holster,” Jeff Storms, an attorney representing Daunte Wright’s family, said. “It’s not an accident to point your gun. It’s not an accident to ignore the fact that what you’re holding doesn’t weigh the same amount as the Taser you’ve used in training hundreds of times. So don’t tell us it’s an accident, because it undermines the tragic loss of life that this family has experienced.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Outraged Bystanders Describe Witnessing George Floyd Death During Chauvin Trial

    Outraged Bystanders Describe Witnessing George Floyd Death During Chauvin Trial

    Jurors in Minneapolis heard another series of dramatic testimonies during the third day of the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd. A teenage clerk named Christopher Martin at the Minneapolis convenience store outside which Floyd was killed told jurors during questioning that he felt guilty for reporting the fake $20 bill to his manager, who called the police on George Floyd. Jurors also heard a recording of Charles McMillian, who witnessed George Floyd’s death last year, approaching Chauvin to say, “I don’t respect what you did,” as Floyd’s body was being loaded into an ambulance. We air dramatic excerpts from witness testimony on the third day of the murder trial in Minneapolis.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jurors in Minneapolis have heard another day of dramatic testimony in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who’s on trial for killing George Floyd last May by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Chauvin, who is white, is charged with second- and third-degree murder, as well as manslaughter, for killing George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black father. Floyd’s death sparked international protests calling for racial justice.

    Floyd’s arrest and death on May 25th last year occurred after the Cup Foods convenience store called the police accusing Floyd of using a counterfeit $20 bill. To this day, it’s not known if Floyd even knew he had used a counterfeit money. Moments after police arrived at the scene, officer Thomas Lane pointed a gun at Floyd and then pulled him out of a parked car, cursing at him. On Wednesday, a teenage clerk at the store named Christopher Martin told jurors during questioning he felt guilty for reporting the fake $20 bill to his manager, who called the police on Floyd.

    MATTHEW FRANK: What was going through your mind during that time period?

    CHRISTOPHER MARTIN: Disbelief and guilt.

    MATTHEW FRANK: Why guilt?

    CHRISTOPHER MARTIN: If I would have just not taken the bill, this could have been avoided.

    AMY GOODMAN: One of the most moving moments of the trial came Wednesday when Charles McMillian, who also witnessed George Floyd’s death, rewatched a police bodycam clip of George Floyd begging for his life after he was handcuffed by police. A warning to our audience: This clip contains graphic video of police violence.

    GEORGE FLOYD: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

    THOMAS LANE: Thank you.

    GEORGE FLOYD: I can’t breathe.

    ALEXANDER KUENG: Stop moving!

    GEORGE FLOYD: Mama!

    DEREK CHAUVIN: [inaudible], Hobble?

    GEORGE FLOYD: Mama! Mama!

    ALEXANDER KUENG: Yeah, it’s in the —

    GEORGE FLOYD: Mama!

    ALEXANDER KUENG: — I think, one of the front pouches —

    GEORGE FLOYD: Mama!

    ALEXANDER KUENG: — on my right side bag.

    GEORGE FLOYD: Mama! Mama!

    THOMAS LANE: Can we get EMS Code 2, for one bleeding from the mouth?

    DEREK CHAUVIN: You’re under arrest, guy.

    GEORGE FLOYD: All right. All right. Oh my god.

    DEREK CHAUVIN: So you’re going to jail.

    GEORGE FLOYD: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

    THOMAS LANE: Affirm.

    GEORGE FLOYD: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, man.

    ERIN ELDRIDGE: Stop it right here, please. Mr. McMillian, do you need a minute?

    CHARLES McMILLIAN: [weeping] Oh my god.

    MATTHEW FRANK: Just take your time. Let us know when you’re ready.

    ERIN ELDRIDGE: We’ll just give you a moment, Mr. McMillian. I’m not sure if there’s water for you, as well. If you need a break to get some water, let me know. We can take a break.

    AMY GOODMAN: After the break, the 61-year-old African American bystander, Charles McMillian, returned to be questioned about what he saw when police killed George Floyd.

    ERIN ELDRIDGE: What stood out to you about what Mr. Floyd was saying when you saw him on the ground?

    CHARLES McMILLIAN:When he kept saying, “I can’t breathe,” and when he said, “Mama, they’re killing me.”

    AMY GOODMAN: During the trial Wednesday, jurors also heard a recording of Charles McMillian approaching officer Derek Chauvin moments after George Floyd’s limp body was put in an ambulance. McMillian told Chauvin, quote, “I don’t respect what you did.”

    DEREK CHAUVIN: Sir.

    DISPATCHER: Can you advise the fire department, if they’re still with you, they need to go to 36th and Park —

    CHARLES McMILLIAN: What you did, well, I’m objecting. But that’s your job.

    DEREK CHAUVIN: All right. That’s —

    DISPATCHER: — to assist with a [inaudible] arrest?

    CHARLES McMILLIAN: But I [inaudible] respect what you did.

    DEREK CHAUVIN: That’s one person’s opinion.

    CHARLES McMILLIAN: But no, no, no. I’ve got to get in — I’ve got to get in [inaudible].

    DEREK CHAUVIN: We’ve got to — we’ve got to control this — we’ve got to control this guy, because he’s a sizable guy.

    CHARLES McMILLIAN: Yeah. And I tried — I tried to get him — get in the car.

    DEREK CHAUVIN: That looks like he’s — looks like he’s probably on something.

    AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, jurors were also shown police bodycam footage of the bystanders who attempted to save George Floyd’s life as officer Chauvin kneeled on his neck.

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: I’m a firefighter for Minneapolis.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: He’s not responsive right now!

    TOU THAO: OK, so you wouldn’t know. Get off the street!

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: No, I do know.

    TOU THAO: OK.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: He’s not responsive right now! He’s not responsive right now, bro!

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Does he have a pulse?

    DONALD WILLIAMS: No, bro, look at him! He’s not responsive right now, bro!

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Check for a pulse, please. Check for a pulse.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Bro, are you serious? You’re going to just let him sit there with that on his neck, bro?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Let me see a pulse!

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Is he breathing right now? Check his pulse!

    TOU THAO: All right. How long are we going to have this conversation?

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Check his pulse!

    TOU THAO: OK.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Check his pulse, Thao.

    TOU THAO: All right.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Thao, check his pulse. Thao, check his pulse, bro. Bro, check his pulse, bro. You’re bogus, bro!

    TOU THAO: All right. Don’t do drugs, guys.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: You’re bogus. “Don’t do drugs,” bro?

    TOU THAO: Exactly.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: What is that? What do you think that is? You saw — you call what he doing OK?

    TOU THAO: Get back on the —

    DONALD WILLIAMS: You call what he doing OK? You call —

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Badge number 7162.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: You call what you doing — you call what he doing OK?

    TOU THAO: Are you really a firefighter?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Yes, I am, from Minneapolis.

    TOU THAO: OK, OK. Then get on the sidewalk!

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Bro, you call — you think that’s OK?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: You show me his pulse!

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Check his pulse!

    TOU THAO: OK.

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Check it right f—ing now!

    TOU THAO: Get back on the sidewalk.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: The man ain’t moved yet, bro. The man ain’t moved yet, bro.

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: [inaudible] on the street.

    TOU THAO: OK. Where? Where?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Minneapolis!

    TOU THAO: OK.

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Bro, you’re a bum, bro.

    AMY GOODMAN: One of the eyewitnesses to George Floyd’s murder, the mixed martial artist Donald Williams, told prosecutor Matthew Frank he called 911 after seeing Chauvin put Floyd in what Williams had earlier called a “blood choke.”

    MATTHEW FRANK: At some point, did you make a 911 call?

    DONALD WILLIAMS: That is correct. I did call the police on the police.

    MATTHEW FRANK: All right. And why did you do that?

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Because I believe I witnessed a murder.

    MATTHEW FRANK: And so you felt the need to call the police?

    DONALD WILLIAMS: Yeah, I felt the need to call the police on the police.

    AMY GOODMAN: Another one of the eyewitnesses was an off-duty firefighter and EMT named Genevieve Hansen, who was out for a walk. On Tuesday, she told prosecutor Matthew Frank she wanted to check George Floyd’s pulse and give him chest compressions, but she was prevented from doing so by the police.

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: I was really concerned about — I thought his face looked puffy and swollen, which would happen if you are putting a grown man’s weight on someone’s neck. I noticed some fluid coming from what looked like George Floyd’s body. And in a lot of cases, we see a patient release their bladder when they die. I can’t tell you exactly where the fluid was coming from, but that’s where my mind went. He wasn’t moving. …

    MATTHEW FRANK: What’s the point of doing chest compressions?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Pumping — pumping the blood for somebody that’s not doing that themselves, trying to get a pulse back.

    MATTHEW FRANK: And were you able to do that, any of those steps?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: No, sir.

    MATTHEW FRANK: Why weren’t you able to do any of that?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Because the officers didn’t let me into the scene. I also offered — in my memory, I offered to kind of walk them through it, or told them, “If he doesn’t have a pulse, you need to start compressions.” And that wasn’t done, either.

    MATTHEW FRANK: Is this — are these things that you wanted to do?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: It would have — it’s what I would have done for anybody.

    MATTHEW FRANK: When you couldn’t do that, how did that make you feel?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Totally distressed.

    MATTHEW FRANK: Were you frustrated?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: Yes.

    MATTHEW FRANK: Ms. Hansen, you know, as I told you, we can take our time, so feel free to just take a minute to — if you need a drink of water, go ahead.

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: OK. …

    MATTHEW FRANK: How were you doing that, trying to get the officers to focus on you and get help?

    GENEVIEVE HANSEN: I think, in my memory, I tried different tactics of calm and reasoning. I tried to be assertive. I pled and was desperate.

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s Genevieve Hansen, a Minneapolis firefighter and EMT. Jurors on Tuesday also heard from Darnella Frazier. She was just 17 years old when she used her cellphone to film the killing of George Floyd. Her image was not broadcast on the court television feed because she was a minor at the time of Floyd’s death.

    DARNELLA FRAZIER: I heard George Floyd saying, “I can’t breathe. Please, get off of me. I can’t breathe.” He cried for his mom. He was in pain. It seemed like he knew. It seemed like he knew it was over for him. He was terrified. He was suffering. This was a cry for help. …

    JERRY BLACKWELL: Now, Mr. Nelson asked you a few questions about your video going viral and how that’s changed your life. Remember that, at the end?

    DARNELLA FRAZIER: Yes.

    JERRY BLACKWELL: Would you tell the ladies and gentlemen how your viewing, experiencing what happened to George Floyd has affected your life?

    DARNELLA FRAZIER: When I look at George Floyd, I look at — I look at my dad, I look at my brothers, I look at my cousins, my uncles, because they are all Black. I have a Black father. I have a Black brother. I have Black friends. And I look at that, and I look at how that could have been one of them.

    It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life. But it’s like, it’s not what I should have done. It’s what he should have done.

    JERRY BLACKWELL: All right. Thank you, Darnella.

    JUDGE PETER CAHILL: That’ll finish the answer. Thank you.

    AMY GOODMAN: Now 18 years old, Darnella Frazier, who filmed the police killing of George Floyd. When we come back, we’re going to speak to Mel Reeves of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the oldest Black-owned newspaper in Minnesota, plus Rashad Robinson of Color of Change. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Chauvin Trial Matters, But Real Victory Would Mean Divestment From Policing

    As opening statements begin in Minneapolis for the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, we speak with UCLA historian and author Robin D.G. Kelley, who says a guilty verdict alone would not represent justice for George Floyd. “The real victory would be to end policing as we know it, to end qualified immunity, to end the conditions that enabled Derek Chauvin to take George Floyd’s life and his colleagues to kind of stand there and watch,” says Kelley.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Kelley, I wanted to move on to a couple of other subjects before we end today. I want to turn to the opening statements beginning today in Minneapolis for the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd last May by kneeling on his neck for over nine minutes. Floyd’s death set off a worldwide protest movement. Chauvin is charged with second- and third-degree murder, as well as manslaughter, the jury made up of one Black woman, three Black men, three white men, six white women, and two women who identify as multiracial. George Floyd’s family and friends came together yesterday for a vigil in Minneapolis. This is one of Floyd’s brothers, Terrence Floyd.

    TERRENCE FLOYD: We’re asking the system for the justice. But this gathering we’re doing right now is what’s needed. We’re going to take not one knee, but both knees. Get down. And we’re going to ask God for the justice, because our justice can’t compare to his.

    AMY GOODMAN: Still with us, UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley. Can you respond to what’s happening today in Minneapolis to this trial?

    ROBIN D.G. KELLEY: Sure. First, I’m not really holding my breath over whether or not Derek Chauvin will be convicted. I mean, the jury selection is pretty extraordinary. I mean, given the history of jury selection in this country, it’s great that it’s a little bit more representative.

    But there are two important things to keep in mind. One is that the fact that the city has already provided a settlement to the Floyd family suggests some effort at accountability, but this trial is not so much about accountability. It’s about whether or not the killing reaches a threshold of second-degree murder. But, you know, I’m not — I have to say, I’m not excited about anyone being in a cage, even if you’re a killer. That, to me, is not the victory. The real victory — the real victory would be to end policing as we know it, to end qualified immunity, to end the conditions that enabled Derek Chauvin to take George Floyd’s life and his colleagues to kind of stand there and watch, and to really divest from the kind of death-dealing systems like policing, and invest in life-sustaining policies and institutions that make us safe. I mean, that, to me, that hasn’t been lost. And that’s what that struggle was about in the first place. And to me, that’s what can vindicate, if vindication is even possible, the murder of George Floyd.

    AMY GOODMAN: And I also wanted to ask you about this historic moment in Evanston, Illinois, historic for the whole country. The City Council has agreed to pay Black residents reparations for historic housing discrimination, making it the first U.S. city to adopt such a measure. We talked to Evanston City Councilmember Robin Rue Simmons Friday about this vote.

    COUNCILMEMBER ROBIN RUE SIMMONS: What we passed, actually, was in 2019, a resolution to provide reparations to Black Evanston residents. We passed it with funding from our cannabis sales tax, with an initial commitment of $10 million. And what we passed on this last Monday was the first disbursement or the first remedy, which is going to be in the form of a housing remedy, $25,000 direct benefit to eligible Black residents for home equity, home wealth, acquisition or purchase, any type of improvement, but something that will build wealth through home equity.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Kelley, your response to what’s taken place? And do you see this as a grassroots approach to dealing with this from the bottom up, considering federally it has not been dealt with?

    ROBIN D.G. KELLEY: Exactly, yeah. I mean, I think it’s historic. And we’re seeing the same thing happening — beginning to happen in places like Vermont and elsewhere across the country. Ten million dollars is a good start. And I get the idea, which is that part of what this reparations campaign is trying to do is address the wealth gap, especially around real estate. But I have to say, I’m a little bit — I’m concerned sometimes, because, one, when you pay out — when reparations are paid, sometimes that shuts down all conversations about other kinds of inequalities that are produced by historic racism.

    And we have to ask ourselves really hard questions, like, for example: What does it mean to secure Black property ownership as reparations on stolen land? How does that change kind of racialized property values? I mean, if the property values in Black communities are still lower, how do you address that? Even if you can provide people startup money to put down on a home, how do we address the reasons why Black people are poorer and go to inferior schools? How do we disentangle, say, property values and property taxes from school expenditures or school budgets, like how we actually fund schools?

    And then we have the wealth gap. We also have the wage gap. And part of what I’m going to talk — I have this conversation with Reverend William Barber this afternoon at 3:00 about the Amazon workers, but it’s also about, you know: How do we address these kinds of gaps, even through multiracial, working-class organizing? Because my question, of course, is: Will reparations ensure not just equality, but the dismantling of the kind of racialized structures that devalued our lives, our experiences, our property, our wages in the first place? I mean, and this is something that is really important, because racialized wage differentials are also compounded by gender. How are we going to address that, that women make, women of color make, Black women make less money? How do we deal with other kinds of violences, sexual violence, for example, reproductive violence? You know, that goes way beyond the loss of property. Now, so, I’m not saying I’m against it. I’m just simply saying, as we move forward, this is just the beginning, an opening for a larger question.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Kelley, before we end, I wanted to ask you about the piece you wrote in the Boston Review headlined “Why Cornel West’s Tenure Fight Matters_. Earlier this month, Cornel West announced he’s leaving Harvard to rejoin Union Theological Seminary, after he was denied tenure at Harvard. In this last 40 seconds we have, explain.

    ROBIN D.G. KELLEY: Right, right. Very quickly, I think Dr. West shows enormous integrity by making the decision to leave Harvard to go to Union — go back to Union, in many ways. Why do I say that? Because he could have stayed at Harvard. I mean, the chances of him being fired are pretty slim. And he understands that. He was making a larger statement about what tenure is supposed to represent. That is, the protection of our intellectual and academic freedom. And there’s a relationship between the story you told about Bandy Lee, for example, with Cornel West, that if we can’t speak out, if we can’t do our work and make controversial stands —

    AMY GOODMAN: Three seconds.

    ROBIN D.G. KELLEY: — and not be protected, then we don’t need tenure.

    AMY GOODMAN: Robin D.G. Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, studies social movements. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Activists Counter Anti-Asian Racism Through Community Safety Initiatives

    People march behind a banner reading "AAPI AGAINST HATE" during a protest

    Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition formed to address anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, reported that Asians and Asian Americans reported approximately 3,800 racist incidents, including threats and physical attacks, this past year. More than two-thirds of those reports were about violence against Asian women.

    Reported anti-Asian violence has soared since Donald Trump initially blamed the coronavirus on China, calling it “the China virus” and “kung flu” from his bully pulpit as president. Even after his ouster from the White House, his remarks linking the coronavirus with China continues to spark harassment, threats and violence against Asians and Asian Americans across the U.S.

    On March 16, this violence caught national attention after suspected gunman Robert Aaron Long, a white 21-year-old, opened fire on three Atlanta-area massage parlors, killing eight, six of whom were Asian and Asian American women. Long’s arrest did not deter others from engaging in random violence against Asians, particularly those seen as vulnerable. The following day in San Francisco, a 39-year-old white man reportedly attacked first an 83-year-old Vietnamese man, and then attacked 75-year-old Xiao Zhen Xie, who picked up a stick and fought back, sending her assailant to the hospital handcuffed to a gurney. Xie, who was also taken to the hospital for treatment, suffered two black eyes, one of which is still swollen and cannot open, as well as severe post-traumatic stress disorder from the unprovoked attack. In New York City, five attacks were reported over the weekend.

    Politicians in cities with large Asian populations have condemned these assaults, calling for increased policing. Police departments have announced they will increase policing in Asian communities. These announcements have been denounced by many Asian and Asian American advocacy organizations, which have noted that law enforcement, including police and immigration authorities, have not kept their communities or residents safe, and instead act as perpetrators of racialized and xenophobic violence.

    Calls for policing ignore community-based safety efforts, both those created over the past year as well as more long-standing efforts. They also ignore the long history of systemic violence against Asians and Asian Americans. In the week that followed the shootings, marches, protests and mass demonstrations were held across the U.S.; in many, attendees called for an end to anti-Asian violence while also rejecting calls for more policing.

    “Policing Has Never Kept Sex Workers or Massage Workers or Immigrants Safe”

    On March 18, two days after the shooting, more than 200 racial justice, sex worker, and a wide variety of advocacy organizations co-signed a statement by Red Canary Song, a New York City-based collective of Asian sex workers, massage workers and allies, highlighting the stigma against sex work, as well as the racialized and gendered nature of the Atlanta attack, and refuting the claim that police provide safety.

    “Policing has never been an effective response to violence because the police are agents of white supremacy,” the statement read. “Policing has never kept sex workers or massage workers or immigrants safe.”

    Red Canary Song was created in response to police violence against sex workers and massage workers. In November 2017, police raided a massage parlor in Flushing, New York. Yang Song, a 38-year-old massage worker, fell to her death from a fourth-floor apartment when police attempted to arrest her for allegedly engaging in sex work. Song had previously been sexually assaulted by a person claiming to be a police officer and arrested on sex work allegations two months before.

    Red Canary Song initially formed to provide legal support for Song’s family and assist with funeral expenses. The group then expanded to offer support for other massage workers, connecting them with legal help and medical resources. Organizers also worked with other groups to monitor the city’s human trafficking courts and joined Decrim New York, a coalition demanding that New York decriminalize sex work.

    By the time COVID hit the U.S., Red Canary Song had built relationships through two years of door-knocking, assistance and advocacy. Learning that many of their contacts had lost income, the collective shifted to mutual aid efforts — providing groceries and cash assistance to out-of-work massage workers on a bimonthly basis.

    Yves Nguyen, a Red Canary Song organizer, told Truthout that the organization typically plans to provide groceries and cash to 50 people, but at times, more people show up than anticipated, forcing volunteers to recalculate both funds and food on the fly.

    “Our big dream is community support,” Nguyen said, adding that Red Canary Song would like to see “more community-designated resources, not just our small collective handing out groceries and giving out cash aid.” This dream goes hand in hand with decriminalization, which would prevent police from exploiting and assaulting people who engage in massage work, regardless of whether they are also engaging in sex work.

    Meanwhile, “mutual aid is keeping people safe [by] meeting people’s needs in the immediate that are not being met by the systems that are in place,” Nguyen said, noting that these same systems criminalize Asian migrants, including massage workers, assuming that they are all engaged in criminalized activity. “We’re meeting people’s needs by giving them money, food, supplies, etc., so that they can survive and build and transform the world.”

    “Call on Me, Not the Cops”

    In February 2021, after a video of a young Black man violently shoving a 91-year-old Asian man went viral, actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu offered a $25,000 reward for information about the assailant(s). Their offer drew criticism from Asian and Asian American organizers, who compared it to a bounty at the expense of Black people upholding the white supremacist policing system that systematically targets and kills Black people.

    Cayden Mak, executive director of 18 Million Rising, a national digital advocacy organization for Asian Americans, noted that the actors’ offer “completely takes agency away from the community. Asian American community orgs have been working on police alternatives here for ages.”

    18 Million Rising began in 2012, the same year that Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was murdered. His death immediately set the stage for the group to challenge members to think about safety beyond policing. At the same time, organizers partnered with groups supporting people in prison and immigrant detention, writing letters to incarcerated and detained people and participating in anti-deportation campaigns.

    “White supremacy is invested in pitting us against each other,” Mak told Truthout. In 2020, 18 Million Rising put out “Call On Me, Not The Cops.” It was an abolitionist tool for Asians and Asian Americans to use when talking with family members about safety, policing and police violence against Black people. It also served as a way to talk about the racial divides encouraged by decades of government policies restricting resources, sensationalist media stories pitting Black and Asian communities against one another, and fears about street violence.

    The letter, which is available in 12 languages, notes the desire for safety — and that that desire should not come at the expense of Black lives. “We want the world to be safer, and that means changing what we do,” it states, urging family members to call each other, a friend or a neighbor when they are scared or need help. “Calling someone else instead of the police is a safer option for you and everyone involved. I want you to know I love and care for you and we can make a safety plan together that doesn’t involve the police.”

    Mak also points to ongoing efforts in Oakland to ensure community safety — efforts that would have benefited greatly from Kim’s and Wu’s $25,000 offer. This includes the Community Ambassador Program, originally established by Asian Health Services and the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, to allow formerly incarcerated people to rebuild their relationships with the community. Now, members, who are not always formerly incarcerated, act as volunteer patrols to both deter random street violence and help residents, including acting as escorts to elders and others on their daily errands around the neighborhood.

    “We’re Here for Our Community”

    There is a rich (and often underreported) history of cross-racial solidarity in the United States. Some of the newer safety efforts continue that legacy.

    In Oakland, Jacob Azevedo, a 26-year-old Latino, put out a call to provide an escort to anyone in Chinatown who felt unsafe on the streets. Four others immediately responded to his call and in February 2021, Compassion in Oakland was created. The group now has hundreds of volunteers who work in pods to escort seniors and other vulnerable people on their daily errands, as well as provide translation services and help those with limited English or computer skills.

    In New York, what started as a safety initiative to prevent assaults against women quickly expanded to encompass safety for Chinatown residents. Peter Kerre, a Black Brooklyn resident and founder of Street Riders NYC, saw photos of several women who had been badly beaten at the Morgan Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. Kerre put out a call on social media for volunteers to escort residents who felt unsafe. Hundreds responded. Now, people who need an escort can send a message in English, Chinese or Spanish through SafeWalks NYC’s webpage or Instagram and be walked home by a pair of escorts sporting bright yellow and orange safety vests.

    In February, SafeWalks expanded to Manhattan’s Chinatown, where volunteers spread the word through fliers and word-of-mouth. “We’re here for our community and ready to go into the fire, not to fight but to just show up for our neighbors,” Kerre told Bushwick Daily. “It’s about compassion.”

    “We Have to Build Relationships”

    The Massage Parlor Outreach Project (MPOP) began in 2018 to support massage workers in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District. Organizers took inspiration from labor organizers in Hong Kong and China, who utilized hot pot and shared meals to cultivate space for worker resistance.

    In 2019, the Seattle Police Department raided nearly a dozen massage parlors on the pretext of rescuing trafficking victims. But, said MPOP organizer Shuxuan, the people arrested were charged not with trafficking, but with money laundering and promoting prostitution. Those not arrested were displaced, leaving them more vulnerable to economic exploitation and violence.

    The raids pushed MPOP organizers to organize around safety in spite of policing and raids. But doing so, Shuxuan told Truthout, meant building relationships, a process that takes time. “If we don’t have trust, then no matter what happens, they won’t look [to us] for support. We need to build relationships before another raid or deportation happens.”

    MPOP visited massage workers each month, bringing care packages containing candy, fruits and feminine hygiene supplies. Each package also contained a zine in Chinese with information about Seattle labor laws and health care, including places that did not ask about immigration status.

    When COVID hit, MPOP continued visiting on a bimonthly basis. The group included information in Chinese about COVID, including prevention, testing and now vaccinations, as well as local politics, such as the Black Lives Matter/Defund the Police protests that were either underreported or demonized in Chinese-language media. Shuxuan said that many of the workers saw their incomes drop by half or even two-thirds; some began asking for MPOP’s assistance in navigating unemployment insurance or for assistance applying for small-business grants.

    The day after the Atlanta shootings, Shuxuan and other MPOP organizers visited the dozen massage parlors that remain in the International District. Half of the workers they spoke to had not heard about the shootings, which had yet to be covered in the Chinese-language media. Those who had felt unsafe. COVID had already decreased the number of workers in some parlors; in one instance, a woman was attacked by a man who noticed that she often appeared to be the only person working in the parlor. They discussed safety strategies — leaving for work earlier, walking with their boyfriends, and being more cautious when opening the door to an unknown client. Some suggested that community-based patrols and self-defense classes would help. None said they wanted more policing.

    At 9:30 am on Monday, March 22, approximately 200 people gathered at Seattle’s Hing Hay Park for a vigil commemorating those killed in Atlanta. The morning vigil was scheduled so that massage workers could attend before work. The attendees included Native organizers with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, who tied the shootings to the legacy of colonialism, as well as Black sex workers who showed up in solidarity for their Asian sisters.

    Incarcerated Asian and Pacific Islanders penned a solidarity statement (which did not arrive before the vigil). “The message is about cross-racial solidarity,” Shuxuan reflected. “We all need to see white supremacy and colonialism as the enemy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Attacks on Asian Women Are Fueled by Criminalization, War and Economic Injustice

    An Asian woman wears a mask with "I AM NOT YOUR FETISH" written across it

    When eight people, six of them Asian and Asian American women, were killed in a mass shooting at three massage parlors in the Atlanta, Georgia, area last week, we learned that a white man targeted these parlors to get rid of a “temptation.” His reasoning made transparent the disregard for the lives he took.

    “He made human beings — mothers, sisters, daughters — into something less than human,” said Kai Zhang of the Asian Pacific American Taskforce in New York and co-founder of Red Canary Song during a vigil to mourn lives lost.

    We know so little about these women. Information is passed in trickles and spurts, heavy with silences, unknowns. In the days following the attack, we slowly learned some of their names. However, we don’t know many of the stories that their lives hold. There are things we’ll likely never know, nor should we have access.

    An act of spectacular violence brought these six women into our collective awareness and exposed many other everyday forms of violence that often go unnoticed: the moments of rupture, war and geopolitical upheaval that prompted their migration; the harassment and vitriol that service workers face daily; the compounded indignities brought about by housing insecurity and precarious immigration status.

    Exceptional Forms of Violence Rely Upon and Coexist With Non-Exceptional Forms.

    The targeted killing of Asian American women in a claimed attempt to eliminate sexual temptation is bound up in politics of race, gender and sexuality. Asian American women and femmes being killed and attacked because of toxic masculinity, which is a form of racist, classist and heterosexist entitlement that brings together white supremacy and rape culture, is not new.

    The long history of U.S. racism and imperialism creates forms of violence that draw people in and out in different ways.

    The U.S. permanent war and military occupation in Asia at different points in history — including the Philippine-American War, World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War, to ongoing geopolitical tensions with China in the present — is connected to long-standing violence against Asian women. The targeting of Asia as a foreign threat and an enemy to be eliminated alongside U.S. desires for dominance over Asia work in tandem with the imagination of Asian women as submissive fantasies to be conquered.

    Military encounters were often “first encounters” U.S. soldiers had with Asian women. Local sex industries were created through military occupation. Soldiers presumed sexual access to women’s bodies.

    The desires for Asian submissiveness are also connected to fears of Asian women as dangerous and deviant with regard to the norms of white society. The regulation of race, gender and sexuality through restrictive immigration measures creates ongoing precarities and vulnerabilities for Asian working-class migrant women.

    For example, the Page Act of 1875 was introduced to target Chinese women as sex workers and prohibit entry of immigrants deemed to be undesirable. Or, while many migrants from Asia were formally barred from entering the United States, policies such as the War Brides Act enabled women to migrate with U.S. soldiers. Later, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act would allow large numbers of Asian migrants into the United States, primarily through family reunification provisions and sponsorships.

    However, these conditions of migration created economic vulnerability and dependency, often exposing women to abuse and violence. Roadblocks to naturalization, such as two-year waiting periods and the loss of immigration status for separating from U.S. citizen spouses enabled and incentivized — and continues to enable and incentivize — intimate partner violence by criminalizing attempts to leave. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s lack of adequate social safety nets, such as aid for food and housing, forecloses possibilities for migrant women to independently sustain access to care and safety.

    The collapse of social safety nets and the expansion of carceral systems have worked in tandem to expose working-class Asian migrant women to everyday violence.

    In 1996, the passage of three federal laws further criminalized working-class migrants: the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA); the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA); and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). First came AEDPA, which expanded local law enforcement’s authority to make arrests for immigration law violations and expedited processes of detention and deportation. It has been devastating to Southeast Asian communities — just a week prior to the murders in Georgia, 33 Vietnamese community members were deported. AEDPA also extends U.S. “counterterrorism” measures by giving the FBI more jurisdiction to surveil organizations.

    Later, PRWORA passed, further repealing welfare provisions with a sweeping $54 billion in budget cuts, almost half of which came out of denying benefits to immigrants. This included cutting off undocumented immigrants from federal funding and barring immigrants from benefits during their first five years. Paired with the 1994 Crime Control Act and expanded criminalization of drugs, this also removed benefits for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense. (Notably, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is included as part of the 1994 Crime Bill, effectively linking mainstream feminist anti-violence movements with law enforcement. VAWA affirms law enforcement as the default response to gender-based violence.)

    Additionally, IIRIRA worked to curtail family migration by raising the minimum income guidelines for sponsors as a barrier to petitioning. It also limited immigrant access to temporary public assistance. IIRIRA has also been devastating in its expansion of detention and deportation.

    With reforms to welfare, migration and policing, technologies of surveillance and punishment once applied to domestic welfare recipients also became routinely leveraged against migrants, with the double threats of deportation and detention close at hand.

    Death is deployed through different systems of racialized, gendered and sexualized difference. Feminist scholar Grace Kyungwon Hong reminds us that under our current “structures of disavowal,” existing forms of protecting and preserving life, such as access to benefits, care and safety, coexist with the dispersal of death.

    As We Grieve, We Need to Have Responses to Violence That Don’t Rely on More Violence.

    The U.S. use of military force globally, the militarism of policing and white supremacist attacks on people of color are all intertwined. Thus, police are not the solution for safety from anti-Asian violence. In the wake of the Georgia murders, some cities are deploying specialized police forces and increasing patrols into Asian American communities. However, the presence of heightened policing in Asian American communities has long been tied to ongoing violence against Asians, especially massage parlor workers and other working-class Asian migrants, who have been harassed and targeted by police, and has also resulted in deadly raids.

    In their public statement, members of Red Canary Song, a New York City-based collective of Asian and migrant sex workers, emphasize, “The criminalization and demonization of sex work has hurt and killed countless people — many at the hands of the police both directly and indirectly.”

    We must direct our energy away from systems of police and punishment and toward alternatives to what justice can be. While it may seem we have limited options to respond in moments of loss, grief and tragedy, we can work more expansively and creatively to change our systems to prevent future forms of violence.

    We need ongoing feminist solidarities to address the intertwining of movements for abolition, demilitarization and sex worker rights. This means continuing to work toward ongoing efforts to end policing; for the decriminalization of sex work; for safe and accessible housing; and for building stronger social safety nets. If the Biden-Harris administration means to make good on its promise that “hate can have no safe harbor in America,” it must begin by dismantling the carceral and punitive system that undergirds our immigration policies, many of which they are responsible for.

    As Yves Tong Nguyen of Red Canary Song says, “I want you to care when people are still alive.”

    Note: As of publication on Tuesday, March 23, we are not publishing a full list of the women’s names to respect families’ and loved ones’ wishes. This may change in the future as we get updated accounts from those on the ground. Readers who wish to support families can donate directly.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The real story of the siege of Bristol’s Bridewell police station

    The message from the streets of Bristol on Sunday couldn’t have been clearer. The fight against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill has started. And people are ready to struggle against it tooth and nail.

    On Sunday 21 March thousands of people joined a #KillTheBill demonstration in Bristol, part of a weekend of action that saw protests held in many UK cities. By the end of the day in Bristol, at least three police vehicles were on fire, while a hundreds-strong crowd laid siege to a police station.

    The protesters have been called a “mob of animals” by Avon & Somerset Police, and ‘thugs’ by Priti Patel. Politicians from Labour and the Green Party were quick to line up to express their condemnation too.

    If you’re looking for more condemnation, you won’t find it here. The people who besieged Bridewell Police station were fighting against state violence and authoritarianism, standing up for freedom and for the oppressed. We need to carry on resisting the bill, and standing with those arrested.

    Several Canary reporters joined the protests on the streets of Bristol throughout the day. Here’s the real story of what happened on 21 March.

    Kill the Bill

    Under the cover of a national health emergency, the Tory government has launched the biggest attack on our freedoms since the Public Order Acts of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill passed its second reading in parliament last week. The bill will give the police unprecedented draconian powers to arrest protesters, and will criminalise trespass, effectively outlawing the livelihoods of the UK’s Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

    The timing of the bill’s passage through parliament is no coincidence, coming during the UK’s strictest ever lockdown where protest is completely banned. The government must have hoped that people’s attention would be on the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis, and that even if people did notice, they wouldn’t be able to take to the streets. It was wrong.

    Footage of police brutalising women at a vigil for Sarah Everard spurred more people to take to the streets against the bill in the days before its second reading. As protests erupted in London and across the UK, the government announced that the bill’s progress through parliament would be delayed. But that didn’t stop people’s anger from spilling onto the streets.

    What really happened in Bristol

    At 2pm on Sunday 21 March, thousands of people gathered on Bristol’s College Green to protest the bill. They were met straightaway by police officers filming them. Avon & Somerset Police announced later that day that they planned to prosecute people retrospectively.

    The police filming protesters at College GreenThe crowd was the largest seen in Bristol since last June’s Black Lives Matter demonstration, where Bristolians pulled down a statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston and threw it in the River Avon. Their action has been widely celebrated in Bristol, but Priti Patel called it “sheer vandalism”. The proposed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill includes a clause that makes damaging national monuments punishable by up to ten years in prison.

    The march made its way through central Bristol, accompanied by a samba band and sound systems. As the demonstration reached Castle Park at around 4pm, it became apparent that the marchers weren’t going to be willing to be pushed around by the police. Police officers moved in to give warnings to a small group of protesters sitting in the road. The crowd quickly rushed to their aid, seeing the police off with sheer force of numbers.

    Marchers at the Bristol Kill the Bill demo

    A placard at the Bristol Kill the Bill demo

    As the evening drew on, police unsuccessfully tried to clear protesters off the streets. According to a statement by Bristol Anarchist Federation:

    as things were dying down that police manhandled and attempted to remove a protester who was sitting down. It was after this provocation, at about 6pm that those still up for marching headed down the hill next to the Galleries towards Bristol’s central police station – Bridewell.

    When the crowd arrived at the police station, a group of “young” people reportedly sat down outside the station and chanted. According to the report by the Anarchist Federation:

    At this point, approaching 6.40pm the police had a choice, line up defensively to protect their station perhaps even pull back a little, or escalate and create a dangerous and increasingly violent situation. They chose the latter, and sent in the dogs, literally in the case of the canine units who would soon deploy, and metaphorically in the case of the human officers who baton charged the crowd, striking at the heads of those standing, kicking folks on the floor, and even hitting a young woman sat on the floor hands raised telling them this was a peaceful protest.

    ‘I’m not sure what response they expected’

    The Canary’s Sophia Purdy-Moore was at the scene. She gave us a similar description of the police attack on the protesters:

    I saw police in riot gear hitting protesters round the head with batons. I did also see people at the front throwing bottles at police, but the response seemed disproportionate. The power imbalance felt completely off. At one point it looked as though their horses were going to charge into the crowd of peaceful protesters. The atmosphere was horrendous. There was a real sense of unpredictability and danger in the air after what had been an uplifting day. This all happened while there were still hundreds of people in the crowd (including children), many sitting down shouting: “this is a peaceful protest” in an attempt to de-escalate the situation. It soon became clear that the police were not going to listen. I’m not sure what response they expected.

    People are sick and tired of the police acting with impunity. This is what happens when the state refuses to listen to our demands for justice.

    A statement from the #KillTheBill coalition points out that:

    Ordinary people were charged with police horses, and pepper sprayed

    Self defence

    Myself and another of The Canary’s reporters arrived at the scene shortly after the police attack on the crowd. Several people were on the floor, suffering from the effects of pepper spray. The crowd had successfully defended itself against the police charge, even seizing a police riot shield. A police van that had been driven into the crowd had been graffitied. Protesters were occupying part of the Bridewell Police Station building, as well as a nearby car park. The windows of the police station were cracked.

    After the demonstration, the police told the media that several of their officers had suffered broken bones and other injuries. We know from past experience that police do exaggerate the injuries sustained by officers. But even if police claims are true, the crowd’s self defence might have prevented greater injuries. Protesters have been killed or sustained brain damage after a police attack on a crowd like the one on Sunday. I personally know several comrades who have suffered broken bones at the hands of the police during protests.

    A police officer with a graffitied riot shield outside Bridewell police stationThe police drove several more vans into the protest. But the crowd would not be moved from their siege. Eventually, several police vehicles were set alight. One car was emblazoned with the words: ‘Defund the police’.

    A burning police car at Bristol's Kill the Bill demonstration

    A police car emblazoned with the words 'Defund the Police'
    A police car burns
    An act of resistance against daily acts of police violence

    The siege of Bridewell was an act of resistance against the police violence which is felt daily by communities in the UK. Against the violence routinely faced by protesters. Against police harassment and police killings.

    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.

    Since the killing of Sarah Everard, Sisters Uncut and others have been making efforts to highlight the deaths of women at the hands of the police. A document called #194andcounting shows that at least 194 women have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales, either in state custody or in prison, since the 1970s.

    These figures are heartbreaking. But instead of focusing on the suffering caused by police violence, politicians and mainstream media pundits are busy wringing their hands over a few burnt police cars.

    The violence faced by people in the UK at the hands of the police on a daily basis is a reminder of how important it is to resist this bill, and to stand with those facing police violence.

    Defund the police

    So what do those words, carefully inscribed on the bonnet of a burning police car, really mean? The call to ‘defund the police’ became popular last year, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the US police. According to Kailee Scales of Black Lives Matter:

    So a lot of people are asking, ‘well why defund the police, why not police reform?’ So we’ve tried that. We’ve tried police reform over many many years and still it stays the same. We’ve tried to find out different ways to train police, still things stay the same. Still to this day, every year more than a thousand men, women and children are killed by police. It’s out of control.

    Defunding the police is the only way to stop pouring resources into a system that does not make us safe.

    Solidarity

    Right now – in the aftermath of the siege of Bridewell – we need to look at the real story of what happened, and to listen to the voices of those who took part. The mainstream media is reporting that at least seven people have been arrested, so it’s also of paramount importance that we stand with them and offer them support.

    We need to remember that if we are going to defeat the Policing Bill, then the struggles of the past week are only the first step. We have a long battle ahead of us. We need to stand strong together, and to organise.

    Tom Anderson is part of the Shoal Collective, a cooperative producing writing for social justice and a world beyond capitalism. 

    Photos by Shoal Collective

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • As British loyalists threaten peace, police arrest Irish republicans

    As The Canary reported, loyalist terrorist organisations have withdrawn their support for the Belfast peace agreement. This withdrawal was to protest the EU and UK Brexit protocol which started on 1 January 2021.

    However, despite this threat to peace from British loyalists, it’s Irish republican communities who are predominantly under the police radar. And republican activists also allege MI5 involvement targeting ordinary family homes.

    A double standard?

    On 2 February, there was an Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) “show of strength” in east Belfast. A group of masked people assembled. One media report said the gathering is “linked to internal tensions over drugs”.

    Gatherings of more than six people aren’t allowed in the north under coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown regulations. But despite the size of this gathering, police didn’t appear to intervene. In fact, Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly said the police “made minimal efforts to intervene”. Kelly added:

    the PSNI [police] merely shepherded the gang out of the area.

    Just three days later, a group met to commemorate the 1992 loyalist killing of five people in the Irish republican community. On this occasion, police arrested Mark Sykes after attempting to break up the gathering. Sykes was one of the survivors of the 1992 attack.

    Monitoring republicans

    On 22 February, the “Revolutionary Republican Party” Saoradh, claimed it found “a high tech and advanced military grade listening device” in a working class housing estate in Derry. Saoradh believes this device:

    was deliberately constructed and planted by British Military Intelligence with the sole purpose of eavesdropping and recording potentially months of audio/sound. They then collect the device to charge and extract the collated data and return it to a spot of their choice.

    Then on 8 March, Saoradh claimed it came across:

    armed members of the British Crown Forces who were protecting MI5 agents in civilian clothing, who themselves were installing a new camera onto the mast.

    Arrest of republicans

    Writing in junge Welt on 20 March, Dieter Reinisch said the PSNI and secret service have intensified their activities against Irish republicans. Reinisch notes there’s been a continuous stream of arrests and house searches in early March.

    In fact, on 4 March, the PSNI arrested a 35-year-old woman as part of Operation Arbacia. This operation is part of the PSNI’s investigation into the activities of the New IRA.

    Then, on 18 March, the PSNI raided a family home in a working class republican estate in Derry city’s Creggan area. Saoradh said:

    members of the British Crown Forces were on the streets of Creggan yesterday [18 March], where they invaded a family home, assaulted the occupants, stole property, terrorised children, damaged the house and ransacked it from top to bottom.

    They assaulted children and caused public disorder for almost 12 hours in a heavily built up area, disrupting the lives of residents including the elderly, putting them at risk of injury or worse.

    PSNI response

    Chief superintendent Darrin Jones of the PSNI claims:

    The vast majority of the public welcome the action we are taking against those who are causing serious harm to the community.

    The PSNI told The Canary:

    The operation was led by detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland Terrorism Investigation Unit (TIU) with assistance from District Policing colleagues and Operational Support Department.

    The operation, called Ledging, is a discrete, stand-alone strand of Operation Arbacia, looking specifically at the New IRA’s bomb making activities as well as the group’s storage of explosive devices and equipment.

    Threat to peace?

    The Canary recently reported on British loyalists “blood-soaked” contribution to the 30-year conflict in Ireland. Loyalists called a ceasefire at the end of that conflict, but The Canary article also highlighted how loyalists breached their ceasefire since they signed the peace agreement.

    Now that they’ve officially withdrawn from the agreement, it’s telling that the PSNI is failing to hold loyalists to account. It’s preoccupied with targeting republicans instead.

    Featured image via YouTube – lockdown maddness & Commons Media – This Particular Greg

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • MPs and campaigners demand the home secretary stops police clamping down on protests

    Campaigners, MPs, and peers have written to home secretary Priti Patel. They’re calling for changes to coronavirus (Covid-19) legislation to allow for protests to take place during lockdown.

    Protecting the right to protest

    The letter was organised by Liberty and Big Brother Watch. It calls on the home secretary to provide guidance for police on how to facilitate protests during the pandemic. And it also asks for clarity around laws on the right to protest. The letter emphasises that protest is a human right.

    This comes ahead of further “Kill the Bill” protests to challenge the government’s draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The protests are due to take place nationwide on 20 and 21 March.

    MPs from various parties have signed the letter. However, Network for Police Monitoring co-ordinator Kevin Blowe highlighted that the Tory MPs who signed the letter previously voted for the bill which proposes to “clamp down on protest“:

    Banning protest

    Earlier in March, campaigners tried to secure exemption from lockdown legislation to attend a vigil commemorating Sarah Everard. The judgement handed down suggested “that the human rights of expression and gathering might be considered reasonable excuses in some circumstances”. But police still proceeded to harass and arrest vigil attendees.

    Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo said:

    The harrowing scenes of police officers using force against women at Clapham Common recently were avoidable and wrong. Over the past week, many more demonstrators and even legal observers have been arrested or fined. This stain on our democracy is a direct consequence of this government’s disrespect for the most basic of British democratic freedoms.

    Sam Grant from Liberty added:

    Last week, the police conceded protest is not banned under the lockdown regulations, but used them to threaten then arrest demonstrators anyway. The home secretary must immediately issue guidance to all police forces to ensure socially distanced protests can go ahead and create an explicit exemption for protest in the current regulations. 

    Doughty Street Chambers barrister Adam Wagner highlighted – as set out in the judicial review – that any police force with a blanket ban on all protest would be acting unlawfully:

    Statements from the Metropolitan police, London mayor Sadiq Khan, and Wiltshire’s police constable are not in line with Holgate’s judgement:

    Lack of clarity

    The letter to the home secretary states:

    The absence of clear guidance on these issues has created an entirely unsatisfactory situation, which has persisted to varying degrees for almost a year now. The police have no legal certainty as to their duties and powers, protestors have no legal certainty as to their rights, and there is inconsistent application of the Regulations across the country. This cannot continue.

    Netpol suggested that the confusion created by “state-of-emergency laws and enforcement” is “a very effective way of making people fearful about exercising” their rights:

    The Home Office responded to the joint letter, saying:

    While we are still in a pandemic we continue to urge people to avoid mass gatherings, in line with wider coronavirus restrictions.

    The Home Office also confirmed that stay at home regulations will remain in place until 29 March.

    Featured image via Double Down News/YouTube

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • ‘Kill the Bill’ protests are happening across the country this weekend

    Protests to “Kill the Bill” will be held across the country on 20 and 21 March.

    The bill

    The Tory government’s authoritarian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will not only clamp down on protest but will also target marginalised communities, criminalising the Gypsy and Romany Traveller (GRT) community and introducing more stop and search powers. As the call to action from Cornwall explains:

    The new bill gives the police more power to impose conditions on a protest, including ones they view as too noisy…
    And it’s not just protest. The bill will make trespass an offence, criminalising Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. And it introduces new stop and search powers that will increase racial profiling and harassment.

    The Canary warned earlier this week that:

    The Bill will ban protests that block roads around Parliament. It also allows the police to impose conditions on one-person protests. And it will introduce a new offence, punishable by up to ten years in prison, of ‘public nuisance’ for actions that cause “serious distress”, “serious annoyance”, “serious inconvenience”.  Yes, that’s right. If you cause serious annoyance on a protest, you could go to jail for a decade!

    Oh, and then there’s the ten year sentences for damaging a memorial or statue. Yep – you could get a longer sentence for damaging an inanimate object than the average sentence given to rapists.

    The coalition

    As a result, a coalition of groups is coming together to oppose the bill.

    Sisters Uncut have led the charge against the bill and in women’s demonstrations. In a press release, an anonymous member urged supporters to keep up the pressure:

    The last week has shown that protest works. That’s why they want to ban it, and that’s why we’re fighting back. The coalition that is coming together shows just how many people are angry about the brutal reality of policing in this country, and who are determined to roll back this dangerous extension of state power. Saturday night has shown us that the police are drunk on power, and should not be rewarded with more.

    Policing by consent is a story this country likes to tell about itself. The reality is that policing is unaccountable, aggressive and violent. Targets of police repression – working class people, racial minorities, sex workers and many others – have had enough.

    Take action!

    Not all details have been announced yet, but protests against the bill will be held in:

    Liverpool at 4pm, Saturday 20, location to be decided.

    Bristol College Green at 2pm, Sunday 21.

    Piccadilly Circus, Manchester, 16:30 Saturday 20.

    Leeds, Sunday 21, 5pm, location to be decided.

    Cornwall, Truro, Lemon Quay, Saturday 20, 2pm.

    Newcastle, Grey’s Monument, Sunday 21, 14:00.

    London (Deptford), Deptford High Street, Saturday 20, 12.30pm.

    Plymouth, Charles Cross station, Sunday 21, 2pm.

    Brighton, The Level, Saturday 20, 2pm, information here and here.

    Cardiff, Cardiff Central Police Station, Saturday 20, 2pm.

    Birmingham, Victoria Square,  Saturday 20, 2pm.

    Sheffield, time and date to be announced.

    London, New Cross, Telegraph Park Hill, Saturday 20, information here.

    News that the bill has been delayed is welcome and a victory. But the battle is far from over. And everyone still needs to take urgent action to ensure this repressive bill doesn’t become law.

    Featured image via YouTube screengrab/Real Media

     

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Defend the right to protest, fight back against the police crackdown bill

    Our right to protest is under attack. Protest is being criminalised and it’s urgent that we act now before it’s too late.

    The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is being rushed through parliament. It will give the police powers to impose conditions on protests that they view as too noisy or cause “serious unease”.

    The Bill will ban protests that block roads around Parliament. It also allows the police to impose conditions on one-person protests. And it will introduce a new offence, punishable by up to ten years in prison, of ‘public nuisance’ for actions that cause “serious distress”, “serious annoyance”, “serious inconvenience”.  Yes, that’s right. If you cause serious annoyance on a protest, you could go to jail for a decade!

    Oh, and then there’s the ten year sentences for damaging a memorial or statue. Yep – you could get a longer sentence for damaging an inanimate object than the average sentence given to rapists.

    Home secretary Priti Patel doesn’t like protests. She thinks Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter protesters are ‘extremists’. She wants the police to take more action against anyone who dares to stand up to this government. 

    Meanwhile, a government report into policing is labelling anyone who takes direct action as an “aggravated activist”. It states that the police have gone too far in allowing protests to go ahead. It is also calling for increased surveillance, including the use of facial recognition technology on demonstrations.

    Make no mistake. This is the biggest threat to our freedom to protest that we’ve seen in generations. The police already abuse their powers. This new bill will give them unprecedented power to crackdown on protests. The UK has a long and proud history of protest. And it’s through taking to the streets that we’ve won many of the rights that we now take for granted.

    Our opposition to this bill cannot wait. We need to take action now before many of us end up behind bars for trying to make the world a better place.

    The Network for Police Monitoring is leading the fight against these extra powers with a charter that calls for the protection of protestors’ rights. Over 150,000 people have already supported the campaign to protect the right to protest.

    Get involved today and stop this bill becoming law!

    By Emily Apple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The Answer to Anti-Asian Racism Is Not More Policing

    A man is arrested by cops

    This past year of the pandemic has seen a horrifying uptick in anti-Asian violence and hate crimes in the U.S., many targeting the elderly. From Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year old Thai man who was knocked to the ground, to Noel Quintana, a 61-year old Filipino man who was slashed in the face, many Asian elders have been assaulted and attacked since the pandemic’s onset. Asian people, especially Chinese folks have been subjected to verbal and physical violence — much of which has been fueled by Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric pertaining to COVID-19’s origins. Racial epithets such as “kung flu” and “Chinese virus” have only exacerbated the situation. While some people have donated or raised awareness, others have expressed their grief by calling on more policing as a means for justice. The problem is that more policing rarely results in justice for anyone, and only puts Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color (BIPOC), including Asian people, at risk for more violence.

    From 1977 to 2017, state and local spending on policing increased from $42 billion to $115 billion. Policing is not only problematic, but would further negatively impact the health, well-being, safety, and livelihood of BIPOC and other marginalized people. Research has shown that police brutality has ramifications on Black health, underscoring the importance of reallocating police funds to community-based interventions. It’s linked to death and excess morbidity including fatal injuries, adverse physiological responses, racist reactions that exacerbate stress, arrests and incarceration, and systematic disempowerment.

    Policing is a system deeply rooted in upholding white supremacy and anti-Blackness, while enabling racist systems to inflict harm on communities of color. The origins of policing have been linked to slave patrols that date back to the 1700s who chased down runaway slaves and prevented rebellions from occurring. We see the legacy of this policing today in the mass killing of unarmed and innocent Black people from Trayvon Martin to Eric Garner.

    Additionally, more policing only catalyzes racial tensions between Asian and Black communities — a racial divide that has persisted in large part due to the model minority myth. The stereotype ahistorically and dangerously portrays Asian people as “successful” and able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps even in the face of racism and systemic oppression. It’s used as a weapon to pit Asian people against Black communities by implying that anti-Blackness and white supremacist systems — like policing — benefit Asian people.

    This is a lie. Far from protecting us, policing has also harmed and taken the lives of Asian Americans, such as Angelo Quinto, a 30-year old Filipino American man who was knelt on and killed by Antioch Police, and Fong Lee, a 19-year old Hmong man who was killed in 2006 by the Minneapolis police — the same institution and system that would kill George Floyd, a 46-year old Black man, 15 years later. Policing is a harmful and inequitable system of justice and advocating for more policing in our communities does not mean we will see more justice or less crime. It would only call for more violence against BIPOC communities, especially police brutality and unfair treatment on Black and brown lives, violence that Asian Americans have taken part in as police officers themselves.

    Instead of calling on more policing, we need Asian solidarity with Black and brown communities as a catalyst for tackling white supremacy and the systems that continuously uphold and enable racism. Dismantling these divides requires unlearning the “scarcity mindset,” a belief that tells us that there are not enough resources for everyone’s needs. In Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Lorde highlights “the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us … So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie.”

    Scarcity mindset underpins the lie that we should fight solely for Asian liberation at the expense of others, and ignores an existing history of alliance and successful collaboration between Asian Americans and Black and brown communities. For example, Jesse Jackson, a Black political activist, called for justice for the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American draftsman who was beaten to death by two white men. Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American civil rights activist and Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American social activist advocated alongside the civil rights and social justice movements for Black liberation–which served as inspiration that was used to advance Asian American liberation. So much of Asian American rights that we see today are in large thanks to Black activists and their fight and struggle for freedom. Further, the Delano Grape Strike, one of the most important economic movements in U.S. history, resulted from the collaboration of Filipino and Mexican farmworkers, led by Larry Itliong, César Chávez, and Dolores Huerta. Sadly, much of this history is erased and ignored while conflicts between Asian American communities and other BIPOC, particularly Black communities, are amplified to the benefit of the white supremacist systems that oppress us all.

    While the fight for racial justice is a collective effort, working in solidarity does not mean that we should expect Black communities to do or lead the work. Asian Americans must talk directly with family and friends who believe that “police keep us safe,” giving family members the opportunity to share how they feel before speaking, because family members are more likely to listen when you hear them out first. We must remind our communities of the many examples of America’s racist history toward Asians, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the colonization and denigration of Filipinos, and Executive Order 9066–which incarcerated a disproportionate amount of Japanese people who were “under suspicion as enemies” during WWII, and how this was a prelude to more recent hate crimes such as the murder of Vincent Chin, the targeting of South Asians since 9/11, and prominent Asian Americans like Jeremy Lin speaking about the racist harassment he’s experienced on the NBA courts. You can learn more about having these conversations by following organizations such as AAPI Women Lead and South Asians for Black Lives, both of which have created and shared informative content about speaking with elders or loved ones who might not speak English about breaking anti-Black stereotypes in the household.

    Another way to engage is by learning how to stop xenophobia and harassment targeting Asians in America through bystander training. In collaboration with Hollaback, Asian Americans Advancing Justice offers free bystander and de-escalation training to learn how to intervene when anti-Asian hate and harassment occurs.

    White supremacist systems like policing thrive on the dissonance between BIPOC communities. Asian lives cannot afford to have hate and racism win. Instead of looking to more policing as a solution, we must redirect our grief toward positive healing in the form of solidarity. We must organize together, mobilize together, and stand alongside one another in all spaces, and not just in performative ways. There is a long history of Asian American communities working in collaboration with Black and other communities of color that offers far richer and more beneficial pathways to justice than more police, and as we’ve seen time and again, we’re stronger and safer when we work together for our mutual liberation.

    Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by national media.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Deploying undercover officers to ‘protect women’ is just making us more outraged

    CONTENT WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS REFERENCES TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN THAT SOME PEOPLE MAY FIND DISTRESSING

    It should possibly come as no surprise that the government is seizing upon the murder of Sarah Everard to roll out more Stasi-like undercover policing, all in the name of protecting women. Boris Johnson has announced that the government is going to send plain-clothes police officers to spy on people in bars and clubs around England and Wales. It’s part of a pilot scheme, Project Vigilant, which was launched by Thames Valley police in 2019, and is now going to be rolled out nationwide. The mainstream media is calling it a “drive to protect women“, and a scheme “to catch sexual predators“.

    Spy cops abuse women. They don’t protect them.

    But we’ve seen time and time again that undercover police abuse their powers, deceive women into relationships, and wreck their lives. More than 30 women have been tricked into relationships with spy cops. The exact figure is likely to be higher, because the government likes protecting the identities of undercover policemen who have infiltrated women’s lives. And they don’t like telling us whether the police are still doing it now.

    This latest announcement about deploying undercover police makes a mockery of the Undercover Policing Inquiry that is currently taking place, which should be investigating the disgraceful actions of undercover officers and their bosses. It’s a kick in the teeth to the women participating in that inquiry whose lives were torn apart by police spies.

    People have taken to Twitter to vent their frustration:

    The police aren’t here to protect women

    A serving Metropolitan police officer has been charged with Sarah’s murder. And the subsequent police violence towards protesters on the streets, showed the world that the police are definitely not here to protect women.

    And Sarah’s murder was just the tip of the iceberg. A document called #194andcounting shows that at least 194 women have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales, either in state custody or in prison, since the 1970s.

    The Canary’s Steve Topple reported on statistics which show that between January 2009 and September 2020 there were:

    • 11 murders [of women] involving serving or ex-police officers. Eight were convicted. Three cases are ongoing. But nine of the 11 victims were police officers’ wives or girlfriends.
    • Over 90 charges of, or convictions for, rape among [employees of the criminal justice system]. The majority were against women and children. Several of the offenders committed multiple crimes. Dozens of these were serving police officers.

    And there are a number of other disgusting misogynist incidents involving police officers. I will list just a couple. On 15 March, the Sun reported that a Metropolitan policeman, who was guarding the spot where Sarah Everard was murdered, sent out a meme “containing six images of a uniformed officer abducting a woman”. In 2020, Metropolitan police officers took selfies of themselves next to the bodies of murdered women Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.

    Also in 2020, a police officer from Avon and Somerset was found guilty of gross misconduct for his treatment of a domestic abuse survivor whose ex-partner broke into her house and “punched her head into a wall”. The policeman described the survivor as “anti-men”. The Canary spoke to the woman, who said:

    When you call the police, you expect to be treated with respect. You don’t expect to be treated with prejudice by an officer who clearly has an issue with you as a woman. Misogyny has no place in any police force. Misogyny kills.

    Giving the police more powers to act with impunity

    It’s all too clear to women that the police are institutionally violent towards us. But instead of addressing this, the Tory government is giving them sweeping new powers. The recently passed Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act legalises the criminal activities of undercover officers and agents working for the police, MI5, and other state agencies. The Act doesn’t prohibit murder or torture in the name of undercover work. So, essentially it means spies and their agents will be able to act with impunity.

    Meanwhile, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill currently being rushed through parliament will give police officers even more powers. Sisters Uncut argues:

    As the actions of police at peaceful vigils this weekend show, police abuse the powers that they already have – and yet the government plans to give them more powers in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

    The death of Sarah Everard must be seen in context of the structures of violence against women in this country, which include the police who brutally manhandled grieving women on Saturday, and the routine failures of the police to investigate rape cases as well as their own record of domestic abuse against women.

    It continues:

    The police are institutionally violent against women. Handing them more powers will increase violence against women.

    We need systemic change

    While the government pretends to care by promising to provide us with undercover cops and better-lit streets, the reality is we need complete systemic change. Women are unsafe, whether they’re walking home or already in their house. In fact, 62% of women murdered between 2019 and 2008 were killed by men who were currently, or had previously been, in an intimate relationship with them. No amount of spy cops or street lighting will protect us from the misogyny and patriarchy within our society, ingrained in boys from an early age.

    We don’t trust the police, or the criminal justice system, to protect us. The number of successful rape convictions is at an all-time low.  The Centre for Women’s Justice’s Harriet Wistrich has argued that rape has virtually been “de-criminalised” because it’s so rare that a man will be convicted of the crime. It’s therefore unsurprising that, according to the Office for National Statistics, “less than one in five victims of rape or assault by penetration reported their experience to the police”.

    We are tired Johnson and Patel’s crocodile tears. We are tired of our behaviour being policed, of being told that we must not walk alone at night, just because we’re women. We are tired of being victim-blamed for being assaulted. Together we must fight for radical change.

    Featured image via a Bristol activist, with permission

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.