An interview with Dorothy Roberts, the author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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A recently leaked memo from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reveals that the organization has paused its controversial law enforcement trainings of U.S. police with Israeli military and police forces in response to the movement for Black lives. It shows the power of the movement — which resonates years after its biggest mobilizations, and beyond the borders of this country.
It was not too long — less than two years ago in the summer of 2020 — that people moved by the cases of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, participated in protests across the U.S. Despite the naked white supremacy of the Trump administration, mass protests in the streets drove a conversation about systemic racism and violent policing.
That wave of Black-led protest achieved so much. It confronted deeply entrenched commitments to policing and prisons, huge local budgets for police departments that were considered untouchable, well-organized police unions, and a White House calling for the deployment of troops to repress the marches and rallies. The revolt shaped an urgent conversation that overcame those obstacles — and it made concrete gains.
And the wins went beyond the Black community. The Washington NFL and the Cleveland MLB teams removed and replaced racist mascots that caricature Indigenous peoples after facing years of campaigns demanding such action. The list goes on.
One of the victories that speaks to the ways that the struggle for Black freedom is tied to the freedom of other communities is the suspension of collaboration between U.S. police and Israeli forces.
Those trainings are extensive. It is not an exaggeration to say that every major urban police department in the country undertakes exchanges with Israel. Many small police departments also participate in these exchanges. The ADL is the lead organization facilitating such exchanges. Coordinating with law enforcement agencies, the ADL acts as a go-between for U.S. police and Israel, and it provides funds to support the trips.
The results have been disastrous for victims of both U.S. and Israeli police violence. Israeli military and police have shared tactics that they honed while controlling Palestinians living under Israel’s brutal military rule in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem with U.S. police — practices that the whole world saw in the police brutality against the 2020 protests. Israel has also shared its weapons, such as the “skunk truck” — a vehicle that sprays putrid liquid that is hard to wash off onto protesters — which St. Louis police purchased after the 2014 Ferguson uprising. Indeed, in May of last year when Israeli police in East Jerusalem violently cleared Palestinian worshippers from the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan and attacked Palestinian residents of the city targeted by Israel for removal from their homes, their methods looked very familiar to observers here in the U.S.
Mobilizations asserting that Black lives matter, forced countless people and institutions to answer the question: What side are you on — that of Black people demanding justice, or of police carrying out violence in our communities each day and repressing protests?
The ADL claims to be a civil rights organization. Yet its central practices include attacking Palestinians and critics of Israel. The ADL has presented itself as an expert on counterterrorism and has advised law enforcement on the hallmark “war on terror” surveillance programs — which have led to serious attacks on civil rights — particularly of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern background. The very police departments with which the ADL collaborates so closely have been at the forefront of attacking the civil rights of Black and Indigenous folks, and other people of color. The conflict between the ADL’s stated mission and its actual practice is clear.
That tension led to an internal evaluation of the police trainings with Israel: How could the ADL maintain them as more people raised their voices against both racist policing and Israeli violence against Palestinians?
The ADL’s leaked internal memo shows that it did pause its trainings — quietly — in hopes that no one would notice. However, the fight is not over. While the ADL suspended the training program, it has not ended it. The ADL was compelled to acknowledge how out of step its work is with public momentum in solidarity with the targets of police violence — albeit privately. Ultimately, it is on the public to demand that these programs stop entirely.
The 2020 uprisings pushed the goal of suspending the police trainings across the finish line, but activists worked for years to do community education and protest to call attention to them. The work of campaigns like Deadly Exchange and organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, BYP 100, and the Movement for Black Lives laid a foundation for challenging the police exchanges that found a new vitality in the swelling of the mobilizations.
As we demand an end to the programs altogether, we can take a lead from Durham, North Carolina, whose city council outlawed the police exchanges in 2018. Activists there built a multiracial and multifaith coalition that called attention to police trainings with Israel and Israeli brutality against Palestinians in particular, and framed rights for Palestinians in the context of the advancement of human rights more generally. The coalition won a resolution by the city council that “opposes international exchanges with any country in which Durham officers receive military-style training.”
The work of the movement for Black lives is far from over. Justice must include the fullness of our communities, and it must go beyond our local communities too. Indeed, and our scope for racial justice must extend beyond this country. Events and institutions that may seem far away are, in reality, intimately connected with our communities. There are ties that bind us extending beyond borders: of U.S. military aid and weapons sent to abuse our relatives in Palestine and elsewhere around the world, and of ties between Israeli security forces and U.S. police. Ending police exchanges will help build a world where our ties are of cooperation, solidarity and common pursuits for justice, rather than racism, violence and repression.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Content warning: this article contains material some readers may find distressing
Grassroots groups including the 4Front Project, No Police in Schools, No More Exclusions, Sisters Uncut and Hackney Copwatch have come together to demand an end to the degrading and humiliating practice of strip search, particularly against children. This comes in the wake of news about the Metropolitan Police’s traumatising strip-search of a Black schoolgirl – known as Child Q.
Child Q
On 14 March, the City of London & Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership published its Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review. The review details two Metropolitan Police officers’ strip search of Child Q at her Hackney secondary school in 2020.
Teachers referred the schoolchild to police claiming that she smelled of cannabis. The child’s teachers allowed officers to conduct an intimate search without supervision by an appropriate adult.
The review explains that officers stripped the child and forced her to expose her “intimate body parts”. They made the child – who was on her period at the time – remove her sanitary pad. They then made the child “bend over [and] spread her legs… whilst coughing”.
In her testimony reflecting on the traumatic incident, Child Q said:
Someone walked into the school, where I was supposed to feel safe, took me away from the people who were supposed to protect me and stripped me naked, while on my period.
She added:
I don’t know if I’m going to feel normal again. […] But I do know this can’t happen to anyone else, ever again.
The child has launched civil proceedings against the Met and her school. The force has removed the officers who were involved in the search from frontline duties, but they remain on desk duties.
A systemic issue
According to the review on Child Q’s case, police strip searched 25 other children in Hackney over 2020/21.
And as reported by The Canary in March, a freedom of information request submitted by criminology researcher Tom Kemp found that Met officers carried out over 9,000 strip searches on children between 2016 and 2021.
4Front founder and director Temi Mwale has calculated that this equates to five children every day in the last five years. This includes over 2,000 under 16s and 35 children under the age of 12.
The Met disproportionately uses strip search powers against Black Londoners. Although Black people make up 13% of London’s general population, 35% of the force’s strip searches between 2016 and 2021 were against Black people.
In a powerful video urging people to support the campaign to end strip search, Mwale said:
This is state sanctioned sexual assault. At 4Front more than 60% of our current members have been strip searched more than once. Not just in schools – in police stations, the back of a police van, in the homes of children and even on the street.
A spokesperson for the Met Police told The Canary:
Officers are highly trained around the use of stop and search. Part of the training is around unbiased decision making, unconscious bias and the impact of the use of these powers on communities.
A dehumanising experience
The #EndStripSearch campaign has shared some children and young people’s testimonies of their experiences of strip-search. One young person told youth and community workers:
I got strip searched three times in one night. The first time was enough. The second time was ‘whoa what are you lot doing?’ and the third time I gave up. What can I do? I couldn’t do nothing, so I gave up.
Sharing their experience of officers taunting them during searches, they added:
Things like that can change a person’s mind, you know. From a little kid. Imagine being 14, 15, 16. You’re in a room with grown men, four strangers, grown men telling you take off your clothes, bend over and squat. They’re watching you. They’re watching you – and the funny thing is they are bantering, they’re laughing about it.
Speaking to their dehumanising experience of strip-search, another young person said:
Showing your private parts to the people that you’ve never met before. Just […] feels degrading and it feels like it’s just a very really nasty feeling to be honest about how you feel inside. And afterwards I went back to the cell, feeling very down and not in the right headspace. […] I just felt a lot less human.
Reflecting on the devastating impact that the practice has on children and young people’s wellbeing, Mwale said:
The impact that this is having on Black youth is so extreme and we have to fight for their rights. It’s humiliating, it’s degrading and it’s dehumanising. And the long-term impact on children’s mental health is so significant.
She added:
It should not be legal. If the law says it’s justifiable for the police to strip children naked, then we have to change the law. That’s why we have to end strip search.
Join the campaign to end strip search
Stating that “we do not underestimate the impact that the use of stop and search has on some individuals”, a spokesperson for the Met Police told The Canary:
We work closely with communities in London and understand that stop and search can have a significant and lasting impact on someone, especially an MTIP (More Thorough Search where Intimate Parts are exposed) and strip searches in custody. Every search must be lawful, proportionate and necessary and carried out with respect, dignity and empathy.
But emphasising the need to abolish the practice altogether, #EndStripSearch campaigners say:
Even when ‘safeguards’ are in place, like parents being notified or an appropriate adult acting as a witness, the strip search experience is still one of trauma. A child is always traumatised, whether protocol is followed or not.
They add:
Nothing a child could hide in their body is worth them being sexually assaulted. Whether something is found or not, a child is harmed in a way that has deep ramifications for their mental health, and their future. There is no justification.
The coalition is urging people to promote the campaign to end strip search by galvanising support and sharing information about police’s use of the degrading practice using the hashtag #EndStripSearch. Supporters can keep up-to-date with the campaign by signing up for updates on its website.
Featured image via Oliver Hale/Unsplash (cropped to 770×403 px)
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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On February 18, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a non-binding opinion calling gender-affirming care for trans young people “child abuse.”
On February 22, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Planning Services to investigate parents as child abusers if they support their trans children in accessing care they want and need. He also claimed that teachers, doctors and nurses, as well as members of the general public, could face criminal penalties if they do not report parents and providers who support trans youth.
The Danger to Families
Legally, neither the governor nor the attorney general have the power to define — or redefine — child abuse. And providing trans young people with health care they want and need — and that doctors have provided for roughly a century — is absolutely not child abuse. The law has not changed. Trans health care remains legal in all 50 states.
But what people think the law says matters. Once someone reports suspected abuse or neglect and the state insinuates itself into a family, it can be difficult to get it out again. The fear of state surveillance is real for all families with trans children. But the danger is amplified for those in Texas already vulnerable to child removal and the family policing system. Black, Indigenous, Latinx, poor, and disabled families, as well as parents who are trans, survivors of intimate partner violence, or dealing with drug addiction, are much more likely to have their children removed than other families. They are also less likely to have the resources to leave their home state to seek a safer climate for their families if they choose.
For families in this position, there is no clear safe option.
Parents of trans youth in Texas are now afraid of bringing their children to the doctor or to school, because if they do, teachers, doctors and nurses — who may be afraid of being criminalized themselves, even if the actual risk is very low — could report them as child abusers. But not taking the child to the doctor or to school can also result in the child’s removal from their home.
If a doctor recommends their child start puberty blockers — a safe, reversible intervention that has saved trans lives for years — and the parent moves forward with the treatment, they might be accused of child abuse. If the agency then decides to act on the governor’s word rather than the law, the agency could remove the child until the parents can fight it in court. Meanwhile, being removed from their homes puts children at greater risk for actual abuse: Trans kids are often abused in foster care systems. In this context, knowing that you should win in court is thin comfort.
If the parent doesn’t move forward with gender-affirming care, that doesn’t make their child safe either — their child’s health may deteriorate. And not following a doctor’s advice on medically necessary care for a child can sometimes lead to accusations of medical neglect and child removal anyway. So far, no reported cases involve child removal for failure to treat gender dysphoria, and it seems unlikely to happen given how much providers tend to emphasize consent of both parents and patients in this context. Still, there is no safe option.
For those already entangled in the family policing system, these catch-22s might not come as any surprise. To get or keep custody of your kids, you might be told you have to get and keep a job — while also being told you must never leave your child unsupervised. (The system, of course, will not pay for child care.) If you are unhoused, you might be told you have to get appropriate living quarters for you and your child. (The system, of course, will not pay for housing.) If you have been abused, you might be told you have to stop “exposing” your child to domestic violence, as if you could control the actions of your ex. You might be told not to get arrested, when you have no home and it’s a crime to sleep outside, or when the police pick you up every time you leave your house just because you’re Black, trans, femme and walking down the street.
Where These Attacks Come From
The Texas attorney general and governor’s actions, as well as those of others attacking trans people, seem hypocritical only if you believe their propaganda. Supposedly champions of “parental rights” and “small government,” they want the government to kidnap trans children if their parents choose to love and support them. Supposedly concerned about the risks of unproven treatment on young people, especially treatment that impacts fertility, they have chosen to try to outlaw care that young people understand and want, that no one gets before puberty, and that has proven long-term benefits and little risk, including to fertility. Yet they continue to support intersex genital surgeries performed on infants and children so young they cannot possibly understand or want the intervention, and even though most of these surgeries lack proven long-term benefits and pose significant risks, including to fertility.
But it’s never been about parental rights or health concerns to Paxton, Abbott, or the many others like them. It’s only ever been about power. This quest for power takes the form of trying to advance political careers at the expense of those they don’t think will be able to do anything about it. It also takes the form of trying to create a world order — half remembered and half imagined — where people like them have even more control than they do already, and everyone else either knows their place or has been rendered extinct.
While unprecedented in its specifics, this extreme attack on trans young people, their families and their providers is of a piece with other efforts to impose or maintain that world order. It is a part of the web of criminalization and family policing woven into the fabric of government and society around the country, including in “progressive” states. It is a part of the more than a hundred anti-trans bills that have been introduced this legislative session and the several that passed last legislative session, some of them seeking to criminalize the care that many trans young people’s lives depend on, and almost all attacking trans young people specifically. Those bills themselves are not alone, but part of a package of extreme measures seeking not only to eradicate or contain trans life but also (further) criminalize abortion, homelessness, and Black protest; decriminalize white-perpetrated murder of Black Lives Matter protesters; inculcate schoolchildren in white supremacist values; and suppress the vote of Black, Indigenous, disabled, homeless, trans and non-English speaking folks. It is also a part of a much larger attack on trans life, which shows up in myriad ways, whether it’s the latest hot take on whether trans people ought to exist on the pages of a major newspaper or the harassment that drove the only clinic for trans young people in Texas to close last year.
How to Take Action
Unfortunately, most larger LGBT organizations are poorly equipped to respond to this emergency. That’s for two reasons.
First, for decades, mainstream LGBT organizations have excluded trans leadership. While many now work on trans issues, get funding earmarked for trans communities and no longer refuse to hire trans people, they have by and large kept their boards and executive-level staff cisgender, and they continue to respond with more urgency and resources to threats that target cis LGBQ people. You cannot beat a tidal wave of anti-trans hate while sidelining trans leadership and offering up mealy-mouthed messaging on tolerance cooked up by and for cis people.
Second, for decades, instead of building coalitions with those fighting criminalization and child removal, many of these groups have cozied up to prosecutors under the guise of opposing hate crimes and engaged with family policing systems only by championing the right of same-sex couples to foster and adopt children the system has removed from their families. You can’t beat the intensification and expansion of the family policing system without backing the leadership of the mostly Black women who have been fighting this system for years, much less while backing the other side.
Thankfully, though, large LGBT groups are far from the only resources we have. These coordinated attacks on trans lives demand that we deepen connections among those working for reproductive justice, racial justice, trans liberation and decriminalization. Cis parents of trans young people — and trans young people themselves — would also do well to deepen their connections with trans adults and elders, many of whom have deep experience navigating unsafe environments and severe barriers to care. Additionally, as we fight hard for trans young people to be able to get the care they want and need, we should also be fighting hard for intersex and disabled children to be free from unwanted medical interventions.
We should all be watching for guidance and calls to action from local trans-led groups in Texas and following their lead. We should also be giving them money if we have it. I recommend going to the Trans Justice Funding Project and checking out their recent grantee list — it’s a treasure trove of information about small, trans-led organizations doing important work, organized by state or territory.
It’s also important not to spread misinformation, and to correct it when you hear it. Remember, what people believe the law says matters. And trans health care is absolutely legal. No parent or provider breaks the law by supporting a trans young person’s access to care, in Texas or anywhere else in the country (a court has stopped the Arkansas trans health ban from going into effect thus far). No teacher or social worker breaks the law by not reporting a supportive family. If anyone does face consequences for not denying trans young people care or not trying to get them removed from their homes, we need to be all in to support and defend them.
More generally, trans people need cis people to do the work of educating other cis people on trans issues, and speaking up when they say or do something harmful to trans people, in every context where it happens.
Everyone should be watching the legislative session, and responding to attacks on trans communities — as well as attacks on Black and Indigenous people, cis and trans women, immigrants, pregnant people and those who can become pregnant, and others — by responding to and boosting calls to action from local folks from the affected communities. When considering whether to show up to rallies, contact elected officials, testify at a hearing, give money or otherwise get involved, consider what you would do if your life — or the life of your child — was on the line.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On January 28, Atlanta resident and activist April* joined about 60 racial and environmental justice protesters at Intrenchment Creek Park in the South River Forest — a vital green space that plays a crucial role in the region’s ecology, serving as Atlanta and south DeKalb County’s largest watershed and floodplain.
She was there to protest preparatory work on what Atlanta-area activists have dubbed “Cop City,” an 85-acre, $90 million police militarization and training complex spearheaded by the Atlanta Police Foundation that, if built, would be one of the largest police training facilities in the country. The site would contain several shooting ranges, a helicopter landing base, an area for explosives training, police-horse stables and an entire mock city for officers to engage in role-playing activities.
The protesters marched through the South River Forest to a boring machine being used to collect soil samples in advance of the compound’s construction, where a brief standoff with several workers and DeKalb County sheriff’s deputies ensued. After police reinforcements arrived, protesters say the sheriff’s deputies attacked the crowd, tackling April and other protesters to the ground. She and two others were arrested and jailed on misdemeanor trespassing charges. Another protester faces a felony-level charge of obstructing a police officer.
“It’s the site of basically an environmentally racist attack on the people and forest that exist here,” April tells Truthout about why she took action against the compound. “I see Cop City as giving up this beautiful ecological zone and sacrificing South Atlanta to development … and more police.”
Her January arrest is among the first to take place at the forested site in unincorporated DeKalb County, where organizers have erected at least two tree-mounted structures in an effort to physically delay the clearing work necessary to build the facility. Activists are digging in for the long haul, building barricades and communal living spaces throughout the forest to monitor construction activity and assist tree-sitters. Some are sabotaging construction equipment, while others have begun visiting the site daily as preparations move ahead. They hope to attract more Forest Defenders to the newly established autonomous zone.
Organizers argue that if their presence on the Atlanta Police Foundation’s easement violates the law, so do certain construction activities by the Foundation and its contractors: Workers with the Reeves Young construction company first entered the site on January 24, organizers say, to conduct soil boring and geotechnical engineering to prepare for construction, despite not having a proper permit from the Dekalb County Planning and Sustainability Department for tree removal or land disturbance, as required under Georgia Code § 12-7-7. The Sustainability Department’s permitting division, however, did not respond to Truthout’s request for clarification as to whether the Foundation obtained the required permit.
Defend the Atlanta Forest organizer Elias* tells Truthout that since workers recently finished collecting the soil samples, activists have used a lull in preparatory construction activities to continue building up the outdoor living spaces and coordinating logistical supplies as more people begin to reinforce the scattered encampments. “It’s been pretty chill compared to the few weeks before, when there were construction workers in there every day,” he said.
The movement is also fighting other development projects threatening the South River Forest, including a planned expansion of Hollywood’s Blackhall Studio, which they say would further intensify gentrification in an area that has one of the widest income inequality gaps in the country. Organizers argue both projects would further displace working-class Black people rather than prioritize the kinds of solutions the city and county desperately needs, such as affordable housing.
Rather than investing in supportive social infrastructure, Atlanta has largely responded to the citywide uprisings against the police-perpetrated killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Atlanta’s own Rayshard Brooks by back-tracking on police reform measures and increasing both the Atlanta Police Department’s budget and surveillance capabilities — all while limiting opportunities for public comment.
The Atlanta Police Foundation even paid bonuses to city cops after some staged a sick-out over former Officer Garrett Rolfe’s felony murder charge in Brooks’s killing. Later, City Council Member Howard Shook pushed for additional bonuses paid with taxpayer dollars. Now, the city — and by extension the county — are doubling down on this approach by moving Cop City toward completion, organizers say.
“Rather than addressing the problems with policing that the protests have brought to light, [officials] are more focused on repressing protesters. And [Cop City’s] mock city blocks are sort of exemplary of that,” Elias tells Truthout. “This is where [police] would train to do things like kettling crowds and tear-gassing people and rubber bullets, and just all the different crowd-control methods that we saw in the summer 2020.”
The blockade is the culmination of more than a year of resistance to the planned compound. In September, the Atlanta City Council approved the project despite nearly 17 hours of comments from more than 1,100 constituents across the city, 70 percent of whom expressed firm opposition. Black working-class communities who actually live in the proposed area of unincorporated DeKalb County, and therefore aren’t represented in Atlanta’s City Council, have also opposed the project. The night of the Council vote, at least 12 protesters were arrested after gathering outside then-City Council member Natalyn Archibong’s house.
The Council’s plan sticks Atlanta taxpayers with at least a third of Cop City’s bill, an estimated $30 million, through a public-private partnership in which the city has agreed to lease 381 acres of the South River Forest site to the Atlanta Police Foundation for $10 a year for up to 50 years. The remaining two-thirds of the funding comes from the Foundation’s corporate and other donors, including Coca-Cola; Delta; Home Depot; UPS; and Cox Enterprises, which owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a vocal supporter of Cop City. The Council’s proposal, however, also gives the city the power to terminate the agreement and cancel the project.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens’s office, DeKalb County Commissioner Larry Johnson and the Atlanta Police Foundation did not respond to Truthout’s requests for comment.
Kamau Franklin, an organizer with the Black-led collective Community Movement Builders, tells Truthout that the group, which organizes against gentrification and played a leading role in the fight against the Council’s approval of Cop City, is fully supportive of the nascent blockade in the South River Forest. Franklin says the collective, in addition to campaigning against the Atlanta Police Foundation’s corporate donors and board members, is already working to provide Forest Defenders with resources. He expects some Movement Builders organizers will soon take on more direct roles and responsibilities.
“We think drawing the line at the City Council vote and suggesting that that’s the end of the ball game is sort of ridiculous,” Franklin says. “The fact that the City Council went against the everyday people of Atlanta and decided to pass this, that both the old mayor [Keisha Lance Bottoms] and the new mayor [Dickens] still support this, means that this has now turned into a people’s struggle.”
Franklin says that despite the Council and mayors’ support of the project, community organizers have had some success in ousting council members who backed Cop City in the last election cycle — including, most notably, former Councilor Joyce Sheperd, who introduced the ordinance authorizing the ground lease to the Atlanta Police Foundation.
The struggle has brought activists against police violence together with environmental activists as well as Muscogee (Creek) tribal members, whose ancestors originally inhabited the land before their forced removal in the early 19th century. Highlighting the intersection of Cop City’s social and environmental injustices, they point out that not only is the South River Forest and watershed one of the city’s most important defenses in the face of the worsening climate crisis, it’s also long been the site of racist displacement, enslavement and carceral subjugation.
The land is associated with the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, a complex of farms sold in a land lottery to a chattel slave plantation. After that, it became a city-run prison where incarcerated people were forced to grow crops and raise livestock to feed the populations of other city prisons from about 1920 to nearly 1990, according to the Atlanta Community Press Collective. Today, the area continues to host a shooting range, juvenile detention facility and the Helms state prison.
“This land was Native people’s land which was taken from them, and the fact that the city can find no other better purpose than to build a training center for militarized actions against its citizens shows that there’s a certain continuity of the ideological viewpoint of the city, even with Black officials, around supporting capital, supporting white supremacy, supporting oppressing people who can be used as free labor and/or cheap labor for others, and this is a continuation of that history,” Franklin says.
Former Atlanta resident Rev. Chebon Kernell, a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and a descendant of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, could not agree more. “There are several layers of violence that are taking place with the development of this Cop City in that location,” he tells Truthout. “My hope is that we don’t put something else in its exact same place that will continue the oppression of [Black and Indigenous] communities and peoples.”
In November, Reverend Kernell and other tribal members visited the South River Forest to educate local activists about the history of his tribe and the land, engaging in spiritual practices including stomp dance ceremonies and other rituals at the site. The visit represented the first migration of Muscogee tribal descendants since their forced removal beginning in 1821, with many tribal members connecting with their ancestral homelands for the first time.
Those homelands, the fruits of which have long been cultivated to support the region’s population, continue to provide the “City in the Forest,” as Atlanta is widely known, with important protections against accelerating climate disruption. Conservationists warn that the land not only serves as a crucial filter and buffer for runoff and flooding; it also acts as “the lungs of Atlanta,” in sequestering carbon emissions and providing the greatest amount of tree canopy shade of any urban area in the country.
“By tearing down 85 acres of this forest and turning it into a semi-impervious, built-up area, they are going to have a direct impact, … with [surrounding] neighborhoods experiencing higher urban heat island effects and then having to pay more for their cooling bills in the summertime,” says environmental engineer Lily Ponitz.
Ponitz, a graduate student studying urban planning at Georgia State University, was put on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee by DeKalb County Commissioner Ted Terry in September. The advisory committee was created through an administrative order by former Atlanta Mayor Bottoms on January 4, 2021, in response to criticisms about lack of transparency in Cop City’s public process, which at that point had consisted of just three virtual meetings — two of which did not allow public questions or comments.
The board was initially comprised solely of police and fire department chiefs, Atlanta Police Foundation heads and city employees, but has since opened up to include a broader range of community members. Despite this, Ponitz tells Truthout, the public meetings are still largely dominated by Foundation officials and their development team, with little opportunity for open discussion. “It’s very much like a captive audience of us listening to boosters of the project,” she says.
Ponitz argues that the Foundation is actively mischaracterizing the results of a preliminary environmental assessment and limited secondary investigation of the Cop City site conducted last year by Terracon Consultants, as required under the Foundation’s lease agreement with the city of Atlanta. Terracon’s Phase 1 assessment recommended additional investigation after finding potential for soil and groundwater contamination beneath the site due to several factors including burnt tire activities, old fuel dispensers and containers, an unspecified 20,000-gallon above-ground storage tank, and issues related to a local municipal waste landfill.
The Foundation, Ponitz says, has represented Terracon’s limited secondary investigation as a more comprehensive Phase II environmental assessment in order to argue that it has met its lease requirement. Yet more analysis is needed, she says, as the secondary investigation failed to sample around the 20,000-gallon storage tank, which she argues likely functioned as a “day-tank for mixing concentrated pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers with water to dilute them so they could be sprayed on fields or animals” at the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. In fact, Terracon failed to analyze soil or groundwater samples for presence of any pesticides whatsoever, nor did they analyze for the presence of petroleum hydrocarbons.
“It’s just sketchy,” Ponitz says, referring to the secondary investigation. “I think that [the Atlanta Police Foundation is] using the language of ‘Phase II’ to make us believe that the report is something that it’s not.”
She also worries that historic and ongoing munitions testing pose a risk to South River Forest’s soils and waters — an issue that would only be made worse with the addition of Cop City’s explosives training area and new firing ranges. The Mainline reports that residents have found police grenades containing lead and other toxic chemicals in the area’s already-existing firing range.
Neither the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (GEPD) nor the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Region 4, which oversees the Southeast region, have conducted an environmental assessment, spokespersons for the agencies confirmed to Truthout.
To make matters worse, Atlanta’s South River is already one of the most endangered rivers in the country, having long been plagued by sewage pollution. In fact, a consent decree with the EPA and GEPD gave DeKalb County more than eight years to implement procedures to rein in water pollution, but mass sewage spills have only continued in that time. The county’s deadline has since been postponed to 2027, a move critics argue allows the county to continue active practices of systemic environmental racism against surrounding communities of color.
In fact, the South River Forest area’s ecological benefits and clear need for protection had become so evident over the years that, prior to plans for Cop City, the Atlanta City Council had planned to turn the corridor into a protected park. That’s still what Forest Defenders say they want, arguing Cop City destroys opportunities for green jobs that would have been created under the original plan.
In the face of rising calls for racial justice and the worsening climate crisis, the choice, organizers say, is clear: The city and county must pursue environmental justice by remediating the South River Forest, a life-affirming green space that provides critical protections for all — not build a toxic, militarized police playground that will only further destroy lives and land.
“We see this climate change taking place right before our eyes, yet we do not do anything but more destruction in reaction to it,” Muscogee (Creek) tribal member Reverend Kernell tells Truthout. “My hope is that this ecosystem, this biodiversity that is protected by a forest like the South River Forest will always be there for our well-being, whether it’s producing oxygen, whether it’s producing water, whether it’s producing a place of spiritual retreat, whatever it may be.”
* Names have been changed to protect the identities of activists organizing and engaging in nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience under heavy police surveillance and presence.
*Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that the Old Atlanta Prison Farm was never federally run. Thanks to the Atlanta Community Press Collective for the observation. Truthout regrets the error.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The CIA recently declassified parts of a letter written by two U.S. senators that revealed the existence of a previously unknown bulk spying program that collects and stores Americans’ data. The letter, written by Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, calls for the CIA to reveal the details of the program. It was sent to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in April 2021. Much of the letter remains classified, and neither the senators nor the CIA have provided any specifics about what the underlying spying program entails.
“Among the many details the public deserves to know are the nature of the CIA’s relationship with its sources and the legal framework for the collection; the kinds of records collected [redacted] the amount of Americans’ records maintained; and the rules governing the use, storage, dissemination, and queries (including US person queries) of the records,” the senators wrote. The mention of the CIA’s “relationship with its sources” is likely a reference to the telecommunication companies providing the data, a reminder of the symbiotic roles private companies play in national security surveillance.
The existence of the CIA’s program was first disclosed to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2021, according to Wyden and Heinrich. They became aware of the bulk collection from a report issued by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent executive branch agency whose members have access to classified information. That review, known as “Deep Dive II,” remains classified, but the CIA partially declassified a set of recommendations issued by the board. That document revealed that when CIA analysts enter a search term, or query, into the program, a “pop-up box will appear to remind the analysts” that they need to provide a foreign intelligence justification for the search. Analysts are not required to document that justification; the oversight board recommended requiring it.
Although Wyden and Heinrich, who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said they were only informed about the bulk spying program in March 2021, a CIA official told The New York Times that Congress had already been told about the data collection. That official suggested that the new information in Deep Dive II had to do with the “repository and analysis tools for storing and querying that data after its collection.”
If the CIA is lying to Congress, or misleading members through wordplay and hiding behind technicalities, it would not be the first time in recent memory an intelligence official had done so. In 2013, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Senator Wyden in an open hearing about bulk surveillance of U.S. persons. Wyden asked if the National Security Agency (NSA) collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper responded “no,” later adding “not wittingly.”
Clapper’s obfuscation was a key motivation for Edward Snowden, then an NSA contractor, to leak documents to journalists exposing multiple mass surveillance programs. Following the Snowden disclosures, Clapper referred to his own earlier testimony as “clearly erroneous.”
There have been other episodes of tension, in some cases outright hostility, between intelligence agencies and their congressional watchdogs. At the end of Obama’s second term in office, the Senate Intelligence Committee assembled the most exhaustive accounting to date of the CIA’s role in the post-9/11 rendition, detention and interrogation program. Commonly referred to as “The Torture Report,” the document was designed to expose the CIA’s lies about the efficacy and necessity of torture. In the days immediately before the report was to be released, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose office was the primary author of the report, revealed that the CIA had spied on her staff. Then-CIA Director John Brennan initially denied the allegations, but later admitted the CIA had inappropriately surveilled Senate staffers while they were using a CIA network to conduct their research. The report remains classified, other than an executive summary that was released to the public with heavy redactions.
Although little is known about the newly disclosed CIA bulk spying program, Wyden and Heinrich wrote in their letter that its legal foundation is Executive Order (EO) 12333. That order, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, serves as the authority that governs most covert foreign intelligence activities carried out by the U.S. government. It purportedly bans the assassinations and covert action “intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media,” but the order gives wide latitude for overseas physical and electronic surveillance. Executive orders are issued by presidents, and by definition have not been passed by Congress. Although the intelligence committees in both chambers are supposed to have broad oversight over the CIA, NSA and the rest of the intelligence community, programs and activities governed by EO 12333 generally have more autonomy than those controlled by statutes, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bulk spying may have something to do with collecting “financial data” as it relates to ISIS, as suggested by a different, partially declassified PCLOB report. If it does, it would suggest a familiar pattern in the “war on terror,” namely, intelligence agencies claiming that countering the threat of terrorism requires mass surveillance with no congressional or judicial oversight.
Elizabeth Goitein, codirector of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, reacted to the newly disclosed surveillance program by summarizing the distinctions between the two types of legal authorities. “You might be asking, didn’t Congress end bulk collection? The short answer is no,” she tweeted. “In 2015, Congress passed a law aimed at prohibiting bulk collection when the government is acting under [FISA], but FISA only applies to certain types of surveillance that target U.S. persons or happen inside the United States. When the collection happens overseas or falls into one of FISA’s statutory gaps, it takes place under Executive Order (EO) 12333.”
Goitein added that “most foreign intelligence surveillance actually takes place under EO 12333, not FISA. That means it is subject to no statutory constraints whatsoever, and there is no judicial review or oversight.” When it comes to what prevents the CIA from using this bulk surveillance repository to search for U.S. persons’ data, Goitein writes, “Let’s be honest: nothing.”
The Snowden disclosures partially reveal the nearly limitless authority that intelligence agencies have claimed under EO 12333. The NSA program MYSTIC, revealed based on Snowden’s leaked documents, was “capable of recording ‘100 percent’ of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place,” The Washington Post reported in 2014. The Intercept reported two months later that a MYSTIC sub-program called SOMALGET had targeted the Bahamas, without the country’s government’s knowledge or approval. Both MYSTIC and SOMALGET operated under EO 12333.
Despite the well-documented abuses the CIA carried out under the auspices of the war on terror, and during the Cold War before that, there is very little political will at the moment to abolish the agency. However, the idea has been broached over the decades. In a 1974 speech, then-Senate candidate Bernie Sanders called the CIA “a dangerous institution that has got to go.” In 1991 and 1995, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced legislation to abolish the CIA and move some of its authorities to the State Department. Presidents Truman and Kennedy each expressed their reservations about the CIA’s authority, as did Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
The recent disclosures from Senators Wyden and Heinrich are a reminder that the CIA sees itself as an institution beyond the reach and control of Congress, and U.S. and international law. The agency can’t be trusted, and has repeatedly shown that it can’t be reformed. It may be well past time to resume questioning whether it should exist at all.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In response to the so-called “Freedom Convoys”, Canada’s federal Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act on February 14, reports Jeff Shantz. However, this move by the government should be viewed as a danger to community organisers and the left.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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Canadian socialist Jeff Shantz describes the community counter protests that rose up to challenge the far-right led “Freedom Convoys” this month.
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On 17 February, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner announced the party’s “hardline” approach to law and order. In a shocking statement, the deputy leader urged terror police to “shoot first” and “ask questions second”. People soon took to Twitter to express outrage at Rayner’s disgraceful comments.
Shoot first
Appearing on Matt Forde’s Political Party podcast, Rayner said:
On things like law and order I am quite hardline. I am like, shoot your terrorists and ask questions second.
Explaining her “hardline” approach to law and order, Rayner added:
I want you to beat down the door of the criminals and sort them out and antagonise them. That’s what I say to my local police … three o’clock in the morning and antagonise them.
Black Lives Matter?
The Black Lives Matter movement saw a resurgence in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd in the US. Anti-racist campaigners in the UK highlighted the police’s disproportionate criminalisation and use of force against Black people in this country, particularly those with special educational needs and disabilities or experiencing mental health crises.
A central demand of the anti-racist movement remains a move away from punitive and draconian reactions to criminal justice issues, towards healing and community-centred solutions.
Rayner was among the countless neoliberals to perform solidarity with the anti-racist movement at its peak. In 2020, she expressed solidarity by taking the knee in a bizarre photo opportunity with Labour leader Kier Starmer.
Pointing out Rayner’s bare-faced hypocrisy on the matter, independent media outlet Another Angry Voice shared:
She performatively took a knee for Black Lives Matter …
Then she chuckled away with her grotesque Blairite mate about instilling a "shoot first, think later" mentality in the police, without a single thought about what such a policy would mean for people of colour. pic.twitter.com/h70qZBeY1t
— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) February 17, 2022
And The Canary‘s former editor-at-large Kerry-Anne Mendoza said:
We cannot let Centrist Labour into power in Westminster.
A “Shoot first, ask questions later” police policy is a death sentence for countless people of colour, especially traumatised, disabled & mentally ill.
Didn’t they kill enough of us last time they were in government? Ffs
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza
(@TheMendozaWoman) February 17, 2022Indeed, Rayner’s latest remarks echo Tony Blair’s ‘tough on crime’ approach to criminal justice issues. Blair’s punitive anti-crime policies and legislation created a boom in England and Wales’ prison population, and criminalised many people suffering from addiction and experiencing mental health issues.
Further, evidence demonstrates that such approaches fail to reduce crime.
The policy already exists
Others took to Twitter to highlight the fact that the UK’s terror police already enacts Rayner’s suggested ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ policy. Former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal shared: Former chief prosecutor for North West England Nazir Afzal shared:
Some making out Angela Rayner’s comments about shoot first policy for terrorists is some new policy
It’s been operational anti-terror response to “marauding terrorist threats” for yrs
If faced with man wearing what purports to be “suicide vest” you disable to prevent greater harm— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) February 17, 2022
This is exemplified by the tragic case of Jean Charles de Menezes. In 2005, armed police mistook the Brazilian electrician for a suicide bomber, shooting him seven times at close range and killing him in Stockwell station.
Raising this point, Novara‘s co-founder James Butler tweeted:
The "shoot first" approach lauded by Rayner here led to the police murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005. It would be good if Labour politicians engaged either their brain or their conscience before inane hardman electoral posturing in the press. https://t.co/Obeymfzg45
— James B (@piercepenniless) February 17, 2022
Sam Browse shared:
I walk past this everyday on the way to work. I do not think “shoot first” should be anyone’s approach to these issues. pic.twitter.com/qSPnxmDNXC
— Sam Browse
(@SamBrowse) February 17, 2022And there was this reminder on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Derry:
On the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 17 years after the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, Angela Rayner is very keen for our brave security forces to gun down whichever British citizens they consider in that moment to be a "terrorist". https://t.co/K7s6c8vwea
— Nick (@Nickiquote) February 17, 2022
Another bad day for Labour
Research consultant and Hackney-based activist Heather Mendick set out the only logical response to Rayner’s heinous remarks:
Deselect Labour MPs who support extrajudicial killing, ask questions later.
— Heather Mendick (@helensclegel) February 17, 2022
All in all, this represents a new low for Starmer’s increasingly right-wing Labour Party.
Featured image via Sky News/YouTube
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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A freedom of information (FoI) request on the Metropolitan Police’s use of strip-searches has revealed that Black people remain over represented in the force’s use of the humiliating and degrading practice. A concerning number of children are also represented in the data.
And despite calls to reduce the number of strip-searches conducted by the Met, Nottingham criminology researcher Dr Tom Kemp found an increasing trend of the force’s use of the draconian measure.
Disproportionate use of strip-searches
An FoI request by Kemp found that Met police carried out a staggering 172,093 strip searches in the past 5 years.
In spite of calls to reduce the force’s use of the humiliating and traumatic practice, Kemp noted a peak of around 34,000 strip-searches in 2020 which “continued a trend in increasing use of strip searches from before the pandemic”.
Kemp’s analysis of the data revealed that 33.5% of strip-searches carried out by the Met police in the last five years were on Black people. This amounts to 57,733 strip-searches. However, Black people only make up around 11% of London’s population.
Conversely, white British people – who make up nearly 45% of London’s population – accounted for 27% of strip-search victims.
A concerning number of children were reflected in the number of strip-searches the Met has enacted. Indeed, the force carried out over 9,000 strip-searches on children in the last five years, including more than 2,000 under-16s.
In an open letter published in the Guardian in 2015, a group of children’s rights organisation leaders raised concerns abut safeguarding and child protection when it comes to strip-searches. The letter read:
Strip-searching is a humiliating, degrading and frightening experience for anyone, but especially for children who come into contact with the police, a high proportion of whom may have experienced abuse and/or mental health difficulties.
Traumatic experiences
In 2019, the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) drew critical attention to the Met’s excessive number of “unwarranted” strip-searches. The inspectorate raised concerns about the disproportionate number of strip-searches carried out on people from racialised Black and ethnic minority backgrounds. It also noted the high number of children represented in the Met’s strip-search figures, highlighting that some cases were not “properly justified”.
The data gleaned from Kemp’s FoI request comes just weeks after the Met was forced to apologise to Koshka Duff after carrying out a degrading and misogynistic strip-search in 2013 which left her with PTSD.
Recounting her personal experience of strip-searches and reflecting on the mental and physical harm caused by the police’s draconian practice, The Canary‘s Emily Apple said:
It has to stop. This isn’t about police safety. This isn’t about ‘concern’ for detainees’ well being. The police do it when they don’t like someone. They do it to subjugate, humiliate and repress people.
As was the case for Apple, the victims of traumatic, unjustified strip-searches are routinely denied access to justice or recourse.
The Met police’s increasing and disproportionate use of strip-searches is incredibly disturbing. Officers can’t be trusted to respect people’s rights as things stand. We can only speculate as to what the future holds if they have even more powers and less accountability.
Featured image via Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona/Unsplash
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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“When you have a power that is designed to be unaccountable and has been unaccountable for so damn long, the reforms that stick to it just make it stronger and more efficient as they cover it in a veneer of legitimacy,” says author Brendan McQuade. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kelly Hayes talks with abolitionist criminology professor and activist Brendan McQuade about how securitization has shaped popular ideas about what it means to be free, and how we can build something better.
Music by Son Monarcas and Amaranth Cove
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. We talk a lot of this show about building the relationships and analysis we need to create movements that can win. Well, today, we are really going to nerd out. Because in addition to talking about the abolition of prisons, we are going to talk about the abolition of security. Some of our listeners are probably nodding, and some are probably wondering what I’m smoking, but yes, we are going to talk about the anti-security critique, Karl Marx, mutual aid and more. But I think we’re ready for this, because as my friend Ruth Wilson Gilmore recently said, “Activists throughout the history of struggle have been nerds.” My guest Brendan McQuade and I definitely fall within that proud tradition, so here we go.
As regular listeners know, I am a prison-industrial complex abolitionist, so for me, winning means building a world where there would be no perceived need for the prison system. People’s needs would be met, from health care to food, housing, education and conflict resolution. When harms occurred, we would have developed responses that are not rooted in punishment. And of course, the monstrosity that is the prison system would no longer exist. But the carceral state is bigger than the prison system. So in addition to cages, what would we have to eliminate in order to end the system of control that punitively monitors people’s lives and manages their movements? Surveillance and control, as extensions of state power, are ever-growing in our health care system, schools, workplaces, in the family regulation system (often referred to as the “child welfare system”), and other areas of our lives as well. These manifestations of policing are tentacles of the prison industrial complex tightening to maintain order in an unstable world, devoid of safety nets. Securitization, as exercised by modern states, creates systems of exclusion, containment and disposal. These efforts supposedly reduce insecurity – at least for protected member groups, like U.S. citizens. But whose interests and well-being are really being protected by measures defined as “security”?
I know many of us have been conditioned to think of “security” as a good thing. When I organize marches and actions, we use the word “security” to describe our collective safety planning efforts, because we have come to understand security as the creation of safety, organized in response to potential threats. But what about when the word “security” is used to describe the maintenance of conditions that ensure suffering? And what if the maintenance of that kind of “security” is destroying the world?
My friend Brendan McQuade is an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine and the author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Surveillance. Brendan was the first person to introduce me to the concept of anti-security and its relationship to abolition, and I asked him if he could try to break that idea down for our audience a bit.
Brendan McQuade: Anti-security is a collective project of critique. We’re a small group, mostly of academics in the U.K., Canada, U.S., and Turkey. And we’re trying to understand and write about security without becoming part of security. So when we talk about security, we usually talk about it as if it’s an unambiguous good. Who doesn’t want to be secure? How could anyone possibly have a problem with the idea of security? But the problem isn’t so much what security promises, namely safety, but how it packages that promise. “Security” communicates an entire world view. In liberal theory, which forms most of the apparent common sense in contemporary politics, liberty, security and property are linked concepts. Everything revolves around the idea of the self-contained and property owning individual, which is often simply asserted as human nature.
So think of foundational works of Western political thought by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke or Adam Smith. All of them start with the premise that humans are individual. We are born alone, we die alone. And in this conception, we can only be free if we’re liberated from the demands of others. We can only be free if we’re separate from them. We can only meaningfully be individuals if we own property. And we can only maintain our property if we’re secure against the threats of others. So when we talk about security, we accept the premise that we are alone in a cruel world and already and always at war with each other. Individuals and households, peoples and nations are always at odds. That’s just what it is to be human.
Of course, that’s a lie, a fabrication. As Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist and naturalist argued over 100 years ago, mutual aid is a factor in human evolution. We’re social creatures and as such, we’re collaborative, we’re not alone. In fact, if you consider the grand sweep of human history, the idea of an individual that owns property is the exception. The rule is communal living on commonly held land. So let’s think about those three classic European thinkers I mentioned a minute ago, Hobbes, Locke and Smith. What they were describing was not human nature, but the nature of humans in a particular moment of history. They were describing an emergent order. They were describing capitalism.
So capitalism begins with a separation of people from the land and people from each other. The bourgeoisie needs free and right-less proletariat to work for a wage, not peasant communities connected to the land and with customary rights to subsist upon it. Capitalism also individualizes skills and knowledge, and turns them both into property. Those peasant communities shared, reproduced and passed on knowledge about their environment and the skills needed to live within it. Capitalism not only takes control over the organization of work, it revolutionizes it. It makes it as efficient and profitable as possible and makes people as powerless and interchangeable as possible.
So to put it crudely, there’s a progressive de-skilling. The craft of peasants and artisans is broken up into the simplest tasks, technology replaces humans in the name of efficiency, and different forms of work are transformed from communal practices into alienated drudgery that workers have little to no control over. As this process unfolds, the basic needs of the population are increasingly separated from their capacity to provide for them. So in previous modes of organizing human life, basic needs were usually met by the people themselves in some kind of communally organized subsistence economy.
Under capitalism, however, all the accoutrements of life from the basic necessities of survival to the most silly and vulgar consumer thing are provisioned to the population through the market, through commodity exchange or by the state through social policy. What this means is that capitalism is an order of relentless change. Capitalism is a generalized order of insecurity that requires a politics of security. So here we return to that connection between a particular conception of liberty, understood as individual freedom from others, the right to own property, and the need for security.
This is why Marx wrote in 1843 that security is the supreme concept of bourgeois society. The concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights and his property. So this line comes from a piece called “On the Jewish Question” where Marx was responding to claims being made in Germany that Jews had to renounce their Jewishness, become German and fight with Germans in order to gain political rights. Marx’s response to this was that the freedom won by gaining recognition from the state is an unreal universality. Jews can’t simply renounce their Jewishness. We can’t volunteer away history. These differences will persist and will be used to discriminate against each other.
So this argument should be very familiar to people on the left. Okay, Black people have the right to vote in the U.S., but that didn’t end racism because racism persists in the accumulated power differences between Black people and white people. The right to vote and anti-discrimination laws don’t erase the racial wealth gap. The right to vote on paper is an unreal universality. It exists as a formal right but it doesn’t mean that Black and white people are really substantively equal in their life chances and choices.
So the point about security as the supreme concept of bourgeoisie society takes this argument one step further. It’s not just that legal recognition by the state, political emancipation from masters is not freedom. This recognition actually deepens capital’s control over our lives. So again, the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, his property. Freedom then is the freedom to compete in the market, to accumulate property, and importantly, to call on the state and its violence to keep that property secure.
So that’s the brief intellectual history of security as it’s been defined since what we refer to as the enlightenment. It’s important because when we hear security invoked today, we’re not hearing what we think we’re hearing. The state will not protect you because your life has inherent value. The state will protect you if you can control enough property to really count.
KH: In our conversations, Brendan introduced me to a document called Anti-Security: A Declaration. It was written in 2010 by Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos. The document begins with the words:
The purpose of this project, put simply, is to show that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion. Less simply, that security is a dangerous illusion. Why ‘dangerous’? Because it has come to act as a blockage on politics: The more we succumb to the discourse of security, the less we can say about exploitation and alienation; the more we talk about security, the less we talk about the material foundations of emancipation; the more we come to share in the fetish of security, the more we become alienated from one another and the more we become complicit in the exercise of police power.
As someone who has spent long hours studying the trappings of security in the United States, from the Shotspotter microphones in my city to the high-tech hunting grounds of the southern border, those words resonate deeply with me. The idea that security is a fetish that we participate in may be unsettling, but to me, it feels undeniable. Everyday, people in the U.S. accept the conditions that generate violence as inevitable, while fixating on responses to violence that serve next to no purpose. Our government has de-legitimized investments in the common good, while pouring seemingly infinite amounts of money into the military and police without question. In a society that has slashed its social safety nets, with no plan of reconstructing them, we are told more surveillance and control will stabilize our situation. When those interventions fail to generate safety, we are told deeper investments in surveillance and control are needed. Consequently, many people, even those negatively impacted by this cycle, begin to think in these terms, demanding more police surveillance. The creation of a different social context, in which our own insecurity is not maintained by the state, by way of the maintenance of inequality, is almost unimaginable to most people. So they cry out for surveillance, control and violence to repair their situation. It’s a failing approach, and we all bear witness to that, but in most people’s minds, there is no alternative.
As Neocleous and Rigakos wrote:
Security colonizes and de-radicalizes discourse: hunger to food security; imperialism to energy security; globalization to supply chain security; welfare to social security; personal safety to private security. Security makes bourgeois all that is inherently communal. It alienates us from solutions that are naturally social and forces us to speak the language of state rationality, corporate interest and individual egoism. Instead of sharing, we hoard. Instead of helping we build dependencies. Instead of feeding others we let them starve… all in the name of security.
So how did we get here? To understand that, we need to talk about the evolution of policing.
BM: Most accounts of police begin in the 19th century with the first uniformed public police departments, but the word has a longer and incredibly revealing history. The term police was first used in 15th-century Europe. At this time, police meant what we’d now call social policy. It encompassed welfare, education, urban planning, workforce development, and of course, policing. This is the original expanded concept of police that Marx mentioned in “On the Jewish Question.” This is what’s sometimes called the “older police science.” It’s a pre-disciplinary conversation, so this is before social science was a thing, and it was a conversation among statesmen, jurists, moral philosophers and proto political economists. Their main concern was order in prosperity in the broadest sense.
So my friends and I in the Anti-Security Collective — we’ve returned to this original and expanded concept of police in an effort to grasp the expansive set of institutions through which policing takes place. Policing is not just law enforcement, it’s order maintenance in the broadest sense. The work of this order maintenance cuts across the public and private. The state does it; private actors do it as well. There’s also something important about the moment when policing emerged. I mentioned the term was first used in the 15th century. This was the beginning of what historians called the “early modern period.” This was an extended epic of systems transition when the modern order of things was still being consolidated and older ways of living were still being systematically destroyed.
The plebs and the proles and the working class in the making were entangled in both circuits of capital accumulation and the vestiges of pre-capitalist’s economy centered on the commons. The idea of police emerged to organize the violent intervention of the state to transform the commons into private property, dispossess and uproot the people from the land, and rebuild social order through the market. Police power is thus the patriarchal discretion of the head of household applied to the problems of the city or polis, the Greek word for city and root of both police and policy. So while the meaning of the word police has changed over the centuries, the basic nature of police power has not. The police are not here to protect you. They’re here to protect the order of private property and the continued accumulation of private wealth.
So the essence of police power is not violence but discretion, the ability to decide whether to use violence in any conceivable situation. So consider the most basic police interaction: the stop. The reasons for it have never been clear. Walking too fast, walking too slowly, being stationary are all grounds for a stop and have always been used unfairly and unequally. The courts have always refused to define discretion because to define discretion would be to limit discretion. So this isn’t just an individual matter; it’s institutional. The courts won’t tell police they can’t drop a bomb on a house as they did in Philadelphia in 1985, or use a robot to kill an active shooter with a bomb as they did in Dallas in 2016, or use lethal force against an autistic man having a mental health crisis as they did in Augusta, Maine, in October 2021. The courts won’t tell police ahead of time what is reasonable or necessary since all situations are always and forever unpredictable.
So what is police? Discretion, or the expression of state power as an executive prerogative to act as seen fit. The discretionary nature of police power means that police do not enforce the law and are not accountable to it. Police handle the law after the fact to justify the way they decided to restore order. So law is based on a liberal conception of society composed of free, self-governing individuals. The exercise of state power is legitimated through the rule of law which respects individual rights. Police power, however, is based on a classic conception of society as a household and the state as the master. The defining characteristics of police power is the discretionary and virtually unlimited power of the householder over his household. Police then don’t deal with law; they deal with threats.
The law will never hold police accountable because the police are not meant to be accountable to the law or enforce the law. Police is the patriarchal power to manage people and things in the name of good order. So this is why abolition is the only logical response to the police. When you have a power that is designed to be unaccountable and has been unaccountable for so damn long, the reforms that stick to it just make it stronger and more efficient as they cover it in a veneer of legitimacy.
KH: In Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, Truthout’s editor-in-chief Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law describe the many ways prison reforms have further extended the surveillance and control of the carceral state, exerting power over targeted communities within the medical system, public schools, their neighborhoods, and within their own homes. As Maya and Victoria write, “Some people are surveilled from birth — whether the eye that’s on them is that of the police, child protective services, a parent’s parole officer, or state welfare agencies.”
This landscape means that some people live their entire lives navigating dragnets of the carceral state. The Anti-Security Collective calls the deeper set of relations at the core of those dragnets the security capital nexus.
BM: So there’s a relationship between capitalist economies, which are premised on infinite and endless growth, and thus infinite and endless change. There’s a connection between that and the varied apparatuses of security that are used to administer this order, to keep it creaking along, to keep it from pulling itself apart. And I think one of the basic things that the state does is it subsumes all conflict within it. It turns all forms of resistance into something that can expand and enliven and relegitimize state power. The Democrats are in office and we see that all over, the selective appropriation of radical language and radical critiques to on the one hand mollify descent and on the other hand relegitimize the system.
So I think when we reject security, we reject this idea that the state is going to help us and we start thinking about what we can do to not just help ourselves but to transform the state and transform the work of the state from administering poverty and assuring that we live atomized lives apart and transforming it into a communal anti-state so to speak where the separation between people’s needs and their capacity to meet them is eliminated and people have the freedom to take control of their lives in the most basic way.
KH: Prison abolitionists have a long history of organizing projects to create safety in their communities without the intervention of the carceral state. The Creative Interventions Toolkit, for example, was the product of a years-long effort, in which abolitionists worked with people who were facing interpersonal violence, to create a new vision for violence intervention. As an organization, Creative Interventions sought to “strengthen community-based systems to resist
violence in all of its forms.” As the group wrote in the toolkit: “For CI, the community-based approach is one in which everyday people such as family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, members of community organizations such as faith institutions, civic organizations or businesses are the people who take action to intervene in violence.”
Many more examples of community-based safety strategies can be found in One Million Experiments, which is a virtual zine project co-organized by Project NIA and Interrupting Criminalization. Readers can use the project’s website to explore “snapshots of community-based safety strategies that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.” In fact, I highly recommend checking out the One Million Experiments podcast, which is a collaboration between AirGo and Interrupting Criminalization that really explores the ideas behind the project and some of the efforts that it uplifts.
We’ve also talked about Get In Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit on this podcast, which is a resource from Vision Change Win that helps organizers and activists with safety planning for protests and much more. Its authors refer to that work as security, but if we can hold that contradiction for a moment, remembering that language is a grappling process, rather than a finite set of conclusions, I would ask you to grapple with me a bit further. Because Brendan has a way of referring to these kinds of efforts, and to mutual aid more generally, that I find fascinating. He describes these projects as “commoning against security.”
BM: Abolition is closing the prisons and defunding the police, but it’s also something bigger. It’s creating different institutions to manage the problems that we now leave to the police and prisons. And I think the way we build those different institutions is by commoning against security, by coming together to take responsibility for ourselves and for each other, to care for each other, to build systems to care for each other that don’t rely on the intervention of the state, whether through the armed police or the soft social police, for the state to come in and fix the problem for us or make the problem go somewhere else and disappear and preserve our right to live atomized lives apart.
And I think the one thing I would say is, like, sometimes when you talk about abolition, it’s viewed as an extremist position. Like it’s just an off the wall position. But I can think of nothing more extreme than accepting the routine violence and now under COVID, like just mass death that is normal. In my perspective, abolition is not an extreme position, it’s an incredibly sensible one and it’s one that starts with incredibly practical things and opens up to systems transition. What do I mean by this? If we think about police abolition, we start with the obvious defund the police, reduce police budgets by 50 to 80 percent, narrow the mission of police departments to the investigation of reported crimes, create non-police alternatives for so-called problems of public order connected to things like drug use and mental health.
But then from there, it’s what I was talking about as commoning against security, work to recreate the commons and work towards a new order based on cooperation not competition, based on meeting human needs and not advancing the endless and infinite accumulation of private wealth. So I think this begins with a certain social democratic common sense, a universal right to housing, health care, livelihood, unemployment, but it doesn’t end there. Our mutual friend, Mariame Kaba, often says that defunding police is the floor. And to this, I will add that the ceiling is communism. I don’t mean 20th-century state socialism, but I mean the communism of the commons. So a world of decentralized communal life where we all work together to care for each other.
KH: I know we have wandered pretty far into abolitionist nerd territory, so for those who are not aware: Many prison abolitionists are socialists, some are communists, some are anarchists, and some don’t identify as any of those things. We all share the goal of eliminating systems of social disposal and annihilation, which means ending capitalism. We have a lot of friendly disagreements about how to do that. But I have learned a lot from abolitionists who hold all of those ideological perspectives, so I think it’s important for us to explore these ideas together. Because I don’t think anyone among us is carrying around a universal formula for justice-making in an era of collapse.
But circling back to the matter at hand, something about that phrase “commoning against security” really resonated with me. Because I think it captures something about the work that many of us are doing, and also, the moment and context in which we’re doing it. We are isolated in so many ways, and our experiences of one another are so often reduced to the commercial. When we create new social pathways, reclaim space, and extend aid to one another, we are organizing life-giving projects, but we are also acting against disposability. We are acting against our atomization and isolation. We are overriding the impulses that individualism has ingrained in us and recommitting ourselves to compassion in a cynical era. In the face of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment, we are embracing what Monica Cosby has called a “refusal to abandon.” I believe in that work.
In his book Pacifying the Homeland, Brendan wrote, “While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites us to consider what relations produce these conflicts and how they have been managed.”
I hope we will all accept that invitation, because I think it’s an important one. We have the power to generate modes of safety and care within our communities, and to work together to address root causes of harm. Many of us have been turned against one another, very effectively at a time when we need each other the most. There are many disasters on the horizon, politically and environmentally, and I think “commoning against security” is the kind of energy we are going to need in these times. I also hope you all will check out One Million Experiments, the Critical Interventions Toolkit and other resources that we will be including in the show notes on our website. These projects are a great source of inspiration, and you just might discover something that you want to join or create in your own community. And don’t forget to check out Brendan’s book Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision. Trust me, it’s an essential resource.
I want to thank Brendan for joining me today, and I would like to thank all of our listeners for nerding out with us about abolition and anti-security. Please take care of yourselves this week, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
- Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision by Brendan McQuade
- Ant-Security: A Declaration
- Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law
- Understanding E-Carceration: A Book Launch (featuring James Kilgore and Ruth Wilson Gilmore)
- You can explore snapshots of community-based safety strategies that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe at One Million Experiments.
- You can check out the One Million Experiments podcast here.
- You can find the Creative Interventions Toolkit here.
- Whose Security Is It Anyway? is a toolkit created by Project NIA that shares strategies of resistance to the increased securitization of non-profit spaces.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On 1 February, human rights organisation Liberty launched a judicial review claim challenging the lawfulness of the Metropolitan police’s gangs matrix. Acting on behalf of two clients, Liberty intends to take the Met to court on the grounds that the gangs matrix is racist, and breaches human rights law. Liberty is urging people to support the case by raising awareness and donating to their fundraiser.
The gangs matrix
The gangs matrix is a database of people that the Met police thinks could be gang affiliated. The watchlist’s unclear criteria includes who people are friends with, or what music videos they share on social media. According to the criteria, sharing drill or grime music videos can help the Met place someone on the watchlist. Both of these genres are firmly rooted in Black British youth culture.
In 2019, Wired found that the watchlist includes children as young as 13. And a 2020 report by Amnesty found that in 2017, 78% of people on the gangs matrix were Black, even though only 27% of individuals convicted of serious youth violence offences were Black.
The Met shares gang matrix data with other bodies, including immigration authorities, schools, workplaces and NHS service providers. This increases people’s risk of deportation and unfair treatment.
According to Liberty, police consider most people on the matrix to be “low risk”. But the watchlist’s “enforcement actions” are extremely damaging. They include exclusion from school, benefits and housing, as well as eviction. Police are also likely to target those on the matrix with more stops and searches and police surveillance.
Police don’t tell people if they are on the watchlist. And there is no way for individuals to appeal their inclusion, or seek a review of the data.
Liberty lawyer Lana Adamou said:
We all want to feel safe in our communities, but the gangs matrix isn’t about keeping us safe – it’s about keeping tabs on and controlling people, with communities of colour and Black people worst affected.
Arguing that the gangs matrix “is fuelled heavily by racist stereotypes”, she added:
Secret databases that risk young Black men being excluded from society based on racist assumptions are not a solution to serious violence, they are part of the problem.
Challenging the discriminatory database
Liberty has launched a judicial review claim challenging the lawfulness of the Met’s gangs matrix on the grounds “that it discriminates against people of colour, particularly Black men and boys, and breaches human rights, data protection requirements and public law principles”.
Liberty is acting on behalf of Awate Suleiman, who has experienced and witnessed harassment by Met police since childhood. Suleiman tried to find out whether he is on the gangs matrix in 2019. The Met only told Suleiman that he isn’t on the database in December 2021 after he threatened legal action.
Suleiman told Liberty:
The fact that I had to threaten the police with judicial review before they would confirm whether I was on the GVM [gangs violence matrix] is not good enough and another indication of the Met’s intention to covertly surveil young, black people.
Liberty’s legal team is also acting on behalf of Unjust UK, an organisation that works to challenge discriminatory policing.
Unjust UK’s founder Katrina Ffrench told Liberty:
The clandestine nature of the Gangs Matrix must be challenged. Everyone has a right to be policed fairly and treated equally before the law. It is hoped that the decade-long wrongs of the Matrix can be remedied in bringing this case.
Featured image via Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona/Unsplash
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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From the Amazon to Hubbard County, Minnesota, corporations are funding the repression of protesters. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kelly Hayes talks with Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, about the history and future of corporate collaborations with the police. Kelly also talks with attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard about newly exposed documents that reveal the lead prosecutor in Hubbard County sought corporate funding for the prosecution of Line 3 protesters.
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. We talk a lot on this show about building the relationships and analysis we need to create movements that can win. But in order to do that, we also need to understand the forces of repression that seek to destroy those movements. So today, we are going to talk about what happens when corporations fund the police. We’ll be hearing from Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, with the Center for Protest Law & Litigation, as we revisit the situation in Minnesota, where hundreds of criminal cases against Water Protectors are still pending. We’ve talked previously on the show about how the Enbridge corporation funneled $2.9 million into local police departments in Minnesota to ensure the construction of Line 3, a now fully operational pipeline that moves tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin. The movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline cost Morton County a reported $40 million. When Enbridge sought a permit for construction work on Line 3, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission insisted on including a clause that would create a so-called “Public Safety Escrow Fund” to cover municipal costs associated with the pipeline’s construction, including the policing of protests. In short, Enbridge would pay to police the construction of its own pipeline.
These funds reimbursed police for the surveillance, harassment, torture, and violent arrest of Water Protectors working to stop construction of Line 3. We are revisiting this story today because The Center for Protest Law & Litigation has recently obtained documents revealing that Jonathan Frieden, the lead prosecutor in Hubbard County, Minnesota, who is seeking to incarcerate Line 3 protesters, sought to fund those prosecutions using the Enbridge escrow. And having read these documents, I can say this was not a prosecutor who thought he might get compensation — this was a furious and confused official who sunk a lot of public money into prosecuting Water Protectors, believing all the while that Enbridge would foot the bill.
In the documents, Frieden talks about his staff’s overtime hours, and claims the language of the permit clearly entitles his office to these funds. The funds were denied, but when I read the refusal from the Line 3 Escrow Account Manager, Rick Hart, I noticed that he wasn’t arguing that it would be unethical or impossible for Enbridge to fund prosecutions — he said simply that prosecutions did not fit the criteria outlined in the permit clause regarding reimbursement. So, if this model isn’t quashed, the next county considering a pipeline project might try to tweak it to ensure corporations cover the cost of prosecuting protesters. We should definitely expect to see this escrow model recur, as a means of stamping out resistance to corporate harms. Because it worked out well here for Enbridge and for the police. Oil companies also have a history of manipulating prosecutions, so if this entire model isn’t reined in, I have grave concerns about where it will lead.
So we are going to talk about those recently exposed documents, and about the legal fight to eliminate this kind of funding, but first, I wanted us to reflect on this whole corporate escrow situation in the larger context of policing. Because, in some ways, what we are seeing is very consistent with the history and character of U.S. policing, and yet, this funding model could drastically alter how protests are policed in the United States. So, we are going to try to offer a bit of grounding and context for this development.
I also want to be clear that this is not a conversation about why we need public funding, instead of private funding, for the police. Because the money that agencies that policed Line 3 construction received should not have come from taxpayers. That funding should not have existed at all, because there was no need for the drone and helicopter surveillance that Water Protectors experienced, or for the chemical weapons that were unleashed on them. There was no need for the beatings or the rubber bullets. There was no need for the brutal arrests or the police overtime hours cops bragged about to the protesters they brutalized. There was no need for the “field force” training or tactical operations that Enbridge paid for. Like Line 3 itself, none of those things needed to exist or occur. I believe it is essential that we defund the police and reduce their contact with the public, and what’s happening in Minnesota has only reinforced that position. But we do have to examine this corporate funding model, that would allow corporations to become police superfunders anytime people organize resistance to corporate harms, because this is an escalation, and it’s one we need to factor into our analysis and our organizing.
To give us a sense of how this escrow both mirrors the history of policing, and ventures into disturbing new territory, I talked with author Alex Vitale about the relationship between corporations and police. Alex joined me on the show last year to talk about the history and character of policing in the U.S. That episode was called “You Can’t Divorce Policing From Murder“ and I do recommend doubling back if you missed it, because it’s full of essential history. As for the escrow model, Alex had some thoughts to share.
Alex Vitale: So it really raises this whole issue about the functioning of the criminal legal system and policing in particular. So we kind of live with this mythical understanding that police equals public safety, and this obscures a deeper reality about the actual nature of policing. The situation going on in Minnesota, seems like this extreme aberration of a private corporate interest, basically paying for private policing on its own behalf. But this, in fact, is the fundamental origin and nature of policing. Over time, it has tended to take more legitimate forms that obscure this fundamental relationship, but that relationship persists. So what we see in the creation of policing throughout the 19th century, is that it’s driven by the need to create a force that can manage resistance to regimes of exploitation and profound inequality, whether it’s colonialism or slavery or industrial exploitation.
And so early police forces were used to break strikes, suppress slave revolts, to engage in counterinsurgency against anti-colonial forces. And they weren’t necessarily paid by a particular employer to break a particular strike, although that happened, and I’ll talk about that in a second, but that the whole system of policing was a way for corporate interests to create their own force that was capable of managing disorder across a broad front. So a great example of this is that a hundred years ago, there was a movement of labor uprising in Pennsylvania in the coal and iron fields, and employers tried to use local police to break up strikes, but these forces were small and also had some loyalty to the local small town populations. So their first impulse was to create what was called, the coal and iron police, which were basically private security guards, who were deputized at a cost of a dollar a piece, by the employer, and the state of Pennsylvania gave them law enforcement rights.
But this put all of the cost onto the coal and iron producers, and it lacked public legitimacy, so that when they used brutality, shot people down in the streets, murdered people, it was clear that it was the coal and iron companies that were behind it. So instead, they create the Pennsylvania state police, that is independent of local political control, but has the patina of state legitimacy and independence, and is paid for by all taxpayers, not just the coal and iron producers. And this force, which becomes known as the Pennsylvania Cossacks by local miners and industrial workers and union members, engages in a reign of terror that has nothing to do with producing public safety. It has to do with suppressing worker mobilizations. So what we have today is a situation where policing has been created with this patina of serving the public interest, and of course there are times in which they stop a mugger or they prevent some horrible thing from happening.
So, they focus on those things as examples of their public safety function. But when push comes to shove, what remains is this production of a social order that benefits certain people and institutions, over others. And in times of austerity, when local governments lack resources, in part because people with money don’t want to pay any taxes, when there’s a threat to the social order, there can be limits to the ability to respond. And in this case, what we see is a local corporate interest willing to pay some taxes, in essence, but only if those tax dollars go to provide private policing to protect their corporate interests. Essentially they’ve created company towns where they control law enforcement, to serve not a public safety function, but an order maintenance function. And that is really revealing, at the core, what policing has always really been about.
KH: As I told Alex, the escrow funding model also reminded me of what’s happening in countries where there is less ambiguity about the fact that police are the strongmen of fossil fuel corporations. Carceral violence and brutality are escalating against Indigenous land and Water Protectors here in the United States, but in the Global South, things are much worse.
AV: So when we look at policing internationally, we see the same kind of company town phenomena occurring in the Amazon, occurring in the oil fields of Nigeria, where basically police work for the extractive industries, and their primary function is to suppress resistance to extractive functions, whether that’s driving out Indigenous populations, suppressing labor, organizing by the workforce, et cetera. And in those cases, there’s much less need for legitimacy seeking by the institution, because they’re often operating in profoundly undemocratic context, with authoritarian state power behind them. So this raises the question, is what we are seeing in places like Minnesota, a devolving of the legitimacy of the state and the legitimacy of policing, in favor of a more authoritarian and obviously openly corporate controlled state?
KH: Something I have learned about collapse is that people are usually participating in it well before they realize as much. People move through collapsing systems, trying to reproduce conditions and relations that can no longer be reproduced, and they keep doing it, because some changes are very hard to conceptualize. But things are changing. We are living in catastrophic times, and for the powerful, controlling resources and the movements of people will be higher priorities than this country’s myths about the purpose that police and the criminal system serve.
So we have to understand these escalations as they occur, and we have to help people understand what’s happening now. And as Alex told me, we have to take this opportunity to emphasize that these systems lack legitimacy and to name what is actually needed.
AV: You know, there is an interesting contradiction here, which is that elected leaders at all levels are so committed to austerity, to tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for corporations, and the cutting of basic services, that even when they’re presented with a significant political challenge, they have difficulty mobilizing the resources to suppress those movements. And so it’s literally, at times, bankrupting these little towns because the state and federal government has not been quick to come in and provide a robust repressive infrastructure. And that has caused private interest to have to step in on their own behalf. That is a weakness of the state and a kind of contradiction that we could potentially take advantage of, which is to point out that the state is fundamentally lacking in its basic functional legitimacy, that it is unable to provide the kind of most basic services that people need, because it’s so trapped in this ideology of budget cutting, and everyone’s on their own.
And so I think we need to continue to press this idea that the solution to our problems is not constant privatization and budget cutting, it’s solidarity, it’s increasing democracy, it’s providing for people’s basic needs. And so I think it’s really important to point out that when we privatize, what we do is we’re basically just unleashing the power of the richest and most powerful forces in our society, with no real checks, oversight or accountability. And so we don’t just need accountability for the police who are brutalizing us on the picket line. What we need is accountability for a broader system that fails to provide for people’s basic needs.
KH: Crisis distills the character of capitalism. Politically and environmentally, we are on a catastrophic trajectory, here in the United States, and we should expect the character of policing to be further distilled, and expressed more blatantly, as police defend the interests of the ruling class. As Alex outlined, we need to make people understand that what’s happening in Minnesota is not an aberration. In fact, I think we should ultimately expect to see some version of this mechanism anywhere corporate interests are concerned — unless the practice is effectively eliminated.
As a Chicagoan, I’m thinking about the rebellions that occurred here, and in many other cities, back in 2020. On the first night of rebellion here, police raised the bridges downtown, trapping protesters to gas, brutalize and arrest. Why were the police waging war against protesters? Because they were rebelling downtown, which threatened this city’s wealth. Chicago’s corporate interests were imperiled. As violent as the police were that night, I shudder at the thought of corporations creating mechanisms to supercharge police departments with multi-million dollar infusions whenever they feel threatened. Imagine if, anytime a video of a cop killing a Black or brown child went viral, the police got a new corporate infusion, to defend against rebellion. That’s not prognostication, by the way. It’s extrapolation, based on what we are seeing, and the trajectory that we’re on. Because this is a time to understand what present trends portend and to organize people in opposition, so that we can create a different future.
I also spoke with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, who is a constitutional rights litigator and the co-founder of the Center for Protest Law and Litigation. The Center provides constitutional rights advocacy, criminal defense and other support for movements. The group became involved in the Line 3 struggle in 2020, when they were contacted about a need for attorneys to defend Water Protectors. But in addition to its rapid response work to ensure Line 3 protesters had attorneys, the organization also assumed another mission: to fight the corporate escrow funding model.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: We’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of people come to Northern Minnesota, to join with hundreds of people already in Northern Minnesota, Indigenous-led communities and Water Protectors standing up against the extraordinary destruction being caused by this completely needless pipeline. And those folks have been subject to levels of repression, brutality, suppression, surveillance, harassment, torture, and all of this is being funded through this Public Safety Escrow Trust, where Enbridge is able to just pour millions of dollars. The police are able to look at that and know that if they take certain actions or bill for certain time, they can access that money. It incentivizes not only the departments themselves, because the departments of course are inflating their budgets and the documents that we’re able to put together, we can see the significant increase, percentage increase in these small county Sheriff’s department’s budgets, but it incentivizes the individual deputies and sheriffs who are billing overtime to carry out this work in service to the pecuniary interests of the corporation.
And the threat that this poses to democracy overall, and the threat that it’s posed in practice in the immediate to these Water Protectors who have stood up non-violently, peacefully for what they believe in and to protect all of us and to stop a climate catastrophe. This is a danger that I don’t think any of us can turn away from. I believe that it’s crucial that we all stand in support of the Water Protectors who have risked so much at Line 3 and on the larger issue of stopping this structure and making sure that we don’t see it replicated anywhere else.
KH: As I mentioned at the top of the show, Mara’s organization exposed the documents that revealed Jonathan Frieden, the lead prosecutor in Hubbard County, sought to fund Line 3-related prosecutions using the Enbridge escrow.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: As part of our investigation into this entity and this structure, we have been demanding and prying out thousands of pages of documents for many months, from many different entities, many counties. And in a batch of documents that we obtained, we could see that the lead prosecutor for Hubbard County, which is prosecuting hundreds of Water Protectors with really astonishing charges, has himself sought money, oil money, from Enbridge through this Public Safety Escrow Trust Fund. Those documents demonstrate that this prosecutor was engaging in prosecution of Water Protectors, these extreme charges, false charges, overcharges that he and his staff were putting in overtime and anticipating overtime pay carrying out these charges, which are completely improper, at a time when he expected that all of that work, all of those hours would be reimbursed by Enbridge.
This raises very significant constitutional due process issues for the defendants in these matters. Because when you have police and prosecutors incentivized to carry out public law enforcement or justice authority to carry out and use that public authority in service to the interests of an entity that is paying them or that, in other words, you only get paid these funds for carrying out work that is “to keep the peace around the pipelines,” which means repressing and prosecuting Water Protectors. That raises these fundamental, constitutional issues that we are addressing.
KH: In one communication, in addition to requesting funds, Frieden expressed concern about the escrow’s reimbursements being limited to costs accrued within 180 days of the pipeline’s completion. Frieden wrote, “I’m wondering whether that might be changed in the future given the significant amount of resources my office will be expending over the next six months in the prosecution of criminal acts associated with Line 3.”
The existence of these documents calls into question whether the prosecution would have pursued some of these charges at all, had they not believed corporate compensation was guaranteed. Those of you who checked out our November episode about the charges Water Protectors are facing may remember that these cases are not typical. Prosecutors have, for example, creatively reinterpreted the state’s theft statute in order to charge protesters who locked themselves to construction equipment with felony theft, because they had shown an alleged “indifference” to the property owner’s rights. Two Water Protectors were also charged with attempted assisted-suicide for crawling into a pipeline to halt construction.
I have seen a lot of excessive charges during my years as an organizer, but even I have been shocked by the way prosecutors have handled these cases, both in terms of the extremity of the charges and the pursuit of so many defendants. With over 1,000 arrests, you would expect a lot more throwaway cases, where the state would either drop the charges or try to deal down to a minor charge.
My first impression upon reading the litany of the felonies and gross misdemeanors Water Protectors in Minnesota are facing was that this was a spectacle, and that spectacle was meant as a warning to others who might attempt to defend the Earth. When I learned that the prosecutor apparently thought corporate money would cover the whole endeavor, it made even more sense. And the thing is, the next prosecutor just might have that stipulation in writing.
But whether or not prosecutors benefit from the next bureaucratic well of oil money, these documents further illustrate why this funding model cannot be allowed to exist. When actors within the carceral system believe they will be rewarded, and accrue more training and resources, and expand the capacity of their departments, by going hard on a particular group of people, they will produce spectacles of carceral violence and judicial cruelty on command. As Mara told me, all of this lends itself to a future we don’t want.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: The issue of the Public Safety Escrow Trust is one that extends beyond Northern Minnesota. In Northern Minnesota, we’ve seen county after county become, in essence, company towns for the pipeline corporation, where they have poured so much money into those towns and we can see through the Public Safety Escrow Trust Fund, huge sums of money, millions of dollars, into law enforcement offices for, not only regular time hours, but exceptionally huge overtime hours of the police.
This becomes a model that we are concerned will be implemented across the United States, that anytime a corporation comes to a town and the people are objecting or rising up or opposing what that corporation is doing in their town, be it environmental devastation or destruction of workers’ rights. If this becomes the model, all that the corporation has to do is create a fund through which the police are paid to “keep the peace,” which then means that they can bill for their time repressing the opponents, the political opponents of the corporation. It’s for this reason that our organization, that Center for Protest Law and Litigation is preparing to mount a significant challenge to the legality of the structure, because we believe it portends an extremely dystopian future.
KH: An escrow trust that pays for policing so that a pipeline can be built is a perversion of the concept of public safety. Police are inherently violent and fossil fuel extraction threatens life on Earth. Activists anticipate that this particular pipeline will have the impact of 50 coal-fired power plants. It also threatens the drinking water of millions of people. We need to continue to rally around Water Protectors who are facing charges, and we have to call out these police and prosecutors now, while questions of legitimacy still have the potential to create controversy. Because that condition may not last.
Helping people understand these systems for what they are is deeply important work. So if you have listened to this entire episode about how a police funding structure works and why it’s bad, thank you, and I would also ask that you not keep this information to yourself. If you think this is worrisome or terrifying, tell people about it. This is a time for us to develop a shared, clear-eyed understanding of what we are up against, because we are going to need that analysis as we move forward.
Meanwhile, the Water Protectors who have fought to stop Line 3 still need our support. They took direct action to prevent an environmental atrocity. Even when it became clear that the charges would be steep and excessive, they never stopped fighting. They made choices about who they were going to be in an era of so much death-making, and they took action. We should continue to support them, and we should all contemplate our relationship to atrocity in these times, because we all have to decide how we will live, who we will be, and whether or not we will act, as this system’s violence continues to unfold and people continue to resist.
Fortunately, the collaborative team of attorneys who are representing Line 3 resisters have successfully moved to dismiss the outrageous “felony theft” charges leveled against Water Protectors in Hubbard County. They have also succeeded in a number of other motions to dismiss on behalf of Line 3 protesters. These dismissals are important victories and heartening reminders that sometimes the good guys win. And I hope they keep winning.
I want to thank Alex Vitale and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard for sharing their insights with us, and for all that they do. Please do check out Alex’s book The End of Policing, which is an absolutely essential text on the history and nature of policing in the United States. Everyone should read it. You can learn more about the Center for Protest Law & Litigation at protestlaw.org.
I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember, that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Music credit: Son Monarcas, Ambientalism, Stefan Mothander, Ebb & Flod and Curved Mirror
Show Notes
- The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
- EXPOSED: Minnesota Prosecutor sought Enbridge funding to prosecute Water Protectors at Line 3
- As Tar Sands Flow Through Line 3, Water Protectors Fight Trumped-Up Felonies by Candice Bernd
- Over 800 Water Protectors Have Been Arrested Since Line 3 Pipeline Was Approved by Ella Fassler
- Line 3 Resisters Light the Way in a Battle for Life on Earth by Kelly Hayes
- Enough Colonial Pageantry. Let’s Rally Behind Criminalized Water Protectors. By Kelly Hayes
- You Cannot Divorce Murder From Policing by Kelly Hayes
- Human Rights Attorney Sentenced to Prison After Winning Case Against Chevron by Marjorie Cohn
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Activists are gathering across the country this Saturday to fight back against the Tory’s draconian Policing Bill. Kill The Bill protesters are set to turn out in force. As extensively reported by The Canary, the legislation expands stop and search powers and criminalise the livelihoods of GRT people among other things. And human rights charity Liberty has called the bill an “assault on basic civil liberties”:
Location announcement for London march, Saturday 15th January
Meet
Lincoln Inn Fields
Time
12 midday Standing against the #PCSCBILL and alongside @EuropeNottm for their Nationality and Borders Bill Protest#PoliceBill #protests #NBB #Tories #HumanRightsDay #wewontbesilenced pic.twitter.com/apPLZLXKqa
— #KillTheBill Official (@killthebill_1) January 11, 2022
Fightback
No Borders Manchester tweeted a list of locations where you can join the fight against this authoritarian new law:
COME JOIN US AT 1PM ON SATURDAY 15TH (THIS SATURDAY!) IN ST. PETER’S SQUARE. WE’LL BE THERE WITH KILL THE BILL MANC, READY TO PROTEST THESE HARMFUL BILLS.
Be sure to see where else you can join in across the country – thanks to @collectiveactuk for the graphic pic.twitter.com/EP1azsICFN
— No Borders MCR (@nobordersmcr) January 13, 2022
In the north of England these include:
- 1pm at Briggate in Leeds city centre
- 1pm at the Bombed Out Church in Liverpool
- 1pm at St Peter’s Square in Manchester
- 12pm, Grey’s Monument, Newcastle
- and 2pm at Sheffield Town Hall
1PM THIS SATURDAY (15TH) AT ST PETER'S SQUARE, MANCHESTER 
Join us & @nobordersmcr to resist the #PolicingBill and #BordersBill in the streets.
Access, legal rights, donation details & more in below tweets.
The people have the power!#KillTheBill#StopNABB pic.twitter.com/W3CWvHbPes— Kill The Bill MCR (@KillTheBillMcr) January 13, 2022
The Midlands
There will also be demonstrations against the bill in the Midlands:
- 12pm in Coventry at Broadgate
- 12pm at the Brian Clough statue in Nottingham
- 12pm at Hanley Bus Station in Stoke-on-Trent
- The Shrewsbury demo starts at 9am at Quarry Park.
Southwest
- Bristol on College Green at 1pm
- Bath at Bath Abbey at 12pm
- Cornwall at George Eustice’s Office in Camborne from 2pm
- Exeter from 12pm at Bedford Square
- and the Plymouth demo will start at Charles Cross Police Station from 12pm
Wales
- Cardiff’s St John Batchelor Statue from 1pm
- Newtown from outside Santander on the High Street at 12pm
MAP IS LIVE for #KilltheBill National Day of Action, 15 Jan!
Meanwhile, please keep calling/emailing the Lords to show them why it's so important not to let the govt get away with this shameless power grab!https://t.co/H4HN8dD0o9https://t.co/dTCqk22eXr
— #KillTheBill Official (@killthebill_1) January 12, 2022
Additionally, the main London Kill the Bill demo will start at Lincoln’s Inn Fields from 12pm.
Why we’re taking part
Some of those taking part explained their reasons for doing so. Gypsy Roma and Traveller community member Anne Marie:
Under the bill, our vehicles, which are often our only homes, could be confiscated and destroyed, whilst parents could be imprisoned and their children taken into care
Disabled People Against Cuts activist Andy Greene:
All of disabled people’s rights and freedoms were gained by us going out and protesting to demand them. All the harm and damage done to disabled people by government policies over the last ten years since austerity was imposed, would have continued unchecked without our community being able to come out onto the streets and tell its own story. These changes will affect disabled people’s right to protest and make us slide back to a state of disability apartheid, that we fought so hard to break down.
The coordinator of the Muslim LGBT Network, Ejel Khan:
As a person of colour and a Muslim I have been stopped and searched on several occasions and the authorities need no reasonable justification now to continue to racially profile individuals such as myself. If the bill is passed racial divisions in society will become more entrenched than they currently are. This is state-sanctioned apartheid, which positively discriminates against minority ethnic communities.
Marvina Newton of Black Lives Matter Leeds and United for Black Lives:
Protest has done so much for people who look like me. If it wasn’t for protesters such as Paul Stephenson, who was once considered disruptive, Black people in this country wouldn’t be able to ride on a bus in some cities or even buy a drink in a bar. This bill seeks to silence our fight against injustice while persecuting me for wanting an equitable society.
NHS worker and campaigner Karen Reissmann:
As a health worker, I think it is essential that we have the right to protest without fear. Too much is at risk. How can being annoying or a nuisance compare to millions of operations and medical appointments cancelled and 100,000 unfilled NHS vacancies.
Stand up for your rights
The proposed law is currently at the report stage, with some calling this weekend’s demonstrations the “last legal protests”:
Kill the Bill actions on Saturday have been branded 'the last legal protest'. The bill, which threatens our right to protest, is now in the report stage before its third reading in the House of Lords, after which it could enter the final stages before Royal Assent.>>
— ACORN Bristol (@ACORN_Bristol) January 13, 2022
Show solidarity this Saturday
And in the meantime, it’s a good idea to support those Kill the Bill activists currently in prison. As The Canary reported on 11 January, 10 people are currently in jail for the demonstration in Bristol in March 2021. On 9 January supporters held a solidarity demonstration for the eight held at HMP Portland in Dorset.
One activist told The Canary:
Noise demonstrations like this are extremely important. We do this to remind those who have been imprisoned that they are not alone, and that the struggle continues on their behalf outside of the prison walls. People are not forgotten as soon as they are behind bars. They are bearing the consequences of the repressive laws that we are fighting against, and they remain a central part of our movement.
So whether it is prison solidarity, turning out for the protests this weekend, or both, its time to get involved with the fightback against Priti Patel’s authoritarian Policing Bill.
Featured image – Wikimedia Commons, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CY BB 4.0
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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When then-Mayor Richard M. Daley ushered in Chicago’s red-light cameras nearly two decades ago, he said they would help the city curb dangerous driving. “This is all about safety, safety of pedestrians, safety of other drivers, passengers, everyone,” he said.
His successors echoed those sentiments as they expanded camera enforcement. “My goal is only one thing, the safety of our kids,” Rahm Emanuel said in 2011, as he lobbied for the introduction of speed cameras. And in 2020, Lori Lightfoot assured residents her expansion of the program was “about making sure that we keep communities safe.”
But for all of their safety benefits, the hundreds of cameras that dot the city — and generate tens of millions of dollars a year for City Hall — have come at a steep cost for motorists from the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods. A ProPublica analysis of millions of citations found that households in majority Black and Hispanic ZIP codes received tickets at around twice the rate of those in white areas between 2015 and 2019.
The consequences have been especially punishing in Black neighborhoods, which have been hit with more than half a billion dollars in penalties over the last 15 years, contributing to thousands of vehicle impoundments, driver’s license suspensions and bankruptcies, according to ProPublica’s analysis.
“We felt the brunt of it the way white people didn’t,” said Olatunji Oboi Reed, a longtime activist for racial equity in transportation in Chicago who has received a handful of camera tickets over the years. “Fortunately, I’ve always been in a situation where I can survive financially, unlike many Black and brown people in the city; one ticket is throwing their whole finances in a hurricane.”
The coronavirus pandemic widened the ticketing disparities. Black and Latino workers have been far less likely than others to have jobs that allow them to work remotely, forcing them into their vehicles more often. In 2020, ProPublica found, the ticketing rate for households in majority-Black ZIP codes jumped to more than three times that of households in majority-white areas. For households in majority-Hispanic ZIP codes, there was an increase, but it was much smaller.
Similar racial and income disparities in camera ticketing have been documented elsewhere. In Rochester, New York, officials eliminated the city’s red-light camera program in 2016 in part because motorists from low-income neighborhoods received the most tickets and the financial harm outweighed any safety benefits. Miami ended its program in 2017 amid complaints from low-income residents who felt unfairly burdened by the fines. And in Washington, D.C., racial justice advocates are researching the city’s camera-ticketing program after a local think tank in 2018 and The Washington Post last year found that cameras in Black neighborhoods issued a disproportionate share of tickets there.
Although some cities have eliminated their camera programs, automated enforcement has been gaining support elsewhere in the aftermath of the nation’s racial reckoning following the death of George Floyd in 2020 at the hands of police. From California to Virginia, citizens groups, safety organizations, elected officials and others are pointing to cameras as a “race-neutral” alternative to potentially biased — and, for many Black men, fatal — police traffic stops.
And more funding for cameras may be coming: The federal infrastructure bill passed last fall allows states to spend federal dollars on traffic cameras in work and school zones.
In Chicago, officials have known of disparities since at least April 2020, when a pair of professors at the University of Illinois Chicago shared initial research showing that cameras send the most tickets to predominantly Black ZIP codes. The city then hired them to study the issue further.
Six months later, Lightfoot — who campaigned in part on ending what she called the city’s “addiction” to fines and fees — proposed that Chicago expand camera ticketing by lowering the speeds at which cameras will issue citations. Lightfoot called it a public safety measure, especially in light of a spike in traffic fatalities during the pandemic, but many observers called it a money grab. The City Council approved the measure as part of the 2021 annual budget.
After the change went into effect last March, racial disparities persisted, ProPublica found.
When asked why the city expanded the program despite knowing of the racial disparities, Dan Lurie, Lightfoot’s policy chief, said the administration saw that traffic fatalities were “at epidemic levels” and that was a “deep concern” to the mayor. “We feel strongly,” he said, “that cameras are a tool in the toolkit to help alleviate that.”
The city is not considering eliminating the cameras or shrinking the program, though Lurie said the administration would “evaluate” cameras at locations where there’s evidence they do not reduce crashes.
A summary of the UIC research provided to ProPublica last week confirmed the racial disparities in red-light and speed-camera ticketing and found that most of the speed cameras improve safety.
City officials said they are trying to mitigate the financial harm caused by camera tickets. They pointed to a pilot program that halves the costs of fines and allows for some debt forgiveness for low-income residents. That initiative, which was announced last year with no mention of the racial inequities baked into the camera program, is scheduled to start by the end of March.
Lurie said the administration has been grappling with the “twin challenges” of improving traffic safety while “very intentionally ensuring that the burdens of fines and fees as a result of those kinds of efforts do not fall disproportionately on Black and brown residents.”
The irony is that some of the factors that contribute to ticketing disparities, such as wider streets and lack of sidewalks in low-income communities of color, also make those neighborhoods more dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and even motorists. According to a 2017 city report, Black Chicagoans are killed in traffic crashes at twice the rate of white residents.
The city’s latest transportation plan, which has a focus on racial equity, lays out a number of projects, such as improving crosswalks and building more bike lanes. City officials also said they plan to install more flashing signs that show drivers how fast they’re going — devices known to help reduce speeds.
Lurie acknowledged that the best way to reduce traffic fatalities is to fix the underlying road infrastructure that contributes to unsafe driving. That way, he said, “Pedestrians are safer, you’re safer and no one’s getting a fine. That’s the ideal outcome here. We are dealing with, in many ways, after-the-fact consequences of streets that need to be rethought and redesigned.”
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Chicago’s automated camera program began in 2003, after a 30-day “experiment” on opposite ends of Western Avenue recorded some 4,500 red-light violations. Over the next decade, the Daley administration installed cameras at dozens of intersections around the city.
Emanuel expanded the program further in 2013 to include speed cameras.
The Lightfoot-era expansion happened, fundamentally, through lowering the speed limit threshold for tickets, not by adding more cameras.
Today, motorists are monitored by cameras at close to 300 locations around the city, making Chicago’s automated traffic enforcement program one of the largest in the country. Both red-light and speed cameras are distributed roughly evenly among the city’s Black, Latino and white neighborhoods.
The cameras capture images of a vehicle’s license plate as well as video of the alleged infraction, which is reviewed by a third-party vendor before a ticket is sent to the vehicle owner.
Each year the city issues approximately 1 million camera tickets, about evenly split between the two types of infractions. In all, cameras have generated more than $1.3 billion in revenue since the first one was installed nearly two decades ago.
In general, research has found that the cameras help reduce serious accidents by changing driver behavior. Northwestern University researchers found in 2017 that the number of T-bone crashes — where one vehicle drives into the side of another — fell after red-light cameras were installed, as fewer people ran red lights. According to the executive summary of the latest research by UIC associate professors Stacey Sutton and Nebiyou Tilahun, speed cameras reduced the expected number of fatal crashes and those leading to severe injury by 15%.
Still, a wide array of observers has criticized the program as a revenue generator more than a public safety solution. Tickets for running a red light or going 11 or more miles per hour over the limit cost $100; with late penalties that figure can grow to $244. Citations for driving between 6 and 10 mph over the limit cost $35, an amount that increases to $85 when late.
Almost half of the tickets received by low-income residents end up incurring additional penalties, according to the research by Sutton and Tilahun, both of whom are in UIC’s College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. For upper-income residents, 17% of tickets end up with additional fees.
Over the years, many residents have protested that the camera tickets hurt poor people who struggle to pay the fines in time to avoid hefty late penalties and collections fees.
The issue became a priority for Reed, who leads the nonprofit Equiticity, an advocacy and research organization focused on transportation equity, when he saw how much the city relied on enforcement as a strategy to help eliminate traffic fatalities in the Vision Zero Chicago plan published in June 2017.
He has for years called on the city to stop ticketing cyclists in Black and Latino neighborhoods for riding on sidewalks and to instead improve infrastructure in those areas. He is keenly aware that people of color are disproportionately killed in traffic accidents in Chicago and across the country. But he says he doesn’t think the city can ticket its way to safer streets.
At a September 2017 meeting, Reed and others asked city transportation officials to identify and eliminate any racial or geographic disparities in camera ticketing, emails show. The city never committed, Reed said.
“We didn’t subscribe to this notion that the answer to improved traffic safety is a punitive approach,” he said. “The root cause of traffic violence in our society that is disproportionately impacting Black and brown people is structural racism.”
The following February, ProPublica reported on how debt from parking and camera tickets disproportionately piled up in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, sending tens of thousands of people into bankruptcy. The reporting has prompted significant reforms across the state.
This is the first time ProPublica has examined the disparities in camera ticketing itself, not just the financial consequences. The analysis relies on information obtained through public records requests from the city’s ticket database, including the ZIP code associated with the vehicle registration for every camera ticket issued since the program’s birth in 2003 through mid-2021.
ProPublica’s main analysis relies on ticketing from 2015 through 2019 to correspond with the most recent five-year census survey data. Ticketing rates were calculated based on the number of households in each ZIP code, as there is no available and reliable measure of motorists or vehicles by ZIP codes that covers that period.
The data shows how motorists from Black and Latino areas of the city have consistently received a higher share of camera tickets. The disparity persists when you include motorists who live anywhere in Cook County but drive in the city or if you include speed warnings to first-time violators. ProPublica excluded warnings from its main analysis because they carry no financial penalties.
Between 2015 and 2019, some 3.1 million camera tickets went to Chicago residents. The highest share, or about 38%, of those tickets went to motorists from majority-Black ZIP codes. By comparison, those ZIP codes account for 27% of households.
The disparity is less severe in majority-Hispanic ZIP codes, which account for 19% of tickets and 16% of households.
Households in the city’s majority Black ZIP codes received about four citations per household over that time period. That’s more than twice the rate for households in majority-white ZIP codes, which received fewer than two tickets. Households in Hispanic ZIP codes received more than three tickets per household during the same time period.
For their study, which relies on census-tract level ticket data, Sutton and Tilahun looked at a shorter time period, 2016 through 2019, and arrived at a similar conclusion.
Rodney Perry has been caught in the cycle of ticketing. The 28-year-old entrepreneur quit his job at a logistics firm last spring to build a digital marketing and production company. The work leads him to drive past the city’s cameras more than he did in his previous job. Last year, Perry received three tickets for running red lights and eight for speeding. Of the speeding tickets, five were for going just 6 or 7 mph over the limit — speeds that would not have triggered a ticket before Lightfoot lowered the threshold for tickets.
He paid some off, but the penalties eventually added up to more than $700, money he said he did not have. He tried to get on a city payment plan but said he couldn’t figure out how to do that online. Because of the unpaid tickets, the city in November immobilized his 2018 Jeep Cherokee with a yellow Denver boot clamped over one of the front wheels outside his apartment. Perry had to borrow money from his older sister in Tennessee to get on a payment plan and get the boot removed, a process that came with yet more fines.
“Family doesn’t ever want to see you have any moment of struggle,” said Perry, who took on an extra job at a restaurant to help pay off the tickets and make ends meet. “It’s a financial impact, but mentally it’s where I was affected the most. Mentally and emotionally.”
Perry said he takes responsibility for getting tickets. But he can’t help but notice something every time he drives through majority-Black neighborhoods: There are fewer pedestrians and more vacant lots and industrial areas.
“It’s almost like you feel like there is nothing there. Nothing to slow you down,” he said.
When Perry enters more densely populated Latino neighborhoods, he sees bustling commerce and more pedestrians. And in majority white neighborhoods, there are even more pedestrians and “a stop light every few blocks. A stop sign between those. Crosswalks,” he said. “There’s a million reasons to stop once you pass downtown on the North Side.”
It all makes him wonder: Does the way a neighborhood looks affect whether a driver will get a ticket?
Consider the speed camera on West 127th Street, a few blocks east of South Halsted Street in West Pullman, a majority-Black neighborhood on the city’s Far South Side.
The camera sits next to a fenced-in steel plant, overlooking a busy, four-lane stretch of road where the speed limit is 30 mph. What allowed the city to place a camera there — as speed cameras are only allowed near parks or schools — is a bike trail that cuts across the street a little west of the device. It’s not a frequently used path; on a bright October morning, not one cyclist passed through in the half hour or so a pair of reporters observed the trail. No pedestrians walked along that stretch of West 127th Street, either; only one side of the street even has a sidewalk.
Meanwhile, dozens of semitrucks and passenger vehicles roared past.
About 20 miles north, another camera stands along a two-lane stretch of West Montrose Avenue that borders Horner Park in the whiter, more affluent Irving Park neighborhood.
Here, the speed limit is also 30 mph. Drivers have to slow down to maneuver around a concrete pedestrian island and over bright green and white crosswalks that lead into the park. That same October morning, reporters encountered more than a dozen pedestrians, cyclists, dog walkers and others near the camera in about a half hour.
In 2020, the camera on West 127th Street issued 22,389 tickets to motorists caught driving 11 mph or more over the speed limit, each costing $100.
The one on West Montrose Avenue? Five.
Drivers intuitively slow down when confronted with narrowed streets, speed bumps or other traffic, said Jesus Barajas, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California Davis, who has studied transportation and infrastructure in Chicago. Wide roads without what are often called calming measures, like the ones on West Montrose Avenue, encourage speeding.
“If it feels like a highway, you’re going to go 50,” Barajas said.
ProPublica found that all 10 locations with the speed cameras that issued the most tickets for going 11 mph or more over the limit from 2015 through 2019 are on four-lane roads. Six of those locations are in majority Black census tracts.
Meanwhile, eight of the 10 locations where the fewest tickets were issued are on two-lane streets. And just two of the 10 are in majority Black census tracts. (The analysis focused on cameras near parks, because those devices operate for more hours and days than those by schools, leading them to issue the vast majority of tickets.)
Residential density is another factor. Denser neighborhoods have more cars, more traffic and more pedestrians, all factors that cause motorists to intuitively slow down, experts said.
And in Chicago, which has seen an exodus of Black residents in recent decades, Black neighborhoods are far less dense than their white counterparts.
ProPublica found that the 10 locations with speed cameras that issued the most tickets were in census tracts with about 6,400 people per square mile, on average. By comparison, the 10 locations with speed cameras that issued the fewest tickets were in tracts that, on average, were more than twice as dense.
Another factor in ticketing: proximity to expressways, which decades ago were built over Black communities in Chicago and across the nation. Seven of the 10 intersections with red-light cameras that issued the most tickets are within a block of an expressway entrance. Six of the 10 are in majority Black census tracts. None of the 10 intersections where red-light cameras issued the fewest tickets are near expressways, and just one is in a majority Black tract.
Sutton and Tilahun also found that ticketing levels are highest among red-light cameras located within 350 feet of freeways, and that Black neighborhoods account for a disproportionate share of all cameras near freeways, according to the executive summary of their paper.
The UIC researchers also found that red-light cameras in areas where there were high rates of violent crime issued more tickets. “Perhaps people drive differently in those areas,” Tilahun said. “They might rush through intersections because they feel unsafe.”
Census estimates show that Black residents are about as likely to drive to work as white residents, though they face longer commutes no matter how they get to work, according to a study by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, which works on planning issues in northeastern Illinois.
Low-income Black neighborhoods often lack basic amenities such as grocery stores, pharmacies and hospitals, forcing drivers into their cars for longer periods of time, said Alejo Alvarado, a transportation planner who has written about how replacing traffic stops with speed cameras could disproportionately hurt low-income and minority drivers in Oakland, California.
“There’s usually not retail investment or housing investment, so a lot of these communities, they’re food deserts. They don’t have the amenities they need,” Alvarado said. “I can’t just walk down the street to get my groceries; I’ve got to drive somewhere else.”
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When Lightfoot was running for office in 2019, she promised to reform the city’s system of ticketing and debt collection. “We cannot accept a system that has such a devastating impact on low-income people and people of color,” she said.
The mayor has made good on her promise. The city ended a long-standing practice of seeking driver’s license suspensions for unpaid parking tickets, and state lawmakers ended suspensions for any kind of ticket debt, including for unpaid camera tickets. The city has also made ticket payment plans more accessible; it used to be cheaper for motorists with a lot of ticket debt to file for bankruptcy than to get on a payment plan with the city.
So when Lightfoot proposed an expansion of the city’s speed-camera program in October 2020, potentially sending tens of thousands of new tickets to the same populations already overburdened by fines and fees, it was widely seen as hypocritical. She was even criticized by some of the transportation safety advocates who support camera enforcement, including the influential Active Transportation Alliance.
Though the mayor made an argument for traffic safety, alliance spokesperson Kyle Whitehead said his group suspected the proposal was more about revenue given it was made in the context of the city budget. What’s more, he said, the change would be “exposing more people to tickets without really understanding the racial equity impact of that change.”
But Chicago officials did understand. When Lightfoot proposed the expansion, the city already had Sutton and Tilahun’s preliminary findings. Sutton was dismayed to learn of the expansion.
“There’s a disconnect between the data and the politics, the evidence and politics,” Sutton said of the change. “It doesn’t align with the huge burdens that we see in the data.”
Lurie defended the mayor’s decision to expand the program even though the city had evidence of its disparate impact on communities of color. Lightfoot, he said, was particularly motivated after a decade-high spike in traffic fatalities in 2020.
“If someone is a reckless driver, that is a fundamental concern to the mayor,” Lurie said. “That fine and fee, we believe, can help change behavior. That fine and fee should not put someone in a place where they are unable to pay it, where they are making choices about whether they could put food on the table instead of paying that fine or fee.”
The impact of lowering the speed limit threshold was huge. In 2021, the city issued more than 1.4 million tickets to motorists going 6 to 10 mph over the limit, more citations of that kind than it had issued in the combined previous eight years of the program’s existence. The tickets, if paid, had the potential to bring in some $50 million in revenue.
But not everybody can pay their tickets, and the debt can upend lives. Late payments can lead to a boot being placed on a car, which might mean days away from work, making it harder to catch up with the debt. While unpaid tickets may no longer result in a license suspension, it’s easy for Chicagoans to get caught in the cycle.
“We end up fixing something and creating a different kind of harm,” said Priya Sarathy Jones, the national policy and campaigns director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, which sees cameras playing a larger role in cities’ efforts to prevent traffic fatalities. “It removes police from having contact with predominantly Black men and Black people, but you’re also creating an entirely parallel universe of harm.”
Sutton, who has long studied the impact of “race neutral” policies on communities of color, said Chicago’s experience should be a cautionary tale for cities considering camera programs.
“It’s the same cycle, right, in terms of their interaction with the state and with the justice system,” Sutton said. “But the way you enter that is not through a police officer, but through this supposedly unbiased technology. … I don’t think there’s a technological fix to an unjust system.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Diversion programs are presented as exit ramps to incarceration, offering alternatives to life behind bars and providing resources to individuals who would have otherwise been arrested and sentenced to prison.
When an individual commits a crime, they are arrested as an entry point into the criminal legal system and transitioned through a traditional court trial and sentencing. Through diversion, individuals avoid this process altogether or partially by instead receiving treatment or rehabilitation programming designed to address what led them to commit the crime. But what happens when those diversion programs intended to help end up doing more harm than good?
The Prison Policy Initiative, a research and advocacy nonprofit organization that exposes the broader harms of mass criminalization, brings this question to the forefront, informing us that not all diversion programs are created equal. For Black and Brown youth who face the brunt of arrests, incarceration and criminalization, diversion programs can be good, but not when they center the institution of policing to carry them out.
An example of this is Philadelphia’s police school diversion program, piloted in 2014 to combat the rise of youth arrests in schools and provide them with community-based resources. The program, in partnership between the Philadelphia Police Department and the School District of Philadelphia, at first appears to be a successful program. The Philadelphia Inquirer boasted that the program was a “promising reform,” and that its founder, former Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, “broke the school-to-prison pipeline.” After all, the program decreased youth arrests across the school district in a moment where youth arrests and incarceration rates have fallen throughout the U.S.
Entry into the program begins when a school-based incident occurs. The school has a choice to then make an independent disciplinary decision but will generally inform the school safety office or a Philadelphia police officer. The officer assesses whether that child can or should be diverted. If the child has no prior school record and the officer deems the crime to be “low-risk” or “non-serious,” they may offer diversion. Otherwise, they are arrested.
For youths who are diverted from arrest, they are visited by a social worker and followed up with voluntary community-based services such as mentoring, academic support or victim-offender conferencing. Throughout this process, diverted youth and the services recommended to them are tracked and documented by the Philadelphia Police Department, widening the scope of information these officers have of the youths.
While this appears to be an effective and promising reform, its involvement with police draws major concerns which have been voiced by the community. For instance, one Philadelphia student, Alison Fortenberry, voiced that these police officers view her and other youths not as students, but as criminals, thus purporting the narrative of criminality. Alison is not alone here. Her concern joins the chorus of several other students organizing within the Philly Student Union, a youth-centered organization focused on demanding high quality education, who have been pushing for schools to disband police entirely.
The reality of this program is that it is predicated on the notion that police can be repackaged with a “softer” approach to school safety. It relies on rebranding Philadelphia police as “safety officers” who opt to wear more casual clothes with no badge, but as we should expect, still police. It negates the important details that police are traumatic, and increases the likelihood that Black and Brown youth are criminalized.
Sure, fewer youths are arrested and more are provided with community-based services through the program, but the stigma of criminalization that follows them and the strengthening of the prison-industrial complex does not go away — police reinforce that. It goes away by removing police from the equation altogether.
We cannot allow ourselves to be duped by police-led youth diversion programs, believing their effectiveness on the premise of being reforms to combat youth arrests and incarceration. These reforms inevitably fall short for real long-term change and further construct an illusion that police should be present in our everyday lives, such as the schools youths occupy. Even if these are what appear to be promising efforts of diversionary reform, policing has one goal: to police.
To understand why police-led youth diversion programs should be avoided, we must turn to policing and its impact inside the schoolhouse gate.
Firstly, there are a few things to know about police: They lie; incite racist, sexist, transphobic, heterosexist and ableist violence and harm; and often make situations much worse. The institution of policing and police themselves are inherently violent and racist entities — history informs us of that. But how has this taken shape in schools?
Think about some of the headlines that have taken space on the news and newspapers recently, sparking debates in the U.S. about police overreach and the harm caused by them in schools. From 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr., who was shot and killed by police inside a school bathroom stall, to a 4-year-old girl in Virginia with ADHD who allegedly threw a block at another student and was later handcuffed, transported to a squad car and taken to the sheriff’s office, police officers have had a substantial role in school violence and punishment towards youths.
These are but a couple of many examples occurring against the backdrop of how police presence in schools has changed the educational landscape for the worse. Instead of protecting youth, police in schools appear more often to be guarding the school like a prison. Entrances to the school that were once welcoming and inviting instead have metal detectors and are monitored by stationed patrol cars.
Taken altogether, police presence in schools does not make the experiences of youths better and leads to worse outcomes for them, particularly Black and Brown youth.
What does this mean for police-led youth diversion programs? On the surface, they may appear to be a strategy to combat youth arrests and incarceration. However, the effect of keeping police in schools and positioning them to lead diversionary programs is that they have exacerbated the violence of policing and harm against marginalized communities. Moreover, police-led youth diversion programs do not help combat the prison-industrial complex.
Police-led youth diversion programs strengthen the building of carceral capacity — what political scientist Heather Schoenfeld describes as the dramatic increase in the state capacity to punish through new bureaucratic structures, new frontline and administrative positions, new staff training and new protocols across the criminal legal system.
By strengthening police power — allowing them to be the first responders to school incidents and determining who is diverted — reformers for police-led youth diversion programs inevitably build capacity for the prison-industrial complex.
Supporters of these diversion programs might argue that things have gotten better while working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Children get to stay in school and they avoiding an arrest and incarceration. But given what we know about the impact of policing and police presence in schools, do these programs constitute progress?
Progress is recognizing the harm that police have done throughout history. It is making a conscious choice to position other entities, such as counselors in youth diversionary reform. It is also making a proactive shift to providing communities with what they need — housing, health care, quality education — so instances that would have otherwise involved police are not needed.
Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law remind us that innovation in itself is no guarantee of progress. If we are to consider how we make progress in ending mass incarceration among youth and adults, we must critically think about how we stop creating new diversionary policies out of mechanisms of the prison-industrial complex.
While the focus here has been on police-led youth diversion programs, in any measure of reform — be it youth-diversion reform or reform to combat drug addiction among adults — we must ask ourselves whether the proposed diversion program will divest power from carceral institutions. Ask yourself if the diversion program is aligned with doing away with carceral capacity rather than expanding it. A police-led diversion program, be it for youth or adults, is not the answer.
We cannot settle for simply the appearance of slight improvements, some of which may actually expand the realm of policing and the prison-industrial complex. Instead, we must aim for progress — for fundamental transformation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The Los Angeles Police Department released video footage Monday showing the moment when an officer fatally shot 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta while firing three rifle rounds at an assault suspect inside a Burlington Coat Factory store in North Hollywood.
Orellana-Peralta was with her mother trying on clothes in a Burlington dressing room on Thursday when she was shot and killed by an officer whose name has yet to be released by the LAPD. Police said Monday that a bullet bounced off the floor and went through the wall of the dressing room.
The officer also fatally shot 24-year-old Daniel Elena Lopez, who was accused of striking store customers with a bike lock. As The Guardian’s Sam Levin described the scene: “Roughly a dozen officers showed up at once, guns drawn. One officer in charge appears to briefly try to deescalate by saying ‘slow down’ and ‘get distance,’ but as soon as the officer actually sees Daniel, he escalates to lethal force, firing three bullets without pause or commands.”
“The video did not show the officer assessing whether there were any bystanders before shooting,” Levin observed.
Watch the compilation released by LAPD, which includes body-cam footage, surveillance clips, and audio from 911 calls (warning: the video is disturbing):
The family of Orellana-Peralta, who arrived in the U.S. from Chile just six months ago, has hired civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the families of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. Crump and Orellana-Peralta’s parents are expected to hold a press conference Tuesday outside LAPD headquarters as the shooting sparks outrage nationwide.
“Just days before Christmas, Valentina Orellana-Peralta was trying on Quinceañera dresses with her mom when police started shooting at a suspect outside of the dressing rooms. A stray bullet from an officer’s assault rifle struck and killed Valentina,” Crump tweeted Monday. “Her death was preventable!”
The California Department of Justice is investigating the deadly shooting. As of Friday, according to the Los Angeles Times, “LAPD officers had shot at least 37 people in 2021, killing 17 of them — substantially more than they shot or killed in either of the last two years.”
“They have killed four people just in the last week, with two men killed in separate incidents on Saturday, and in the latest incident shot another man Christmas Eve,” the LA Times noted.
Orellana-Peralta’s attorneys on Monday sent the LAPD a letter demanding a transparent probe into Valentina’s killing and warning of possible legal action.
Albert Corado, a Los Angeles City Council candidate whose sister was shot and killed by police officers in 2018, told the LA Times on Friday that “there’s not a lot of will in the LAPD for them to change and there’s not a lot of will in City Hall, in city government, to hold the police accountable.”
“That gives the green light to police to keep doing it,” said Corado.
No officers were charged over the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Melyda Corado in July of 2018.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In Portland, Oregon, unhoused people make up at most 2% of the population, but they account for nearly half of all arrests. Cities have long turned to police as the mechanism for making homelessness disappear. But arrests don’t solve a housing crisis.
Reveal looked at six major cities up and down the West Coast and found that people living on the streets are consistently more likely to be arrested than their neighbors who live in houses. At the same time, places such as Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles are now grappling with a major court decision. In 2019, the Supreme Court let a ruling stand that says it’s cruel and unusual punishment to arrest people who are sleeping or camping in public places if there is no shelter for them to stay. In Portland, the city is trying to build more shelters, but there is pushback from residents who don’t want a shelter in their neighborhood. People are growing frustrated, and they want the problem to go away. Reporter Melissa Lewis tells the story of these intersecting parts after spending months talking to unhoused people who go to weekly dinners at a neighborhood park.
Lewis follows one man’s journey through the criminal justice system as he tries to disentangle himself from arrest warrants that keep accumulating after he misses court dates and fails to check in with his probation officer. We also hear from locals who are trying to build trust and connection with their houseless neighbors and others who are tired of seeing tents and call the police for help. We also hear what it takes to move someone off the street, one person at a time.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
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Why would police want a multi-million dollar gunshot detection system that doesn’t work? “ShotSpotter manufactures the urgency of an active threat, offering situations where there is likely no risk, but where police can operate within a narrative of extreme risk,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly talks with Chicago organizers who are attempting to rid their city of an acoustic surveillance system that is both ineffective and dangerous.
Music by Son Monarcas and Viriya
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. We talk a lot on this show about building the relationships and analysis we need to create movements that can win. Today, we are talking about the surveillance state, and how a coalition of activists in Chicago is seeking to interrupt its work. The surveillance technology known as ShotSpotter sounds like something out of a modern dystopian novel: a sea of microphones, scattered across oppressed communities, supposedly to detect gunshots, for the purpose of community safety. But in reality, the technology rarely turns up actual gun-related crime, and instead leads to harassment, brutalization, false imprisonment, and death for targeted community members. Despite these harmful outcomes, police tout the need for the technology, which costs about $95,000 per square mile per year, and claim that it is integral to their work. The company itself argues that the use of its tech should be expanded, and that schools should also be blanketed with microphones, as a form of early detection for school shootings. So today, we are going to talk about Chicago’s Stop ShotSpotter campaign, and why some police departments are determined to keep a multi-million dollar surveillance system that is both ineffective and dangerous.
In 2018, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) signed a three year, $33 million contract with Shotspotter, with the option for renewal in August 2021. The ShotSpotter system now covers 117 square miles across 12 police districts, mostly on the city’s South and West sides, making Chicago one of the company’s best customers. The company has contracts in over 100 U.S. cities.
In Chicago, the technology’s deployment was largely paid for with funds acquired through the war on drugs via civil asset forfeiture — a controversial process that allows police and prosecutors to seize cash, vehicles, or other goods if they believe those resources are tied to a crime. Chicago police have previously faced criticism for using civil forfeiture to maintain a secret budget that critics say functions “outside the bounds of normal accountability.” A 2016 investigation in The Chicago Reader found that CPD used civil forfeiture funds to pay for some of its day to day narcotics unit operations and “to secretly purchase controversial surveillance equipment without public scrutiny or City Council oversight.”
In the spring of 2021, 13 year-old Adam Toledo was gunned down by a police officer in Chicago’s Little Village Neighborhood. Body cam footage subsequently revealed that Adam had his hands in the air when he was shot. There were, predictably, no charges filed against the officer who shot Adam, but some community members zeroed in on the question of how that police officer wound up chasing Adam that night. CPD’s ShotSpotter surveillance system had issued an alert indicating that a gun had been fired in the area, which led to officers being deployed. In the wake of Adam’s murder, some Chicago organizers began to converge around the goal of eliminating ShotSpotter’s contract with the city.
One of those organizers was my friend, Freddy Martinez, who is a cofounder of Lucy Parsons Labs in Chicago and a co-author of that investigative report about civil asset forfeiture. Lucy Parsons Labs is a collaboration between data scientists, transparency activists, artists, and others who take an abolitionist approach to research, technology and digital rights. LPL is also a major resource to organizers and journalists in the city of Chicago when it comes to understanding the scope of the surveillance Chicagoans face. Most people have never heard of ShotSpotter, or the context in which these systems are being deployed, so I asked Freddy if he could offer us some background.
Freddy Martinez: So what is ShotSpotter? So it’s an array of essentially microphones and using acoustic sensing and different physics techniques, they’re supposed to say that, “We detected this gunshot.” And then what happens is when the microphones pick up an alert, they send it to an analyst, some person who’s sitting in some customer support office who then would listen to the sound, and then pushes a notification out to people on the ground, police officers, who then respond thinking that there is a armed person, a quite potentially dangerous situation. And so, that’s kind of how the system looks overall.
The problem with ShotSpotter is that there has never been any kind of evidence, any research that it actually functions in large cities. So, how do you differentiate between gunshots and car backfiring or fireworks? In fact, they don’t. They just turn it off on the 4th of July. So that’s the first part.
The second part is that we really have no idea where there are errors in some of these processes right there. There’s obviously human error, there’s error in the detection algorithms that the company has written. And then, there’s this idea of, what happens after the alert goes out, right? And so, you have cops that are responding to these alerts dozens of times a day, and we basically have no evidence of what happens after these alerts go out.
The reason for that is that ShotSpotter claims that it’s something like 97% accurate. And the way that they get to that number is quite clever. What they do is that they classify basically every sound that they pick up as either one, a gunshot, a single gunshot, multiple gunshots, or what they designate as a probable gunshot. And that’s included in their accuracy number. I studied science, accuracy means a very specific thing, it doesn’t mean, it’s probably a gunshot, so put it down as it is a gunshot and send cops out to the field.
The company claims, well, don’t you want people — you know, someone dials into 911 and they think that they heard a gunshot but they’re not sure, shouldn’t police respond anyway? It’s like, well yes, that’s true but then what actually happens on a deployment is nothing. The cops show up and they find absolutely nothing. And this happens dozens of times a day, but it also brings really dangerous interactions with the public.
Chicago is often one of the incubators of surveillance technology. It’s often one of the first adopters. They love to go to police tech conferences and say, “Here’s what we’re trying out, and here are all the things that we’re doing.”
The CPD has experimented with all sorts of algorithms that claim that they can predict who, what, where, when crime will happen. They were early adopters into what then called the CAPS Program, but eventually they started calling community policing all over the country, where the premise is just basically have cops talking to people, more interactions with the people everywhere.
And I think this misses a lot of the — when talk about police tactics nationally. I think a lot of people don’t see Chicago as a major player. People always talk about LAPD, people always talk about NYPD, but really Chicago is one of these incubators for experimenting on the public.
KH: So, as Freddy explained, ShotSpotter claims that its product is 97% accurate, and supporters of the technology, including police departments that want to keep the tech, are quite prone to uplifting that number. But when I looked at any report that wasn’t compiled by the ShotSpotter marketing department, I came across very different numbers. According to a report from The MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law, for example, 89% of ShotSpotter deployments in Chicago turned up no gun-related crime. 86% led to no report of any crime at all. The report indicated that over the 21.5 months researchers studied, there were more than 40,000 dead-end ShotSpotter deployments in Chicago. On an average day in Chicago, the report found, “there are more than 61 ShotSpotter-initiated police deployments that turn up no evidence of any crime, let alone gun crime.” That study was conducted between July 1, 2019 and April 14, 2021.
In August, Chicago’s Office of Inspector General’s Public Safety section reported that the police department data it examined “does not support a conclusion that ShotSpotter is an effective tool in developing evidence of gun-related crime.” The report indicated that between January 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021, about 50,000 “probably gunshot” alerts were issued by ShotSpotter in Chicago, each of which resulted in Chicago Police being deployed. The report found that, out of all those deployments, a total of 4,556 incidents in which “evidence of a gun-related criminal offense was found.” That represents 9.1% of CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts.
But when we talk about what we know about ShotSpotter in Chicago, and how organizers have been able to seize upon this issue, we should highlight the fact that activist researchers have been sizing up the surveillance state in Chicago for years, including ShotSpotter, using the Freedom of Information Act, in addition to other methods. Lucy Parsons Labs has gained quite a reputation in Chicago for its in-depth research and dogged cataloging of details that politicians would rather keep buried.
When Adam Toledo was killed, organizers like Freddy were able to offer immediate assistance to people who wanted to understand the surveillance system that set Adam’s fatal police encounter in motion.
FM: So we, for a long time have just been documenting and cataloging police use of surveillance technologies. We’ve done a lot of deep research, we did a lot of lawsuits, to uncover that information. And so, what that allowed us to do is be one of the people that could just plug in immediately. And when people were having questions about, what is this technology? How does it work? What are the pitfalls? What are the police saying, but what’s the actual truth on the ground, and how does it fit into these larger narratives of like anti-Blackness or histories of repression?
We became one of the groups that could answer those questions immediately. I remember at one point there was a journalist on Twitter who had said that weekend that Adam Toledo got murdered was like, “I think I’m going to spend this weekend looking into everything I can about ShotSpotter.” And I said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. Go to our website, chicagopolicesurveillance.com. It’s all on there.” And having those resources ready to go is really critical for just organizing work. And that’s kind of been what we’ve sort of focused on for the last couple of years.
KH: I also spoke with Alyx Goodwin, an organizer with Chicago’s local Defund CPD campaign and the deputy campaign director for the Action Center on Race and the Economy. When we spoke, Alyx told me she’s committed to eliminating the ShotSpotter contract, not simply because the product is ineffective, but also because it’s part of a racialized and deadly system of surveillance that brings violence upon Black and brown people.
Alyx Goodwin: Surveillance is actually the way I started to really get a grasp on racial capitalism. Growing up, I understood Black people to be surveilled in a specific way, right? I knew about COINTELPRO, I knew about the dismantling of the Black Panther Party and other organizations. I know Black communities are over-policed, that was my entry point to understanding policing and surveillance as a Black person. And then I met with folks who are undocumented, and experiencing surveillance through ICE and immigration, and the way federal agencies are surveilling folks. And then I met with folks who are Muslim, Arab, South Asian, who are surveilled in a specific way, with a different set of programs and at the end of the day, it is all surveillance. It is all for the purpose of maintaining the status quo, and that was just a huge light bulb for me. Even this ShotSpotter campaign — we’re trying to understand the way ShotSpotter is informing surveillance, other forms of surveillance, other surveillance tools.
So we know that ShotSpotter, per the OIG report, we know that ShotSpotter has also changed police behavior, basically increasing stop and frisk. And we also know on the other side with the gang database campaign, that cops are performing these, what they call “investigatory stops” on people who they believe are gang members. So, there is very likely a strong correlation between ShotSpotter alerts in specific neighborhoods informing the number of stop and frisk, and the way stop and frisk is happening to folks who are now being stopped and labeled as gang members.
I think it’s also important to name that in the OIG report, it’s described as the narrative that ShotSpotter creates about a neighborhood, is what is encouraging officers to stop and frisk folks. So, they’re already going into this with the frame of mind that this is a dangerous neighborhood, or there’s gang members here, whatever excuse they are using to justify. And so, I think I want us to really hammer down folks who are listening, and coming into the ShotSpotter campaign, to understand that this is a piece of a larger puzzle. Not to overwhelm folks, but if we tear down this particular piece of surveillance, what other wins is that going to open us up to? I think it opens us up a lot to winning a lot of other things, and to breaking down other parts of the police state.
One of the things that the campaign talks about is that ShotSpotter is not actually a public safety solution, for a number of reasons, one of them being it’s sending police in and making situations worse and more violent. ACRE, my day job, did a report called “21st Century Policing: The Rise and Reach of Surveillance and Police Technology.” And in that report, we had a chance to highlight ShotSpotter, and that came out earlier this year. And then I want to say around the same time in Chicago, was the very untimely death of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old, who lived in Little Village who was killed by the Chicago Police Department because a ShotSpotter alert took them to his location.
And we talk a lot about justice for families, and justice for people who are in communities who have been impacted by police violence. And it just kind of felt like, in that moment, we had no choice except to work to cancel the contract. Because as a mom of two myself, I cannot fathom, it’s really hard, just the sheer amount of anger that I feel for Adam’s mom. I can only imagine how she feels, and how other families feel, how other communities feel when they’ve lost somebody to police violence, when these are things that could have been avoided if we were not investing money in policing, and if we were not investing money in surveillance, but instead investing that money into things that communities are asking for and demanding. For some reason it is so difficult for them to find money for housing and mental health, but it is not hard for them to find money for police. And that is also, I think, one of the issues that we want to raise with this campaign.
KH: According to The Associated Press, ShotSpotter evidence has now been admitted in over 200 court cases around the country. Reports prepared by ShotSpotter staff have also been used in court to make dubious assertions about whether defendants fired at police, or how many shots were fired during a particular incident. The AP’s investigation also found that “the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots.”
65-year-old Michael Williams spent nearly a year in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, facing a murder charge on the basis of evidence mined from ShotSpotter. A silent clip of security footage showing a car driving through an intersection, and a noise picked up by ShotSpotter’s sea of microphones were the only evidence against Williams, who eventually considered taking his own life to escape the torment of incarceration. Prosecutors, who initially claimed ShotSpotter’s secret algorithm had cracked the case, eventually asked a judge to dismiss the charges against Williams, citing insufficient evidence.
So we know that ShotSpotter rarely connects police with actual gun crimes, and we also know that, when it does, we can all too easily wind up with a 65 year-old Black man wrongly incarcerated or with a young person shot dead by police. But facts alone don’t generate movements. Well organized facts can create narrative potential, and impactful stories can move people to act, but that kind of activation requires the labor of storytellers. I recently spoke with Caullen Hudson. Caullen is the Executive Producer of SoapBox Productions and Organizing, which is a film production, social activism entity in Chicago. He’s also a member of the Stop ShotSpotter campaign. During our talk, Caullen shared some thoughts on uplifting a radical analysis of the ShotSpotter problem that I think are especially important.
Caullen Hudson: A lot of what we try to do at SoapBox is, work in and be a movement with organizers and activists, and look at the bigger picture, and the root causes of social issues, and attack them in a way that amplifies and uplifts the work that’s already being done, and the history behind things. And because we work in media and films at the forefront, we try to look at narrative. We’ve been involved in the abolitionist community in Chicago for several years now, and we were aware of work around police technology for a while. I think, for me, personally, I looked into a lot more after Adam Toledo.I think what is so tragic about that incident is that it’s a 13-year-old, who was killed by CPD, but it’s also an example of when this technology worked 100 percent, and this is what happened when it does work, because it’s expanding the police state. It’s also, so, interestingly untimely and timely, because it’s happening a year and some change after global uprisings against white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, and policing, which is police violence all the time.
Not only is it happening at a moment where the mainstream and the commons has had a zeitgeist shift in understanding the insidiousness of all these systems and how they are meant to harm us, but we’re seeing it happen when it’s slowly being shifted back. I think that’s important to look at these certain incidents, and look at these moments, and understand how we can show up for that family. I think, also, it’s important to look at the history of all this, right? I think we look at surveillance, in general. It’s never anything new. It just kind of reified every generation. It just looks different and it feels different, and we just see the state and the powerful have new ways to do it, new technologies to do it through any new other institutions they can build up.
Next month is the anniversary of CPD killing Fred Hampton, right, and that’s something that people talk about a little more so because there’s a Hollywood movie made about it. Whether we like that or not, it’s because of narrative and because of media, that it’s more in the ether now. They can have these more robust, and more real, and more radical conversations about this because we’re putting together a critique that’s looking at systems at the forefront that we’re creating, which wasn’t happening before.
KH: Caullen also pointed out that, from a distance, facts about surveillance can often be eclipsed by narratives around reform — narratives that can lead to harmful expansions of the police state.
CH: What I saw last summer was Mayor Lightfoot going on TV at Black Women Mayors forum, talking to all the good racial justice things that she’s doing. If you’re from Chicago or from from Chicago and an organizer, especially, it’s laughable — the public gaslighting, right, that I think about before her, with Rahm, and we tend to forget that like folks on the other side see Rahm as a reformer, Rahm and Lightfoot, as reformers, or don’t like police. And I think it’s important to know that with the Cop Academy in Chicago, Rahm pitted that as an answer to what happened to Laquan, saying that was tragic. Here’s how we’re going to train police better, get them more resources to do that. So it’ll be better. This is for you. ShotSpotter ‘s tech is the same way with particularly those two mayors, but other mayors in the city, as well, is that we want to expand the police state in order to make them better, and that never is the case because it’s inherently violent, you’re just spreading out violence, making it look different, and make it more palatable for folks who aren’t on the ground or being oppressed by those same systems. I think that that narrative component does a lot, and it moves people, and it makes folks, especially outside of those areas, be okay with it.
KH: The ShotSpotter contract was discussed at a recent meeting of the Chicago City Council, and activists I spoke with had strong feelings about the arguments police and ShotSpotter representatives made in defense of keeping the contract.
AG: One of the police officers, I don’t remember his title, his last name is Snelling. And he was saying like, “Yeah, we talk about the 90% number, ShotSpotter not being effective 90% of the time, but we need to focus on the 10% of the time when it is effective.” And that it just sounds like, 10% is an F, that is technically an F, that is basically a zero. And I could not imagine ever trying to come home with 10% and being like, “Look, just focus on the fact that I wrote my name on the paper.” Right? I think that they were trying really, really hard in the hearing to make a case for needing ShotSpotter without having any data to actually back up why they would need ShotSpotter. Which was really, it was exciting to watch because it felt like we had caught them up in the marketing that is ShotSpotter. Like, the numbers, this is all marketing for a product. It’s not like an actual public safety investment, despite what they want us to believe.
And so, yeah, I think that part of why CPD is so invested in keeping ShotSpotter is just because that further legitimizes their role as an institution for violence and harassment, to be the public safety solution.
FM: ShotSpotter people actually said at the hearing, they’re like, “We are relying on data. Data is neutral. Data is objective. We’re only going off of data.” And literally all of us just starting pulling our hair because anyone that studies crime and sociology, knows that data is not neutral. But that’s who our opponents are. They’ll say anything as a way of obfuscating what they’re really doing. They’ll say these things that everyone who’s acting in good faith would never claim. I would never claim that data on crime is neutral in any way.
One of the things that they kept saying over and over at the hearing was, what about the one time that someone was responding to a ShotSpotter alert and they find someone that’s injured? That’s why this technology works. That’s not a good way of making public policy.
I have to make the joke that at one time I was able to buy Christmas presents because I picked up $400 that someone had dropped outside of the Target, but that’s not how bills get paid, right? And so, when we were talking about the difference here about what true public safety looks like and investing money into mental health and violence interruption programs instead of ShotSpotter precisely because we see that there’s this marketing talk of 97% accuracy.
And then what happens, when CPD responds 96% or 91% of the time, they don’t even write a report. They don’t even open any kind of investigation. There’s no shell casings. There’s nothing for them to do. And then what does happen though, is that we know for a fact that they will write reports about, we found someone with weed on scene or someone with an open container.
We have to figure out how to shape this narrative in a way that’s both talking about what the actual facts on the ground are but also rooting out actual factual answers from an abolitionist perspective, because we know that just dumping more money into the police will not keep us safe. Forget ShotSpotter itself not working properly, even if it did, we still wouldn’t want that money that should go to violence prevention programs going into technologies just because they’re good at marketing.
KH: Organizers with the Stop ShotSpotter campaign say that the city needs to address the root causes of harm and violence in Chicago’s communities, but they understand why that argument is a hard sell with neoliberal city officials.
AG: Abolition is not profitable, and Chicago is a business relationship for ShotSpotter, Chicago is the second biggest contract. And were the city to invest in things that the community identifies as true public safety, ShotSpotter wouldn’t make money. It would probably lead us to finally reckoning with the fact that we need to lay off police officers. Once we start recognizing that a lot of this is profit-driven, and moving on the fact that a lot of policing is profit-driven, the institution would fall apart.
I also think that it’s important to name too, that as calls for abolition and defund have gotten louder, the reform industry is booming. Because again, were we to move towards abolition, there’s a number of industries that would fall because of that. So I also think that this is also about business relationships.
CH: It’s about business, and profit, and capital, and it’s about reaction. This is all reactionary. ShotSpotter is a great real life example of policing in general, right? It literally is supposed to, at its best, spot shots after they happen. Why are we so concerned about things that harm after it happens? Again, presumably if that’s actually the case, versus trying to stop in the first place?
If we’re so concerned about data, as they keep telling us, we have the data, we have the stats on how poverty alleviation alleviates crime and harm, how jobs, how food, how good education alleviates harm, and crime, and all that. We know that we’ve had so much data on that for the past several decades, arguably forever, but that’s not what we actually invest in.
Right now, it’s into 2021, and this whole new crime wave narrative has been happening kind of all year. Few folks are talking about how that maybe could be tied to people not having what they need after, or during a global pandemic, and more so about how we stop the crime. We’re talking about the same quote/unquote “solutions” we’ve been talking about for decades, and decades, and decades, so why would we have all this crime to keep doing the same thing over and over again?
Do you want to get that same bag, give that bag more money versus actually thinking about, and listen to the data, and the people in communities that are one suffering the most from it? I just get frustrated, sometimes I feel like it’s so clear. It’s like, “Why are you doing the same thing over and over again?” And relying on the same narratives, and especially we had an explosion of work, and a mass conscious shift, but I think it’s still there showing how these things are not working. If we all truly want to solve gun violence, why are we reacting to gun violence after it happens?
Yeah, it’s like look, we can all agree, we want to end gun violence. No one here is for gun violence, and so let us look at the root causes of how that happens, and how institutions, and how entities have actually been at the forefront of dismantled communities, both locally, and domestically, and globally, and how the criminal violence they always want to talk about actually comes from inequality, that actually come from anti-Black, that actually comes from capitalism, actually comes from slavery, actually comes from taking this land. It comes from all the things that this state or powerful entities have always done. And so we know that those things can’t exist. We need to start dismantling them, in order for us to see true liberation, or to see a decrease in the harms that are so prevalent, that we can all agree we don’t want to see anymore.
Another point, I think that’s important is that, police surveillance expands and visualizes policing under like this myth of tech-based neutrality, and objectivity, and as we’ve talked about, we can’t solve our social and political problems through technology. Tech is not objective, tech is not neutral. We are making this tech, and oftentimes, relying on the same data and information that is sustaining the same systems that we keep talking about, keep fighting against.
I think that’s what they try to sell us when they have the new toy. It’s like, “Oh, this is based on technology. It’s based on data, so therefore it’s neutral. It can’t be racist. It’s colorblind.” And that myth is deadly.
KH: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot often portrays abolitionists and other critics of police as out of touch and insensitive to the plight of neighborhoods that are besieged by crime and violence. It is, in fact, a common criticism of prison and police abolitionists, and of the movement to defund the police, that demanding disinvestment from the police is a privileged, white perspective. But most abolitionists are not white, and the ideas that propel this work were incubated by Black and brown people who were subject to the very violence they were critiquing. This remains true of most abolitionist organizing today, including the Stop ShotSpotter campaign.
FM: When I think about the campaign and the people that are involved in it, I think one thing that I really appreciate and like about it is just how representative we are of the actual people who are facing these issues and have to tackle them and offer actual solutions that we know will keep us safe, that will lead to collective safety. The mayor likes to say that us abolitionists don’t care about victims of crime and things like that.
And when I saw the murder of Adam Toledo, he was killed outside of the high school that my cousins went to. I know that neighborhood. I’m from that neighborhood. I grew up in that neighborhood. And in a lot of ways, I think that coming to this campaign is a way of both trying to do something for me personally going back 20 years or 25 years and wishing I had lived in a neighborhood that was safer, but also realizing that the solutions are going to come from people like me and from people like Alyx and Caullen and all of us because I mean, we have to be involved because ultimately, we keep us safe, as they say. That’s one thing that’s been sticking with me a lot, thinking about the campaign and some of the work we’ve been doing across the city.
KH: Amid public debate about the contract’s renewal in August, activists and members of the Chicago City Council learned that the city’s ShotSpotter contract had been quietly renewed back in December. Some members of the City Council objected to the administration’s lack of transparency, with one alderman calling the renewal “an abuse of authority.” While City Council members talk about how to prevent similar incidents in the future, organizers with the Stop ShotSpotter campaign are reminding the public that the contract is still vulnerable.
AG: So, the contract can be canceled at any time. There’s no legal penalty, there’s no fines. If City Council does not appropriate the money, the contract is canceled. And so for folks in Chicago, we need folks telling their city council member, by calling them, or emailing them, or tweeting at them, Alderwoman Pat Dowell does not like to be tweeted at, so I would highly suggest you tweet at her. But we’re letting them know that folks, we don’t want ShotSpotter in our wards. We don’t want the city paying nine million dollars for this technology, we want nine million dollars invested in structural solutions, in community-led violence interruption and prevention, like the Peace Book, for example. That’s one thing.
We’re also collecting petition signatures, tonight we hit over 2,500 signatures, which is really exciting. Because [the] City Council is saying, “We need to see the data,” so we showed them the data that ShotSpotter doesn’t work. And they said, “Oh, well, we need to hear from our constituents,” so we are showing them that their constituents that don’t want ShotSpotter exist, and are here and are loud.
And so, really the most important thing that folks can do that are in Chicago, is tell their Alderperson that they don’t want ShotSpotter used in their ward, or anywhere in the city. For folks who are not in Chicago, if ShotSpotter has a pilot in your city, hit us up, hit folks up in Chicago, because we are looking to support other local campaigns that want to cancel ShotSpotter contracts, or make sure that ShotSpotter doesn’t happen in their city. Also, I would also highly suggest tweeting at Ralph Clark, who is the CEO of ShotSpotter. This man makes a million dollars a year, he lives in the Hills of Oakland very comfortably, and is profiting off of the harassment and surveillance, and gun violence of Black people and Latinx people in Chicago and around the country. And that is just not right, on so many levels.
KH: Given that police casually inflict violence upon marginalized people, robbing people of life, liberty and dignity, there’s something especially draconian about technology that summons such forces to a targeted community anytime there’s a loud noise. In Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision, Brendan McQuade wrote that the basic mandate of police power is to “regulate poverty and fabricate capitalist forms of order.” According to McQuade, mass surveillance projects and the work of “security” are not a response to disorder, but rather, “the political work of managing poverty and pacifying class struggle.”
Police do not function as community members, operating in the pursuit of communal safety. They operate in opposition to communities targeted for criminalization and pacification. ShotSpotter offers opportunities for instigation wherein community members are assumed combatants. The social impunity that police enjoy often rests on the idea that police have to make split second decisions in life threatening situations. ShotSpotter manufactures the urgency of an active threat, offering situations where there is likely no risk, but where police can operate within a narrative of extreme risk. In this way, ShotSpotter serves up an ideal narrative context for police deployments — one that cloaks the everyday violence of policing in ShotSpotter’s algorithmic fog of war.
A few years ago, a couple of friends of mine were sitting outside on a summer day, outside one of their homes, when the police rolled up. The officers who approached them claimed there had been gunfire in the area and demanded to know what my two friends had seen and heard. My friends, a Latinx woman and a trans white woman, told the police they had not seen or heard anything and did not believe there had been a gunshot. The police insisted that they were certain there had been a gunshot because the ShotSpotter system told them so, and they accused my friends of covering for gang members. The police demanded to know why my friends would protect violent criminals who, as far as we know, did not exist. Two marginalized people were at risk of experiencing violence, or arrest, that day, in an accusatory confrontation with police, generated by a faulty algorithm. My friends managed to back away from the situation safely, but the more often incidents like this occur, the more often they will result in abuse, dehumanization, the indignity of arrest, or even the death of a marginalized person.
Adam Toledo’s case gained attention because body camera footage revealed he had his hands up at the moment he was killed. Such moments of exposure are rare for police, who generally enjoy the white-washed image that cop shows and doting politicians have upheld for generations. In Adam’s case, we saw a convergence of surveillance devices that we are told exist to protect the public: police body cameras and ShotSpotter. A ShotSpotter alert summoned the police. A police officer’s body camera documented that Adam’s hands were in the air when a police officer killed him. And in the end, that footage meant nothing, because the surveillance technology that captured it does not exist to protect people like Adam, and neither do the police.
We live in a time when biometric surveillance systems, facial recognition software, e-carceration and ubiquitous cameras have created new avenues for policing and social control. We know that these technologies are often faulty, and that even when they work, they are empowering an inherently violent, racist system — one where police freely harass, brutalize, cage and kill with impunity. In Chicago, we are witnessing a vicious cycle, where funds captured in the war on drugs fund narcotics unit operations and controversial surveillance devices, including miles of microphones. And those listening devices, working in concert, provide cover for more aggressive police deployments.
But cycles can be broken and organizers are fighting to end ShotSpotter contracts, to ban facial recognition software, and to shut down surveillance technologies that are being deployed against migrants and other criminalized people. San Antonio, Charlotte, and Fall River have all ended their ShotSpotter contracts, deeming the technology costly and ineffective. Seven states and nearly two dozen cities have limited government use of facial recognition technology. Groups like Mijente are organizing for a surveillance free future and targeting tech companies that provide ICE with its predatory infrastructure. The Illinois Coalition to End Money Bond is pushing “to reduce the harm done by pretrial electronic monitoring and to eliminate its use in the long run.” We have so much to dismantle, and so much yet to build, but we can always begin by learning, and by sharing what we know, and then shaping narratives that can help others understand that a dystopian sea of microphones is not what public safety looks like. Safety comes from people working together to change the material conditions that generate harm and despair, and I hope we are ready to do that work together.
I want to thank Freddy, Caullen and Alyx for talking with me about Stop ShotSpotter, security and abolition. I learned a lot and I really appreciate the work they’re doing. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
Take Action:- You can sign the petition to cancel ShotSpotter and support community-led solutions to address gun violence in Chicago here.
- From the StopShotSpotter organizers: “This toolkit contains background information, resources, and calls to action for you to learn more about this campaign and support the Coalition’s goal to not only get rid of this tech, but to also reinvest those funds into the things that would actually create safety in our communities, like the Peace Book and Community Restoration Ordinance.”
Further Reading:- Chicago watchdog harshly criticizes ShotSpotter system by Don Babwin and Garance Burke
- How AI Powered Tech Landed a Man in Jail with Scant Evidence by Garance Burke, Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman and Michael Tarm
- ShotSpotter creates thousands of dead-end police deployments that find no evidence of actual gunfire (MacArthur Justice Center)
- Chicago Inspector General: Using ShotSpotter Does Not Justify Crime Fighting Utility
- Summary of OIG Report report
- Community groups demand city oust ShotSpotter gunshot detection system by Patrick Elwood
- Chicago Should Cancel ShotSpotter Contract After Report Shows Police Influence On Technology, Activists Say by Mauricio Peña and Justin Laurence
- Op-Ed: End the City’s ShotSpotter Contract by Freddy Martinez and Lucy Parsons Labs
- Chicago Awaits Video of Police Killing 13 Year-Old Boy by Jamie Kalven
- The Shots Heard Round the City by Michael Wasney
- Critics see waste, bias in Chicago’s multimillion-dollar gunfire-detection system by Emily Zantow
- Inside the Chicago Police Department’s secret budget by Joel Handley, Jennifer Helsby and Freddy Martinez
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Canadian police continue to arrest Indigenous land defenders blocking construction of Coastal GasLink, a 400-mile pipeline that would carry natural gas through Wet’suwet’en land. Police arrested two people Monday for blockading an access road, less than two weeks after arresting more than 30 in a violent raid on Coyote Camp and elsewhere that ended a 56-day blockade of a drilling site. We get an update from Wet’suwet’en land defender Molly Wickham, also known as Sleydo’, just released from jail. “This is the third time they have come in and raided Wet’suwet’en territory,” says Wickham. “We’ve never signed any documents to cede our land.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Members of the Haida Nation performing last week after they brought medicines, food and supplies to the Wet’suwet’en land defenders in British Columbia. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González as we end today’s show with an update on the land defenders in Canada who are facing a government crackdown. Two people arrested Monday after blockading an access road used by Coastal GasLink to build a 400-mile pipeline within Wet’suwet’en land that violates both Indigenous and Canadian laws. This comes after Canadian heavily militarized federal police arrested about 30 Wet’suwet’en members and supporters at camps and roadblocks in the same area last week including a violent raid that ended a 56-day blockade of the drilling site. One of those arrested in the raid on the Coyote Camp was documentary filmmaker Michael Toledano, who shared this dramatic footage of the raid.
PERSON: They’re walking to the door. They’re breaking it down.
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: They are breaking down the door.
PERSON: Get out of here.
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: They’re breaking down the door.
POLICE: Show me hands.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Get that [beep] gun off me. Get your [beep] gun off me! Lower your gun!
POLICE: I want to see everybody’s hands.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Get your [beep] gun off me! This is sovereign Wet’suwet’en land!
POLICE: Step away from the door.
PERSON: The RCMP have breached the door. They are acting under the authority of the injunction.
MOLLY WICKHAM: The attack dogs are there.
PERSON: There are attack dogs here.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Standing there, right beside the door.
PERSON: Militarized police. They used axes found in camp to break down the door.
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: And the chainsaw.
PERSON: And a chainsaw that they found in camp to break [inaudible].
POLICE: [inaudible] you’re under arrest.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Don’t touch me!
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: Don’t touch her.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Do not touch me.
PERSON: Get your hands off of her!
PEOPLE [inaudible]
POLICE: You’re under arrest.
PERSON: Get your hands off of her!
PEOPLE [inaudible]
POLICE: You’re under arrest.
PERSON: This is sovereign Wet’suwet’en territory!
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: I’m filming a documentary for CBC Television.
POLICE: No problem. You’re under arrest.
POLICE: Get that out of my face and back up. You’re under arrest.
PERSON: For the record, I’m a member of the media. You’ve been notified that I’m here. I’m [inaudible]
POLICE: You’re under arrest right now, so step out.
PERSON: I’m coming with you. I’m coming with you.
POLICE: [inaudible] you’re under arrest.
PEOPLE: [inaudible]
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: I’m a member of the media. I am filming a documentary for CBC Television!
PERSON: Lower the camera.
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: You are twisting my wrist! I’m a member of the media. I’m filming a documentary for CBC Television. I have press credentials.
AMY GOODMAN: Dramatic footage of the violent raid on Coyote Camp. Among those arrested and who we heard in this video was Molly Wickham, also known as Sleydo, a land defender and matriarch of the Gidimt’en Clan of Wet’suwet’en Nation, leader in this protracted battle to protect the land. She joins us now again. Molly, you were just released from jail last week. The cabin where we spoke to you from two Fridays ago was burned to the ground? Explain what happened in this raid. We heard you saying, “Get your bleeping gun off me.”
MOLLY WICKHAM: The CIRG team of the police, the specialized group of RCMP to deal with specifically industry and Indigenous land defenders, surrounded our camp with tactical teams that they dropped in helis. They had canine units, semiautomatic weapons. They broke down the door without an arrest warrant or a search warrant and came into the tiny house that we were at and used axes and chainsaws and held us at gunpoint and arrested seven people inside and then four people at the cabin that they later burned down. They bulldozed the entire camp and CGL was present at the raid.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about this branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police? They call it the Community-Industry Response Group. What is this, a protection outfit?
MOLLY WICKHAM: Yes, it is basically this rogue group of police that work for private industry. They are directed by private industry. The government has claimed no oversight or direction towards this particular group of police that come in and do—this is the third time that they have violently raided Wet’suwet’en territory. They don’t have the same accountability as other police do and they take direction and were using CGL vehicles for the arrests, for the raid. They were staying at the man camps with CGL. They had put up an exclusion zone that they were letting only CGL through and blocking all Wet’suwet’en, even our house chiefs, from the territory, during the raids.
AMY GOODMAN: Molly, if you could talk about again why you are there, this bigger struggle that is taking place.
MOLLY WICKHAM: The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have never ceded or surrendered our territory and so they still have title to our land. We don’t have treaties. We have never signed any documents to cede our land and they said that there is no pipelines within our system to go through Wet’suwet’en territory. Wedzin Kwa is our sacred headwaters where our salmon spawn. It’s the last clean drinking water source in our territory and Coastal GasLink is about to drill under our headwaters.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Who owns Coastal GasLink? Could you talk about their corporate connections?
MOLLY WICKHAM: Yes. They are owned by TC Energy. They are partly owned by AIMCo, which is an investment firm in Alberta that actually holds our CMP police retirement funds, and by KKR, which is a private equity firm in the United States as well.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you demanding right now?
MOLLY WICKHAM: We are demanding that Coastal GasLink get off our territory and that the governments come to the table with the Wet’suwet’en and actually start implementing and respecting our title to the territories. This is a larger issue that could have easily been resolved if implementation of our title was recognized, if our governance system was recognized. Instead, the government is choosing to take direction from a private corporation to come in and destroy our lands and our waters and they are using militarized RCMP against unarmed Indigenous women on our territories and removing us from the territory.
One of the conditions of my release was that I am restricted from accessing my territory. Coastal GasLink wanted to ban me from my territory completely which is a violation of our Section 35 rights under the constitution and of course a violation of Wet’suwet’en law. They successfully banned my husband from our territory other than to come to our home, directly to and from our home, which prevents us from hunting, fishing, doing anything on our territory, getting firewood. They banned everybody else who was arrested from our territory, claiming terra nullius, essentially, that we don’t have a community out here, that we don’t have infrastructure, and that there’s no—
AMY GOODMAN: Molly, we have to leave it there but we will continue to follow this struggle. Thank you so much. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. Stay safe.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This week, world leaders met in Glasgow for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26. Proceedings have largely been characterised by inaction, hypocrisy and empty words. But we have also seen Indigenous, grassroots and youth climate justice activists raising their voices demanding action on the climate crisis.
In spite of the excessive policing of climate justice protests in the Scottish city, people in towns and cities across the world are gearing up to take part in a global day of action for climate justice this weekend.
COP26 – a ludicrous affair
Since 31 October, world leaders have gathered in Glasgow for the two-week climate summit. The summit’s aim is “to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change”. But proceedings have been overshadowed by hypocrisy.
Indeed, we have seen delegates predominantly dining on meat, fish and dairy. Highlighting the ludicrousness of the climate summit’s meat and fish-heavy menu, co-founder of rewilding campaign Wild Card Joel Scott-Halkes tweeted:
Meat and fish on the menu at #COP26 ?!
This is the equivalent of serving cigarettes at a lung cancer conference.
Only when governments grasp animal agriculture's central role in the #climate crisis will we stand a chance of solving it. @RebelsAnimal #ClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/yicbcHiaSL
— Joel Scott-Halkes (@Joelscotthalkes) November 3, 2021
Having lectured world leaders on the need for action to save the planet, UK prime minister Boris Johnson decided to fly home in a private jet after just two days at the two week conference. News outlet Politics JOE summarised:
Boris Johnson: Our children will 'judge us with bitterness' if we fail to tackle climate change
Also Boris Johnson: Train takes too long, private jet it ishttps://t.co/Du5ZLn2oa9— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) November 2, 2021
And Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took to the stage to muse about recognising Earth’s “fragility” during his trip to space. In response, climate justice activist Sam Knights said:
Jeff Bezos just spoke at COP26. He lectured people whose countries are sinking and whose citizens are dying on the "fragility of the natural world"…. yeah, I think they know mate.
— Sam Knights (@samjknights) November 2, 2021
Activists take to the streets
Groups have already staged a number of protests ahead of the global day of action for climate justice, which is taking place on Saturday 6 November. In the face of the farcical COP26 conference, grassroots activists from around the world have taken to Glasgow’s streets to demand urgent action on the climate crisis.
Although climate crisis discourses continue to sideline the instrumental work of Indigenous environmental and land rights defenders, Futuros Indígenas activists from Guatemala and Mexico attended the conference demanding to be heard:
"The future can't be negotiated, the future must be defended!" Andrea Ixchíu, a K'iche woman from Totonicapán, is in Glasgow with a Guatemalan and Mexican delegation of indigenous peoples. They planted a message: "Join the indigenous resistance!"
@midianinja – #CopCollab26 pic.twitter.com/xJcYJlz87v— Mídia NINJA (@MidiaNINJA) November 3, 2021
Meanwhile, campaigners calling on the UK government to stop the Cambo oil field staged a mock ceremony:
BREAKING: Half a century after first turning ON the tap to North Sea oil, Her Majesty the Queen returns today to turn it OFF in a mock ceremony organised by @StopCambo activists in Glasgow.
It's time for a #JustTransition away from oil & gas. #COP26 : #StopCambo pic.twitter.com/6fQPGknuZS
— StopCambo (@StopCambo) November 3, 2021
And in a show of transnational solidarity, Glasgow Calls Out Polluters campaigners teamed up with Fridays for Future organisers from Italy to disrupt a COP26 event:
BREAKING
With @fffitalia, we’re disrupting an event by Italian oil giant Eni.
We’re calling out their climate lies and reading a statement from @ja4change from Mozambique
#COP26 #Rising Clyde pic.twitter.com/9KYoTu6seb— Glasgow Calls Out Polluters (GCOP) (@Ggow_COP) November 2, 2021
Excessive policing in Glasgow
Ahead of the COP26 summit, Police Scotland pledged to be “friendly, fair and accommodating” to protesters. But the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) raised concerns about excessive and disproportionate policing in Glasgow. It shared:
This campaigner was stopped earlier today because police officers said he was "talking to people and walking too fast" pic.twitter.com/yLM3SMS8XG
— Netpol (@netpol) November 3, 2021
One Twitter user shared:
The police followed my friends, who are peaceful protestors, around Glasgow at #COP26 yesterday. Today they were followed around Glasgow, onto a train to Edinburgh, and are currently being followed around Edinburgh. This doesn’t sound like proportionate policing to me @netpol
— Ams (@amsillustrator) November 2, 2021
Meanwhile, police seized and impounded the Jubilee Debt Campaign’s inflatable Lock Ness monster calling on western governments to clear the global South debt:
Our @dropthedebt Loch Ness debt monster is being impounded by the police at #cop26 We wanted to show that the global South debt crisis cannot be ignored if we are to achieve climate justice. pic.twitter.com/h0y49UpYdj
— Heidi Chow (@hidschow) November 3, 2021
Elsewhere, officers kettled Extinction Rebellion marchers headed towards the summit:
The Police are refusing exit of the block they created, you can’t leave to the toilet or for medication.
But, you can get out if your the media!
pic.twitter.com/BJ7xI7N9Fg— Thomas O. Cornwallis (@UrbanistTOC) November 3, 2021
Netpol intends to publish a report on the policing of COP26. In preparation for this, the group is rigorously documenting campaigners’ experiences of oppressive policing during protests in Glasgow. Anyone looking to share their experiences of oppressive policing at COP26 can email their evidence and testimonies to COP26Policing@protonmail.com.
Global day of action
As COP26 continues, people are gearing up to take part in a global day of action for climate justice this weekend. On Saturday 6 November, campaigners in towns and cities across the world will take to the streets to demand climate justice. The COP26 Coalition has produced an interactive map of actions taking place in towns and cities across the globe. Coalition member Surfers Against Sewage has put together a helpful resource pack for protest attendees.
If there isn’t a protest happening in your local area, you can organise your own. Alternatively, you can join the virtual protest on the day.
Staying safe on the streets
If you do take to the streets this weekend, be sure to follow Netpol member Green & Black Cross’ advice for people attending protests. Their key messages are:
- NO COMMENT: You don’t need to answer police questions. Not speaking to officers keeps you and other protesters safe.
- NO PERSONAL DETAILS:You don’t generally have to give your name or address to the police (unless you’re driving a vehicle). However, if police are fining you under a fixed penalty notice (FPN), warning you under an anti-social behaviour power or quoting an airport bylaw, you may want to give your name or address to avoid arrest.
- WHAT POWER?: The police rely on you not knowing the law. Ask them “under what power” they are acting and why. Make a note of their response as soon as possible.
- NO DUTY SOLICITOR: Duty solicitors often give bad advice to protesters. Instead, choose a lawyer from Netpol’s list of trusted protest solicitors.
- NO CAUTION: If police arrest you, don’t accept a caution. It counts as an admission of guilt, and will go on your criminal record. Never accept a caution without taking advice from an experienced protest lawyer.
However you choose to participate, taking part in the upcoming day of action is a powerful way we can all support urgent calls for global climate justice, and demand action from world leaders.
Featured image via Marcus Spiske/Unsplash
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Voters rejected a ballot amendment to replace the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) with a broader slate of public safety services by a slim margin on Tuesday after a campaign that proponents say was marred by misinformation and fearmongering. However, a loss at the polls is not sending police reformers and racial justice activists back the drawing board.
Activists say there are still plenty of avenues for overhauling the public safety system and holding police accountable in Minneapolis, where the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020 sparked an uprising against state violence and forced the nation to face the realities of systemic racism. The police department remains under state and federal investigation for civil rights abuses, and alternatives to policing are already being built, both in the city government and through grassroots organizing.
The Black-led coalition behind the amendment spoke with tens of thousands of residents about expanding public safety ahead of the vote, and organizers say they have permanently changed the conversation. Miski Noor, co-director of Black Visions Collective, a power-building group for Black queer and trans people in Minneapolis, said rallying more than 60,000 votes for the amendment was no small feat.
“Folks are actually talking about public safety, and folks understand that public safety goes beyond policing, and that is a huge shift in consciousness from last year,” Noor said in an interview on Wednesday. “We are not starting from scratch — 60,000 people believe in a new vision of public safety, and that number is only going to grow here in Minneapolis.”
Minneapolis police would not have disappeared had the amendment passed, although supporters have consistently said this is what the opposition wanted voters to believe. Instead, the proposed amendment to the city charter would have removed a longstanding requirement that the city retain a minimum number of police officers relative to the population, while folding the embattled police department into a new Department of Public Safety offering an expanded range of services.
Activists and progressive Democrats such as Rep. Ilhan Omar say this police “quota” is a barrier to holding police accountable for violence and providing people with more options when they call for help, a crucial goal for activists in a city where trust between communities of color and police has repeatedly been broken. Reformers want staffing and funding flexibility so the city can hire a variety of public safety responders, such as mental health counselors and medics trained to treat drug overdoses, rather than relying only on cops with guns.
“It’s actually making necessary structural change in order to actually meet people’s needs and provide the level of care they require, instead of consistently criminalizing or incarcerating people or killing them when police show up,” Noor said.
The failed ballot amendment, known as Question 2, defined the race to unseat Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who opposed Question 2 and efforts to change the governing structure so the police chief would answer to the city council rather than only the mayor. Frey clung to office but only received 43 percent of first-choice votes on a ranked-choice ballot. After tallying second-choice votes, Frey defeated Question 2 supporter Kate Knuth by a 56-44 margin, mirroring the vote on Question 2. Sheila Nezhad, a queer organizer who arose from the coalition behind the amendment, came in second to Frey in the first round of ranked-choice voting.
Minneapolis voters approved a ballot measure that will allow city lawmakers to craft rent controls, and voters in neighboring St. Paul capped rent increases at 3 percent. A victory for progressives after housing dominated the election along with public safety, the success of the ballot measures is a sign that voters recognize both issues as intertwined. In Minneapolis and beyond, organizers are pushing for investments in housing, parks, schools and other resources that promote community well-being instead of hiring more police and expanding jails.
“The campaign and the charter change are only one part of a larger plan,” Noor said. “That part of the plan is about shifting the city’s infrastructure … and there are so many alternatives already being built up.”
Change-makers can still push for new investments and supports that promote public safety despite the defeat of Question 2, according to Elianne Farhat, director of the TakeAction Minnesota, a group that canvassed voters in support of the amendment. The city is also awaiting the results of dual investigations by the Department of Justice and the Minnesota Human Rights Commission into alleged abuses by the Minneapolis Police Department, and Farhat said the findings could increase pressure on city council and the mayor to pull the police “quota” from the city charter.
“We have a city budget, and it will be important to continue to make sure our city is investing in the things we know keeps people safe,” Farhat told Truthout. “We know that the MDP will continue to fail the people of Minneapolis, and we will continue to work to building alternatives to policing and building community-first public safety infrastructure, and make sure we are investing in our people.”
Those alternatives are already popping up. Thanks to efforts by Nezhad and other activists — and with support from Frey — Minneapolis established in 2018 an Office of Violence Prevention that takes a public health approach to neighborhood conflict and violence among youth in particular. Neighborhood teams of “violence interrupters” attempt to resolve conflict and interrupt cycles of violence, rather than relying on police to respond after people get hurt.
Noor pointed to a grassroots project called Relationships Evolving Possibilities (REP), a network of “dedicated abolitionists who show up to support others in moments of crisis or urgency” while respecting the dignity of people in crisis. The group is currently piloting a hotline that provides an alternative to calling police and connects people with community resources or responders trained in first aid and conflict de-escalation.
Noor said such grassroots efforts and the campaign to shift city resources into a public safety department were founded by Black people and led by Black women and queer and trans folks who have “experienced lots of violence at the hands of police.”
“These are communities that really have felt the brunt of policing and so yes, trust has been broken in so many ways, and this is part of the fight that we are inside of to create something new,” Noor said. “Folks hear that abolition is just about tearing things down, but it’s really about building things up and building new supports for one another to be able to survive and hopefully thrive as well.”
Question 2 divided the Black community in a city with a well-known history of racist and deadly policing, with some activists arguing the amendment was too vague to hold police accountable. Others feared that opening the door to a reduced police force would leave Black neighborhoods vulnerable, a sentiment that proponents say was encouraged by an opposition campaign that made it seem like big changes would be made faster than the political system would actually allow.
Noor said the campaign for and against Question 2 was about “fear vs. hope,” echoing researchers who say fearmongering about “crime” and “violence” is an age-old tactic deployed whenever the legitimacy of police is questioned. Police and their backers have defended their stranglehold on city budgets with debunked narratives tying homicides during the COVID pandemic — and on the cops’ watch — to Black Lives Matter protests and reforms that have yet to pass.
Opponents attempted to stoke fear about the prospect of moving beyond the status quo, but Noor remains hopeful about the future after mobilizing 60,000 “yes” votes and giving Mayor Frey a run for his money.
“The scariest thing is continuing to try something that is not working, which is the status quo, which is continuously murdering Black people,” Noor said.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Content warning: the video below contains footage some readers may find distressing
An Asda security guard is under police investigation after footage emerged of him assaulting a young Black man entering an outlet in Shoeburyness, Essex. The guard claims he was ‘just doing his job’ and alleges he believed the young person was carrying a knife and that he had threatened both himself and other customers.
However, anti-racist campaigners have accused the guard of racially profiling the young customer.
Another case of racial profiling
The footage shows a security guard punching a young Black man. The guard then proceeds to drag the young person’s limp body out of the shop, and dump him on the pavement outside. A second clip shows another person handing the young man his phone, which dropped out of his pocket during the assault. Another person helps the young man up, and he stumbles away, unsteady on his feet.
Outraged by the security guard’s actions, the African Diaspora Public Affairs Committee (ADPAC) tweeted:
This ASDA security guard needs to be identified and charged with common assault by the @metpoliceuk
In the first instance, he should be fired by @asda and in the second instance, he should be reported to the police and all video evidence turned over#WeMatter https://t.co/teHTJynxmO
— ADPAC6 (@ADPAC6) October 27, 2021
56 Black Men and Black British Network founder Cephas Williams added:
What @Asda store is this? @Asda, what are you going to do about this? In a world where Black boys and men can get knocked unconscious due to suspicion of carrying a weapon. When will the narrative change? When it’s ingrained in our society. pic.twitter.com/s9f6zRrwBD
— Cephas Williams (@CephasWilliams) October 27, 2021
Meanwhile, the responses from the likes of right wing culture warrior Laurence Fox to “give the Asda security guard a medal, and the knife coward a lengthy stretch” reflect the toxic way in which mainstream society seeks to surveil, control, and criminalise young Black men who are considered ‘guilty until proven innocent’.
It is these narratives that lead to the police’s excessive and disproportionate use of stop and search powers against young Black men, as well as their overrepresentation in the ‘Gangs Matrix’, joint enterprise doctrine convictions, and the youth and criminal justice systems.
Outrage
Campaign group Black and Asian Lawyers for Justice (BAME Lawyers for Justice) tweeted:
How Shoebryness @asda treats black boys. We think an assault may have been commited. Who is the guard and who does he work for? https://t.co/UKfsLUnHfj
— Black and Asian Lawyers For Justice (@BameFor) October 28, 2021
BAME Lawyers for Justice co-founder and Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC UK) chair Zita Holbourne told The Canary:
The violent attack on this young man is shocking and horrific and really upsetting and distressing to watch the footage let alone to be the person who went through this. No security guard has any right to do that to anyone, he could have killed him. The young man could have sustained a serious head injury. He was bleeding and unable to stabilise himself to stand or walk properly.
She added:
Asda have a duty of care towards customers and should not be tolerating or directing such treatment, irrespective of the reason behind it. They need to he held accountable for the security guard’s actions and the security guard needs to be punished for their crime. It seems that organisations and individuals feel they can violently attack black people with impunity but we are not going to tolerate violent attacks on our young people.
Under investigation
Essex Police are now investigating the incident. An Asda spokesperson told The Canary:
We do not tolerate violence in our stores and are investigating the incident in our Shoeburyness store as well as supporting the police fully with their enquiries. As this is an ongoing police investigation we cannot provide any further comment at this time.
BAME Lawyers for Justice is urging the young man and his family to get in touch if they require support.
Featured image via Sean Seddon/Metro
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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The police-perpetrated murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising in June 2020 galvanized campus organizing. Almost immediately, students at Hostos Community College named the racism inherent in policing and demanded their campus cut ties with the New York City Police Department. Students at Columbia University and Howard University launched tuition strike campaigns — a refusal to pay any tuition — demanding the divestment from Israel, the defunding of campus police departments, and the severing ties with local and federal policing agencies. A student-led coalition at the University of Minnesota successfully severed relationships with the local police. (However, simultaneously, the university almost immediately began to hire additional private security forces.)
While mainstream media appear quick to proclaim the end of the #defundpolicing movement, last year’s vibrant campaigns have created fresh starting places for campus-based anti-prison-industrial complex organizing.
With the fall 2021 semester seeing students filter tentatively back to in-person classes at colleges and universities across Turtle Island, assessment and study is overdue: What have we learned from a year of organizing? How are networks responding to emerging cul-de-sacs, or dead ends and false openings? What solidarities have been made possible? As two organizers and educators, in this spirit of study and movement-building, we share our reflections on the past year’s work — successes, challenges and experiments.
Political Education Materials Are Powerful Tools
Many campaigns and projects produced potent materials that aimed to educate people about the long racist histories of policing, particularly on campuses, with concrete tactics for abolitionist struggle. The University of Oregon’s critical history of policing timeline Instagram account offers crucial examples of the racialized violence perpetrated by police on that campus, while Critical Resistance Abolitionist Educators’ “How to Grow Abolition on Your Campus: 8 Actions” provides entry points for abolitionist organizing, including starting abolitionist study groups and challenging discriminatory policies for college access. Timelines and tools like these not only continue to circulate and to support ongoing political education, but also often function effectively to archive crucial abolitionist campaigns and modes of resistance.
Push Organized Labor
Over the last two years, campus-based unions have included demands to defund police in bargaining and also worked horizontally to push for police unions to be removed from wider coalitions and the network of organized labor. In 2018 in Davis, California, the campus-based labor union, UAW 2865, representing the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions passed a proposal across the table calling for disarming and demilitarizing campus police. By 2020, other labor unions were taking up variations of these same demands: The striking Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor demanded a 50 percent cut to the Division of Public Safety and Security budget and that the university “cut all ties with police, including Ann Arbor Police Department (AAPD) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).” Similar organizing took place within the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY and the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at New York University. More widely, organized labor is struggling to engage abolition, and campuses are one site to push this analysis and these demands.
Demand More Than Defunding Campus Police
Those with a badge and a uniform are not the only entities regulating and punishing on campus. Most academic disciplines actively naturalize and expand policing: For example, at Lehman College in the Bronx, students seeking access to the campus food pantry had to be accompanied by campus police, demonstrating the intimacy of student affairs offices and campus police departments. Abolitionist organizing on campus extends beyond defunding the police and involves building forms of community and developing authentic responses to harm that meet people’s needs. Initiatives — often pushed by campus feminists — offer responses to sexual assault that are non-carceral: Brown University’s Transformative Justice Program — created before the summer 2020 uprising — offers survivor-centered abolitionist engagements to gendered and sexual violence. By providing free, fresh vegetables, the Kingsborough Community College Urban Farm works to meet the needs of students and community members, and positions the college as centered around care — or advancing a mission of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “life-affirming institutions.” Dissenters, a newer national anti-militarization network, is supporting (and paying student staff members) to develop campus-based organizing infrastructure to challenge militarization. All of these initiatives, and more, are doing the affirmative work of building abolition.
Multiply Opportunities for Ongoing Dialogues About Safety
People want to feel safe. While many readers may be involved in abolitionist organizing, for some audiences, these demands are new. Organizing must include opportunities for people to talk, build and strengthen practices of safety. Our understanding of safety acknowledges that many people are unsafe on today’s heavily policed campuses, particularly those that are non-white. Over the last year, multiple webinars, teach-ins and days of action unfolded that created dialogues not only about the violence of policing, but other ways to ensure that communities were strong and safe. Abolition feminists have proliferated discussions of safety, such as at the University of Massachusetts where students, outraged by the prevalence of sexual violence on campus and the university’s persistent failure to respond, pushed out and visibly occupied space on campus. At Columbia University, Black and/or feminist organizers have resisted the university’s definition of safety through policing, demanding instead 24/7 access to counseling and rape crisis services. Reimagining and redefining safety can be complex work that requires ongoing engagement — in community.
Make Visible the Tentacles of Policing
The landscape of campus policing is diffuse, with multiple public and private law enforcement actors sharing jurisdictions and creating borders well beyond the campus boundaries. The University of Chicago has one of the largest private police forces in the world, a trend among elite, historically white, private universities in predominantly Black neighborhoods and cities. Universities also create memoranda of understanding with policing agencies from nearby municipalities that both allow for non-university agencies to police campus and university police forces to roam off campus. Agreements like these led to the detention of Black Lives Matter protesters in the University of California Los Angeles’s Jackie Robinson Stadium by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2020 and also were behind the 2020 shooting of Stephanie Washington by Yale Police Officer Terrance Pollock in a New Haven neighborhood. For some campus police departments, such as the University of California Police Department, the entire state is within their jurisdiction. One key outcome of last year’s campus uprisings was highlighting the massive and multi-faceted infrastructures of policing that unfold on campuses and in adjacent communities.
Work Across Borders to Craft Coalitions
By necessity, defund campaigns clearly moved across the artificial on-campus/off-campus boundaries, and demanded the abolition of all policing everywhere. Collaborations across borders of all kinds are generative. For example, Abolition May, a Turtle Island-wide campaign orchestrated by the Cops Off Campus Coalition, and the intergenerational organizing by CUNY for Abolition and Safety and the Release Aging People in Prison campaign, create linkages between sites, institutions and people that may initially seem disparate. Solidarity, not borders, will move us toward the horizon of abolition and liberation.
Learn From Organizing at Other Educational Sites and History
Pre-K-12 organizing has more recent militant histories demanding (and winning) police-free schools. The Black Organizing Project in Oakland, California, struggled for almost a decade before successfully removing police from pre-K-12 schools in June 2020. Post-secondary educational sites can learn from these K-12 struggles and from our own histories of resistance and repression. For example, tuition strikes have historically made visible struggles against austerity and policing. In the wake of the student movements of the 1960s, both campus police budgets and college tuition increased exponentially, in order to manage dissent and privatize education. As Ronald Reagan noted without any irony, “Those on UC campuses to agitate and not to study might think twice before they pay tuition, they might think twice how much they want to pay to carry a picket sign.” It is always a good time to study.
Center Systems-Impacted Communities’ Analysis and Demands
Centering the analysis and demands of systems-impacted people (those who experience the violence of prisons, policing and related systems of violent control — a population overwhelmingly Black, poor, Indigenous and/or queer) surfaces other key ways that post-secondary education must shift. These networks have deepened the movement to “ban the box” — a demand that applications for admission or employment not ask about histories of arrest or conviction. In California, formerly incarcerated students founded and lead the Underground Scholars Initiative, an organization that creates a prison-to-university pipeline by providing support and community, and access to resources and members engage in organizing and advocacy to create a world without prisons. Centering the experiences and needs of these learners also renders visible other imperatives: From the need for paid child care, free tuition and gender-affirming and accessible bathrooms, to the importance of divesting from pension plans that profit from incarceration and resource extraction, the organizing of systems-impacted people presents an expansive challenge to the university as it is and a vision for the university as it could be.
Anticipate Administrative Obstructionism
Higher education administrations respond to these militant and organized campus-based abolitionist campaigns with too familiar tactics: cooptation and absorption and also swift repression. For instance, calls for abolition are met with institutional responses: the creation of hollow task forces and working groups charged with “studying the issue” or a hasty invitation to a high-profile (and usually highly paid) racial justice or equity consultant or guest speaker. Yet more task forces to research the problems and suggest the alternatives are not needed. Campus policing needn’t be researched further when the demand is clear: Defund and abolish campus policing.
Where Do We Go From Here?
While the fall 2021 pace of organizing feels like simmer rather than a boil on many campuses, we know not only is the work continuing, but the organizing from the previous year has reshaped the landscape. Campus communities — from undergraduate students and dining hall workers, to adjunct faculty and neighborhood residents — are joining forces to counter policing in and by universities. As we build coalitions, reflect on strategy and study together, we continue to build a movement, one that extends from the graduate union picket line to the mutual aid distribution site. Find your comrades, and join this beautiful movement to get cops off campus and build the spaces and places for abolitionist teaching and learning in our communities. Abolition now!
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The Home Office is currently carrying out a consultation on reforms to the Official Secrets Act. There are a range of concerning aspects in this outline from the government. Much of the media coverage so far has focused on the potential threat to investigative journalism. But another equally worrying aspect of the possible reforms are the suggestions of giving police greater powers to use crime prediction strategies.
As part of the investigations unit’s work on #ResistBigBrother we’ve been examining abuses of police power, the impact on communities, and the cost to the public. Now, we turn to this emerging consultation to keep a close eye on what the Home Office is planning after it’s attempts to push through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
What does the consultation say?
The Home Office says in the consultation:
It is the Government’s ambition to now create a modern and comprehensive legislative framework similar to that which has developed for counter terrorism.
One prominent prong of counter-terror strategy has been Prevent. The programme is an example of pre-crime: policing that operates to stop a potential crime before it happens. The Prevent duty requires medical professionals, teachers, and other community figures to report anybody they suspect has the potential to be ‘radicalised.’
While Prevent is supposed to tackle all forms of “extremism,” including the rising threat from far-right groups. The reality is that it’s a racist strategy which targets and surveils Muslims. The Home Office’s indication that reforms to the Official Secrets Act will model reforms on counter-terror strategies like Prevent is a dire threat to civil liberties and freedoms. The Home Office claim in the consultation that:
The Government is of the view that the existing legislation does not sufficiently capture the discernible and very real threat posed by state threats and therefore, reform of all of the Official Secrets Acts is central to the UK’s ability to tackle it.
“Acts preparatory to espionage”
Pre-crime is sometimes known as predictive policing, and includes the use of data to assist with police strategies. For example, the consultation states:
It is important that law enforcement can arrest those looking to conduct espionage at a preparatory stage, as this is the best means of ensuring that sensitive information remains secure.
This is a textbook definition of pre-crime, or predictive policing, and points to how the Home Office intends to surveil and punish those who have not yet actually committed a crime.
.. we would seek to criminalise relevant acts carried out in the lead up to hostile activity, which would enable the police to intervene at an early stage before these preparatory acts can culminate into serious harm.
The consultation also argues in favour of keeping existing search powers under Section 9 of the Official Secrets Act 1911. Unlike ordinary search warrants that require the police to have reasonable grounds for “believing” that an indictable offence has been committed, the 1911 power allows for searches when there are reasonable grounds for “suspecting” an offence will be committed. Furthermore, normally search warrants can only be issued by a court. However, the 1911 powers allow a superintendent to issue a warrant in an emergency.
It argues that these powers should be kept because:
Other search powers provided under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), have not been found to adequately provide the police in England and Wales with the swift preventative powers they require to address the espionage threat.
These powers are particularly chilling in the context of a consultation that seeks to strengthen and expand the scope of the Official Secrets Act.
How does predictive policing work?
A recent campaign from human rights organisation Liberty conducted research into predictive policing in the UK:
Our research has revealed that at least 14 UK police forces have used or intend to use discriminatory computer algorithms to predict where crime will be committed and by whom.
Liberty is calling for an end to the “use of these dangerous and discriminatory programs.” The Canary spoke to Data Justice Lab researcher Fieke Jansen who specialises in data-driven police operations. Jansen explained that pre-crime, or ‘predictive policing’ has a couple of different strands:
with predictive policing, you have two different strands. So the first is location policing. It looks at where crime is most likely to occur in the near future. And the other one is predictive identification which is seeing who is potentially most likely to be engaged in a certain criminal activity in the near future.
Jansen says that police budget cuts in the UK have meant a lot of predictive policing models stop and start frequently. For example, Kent Police ran, and ultimately halted their use of crime prediction strategies. Jansen explains that a major problem police forces have is that:
you need a certain volume of police data to actually even make some predictions, and then you can question what the validity of these predictions are.
So, how sophisticated is it? Jansen explains that the level of sophistication varies:
It depends a little bit how sophisticated they are like the gang matrix, or what people have told me is basically the use of Excel sheets. There’s nothing technically sophisticated about it. But then the staff, what they’re doing in the West Midlands Police is that they have a data insight team, and they’re trying out different machine learning models to predict known offenders – so it’s not everybody, it’s those who are already known. And they try to predict the likelihood that they will escalate from low harm to high.
Why is it harmful?
Organisations like Liberty have already made it clear that crime prediction tactics rely on existing discrimination and bias. They are an increase of policing in already police-heavy areas that make communities feel unsafe. We asked Jansen about the impact predictive policing has:
I think maybe the anti-discrimination movements said it the best, that this is just another tool in the repertoire of action that the police already have to target certain communities and control them. Because when you look across the board about how all this technology is used, it’s always applied on a certain criminal offence and not on others. So it’s never used on white collar crime, for example, always used on others.
And as Sofia Lyall explained in Prospect:
Geolitica [used by the Met and Kent police] perpetuates racial and class discrimination by proxy. As people from BAME communities are disproportionately more likely to be arrested, the algorithm wrongly assumes that the areas in which they live are areas where there is more crime—where what is considered “criminal” has an intentionally narrow scope. If the data also accounted for locations where white collar crime was committed, the algorithm would advise police officers to patrol different locations
Predictive policing models are not used for white collar crime. Yet as a Labour policy review states, not only is white collar crime “not victimless”, it costs the economy £73bn a year. It further sets out that:
Victims often struggle to get redress. Researchers at the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Fraud studies estimate that only 1.5 per cent of frauds are ever reported and only 0.4 per cent ever receive a criminal sanction.
So it becomes a matter of priorities as Jansen points out:
I think the real harm lies in the fact that it is obfuscated…these larger questions, like ‘why are we focusing on this rather than other crime’, for example are not being asked. A lot of the discussion is now skewed to data harms, ethics of algorithms, things like this, we are no longer talking about how policing is actually used to control the lower classes of society With civil society funding, who gets a seat on the table?
Hidden questions
Jansen explains that while there are certainly questions to ask about data ethics, privacy, and surveillance, some questions are not asked as often:
I do think the question that hardly ever gets asked is [could] this money have been spent on something else? Education, training within the police, it could have also been spent on health care, and children and so on. So, it’s a question of prioritisation and resources at the state level, but also at a policing level.
Policy decisions are decisive in providing a roadmap for policing that happens on the ground. The consultation on the Official Secrets Act is a marker of dangers for civil liberties and the right to privacy. Predictive policing relies on surveillance in order to work. Surveillance requires infringing on civil liberties. However, in addition to this it’s also a choice from governments to waste money on data and technology rather than spending money on a universal basic income, healthcare, childcare, and a strong welfare state. Properly funding those avenues would be a stronger foundation on which to tackle crime – instead of targeting and surveilling the most disadvantaged.
Featured image via Unsplash/ev
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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In the United States, it is estimated that about two people are wrongfully convicted every day. In 2014, the Innocence Project estimated that around 120,000 people incarcerated in state prisons were wrongfully convicted. More than half of wrongful convictions, one study found, were the result of official misconduct by police officers, prosecutors — or both.
New York City, which was at the epicenter of perhaps the most notorious wrongful conviction saga, the case of the Central Park Five (now known as the “Exonerated 5”), has seen dozens of people freed from prison. Often, the actions of police officers were at the heart of these wrongful convictions. But what happens when someone is accused of being in a gang — and how might that make a wrongful conviction easier to fly under the radar?
Donnell Murray and the Consequences of Police Harassment
After officers walked Donnell Murray into federal court, he waved to his mother, sat next to his attorney and combed through the day’s notes. Getting to trial was a journey in itself. After more than two years in custody, Murray wanted to put the federal government’s case against him to the test.
Murray was raised in the Bronx. Like other young Black men, the entrepreneur worked with friends that he’d grown up with to make music and the street fashion that went along with it. Those friendships, the federal government would eventually argue, were part of a violent criminal conspiracy.
By 2017, Murray was living in Delaware. His mother had moved them out of the Bronx partly due to constant police harassment. The New York City Police Department (NYPD), they learned, was looking for him. In order to avoid more trouble, he turned himself in, unaware of the wild case the feds had built against him.
He hasn’t been home since, charged with a shooting and narcotics distribution in a federal gang conspiracy case.
Murray’s road to federal court might have begun in the NYPD’s 47th Precinct in the Bronx. For years, according to his mother, his fiancée and his legal team, the precinct’s officers harassed Murray. A pattern of targeted stops seemed to stem from a late-night altercation years earlier with a high-ranking 47th Precinct cop.
Murray’s former lawyer, Frank Iannucci, helped him fight some of the harassment. Iannucci, who died in 2015, was a former assistant district attorney from the Bronx District Attorney’s Office. By his own admission, he was a pro-police, pro-law enforcement guy. Iannucci became a private criminal defense attorney and represented Murray.
In 2010, Iannucci went to NYPD Internal Affairs to lodge a complaint against the 47th Precinct on behalf of his client. According to transcripts of Iannucci’s meeting with Internal Affairs Bureau investigators, early one Sunday morning in 2007, Murray and some friends were eating at a popular after-hours Bronx diner. As they began to leave, they encountered a 47th Precinct sergeant, Patrick McGill, who was there for an unrelated complaint. An argument between McGill and Donnell’s group ensued.
Next, according to Iannucci, McGill slammed Murray on a table and cops swarmed in to arrest him. Sergeant McGill claimed Murray had assaulted him. But according to Iannucci, security video showed the sergeant put his hands on Murray first, leading to a skirmish.
The assault case ended in an acquittal, but Murray’s problems with the 47th Precinct were just beginning. A string of questionable arrests and car stops followed. One arrest in 2008, Iannucci described to investigators, was for an assault where Murray had actually come to the aid of someone who had just been jumped by cops. According to Murray, the officers who arrived at the scene screamed, “That’s him, that’s him!” as they approached.
In 2009, plainclothes police officers stopped Murray in his car outside of a friend’s barbecue. They checked his license and let him go. The next day, those same cops drove into his friend’s private driveway to confront Murray and insist he come down to the precinct for a more thorough check of his license, according to Iannucci. They also insisted he bring his car.
At the 47th Precinct, cops claimed he had an invalid license and were going to release him but insisted in searching the car. They claimed to find a gun in his car. Murray was charged with gun possession, but, after many months, Iannucci had those charges dropped. Murray’s family believes the arresting officers, including Officer Abraham Villavizar, planted the gun.
Murray’s fiancée, Destinee Ferguson, was with him during many of these encounters. She remembers cops in marked and unmarked cars would nod their heads when they saw him. During one stop, she says, cops threatened Murray by saying, “Oh, Mr. Murray, if you would’ve run, we would’ve shot you.”
Donnell Murray’s fiancé, Destinee Ferguson, speaking at a protest outside the U.S. Attorney’s Southern District Offices, October 2020. Josmar Trujillo In 2012, cops pulled over and arrested Murray in his mom’s car at gunpoint with his infant son in the back. When his mother, Darlene Murray, went to the precinct to get her car, she saw one plainclothes officer rummaging through her glove compartment, which she filmed in a widely seen video. At that time, Donnell Murray bought and resold cars and had cash in the glove compartment. That money disappeared, according to Murray’s mom.
A few months later, Ferguson says, Murray was waiting for her in his car outside her home when cops pulled up and claimed they had a warrant for him. The officers handcuffed Murray and insisted on taking the car with them. “Donnell is not someone who’s gonna let them search his car. He knows his rights. They hate that. That adds fuel to the fire,” Ferguson told Truthout.
The couple insisted to police that Ferguson take the car and Murray’s property. Cops refused. At that point, Ferguson started to record them with her phone. “They got very upset,” she recalls. Cops took Murray. One of the officers climbed into Murray’s car and sped off.
The incidents happened during the height of stop-and-frisk policing under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who for years rationalized mass stops in the city’s Black neighborhoods. The repeated stops, Ferguson says, were frightening. “I was pregnant. It made me really scared for [Murray’s] life. I felt like he was gonna end up like Sean Bell or something.”
“I feel like Donnell was set up by the NYPD, the 47th Precinct,” his mother Darlene told Truthout. “After that incident at the diner, they had it in for him.” She also believes that because her son had sued for wrongful arrest on multiple occasions and filed numerous complaints, this put a target on his back. She says his inclusion in the federal gang conspiracy case was the culmination of a campaign of intimidation.
It is not clear if the Internal Affairs investigations into Murray’s allegations went anywhere. Investigators interviewed both Officer Villavizar and Sergeant McGill, both represented by their union lawyers, for 16 and seven minutes, respectively. The police department did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Donnell Murray’s family and supporters at a protest outside the NYPD’s 47th Precinct, May 2020. Josmar Trujillo Cops Repeatedly Accused of Misconduct
Officer Villavizar from the 47th Precinct was what you could describe as an active cop. Numerous lawsuits that alleged misconduct by Villavizar paint a picture of an officer who doled out aggressive arrests where charges were often dropped. Lawsuits against Villavizar and others went on over the course of a decade.
In 2008, Villavizar and his partner were alleged to have violently arrested a man in the Bronx, according to court documents. The District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute that man, who then sued for wrongful arrest and settled with the city. Later that year, Villavizar and an unnamed partner forcibly arrested a man and woman in the Bronx, subjecting one to a strip and cavity search, according to a court complaint. Charges were dismissed. A lawsuit and a settlement followed.
In 2012, Villavizar was part of a group of plainclothes cops that allegedly approached people moving furniture, accusing someone of smelling like marijuana. After consenting to a search which turned up nothing, the lawsuit complaint said, a man was violently arrested anyway and thrown from the hood of a police car onto the concrete. That case was dropped.
Later that year, Villavizar and another officer arrested someone at gunpoint who told investigators that cops demanded he show them his hands as he walked to a family member’s house. After showing them his empty hands, court documents say, the cops arrested him for marijuana possession anyway. Charges against that person were dismissed.
In 2013, Villavizar and an unnamed cop were named in a troubling lawsuit. Dressed in SWAT gear, the duo forcibly entered an apartment in the Bronx without a warrant. They arrested a woman and an unnamed “infant-plaintiff” (most likely a minor), placing both in handcuffs, according to a lawsuit. The woman was charged with marijuana possession. Those charges were dropped and the woman’s lawsuit against the city was settled for an undisclosed amount.
The CAPstat police misconduct database shows at least eight lawsuits filed against Villavizar, amounting to at least $240,000 in settlements. Half of Villavizar’s known lawsuits were either settled for undisclosed amounts or the outcome was unknown, which suggests the total amount settlements could be much higher.
And yet it was Villavizar whose testimony in the conspiracy case would be used to connect Murray — who never had a gun conviction in his life — to a gun.
In fact, one of the lawsuits against Villavizar was filed by Murray after the 2010 gun-possession arrest in the precinct. Not only was Villavizar’s gun charge dismissed, the city settled Murray’s lawsuit for an undisclosed amount. Still, Villavizar would be called upon by prosecutors to testify about that arrest to a federal jury as prosecutors painted Murray as a gang banger with a gun charge.
When the judge in the trial ordered prosecutors to provide information about past lawsuits of police witnesses, federal prosecutors wrote that doing so “would be unfairly prejudicial and would waste time and cause juror confusion.” They downplayed Villavizar’s past, writing that, “from conversations with Officer Villavizar and a review of publicly available documents, the Government is aware of one unrelated lawsuit, which was dismissed.”
The judge agreed with prosecutors. The jury didn’t hear about Villavizar’s pattern of questionable arrests or the lawsuits filed against him.
In an emailed response to Truthout, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote: “Allegations in civil lawsuits are just that — allegations. They are often irrelevant to criminal cases. In Donnell Murray’s case, we agreed with defense counsel and the judge that one lawsuit related to … Villavizar was relevant to the case and defense counsel was permitted to cross examine him about it. We also informed the Court of multiple unrelated lawsuits, which defense counsel first identified, and the judge found were not useful for cross examination.”
Donnell Murray’s mother, Darlene Murray, speaks out for her son at a rally in New York City. The Legal Aid Society Courts Permit Testimony From Cops Lacking Credibility
Testimony by cops with shady histories is a long-running problem in New York City. Police credibility has been an open issue in Brooklyn, where the district attorney continued prosecuting arrests by officers accused of perjury and evidence tampering. Manhattan prosecutors have been forced to publicize lists of “bad cops” whose testimony is suspect. A WNYC/Gothamist investigation into the Bronx district attorney’s use of “bad cops” included a gun case where an officer’s testimony was contradicted by video but was prosecuted anyway.
The problems continue at the federal level as well. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica K. Feinstein, who in Murray’s trial claimed the government knew of only one lawsuit against Villavizar, had previously argued against officer misconduct being entered into evidence for other gang cases.
As reported in The Appeal, Feinstein argued that the credibility of NYPD Detective Jeremiah Williams, whose prior gun arrest of Carletto Allen in 2015 was key in Allen’s federal gang trial, was not sullied by the fact that Williams had been sued numerous times. Allen was indicted in the 2016 Bronx 120 gang sweep, the largest gang takedown in city history. Allegations against Williams ranged from needless anal searches to smashing someone’s head against a police car.
While Allen’s lawyers suspected foul play, specifically that Williams may have planted a gun on their client, he was nonetheless convicted in large part due to the testimony of the detective, the only person who could tie him to a gun — like Villavizar in Murray’s case. And, like Villavizar, Williams was the subject of at least eight lawsuits (perhaps more), resulting in a total of a quarter-million dollars in settlements, according to The Appeal.
But because all of those lawsuits were settled, Feinstein could (and did) argue that there was no admission of guilt; hence, Williams’s testimony was credible.
Feinstein’s penchant for relying on testimonies of cops with murky histories even included a case where one may have been a flat-out racist. Her prosecution of Donque Tyrell, also a defendant in the Bronx 120, relied partly on testimony from police officer David Sammarco. Sammarco has had at least 35 allegations of misconduct, has been named in at least six federal lawsuits and was accused by one of Donnell’s co-defendants of stopping and spitting on him.
Officer Sammarco, according to evidence presented at trial, also appears to have had an active social media presence through the (since deleted) Twitter account @ObamaHater55, which posted racist memes about Colin Kaepernick and Muslims. Though Tyrell’s attorney tried to bring up the cop’s social media posts, they were excluded from the trial as irrelevant (the cruel irony being that social media posts are often used as evidence against defendants in gang cases). As in other cases, Sammarco’s testimony helped Feinstein connect Tyrell to a gun.
Screenshots of NYPD Officer David Sammarco’s since deleted Twitter account, “Obamahater55.” If you note a pattern of cops with questionable histories being used to provide testimony in gang cases, consider that Williams, Sammarco and Villavizar also all worked out of the 47th Precinct. But testimony from “bad cops” is just one piece of the puzzle prosecutors use to score convictions against those who are gang-accused. The feds have a whole overarching legal framework to do that.
How Prosecutors Use Conspiracy and Hearsay in Gang Cases
Former Southern District Judge Billings Learned Hand wrote almost 100 years ago that conspiracy laws were the “darling of the modern prosecutor’s nursery.” Decades later, federal prosecutors turned racketeering laws, made possible by the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), into the new darling.
While conspiracy laws liberalized standards of proof and allowed prosecutors to connect multiple defendants to a crime, RICO enabled the lumping together of people as an “enterprise.” RICO was created to peel away the power of organized crime. Prosecutors, like former U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, used it against Mafia leaders who ordered crimes but didn’t necessarily commit them themselves.
While RICO may have turned the tide against the Mafia, it didn’t end there. RICO’s reach targeted labor unions, pharmaceutical executives and even the alleged conspirators of a celebrity college admissions scandal. RICO’s footprint in communities of color, however, has arguably been the most devastating.
In the 1980s, prosecutors began to use RICO against street gangs even as critics argued this was an overapplication. Most street gangs didn’t affect interstate commerce, required under RICO, and were unlikely to be able mount the costly legal defenses that mobsters could. How, one might ask, could police be trusted to identify who was in a gang, what crimes were “gang-related,” or even what a gang was?
There were also political and cultural undertones. RICO was used against groups formed from Chicago’s Almighty Black P Stone Nation, the Black nationalist group, as well as the Latin Kings, who were becoming involved in police brutality protests against New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the former prosecutor, in the 1990s. Bias, some noted, could also lead to a conflation of hip-hop music groups and gangs. The Giuliani administration villainized the legendary hip-hop collective Zulu Nation, calling it a “gang,” and the FBI once tried to build a RICO case against the Wu-Tang Clan.
Beginning in 2012, the NYPD increased its anti-gang efforts and worked closer with federal authorities. The trial of Murray and his co-defendants, charged like Mafia leaders, is perhaps a textbook example of what happens when police and prosecutors use their most powerful tools against young Black men.
Some days, the rear doors of Judge Paul Gardephe’s court would swing open to reveal Murray’s fiancée and their 7-year-old son, Adon. They sat in the courtroom as Feinstein painted Murray’s life as one of violence and drugs. Murray and his co-defendants, Brandon Green and Latique Johnson, had all risked decades in prison by going to trial. Most don’t. By one count, 97 percent of federal cases end in a plea deal.
The odds against them were extraordinarily steep. Conspiracy and RICO lower the burden of proof for prosecutors, who essentially only have to convince a jury of a crime that benefitted an “enterprise.” Another crucial advantage for prosecutors is allowing normally inadmissible evidence, hearsay (someone testifying about what someone else said), into court. RICO also allows prosecutors to prove the existence of an enterprise by discussing bad acts of people who aren’t even on trial.
The linchpins to hearsay are cooperating witnesses, or “snitches.” With the Mafia, the threat of RICO and mandatory minimums turned some low-level soldiers, sworn to never snitch, into snitches. However, the use of snitches has been spotlighted as tremendously unreliable and coercive, even the basis for dozens of false convictions. The practice has been so ripe for abuse that desperate prisoners have often offered testimony against people they didn’t even know — sometimes testifying in cases they’d only read about.
By leaning on snitches, prosecutors can weave a web of guilt. In Murray’s trial, cooperators testified about the alleged gang, the Bloodhound Brims. However, all were facing serious federal sentences but receiving “5k1” letters from the government to recommend lighter sentences in exchange for their testimony. Some who faced life in prison could now hope to be released with time served. Pat Daly, an ex-cop who’d become addicted to crack and indicted in the case, testified that the gang ran a drug operation from his upstate home. He got a 5k1 letter.
At the trial, several cooperators struggled on the witness stand. Two key cooperators were serial snitches. One complained about being re-indicted under RICO for a crime for which he’d already served a state sentence. Others offered conflicting versions of the gang’s structure. While one cooperator testified Murray was a gang leader, another testified that he had no standing in the gang. At least two didn’t know who Murray was. They all got 5k1 letters.
Prosecutors alleged Murray had been part of a 2012 shooting. To prove Murray’s culpability, they brought a jailed cooperator to the witness stand who claimed he overheard Murray brag about it in prison. Another witness prosecutors used to connect Murray to that shooting was so bad that the judge later called him the worst cooperator he’d ever seen. The cooperators’ testimonies were the only sources of evidence connecting Murray to a violent act.
Presumption of Guilt
After weeks of trial, all three co-defendants were convicted on most charges, though not all. While Murray was found guilty of the racketeering conspiracy, the the jury found the government did not prove he attempted murder as part of the conspiracy. Ultimately, Murray was convicted of racketeering, narcotics conspiracy and gun possession, which could mean a sentence up to and including life.
Murray’s mother, devastated by the conviction, remained hopeful because he wasn’t facing a mandatory minimum. His attorney argued for five years. Judge Gardephe sentenced Murray to 19 years, a sentence that would make him almost 60 by the time he is released.
Throughout the trial, the presumption of innocence seemed purely theoretical — to be in a gang was a sign of guilt, with the details to be sorted out later. There are, of course, gangs in the Bronx, and during the trial, there had been acknowledgement that the gang in question was, in fact, real. Murray and Latique Johnson were childhood friends who had mutual aspirations in clothing and music. The jury was persuaded to believe that they were a criminal enterprise.
For the defendants and their families, their hopes now rest on an appeals process that could take years. The trial, fueled by decades-old tactics designed for the Mafia and testimony from cops with a record of alleged abuse, leaves a bitter taste in their mouths.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Today marks seven years since the murder of Laquan McDonald by the Chicago Police Department (CPD). On this same day, the former mayor of Chicago — who helped cover up McDonald’s murder in order to win reelection — is attending a nomination hearing in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for him to serve as ambassador to Japan.
As BIPOC youth who experienced the consequences of living under eight years of a mayor who demonstrated complete disregard for our lives, this is a federal slap in the face.
Every time Rahm Emanuel is invited to be a part of another televised interview where he brags about how he reduced crime in Chicago and transformed the city during his time in office, it feels like he is making a mockery out of the lives of every youth organizer throughout the city whose demands he ignored.
Black youth keep dying every day in Chicago. Meanwhile, Emanuel — who closed schools and clinics and cut the after-school programming that those same youth should have had access to while in office — gets promoted, moving up the ranks and on to other political ventures. He is able to disassociate himself from the communities he helped gut, but we aren’t able to remove ourselves from the harmful effects of his politics.
We still have to experience crises daily, and Rahm Emanuel still has blood on his hands.
During the first year of his first term as mayor, Emanuel moved to close down half of the public mental health clinics within the city. For BIPOC youth who live in over-surveilled communities with a surplus of police, for youth who live in neighborhoods plagued by violence, and for youth who don’t have access to education, stable housing, healthy food, and other basic life necessities, lack of access to mental health resources means not having support to cope with the trauma of growing up in a city that doesn’t care for us.
In 2013, during his second year of his first term as mayor, around 50 public schools within the city of Chicago were closed, most of which were concentrated on the predominantly Black and Latinx West and South sides of the city. These school closings represented the largest public school closing in modern U.S. history. Emanuel justified these school closings by stating that due to “budget constraints” and “underutilization” these schools could not afford to stay open. At this same time in which the city was experiencing these “budget constraints,” however, 40 new charter schools were opened, many of which were within a mile and a half of the public schools that were previously closed. Emanuel valued profit over people, and payoffs over students, with his continued disinvestment in public schools and expansion in charter schools. In addition to this, enrollment in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) saw declines and the Chicago Teachers Union went on its first strike in a quarter of a century due to failed negotiations with the city over an expansion of resources like arts and music programs at a large number of underfunded schools.
Youth on the South and West sides of the city still have to wake up every day and travel through their communities and see the vacant buildings that were once their schools, once their communities and once held their memories of childhood.
While Rahm Emanuel’s first term was full of education crisis, his second term was defined by major failures in his approach toward policing. Emanuel failed Black Chicagoans by not holding police accountable and instead poured hundreds of millions more into police spending. We saw that when he covered up the murder of Laquan McDonald and then put $95 million into a police and fire training academy despite widespread and powerful opposition.
Chicagoans are currently leading a campaign to #DefundCPD and instead demand investment in much-needed resources on the city’s South and West sides. Chicago’s Black and Brown youth are demanding that police officers be removed from schools through the #CopsOutCPS campaign. Many of these officers have long records of misconduct but are placed within schools on desk duty. They are allowed in schools with the same weaponry they use to terrorize us within our neighborhoods.
When making sense of this ambassador position, it is important to understand Emanuel’s prioritization of police over community needs given the inextricable connection between policing and militarism. Police are a militant force in our communities.
When we consider that in 2020 the United States accounted for 38 percent of the world’s military spending, and just approved a $768 billion budget for the military but can’t pass a rescue plan for our communities or our environment, it makes sense that President Biden would appoint Rahm Emanuel as an ambassador of Japan. In his time in Congress, Emanuel supported the war in Iraq. During his time in the White House, he was terribly anti-immigrant. It is clear throughout his career that Emanuel’s priorities are in upholding war and violence over the demands of communities of color who want investment and social justice. His time in the Clinton White House was a reflection of that, his time in the Obama White House was a reflection of that and his time as mayor was a reflection of that. We’re scared that he will show us more of the same as an ambassador.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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14 October is George Floyd’s birthday. Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020 sparked widespread protests across the US and overseas.
Police officer Derek Chauvin was later convicted of Floyd’s murder. As the officer knelt on his neck, Floyd repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”. Soon those words became a global rallying cry against racist policing. The judge said Chauvin’s 22 year sentence was based:
on your abuse of a position of trust and authority, and also the particular cruelty shown
Commemoration
One initiative set up for the occasion is #TeachTruth Day. It’s purpose is to honor George Floyd’s birthday. The day consists of online teach-ins which are being held around the US to address systemic racism. Campaigners say it’s a:
National Teach-in for Truth About Systemic Racism & Sexism in U.S. Curricula
Meanwhile, supporters gathered by a statue of Floyd in New York to remember him:
In honor of #GeorgeFloyd’s birthday a celebration was held in front of his sculpture in #UnionSquare #nyc #news pic.twitter.com/8s0H5oX84M
— Dean_Moses (@Dean_Moses) October 13, 2021
And one twitter user posted images of Floyd with his children. As well as images of the protests which followed his death. Data from the time of the killing showed that Black Americans were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.
George Floyd should've turned 48 today. Happy Birthday to him & may he continue to to rest in peace.
pic.twitter.com/cHNQC2hdgL— BROTHER (@BrotherHQ) October 14, 2021
Since Floyd’s murder many reforms have been suggested. Some want a ban on chokeholds and implicit bias training for officers. Others want the police to be defunded. Elsewhere, national days of action began. And these included calls to decolonise education:
We Love You George Floyd. We Got You This October 14th #TeachTruth National Day of Action for Your Birthday. https://t.co/JNPmnarPIY
— Jesse Hagopian (@JessedHagopian) October 13, 2021
Additionally, the singer Erykah Badu joined Floyd’s family to celebrate his life:
Erykah Badu celebrates George Floyd’s 48th birthday with his family in Minneapolis #Badubotron pic.twitter.com/hIjhSdp17B
— Quan (@BlackK_GMS) October 14, 2021
But, as another poster pointed out, the struggle is far from over. Some reforms have taken place within individual police forces. But these are largely ad hoc and do not seem to address the systemic problem of racism.
Tomorrow would have been George Floyd's 48th birthday. Derek Chauvin cheated him and his family of celebrating
George should be still here.
Need police reform. Too many Black Lives lost…
Always say his name #GeorgeFloyd #wednesdaythought pic.twitter.com/epGllLtncI
— Chrissi Nielsen (@NielsenChrissi) October 13, 2021
Life and legacy
Three other police officers present at the killing will be tried later in 2021. While Derek Chauvin is currently appealing his 22 year sentence. Today will be a day to recall George Floyd’s life and legacy, but the struggle against racism and violent policing continues.
Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Leonhard Lenz.
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Woven into the municipal fabric of the U.S. is a little-known mechanism of privatization and corporate control: the Business Improvement District (BID). In hundreds of urban centers, invisible borders designate zones wherein local governments have granted control of the commons to private interests. Within the bounds of a BID, its corporate operators are empowered to contract for-profit companies to clean streets, make aesthetic and tourism upgrades and, more insidiously, enforce “security” in collaboration with police. In practice, this often results in the exclusion and harassment of populations that businesses find “undesirable” — anyone that is perceived as a threat to consumer activity and profit, and especially the unhoused.
BIDs are not unlike private governments; autonomous and often opaque, many operate free from meaningful oversight. From their financial structures to their influence on policy, they are typical of corporate privatization in that they divert public resources to serve the interests of the ownership class. The recent renewal of a multi-year BID contract in Portland, Oregon, rammed through against significant public opposition, was representative of the sort of unilateralism and impunity that characterizes BID operations. Analogous dynamics can be found across the United States, replicated within the over 1,200 BIDs nationwide.
The Imposition of BIDs
The BID model was first proposed in the 1970s by business interests in Toronto, Canada. Citing what they perceived as inadequate state maintenance services, they developed the concept to confer those powers upon themselves. BIDs have since proliferated, their mandate expanding to include security, marketing and political advocacy, including anti-homeless lobbying. They can wield considerable influence over local governments, often with the latter’s willing collaboration.
Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), a homeless rights coalition, told Truthout, “Local governments across the country have decided that our neighborhoods, sidewalks, plazas and parks are theirs to negotiate away to business entities. [BIDs] are seeking to transform our neighborhoods to best suit the interests of the largest, overwhelmingly corporate property owners.”
Commercial areas in Portland are overlaid with a trio of BID zones, known locally as Enhanced Services Districts (ESDs). The largest of these, the innocuously titled Clean & Safe, was scheduled for a reassessment of its 10-year contract in September 2021. Sidestepping activist demands, public testimony and the recommendations of the city’s own auditors, Portland’s City Council pressed ahead, voting 4-1 to renew the contract for five years. To placate opponents, minor alterations were allowed: a cap on armed security guards, a mental health team and complaint reporting measures. Such marginal concessions did little to address deeper concerns about discriminatory policing and extractive financial structures. Councilor Jo Ann Hardesty, responsive to public outcry, remained the lone vote against.
The eagerness to renew the contract against all opposition and resident testimony is indicative of the sway of business interests over the council and Mayor Ted Wheeler — especially the leverage of the powerful Portland Business Alliance (PBA), the Chamber of Commerce equivalent that operates (and profits from) Clean & Safe. An auditor described the closely entwined PBA-Clean & Safe power structure as “a city within a city.”
Without the work of WRAP and allied organizers in Portland, the Clean & Safe contract renewal would have occurred behind closed doors, shielded from public input entirely. Activists successfully applied pressure to the city council to open the process to testimony. This testimony, along with an email campaign, resulted in the more sympathetic Councilor Hardesty introducing an amendment to delay the renewal. (It was voted down by the rest of the council.)
WRAP-organized protests, research and public awareness efforts around BIDs have been ongoing for years, surfacing invaluable information on their iniquitous practices and unaccountability. In fact, oversight of Portland’s BIDs was so wanting that without pressure from WRAP, a damning audit in August 2020 may never have been conducted — it was WRAP that first brought the iniquitous influence of the districts to the attention of the auditor’s office.
The End Clean & Safe coalition, comprising WRAP, the ACLU of Oregon, Stop the Sweeps PDX, Portland Jobs With Justice, the Portland Democratic Socialists of America, and numerous others, ran a campaign during the lead-up to the contract renewal to inform residents about the obscured realities of the structures in their city, urging them to testify in opposition. Activists also organized rallies against the renewal, among many other tireless efforts.
Among the WRAP activists who opposed the Clean & Safe contract is researcher Kaitlyn Dey. “This contract renewal is a testament to the egregious influence the Portland Business Alliance has over our city. And this isn’t unique to Portland,” Dey told Truthout. “BIDs have managed to grasp control of numerous city councils in order to maintain policing and lobbying activities that directly harm unhoused people.”
Private Cops, Public Spaces
A central critique of the BID model is its role in exacerbating the criminalization of the unhoused. In the United States, rife with economic austerity and housing insufficiency, a catastrophic homelessness crisis has been growing for decades. In response, the state has proven its readiness to resort to punishment and exclusion, repressing unhoused populations with measures like sit/lie ordinances, encampment sweeps and bans on panhandling, camping, vehicle dwelling and food sharing. BIDs encourage and capitalize on these practices, both by lobbying for anti-homeless legislation and through their own direct enforcement.
This is certainly the case in Portland. The city audit released in August 2020 confirmed what activists had long contended: Clean & Safe and the other BIDs intensify policing. According to auditors, their “enhanced law enforcement or criminal justice services create a risk of disparate outcomes compared to other parts of the city.” In 2017, over 50 percent of arrests by police in Portland were of the unhoused. Outside of BID boundaries, the average rate of arrest of unhoused people per square mile was 6.1. Within them, it was a staggering 137.7.
These dynamics are not exceptional, and are just as pernicious elsewhere. Portland, with a total of three, actually has comparatively few BIDs — New York City alone has 76, and California has 200 altogether. Roughly another thousand are strewn throughout the United States. A study of Californian BIDs conducted by the UC Berkeley School of Law concluded that “BID involvement in social services is experienced by homeless people as an additional form of policing, surveillance and harassment.” The report surveyed BIDs in 69 California cities and conducted in-depth case studies of the model in Berkeley, Chico, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco. Researchers found that more than 90 percent “coordinate closely with local police departments — and sometimes use their own private security — to enforce anti-homeless laws and otherwise exclude or remove homeless people from their districts.… Enforcement in California is growing and is increasingly based on homeless people’s status, rather than their behavior.”
Portland’s Clean & Safe fields both armed security guards and four Portland Police Bureau officers — public employees in the pay of private enterprise, a kind of mercenary activity that raises obvious conflicts of interest. The injustices and intrinsic biases of law enforcement are reinforced by the perverse incentives within BID borders that compel the exclusion of “undesirable” individuals at the behest of business.
Barbra Weber lived outdoors for a year and a half on Portland’s NW Davis St., where she experienced the enforcement arm of Clean & Safe firsthand. “What the police and Clean & Safe would do is they wouldn’t let anybody sleep…. Sleep deprivation is one tool they use. Sometimes they’ll just outright lie to you and tell you you’re on private property, or you’re bothering this business,” Weber told Truthout. “We went through this on a daily basis…. They’ll say they saw somebody using drugs or something, so they have a reason to call the police, and the police come and harass them.”
Weber says that Clean & Safe and police are directly responsive to requests from business owners. “They claim that we’re stopping their business from making money. I understand if there’s an incident, but these things are happening when there’s not an incident — somebody’s just sitting there.… They don’t even consider us human beings.”
Some BIDs extend their influence beyond the streets and into criminal legal systems. In Portland, it was found that BIDs were paying the salaries of dedicated assistant district attorneys and funding a community court in hopes of increasing enforcement. Further, some of those convicted by this BID-funded court were sentenced to community service for the BID’s own cleaning program, performing at least a million dollars’ worth of free labor: a complete circle of exploitation. A similar pattern was unveiled in St. Louis, Missouri. In Bogan v. Bonner, a state court ruled a community court unconstitutional, as the court and the presiding judge were in the direct pay of a local BID.
Structures of Profiteering
The problems with the BID model extend beyond their role in criminalization. The creation of a BID largely circumvents public input. They can be instituted by cities at the request of business or property interests, which, most commonly, petition the government to establish the zone and form a nonprofit to operate it.
As in the recent case of Portland, cities and business have overridden public opposition in creating or renewing the zones. In California, the decision to found a BID is put to a vote among affected property owners. However, in Los Angeles, among other cities, it is the largest owners that have a disproportionate say — votes scale with property value. In a BID vote in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, this weighting tipped the scales to keep a BID structure intact; the same occurred when the City used its weighted votes to push through a Venice Beach BID against majority opposition.
BID overseers collect fees from both private and public property owners in-district, “fund[ing] their activities partly with assessments on publicly owned buildings — in effect, using taxpayer money to achieve their goals,” noted the Berkeley report. This siphoning of public and private funds alike is facilitated by a legally binding assessment fee structure that is tantamount to private taxation.
Some who own properties in the district object to the levied fees, questioning the utility of improvement programs and aspects of their financing. One point of conflict over the Clean & Safe renewal centered on the fact that, as Willamette Week reported, Clean & Safe funds are channeled to the Portland Business Alliance, paying 45 percent of PBA staffing costs. These types of exploitative practices reflect a dearth of oversight and a fundamental accountability problem with the BID model.
Furthermore, BID income is commonly put toward lobbying in favor of criminalization ordinances. From the Berkeley report: California BIDs “advocate for anti-homeless policies … [using] property assessment revenue, including from public properties,” in violation of state law. The report also found a close correlation between the rising number of California BIDs and an increase in anti-homeless ordinances.
Examples abound: BIDs fervently supported sit/lie ordinances in San Francisco, while in Berkeley, a BID CEO was a major financial backer of another sit/lie law. To support a Chico, California anti-homeless ordinance, a BID coordinated with police and encouraged its members to attend and testify at city council meetings. A BID in Los Angeles advocated that the municipal code be amended “to preserve the city’s ability to confiscate homeless people’s property.” Relatedly, in 2017, the City of Los Angeles settled a lawsuit alleging that Los Angeles Police Department officers led BID contractors to confiscate the property of unhoused individuals, while threatening to arrest anyone who attempted to stop them. For their part, the California legislature has also been complicit: A 1994 law reduced oversight of BIDs and broadened their power to collect and spend revenue.
BIDs can be found lobbying against a payroll tax on big business in Seattle, or, in Denver, urging the city to pass a camping ban, then enforcing it. A BID in Washington, D.C. took over management of a public park and moved to expel unhoused people that had gathered there. California BIDs have also acted collectively, partnering together in a statewide alliance to oppose an act that would have limited anti-homeless laws in the state legislature. And, in a telling example, this coalition worked to defeat the passage of an unhoused bill of rights.
BIDs, of which the public is largely unaware, effectively grant private interests an arm of forcible social control, which they readily deploy to ward off perceived threats to the flow of profit. It’s true that they may contribute to city beautification and urban improvements, and some do at least attempt to connect unhoused people with services. But any fringe benefits of the model do not justify its exploitative architecture. It is not necessary to cede public spaces to private control, empowering business conglomerates to make decisions affecting the public square, in order to achieve the same ends.
BIDs worsen the discriminatory policing already ubiquitous in U.S. society and represent another conduit of the creeping privatization of public services. The result is that inequalities are reinscribed: The unhoused and underserved, the majority of them people of color, are immiserated, subjected to harassment and punishment and driven deeper into abjection. These structures represent another incarnation of the primacy of the profit motive over civil rights in the United States — and the unconscionable human toll that those imperatives exact.
Weber, reflecting on her experience with Portland’s BID police and security, said that their treatment was the source of “some of the roughest times I had to go through as a homeless person. You’re living on the streets, doing everything you can, you’re feeding each other and taking care of each other. And that’s offensive to them. Why?”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
