Curtis Ray Davis II was wrongly convicted of murder. He served nearly 26 years in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison before his conviction was overturned and he was released in 2015.
While in prison, he worked for various corporations in the private sector, making just two cents an hour. Despite the overturning of his conviction, Davis has received no additional monetary compensation for the time he spent in prison or for the thousands of hours he spent producing agricultural products, making car license plates, and working in metal fabrication.
“It was like being in slavery again. I was working 40 hours a week to make enough to maybe buy a bar of soap.”
Curtis Ray Davis II, who served nearly 26 years in Angola State Prison after being wrongfully convicted
“I spent 25 years in prison and left with $1,200, and I was innocent of the crime I was convicted for,” said Davis. “It was like being in slavery again. I was working 40 hours a week to make enough to maybe buy a bar of soap.”
Davis is now the executive director of the ReEntry Mediation Institute of Louisiana, an organization that provides mediators to develop plans with incarcerated individuals and their loved ones on re-entry—plans that include mental health services, apprenticeships, and job training opportunities.
According to statistics obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, over 600 prisoners currently work in the private sector in Louisiana. Hundreds more inmates in Louisiana prisons work for state, local, or internal departments. In fiscal year 2021, private corporations spent $2,997,984.68 on contracts leasing prison labor, and the state prison labor system reports more than $29 million in operational sales (for example, the sale of agricultural products or livestock raised by state prisoners).
Around the US, people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are forced to work for private employers or government agencies for little to no pay with virtually no labor protections. All the while, the companies and public agencies involved reap the benefits of a cheap, reliable source of labor that produces millions of dollars in revenue.
Typical wages for prisoners working in private industry in Louisiana range from as low as $0.02 an hour to $0.40 an hour. Many of these workers supply labor for the private agricultural industry, primarily in livestock, soybeans, and corn.
Agricultural corporations that rely on prison labor in Louisiana include the Louis Dreyfus Company, a global corporation based in the Netherlands, which reported $33.6 billion in net sales in 2020.
Agricultural corporations that rely on prison labor in Louisiana include the Louis Dreyfus Company, a global corporation based in the Netherlands, which reported $33.6 billion in net sales in 2020.
Prison labor is used by multiple livestock auction corporations such as Tiger Lake Livestock, Red River Livestock, Dominique Stockyard, and the Amite Livestock Company. The lack of transparency in corporate supply chains and reliance on subcontractors makes it difficult to uncover the extent to which US corporations are benefiting from prison labor.
Elomba Ngabo, a current prisoner at Hunt Correctional Center in Louisiana, has refused to work throughout his incarceration. He’s received numerous disciplinary reports, loss of privileges, and punishments (including solitary confinement) for refusing to work for free in the agricultural fields around Angola since he was first told about the working conditions by other prisoners. Ngabo arrived at Angola State Prison in late 1997, and spent 22 years there before getting transferred to a different facility two years ago. He described lines of predominantly Black prisoners working in fields, overseen by armed white men directing them on what work to do and how to do it.
“It took away my appetite and literally I would feel sick. It affected me to the point where I began to have nightmares and couldn’t sleep at night thinking about the day they would call us out to work in the field lines,” said Ngabo.
He co-founded the organization Decarcerate Louisiana, which seeks to abolish slavery as punishment for a crime, in addition to abolishing the prison-industrial complex. The organization is supporting State House Bill 196 to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude in Louisiana.
“One can simply consider the unskilled labor that is hired to supervise the prisoners to see that no serious educational and rehabilitation instruction can successfully take place,” added Ngabo. “If public safety instruction and the morals of the people were an important value that outweighed slavery in significance, why not take at least 75% of the 18,000 acres of land that Angola Prison sits on today and, instead of using it to enforce plantation labor discipline, how about zone the land for education and rehabilitation instruction?”
“You still see the plantation, you’re still doing exactly what was being done in the 1800s.”
Prisoner at Hunt Correctional Facility in Louisiana
More than 1 in 10 prisoners in Louisiana, 14% of all prisoners in the state, are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole—the highest rate in the US.
“You have the prison enterprises making millions of dollars off of the backs of prisoners. It’s all catered to making money, using prison labor as much as they can, and with life sentences, that means the labor is continuous,” said another prisoner at Hunt Correctional Facility in Louisiana, who requested to remain anonymous. “You still see the plantation, you’re still doing exactly what was being done in the 1800s.”
Approximately 55% of prisoners in US prisons work while serving their sentences, with jobs ranging from internal work related to food service, maintenance, and cleaning, to correctional industry programs that require prisoners to either work for private employers or, more often, for public agencies in jobs like construction or manufacturing.
Severely low wages are rampant throughout the prison labor industry, with workers being paid nothing or, at most, up to a few cents or dollars an hour—and even these wages are subject to various deductions to pay for prison and court fees.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was a major blow to many employers, including those in the private sector who utilize prison labor to manufacture their products. But the pandemic has also emboldened employers to rely more on prisoners as a cheap source of labor amid claims of a “labor shortage” and difficulties in hiring and retaining enough workers.
Early on in the pandemic, when sanitation workers in New Orleans went on strike over poor working conditions and low pay, prison labor was used as a source for replacement workers. Other employers in the sanitation and manufacturing industries cited prisoners as a pool of labor they sought to expand during the pandemic, and over 40 states relied on prison labor to produce personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitizer products from the onset of COVID-19 in the US.
Other employers in the sanitation and manufacturing industries cited prisoners as a pool of labor they sought to expand during the pandemic, and over 40 states relied on prison labor to produce personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitizer products from the onset of COVID-19 in the US.
Prisoners in Iowa who produced PPE during the pandemic made on average $30 a week for 40 hours of work, while facing significant costs for necessities such as toiletries and phone call fees.
In Mississippi, prisoners are forced to work off small debts through a restitution program where the prisoners are transported to and from private employers from a jail until they cover their debts.
In Arizona, the largest egg manufacturer in the Southwest US, Hickman’s Farms, has used prison labor since the 1990s. The owner claims the practice began as a result of difficulties in hiring and retaining enough workers to do farm work. Prisoners are paid on average $4.25 to $5.25 an hour to work on the ranch, but that pay is subject to various deductions, including 30% for room and board, which leaves them with a net income of about $1.50 an hour.
Arizona’s use of prison labor in the private industry has grown significantly over the past several years, with Arizona Correctional Industries’ revenue nearly tripling from 1999 to 2020. Arizona Correctional Industries reported a revenue of more than $46.5 million in fiscal year 2020 and is seeking to reach a revenue of $65 million by 2025. Executives of Arizona Correctional Industries received some of the largest bonuses in the state in 2019, while prison workers make far below minimum wage.
The largest private employer of prison labor in Arizona, Hickman’s Farms, spent more than $7 million on leasing prisoners for cheap labor in fiscal year 2020, using on average more than 200 prisoners at any given time prior to the pandemic. The number of incarcerated workers the company used dropped to around 90 in the first few months of the pandemic until the egg ranch moved over 100 prison workers into company housing on the egg ranch itself, citing COVID-19 concerns. The company also uses prison workers through a work release re-entry program, though only a small percentage of prisoners used for labor by private employers in Arizona are provided jobs upon release.
Several prisoners formerly employed at Hickman’s Egg Ranch have filed lawsuits over injuries and maimings sustained while working at the ranch. Residents near the farms have filed complaints over the pollution and harmful chemicals produced by the company. The eggs produced by Hickman’s are sold at grocery stores around the Southwest US.
Fiscal Year 2020, July 2019-June 2020
Customer
Monthly Avg # IMs
IM Hourly Wages
Hired Post-Incarceration
Hickman’s
213/9 months 95/3 months
$4.25- $5.25
34
ADOT/MVD
33/12 months
$0.50- $0.80
1
Televerde
191/12months
$3.00- $6.00
36
Taylor Farms
87/9 months 0/3 months
$4.25- $5.25
N/A
Hometown Hero
83/12 months
$4.25- $5.25
28
Com Mkt Equip
85/12 months
$4.25- $5.25
0
Keefe
82/9 months 0/3 months
$4.25- $5.25
0
Safety Services
45/10 months 20/2 months
$4.25- $5.25
28
Erickson Const.
40/9 months 18/3 months
$4.25- $5.25
4
Data provided via FOIA from Arizona Department of Corrections
In a recent piece for Protean magazine entitled “The American Prison System’s War on Reading,” Alex Skopic writes, “Across the United States, the agencies responsible for mass imprisonment are trying to severely limit incarcerated people’s access to the written word—an alarming trend, and one that bears closer examination.” From outright banning books and letting prison libraries fall into decay to the intrusion of for-profit electronic reading services that inmates have to pay for, the assault on prisoners’ ability to read books while incarcerated is one of many calculated cruelties that make the US carceral system so inhumane.
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Skopic about the American prison system’s war on reading and its deep (and racist) historical roots. Alex Skopic is a freelance writer from Springville, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in AnthraciteUnite, Current Affairs, and Vastarien: A Literary Journal, among other places.
Eddie Conway:Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Reading among slaves have always been banned and forbidden, and now we find that reading in prison is also being banned and curtailed. Alex Skopic has written an article and has investigated this, and he’s joining me today to tell us what’s happening with books in prison. Alex, thanks for joining me.
Alex Skopic: Oh, thanks for having me.
Eddie Conway: Alex, can you just give us an overview of what’s happening in the prison-industrial complex in general?
Alex Skopic: Yeah, absolutely. I first started investigating this when I read some reports coming out of Iowa that the Department of Corrections there had banned donations of books completely from outside parties, so that’s charities, that’s family members. Nobody can send books into prison out there and that’s… The more I dug, the more I realized that’s happening in states all over the country and they’re making it harder and harder to get reading material from anywhere.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Some 50 years ago when I was in prison in the Maryland Penitentiary, when I arrived there there were like 4,000 people in the area that I was housed in, and there was no library. There was no library in the whole penitentiary in all the other housing areas and we actually created a library. We took two cells and got people to send us books in and we built the library. It embarrassed the prison and eventually the government actually funded our library. This was like 1971. So I thought about it then and I realized that prison officials don’t want prisoners to read. And why is that?
Alex Skopic: Well, in a lot of cases, what I found is that it’s a lot to do with the profit model in prison. It’s that these prisons are run for-profit in a lot of states and so their incentive is to keep people coming back and to keep recidivism up. If you read, you may educate yourself. You may get out of the cycle. So they want to take that opportunity away and keep the profit line basically.
Eddie Conway: Okay. That contributes to recidivism greatly because like eight out of 10 people end up back in the prison system within a year and a half. But you also pointed out in your article that there is another ulterior motive in terms of the profit system in terms of big book manufacturing distributors. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Alex Skopic: Yeah, absolutely. So, this is one of the more sinister aspects of it now, is that when they ban donations and they ban a lot of the ways of getting books they’ll leave one or two retailers. And usually it’s big companies like Amazon, big companies like Barnes and Noble. And they’ll leave them as the approved vendors, they call them, and charge the full retail price, full markup, just price gouge completely the people held captive. It’s a literal captive market.
Eddie Conway: Okay. And it seems like there’s also some stuff around ebooks and global tech. Could you talk about that a little bit? Because that seems kind of scary and I’m sure it’s probably used in the federal systems and in other places that use emails.
Alex Skopic: Yes. Yes. That’s one of the newer developments is that things are bad with physical books, like the old fashion kind, but they’re, if anything, even worse with ebooks. Because there’s this one company in particular called Global Tel Link and in a lot of states, they will provide what are supposedly free tablets for people to read on, but the catch is always that the content itself is charged for. And they don’t sell an ebook as a one time purchase, they actually charge by the minute to read. So every time you open your book you’ve got like a register running up money. Somebody did the math on this and I believe it’s $.05 a minute to read, which it doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that the wage in prison could be $.25 an hour or less it’s days and days of people’s wages.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. And if you are a slow reader like me it would take me five minutes to read a page or two.
Alex Skopic: Yeah. And it discourages stopping to think and reflect.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. Yeah. Well, how does the prison system justify these bans? All of a sudden books are dangerous? How do they justify that?
Alex Skopic: Yeah. It’s really interesting. The language they use in a lot of places, like in Michigan especially, I dug into the law, and the language they use is that supposedly the books could be used to bring in dangerous contraband, they say. They will go as far to say there could be drugs in the books, there could be weapons. It’s a really flimsy justification because they can’t hardly ever point to a case of this happening, they just bring up the fear that it might.
Eddie Conway: The old hacksaw in the cake kind of scenario from the wild west. Okay.
Alex Skopic: Exactly.
Eddie Conway: When actually everybody realizes, and especially people that’ve been in the prison system, realize that most of the contraband is brought in by the guards.
Alex Skopic: Yeah.
Eddie Conway: Most of the contraband is brought in because the guards can be rich, I mean be enriched, and so it might be in their interest to ban things that they’ll have to end up bringing in surreptitiously. I’m wondering, because it seems like in looking at your article, it seems like there’s a racial disparity in what books are allowed in and what books are banned. Talk a little bit about that.
Alex Skopic: Yeah. There absolutely is. It’s a flagrantly racist system and they’re not even trying to hide it really. Even in prisons that don’t even have the blanket bans on bringing books in they’ll have what are called content specific bans, and it’s a certain title or a certain author that is said to be inflammatory, and it is virtually always a Black author that’s targeted. It’s people like Angela Davis, people like Elijah Muhammad are on the banned list and even things Mein Kampf are not, which is like not even subtle.
Eddie Conway: That’s like Hitler’s Bible, right?
Alex Skopic: Yeah.
Eddie Conway:I noticed you mentioned The Turner Diary and it should be mentioned because it’s one of the most racist, horrible kinds of books you could pick up that leads to a lot of violence against people of color, and that’s not banned.
Alex Skopic: No, that’s allowed and books about crime in white communities are allowed, but it’s along the racial line that they target this stuff.
Eddie Conway: How widespread is this? You pointed out a few states and I know it’s also probably in the Federal Bureau of Prisons also. How widespread is this ban? Is it growing? Is there resistance? Is there pushback? What?
Alex Skopic: Yeah, it’s scarily widespread. It’s way more than I expected when I first started researching this. Iowa is the latest state, but there are dozens. There’s Michigan, there’s Pennsylvania, there’s things in Washington. The good news is there has been resistance and some of these states, like Pennsylvania for example, have been forced to roll back the policies after people made noise about it.
Eddie Conway: The one thing that I thought was important… I mean, the whole entire time I was in prison, I read, and it was very vital to me. The loss of the ability to read at your leisure and stop and think and have multiple choices, what kind of impact do you think that will have on the prisoners?
Alex Skopic: Oh, I think it’s going… If it’s not reformed and if these policies aren’t checked it’s going to be devastating for people because we can look at pretty much any memoir of somebody who was in prison. I looked at Malcolm X’s memoir or Eldridge Cleavers, even in your own book, Martial Law, the solace that people get from books is one of the most important things for them to educate themselves and liberate themselves and be able to understand the system they’re in and stand up to it.
Eddie Conway: And not come back.
Alex Skopic: Yeah.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, certainly the support of thousands of people helped me survive my ordeal, but had it not been for books I don’t think I would have survived. Because books played an equally important role as people outside did because the times I couldn’t get the people outside, I had the book. I had something that gave me comfort or at least gave me agency. It concerns me that this is happening. What can people do about this?
Alex Skopic: Yeah, there are a few things people can do. Maybe the most important is to just educate themselves on what is going on in there because the biggest, I think, weapon that the administrators and the wardens have is that this issue is just kept out of sight for most of the population. So many people don’t even realize that this is going on. So education, hugely important. Getting in contact with people behind bars. There are groups that send books in and help to facilitate things like that. I wrote about the Appalachian Prison Book Project is one, Books Through Bars, a lot of different groups like that that are doing the work and we can always use more of those groups. People need to just get informed and get in contact and get organized, really.
Eddie Conway: Okay. You’ve pretty much covered everything. And I guess my feeling is, and I go back to slavery, obviously that’s part of a long history that I share with my ancestors, and I always realized that the most dangerous thing in the world for the slave owners was a slave that was reading. We talk about the 13th Amendment and talk about how that Exception Clause for being locked up and convicted means you can be held in slavery. And it seems to me now with all two-plus million people in this system, it seems like there’s a concerted effort to bring back slavery in all its forms, not just the work. In fact, you talked a little bit about it in your article about rehabilitation. There’s no sense of rehabilitation at all as far as I can see. Can you talk a little bit about that? You did point out the vice president is like a component of that. Talk about how they are framing this prison system? And yet, it’s doing exactly the opposite.
Alex Skopic: Yeah. The rehabilitation thing is really key there because that’s a lot of the time the story, or the lie, really, that’s used to justify these systems. And even the name penitentiary, it sounds like it’s a place to be penitent and reform and change your life. But in reality, that’s not what’s going on at all. In fact, that kind of reform and reassessment is a threat to the system because it’ll get people out of it eventually and it’s so ingrained in American society that like… Yeah, both parties, even our vice president, it has a history of just working to maintain this system and make sure that it’s never questioned. So really, anything we can do to question the basic logic of it goes a long way.
Eddie Conway: All right then, Alex, thanks for joining me.
Alex Skopic: Yes and thanks for having me.
Eddie Conway: Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.
Nearly 20 years ago, Mark Neocleous published a seminal book entitled A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of the Social Order, which examines how law enforcement and capitalism work in tandem to control the working class and enforce a brutal social and economic order. In this conversation for the Police Accountability Report podcast, PAR host Stephen Janis speaks with Neocleous about his book, the potential it has to transform the debate over the future of law enforcement, and how our unchecked policing system amounts to a radical form of state power that is both unnecessary and antithetical to democracy. Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London and the author of numerous books, including War Power, Police Power and The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and ‘The Enemies of All Mankind’.
Studio: Adam Coley
Post-Production: Stephen Janis
Transcript
The transcript of this podcast will be made available as soon as possible.
On Dec. 22, a few days before Christmas, Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry showed up to the (virtual) Board Of Estimates hearing dressed as Santa Claus. There, Henry and the rest of the voting members proceeded to give one last present to the police this year: With little to no discussion, they approved $41 million for the Baltimore Police Department to get new helicopters and police cars.
Meanwhile, the omicron variant of COVID-19 spread, including to many people who have been vaccinated—and some who received a booster. For the people of Baltimore, the only advice from on high was to get tested (which was incredibly difficult) or get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Mayor Brandon Scott announced the city was looking to develop a “vaccine passport” and, during a maddening Dec. 29 virtual event, Scott also noted a new testing center will open up; beyond that, though, the city is waiting on the state for instructions on further actions. Schools will not be going back to virtual learning. The CDC’s latest recommendations, which are the result of government caving to the demands of commerce, will be followed.
This is how 2021 in Baltimore City ends: With another series of stark reminders that Baltimoreans, for the most part, only have each other to rely on.
Until the omicron surge, Baltimore City had maintained a relatively low infection rate, which was one of Scott’s crowning achievements during a year when he often disappointed voters.
This is how 2021 in Baltimore City ends: With another series of stark reminders that Baltimoreans, for the most part, only have each other to rely on. Then again, that’s how most of this year in Baltimore felt. And that feeling was the impetus for former Real News Managing Editor Lisa Snowden establishing Battleground Baltimore’s weekly news roundup. For all of us involved, we wanted Battleground Baltimore to capture the actual stakes of what was happening (and not happening) in the city, and we wanted to always be honest and direct about issues that the city’s powerful would like to obfuscate or repeatedly describe as just “really complicated” until you get sick and tired of their excuses and leave them alone.
This week, Battleground Baltimore is giving all of 2021 the roundup treatment. Here are some of the most important Baltimore news stories from the year…
The Mosbys are under investigation
State’s Attorney for Baltimore City Marilyn Mosby and her husband, City Council President Nick Mosby, are currently under federal investigation related to their taxes. The Mosbys, a couple already caught up in a tangle of conflicts of interest—Nick’s position means he approves his wife’s office’s budget, for example—have spent the year claiming they are being maliciously targeted and wrongfully attacked (Marilyn for being “too progressive” and Nick for, well, who knows why). They have even begun fundraising for their legal defense, a move that opens them up to even more conflicts of interest. Marilyn Mosby has also taken to attacking Isabel Cumming, the inspector general whose job it is to investigate possible fraud and misconduct.
At this point, with the city being largely silent on the issue, we are supposed to simply trust that the Mosbys will not make any political decisions based on who does or doesn’t donate to their legal defense.
Housing advocates partially defeat Nick Mosby
Two housing policies introduced by Nick Mosby this year were immediately questioned by housing advocates for efficacy, but also because it didn’t seem like said policies would serve Baltimore’s residents as well as they would serve venture capitalists and developers.
In the spring, Mosby introduced a bill that was framed as providing assistance for residents who could not pay the security deposits on their rented properties. But the policy, loudly backed by a New York-based venture capital group called Rhino, would have sucked residents into what amounted to a predatory loan scheme. The bill was defeated by housing advocates such as Baltimore Renters United and was a stunning example of people in Baltimore mobilizing and making change.
More recently, Mosby has reintroduced the dollar homes program, which would allow Baltimoreans to purchase and own a vacant home in the city for just $1 if they repair it. Even though it sounds good on paper, housing advocates have warned that the bill would primarily help developers, not residents who largely lack the capital (and access to capital) to pay for such improvements.
Battleground Baltimore’s Jaisal Noor discussed the dollar homes program in this explainer and in this follow-up report on a recent hearing regarding the dollar homes program, during which Mosby was light on specifics about how the program would actually work.
Marilyn Mosby and the limits of the ‘progressive’ prosecutor
When she wasn’t busy mounting a public defense for herself and her husband, Marilyn Mosby spent the year splitting the difference between the sound, “progressive” policy she is nationally known for and the vindictive, carceral approaches to prisoners her office is locally known for—approaches that cannot possibly be perceived as “progressive” and can only be described as cruel.
Earlier this year (and a few days after it was revealed she was under federal investigation), Mosby made a headline-grabbing decision to stop prosecuting low-level offenses, effectively making permanent a policy her office previously said would be temporary amid COVID-19. The policy stops prosecution of offenses such as drug possession, trespassing, sex work, rogue vagabond charges, and more. This policy, Mosby argued, reduces police interaction and will not increase crime. Indeed, since the policy was first introduced, crime has not increased. Moreover, although the policy is imperfect—people seem confused about it because Mosby’s office has still found ways to charge for drugs—its impact and message are encouraging.
In 2020, when the policy went into effect temporarily, there were 1,348 drug arrests. In 2019 that number was 3,770. That means significantly fewer people in jail.
Meanwhile, Mosby’s approach to those already incarcerated has been unkind, to say the least. As Baltimore Courtwatch has shown week in and week out, her prosecutors aggressively argue in support of holding people without bail, even amid successive COVID-19 waves. The office has significantly slowed down its policy of reducing incarceration during the pandemic by letting people out. Mosby has also continued playing games by not releasing (as she said she would) a full list of problem cops to defense attorneys.
And then there is Keith Davis Jr., a man who was shot by police in 2015, later charged with a murder, and then tried four times for that murder, resulting each time in Davis being granted a new trial either because of a hung jury or an overturned verdict. Davis’ saga is rife with police and prosecutorial misconduct, which has been best detailed in Ron Cassie’s Baltimore Magazine story, “The Many Trials of Keith Davis Jr.”
In May 2022, just one month before the primary election for Baltimore City State’s Attorney, Davis goes to trial for a fifth time for the same murder.
Another year with 300-plus homicides, more money for police
As of press time, there have been 335 murders in Baltimore City. 2021 is the seventh year in a row that Baltimore has surpassed 300 homicides. Additionally, there have been more than 700 nonfatal shootings—“failed murders,” as some cops like to call them—this year. These numbers are not a significant departure from what they have been over the past few years and, more broadly, they reflect trends Battleground Baltimore has observed when looking at decades of crime data for the city.
Over the past 30 years, nonfatal shootings have typically been twice the number of homicides. At the same time, the Baltimore Police Department’s clearance rate for homicides, as well as the number of arrests for murder, has plummeted. For example, in 1990 there were 305 homicides, 345 murder arrests, and a homicide clearance rate of nearly 76%. Currently, the clearance rate sits around 40%. The national average is 54.7%.
The last time the clearance rate reached 70% or higher was 2000, when there were 261 homicides and 239 murder arrests. In 2020, there were 335 homicides, 102 murder arrests, and a clearance rate of 40%.
Even as the very metrics police use show they’re not doing their job effectively, the Baltimore Police Department continues receiving more money and more resources—such as those new helicopters the Board Of Estimates approved last week. Indeed, the Baltimore Police Department received a budget increase of $22 million this year. It was unanimously approved by the City Council, who had voted for modest cuts just one year before. This budget increase, which puts the total police budget over $550 million, was loudly opposed by many Baltimoreans during two Taxpayers’ Night events that were set up so residents could make public comments about the city budget. Residents were mobilized by the group Organizing Black.
Even as the very metrics police use show they’re not doing their job effectively, the Baltimore Police Department continues receiving more money and more resources—such as those new helicopters the Board Of Estimates approved last week.
“The community is saying this ain’t working, and we need to cut the funding to the police department,” Organizing Black’s Rob Ferrell told journalist J. Brian Charles of The Trace.
The defund demands from residents were ignored. The police budget was increased. Additionally, Baltimore Police scooped up other funding, including $6.5 million in speed camera revenue that was originally allotted for making streets safer for pedestrians and drivers. There is also a grant for $10.5 million from the state of Maryland, all part of Gov. Larry Hogan’s counterfactual “refund the police” initiative.
Hogan, who thinks he is seriously running for president, has spent the year demagoguing Baltimore violence while ignoring increases in violence in other parts of the state, and bullying Baltimore’s elected officials when it comes to crime. He even contrived a photo-op in the Waverly neighborhood to prop up his “refund the police” initiative, angering some of the neighborhood’s small business owners.
Inaction on the overdose crisis
It was also another year with a staggering number of fatal overdoses. Baltimore has always been a heroin city, but the poisoning of the drug supply has meant way more overdoses. Baltimore is again set to surpass 1,000 overdose deaths this year—nearly triple the number of homicides. Since the onset of the pandemic, the push for substantial policy to prevent overdoses has gotten nowhere. In early 2020, before the pandemic shut down much of the city in March, then-City Council President Brandon Scott was advocating for overdose prevention sites—places where people can safely use drugs without fear of arrest. As mayor, Scott has been public about his evolution on this issue, admitting to his own misunderstanding of drug use due to stigma while vocally, if not legislatively, advocating for smarter approaches to drug use and overdose.
Though New York City recently opened two overdose prevention sites, Gov. Larry Hogan has called the very concept of overdose prevention sites “insane.” And in Maryland, the state Senate could not even organize to pass a bill that would decriminalize paraphernalia—including needles and other supplies used to inject drugs—during a December special legislative session.
No substantial legislation to address the overdose crisis passed in 2021. That means the many, many people in Baltimore who use drugs—such as “D,” whom I profiled last month—are left on their own, facing a pandemic that eliminates the possibility of safe gatherings (one is more apt to overdose if they are alone) and an unstable, increasingly lethal drug supply.
Baltimore people power
It is hard not to feel pretty hopeless right now. But let’s end by focusing on the rare victories described above, which, of course, mostly began with the people: Baltimoreans organizing and breaking through all of the barriers put in place to stop people from organizing and working together to bring change to the city.
Activists pushed against Mosby’s security deposit insurance bill because it was, in their words, “a scam,” and got that bill killed. Moreover, the city ended up with better housing policy as a result, and that is a victory. When residents from all across the city spoke out and demanded the city “defund the police,” the city did not listen, but their presence was important and a forceful rejoinder to bad-faith claims that “defund” is the position of some bougie white elite that could not possibly come from people in the neighborhoods police prowl the most. It is because of Keith Davis Jr.’s wife Kelly, and a group of police abolitionists supporting her, that Davis’ name has made Mosby’s “progressive prosecutor” platitudes harder to accept.
What else? There are more and more co-ops in Baltimore and they offer up a future vision for workers that’s quite different from the current status quo. Moreover, unionization efforts have been spreading in the city, including at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum.
I’m going to let Sonia Eaddy, one of the residents of Poppleton who is fighting for her home, have the final word this year. The following quote is currently painted on the side of her house: “SAVE OUR BLOCK. Black Neighborhoods Matter. Losing my home is like a death to me. Eminent Domain law is violent.”
The world was horrified earlier this year to see US Border Patrol’s horrific treatment of asylum-seeking Haitian refugees fleeing for their lives. Even though the news cycle has moved on, the nightmare for migrants and refugees is still very much ongoing, and the US deportation machine under President Biden is moving at a monstrous pace. In this urgent, unscheduled episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with organizer Selinda Guerrero about an upcoming protest action at an ICE detention facility in New Mexico and about the need for people to hold Democratic and Republican administrations accountable for their inhumane immigration policies. Selinda Guerrero is the New Mexico field organizer at Forward Together, the national action coordinator for Save the Kids, and she leads the New Mexico chapter of Millions for Prisoners, a national movement to abolish the loophole in the 13th Amendment that allows for the continuation of slavery through the criminal justice system.
This will be the last weekly roundup of 2021. Over the next two weeks, Battleground Baltimore will be doing some year-in-review-ing, and likely a little bit of prognostication into what Baltimore will look like in 2022. We imagine what we’ll see next year will be a lot of the things that you’ll see in this week’s roundup, actually: residents fighting to be heard by seemingly indifferent and poorly informed city officials; plenty more law enforcement malfeasance; the occasional minor victory that gives regular residents far from City Hall or police headquarters a leg up; and one “nostalgic fantasy” or another about this wonderful, often fucked-up city being peddled for political and ideological gain.
Poppleton is what development looks like for Black Baltimoreans
Residents of West Baltimore’s Poppleton neighborhood gave city officials a tour of the overgrown, trash-strewn lots and the mounds of rubble that have come to define their historically Black neighborhood after more than a decade of supposed “revitalization” from well-connected, out-of-town developer La Cité.
The residents who organized the tour are fighting the city’s use of eminent domain to remove them from the homes they have lived in for decades.
“I want everyone in Baltimore to see what eminent domain is like,” said Sonia Eaddy, a third-generation Poppleton resident who has owned her home since 1992.
The house has been owned by Black families as far back as the late 1920s—a particularly impressive feat considering Baltimore City’s racist lending practices. Painted on the side of Eaddy’s 321 North Carrollton Ave. home is a 20-foot mural reading: “SAVE OUR BLOCK. Black Neighborhoods Matter. Losing my home is like a death to me. Eminent Domain law is violent.”
The neighborhood’s development has, over the past 15 years, mostly yielded displacement and demolition, and little new housing, except for two sleek buildings dubbed Center/West.
The Saturday, Dec. 11, tour for Deputy Mayor Ted Carter and Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy, then, was a way to show the litany of injustices Eaddy’s community has endured in recent years.
Read the rest of this story, “‘Eminent Domain is Violent’: Poppleton residents show the city what development looks like for Black Baltimoreans,” here.
Another month of racially disproportionate traffic stops
Over the past few months, Battleground Baltimore has, with data provided by City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey, called attention to ongoing disproportionate traffic stops by police in majority Black and heavily divested council districts. Back in August, when we first reported on this, we noted that the Ninth District was, by far, enduring the most traffic stops.
“In Baltimore City’s majority Black and heavily-divested Ninth District in West Baltimore, police made 516 car stops in June 2021 and 557 car stops in July 2021,” we reported. “The Ninth District contains some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, which are often less walkable and bike-able than other whiter parts of the city and are beholden to the city’s poor transit infrastructure—which puts more people into cars in areas where police are more apt to make traffic stops.”
The Ninth District still topped the list when we revisited the topic with a few more months of data in November.
“In August, there were 477 stops in Ninth District; in September, 356 stops, and in October, 386 stops,” we reported. “For Dorsey, the fact that the past five months of data show the highest number of stops in majority-Black parts of the city like the Ninth District make the ‘implicit bias’ of BPD pretty, well, explicit.”
Dorsey also noted that this kind of racially disproportionate policing was a major part of the 2016 Department of Justice investigation into the Baltimore Police Department and should be of concern to those overseeing the Consent Decree. It has not been addressed.
Data for the month of November shows that there were 456 car stops in the Ninth District.
The data also shows a significant jump in the number of stops in the 12th District, which also contains some of the city’s most heavily divested Black neighborhoods: 181 in August; 341 in September; 301 in October; and 350 in November.
The whole list of in-custody deaths in Maryland, 2003-2020
Thanks to a public information request filed by The Real News Network’s Taya Graham and Stephen Janis of the Police Accountability Report, you can view and download a list of every death in police custody in Maryland from 2003-2020.
The request came after more than 400 medical pathologists called attention to the work of former Medical Examiner Dr. David Fowler, whose testimony during the Derek Chauvin trial raised questions about Fowler’s bias towards police and general competence. Fowler all but dismissed the knee Chauvin pressed into George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds as reason for Floyd’s death, and suggested exhaust from cars, Floyd’s heart condition, and his use of drugs were major factors.
Chavin was found guilty of murder and Maryland is looking into cases overseen by Fowler, who was the Chief Medical Examiner during much of the past 20 years.
Read and watch Graham and Janis’ story here, where you can also view the full list.
No more drug testing for (most) prospective city employees
Most of those applying to work for Baltimore City will no longer be subjected to alcohol or drug testing thanks to the approval by the Board of Estimates this week. Now, only those applying for ‘safety sensitive’ jobs will still be tested. Safety sensitive jobs is a fairly expansive list and includes jobs in which one is driving, operating heavy machinery, responsible for the safety of others, dealing with children, or handling money or other “sensitive” materials.
The change was encouraged by Mayor Brandon Scott, who made campaign promises that he would reduce barriers to employment that were exclusionary or inequitable. Battleground Baltimore wants to call attention to the subtle but important way Scott frames his support. Given how terribly people who use drugs are treated, it’s encouraging to see them framed as employees that are among “the best and brightest.”
“We want the best and brightest candidates to help us provide efficient and effective City services to our residents,” Scott said in a statement. “Frankly, the outdated and costly pre-employment drug and alcohol screenings only served to block qualified and passionate residents from obtaining employment with the City.”
City Comptroller Bill Henry, who also encouraged this policy change, noted that drug testing is strictly exclusionary and nothing more.
“Pre-employment drug testing for non-safety-based jobs is only effective at preventing qualified applicants from applying for jobs,” Henry said in a statement. “It’s not evidence-based, it’s costly.”
Keith Davis Jr. rejects plea deal
Keith Davis Jr., a man who was shot by police in June 2015 and later charged with a murder that occurred earlier on the same day, rejected a plea deal offered to him this week. The plea was an offer of 50 years in prison with 35 of those suspended—so he would be doing 15 years—and was an Alford Plea, a guilty plea in which a defendant is allowed to maintain their innocence while conceding that evidence provided would be enough to get a conviction.
Davis has been tried for the same homicide four previous times—there have been two hung juries and two guilty verdicts that were overturned—and will now face a fifth trial. The ongoing saga has been covered by The Real News for years and has gained the attention of local and national activists, including DeRay Mckesson. Last month, Baltimore Magazine published what may be the definitive piece on Davis, calling attention to the problems, inconsistencies, and misconduct surrounding Davis’ ongoing prosecution. Davis is the second person to be tried this many times for the same crime.
Seemingly in response to Davis rejecting his plea, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, whom activists have criticized for going forward with this ongoing prosecution, posted an image to Twitter (since deleted) and Facebook (still there) of a little girl seemingly rolling her eyes, along with the words, “Thanks niece for summarizing (G-rated) how I feel about my Haters today!”
Dollar homes hearing on Monday night
City Council President Nick Mosby is continuing his quest to resurrect the fraught dollar homes program without providing any information about it except for social media propaganda. As Battleground Baltimore reported last month, the success of the original dollar homes program has been vastly overstated.
Mosby has, over the past two weeks, appeared on a number of “live” internet events which are promoted on the official City Council Instagram (which Mosby regularly uses to post pictures of himself) and framed as informational events about dollar homes, but which really equate to promotions for the policy.
Thread of the Week: @BmoreCourtwatch on bail review for children tried as adults
We think it makes sense to end the year with a return to Baltimore Courtwatch’s weekly thread detailing the comings and goings of court. Read this week’s thread of Thursday’s hearings for children being tried as adults: “A child who is need of medication that he is not receiving while being caged. ASA Hemmerle brings up dropped charges and recommends HWOB [held without bail] Judge Schiffer orders HWOB,” the first tweet explains.
Tweet of the Week: Christopher Ervin on city hiring
Local radio host, former City Council candidate, and founder of Lazarus Rite shows just how much more needs to be done when it comes to reducing the barriers for Baltimoreans to get jobs: “Hired one of our former students to drive a waste truck for @BaltimoreDPW because the agency was short handed. After almost a year working for the city through us he applied directly to the city to do exact same job. HR told him he was unqualified. Not enough experience,” Ervin tweeted.
Dr. David Fowler garnered national attention after his controversial testimony on behalf of killer cop Derek Chauvin. The former Maryland Chief Medical Examiner made headlines when he testified Floyd died in part due to exhaust from a tail pipe. The testimony raised questions about his competence and police bias, and lead nearly 400 medical pathologists to call for review of his rulings on ‘police-involved’ deaths during his tenure in Maryland.
This week, in response to a request from The Real News Network, the state of Maryland released a list of roughly 1,400 cases of in-custody deaths that occurred during Fowler’s tenure. The list has been turned over the the Maryland Attorney General’s office for review by a panel of experts.
Studio/Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and this is Stephen Janis, and we are your hosts of the Police Accountability Report. And we have a breaking news update. Now, you may have heard of Dr. Fowler just recently because he rose to national prominence during the George Floyd murder trial. When he testified on behalf of Derek Chauvin, what did he say that was so controversial? Well, he suggested that George Floyd’s death was due to underlying heart disease and car exhaust. Let’s take a moment to listen to him speak for himself.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker: Would you agree that pressure on the soft side of the neck also narrows the size of the upper airway, the hypopharynx?
Dr. David Fowler: I have not seen any literature which indicates that that happens. That was one of the specific things I searched for. Because you’re correct, counselor, it was not something that was put into the report. Because it’s not something that I have ever heard of, and so I then went and looked for pressure on the neck causing restriction of the hypopharynx, and my literature search was not fruitful. What you’re referring to as a sudden death – And I may well have misinterpreted – I’m referring to as a sudden cardiac rest. There’s a difference between death and cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest is not absolutely irreversible and not synonymous with a person always passing away.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: So as you can see, Dr. Fowler’s testimony was highly controversial, and 431 doctors and pathologists from around the country wrote an open letter demanding that all of his determinations and all of his rulings be examined and be audited. And so we have gotten a hold of internal documents that will show the cases that will be reviewed. Stephen, tell them a little bit about what we found in these documents.
Stephen Janis: Well first of all, this is the first time that we’ve seen a list of the cases that the state medical examiner’s office has turned over to the Maryland attorney general’s office. That list cases of police custody deaths, people who are in prison, people who died during a shootout with police, people who died during a chase with police. So it pretty much covers decades of police-involved killings, or police in custody deaths, roughly 1314 cases. So it’s pretty broad, it’s a huge list, but it has some pretty important cases in it which we’ll get to later. Nevertheless, it’s broad, it’s been turned over to the attorney general’s office. And so this is the beginning of taking these cases and reexamining them.
Taya Graham: Now, I just want you to explain why the medical examiner’s office is so important, how their processes haven’t been transparent, and how they affect the investigations into police misconduct and police brutality.
Stephen Janis: Well, essentially the medical examiner rules on a manner of death, which can be suicide, accident, natural, or homicide. So take the case that we’ll talk about later, Anton Black, who was a young man who was killed by police during an arrest. If the medical examiner rules it an accident, which they did in this case, it’s going to be very hard to prosecute police.
So a medical examiner by ruling a case as undetermined, which means they don’t determine any manner of death, or by ruling a case an accident, where it seems like force led to the death, can pretty much take police off the hook. And the other aspect of it that’s important that you bring up is that the medical examiner in our state is not elected. In some jurisdictions you have what’s called a coroner, who is elected. But in our jurisdiction, it’s appointed by a board that’s appointed by the governor. So there’s not a lot of accountability to the people. So it’s very easy for a person like that to really not be accountable and to make rulings that are controversial, there’s not a lot anyone can do about it.
Taya Graham: And one thing I’d like to add is that we found out that police officers who were involved in the case of police brutality were often in the room with the medical examiner while they were making the determination. So to me it seems that they could have some undo influence on what the medical examiner ruled.
Stephen Janis: Well, that’s certainly been the allegations of defense attorneys who have sued on behalf of families who alleged that police violated people’s rights when they killed them or abused them. And that type of inter-relationship probably has more influence on the medical examiner than their accountability to the people.
Taya Graham: Absolutely. Now this whole process really hasn’t been transparent to the public. And if it hadn’t been for the George Floyd trial, we may have never gotten this audit in Maryland. So this is incredibly important. Now you brought up a case that occurred in Maryland, and it was the death of Anton Black in the hands of Greensboro Police. Can you talk a little bit about that investigation and why we spoke to an independent pathologist?
Stephen Janis: Well, it took four or five months for the medical examiner office to even release any sort of statement on the death of Anton Black. Anton Black was a 19-year-old track star who was stopped by police in Greensboro, Maryland, and chased to his mother’s home, where they sat on top of him during the arrest. They accused him of kidnapping a child who turned out to be his cousin by marriage, and it was a really big screw up case. And they sat on it for months, which is really the playbook, and why the medical examiners could just say, I’m not going to release it.
Taya Graham: And as a matter of fact, the family didn’t get any information until we started reporting on it and other reporters started covering it. The family needed information for months, and they were simply unresponsive to them.
Stephen Janis: Yeah, and that’s the medical examiner again has no accountability. So they ruled this death and accident due to a heart abnormality, which was really… And we spoke to an independent pathologist, Cyril Wick, and you know what he said, right?
Taya Graham: Absolutely. Dr. Cyril Wick let us know that this was an obvious case of positional asphyxiation. And I think a lot of people now know about positional asphyxiation, but it occurs when someone is prone and laying on the ground and then a weight is placed on top of them. So their lungs can’t expand and essentially they can’t breathe. They slowly die of suffocation.
Stephen Janis: Right, and that’s what happened with George Floyd, it was positional asphyxiation. So this case is a perfect example of why the medical examiner’s office needed to be reviewed, why this review needed to happen. Now, one point about this is it’s a lot of cases. So we put a request into the Maryland attorney general’s office, who has impaneled seven experts to review these cases, to ask how they’re going to whittle them down. But you found something that was interesting when you went through this, the data, right?
Taya Graham: So something I looked into was cases that these deaths were ruled undetermined, but one of the causes that was listed is excited delirium. And this is really bunco science. And Stephen, talk a little bit about what you’ve learned about excited delirium.
Stephen Janis: Well, I had a very engaged period of time with Dr. Fowler when I was investigating taser deaths. And a lot of taser deaths were attributed to “excited delirium.”
Taya Graham: As if someone having electricity jolted through their body would have no impact on their heart. Right?
Stephen Janis: Well, a lot of it was done at the behest of the taser industry, and they didn’t want tasers being the primary cause of death. So at that point when I was interacting with him he gave me a book that explained excited delirium because I had a lot of questions about it. And the book attributed the entire phenomena to a 19th century physical malady that took over people in sanitariums where for a period or three or four weeks they become very excited, and then they die. And they sort of transpose that into the present with no real research or science to say that when a person is in custody and they get tased and they die that it’s not cardiac arrhythmia. Like you say, getting jolted by 20,000 or 50,000 volts, that is actually a 19th century malady of people who were in sanitariums.
Taya Graham: And you know, there’s just sort of an interesting side note that in Colorado, where they’ve had this incredible use of ketamine to subdue people who are considered suspects by the police, oftentimes controlling them for excited delirium was cited as the reason why ketamine was administered.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. So this just shows your point about lack of transparency in the medical examiner’s system, in the whole process. You can take bunk science that everyone knows is BS and put it in an autopsy, like we found 14 cases like you found in this case. You can delay investigations for months, and I think part of that playbook is let’s just wait until it dies out and people stop paying attention and then we’ll release it. So all those elements are why this list is very important. And it also shows that a lot of people die in custody, a lot of people die in jail. A lot of people die during… It’s dangerous. And one of the reasons why you might not want as much law enforcement as we have in this state is because many times people die when they’re in custody of police.
Taya Graham: Absolutely. Now I just want you to let people know what the next steps are. What are we going to be seeing in this process?
Stephen Janis: Well, we are waiting for a comment from the attorney general’s office on how they’re going to whittle it down, if they do at all. They have impaneled seven experts from across the country and around the world, pathologists, psychologists, to review these cases. So I think the next step is we will see what the attorney general’s office does with this raw data and how they decide to process it, and what they decide is important and what they want to prioritize. I mean, the three cases that we have reported on that will be critical are the case of Anton Black, Tyrone West, who was killed by police during a routine traffic stop, and Towan Boyd, who died during a similar [incident], and all of them have elements of positional asphyxiation. So those are the ones that I think will be very important to look at.
Taya Graham: Yeah, we’re definitely going to keep an eye on those cases and keep you updated. So thank you for joining us for this breaking news update. I’m Taya Graham, this is Stephen Janis, and we are the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
After spending the past year and a half socially distancing, millions around the country will be coming together to celebrate the holidays this year with a renewed appreciation for seeing and being with loved ones. For those who are locked away in prisons and jails, however, the dehumanizing separation from family, friends, and community will continue. Having spent 44 years as a political prisoner, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway has an intimate knowledge of just how painful the holidays are for incarcerated people and why suicides, violence, and depression spike for prisoners this time of year. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Conway and TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez have an open and emotional discussion about what it’s like to be locked up during the holidays and about the importance of doing what we can to help prisoners maintain contact with the outside world.
Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Since it’s the holiday season, we thought we would have a conversation about the impact of holidays on prisoners in the prison-industrial complex. Joining me today as an honor and a special guest is our editor-in-chief, Max Alvarez, of course. Max, thanks for joining me.
Maximillian Alvarez:Hey, Eddie. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s a real honor and a pleasure to be here.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Max, you talked to me earlier about what it’s like being in prison during holidays. Are you still interested in that?
Maximillian Alvarez:Yeah. I mean, it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot. I mean obviously I watch Rattling the Bars every week and we’re truly honored to be putting it on every week, and you and Cameron do such incredible work covering the violence and victims of the prison-industrial complex week in and week out. And obviously you yourself have a very intimate knowledge of just how brutal this prison-industrial complex can be. And I don’t know, I guess just, there were moments over the past couple of years where I think, for those of us who were kind of socially distancing or even quarantining ourselves, that may have been the first time people really felt that sort of distance and isolation from their families. I know that I personally, over the summer I saw videos that my family was sending of the family getting together in California. And I was looking at them and it felt like I was sitting on the moon looking at pictures of something that was just so far away that there was no way I could get back there.
And I mean, that’s not even close to the kind of isolation that prisoners feel on a day-to-day basis. And so, I just wanted to make sure that as we wrap up a really incredible year of work here at the Real News, as folks are perhaps heading back home to see friends and family after perhaps not being able to next year, that we all spare a thought for our… The folks who are locked away right now and who are kind of living deep in the gut of an incredibly brutal prison system completely separated from their loved ones and their communities. And I think it’s important for all of us to think about what that’s like, to think about what we can do to bring some semblance of humanity back to those who have had it ripped away from them in the prison system.
And so, I figured there’d be no better kind of chance than for maybe you and I to chat a little bit and talk to viewers about what that’s like. I mean, I know that there’s probably no way to communicate what it’s like, but I guess, if you were talking to someone who asked the question, what do you think people need to know about what it’s like being locked up around the holidays?
Eddie Conway: It’s interesting though, because of the pandemic I have been telling people, because people have cabin fever, they’re bored to death, they’re jumping out of their skin because they can’t have contact. Some of them are even so desperate now that they’re willing to even take risks to go to events. And I was telling them, that’s just a small fraction of what prisoners feel when they’re isolated in cells surrounded by strangers, because you’re never alone except maybe in solitary confinement and so on. But most of the time there’s people coming in, people going out, but there’s never really close friendships. There’s a few here and there. Then there’s a certain amount of macho-ism that goes with being a prisoner. You can’t show kind of weaknesses, you can’t show that you’re vulnerable to certain things, you can’t cry, you can’t even hug prisoners man-to-man. They might come up and do a manly hug and a slap on the back and whatnot.
But the most debilitating time of the year for prisoners is the holiday seasons because that’s the memories that they bring into the prison system from their childhood: The happy times, the good food, the grandma’s cooking, the presents, the interacting with families. All that’s taken away, and it’s taken away and it’s not replaced with anything. There’s no packages. Used to be Christmas packages, you could get stuff. There’s no special events during the holiday season because the guards are taking off their vacations and so on. So, most of the time you are locked in the cell, and so you don’t even get to talk to your family on a regular basis on the telephone. And the depression is so intense throughout the whole area that it creates a sense of doom.
Everybody’s sad. People that can get high are getting high. People that can get drunk, get drunk because they can make… jump study or whatever. People that have no recourse at all might go out and run the yard, or might do calisthenics all day. But the absence of relief that you get during the holidays with the family and friends and all that stuff, it’s so intense that every little incident is exacerbated. I’m angry. I’m mad. And so, it’s the transfer of hostility and it’s transferred because the oppression of the prison system doesn’t allow you to speak out and say we want this or we want that or so on. And so, we transfer it to each other. You bumped into me. Watch where you’re going.
But it’s really about the turkey. It’s really about mom and grandma’s cooking, but it translates like that. And so, you get not just violence but then you get a level of depression that leads to suicides. So suicides during this particular period. This is the worst time in the world to be in prison and be cut off and isolated from your family, because that’s the time that’s more depressing and people tend to opt out or to end their life, or get reckless.
Maximillian Alvarez:Right. Well, I –
Eddie Conway: So, it’s… Yeah. Yeah, Max?
Maximillian Alvarez:Well, I was just going to follow up on that because I know this is something that you have talked a lot about yourself, not only on this show but even when you were on the inside organizing, right? You were constantly bringing up the importance of maintaining some semblance of connection between folks on the inside and the outside because of what it does to you, the ways that it dehumanizes you, the ways that it almost turns you in and your soul starts eating itself, if you are completely cut off from the outside world. And that is something that you see happening, especially… It becomes very apparent in times like these where maybe in the past loved ones could travel to jails or prisons and touch their sons, their spouses, but now they’re behind glass or they can only talk to them behind these video phone calls.
I guess I just wanted to ask if you could connect that to what you’ve spoken about before of what it does to you as a person to be so thoroughly disconnected, even in the sense of being able to touch your loved ones, what that does to you?
Eddie Conway: Yeah, and I think I would kind of reinforce that a little bit because cards, letters, pictures, phone calls, or anything that you get during that time helps you kind of survive through that time. Because not only do you suffer the consequences of wearing uniforms and being a non-entity, and recognizing because of the 13th Amendment that you’re treated as a slave, but then you’re further dehumanized by the guards, by them coming in happy and joyous and celebrating and then, and talking and high-fiving each other and all of that. And you’re tucked away in that cell with nothing and no contact, no comfort. It’s really, I mean, that’s kind of like the final level of dehumanization, because you can’t even develop the memories that we need to have experiences with our family. In other words, holidays and those kinds of gatherings, that’s what we remember. Being with Aunt Lou or Cousin Billy or so on. We remember those experiences, but when you take those memories away then you have not just a blank slate of what’s going on with the family, you’re not part of it, but you’re not part of anything.
And so then – And in fact I just want to go a step further, because it’s important for people to reach out to their people while they’re inside. It’s very important to do that. But a step further is that it causes most people to try to make up for that lost time, and that’s what creates the recidivism. They go out and they try to catch up. They try to get the memories, the experiences, the resources, the stuff that they know that they missed for the last 10 years. And they try to get it within a year, and they end up running afoul and end up back in the prison system within a year or 18 months, and that’s 80% of the people that get released. But it’s the missing experiences. It’s the missing comradery with the family. It’s the missing good times that they remember that they’re trying to catch up. And you can never catch… They’re lost. They’re lost forever. You can’t catch them, that’s an empty hole. You have to bury them, and you have to put them to rest and move on.
But most prisoners don’t do that, and most prisoners end up suffering a big, empty space in their life, like 10 years. And they come out and they’re desperate to fill that space, and you can’t. So it’s long-term consequences, too. And so, I think it’s just very important for any and everybody that can reach out. It is through the glass now. It’s through the emails. It’s through, even when you send pictures you’ve got to send them certain ways. Even when you buy books you’ve got to send them certain ways. The prison-industrial complex, it’s getting rich off of this, but it’s important to keep your loved one, your family member, as whole as possible. That means you have to suffer some of that exploitation in order to reach out and to have that person whole, and have that person share as many family photos around the [inaudible] and that kind of stuff. It seems trivial, postcards. Even $5 in the commissary. It seems minor but it’s so important to that person in that cell.
Maximillian Alvarez:I bet. I mean, and like you said, the stakes here are incredibly high. I mean, I guess it’s not surprising, right? That this is the time of year where suicides go up, where, like you said, you take all that hurt and you turn it towards one another and so violence inside the prison goes up. And I guess, again, that’s just something I wanted to stress for folks watching and viewing. If you have it within you to please look for ways that you can, in some little way, help someone out, help them maintain that connection with the outside world, help them maintain that shred of humanity in a very inhumane system. And I guess, obviously, the overarching theme of Rattling the Bars is that we don’t need a kinder prison-industrial complex, right? The system itself is violence. It is perpetual violence. This is what it’s designed to do.
So we’re not saying, let’s do this as a sort of salve while keeping the system in place, but while that system is in place there are things people can do to, again, keep that sort of fire of humanity burning, however weak it is, and do something that may mean only a few minutes or a few dollars for you, but it’ll mean everything for someone on the inside. And so, I just wanted to kind of end up there, Eddie, and ask if you had any kind of final thoughts for people about what they could do and what that does mean for someone who’s there on the inside, and at the holidays like now.
Yes. And I’ve said it and you’ve said it. Reach out in any kind of way you can. Send a card, send a letter. If it’s an email system, email. Send money for the commissary. Send books. You can definitely send pictures. You have to go through some process. But try to reach out and make as many contacts as possible with your loved one. Encourage the family members to do the same thing. Every little bit helps. Every little bit lightens that burden of the massive depression that holiday seasons bring in the prison system. And you will hopefully bring somebody home that’s less damaged than the prison system intended to make them. Max, I want to thank you for joining me. Hope –
Maximillian Alvarez: Eddie, it’s all a pleasure, brother. Thank you so much for having me.
Eddie Conway: Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.
The battle over the right to record police is far from over. That’s because a case pending over a routine traffic stop in Lakewood, Colorado, where police interfered with a citizen journalist recording, could have a huge impact on a controversial legal precedent that shields cops from legal liability.
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible.
And today, we’re going to achieve that goal by examining how a Cop Watcher’s efforts to record police, and what cops did in response is actually leading to some truly surprising developments in our legal system. In fact, what is happening is so profound it calls into question the entire notion that the Cop Watcher’s work is a worthless endeavor in search of clicks.
But before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasBaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, please hit the Patreon link pinned below in the comment, because we do have some extras for our PAR family. All right, now we’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, everyone who watches this show knows that we don’t just report on bad cops, but we also focus on the people who watch them. Meaning citizen journalists with their own YouTube channels, whose efforts to document law enforcement overreach have been both popular and controversial. Most of the criticism can be summarized thusly: Cop Watchers and auditors, otherwise known as frauditors, don’t really accomplish any real change. Instead, they simply provoke police to get clicks and eventually monetize their videos in exchange for cash.
So, first, I’m not even going to weigh into the debate about monetizing a video. Every major news corporation does, so why is it so deplorable for a citizen journalist to do the same? Nobody seems to criticize how companies like Google and Facebook monetize practically everything we do and then sell the data.
But today, I want to address the second prong of the frauditors argument. Namely, to quote beloved American author William Faulkner, Cop Watchers are full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Well, interestingly, a recent case pretty much turns that notion on its head. It involves a Cop Watcher known as Liberty Freak or Abade. He is and was a video activist who worked closely with controversial fellow Cop Watcher Eric Brandt, who has also been accused of being nothing more than a social menace.
But as I already mentioned, a case before the Federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals may actually put these two YouTubers in a position to do something pretty extraordinary. What I mean is that according to the briefs filed with court in support of their case, the video you are now seeing on screen, has the potential to deliver a stinging blow to the legal orthodoxy which has made police almost immune to accountability.
But before I delve into the details of what might happen and the implications, I want to start by giving you background on the actual encounter with the police that started the series of, at least for people in favor of recording the police, fortunate events. The story begins in 2019 when the Cop Watcher Liberty Freak, along with Eric Brandt, was filming police at an accident scene in Lakewood, Colorado. The duo was exercising their First Amendment rights when a Lakewood City police officer decided he was going to interfere with their recording. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Eric Brandt: Hey, get the fuck out of his face, asshole.
Abade: Can I help you?
Officer Yehia: No.
Abade: All right.
Officer Yehia: I don’t need your help.
You got a fucking problem, you fucking goon?
Eric Brandt: Hey, get the fuck out of here, police asshole.
Officer Yehia: Get the fuck out of my fucking line, man. What’s wrong with you? Clown.
Abade: Calling me a clown?
Officer Yehia: There’s always going to be one fucking clown that shows up. [crosstalk].
Abade: Fucking jackass.
Officer Yehia: You’re always the jackass that makes those videos.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, not only did the officer obstruct their clearly lawful right to record, the move further escalated an encounter in a way that we, unfortunately, have witnessed before on this show, as you can see.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Abade: Don’t shine that in my eyes. Don’t shine that in my eyes.
Officer Yehia: Fuck you. You guys shine those things in my eyes all the time.
Abade: You think you get extra privileges [inaudible].
Officer Yehia: Yeah, I’ve just had them shined in my eyes all night by you guys.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But Abade did not simply sit back and allow the police to have the final word on his First Amendment rights. He, like his counterpart Eric, used the courts to contest the behavior of Officer Yehia. Just a side note here, many of the auditors we have interviewed on this channel have actually used the courts to make real progress to affirm the Constitutional rights of everyone.
Take, for example, well known Cop Watcher the Battousai, who won a case when a cop in Texas prevented him from recording a police facility, and has actually made case law known as Turner versus Lieutenant Driver which is cited often by lawyers who fight for freedom of speech. But after Abade sued is when the rubber met the proverbial road. That’s because lawyers representing Officer Yehia turned to a warm blanket of legal theory used by cops across the country to evade any responsibility for their actions.
It’s a concept known as qualified immunity. The idea that police officers are immune to legal liability if the right they violate is not firmly established when the violation occurred. Just to give you some background on the long and twisted history of this controversial legal concept, the idea of qualified immunity was carved out by courts in response to a federal statute known as 1983. That statute was passed during the reconstruction era to allow citizens to sue public officials acting under the color of law for violations of Constitutional rights. Over time, the court carved out these special exemptions for certain public officials, including police officers, to give them leeway to argue that the right they violated wasn’t firmly established and thus cannot be held accountable for their actions.
A brief on Abade’s case by the Cato Institute points out this esoteric legal theory has evolved into a two-headed monster of police impunity as courts have extended this concept to a variety of cases where police and public officials have violated someone’s rights and then simply cloaked themselves in the aforementioned blanket of immunity and walked away scott-free. In fact, this idea has become so toxic to the notion of police accountability that it was originally part of a bipartisan legislation aimed at reforming police currently still on the docket in Washington. Unfortunately, that part of the bill has been carved out during negotiations between Democrats and Republicans. I wonder why.
But nevertheless, could it be that Abade and Eric Brandt and their band of so-called frauditors might be able to achieve what our nation’s elites cannot? Could the YouTubers who have been ridiculed as click-baiting opportunists actually strike down a pillar of law enforcement protection that the best lawyers have yet to be able to dent?
Well, it is actually possible, and for more and why and how this could happen I’m going to talk to the man at the center of the case himself, Abade, also known as Liberty Freak. But before we do, I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, who has been delving into the case and has more on the legal filings and what they mean.
Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: Now, Stephen, I was talking about qualified immunity and how this case could set precedent. How has qualified immunity been used in this case and what are the implications?
Stephen Janis: I think what’s interesting about this case is the way qualified immunity was used by the court. The district court granted it in 2019. This is after the first, the third, the fifth, the seventh, the ninth, and 11th circuits had already granted or affirmed that the First Amendment right to record was an established right, and that’s where it conflicts with the idea of qualified immunity. So, this case could be a particularly interesting case because the whole concept of qualified immunity is the officer’s not aware. This also includes the fact that there was a 2015 law passed in Colorado that also affirmed the right to record police. So there are multiple legal issues where qualified immunity, the use of it, could be challenged.
Taya Graham: There have been several briefs filed in the case including with the US Department of Justice. What do the briefs say and why are they important?
Stephen Janis: Well, what’s very important about it, just the fact the US Department of Justice has said this is a very pivotal First Amendment rights case, that the ability to record police is fundamental to holding police accountable. Which of course has been the message of Cop Watchers, and which actually, weirdly, of all things, the Department of Justice has affirmed.
The Cato Institute has also joined with an amicus brief that focuses mostly on qualified immunity, saying that the legal concept is untethered from the statute from which it arose and that it’s completely gotten out of control basically, and been used in many cases where it’s not warranted. So, these briefs, among others – The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the University of Colorado Law School – It’s an incredible collection of legal minds who are going to bat for two auditors who had their cameras and were recording an accident in Lakeland, Colorado.
Taya Graham: So what makes you think this case could have some real impact on qualified immunity, and why is it important with regards to First Amendment rights and the right to record?
Stephen Janis: Well, I think when the legal system reacts to correct something, it’s when something has been abused. And the fact that the district court just dismissed the case based on qualified immunity when there was much evidence that the right was established – Like I said, all those circuits had already affirmed that right – I think this is going to be a test case where a good legal mind will have the opportunity to say, you know what, you’ve overstepped your bounds. It’s time to start pushing back on this whole notion of qualified immunity.
I think this could be a really pivotal case, which I think speaks to the power of cop watching and why even going to a routine accident can have an important influence on our First Amendment rights. Me, as a journalist, I am hoping that this case turns out well because it’s important to us. We record stuff on sidewalks. And so, this shows how this whole continuum of behavior, how cop watching, auditors, and journalism can have effects that you don’t see or unintended effects or positive outcomes for all of us.
Taya Graham: And to get more details on the case and how it’s affected him personally, I’m joined by the plaintiff himself, the Liberty Freak, also known as Abade. Abade, thank you so much for joining us.
Abade: Thank you guys for having me here. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Taya Graham: First, tell us about the initial incident of the video that we’re going to be showing on the screen now. Describe what we are seeing.
Abade: We were together as a group. We were cop watching out in the city of Denver. That evening we had gone to LoDo, which is a really popular spot here in Denver with all the clubs and all of that kind of stuff, a lot of youth out there in the streets and a lot of police officers.
We had a good night of cop watching. Then, as we were going home we saw that there were a couple police cars that had somebody pulled over. So we decided, hey, let’s look out for our neighbor. And let’s just document this moment. As we began to document it, just, a police officer showed up, he decided to come in an aggressive manner. And then he got out of the car, he got in front of me, and he was purposefully trying to interrupt our videotaping. And he just thought it was the right thing to do at the moment, I guess. But the law in Colorado says otherwise.
Taya Graham: So what happened because of this interaction with police? Was your property taken or are you looking at charges, or are your fellow Cop Watchers looking at charges?
Abade: Well, when the police officer got there he purposefully decided to escalate the situation as much as possible to be able to cause as much of a distraction and as much of an interference to what we were doing. He actually states this in a court case which happened due to the fact that my partner, Eric Brandt, had gotten arrested for shining a light in a police officer’s eyes for three seconds.
Taya Graham: Tell us what happened when you filed the lawsuit. Why did you file it? And I believe qualified immunity played a role here.
Abade: The reason why I filed the lawsuit is because I get told a lot, well, sue me. Well, take it to court. So, I actually learned how to do that, and I had followed all the procedures to be able to. The written law also states how you can bring the issue to the offending agency and they’re supposed to review it, and they’re supposed to give you a certain amount. And if they refuse it, then you can sue them for $15,000.
So, I thought I was going to follow it through the state court at first, but I had spoken with some of my friends, some attorneys, and this question just hadn’t been answered federally in this circuit. So, we gave it a crack because it was pretty blatant and obvious what he had done. And he even stated very proudly what he had done. He detailed it in a court of law and he detailed it also in the original statement, as if the law really didn’t even exist. So I figured that there was enough there to be able to, with his admission, basically – Because that’s what it is. Basically, it’s an admission of guilt – That I had a chance at it federally, but it was dismissed with prejudice. But then I got lucky.
Taya Graham: Now, there was a law filed in Colorado in 2015 to protect the right to record the police and to protect the First Amendment enshrined in the Constitution. How did this officer defend himself from that law? How did he use qualified immunity to defend himself?
Abade: Unfortunately, lately, in the courts they’ve been taking the question of whether it’s been well established in the court, so they’re bringing it down to such detailed levels where nobody can really follow through with that. So exact that they’ve had cases where one person was tased, the other person was pepper sprayed. I can’t remember which was which, but it was ruled that he wasn’t tased. He got pepper sprayed. Even though the cases were identical, identical.
So, here, the police have been using qualified immunity for a long time to get away with all kinds of discrepancies and crimes. And so, the state filed a law that says that they lost qualified immunity if they violate your rights in any way, but you’d have to sue them through the state to be able to get that benefit. So, since I sued them through the federal court… Whenever you write these lawsuits they always come back. Their first comeback is always, well because the officer was shrouded, for he was simply anointed, surrounded in his qualified immunity because his impenetrable… I mean, they use all these words. It’s hilarious how they explain it all. So, that’s what they did here.
Taya Graham: So now we have an amicus curiae, a friend of the court brief, where the United States Department of Justice has written eloquently arguing for the right to record police. Who has joined your case and written in support of the right to record police and of the First Amendment?
Abade: I guess, chronologically, I’d have to say that first it was dismissed and I was bummed because I tried really hard on that one. And then somebody sent me a link to a newspaper ad in the Denver Gazette. And then that reporter called me and I answered a couple questions and he was the one that let me know how big of a deal this was. I had no idea. I kind of figured it out when I saw that Andrew McNulty and David Lane had actually commented on the article.
They’ve battled this a lot, too. So, this is really, really a question that needs to be answered here. It’s a really serious issue here, as far as Colorado goes. That’s why the state actually removed the qualified immunity. So, then I received an email from an attorney firm called Arnold and Porter out of Washington, D.C. And they asked me, they said that they had seen my case and that they were very interested in my case but they had to iron out a few little wrinkles to see if they were going to take it or not. But that they were interested, but with no guarantees.
It ended up being that they took the case. I didn’t even know who they were. Later found out that they’re a pretty big deal when it comes to this, civil rights issues and things. They’re an international firm. So, I was like, wow. I was pretty blown away by that. The most professional attorneys I ever dealt with. My attorney is Mr. Andrew Tuck, and he is just a beautiful human being.
And then from there, just a couple days ago, he texted me and was like, did you check your email? Did you see who wrote a brief on your case? And then I was like, what? And then I look, and then it said, from the United States of America. I was like, well that’s… But then also I see that, and then further down it said, Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. And I was like, wow.
And then, now, when I looked at it, I have some other ones. I have also the Cato Institute wrote an amicus. And so did the National Police Accountability Project as well. The Electronic Freedom Foundation. So, I’m pretty humbled. Yeah, I’m pretty humbled.
Taya Graham: Now, you are making case law. And I noticed the DOJ cited Turner versus Lieutenant Driver, which is the case law that Batoussai affected. What do you think this says to the detractors of auditors and Cop Watchers?
Abade: Well, first I have to say kudos to Philip Turner for standing up and being one of the first Cop Watchers to actually make case law on this issue in his area, in his circuit. It is a big deal because we talk about Mr. Turner a lot, especially when it first happened. When I saw that, that’s when I said, you know, I think I’m going to put that on my bucket list. I’d like to be able to make case law and have my last name always mentioned for the cause of freedom. And I never thought that it would ever happen. And here we are.
Taya Graham: Do you feel like this is a vindication for you and other Cop Watchers? That it gives credence to your work and shows that it actually has value for the community?
Abade: Fuck yeah! No, I know you’ll need to edit that out, but yeah. I do have to say that it does feel good, a little bit, because we try so hard here and we really live what we do here. We’re dedicated. None of this would’ve happened, by the way, if it wouldn’t have been for my friend Eric Brandt. He’s the one that helped me co-write that. And it feels good to see that people are making a change, and it is making a change. And it is good to see that people are actually taking it all the way to the end. Because that’s the key. The key is to be able to take it all the way to the end, right? Not everyone can do that.
Taya Graham: Now, I think we need to make a factual correction to the record when it comes to the notion of qualified immunity. That’s because if you look at the data Stephen cited and the argument before the 10th circuit court of appeals, it raises the question if the label qualified immunity is simply a misnomer. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call this legal precedent run amok something more apt. How about qualified impunity?
What do I mean? It is a point we’ve discussed quite often on the show but bears repeating, which is you cannot have two systems of justice, one for the cops and one for the rest of us, and expect good results. And that’s exactly what qualified immunity, or qualified impunity, represents.
But it doesn’t end with civil liability. Consider the recent case in our own backyard involving a former Baltimore County police officer. The officer, Anthony Westerman, was recently convicted of two counts of rape and several counts of sexual assault. The crimes occurred over period of three years, when Westerman was accused and found guilty of offering to take a woman home in an Uber and then raping her. He was later charged with a second rape of a woman who came forward after the first charges were announced.
But what happened after the case made its way to court is, I think, illustrative of the two-tiered system of justice we conjured in our construction of an American police state. Initially, the officer asked for a judge trial, a choice available to defendants in Maryland that has become a favorite go-to for cops for obvious reasons. Even so, the judge initially convicted him on all counts. But when it came to sentencing, the judge reversed his ruling, noting that the second victim did not present any evidence of psychological harm due to Westerman’s actions.
So, what happened? For a crime that would normally require a 10 to 15 year sentence, the judge threw the proverbial book at the former officer consigning him to four years of home detention. Seriously. But it gets worse. Prior to the sentencing, because the judge said he did not intend to convict Westerman on the second count, he consolidated both cases before sentencing him, therefore giving him the ability to mete out a punishment that was, to say, the least lenient.
Now, the reason I’m counting the sentencing of Westerman is to make a simple point. As we have reported over and over again on this show, when the law is applied to us it is interpreted in the strictest sense possible. And when the law is applied to cops the opposite is true. In other words there are simply two sets of laws in this country, one for cops and one for citizens. And in the case of Westerman, as this proves, only the most extreme cases of bad cops are subject to the same rendering of law as us.
And almost never, in any case we’ve ever investigated, is the law applied with the same empathy as we see in Westerman’s case to the people who police purport to serve. What does this mean and why is this so important? Well, I think it speaks to the notion that policing is, by design, anti-democratic. In other words the institution, as it becomes more powerful, evolves into a force more and more antithetical to the existence of democracy itself. I mean, what we have seen in the plethora of reports on police overreach on our show alone is a literally armed branch of shadow military often operating outside the law and not accountable to it.
As that institution grows in influence, it warps the system that sustains it. Hence, we see cases like Westerman’s. Now, I will concede that there have been recent examples of cops going to jail for committing crimes. In our own city, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has charged dozens of cops with crimes and many have resulted in significant sentences. And of course we have national examples like Derrick Chauvin, who was recently convicted and sentenced for the murder of George Floyd.
But you can’t assess an institution on the basis of the exceptions. And certainly those cases appear to be just that. What we see day in and day out on our show is case after case and bad arrest after bad arrest slowly chipping away at our freedoms, our Constitutional rights, and the idea that the legal system is about protecting the innocent first and jailing the guilty second. And this proliferation of badge-induced power is not just limited to bad cases and bad arrests. In a sense, I think it has a more profound effect on both our civic imagination and our collective sense of communal possibility.
What do I mean? Well, it was something that struck me when I drove around Baltimore reporting on poverty and violence here. As many of you probably already know, wide swaths of my city are filled with abandoned row homes and deserted blocks, communities that were once thriving and now have been all but consigned to desolation. What made me consider this visual evidence of societal neglect is how much the city bet its future on policing and how that philosophy prompted a very destructive strategy presaged by my point about the corrosive power of unmitigated law enforcement.
That’s because during the aughts the city engaged in a strategy known as zero tolerance, a policy that led to almost 100,000 arrests in a city with roughly 600,000 people. That is roughly one in six people arrested, ripped away from their families, their homes, and their jobs. Now, setting aside for the moment the havoc that it wreaked on our city, which we are still dealing with today, I want to address the philosophy the idea was based on as an example of what I mean about the perils of empowering law enforcement above and beyond all other forms of governance.
The idea of zero tolerance was based upon an article on broken windows theory written by sociologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelly. The pair asserted that a community which allowed petty crime to proliferate was like a building in disrepair, a representation of failed government and communal malaise. The duo proposed a solution to this decline was to arrest people for petty crimes, and thus fix the broken windows as a means to discourage more serious crimes. And unfortunately it was an idea that was embraced by law enforcement agencies with gusto, leading to the horrible consequences I described before.
But the reason I bring this up today is because something struck me about that idea that I just think seems odd. Because as I drive around Baltimore, I wonder why no one ever thought of actually applying the metaphor of their idea literally. What do I mean?
Well, if broken windows represent disrepair, why didn’t the city fix them? If a building in disrepair symbolically represents neglect and engenders crime, why not repair it? I mean, the city of Baltimore has spent billions and billions on policing. What if instead we had spent it on fixing the broken sidewalks and dilapidated buildings? Wouldn’t we be better off? I mean, what if we’d spent it on parks and better athletic facilities? What if we simply spent it on making sure that our schools were the best in the world? Would things really be worse? I doubt it. And guess what? Fixing up a city actually reduces crime. I’m not even kidding.
A study in Philadelphia by the National Institute of Health found that clearing, mowing, and planting on vacant lots reduced gun violence in the surrounding neighborhoods by up to 30%. I’m serious. Just making a slight effort to beautify the city actually had a greater impact on reducing violence than police.
And that’s the point about the anti-democratic tendencies of an ever-expanding law enforcement-industrial complex. All that money poured into cops and police pensions and militarized equipment is money that isn’t spent on building a stronger community. All the assets allocated towards empowering people with guns and badges and paying judges that coddle them does nothing for the infrastructure of democracy. I mean, we can’t protect the health of our democracy if we don’t invest in its most important institutions. Or put simply, do we want to educate and enlighten, or simply punish? Do we want to beautify and build, or incarcerate?
I’m asking because, driving around my city, all I see is the collective madness of a community willing to fund generous overtime but not fix a freaking sidewalk that has turned into a sinkhole. Which is why we will continue not to just hold police accountable, but also try to evince the less obvious consequences of not doing so at all. I think it’s clear that our freedom, our collective imagination, and our future are all at risk.
I want to thank Abade, also known as LibertyfreakTV, for sharing with us the wonderful news about his lawsuit. Please keep us updated, and thank you so much for sharing the good news. And of course, I want to thank intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, his research ,and his editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And a very special thank you to our Patreons. We appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter and Facebook.
And please like and comment. I do read your comments and appreciate them. And every like and comment helps our videos. And we do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So if you feel inspired, please consider donating. My name is Taya Graham, and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please, be safe out there.
In 2014, at the age of 15, Prakash Churaman was arrested at his home at 6AM without a warrant. After driving him around for a few hours, police brought Churaman to the 113th Precinct and, as Churaman and his attorney maintain, coerced a confession out of him for a crime he did not commit. As reported in the Queens Daily Eagle, “Prosecutors say Churaman was one of the gunmen in a robbery gone wrong when Churaman, alongside two others, allegedly broke into his friend’s home and ended up fatally shooting [Taquane] Clark and injuring one other. An elderly woman who lived in the home during the robbery later told police that she recognized Churaman’s voice and identified him as one of the suspects. Her testimony, which is at the crux of the prosecution’s case, has been called into question by Churaman’s attorney.” Even after the court overturned Churaman’s conviction, he is still fighting to clear his name and is now facing a second trial after declining to take a plea deal.
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Eddie Conway talks with Churaman and his attorney Jose Nieves about how the criminal justice system railroads juveniles into false confessions, and about the ongoing fight to get all charges against Churaman dropped.
Eddie Conway:Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Recently, we have been looking at Rikers Island and the conditions up there. One case caught our attention, that’s the case of Prakash Churaman. And so today, joining me is Prakash Churaman and his lawyer Jose Nieves. Thanks for joining me.
Jose Nieves: Thank you for having us. Prakash is very happy to be here, and so am I. And we hope that this will be a productive discussion.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Let’s start with what happened, Prakash? How did you wind up in this predicament?
Prakash Churaman: NYPD came to my home, to my residence, at the age of 15, four days after an alleged crime took place two blocks away from where I lived at that time. And due to the fact that an elderly woman made claims that she recognized my voice, that gave NYPD probable cause to “apprehend me” and take me into custody. That was four days after this alleged crime took place. At approximately 6:00 AM in the morning I was apprehended in my basement apartment. I was living with my mother at the time in Jamaica, Queens. I think it was literally like –
Jose Nieves: I think it’s important to also make note that at 15 years old, you have detectives knocking on this young man’s door, 6:00 AM in the morning. They don’t know what’s going on. His mother is shocked by the entry of these police officers in their home. And they grabbed him. They put him in a van for over three hours and then they brought him to the precinct and began an interrogation that lasted multiple hours. I mean, it was an extended interrogation of a 15-year-old who had just woken up, thrown in the back of a van, driven around. And when his mother got there she was told mistruths, half truths, just outright misinformation. And they were using that to try to get her to manipulate him.
So just think about that if you have children at home, a 15-year-old under those extreme circumstances, what could possibly happen. And unfortunately in this case after many, many hours of interrogation, Mr. Churaman had made some incriminating statements. But even statements that he did make were not a full admission to any type of criminal activity whatsoever. But unfortunately after the long interrogation he did make some statements. And this is a case that really highlights how juveniles are really railroaded by the criminal justice system. And he had to spend six years in jail before I took the case and was able to get him released on bail and assigned to home confinement. It happens all the time. It’s very sad. And it really cries out for attention to how we’re dealing with our young people in this criminal justice system.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. In fact, I see in the exoneration of a lot of people, and thousands of people are exonerated every year in this country, every year at least 2000 or more are exonerated. And the statistics show that probably almost a quarter of them are confessions that’s been forced or intimidated by the police department, particularly on juveniles. How did you feel at that time when they were interrogating you?
Prakash Churaman: I honestly felt trapped. Prior to being brought in that small interrogation room I was handcuffed to a metal bar in the precinct for about two hours waiting for my mother to arrive at the precinct. And I honestly as soon as I entered the interrogation room itself, I felt like the walls were literally getting closer and closer and closer to me. Especially as the interrogation with these two NYPD detectives, who also, in fact, have prior misconduct within their own departmental policies and within the NYPD. Like I said, I felt intimidated. I felt pressured. And I literally was broken down mentally, physically, until I literally said whatever they wanted to hear.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. I understand they even encouraged your mother to encourage you to cooperate without her really having all the facts and circumstances. When was it you decided to reach out to your lawyer, Jose, and try to rectify this?
Jose Nieves: Marshall, on that point that they used the mother as a leverage in the interrogation, it’s not even our own perspectives that they improperly used his mother in the interrogation. The Second Department Appellate Division, which is the higher court in this case that overturned Mr. Churaman’s first conviction, basically put in writing in their opinion that the use of his mother in the interrogation was improper and possibly lead to a false confession. Now, this is something that they do on a regular basis. This is just routine protocol for the NYPD, unfortunately, when they have a young man in their grasp. We’ve seen it with the Central Park Five case where they just bear down. And if you would see the video of this interrogation, you would see two grown men yelling and cursing at this 15-year-old child, even with his mother present. And they’re saying things that they know are not true, and they’re just pressuring and pressuring and pressuring.
And the mother is just completely confused as to what’s going on. And she, as we all do, we want to believe the police, we want to believe that the police officers are doing their jobs and doing the right thing. But in this case, they were just truly, truly bearing down on this young man and just shooting him with misinformation, and his mother. And that’s one of the things that we really need to look at in this criminal justice system where those lies and untruths create a false confession. Especially when you have a vulnerable population like juveniles where under normal circumstances, completely un-pressured circumstances, that they tend to be misled or misstate things that they know are not true. But when you bear down on them like these two detectives did in that interrogation he had no chance. He had no chance. They were going to get him to say whatever they wanted him to say and his mother was just going to go along for the ride because she had no idea what was going on.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. And that’s equally true, not as much, but equally true of older people that’ve been in contact. A lot of times, they just actually force confessions to make a deal, or plea to this, plea to that, and we’ll give you less time. 90% of the convictions, in fact, are some sort of plea deals anyway. I probably got those figures wrong, but it’s close. But how did you survive Rikers Island at 15? That in itself is a crime, from 15 to 21 to put you in an environment like that. How did you survive that?
Prakash Churaman: Well, to be honest with you, when I was initially arrested, I was 15 so I was taken to a secure juvenile detention facility by the name of Crossroads which is located in Brooklyn. I was held there for about a year and a half. And a month after I turned 17 I was then transferred to Rikers Island. So when I got to Rikers Island, it was in July of 2016. I was there from 2016 in July all the way until January of 2019. My first trial was done in November of 2018. I was sentenced to nine years to life on Dec. 11 of 2018. I immediately appealed my conviction. My conviction was overturned on appeal and the new trial was ordered on June 24 of 2020. So within that remaining time I was then transferred to a maximum security prison from January 2019 and held up there in a prison for a whole nother year and a half just awaiting a decision on my appeal. Once I got the decision on my appeal –
Jose Nieves: It can’t be understated, the amount of violence Mr. Churaman has witnessed. I’d speak to him several times, I’ve had him evaluated and spoken to by a psychiatrist, and the trauma, just the mental trauma that he’s endured for six years, not only at Crossroads but at Rikers, at the maximum security detention facility in the state, it’s incredible that he’s able to come out of that and just be able to speak and be articulate as he is because the amount of violence and stress that was put on him. I’m amazed that he’s even able to undergo this interview.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m very aware of that kind of trauma. I understand you had started organizing for your release though. You were organizing people outside to support your case. Talk a little bit about that.
Prakash Churaman: Yeah. So after my conviction was overturned I was then remanded back to Rikers Island, and I was transferred from state prison back to Rikers on July 1 of 2020, last year. So within that time frame, a plea bargain had presented itself by the DA’s office which I immediately rejected. I said, I’m not taking no deal whatsoever. So my attorney at that time withdrew from my case and that’s how Mr. Nieves was assigned to my case. But within that time frame, that was basically from July of last year leading up to January of this year, I literally picked up this book called Connections. And within this book there are organizations that assist formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated individuals.
So I just started going through the pages and I just started calling up different organizations. Most of them were just grassroots-led organizations within the NYC community. And then I just also started networking with other individuals that I was incarcerated with that’s involved with other orgs that I necessarily didn’t know about. Needless to say, if it hadn’t been for my networking and connecting while I was back on Rikers Island, I could have probably still been sitting in a Rikers Island cell right now waiting for a new trial. But by the grace of God, you know.
Jose Nieves: It’s important to note that the reason why he’s released is two reasons. One is that I, again, went back to the Second Department Appellate Division. I asked them to set bail because the original, the presiding court, had remanded him. He couldn’t get out no matter how much money you had. But the Second Department disagreed and they set bail. But it was his support network that raised the money that allowed him to actually make the bail that he made and be released. Many of my clients don’t have the benefit of that support network that can help them raise money to pay for bail. Unfortunately so many people, especially young people, are just sitting in jail simply because they’re too poor to buy their way out. And one of the reasons that I, and it can’t be understated, one of the reasons that I took this case is because Mr. Churaman turned down the deal that they offered him after they overturned his conviction.
They literally gave him the keys to the cell, and they said, just plead guilty and we’ll let you go. You’ll have a conviction. It really reminded me of Kalief Browder and how he refused, no matter what the DA offered, no matter how they claimed they were going to give him a deal to plead guilty, because he was innocent and he refused to take that plea. And that is exactly what Mr. Churaman did. He refused to take that plea which gained my interest in his case and is one of the reasons why I accepted the case for assignment was because this is a young man who’s fighting for his life. And he’s not accepting the system’s force and coercion. He’s innocent, and he’s going to prove, and he’s going to stand trial. He’s going to fight for his life.
Eddie Conway: Okay. It’s the DA, the new DA, that was supposed to be creating an integrity unit to look at cases like this, Jose, and I hope you don’t mind me calling you Jose –
Jose Nieves: Go right ahead. Go right ahead.
Eddie Conway: Okay. What happened with that unit? Because it looked like they did not do their due diligence in this particular case, because I understand there’s no forensic evidence, no DNA, no eye witnesses, nothing to connect your client to this case other than an ear witness. Which is shocking to me, because a 74-year-old ear… I need hearing aids myself. I mean, I wouldn’t trust a 74-year-old saying that they heard this or they heard that clearly to recognize a voice. So what’s with the DA and what can be done about that?
Jose Nieves: I’ve been in contact with the head of that unit. And the policy is they don’t look at pending cases, which is sad because what you’re basically saying is, even if there’s a case that’s at question, that really draws concern in the community, we’re not going to look at it because we have convicted the individual accused of a crime. How many people have to be wrongfully convicted before the DA’s office looks at a case seriously and says, you know what, this is wrong. We shouldn’t wait until a conviction happens and then look at it afterwards. We should look at cases right from the start all the way through to the end, even after conviction, and make sure we got it right. Because that’s what people think is happening, but that’s not what’s happening in the criminal justice system.
And it’s sad because the policy doesn’t make any sense to me. Because you have a clearly… You said it was an ear witness. The only thing that connects him is an ear witness that testified four times. And every time she takes the stand she says something different. And it’s incredible to me that the DA’s office doesn’t take that into account, that their witness keeps changing the circumstances of how she can identify the people in this crime. And it’s like they ignore the reality of it and they’re just going forward. Almost damn the evidence, we’re going to go forward. And it’s sad to see that because, you know, I was a prosecutor for many years as well. And I was always taught that we were ministers of justice as a prosecutor.
And if you’re truly a minister of justice, then you should be looking at what your case is and are you doing the right thing? And really looking hard at the evidence and saying, this the evidence that we have and can it really meet the burden of proof? Which is beyond a reasonable doubt of 12 people agreeing on that burden. And I don’t think that’s going to be the case in this case. And I think that they’re not going to be able to meet their burden. So I’m looking forward to the trial.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Speaking of trial, that’s due to come up in a few months? Is that right?
Jose Nieves: No, it’s not going to come up in January, next court date’s in January. So what the judge did, he granted the prosecutor the opportunity to have Mr. Churaman evaluated by a forensic psychiatrist. And now they have to pick their forensic psychiatrist and then they also have to have him evaluated, Mr. Churaman evaluated, for that purpose. So it’s not going to happen in January, might happen in February or March, but we’ve been waiting over a year. I mean, when I got involved with this case it was late November of 2020. And the delay that the prosecutor has engaged in to see how they can make their case. Maybe circumstances will change. And there’s been no change in circumstances. The evidence is what it is. It’s not going to get better with time. And I don’t believe that the DA’s office is going to meet their burden. So I’m looking forward to trying this case in April or March of next year.
Eddie Conway: Okay. I understand that there’s a lot of public support. There’s been rallies, newspaper articles. What can the public do to make sure that this doesn’t happen to the next juvenile? I mean, it needs to be checked right here because it could be my 15-year-old grandson. It could be anybody. What can the public do to focus some attention on this?
Jose Nieves: Well this case, and every other juvenile case, should be of great concern to the public. And one of the things that they can do as the public is vote in DAs that are progressive. They are going to look at these cases in the right way and hold them to account. If a candidate comes out and says they’re going to support, raise the age, and they’re going to make sure juveniles are given opportunities, a second chance in life, and they’re going to hard look at the evidence in cases that involve juveniles, and they don’t do that, then you have to hold them accountable in the ballot box.
And that’s so important. Other than just keeping Prakash Churaman’s name out there, his story, keeping it alive, keeping it in the public sphere, because he should not be persecuted the way he’s been persecuted by this DA’s office in the dark courtrooms of Queens County Supreme Court. I think we need to bring to light the facts of his case and make sure everybody knows what the DA’s office is doing in this case.
Eddie Conway: Mmm, okay. And I think it’s important too, because earlier it was mentioned that initially he had been sentenced to nine years to life. That doesn’t mean he can go home in nine years. That means he might end up doing 29 years or 39 years of his life. And so it’s important to know that those numbers give a false sense of leniency when actually they could keep you in prison until you die.
Churaman, do you have any final words, anything you want to say to the public?
Prakash Churaman: I want society to know that we have rights, especially in situations like mine where I didn’t have the knowledge, the experience. I never had any prior experience with law enforcement prior to this, nor did my mother. So that also enhanced the situation at hand. Like I said I just want society to know that we have rights, and especially when you’re in police custody and about to be questioned. You have the right to invoke your Fifth Amendment Constitutional right against self incrimination. You know what I mean? And people need to know that. People need to teach their children, their grandchildren. Because it’s sad that law enforcement can sit there and lie to you in your eyes, lie to you, spoon feed you information just to solicit a false coerced confession out of a 15-year-old child, a child.
I’m going to continue fighting. And one of my main goals is to push that lawmakers make sure that police deception on youth in particular is abolished. It needs to be abolished immediately. But yeah, and I ask folks to just continue signing and sharing my petition on change.org. I also have a GoFundMe where I’m trying to just continue to raise funds to maintain stable housing so I could stay out on house arrest versus being in the Rikers Island cell. So that’s another thing I’m asking the public and society to just share if they can and just support me in any way possible, honestly.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Jose, you get the final word then.
Jose Nieves: What I would say to the public at large, especially the public that look like us, the Brown and Black citizens of the City of New York is to talk to your children and tell them, don’t talk to the police. It’s sad to say, but too many times this happens where kids are brought into the precincts and they’re coerced into making incriminating statements or saying things that are not even true. It’s come to a point where I have to advise anybody I can, anybody who would listen, don’t talk to the police. Parents, do not give permission for the police to talk to your children. How many individuals do we have to see, kids, who we have to see wrongfully convicted before we start saying, you know what? We just can’t trust the law enforcement dealing fairly with our children.
And it’s sad, it hurts. Because I have a child, and again, I was in law enforcement for many years myself, and I know there are good cops out there. I know there’s good law enforcement officials out there, but there are too many that are willing to skirt the lines of fairness and skirt the lines of what’s right and what’s wrong and just get to something that they think is right. And the means do not justify the ends when you’re dealing with kids. When you’re dealing with kids you really have to look at what you’re doing and how you’re treating them and whether you’re really coercing them into saying something that’s just not true, that they don’t agree with, it’s not part of what they are.
Jose Nieves: So unfortunately, my advice to the city and to minorities in the city is, don’t talk to the police. And if they try to talk to you, get an attorney, invoke your right. Say, I want an attorney. Don’t even ask them, do I get an attorney? I want an attorney. And that’s the only thing you should be saying to the police.
Prakash Churaman: Given the color of my skin and the fact that people of color don’t hardly ever even see a second chance when you’re battling against the criminal justice system here in New York, I now have a second chance at life to fight, to prove my innocence. So I just want to emphasize that this upcoming trial, it will be the trial of my life.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Thank both of y’all for joining me. I hope this will be instrumental, instructing other young people so that they won’t get caught up in this web, in these kinds of traps. So thank you.
Prakash Churaman: Thank you very much, Marshall. And thank you everyone from The Real News Network, shout out to The Real News Network team for making this happen. I’m very appreciative. Thank you.
Jose Nieves: Thank you for having us.
Eddie Conway: All right. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.
As police reform efforts stall across the country, the case of an Arizona man who was dragged from his car by cops during a routine traffic stop is revealing. In this episode, the Police Accountability Report investigates the incident and exposes flaws in the system of police accountability in Arizona that reveal just how difficult it is to create effective systems of police oversight.
Transcript
Taya Graham:Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today we’re going to do so by reporting on breaking developments in a story we have been investigating for months. It involves an Arizona State Highway Patrol officer accusing a motorist of a crime he didn’t commit and then ordering him to risk his life for no apparent reason. But we’re not just going to be discussing what happened on this disturbing video. We will also be giving you, our viewers, a peek behind the curtains on how police respond after we publish a report and what they do to justify their actions when their overreach is called into question.
But before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, and please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore or Facebook or Twitter. And we have a special thank you shout out to our patrons at the end of this episode. And if you would like to be one, just hit the Patreon donate link pinned in the comments below. All right, now we’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, for those of you who watch our show, you might already be familiar with the segment of our program when we perform what we consider a basic function of journalism. That is, no matter how bizarre, odd, or seemingly corrupt the actions of a particular officer or department are, we always extend the courtesy of asking them for comment to tell their side of the story. Why? Well, as much as law enforcement does quite the opposite when they paint a victim of brutality or false arrest in the harshest light possible, we simply believe that the tenets of basic journalism are too important to cast aside regardless of a story. I mean, what’s the point of reporting on an institution like law enforcement if you behave exactly like them?
What I mean is you can’t hold an institution accountable if you are not accountable yourself. Therefore, whenever possible, we always reach out to cops and extend them the courtesy of giving them an opportunity to tell their side. Of course, keeping with their tradition of a maximum of institutional arrogance, cops and their spokespeople certainly don’t make it easy for us to follow through even when we try to adhere to the basic principles and ethics of journalism. In other words, regardless of how many times we reach out for comment, our efforts are usually met with silence. At least until we publish our report. But I’ll elaborate on that more later.
Now, one of the reasons I believe we encounter so many obstacles getting cops to talk is simply due to the fact that we are not by any measure members of the mainstream media. The Real News is of course an independent donor-funded enterprise. We don’t receive corporate dollars from the same elites who bolster the police and profit off of prisons. Which means that, generally speaking, when we ask for comment, getting an answer before we go on camera is dicey at best.
But thanks to you, our audience, that lack of response is not always the end of the story. In fact, because so many of our loyal viewers like you watch our show comment and otherwise respond to our work, police often change their tune once we post videos. So your views and comments matter. And tens of thousands of views later, it seems that cops suddenly feel the need to respond. Sometimes it’s just a phone call complaining about our coverage in general, or at the very least they issue a statement defending the actions of the officers. Which, I might add, often includes taking a not so subtle swipe at our journalism qualifications, or, simply put, our basic level of competence.
Take, for example, our story on an illegal entry into the private property of two brothers in Brenton, Texas. As you can see here on this video police claim the door was open, which they used to justify entering the premises guns drawn. Now, the video clearly contradicts that contention. And when he initially asked for a comment on that discrepancy, Stephen did not hear back. But oddly, after we published our report on what appeared to be at least police exaggerating what occurred, the video got nearly a hundred thousand views. And guess what? Police in Texas actually did respond. Of course, not only did they defend the officer’s actions, but they took the time to say that we were not qualified to judge their actions.
Let me read a little bit from the email the police sent to Stephen. “I know that you have likely never undergone professional police training or served as an officer, but this is appropriate under the circumstances. No warrants are necessary under these elements and the elements noted below.” So as you can see, police are not exactly eager to interact with independent media. Maybe that’s because we’re a little less enthralled with the rhetoric of law enforcement that is so tightly embraced by many of our mainstream media counterparts. And this brings me to the story that we are going to update you on today. It involves a viewer named Perry Taylor, an Arizona resident who contacted us after he was pulled over for allegedly drag racing on an Arizona highway. As you can see in the video, when Perry pushed back on the assertion he was driving recklessly an Arizona State Highway Patrol officer quickly escalated the encounter. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Trooper Lawrence: Hello, I’m Trooper Lawrence, Highway Patrol. And the reason I’m stopping you today is for your driving behavior.
Perry Taylor: My driving behavior?
Trooper Lawrence:Yeah.
Perry Taylor: I just let off the break. Can you explain?
Passenger: Yeah, can you explain?
Trooper Lawrence: You’re weaving in and out – What’s that?
Passenger: Can you explain?
Perry Taylor: [crosstalk] I’m weaving in and out? How am I not allowed to weave in and out, like I’m just changing lanes.
Passenger: He was just changing lanes.
Trooper Lawrence:Oh, yeah, just changing lanes?
Passenger: Yeah.
Perry Taylor: Yeah.
Trooper Lawrence:You’re not racing a white Camaro at all?
Passenger: No.
Perry Taylor: No. Can I not get around somebody to make it safe for myself?
Trooper Lawrence: Can you do what?
Perry Taylor: Can I not get around somebody to make it safe for myself? Can I not make distance between me and the guy beside me or next to me because I think maybe they’re driving a little aggressive. I’m just asking?
Trooper Lawrence: Oh, okay. So that – Is that how you want to play today? [crosstalk].
Perry Taylor: I’m just asking. I’m just asking.
Trooper Lawrence: No, is that how you want to play today?
Perry Taylor: Okay.
Trooper Lawrence:Because you’re talking a whole lot of attitude, so here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to go ahead and exit the vehicle.
Perry Taylor: No, I’m not.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham:And the officer was hardly done. As you can see here, he enlists another cop to point a taser at Mr. Perry. Then he proceeds to drag him out of the car onto the shoulder of the road, pretty much packed with oncoming traffic. Let’s look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Perry Taylor: I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe.
Police Officer 2: Get out of the car, sir.
Perry Taylor: Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.
Police Officer 2: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: Don’t touch me. I’m getting out. [crosstalk] Don’t touch me –
Police Officer 2: Put the phone down.
Perry Taylor: Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. You’re threatening my life right now –
Police Officer 2:Put the phone down.
Perry Taylor: – So get out of my face. Get out.
Police Officer 2: Put the phone down.
Perry Taylor: No, I’m not putting my phone down. No.
Police Officer 2: You can leave it recording right there.
Perry Taylor: I don’t care.
Police Officer 2: I’m trying to be-
Perry Taylor: No, you’re not.
Police Officer 2: Listen –
Perry Taylor: I asked you to give me the ticket.
Police Officer 2: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: Okay.
Police Officer 2: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: Let me get out of the car.
Police Officer 2: Get out of the car now.
Perry Taylor: Let me get out.
Police Officer 2: Get out.
Perry Taylor: Let me get out.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Mr. Taylor was charged with, wait for it, obstructing an investigation. But before we posted our first report on this alarming incident, Stephen reached out to the police and did not hear back, at least initially. But after the video debuted, some strange things started to happen. And to explain them, I will be talking to Mr. Perry in a moment. But, before we talk to him, I’m joined by reporting partner Stephen Janis who gives us the breakdown on how this all started. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Taya thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So first, tell us what you did when we initially reported on the story to get a response from the police. Who did you contact and what did you send them?
Stephen Janis: Well, I sent the email to the Arizona Department of Safety with which I believe is the umbrella organization for the Highway Patrol and I asked them some very specific questions about, did the officer have a use of force report? How did the officer justify the use of force? Was the use of force consistent with the department policy? And what they told me was you have to file a public information act request. It was very unusual because these are things that public relations and media relations specialists are supposed to be able to answer right off the bat.
Taya Graham: So they wanted you to file a public information act request to answer some pretty basic questions. What do you think’s going on here?
Stephen Janis: Well, that’s the question I had. It was weird. I said, do I really need to do this just to ask these basic questions? And then they never responded to me. So it was a very weird situation. I’ve had people not respond or send a response late, but never saying, hey, just to get basic information about an incident you have to file a public information act request. So it was very unusual. I think they were just stonewalling.
Taya Graham: Now behind the scenes, you had an inkling that police were more interested in this case than they expressed. And they had a pretty amusing indication of just how interested they were. Can you explain it?
Stephen Janis: So I sent them the video, the whole video of the incident, the whole thing so they could comment on it. And while they were stonewalling me and not talking about it, somebody was watching it. We were getting all these plays. It was in my VIMEO account so I could track geographically, and we’re getting all these plays in Arizona, like dozens and dozens of plays. So apparently the police department, because this link was created specifically for them, they were watching the video, all of them. Meanwhile, not telling me a thing about what was actually going on.
Taya Graham: And now to continue the story on how Arizona Public Safety officials got in contact with him and what they said to him when they did, I’m joined by Mr. Perry Taylor. Perry, thank you for joining us.
Perry Taylor: Thank you, guys, for having me back again.
Taya Graham: After our story aired you got a call from state investigators. What happened?
Perry Taylor: Yeah, so I got a phone call, I believe, I don’t remember the name on the letter. I think he’s a captain in the field. I think maybe the officer’s supervisor. And he said from what I remember from the voice conversation on the phone was that he said, yeah, I didn’t agree with how the officer handled the situation, but I also thought that you should have, didn’t agree with what you did as well. So I kind of felt like, again, you’re just not accepting full responsibility for what you guys did and you’re going to come out with the outcome you want to come out with no matter what. You got to make face with… I filed the complaint. You got to show something that you did to the guy but all I got back was that letter. So I’m just supposed to take their word that they did something to him.
Taya Graham: So you’re not getting any follow up on what disciplinary actions were taken.
Perry Taylor: So, yeah, that’s a good point. So I asked exactly that. I said something to the effect that, okay, so I got a piece of paper in the mail saying you did this, this, and that. And me or whoever else would’ve been involved is just supposed to accept that as you did something. I’ll never know for sure what you did or if he’s really been disciplined or reprimanded, and he’s just right back out on the streets terrorizing everybody else. So yeah, I did ask that question. And trust me, from what it sounds like you feel the same way I do. I don’t trust anything they say. I just know how it is.
Taya Graham: Kind of break down for us what was in that letter.
Perry Taylor: Well, what was in the letter from what I remember was that the officer… It sounded like they did mention both officers at first and then said that the Officer [Tropp] was counseled and was pretty much the end of it. It was like a little one paragraph letter saying that he got disciplined and that was it. Didn’t even mention the part like I told you where the cop also said, well, we felt you were at fault as well. So they wanted to make it sound like they did their part. Now, what do you want us to do?
Taya Graham: How would you characterize the attitude of the investigator? Because I’m not getting any sense of impartiality here.
Perry Taylor: Yeah. So, like I said, when he called I was kind of surprised that they even called even to follow up to be honest with you. But then again, as soon as he said, I don’t like the way Officer Tropp handled the situation and his partner, I felt like, okay, great. That’s nice to hear that. And then he came in with the, but I think you’re at fault as well. I don’t like the way you handled it. And I thought, see, and I said this to him. I said, this is exactly why we don’t trust you guys. You never admit when you’re wrong. You have to come in and put everyone else at fault. And just accept when you did something wrong. He overreacted, didn’t have anybody’s safety in mind at all including his own, and decided to put his ego above everything else.
And I just politely ended the conversation with him. I didn’t get his name at the time, the captain, so I called back to the original internal affairs officer. And he did some digging around for me and found out that’s who it was. And then they had sent a letter to my previous address. Again, this is how unorganized they are. They didn’t even ask for… Sometimes when the cops say, is this your current address? None of that stuff was ever asked of me. So they sent it to a previous address that was on my license, but not the updated one. So I had to wait to get that letter, so that letter was obviously dated November 4th. And here we are, it’s the 15th. So yeah, I should have had that letter a few days ago but I just got it today.
Taya Graham: So what do you think this says about police accountability and what lessons are you learning from this experience?
Perry Taylor: Again, it’s just nothing more than them just… It’s just smoke and mirrors. It’s just okay, you made the complaint. We’re going to satisfy you to shut you up. We’re going to show you that or tell you that we counseled this particular officer. Again, just having to take their word for it, I have no details of what happened. Again, I don’t even have any of their body cam footage now. Yes, I do have my attorney and I do want to see their body cam footage eventually. I have not accepted their… Well, I’ve accepted it but I haven’t paid for anything to set anything up technically, their little diversion program to kind of make this all go away. But again, it just gets underneath my skin that even if it was a penny out of my pocket to pay more to satisfy these people for what they did to me, it doesn’t sit well with me.
Taya Graham: What happened with the charges?
Perry Taylor: As far as I know, it’s called a delayed prosecution. So as long as I sign up for this, whatever, this counseling class with this third party counseling company that’s in cahoots with the state, all making money with each other off of people like us. As long as you complete that class then it just goes away as if you never got charged with anything. And it just goes away, nothing on your record from what I’m being told. And again, going back to my whole issue with this is I don’t care if it’s a penny, why am I paying anything out of my pocket for something you did? You should have a civil lawsuit against you right now for what you did to people, putting my life and your own life in danger. Are you ridiculous right now? It just blows my mind, I don’t even know how to respond to it, what all that just happened. I’ve watched that video so many times now just going back and thinking, oh my God, this guy, was it his first day? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Taya Graham: So do you think there’s any way to reform the police, given what you’ve experienced?
Perry Taylor: Somehow, some way, they need to stop prowling the streets looking for petty stuff and just combing the highway… I get the idea of it. Again, if he pulls me or someone else over thinking he saw what he thought he saw, and then after getting an explanation he should make sure everybody’s okay. Okay. Okay. Well then I guess I didn’t see what I thought I saw. I’m just making sure everybody’s okay. Have a great day. That would’ve been like, wow, you guys do represent what it says on the side of your vehicles. You’re making sure everybody’s safe, blah, blah, blah. No, it’s the whole us against them mentality. And to go out of your way to tell me to step out of the vehicle on the side of a busy highway and put everybody’s life in danger including his own, it just blew my mind.
It’s like, you’re not public safety at all. You’re a public danger. But anyway. Somehow stop these little patrol units. Like I said before, I’m an ex-firefighter. We don’t comb the streets looking for fires, looking for stuff, we respond. Medical calls, fires, stuff like that. It has to be the same way. I know they think they don’t have enough officers, they have way too many.
And the lawsuits, they cost all of us taxpayers. I know we don’t see it directly hit us but we do. Stop pulling people over, get rid of this patrol combining the streets for people rolling past the stop sign, you didn’t use your blinker, you made a wide turn, or you were like, they said to me, my driving behavior. You were changing in and out of lanes on the highway in an aggressive manner. My car’s in way better shape than yours, I guarantee it. So I’m not worried about it. But yeah, I think they should get rid of that stuff. And then for stuff like real crime. They got a call, there’s a robbery in progress. There’s a shooting, like these mass shootings we hear about every day. That stuff, respond to that stuff. Stop combing the streets looking for revenue, pissing people off. And you see what happens.
Taya Graham: Now, this story illustrates several truisms about American policing that I think are worth emphasizing. And I’m not just talking about the difficulties and obstacles of basic police reform in light of what we reported on in Mr. Taylor’s case. No, this series of events speaks to an even deeper malaise within the law enforcement-industrial complex that needs to be examined more closely to be fully understood. Consider a story about the Washington, DC, police union that all is a revealing example of what I’m talking about. It is an almost comical take of how law enforcement perceives a responsibility to adhere to the law and how often they evade it with little or no consequences.
It’s a tale about a police-sponsored organization called the Jack Daniel’s Committee. I’m not kidding. A fundraising arm of the Washington DC police lodge, or more specifically, the union that represents cops who serve in our nation’s capital. The committee was formed in 2017 to purchase Jack Daniel’s whiskey by the case and print the union’s logo on the bottles and sell them online. It turned out to be a wildly successful enterprise with cops selling tens of thousands of dollars of alcohol online, pardon the pun, at jacked up prices.
But there was a catch. A slight hiccup so to speak in this otherwise profitable fundraising scheme that, as I already said, reveals much about how the police think the law applies to them. That’s because it turns out the cops were selling the liquor without a license, and that is illegal. But fortunately, the officers enforcing DC’s law didn’t let the law get in the way of a good time. In fact, as the Washington Post reported, a paralegal who worked with the group asked the same question and was rebuffed by the leadership as they hauled nearly half a million dollars.
It was only after the group commissioned a study three years and 3000 bottles later that they figured out selling liquor across state lines without a permit was illegal. In fact, the entire idea that a whiskey bootlegging operation was a fundraising operation was also a fraud. Turns out an audit of the entire enterprise found that almost all of the nearly half a million dollars raised, nearly all of it was spent on travel expenses. Seriously. But of course, one would expect given that this is an organization of law enforcement officers, the discovery of a scheme which flagrantly violated the law would lead to consequences. I mean, how on earth can a group run by cops not be accountable to the laws they enforce? Well it turns out, no need to worry for the liquor-touting law enforcement officers. That’s because despite the fact that the selling of alcohol without a license is clearly illegal, prosecutors in DC investigated and declined to press charges. Another probe of the sales by the DC Liquor Board is currently underway, but that too has yet to yield any results.
I think the point here, though, can be best understood by what the head of the union, a police officer himself, argued to the Washington Post when they published this article on the liquor sales scheme. The union had said there was no way, and let me make this clear, no way they would’ve sold Jack Daniel’s if they knew it was illegal. In other words, they just didn’t know the law and therefore are not responsible for their illegal actions. Wow. That is a twist. I’m sure that if you or I or anyone else who doesn’t wear a badge made this sort of plea, it would fall on the collectively deaf ears of the cops, courts, and prosecutors who love to hold us accountable to the strictest interpretation of the law.
I’m sure if one of us started selling whiskey out of our basement across the country online and then told investigators we didn’t know it was illegal, we would be forgiven for our transgressions and patted on the back with a reminder not to do it again. And that’s the point of bringing up this story and the conundrum of events by this tale of a police union turned bootlegger. It’s also the reason we decided to revisit the case of our viewer Perry Taylor. Both illustrate, as I said before, the inherent ironies and challenges of holding police accountable. How can we ensure that people who enforce the law are also subject to it? How can we create a system where people who wear a badge do not exist in a rarefied space where the laws which apply to us don’t apply to them. It’s a vexing dilemma that has no easy answers.
And it’s one of the tougher policy questions that legislators and activists have been struggling with across the country as they try to reform an institution that considers itself to be almost always immune to the rules that govern the rest of us. But maybe, and this is just a thought, we’re approaching this dilemma the wrong way. And maybe, I’m just throwing this out there, we need an entirely fresh approach. Maybe what we should do is simply balance the scales of justice in a way that reflects the reality of how it functions or doesn’t today. What do I mean? Well, maybe we should apply the same standards of leniency to us. Maybe we should have qualified immunity just like they do. Maybe we should be given the benefit of the doubt that even if we committed a crime, we didn’t mean to. Why not apply the same compassion and empathy showered on cops to us?
I mean, why not? Aren’t we deserving of the same consideration as people who are actually paid with our tax dollars? Why can’t the people who fund the police have the same beneficial perks as the cops who work for us? Why can’t we all be afforded the same sense of compassion and empathy given to our so-called public servants? Seems fair, doesn’t it, to have the law apply equally to everyone? Of course, that’s not how it works. And as we discussed before on this show, that type of leniency would be bad for business. But still, I think it’s worth a shot. After all, equal treatment under the law is one of the defining principles of our Constitution. Let’s just give it a try, maybe it will reveal something about just how corrupt a system is that affords special privileges to people who have the right, well, scratch that, the undue privilege to take the lives and the freedom of others. Maybe we’ll discover that a legal system that carves out privileges for a special class of enforcers is not a justice system at all.
I want to thank our guest Perry Taylor for keeping us updated on this process. Thank you, Perry. And of course, I want to thank intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And a very special thanks to our patrons. We appreciate you. As a matter of fact, I want to thank all of our patrons, including: Rhyme P, Mark W, Noli Dee, Kyle R, Guy B, Shane B, Calvin M, Steven D, Allen J, Trey P, Julius Geezer, Jemesh H, John P, Ryan, Lacey R, Rod B, Douglas P, Andrea J, R B M H, Siggy Young, Steven J, Celeste DS, P T, Talia B, Peter J, Joel Armstrong, Tim R, Larry L, Ronald H, Tamara A, Artemis LA, Tumble Bug, Don T, Jimmy T, and True Tube Live.
And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us privately and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course, you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter and Facebook.
And please like and comment, I do read your comments and appreciate them. And we do have the Patreon link pinned in the comments below, so if you feel inspired to donate, please do. We don’t run ads or take corporate dollars, so anything you can spare is greatly appreciated. My name is Taya Graham and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Dec. 1, 2021. It is shared here with permission.
US Sen. Patrick Leahy has become the most senior US government official to support the release of American Indian Movement militant Leonard Peltier, who supporters say was framed and falsely convicted of murdering two federal agents during a 1975 reservation shootout.
HuffPostreported Tuesday that Leahy (D-Vt)—the Senate’s president pro tempore who will retire after this term as the chamber’s longest-serving member—responded affirmatively when the outlet asked if it was time to free Peltier.
Peltier, now 77 years old, admits to having participated in the June 26, 1975, gunfight at the Oglala Sioux Reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, but denies killing Federal Bureau of Investigation agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams.
NEW: Patrick Leahy, the longtime former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman + longest-serving sitting U.S. senator, says it's time for Native American activist Leonard Peltier to go home after 44 years in prison. https://t.co/jrNBVJ6uS6
From the time Canada granted a fraudulent US extradition request for Peltier in 1976, his case has been marred by improprieties.
Senior HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery writes:
Peltier has been in prison for 44 years for a crime he says he didn’t commit. His trial was riddled with misconduct. Prosecutors hid key evidence. The FBI threatened and coerced witnesses into lying. A juror admitted she was biased against Peltier’s race on the second day of the trial but was allowed to stay on anyway.
There was never proof that he killed two FBI agents in a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. But the FBI needed someone to take the fall. It had just lost two agents, and Peltier’s co-defendants were all acquitted on grounds of self-defense. His trial was also happening as the FBI was trying to suppress the activities of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a grassroots group of activists focused on drawing attention to federal treaty rights violations, discrimination, and police brutality targeting Native Americans.
AIM activist Joe Stuntz Killsright was also killed at Pine Ridge when a US Bureau of Indian Affairs agent sniper shot him in the head after Coler and Williams were killed. Stuntz’ death has never been investigated.
Peltier was found guilty and given two consecutive life sentences. Now in poor health, he is often referred to as America’s longest-incarcerated political prisoner. Hundreds of thousands of people—including the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, and Nelson Mandela—and numerous advocacy groups have called for his release over the years.
Dear @POTUS@JoeBiden, please release this man. This is another injustice in a long line of injustices brought down on our Native Family here in the USA. https://t.co/X6fmIrUee3
Both the Canadian solicitor-general at the time of Peltier’s extradition and the US federal prosecutor who helped convict him have also pleaded for his freedom.
“I write today from a position rare for a former prosecutor: to beseech you to commute the sentence of a man who I helped put behind bars,” former US Attorney James Reynolds wrote to President Joe Biden earlier this year. “With time, and the benefit of hindsight, I have realized that the prosecution and continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is unjust. We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”
Successive presidential administrations have declined to free Peltier, although he and his advocates are hopeful that could change under President Joe Biden. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland—the first Native American Cabinet secretary—advocated for Peltier’s release due to the Covid-19 pandemic while she was serving in the House of Representatives last year.
In an action update in October, Amnesty International USA said Biden “must grant Leonard Peltier clemency on humanitarian grounds and as a matter of justice.”
“I still hold out hope that I can make it home to Turtle Mountain while I can still walk out under my own power,” Peltier wrote in a statement last week. “I remain grateful for the gift of life.”
According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, even though they have doubts about its administration, fairness, and usefulness as a crime deterrent, most Americans today still support the death penalty. Moreover, while it may seem like a brutal relic of a bygone era, capital punishment is still legal in 24 states, for the federal government, and for the military. As John Gramlich writes, “while state-level executions have decreased” in recent decades, “the federal government put more prisoners to death under President Donald Trump than at any point since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.”
Sister Helen Prejean has spent much of her life as a Catholic nun bearing witness to the violent inhumanity of state executions and campaigning to abolish the death penalty. Her work has been recognized around the world, including by the Pope, and has been instrumental in advancing national dialogue on capital punishment and in shaping the Catholic Church’s vigorous opposition to all executions. She is also the author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States,The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, and River of Fire: On Becoming an Activist. In this special episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway sits down to speak with Sister Prejean about the barbarous injustice of state-sanctioned executions and her own path to becoming a leading advocate for death penalty abolition.
After spending nearly half a century in prison, leftist revolutionaries and political prisoners David Gilbert and Russell Maroon Shoatz (who also spent 22 years in solitary confinement) were released earlier this year. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, about the historic occasion of Gilbert and Shoatz’s release and the reasons for their imprisonment. Conway and Hopkins are both former Black Panthers and longtime political prisoners who engaged in radical organizing and education programs while locked up. While reflecting on the historical climate in which they, Gilbert, Shoatz, and a generation of radicals were killed or imprisoned in the 1960s and ‘70s, Hopkins and Conway also offer advice to today’s social justice activists on the imperatives of community organizing and the continuing threat posed by the draconian apparatus of state repression.
Eddie Conway:Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Recently, two political prisoners have been released: David Gilbert and Russell Maroon Shoatz have served decades in the American prison system. So joining me today to give us an update on their situation and who they were is Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, who also was a former political prisoner. Charles, thanks for joining me.
Mansa Musa: Thanks for having me, Ed.
Eddie Conway: Okay, Mansa, could you just talk a little bit about each one of those political prisoners first? You can start with whichever one you want.
Mansa Musa: Right. Thank you. First of all I want to acknowledge that this is a good and a great opportunity for us to finally see some political prisoners released alive and not have to write their obituary and attend their funeral. Even though in the case of Maroon, he was released, which I’ll start with. He was released, what they call compassion leave. But the concept of compassion leave coming out of prison is that you’re going to die. They’re not going to release you unless they emphatically know that you are going to die. I researched this for a guy when I was in my own prison system, on compassion leave and that’s what it said. It said that the diagnosis is that the person that’s being released is going to die.
Now, in the case of Maroon, Maroon was a former Black Panther and a member of the Black Liberation Army back in the 60s and 70s. And during that period he was involved with the party in Philadelphia, primarily, and on the East Coast. But during that period, we’re talking about Philadelphia, we’re talking about Rizzo, and we’re talking about an all-out assault on the Black community, bar none. We’re talking about a police force that literally looked like the gestapo during that time. And anybody that was poor, oppressed, and Black in particular, they were being preyed on, they were being killed, and Rizzo took pride in that.
Maroon had the mindset to become involved in the political activities that were going on in the Philadelphia community at that time and on the East Coast. By becoming involved with the Black Panther Party during that era it became apparent that he was going to be marked for death. And ultimately he wound up in prison because of, allegedly, an assault on the police station in Philadelphia.
So to say that somebody would attack the police station in Philadelphia is like saying somebody would attack the White House in the United States. But being that’s said, he was locked up and given a life sentence. And then given the life sentence, he served 50 years. But more importantly, he served the majority of that time in solitary confinement for only one reason and only reason, one reason only: because of his political consciousness. And the fact he was organizing the prison population throughout the Philadelphia to become more self sufficient in terms of advocating for just laws around life without parole, just laws in terms of what we see a lot of things going on now, just laws in terms of how they look at juveniles and the mindset of juveniles that commit crimes when they committed them. He was actively organizing and around these things when they had put him in solitary confinement in an attempt to silence his voice, which as we can see wasn’t successful. I’ll get into that a little later on.
Gilbert on other hand was involved with a group called The Weathermen, and it was really a multiethnic group. But back in the 60s most people associated it with being white radicals, but really it was a multiethnic group of radicals, of people that had a perspective that armed struggle was necessary in order to reverse some of the oppressive things that was taking place in America during that time. Mainly it was the police. Police during that time were like an occupying force. During that period, not only we had the Puerto Rican National, we had [inaudible]. They had taken over the capital, and they took it over in the manner to try to establish that they won independence for Puerto Rico. They didn’t go down there and march on under the orders of the president and attack it. They went down there with understanding, just to make a political statement that Puerto Rico should have their independence.
The Weathermen was also in that same regard, was making political statements and making armed struggle statements, or making impact statements, on assaulting industries and industrial complexes or industrial businesses to establish that capitalism and the fact that capitalism and imperialism was responsible for a lot of the oppression that was taking place in the poor and oppressed community. So both of them were released. Gilbert was involved in what they called a Revolutionary Task Force, and this was a group that got together to try raising monies to get political prisons out and/or to support any type of armed struggle that was taking place in the United States or anywhere in the world.
He was the driver in what had to be a foiled attempt on an armored car, and he was given an exorbitant sentence of 75 years, and Mayor Cuomo, Governor Cuomo, commuted his sentence, and the people were incensed at this. But the reality was that they didn’t do no more than what had been done to people throughout this history, in this country, as we well see. They didn’t storm the Capitol. They didn’t shoot Ronald Reagan with an infatuation with Jodi foster. They took and exercised their political right to armed struggle.
Eddie Conway: Okay. First place, I know you said Russell Shoatz was held for 50 years. How long was David Gilbert held for, and why were they held so long? Did they have support committees? Did they have community support? Why has all these decades then passed?
Mansa Musa: I think David, and you can correct me, I think David was held for like 48 year. He would be held for a significant, we looking at half a century in any case, we looking at half a century of both them being held. They had political support and they mobilized a political base in terms of educating the people about their case and the fact they were being held so long. But because of their political ideology and the threat that they represented in terms of their ideology in terms of what they were doing in the prison, when they were taking and educating other prisoners about the right to self determination, the right to equal justice, the right to equality of life. When they start educating other prisoners and helping those prisoners start looking at themselves in that same light and start saying, okay, yeah. I’m not here because I committed a crime. I’m here because a crime is being committed against me because I’m poor, I’m oppressed, and it’s by design. So therefore I’m here because of that, and now I have a right to challenge this.
When they started educating the population, and when they started getting the community involved in terms of the lawyers, radical lawyers, and have them become involved and start filing litigation and bringing to the attention of the criminal injustice system, of the injustices that were taking place. That’s why they were being held so long, because the impact they were having on changing the mindset of not only the prison, but society at large. And that’s really why they were ultimately released.
Shoatz has been released. As I said, this is criminal, because you knew that his health was being debilitated by virtue of him being in solitary confinement. You knew that this was premeditated. You knew that if you continue leave him in this state that he ultimately was going to die, just like they’re ultimately hoping that Mumia Abu-Jamal would die. Case the same thing, a misdiagnosis, or ignoring the medical conditions of a person to where it gets to the point where it becomes so fatal that all you can do then is just say, well, hey, give him some whatever to hold him off until he dies. In the case of Shoatz –
Eddie Conway: Okay, Mansa, tell me this then, that was like the ‘60s and the early ‘70s. Why do you think they chose to engage in armed warfare or armed struggle? What was going on in the world at that time?
Mansa Musa: Internationally we had a prairie fire of revolutionary activities taking place throughout the world. On an international level, we had all of Africa in an armed struggle from the north to the south. We had Vietnam, we had Vietnam that was taking place. We had it, in Latin America we had most countries in Latin America, in South America, were waging some form of armed struggle because of the growth of imperialism and the onslaught of imperialism and capitalism on these countries.
In America, because of the things that were taking place on an international level, the society or people at large started protesting the war in Vietnam. We had the Civil Rights Movement. That was here. We also had the protests against the war in Vietnam. And more importantly, we had the birth and the growth of the Black Panther Party that was taking and starting to educate people around the right to self defense. Because in order to contain the population in the United States from protesting against the war in Vietnam and the social, economic, and political condition that we found ourselves in, we had the police becoming more and more repressive in terms of responding to those things that they felt, or that the system felt, was necessary to suppress.
So that’s what we had during that time. During that period, with this kind of revolutionary upheaval, with this kind of international struggles taking place, we had an international perspective that was being developed in this country. We had African Liberation Day. So when you had African Liberation Day, people were being educated about Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Southwest Africa, our struggles that were taking place in there. We seen that Tanzania had gained their liberation. We had seen on the heels of Patrice Lumumba being assassinated. So we seen first hand that armed struggle was taking place worldwide, and the response from radicals and militants and revolutionaries in this country was to find their place in that movement.
Eddie Conway: Okay. And I would add too, since both you and I lived through this period, I would also add COINTELPRO and the repression that the American government, through the FBI program, unleashed on liberation movements, Black militant movements, and Black and white radical organizers. That led to the death of a number of people and the repression… And Fred Hampton obviously is certainly a great example of those extra-judicial murders that the United States government engaged in.
But there were so many other subtle kinds of things. They tried to get Stokely Carmichael assassinated. They made several attempts to assassinate all our key leaders, and they assassinated a lot of the civil right leaders, including Martin Luther King. So there was a sense, like you say, of massive police repression and a sense that there would need to be a fight back.
Well, tell me this. With this new round of protests after George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement and whatnot, there’s been a number, hundreds of people have been locked up from these rebellions across the country. They are now getting time, they’re political prisoners. Is there something that organizers today can learn from the cases like David Gilbert and Russell Shoatz, and the amount of time they spent and how those cases were managed? Can the organizers today learn something from those cases? Do you have any idea on that?
Mansa Musa: Yeah. I think that what they really need to recognize, one, is that the threat is real and that this is a continuum of what you just espoused. And digressing that, we have, as you well know, in the party’s headquarters they had all the fallen pictures of all the fallen comrades they had killed and assassinated because of this onslaught of police. This is like repackaging the COINTELPRO. This is COINTELPRO 2021 in terms of identifying potential leaders, Black Lives Matter, co-opting them, identifying potential threats within these movements, and locking them up. So we need to do, and what we need to learn from, is that we know that if you protest, if you come out and protest against anything that’s going on in this country, that this is the result. Repression is going to be the result.
So therefore we have to be in a position to be educated on our response, and our response has to be there. We have to dial down terms of organizing in the community. We have to get the community more involved in terms of the activities that we’re involved in. It’s not a matter of going down to Black Lives Matter Boulevard and protesting. It’s a matter of going into Black Lives Matter communities and organizing the people to understand that they have certain rights. They have certain inalienable rights.
Organizing around those things so that we don’t have to worry about having to make a massive protest down Black Lives Matter Boulevard, we got community control. We got control over the community. We got control over the police. We got control over all those things, those resources that these so-called local governments are responsible for. Giving housing, adequate housing, education, and medical [care]. Because in the long and short of it, Eddie, it’s because of the social conditions that people are responding.
So we need to become more focused on and take a page out of the Black Panther Party in terms of creating programs, what we call survival programs, but creating programs that are directly related to educating the people about the need to become more involved in controlling their own destiny. And by that, I mean controlling what goes on in their community. I just read, and I’ll cut on this point, I just read they had seven shootings in D.C. last night. Two of them fatal. This is like a continuation of what’s going on throughout this country in the Black community, it’s internal violence that Francis [inaudible] spoke about.
Eddie Conway: Okay. All right. So you yourself was a political prisoner. You came into the jail, you were young, you joined a Black Panther Party affiliate chapter in the prison that we had set up. And of course you’ve been treated like a political prisoner for… How many years did you spend in prison and what was it like?
Mansa Musa: Well, I spent 48 years in prison and it was hell. I couldn’t describe it another kind of way. The only reason why I survived was because of the choice I made to join this revolutionary collective that you spoke of, the inter-communal survival collective, that you had helped organize. That was the only reason why I survived prison. Because once I got in prison – And prison at that time was just starting to take a shift in terms of younger people being locked up. So they had the onslaught on younger people in the community during that time, and drugs were prevalent during that time. So in order for me to survive, because I had a life sentence [inaudible] I had to change my way of thinking and this allowed me… When I joined this collective it gave me a dialectical method of thinking.
It gave me a way to look at conditions and analyze and understand, and how to understand with the understanding of how to influence and change them. So because of this, I was able to go forward in terms of raising prisoners’ consciousness. I did like Shoatz. I ain’t do as much time in solitary confinement as he did, but I did at the end of my prison sentence, I did four and a half years within what they call a supermax. So I recognize that mechanism that they use. But what it allowed me to do at the end, it allowed me to be able to have clarity of thought and be able to keep a focus on, maintain a certain attitude about, my role in the struggle, and my involvement, and the necessity to maintain some type of presence in the struggle for our people’s liberation.
Eddie Conway: Okay. So it’s good that we can celebrate the release of Russell Shoatz and the release of David Gilbert, but there’s Sundiata Acoli, there’s a ton, it’s still a dozen political prisoners or more. And now of course there’s a new round of political prisoners with these last protests. What can people do individually or collectively to help gain the freedom of these political prisoners or prisoners of war?
Mansa Musa: That’s a good point because I remember that after Martin Luther King back in the 70s, we had made a call to take the problem of prison to the United Nations and to put the United States on blast about the fact that they were using… that we are political prisoners, we’re prisoners of war. That they’re using our right to protest and criminalizing it in order to give us these long lengths of time. I think what we need to look at, and people need to look at in general, is that the prison-industrial complex, mass incarceration, is something that’s being used to control and contain people. More importantly, it’s being used to prop up rural America. When you look at rural America, it’s where most of the prisons are, in there. So this is where you have your new plantation.
People need to recognize that they need to start getting organized around, on one level, on a political level, in terms of holding legislators responsible for the monies that they’re allocating to prop up these rural counties by putting these prisons in. We need to organize. People need to get organized around understanding that what we call political prison… They criminalizing, that’s why both Shoatz and Gilbert stayed locked up so long, was because they criminalized their activity as opposed to making it what it was, a political activity, and they have a right.
Case in point, Eddie, the guy, one of the people that stormed the Capitol in Washington, he was over at D.C. jail and he had got cancer. And he told the judge, he protested. When he protested, they responded to him. And as a result responded to him, the federal courts came in and sanctioned D.C. jail, moved all the federal prisoners that were being held in D.C. jail to Louisburg. They took the dude that protested, that was Trump’s ally, they took and sent him home on home detention.
So because he took a position and he had the support of a right wing group, he was able to get the full power of his rights. But everybody else was sent to Louisburg because of the abuse of the DC jail. So we need to really be able to take a position, or we need to take a position like that. We need to take a position and hold politicians and everybody accountable for people that they’re saying that are criminals, that are political. They committed a crime. They committed an act. They were charged with an act.
We know COINTELPRO had a lot to do with a lot of things going on with this. So we need to get people to recognize and get involved with contacting these networks that these groups, these people are involved with and supporting them even in the form of finance or feet on the ground.
Eddie Conway: Okay. All right. So thank you for that overview and I hope to see you again in future programs.
Mansa Musa: Yeah. Eddie, I was telling a person about Rattling The Bars and where it came from. I remember when we were locked up, we were on south ring, and to get the guard’s attention when somebody was sick, we would bang on the doors and rattle the bars to get their attention, and we were calling for people. This is what we need to do now. We need to rattle the bar. We need to shake these bars and get people to recognize that it’s a social injustice taking place in society, and you all need to get involved. We need to get your attention to get involved with our struggle.
Eddie Conway: And that’s actually the purpose of this program. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.
Traffic stops lead to fraught encounters with American law enforcement, which is why this stop between a LA County Sheriff and a local cop watcher is so illustrative of the power of turning the camera around on police. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, we break down what happened and explore how the techniques used by cop watchers can actually prevent police from making questionable arrests.
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we’re going to start today by showing a video of a police encounter after a Los Angeles man was pulled over for a red light infraction. But how this story unfolds is so unusual and so outside the norm for police behavior, we’re going to break it down in detail, and why we think it might be an indicator of how cop watchers are more important than ever.
But before I get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com and we might be able to investigate for you. And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook and Twitter, and please like, share, and comment on our videos. It really does help us. And if you can, hit the Patreon donate button pinned in the comment below, because we do have some special goodies for our PAR family. Okay, now we’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, if there is one maxim that has been repeated by all cop watchers we have interviewed on our show, it is a rule that can be expressed in three simple words: record, record, record. It’s a concept that reporting has certainly confirmed can be quite effective at documenting police overreach. Unfortunately for some of the people who have used it, the end result has been a little less encouraging. Meaning, even when cops are caught on camera, they usually don’t have a problem executing a brutal and sometimes even shocking arrest. Let’s remember this scene when First Amendment auditor, David Bourne, was filming police at an accident in Texas. Even though he was clearly exercising his First Amendment rights, cops didn’t have a problem arresting him for reasons that still remain unclear. Let’s watch.
David Bourne: I think it was personal. They wanted to retaliate against me. I think for a good portion of it, Rockwell PD behaves for the most part. They’re not near as bad as Dallas or Fort Worth or Baltimore or some of the bigger cities, but they still have bad cops in their department.
Taya Graham: That’s why when we first watched the video made by Los Angeles resident Tracy McKinley, known as Sip CanSeeAHigherPower, we were blown away to say the least. Not because cops pulled the man over as seen here for a fairly minor reason and then escalated the encounter, that is standard fare for American policing. No, it’s what happened after McKinley turned the tables on the police and then documented the stop with his camera, which led to one of the most unusual police engagements we’ve seen in quite some time. The story started last month when McKinley was driving in Los Angeles with his family, when a Los Angeles county sheriff pulled him over for allegedly running a red light. But the car stop quickly took a strange twist as he decided, not just to record the police, but also, for a lack of a better term, take charge of the situation. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer: Sir, can I please see your driver’s license?
Tracy McKinley: One second.
Police Officer: Sir, can I please see your driver’s license?
Tracy McKinley: Getting out the driver’s license? That’s it. So she won’t being all extra for nothing. You know what I’m talking about? It doesn’t even have to be all this aggressive type shit. Oh, this a ticket, it doesn’t mean to have to be that frustrated. [crosstalk] I’m grown, I can do what I do.
Police Officer: I’m coming to you professionally.
Tracy McKinley: You don’t tell me what the fuck to do, lady, you’re knocking on my window. You’re knocking on my window, you’re pissing me off by [tapping] doing some shit like that.
Police Officer: I can’t see in the back of your window.
Tracy McKinley: You can see paint.
Passenger: [inaudible] we’ll be going to jail.
Police Officer: I can’t see what’s back there.
Tracy McKinley: So, what?
Police Officer: What do you mean, so what?
Tracy McKinley: You can’t see back there.
Police Officer: We can’t.
Tracy McKinley: So? That’s what I’m talking about.
Police Officer:That’s why I asked you to roll down your window.
Tracy McKinley: Ain’t nobody don’t mean no harm.
Police Officer: Can I see your driver’s license?
Tracy McKinley: There you go.
Police Officer: Presented to me in my hands, please.
Tracy McKinley: No, I’m not presenting you shit, I’m going to display it to you. Anything else you need?
Police Officer: Do you have insurance?
Tracy McKinley: Yes, I do.
Police Officer: Let me get your insurance card and your registration please.
Tracy McKinley: Write the ticket. Go ahead. I ain’t giving you shit. I can display it to you. If you got a problem with it, let me know.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, not only does McKinley tell police he’s not going to get out of the vehicle, but he actually declines another routine order in a way that practically turns comical. Watch what happens when the sheriff tries to take his license, and let’s listen to him explain what he was thinking when he prevented the officer from grabbing it.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Tracy McKinley: [laughs] Don’t scare me like that. You just fucking scared me. [crosstalk] So? Don’t do… [laughs] Stop, man.
Police Officer: Sir, stop reaching for stuff.
Tracy McKinley: I’m trying to get you that motherfucking license. Fuck out of here, lady.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But that’s not where this story ends. Because as we’ve seen in other cases, police begin what we’re going to call their standard escalation tactics. Or put simply, ordering him to step out of the vehicle. Usually is a prelude to arrest, but McKinley was not having it. Not at all. In fact, as the officer orders him out of the car, he simply refuses. Let’s take a look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Tracy McKinley: It’s not fake, it’s not fake.
Police Officer: I don’t know that if you don’t present it to me.
Tracy McKinley: Hey, this lady says my driver license is fake. Stop knocking on my motherfucking window. All right. I’ll step out. Thank you.
Police Officer: Unlock the door.
Tracy McKinley: Hey, back up some.
Police Officer: No.
Tracy McKinley: I ain’t getting out then.
Police Officer: Okay.
Tracy McKinley: Hey, she won’t let me get her my license.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: And so, as you can see, that’s when things turn truly bizarre, at least in the parlance of American law enforcement. That is, instead of dragging him from the car, something unusual happens. It seems like McKinley is a cop watcher and he somewhat has the officer off balance. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Tracy McKinley: I displayed my license to her. I displayed it to her. Was she… Listen, listen to me, listen to me right quick.
Police Sergeant: Right now you’re giving us a hard time.
Tracy McKinley: Of course.
Police Sergeant: And what’s going to happen is you are obstructing our dudes.
Tracy McKinley: Obstruction is physical, repeat that.
Police Sergeant: You don’t know.
Tracy McKinley: Yes I do. I’m telling you it’s physical when you obstruct.
Passenger: [Baby crying] Tracy.
Tracy McKinley: Fuck out of here.
Police Officer: Hand it to my Sergeant.
Tracy McKinley: I ain’t giving it to him.
Police Officer: Hand it to my Sergeant.
Police Sergeant: Give it to me. Just give it to me.
Tracy McKinley: Y’all just pulled the gun out on me.
Police Sergeant: I can’t read that.
Tracy McKinley: Yes, you can.
Police Sergeant: I cannot read that.
Tracy McKinley: I’m sorry. You can, I don’t got to ask you no shit like that, nigga. What the fuck wrong with you?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: So what exactly is going on here? Are we seeing the first law of Cop Watching: record, record, record, actually succeeding? Did the tactic of putting the officer on camera from the start turn the often skewed tables on the sheriff, looking for the arrest at? And was the legal maneuvering of McKinley more than the police could handle? Well, we reached out to him to ask him just those questions and what he was thinking when it happened. But before we get to our interview, I’m joined by reporting partner, Stephen Janis, who has been examining the video. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Thanks for having me, Taya. Appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So Stephen, for serious, a really interesting interaction where Tracy presents his ID, but does not actually hand it to the officer. What’s your take?
Stephen Janis: Well, it’s a really interesting interpretation of the law. What it shows is the law is sort of something that is language, right? So law can be interpreted, it can be sort of bent, or not necessarily bent, but interpreted in a way that could be favored to one party or another. And I think he is demonstrating that there, that you have your perspective on the law. What about if the law was actually fashioned with regards to the people who are subject to it? And I think that’s what makes this a very interesting form of pushback against the police.
Taya Graham: This is something we’ve seen with cop watchers, this detailed knowledge of the law. Why is this so important?
Stephen Janis: Well, because really these issues, these broader issues about police power and the ability of police to interfere in our lives or otherwise ignore our constitutional rights are played out in the courts, ultimately, that’s where they end up. I mean, the case law is important because case law is used as precedent to decide other cases. So all these sort of decisions that guide whether or not a cop can stop you for some reason, whether or not you have to go through a checkpoint. All this is decided in court with judges and lawyers. And the fact that activists are taking this and fashioning into law that can help them I think is extremely important.
Taya Graham: Now, this case involves the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office, and we’ve encountered them before in other cases. What’s your take on the interaction between Tracy and the sheriffs in the video?
Stephen Janis: Well, let’s remember one of our biggest videos was covering the arrest of Daniel Alverez by Los Angeles County sheriffs where we caught them on cameras calling him a jerk. I won’t use the word they actually used. But nevertheless, they are notorious for being very aggressive. There’s been a lot of scandals in that department, a lot of questions about racial bias. And I think it’s very interesting that this story unfolded as it did, because this is a department that is known to be really, really aggressive. So I think this is a really unusual outcome and something worth talking about.
Taya Graham: And now, we are joined by the man who took this video to talk about what happened and his thoughts on police interactions. Tracy McKinney, also known as Sip CanSeeAHigherPower. Tracy, thank you for joining us.
Tracy McKinley: Thanks for having me.
Taya Graham: So first, Tell us why the police pulled you over. What are we seeing in this video?
Tracy McKinley: They pulled me over. Allegedly, I ran a red light. Allegedly.
Taya Graham: So you displayed your license and registration to the officer. Why didn’t you want to hand them your property?
Tracy McKinley: From what I understand, there are US codes that say you don’t have to hand over your license or paperwork like registration and insurance to them. That’s what I heard. I read it for myself and I saw a few videos on it. You know what I mean? About it. And so I did it myself. I would’ve given it to her, to be honest with you, Taya. I would’ve given it to her, but she just irritated me from the start.
Taya Graham: So what did she do that irritated you?
Tracy McKinley: The tapping on my car, she could have messed my paint up or accidentally bust my windshield. She didn’t know how hard – She was tapping real hard with her flashlight or whatever she had in her hand.
Taya Graham: And how many officers arrived on the scene?
Tracy McKinley: It was nine officers out there.
Taya Graham: Wow. Well, there are a few moments where this could have escalated badly. One moment in particular I noticed where the officer put his hand on the gun, and another when an officer starts implying you might receive child endangerment charges. Were you concerned about where this was headed?
Tracy McKinley: Yes, I was. I was concerned about it.
Taya Graham: I noticed before you were willing to interact with police, you made certain your camera was up and recording. How important was recording this for your safety?
Tracy McKinley: Police out in this country have been hurting a lot of people and I didn’t want to be one of the next hashtags.
Taya Graham: Now, some people might watch this interaction and say that you were antagonistic with the officers, that you should have handed your license over, and that you should have stepped out of the car. How would you respond to that?
Tracy McKinley: Bootlicker.
Taya Graham: Well, that’s an interesting characterization. I feel like maybe you had a reason or goal in mind when you interacted with the officer this way and were so specific about what your rights were in the situation. Did you have a goal in mind? Were you trying to educate the public, or were you trying to educate the police?
Tracy McKinley: Both, to educate the public and educate the police officer. A lot of sheriffs don’t know a lot of laws. They just go off mere emotions.
Taya Graham: I have to ask. There are so many who have been injured and even killed by police even while complying with orders; Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Michael Bell Jr., even Daniel Shaver. Did you consider those incidents of police brutality at any point? Were your cameras or your actions somewhat influenced by incidents of police misconduct?
Tracy McKinley: Yes, and also my own. I have incidents with them, and like I say, it’s all on the media about all their encounters with people.
Taya Graham: Tell me about the negative incidents with police officers that you had.
Tracy McKinley: I can say, a traffic stop I had, they pulled me over because – Actually I wasn’t even pulled over. Actually I was parked. I didn’t have my cameras or nothing on me at the time. They snatched me out there out of my truck and everything. For what? Because I’m parked there. If I’m illegally parked, just tell me to move. Why should I have to do all the extra and you touching on me and all that?
Taya Graham: Now, do you consider yourself part of the auditor or cop watcher movement?
Tracy McKinley: I’m definitely part of the cop watching movement.
Taya Graham: Well then who’s one of your favorite cop watchers?
Tracy McKinley: Tom Zebra. He tells the truth. He’s not ashamed about life and the truth. I love it. And I want to get out the truth too.
Taya Graham: Hey, I didn’t realize you’re with veteran cop watcher, Tom Zebra. Welcome back to PAR, Tom. So tell me, why do you think they pulled him over in the first place?
Tom Zebra: They didn’t pull him over to write him a ticket. They had no, they were pulling him over for one reason, it was to take him out of the car. That was the only interest they had. He cut them short. I just wanted to make sure that you know that, you probably already know that. Because that’s what I record them doing every day, every night. They’re not interested in that ticket. The only reason that ever came up is because they couldn’t get him out the car. They wanted to search him. They’re not interested in giving him a ticket. They want to take him to jail.
Taya Graham: Now, one of the reasons I wanted to feature this video on the show is because part of our job is not just to report on the state of policing now, but how it’s evolving. And most importantly, to take note and acknowledge what is driving the change we witness as it occurs. It’s an aspect of journalism that is just as important as documenting a specific case or incident, a responsibility to look at the larger trends to see if the cumulative effects of activists and cop watchers to affect change are actually affecting change, and if so, how? That’s why this case is so intriguing. As was revealed in our interview with Tracy, he had learned from the work of legendary cop watcher, Tom Zebra, and he had employed his knowledge of the law to push back against what Zebra described as a pretextual stop intended to lead to something more serious. Meaning this whole incident was not about running a red light.
And that’s why I think this case is so significant. That’s because the process of using the law to project power is usually the purview of police and high-priced lawyers. That is, as much as we think of law as a static set of guidelines of what we can and cannot do, it’s actually pretty malleable in the hands of a skilled practitioner or a power hungry cop.
Look at the controversial cop watcher Eric Brandt. Brandt was of course sentenced to 12 years in prison for making violent threats against judges, words which we do not condone, nor should anyone. But he has also been quite skilled at using the law to achieve goals that have elicited positive results. For instance, his first amendment lawsuit against the Aurora, Colorado, police over his arrest for a tattoo that said, ‘F the cops’, which led to a settlement for Brandt and First Amendment training for police. Or, his successful defense of handing out jury nullification flyers outside of a Denver courthouse that led to the Colorado Supreme Court codifying the right of others to do so.
Like the video we watched today, these victories are, in some sense, addressing an imbalance that has long been tilted towards law enforcement and the powers that be. Generally speaking, it’s the high-priced attorneys hired by rich elites that can bend and twist the law to their advantage. It’s why major corporations don’t have to pay taxes, or why someone like Jeffrey Epstein could run an underage brothel from the confines of his private jet.
Put frankly, a malleable disposition of the law has always been for sale. It’s just that the average American couldn’t afford to buy it. But now we have something different. Let’s just call it folk law or the people’s defense. And we see on the channels of cop watchers and auditors an acute awareness of how the law is a living, breathing body of ideas. We see what could be best described as folk law being applied so effectively, it actually appears to be setting a precedent that puts limits on how easily police can trample our constitutional rights.
Let’s not forget how our guests, the auditor and cop watcher The Battousai, made case law when he challenged an ordinance that said he could not record police facilities in Texas. A ruling which was enforced when he was detained by the police in Plano, Texas, for – wait for it – filming police headquarters there. The point is that I think that what we’ve seen in this story and in others is the people fighting back by refusing to concede the space that elites have often reserved solely for themselves by smartly using the law to push back against the limits of police power, and refusing to concede law enforcement’s sense of entitlement to bend it as they wish. We’re seeing a movement crystallizing around real change.
It’s good to protest and important to air grievances before the government, but what we see here is something different. The tools of the elites and their agents have been turned around on them and used in ways that really seem to catch them off guard. The law, which they tout as absolute for others and malleable for them, has suddenly become even more, interestingly, flexible, in the hands of the people. Isn’t it intriguing that the power of police suddenly seems less potent when confronted with even a cursory invocation of a technical interpretation of what the law actually means? Isn’t it fascinating how in the hands of the people, the law suddenly becomes a tool not just for the powerful, but a sort of equalizer for the rest of us?
I think that’s why the case we reported on today is both fascinating, and an example of a broader issue. It shows, for example, that in a sense, when faced with a camera, police are hesitant to abuse powers in ways that they’re accustomed to. It’s a reaction that begs the question; If what they do is so righteous and legal, then why not do it for all of us to see? If, without public scrutiny, you’re willing to drag a man out of his car and arrest him for running a red light, why on camera is your sense of entitlement and power so different and so less bold? And moreover, this everyman application of the law is the perfect antidote to a usually destructive form of policing we have discussed before on this show. The notion that the most potent form of police power is arbitrary. It’s an idea we’ve seen play out over and over again, where cops simply create their own laws and immediately improvise new powers on the spot.
In a sense, the whole point of using minor encounters over traffic lights and lane changes as an entry point is to invent, prescribe, and create powers that don’t exist and that our constitution doesn’t permit. Which is why covering cop watchers, who use those same laws to fight back, is such an important and intriguing development in the broader story of law enforcement overreach.
I mean, let’s think about it. If police were defined by an actual set of consistent laws, officers would have a hard time writing tickets for cash, making bogus arrests to fill jails, and using violence indiscriminately. If the ambiguity of the law exposed by cop watchers actually governs the bizarre series of car stops we’ve reported on, much of the police-created mayhem we’ve witnessed would’ve been much more difficult to justify. That’s why what we’ve seen in this car stop is so interesting and compelling. Confronted with the actual elements of the law, police power is not so absolute. And when forced to implement their arbitrary and improvised powers on camera for public scrutiny, their tactics and techniques suddenly seem less bold, to say the least.
The point is that for the first time in decades, the cover is being lifted on the underside of American law enforcement. The unconstitutional tactics and legal chaos of their stop and frisk mentality seems to be transformed when it is subject to public pushback and reverse surveillance. And most importantly, the law in its application is no longer the sole purview of the people who want to use the law as a cudgel of injustice and inequality. All thanks to cop watchers and activists across the country, we have covered and witnessed. It’s a sea change that might just be having an effect, which is why we will continue to report on these stories.
I want to thank my guest, Tracy, known as the cop watcher Sip CanSeeAHigherPower for his time and sharing his experience. Thank you, Tracy. And thanks to Tom Zebra as well. And of course, I have to thank intrepid journalist Stephen Janis for his writing, his research, his reporting on this piece. Thank you so much, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And of course I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And a shout out to the PAR family and Patreons. We appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course, you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook, and please like and comment. You know I read your comments and appreciate them, and I try to answer your questions whenever I can.
And we now have a Patreon account called Accountability Reports. So if you have a few dollars to spare, it would really help us keep doing these investigations for you. Investigations and reports the mainstream media simply won’t do. So, please check for a link pinned in the comments below. My name is Taya Graham and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
For years, prisoners, activists, and legal advocates have been drawing attention to the inhumane conditions at Rikers Island, New York’s most infamous jail complex. But the COVID-19 pandemic turned what was already a dire situation at Rikers into a full-blown humanitarian crisis. With cells grossly overcrowded, guards and medical staff largely absent, and an interior crumbling from disrepair, Rikers became a hotbed of contagion and needless death. What’s worse, as Judge Jonathan Lippman recently wrote in The New York Times, “90 percent of the human beings subjected to the appalling conditions at Rikers are there pretrial, many because they cannot afford bail. Almost 1,600 have been waiting for a trial for over a year. Almost 700 have been waiting for more than two.
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Olayemi Olurin about the ongoing crisis at Rikers and the renewed wave of outrage from the public and elected officials who are demanding that the jail be closed for good. Olurin is a public defender and staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society and an analyst at the Law & Crime Network.
On Nov. 2, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan made a stop in Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood to discuss a $1.3 million dollar investment in area businesses through the Maryland Strong Economic Recovery Initiative (SERI), which was designed to help local businesses cope with the financial impact of the pandemic.
Hours after Hogan’s visit, which included stops to Pete’s Grille, Peabody Heights Brewery, and Urban Reads Bookstore, the workers and owners were shocked to see that they’d been unknowingly conscripted into Hogan’s copaganda campaign. The term-limited governor with aspirations of holding national office used photos of him visiting these small businesses to suggest they supported his reactionary “refund the police” initiative.
Hours after Hogan’s visit, which included stops to Pete’s Grille, Peabody Heights Brewery, and Urban Reads Bookstore, the workers and owners were shocked to see that they’d been unknowingly conscripted into Hogan’s copaganda campaign.
“We never had a discussion with anything about ‘refund the police,’” Tia Hamilton, owner of Urban Reads, said of Hogan’s visit to her Greenmount Ave. bookstore and community space.
Hamilton, who also publishes State vs. Us magazine and is a vocal prison reformer and abolitionist, said Hogan’s visit lasted less than 10 minutes. But soon that casual visit became part of Hogan’s “refund the police” campaign thanks to a press release and Facebook post by the governor.
“The governor visited multiple small businesses, including Pete’s Grille, Peabody Heights Brewery, and Urban Reads Bookstore, in the Waverly neighborhood of Baltimore,” the press release read. “The Hogan administration has invested $1.3 million in the Waverly Main Street district, and the governor’s Refund The Police Initiative will make Neighborhood Safety Grants available to support hardware upgrades, lighting, cameras, and increased security services.”
As Battleground Baltimorereported, Hogan’s initiative is red meat for the right wing and squarely aimed at the burgeoning “defund the police” movement. And Hogan’s public claims that local police departments like Baltimore’s have been defunded are demonstrably untrue: Earlier this year, the Baltimore Police Department’s budget was increased by more than $20 million.
Soon after the visit, Hamilton found that customers and residents were questioning why she was supporting Hogan and “refund the police.” Hamilton eventually took to Urban Reads’ Instagram and the comments section of Hogan’s Facebook to make clear she did not support “refund the police.”
Hogan’s public claims that local police departments like Baltimore’s have been defunded are demonstrably untrue: Earlier this year, the Baltimore Police Department’s budget was increased by more than $20 million.
“He used us for [his] agenda,” Hamilton told Battleground Baltimore. “He misled the people, being underhanded, conniving, and selfish to the fact that this can hurt the businesses over here because you know damn well Baltimore City don’t give a damn about no ‘refund the police.’ We try to take money from the police and put it in education where it belongs.”
During Hogan’s visit, Hamilton said he discussed prison reform with her, including the next steps for Baltimore’s Civil War-era jail, which Hogan shuttered in 2015. Hamilton explained that she challenged him on the details of his plans.
“I basically checked him and his own visit,” Hamilton said. “He didn’t expect me to come at him rapid-fire with questions about prison reform.”
Hamilton remained cordial during the visit and tried to show the governor—who built his career on vilifying and cutting resources to Baltimore—a side of the city he’s never seen. Only after Hogan issued his misleading press release and social media posts did Hamilton see Hogan’s deception.
Last week, in fact, a woman entered Urban Reads after seeing Hogan’s Facebook post to personally confront Hamilton over “refund the police.” This prompted Hamilton to post her own 20-minute social media video to address the incident and set the record straight: She does not support “refund the police.”
“That video that I did live was important because I had a lot of people questioning my integrity because they know what I stand for,” she said.
Hamilton says Hogan’s visit and the ensuing backlash have distracted from her work fighting for reform of the criminal justice system, helping the formerly incarcerated find work, and freeing the wrongfully convicted.
“I’m responsible for over 30 [returning citizens] getting jobs this year,” Hamilton said. “[State Vs. Us] is responsible for three men coming home from prison due to the interview I gave them because they were wrongfully convicted.”
“[Hogan] misled the people, being underhanded, conniving, and selfish to the fact that this can hurt the businesses over here because you know damn well Baltimore City don’t give a damn about no ‘refund the police.’”
Tia Hamilton, owner of Urban Reads
A fourth person profiled in the magazine was able to receive clemency, Hamilton noted. She also reiterated just how frustrated she was with Hogan using local businesses like Urban Reads for political ends.
“We know he’s trying to run for president, but you don’t have to use the people,” Hamilton said. “Baltimore already don’t like or trust you. And you come and use us yet again? He’s a clown.”
In many of the photos Hogan circulated, he is seen walking through Peabody Heights Brewery. The brewery—which is about to celebrate its ninth anniversary—posted their own rebuttal to Hogan’s misleading social media post:
“We just wanted to make a small PSA. A few days Governor Hogan came to visit businesses and organizations apart of Waverly Main Street. This was supposed to be a simple meet and greet to discuss the SERI grants that were given to small businesses and Nonprofits throughout Main Streets. SERI grants were given to Main Streets to help with Covid Relief, as many of you know, we were shut down for 8 months during Covid and we still continue to struggle. These grants came at a very important time for us and we are incredibly Thankful to Waverly Main Street, Maryland’s department of Housing and Community Development and the Governors Office. That being said, we were excited to introduce ourselves and say thank you and show him around our small business. We told them about the history of our business and after 6 minutes and 30 pictures later, they were gone. Later those same pictures were used along with other Waverly Main Street Businesses to promote his plans of Refunding the police through new bills and grants. We do not support these measures and never have. We believe our work in the community shows that we have different values than our governor. We’re frustrated that our images have been used to push such [an] agenda.”
When Battleground Baltimore reached out to Hogan’s office for comment, the governor’s spokesperson Michael Ricci wrote, “it was a great visit.”
Ricci did not comment specifically on Urban Reads or Peabody Heights Brewery’s concerns and also provided Battleground Baltimore with the same statement provided to other local media: “The governor enjoyed his visit to the Waverly community and remains committed to strengthening the economic potential of Maryland’s main streets and neighborhoods.”
This week, PAR continues its coverage of the overt abuses of police power by examining new data that shows just how dangerous—and even deadly—systematic over-policing can be. PAR hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis break down several cases that show how police use pre-textual car stops to expand their power, challenge the constitutional rights of citizens, and expand the reach of the country’s law-enforcement-industrial complex.
Post Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today we’re going to achieve that goal by examining one of the biggest drivers of bad policing that simply does not get the attention it deserves: governmental greed, and how the need for cash is turning cops into variable bounty hunters. But, before I get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, and please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can please hit the Patreon donate link pinned in the comments below, we do have some extras for our PAR family.
Now, if there is one theme on this show that emerges time and time again, it’s just how much police love to make unnecessary traffic stops and profit from them. Through literally dozens of stories we have accounted how cops have pulled people over under dubious pretext and proceed to give them a ticket, or even arrest them without a real justification.
Don’t believe me? Well, consider just a few of our recent shows. There was Arizona driver Perry Taylor, who was pulled over for the mercurial crime of aggressive driving and was subsequently dragged from his car and charged with a crime. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker 1: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: I’m asking you to give me a ticket. I’m asking you.
Speaker 1: You’re not getting a ticket.
Perry Taylor: You’re trying to go for your arrest quota and I’m not going to allow it to happen.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car.
Speaker 2: No, don’t.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car, right now.
Speaker 2: Don’t. Don’t man.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car, right now.
Perry Taylor: For what? For what?
Speaker 1: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: For what? I don’t feel safe. You see this? I don’t feel safe. [crosstalk] I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car, sir.
Perry Taylor: Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: Don’t touch me. I’m getting out. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. You’re threatening my life right now. So get out of my face. Get out.
Speaker 1: Put the phone down.
Perry Taylor: No, I’m not putting my phone down. No.
Speaker 1: You can leave it recording right there.
Perry Taylor: I don’t care.
Speaker 1: I’m trying to be at [inaudible]
Perry Taylor: No, you’re not.
Speaker 1: Listen.
Perry Taylor: I asked you to give me the ticket.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: Okay.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: Let me get out of the car.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car. Get out.
Perry Taylor: Let me get out.
Speaker 1: Get out.
Perry Taylor: Let me get out.
Speaker 1: Get out of the car.
Perry Taylor: I’m asking [inaudible].
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Or, let’s not forget Georgia resident George Spradling, who drove a mile from his home to confirm that a police checkpoint had been established nearby, when police then followed him to his driveway and arrested him. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker 3: I have every legal right to put you under arrest.
George Spradling: Well, you just.
Speaker 3: We’re doing the road check.
George Spradling: Yeah. I heard you doing a road check. I heard you.
Speaker 3: Okay, you got your license with you?
George Spradling:I do have my license, it’s right here.
Speaker 3: Okay.
George Spradling: Hey Daniel, come here.
Speaker 4: I went down there because my neighbors complained that there was a roadblock on our street, so I went down to see what was going on.
Speaker 3: Okay.
George Spradling: They want to give me his license. I live right here.
Speaker 3: Okay. Might want to give me your license.
George Spradling:No, I did not [inaudible raised voices] [sound of open car door].
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Of course, we cannot ignore Daniel Alvarez, the Los Angeles, California, resident who is pulled over by a San Bernardino County Sheriff for driving too close to another car and issued a hefty ticket. Which, incidentally, was dropped when the officer didn’t show up in court. Let’s take a listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Passenger 1: No, you’re not going to violate my rights. I’m not going to do anything just because you think it’s right. No, I don’t owe you my ID.
Passenger 2:And next time.
Passenger 1: Tell me the law that says I got to give you my ID.
Speaker 6: I’m telling you to step out of the car.
Passenger 1: No, that’s not the law.
Speaker 6: It is a law.
Passenger 1: [crosstalk] No, I am not driving this vehicle.
Speaker 6: …Look it up on your phone right now. Look on your phone.
Passenger 1: No, I’m not going to look up the phone that – I am not driving the vehicle. I got nothing to show at this stop.
Daniel Alvarez: As him, as a passenger, as I’m being stopped for a traffic stop, he has to ID?
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Passenger 1: No, I do not.
Daniel Alvarez: Is that true?
Speaker 6: Can you tell me the law?
Passenger 2: Sir, we’re asking you a question, sir.
Speaker 6: You asking me a question?
Passenger 2: Yes.
Speaker 6: [inaudible]
Daniel Alvarez: But is that the law, that he has to ID himself?
Speaker 6: You can ask him the questions, it’s not my [inaudible].
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But the reason I bring up these troubling stories is because of some of the new data just released by the New York Times, which confirms what we have been reporting on about this phenomena all along. The Times examines car stops across the country because reporters wanted to understand why so many stops turned deadly. As part of their investigation, they found a whopping 400 stops resulted in police killing unarmed motorists who had been pulled over with a broken taillight, with tinted windows. But there’s more, because the Times reporters also had another question. Why, they asked, if car stops are so dangerous, do police pull over millions and millions of motorists every year? And one of the conclusions they reached points to a problem we have been reporting on this show for years: money.
That’s right. The Times found that across the country, department after department relied on cops to generate revenue. And in some cases, fines and fees for traffic stops accounted for more than half the entire budget of a town. In fact, the Times highlighted cities where police were actually given quotas for ticket writing and were disciplined or demoted if they did not meet them. And to get more on the problem and the data and what it means I’m joined by reporting partner Stephen Janis. Stephen, thank so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Tay, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So Stephen, first I want to explore one facet of the Times report that we have done some work on, and that is how many stops end with police violence. What did the Times find about why police are so quick to resort to violence, and what did our own reporting uncover?
Stephen Janis: Well, you know, hundreds of stops for taillights and, you know, license plates askew or whatever end up in people being dead. The police shooting or killing, in many cases, unarmed motorists, which is what the Times found, which is what we have reported on. And what’s really interesting is the reason, and it has to do with police training. We talked about this in the killology training and policing. Police are taught that motorists are deadly, that every car stop is potentially a deadly incident. It’s not true, but that’s what they’re taught. So, they tend to resort to force much faster. They tend to be trained to think that if a motorist makes a gesture, reaches for his or her wallet, that they’re reaching for a gun. And so therefore it’s the psychology of policing and the training of policing that makes it deadly. It makes car stops so deadly.
Taya Graham: So what were the findings in terms of how intimately police is tied to revenue? And how do those numbers relate to some of the reporting we’ve also done?
Stephen Janis: Well, for example, a city in Oklahoma collected about a million dollars of its budget from ticket revenue. But what’s really interesting is how this all is driven by the federal government. The federal government writes 600 million dollars in grants tied to writing traffic tickets. So, at least 20 states have quotas for officers in different municipalities. So basically, the federal government is creating this big revenue generator for towns, towns are turning around and making officers write more tickets. How it relates to our reporting is the fact that almost all the towns that have a large percentage of their budget from ticket revenues are under 30,000 people. And that’s what our reporting has found over and over again, that rural policing is overpolicing, and that rural police departments spend most of their time generating revenue. That’s what this report found, that’s what we reported on before, and that’s what’s happening.
Taya Graham: Now, just from a political and philosophical perspective, why would public safety have to also be a profit center? Why are those two seemingly disparate ideas so closely intertwined in this country?
Stephen Janis: I think because policing is so not focused on public safety in many instances. That policing is part of the capitalist ideology to kind of create a system of inequity that creates wealth for very few and leaves the rest of us behind. And part of that is the rhetorical power of policing. So, policing comes to intertwine with some of the worst aspects of capitalism. That’s why, philosophically speaking, policing in many cases is about projecting power and using that power to continue and to sustain a system of inequality.
Taya Graham: Okay. But before I let you go, I wanted you to update our viewers on a couple of stories we’ve been following.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. It’s really funny because people will make a comment, well, the police never talk to Stephen, but I always give them the courtesy of asking before we publish a story. But what’s really interesting is once we publish a story and it gets tens of thousands of views on YouTube, they start calling. For example, if you look at the case of Chris Dixon, the police chief from New Mexico called me and said his officer wasn’t the one who arrested Chris Dixon, it was actually the county sheriff. So, that’s actually true. But the police officer you see who’s talking to him is from the town, but I wanted to make that clarification.
And also, the Arizona State Highway Patrol called Perry Taylor – You might recall Mr. Taylor was pulled over and dragged from his car for supposedly drag racing – Well, they called him after our video was posted and said they were investigating the incident. But it’s really interesting. The internal affairs officer told Taylor, I think what the cop did was right. That just shows you the problem with policing, police can’t police themselves. But, believe me, the police get back to me. It’s just once the video comes out and they’re embarrassed that they call us. So, I just wanted to make that clear. They do call me back. It’s just after we get 50,000 views.
Taya Graham: Now, the aforementioned pension for profit and policing is not limited to traffic stops. And that’s not the only way crony capitalists compulsively corrupt a process that is supposed to be focused on public safety. Consider this story about efforts to legalize pot in Minnesota that got little attention, but says quite a bit about the real incentive behind American law enforcement. As the Minnesota legislature was exploring the impact of legalized marijuana, there was pushback from the union which represents police officers throughout the state, that caught our attention, but received very little coverage elsewhere. Their concerns? Legalizing pot would be bad for business. Literally for their cash flow. I’m not kidding. The union said that legalizing pot possession would actually be bad for both police budgets and the paychecks of their members. It would result in fewer bonuses and overtime for cops, and fewer bodies to fill local jails and high price prisons.
The bottom line is that the union was all but admitting that a major facet of law enforcement had literally nothing to do with public safety, but instead was a means to generate revenue. We have a name for this type of warping of a public process by fiscal concerns. It’s called neoliberalism. The idea that anything the government does, it will do better under the auspices of a for-profit ethos. In other words, nothing is worth doing for the community unless there’s a buck to be made. It’s an idea that is responsible for many of the miseries that the American public endures on a regular basis. It’s why our healthcare system is both unaffordable and often ineffective. It’s why young people are consigned to a lifetime of debt just to attend college. And it’s also, according to both our reporting and the New York Times, why rural police trawl the highways like bounty hunters searching out unsuspecting motorists to fleece them for cash and belongings all in the name, supposedly, of public safety.
And let’s remember the money collected through fines and fees doesn’t even include the nearly 2 billion dollars annually police sees under the auspices of civil asset forfeiture, which is this bizarre legal process that allows cops to take property of people never charged and often not even convicted of a crime. But this mess also raises another more intriguing question about the overarching impetus for our massive law enforcement-industrial complex, a fundamental question about how we decide what is legal and what is not. It’s a query we often ignore, but it is certainly worth considering now. What exactly is a crime? What I mean is if you consider how many infractions and supposed violations of the law result in monetary gains, then how do we trust a process that decides what is and isn’t illegal? What I mean is, have we ever considered that the underlying philosophy that defines what types of behavior we deem illegal might simply be corrupt?
I was thinking about this question when Stephen and I traveled to Denver, Colorado, to work on a longer piece about Eric Brant. Brant, as many of you know, was sentenced for 12 years in prison for allegedly making threatening statements about judges, a story we’ll shed more light on later. But what made me think of the concept of what is a crime was actually something a bit tangential, but still vital to explaining why I’m asking the question. While we were there in Denver, everywhere I went, I saw billboards, signs advertising not just soft drinks or fast food, but advertisements touting marijuana. Spread throughout the city were large messages enticing me to visit a local dispensary and buy any form of weed I could possibly want. Wall to wall entreaties to visit the nearest store and pick up joints or nice boxes of chocolates infused with THC.
Of course, this is hardly news. Colorado was one of the first states to legalize pot. But what made it so striking to me was the cognitive dissonance that surrounds this relatively new, and obviously thriving business. That’s because I come from a state that, while it has legalized medical marijuana, in 2010 spent $100 million, according to the ECLU, arresting and incarcerating people for the possession of it. In my city of Baltimore alone, police would make nearly 6,000 arrests annually for simple marijuana possession. How am I, and you, supposed to reconcile, that in the state of Colorado, I can walk into a dispensary and talk to a friendly budtender and pick from a wide selection of plants to enjoy, and in the relatively nearby state of Wyoming, I can literally be locked in a cage just for having the remains of a joint in my car.
How can I, in one locale, buy THC in all possible consumable forms imaginable, and in other states have my property seized for just possessing a pipe used to smoke it. How can anyone make sense of a system where corporations can profit off a plant while people have literally lost their freedom for being near it? How can one country entertain two completely incompatible ideas? Well, I think that’s a good question. To me, it’s a uniquely American form of cognitive dissonance that I think says more about how the law is both conjured and applied than any other example I can think of. I mean, how many people are sitting in jail right now locked in a cage for possessing weed, while the Uber rich get richer off of selling it elsewhere. How many lives have been destroyed by a SWAT raid or a search warrant written at the behest of a pot arrest while major corporations are turning it into another source of propagate profits?
What I’m trying to point out is that living in the country where, on one hand, pot is a source of riches for some, and for others an absolute source of misery, literally points to the absurdity and credibility of our system of laws in general. I mean, let’s not forget the story of Dr. David Allen, who was arrested for researching the beneficial effects of marijuana after authorities tried to seize his ranch. He was uncovering the fact that pot can actually save lives, and they were simply trying to use an unjust law for unjust enrichment. The point is that the concept of turning a product of nature into a source of indiscriminate power and profit reveals just how insane our philosophy of governance and law really is. Maybe the idea that a naturally healing and proven beneficial flower is somehow twisted into a legal source of unchecked authority and profit exposes just how far astray law enforcement really is from the concept of justice.
And that’s supposed to be the idea, right? Justice, not tickets, and fees, and fines, and stats. Not charges, and prisons, and pensions for cops. The whole point of the criminal justice system is to create a community defined by fairness and equity. That’s why when we read about towns or report on cities where ticket fines constitute half of the budget, or when we hear that police have quotas to write tickets and are begging for the power to seize property, we have to stop and ask: What really is the point here? What really is the underlying goal? And how on earth does this benefit our society to turn a badge into a cash register? Well, that’s the question we will continue to ask on this show. I want to thank Intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show, Noli Dee for his support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And a very special thank you to our Patreons, including PAR super friend, Shane Busta. We appreciate you. And if you want to have me shout you out, go to our Patreon page and become a PAR super friend, or an official patron like Calvin M., Steven D., Rob B., Celeste S., PT Tumblebug, [inaudible] live, Tamara A., Dante S., and of course, my mom. Hi, mom.
And as always, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com. And of course, you can always follow us on Facebook or Instagram at Police Accountability Report or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And you can always follow me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And please like, and comment on our videos. We do read your comments and appreciate them, and I try to answer your questions whenever I can. My name is Taya Graham, and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
The Baltimore Police Department continues to make most of its car stops in the city’s poor, Black neighborhoods.
Battleground Baltimorepreviously reported that the majority Black and heavily-divested Ninth District in West Baltimore endured the most traffic stops during June 2021 (516 stops) and July 2021 (557 stops).
That pattern persists. In August, there were 477 stops in Ninth District; in September, 356 stops, and in October, 386 stops.
The next highest number of stops for August was in the Seventh District (330). For September, it was in the Twelfth District (341), and in October, again, it was in the Twelfth District (301). The Seventh and Twelfth Districts also contain some of the city’s most heavily divested Black neighborhoods.
These numbers were all made available thanks to Third District Councilperson Ryan Dorsey, who began requesting the car stop data over the summer and has continued sharing that data with Battleground Baltimore.
For Dorsey, the fact that the past five months of data show the highest number of stops in majority-Black parts of the city like the Ninth District make the “implicit bias” of BPD pretty, well, explicit.
“Based on the way that police and council district boundaries overlap, and where the racial makeup of communities lie within those areas of overlap, it’s clear that BPD is policing in an implicitly biased fashion, aggressively targeting Black communities,” Dorsey told Battleground Baltimore.
As Battleground Baltimore noted when we first called attention to traffic stop numbers:
“[T]he Ninth District contains some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, which are often less walkable and bike-able than other whiter parts of the city and are beholden to the city’s poor transit infrastructure—which puts more people into cars in areas where police are more apt to make traffic stops.”
The Ninth District also includes the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where, in 2015, Freddie Gray was stopped on the street, arrested, transported, and killed in Baltimore Police custody.
Dorsey stressed that there isn’t any clear justification for these disproportionate numbers: “Given that there’s no data to show that the targeted communities have a higher prevalence of traffic violations than anywhere else in the City, it’s also clear that this is not being done for purposes of traffic safety,” he said.
Dorsey began requesting the car stop data over the summer because constituents in his district complained to him that it seemed as though there was a lack of traffic enforcement in their communities. In August, there were 99 car stops in the Third District; in September, 92 stops; and in October, 90.
Some of the city’s most egregious moving violators, meanwhile, are not being dealt with at all.
“I have in fact never seen BPD even hint that they had an interest in or pride in stopping menacing drivers, like the hundreds that have accumulated 50 or more unpaid speeding and red light violations,” Dorsey said. “That this traffic stop data correlates to no demonstrable reduction in any crime or increased quality of life gives good cause to reallocate those resources elsewhere.”
At the top of a list of the 20 worst red light camera offenders is an Acura with Maryland tags and 283 unpaid tickets. Number 20 on that list is a Volkswagen with Maryland tags and 95 unpaid tickets. While the city regularly tows those who have unpaid parking tickets, it does not and cannot tow for unpaid red light camera tickets.
In September, Baltimore City’s Board of Estimates voted to use $6.5 million in speed camera revenue for the Baltimore Police Department. Public transportation advocate Jed Weeks of Bikemore stressed that the money was intended to be used to fund safer streets for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike.
“Revenues generated by speeding red light cameras under state law are to be used for public safety improvements, including pedestrian safety programs,” Weeks said. “We can’t accept the continued theft of desperately needed transportation dollars by the Baltimore City Police Department.”
Traffic stops also frequently lead to police violence. The recent New York Times story “Why Many Police Stops Turn Deadly” noted that “over the past five years … police officers have killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or a knife, or under pursuit for a violent crime—a rate of more than one a week.”
Traffic stops were also a focus of the 2016 Department of Justice report on the Baltimore Police Department. The report, which highlighted BPD’s routine civil rights violations and racist policing, noted that the police in Baltimore disproportionately stop Black drivers.
“From 2010–2015, African Americans made up 82 percent of people stopped by BPD officers for traffic violations, compared to only 60 percent of the City’s driving age population. As with pedestrian stops, BPD stopped a higher rate of African American drivers in each of the City’s districts, despite large differences in those districts’ demographic profiles and traffic patterns,” the DOJ report explained. “For example, African Americans accounted for 80 percent of vehicle stops in the Northern District despite making up only 41 percent of the district’s population, and made up 56 percent of stops in the Southeast District compared to only 23 percent of the population living there.”
The car stop data is also broken down by police districts (there are nine police districts and 14 council districts). Battleground Baltimore reached out to the Baltimore Police Department hoping to obtain an estimate on the number of residents in each police district to get a scope of the number of car stops. The police, however, explained that they do not know how many residents they police in each district.
“We do not track the number of people who reside in each of our nine districts,” Det. Donny Moses of BPD told Battleground Baltimore.
The police district with the highest number of car stops in August, September, and October is the Western District—which encompasses many parts of the Ninth District.
At a recent hearing about the federal consent decree imposed on the city following the DOJ’s 2016 investigation, Judge James K. Bredar made numerous claims about the technological and financial needs of the police and the purported dangers of their job.
Bredar has not, Dorsey stressed, commented on the ongoing disproportionate number of stops in majority-Black parts of Baltimore, even though it was a significant part of the 2016 DOJ report—which is why the city is under a consent decree in the first place.
“There is no discernible benefit to what is being done, and yet it is happening in flagrant disregard for the consent decree that resulted from doing exactly this: intentionally targeting Black communities with disproportionately aggressive policing efforts,” Dorsey said. “The greatest mystery is why it seems to be of no concern to Judge Bredar or anybody else involved in monitoring implementation and compliance with the consent decree.”
Baltimore Police Department District
August
September
October
Central
243
156
183
Eastern
198
276
402
Northeastern
327
391
400
Northern
73
163
89
Northwestern
215
270
254
Southeastern
357
237
213
Southern
175
238
296
Southwestern
330
352
308
Western
348
372
374
Total Car Stops
2266
2455
2519
Number of car stops by Baltimore Police Department district between August 1, 2021 and October 31, 2021
Council District
August
September
October
1
188
141
117
2
104
153
130
3
99
92
90
4
27
23
41
5
78
95
69
6
102
150
152
7
330
308
254
8
127
99
60
9
477
356
386
10
157
171
251
11
213
191
216
12
181
341
301
13
247
204
252
14
91
89
140
Bad Address*
45
42
60
Total Car Stops
2466
2455
2519
Number of car stops by Baltimore City Council district between August 1, 2021 and October 31, 2021
*Address did not correspond to a Council District, likely due to a bad address or format.
Mansoor Adayfi, “Detainee No. 441,” was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. As detailed in the description for Adafyi’s new book Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, “Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp’s infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes protesting inhumane treatment and arbitrary detention. With time though, he grew into the man nicknamed ‘Smiley Troublemaker’: a student, writer, advocate, and historian.” In this special episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer, legendary Black Panther, and longtime political prisoner Eddie Conway sits down with Adafyi to talk about his new book, his time at Guantánamo, the human cost of the War on Terror, and about the battle for survival in the dark heart of American empire.
Eddie Conway:Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. One of the things that everybody in the world knows is that Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, is a horrible place to be. Today, we have the opportunity to talk to Mansoor Adayfi, who’s an author, an activist, and a former detainee at Gitmo, joins us today. Mansoor, thanks for joining me.
Mansoor Adayfi:Thank you so much for having me today, and for giving me this opportunity to talk to you guys and talk to the world. Thank you.
Eddie Conway: Okay. You know, I want to start off… I guess I want to start off by apologizing for my tax money that’s been used for horrible things.
Mansoor Adayfi: No. I won’t accept that. Don’t apologize for others’ hideous behavior. Because you have done nothing, and I won’t accept any apologies from you because if someone cuts me, I’m not going to spill my blood on anyone. So, I mean, we don’t blame America or Americans for what happened to us, to be honest with you. And we don’t hold anyone accountable for what has been done to us. Sorry for the interruption, because I always – [crosstalk].
Eddie Conway: No, it’s okay.
Mansoor Adayfi: I understand you feel sometimes frustrated and guilty and… But from my understanding, it’s not what America is about. It is, we are considered those small groups who didn’t represent, or don’t represent America or American values. Simple as that.
Eddie Conway: Okay. All right. So then will you give the audience a little background history, how you end up in 2002 in Guantanamo. Where did it start from and what happened?
Mansoor Adayfi: Okay. Before we jump to Guantanamo, I would like to highlight just two points. The first point, I noticed that a lot of people talking about 9/11, which I’m not trying to undermine and [inaudible], but at the same time, people forget to talk about what happened before 9/11 and what led to 9/11 to happen in the first place. As we know [about] the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan since the 1980s and 1990s. And also that 9/11 happened the first time in 1993, as we recall, in my research that we found out when the same person targeted the same twin towers. But then the thing that happened, the 9/11 when the war started between one organization, one man, Osama bin Laden and the United States, and that led to 9/11. And we know that a few attacks happened before that.
9/11 didn’t change the world; The way Americans or the American government at that time reacted to 9/11, it changed the world. 9/11 was misused and abused until that day. And as we know, it has been like almost 20 years and there was [inaudible] justice. And delaying justice is justice denied, simple as that. So basically let us jump to after 9/11. Before 9/11, I was in Afghanistan. I was sent as a research assistant in Afghanistan to research the new group in Afghanistan, because as you know, in the 1990s there was a vacuum in the media. And Al-Qaeda emerged really fast because it was fighting one of the super powers. And that time they said, a man against a superpower country, to the extent. And they start building up. 9/11 happened while I was in Afghanistan, and when it did happen, we didn’t pay much attention to it or care much about it.
Because simply, in Afghanistan there was no TV, no media or newspaper or something that really if… When you live in Afghanistan, you feel like 1000 [years] behind the world. Definitely think that the signs that you live in modern life, the moving cars. Other than this, people are almost in their own way of life, poverty. And also people forget that Afghanistan has been suffering for the last 40 years. Soviet Union, civil war, United States occupation, so it’s a lot. So when the first time I heard about 9/11 I was in a restaurant, we had the radio that, you know airplanes flew into buildings, and that’s it.
So in my research, I used to also station one of the charity musician’s work in Afghanistan, at that time for relief, helping aid, and providing logistics and medicine and so on. The organization, Saudi Church of Musician, got instructions from Saudi Arabia that they should liquid everything and they should leave. My friend told me, Mansoor, this is our last load. We are going to take it to the hospital before we leave Afghanistan. We received instructions that we should leave. I said, okay, I’m going to accompany you. In Afghanistan at that time, there was a war also between the Taliban and the North Alliance.
Also, there was a different kind of warlord. There are some areas of no-man’s land. It’s just warlords and kidnapping, and so on. One day we had a new blue, beautiful car. We were targeted and ambushed, and our car was taken. So at that time we knew that they wanted the car, and they would try to ransom us to Saudi Arabia for some money. Then Americans arrived there, and before the Americans arrived there, they were from the airplane throwing flyers, offering large bounty of money. So, one bounty could change someone’s life. So people start kidnapping people and selling them to the Americans as Al-Qaeda commanders, leaders, Taliban commanders, and so on. Because the more you give them the higher rank, the more pay you got. The price was variable from $5,000 to like $100,000, $200,000, a lot of money. So I stayed a week or two in the warlord’s house, then I was sold to the CIA as an Al-Qaeda commander of 9/11 insider, shipped to the black site, [Kandahar] detention, then to Guantanamo. I turned 19 years old in the black site under the CIA. In the black site.
So, I mean, I’m shortening the story. Story’s really heavy and really dark and more of torture, abuse, to that extent. So I wasn’t just that victim. I’m not trying to say that everyone in Guantanamo was innocent, but I’m going to give you American figures, which are from ECLU and Seton Hall University. They said only 8%, according to the research, only 8% have a connection to Al-Qaeda or Taliban. And 86%, they were either sold for bounty money, or mistaken identity.
And I want to say something. The people who were in Guantanamo, they weren’t in the battlefield holding guns, or loyal to Al-Qaeda or Taliban, though the men who arrived at Guantanamo, they were brought from different parts of the world. From Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mauritania, Bosnia, Africa, different countries. And as we know, when George W. Bush announced the crusade or war on terror, he said, either with us or against us. There is no gray area.
So people actually… And it’s a lot of money on people… Who cares? And war against terror tends to be one of the profitable businesses until that day. I remember starting in 2005, when Yemen’s president visited the United States and they refused to give him $120 million. He was upset, he went back to Yemen. He had some Al-Qaeda members in his jail, he released them. He said, okay. They escaped. Simple as that. After that, the European Union sent 500 million Euro every year. The United States government also [inaudible] some funds. The Yemen president at that time said, I didn’t have money. I didn’t have jets. I didn’t have soldiers. I didn’t have cars. So I cannot fight against terrorism or Al-Qaeda. So it turned out to be a way of making profits. If you are afraid of me, I’m going to use your fear to basically blackmail you, or try to tell you I’m out of control.
So that’s what happened here. And many victims, many, many victims. So at Guantanamo, it was around 800 men. The youngest was only a few months old. The oldest was 105 years old. This is the age. All kinds of people. You have doctors, engineers, nurses, paramedics, journalists, poachers, mafia, drug dealers. You have also spies who used to work for the CIA. They were caught by Al-Qaeda and Taliban and jailed. And also when American forces arrived in Afghanistan they shipped them back to Guantanamo, to that extent. I met a full team who was sent by Saudi Arabia to assassinate Osama bin Laden. They failed, they got caught. When the Americans came, they shipped them to Guantanamo. So what they did, basically, the CIA and American FBI and other American intelligence and army, they used to either kidnap people or arrest people from different parts of the world, ship them to Guantanamo.
The idea was, we are going to take these people to this place, interrogate them, and sort their files. Even when George W. Bush established Guantanamo, it was just a temporary place. That’s what they called detention. But it was intentionally selected to be the island [outside] of the law. So American law doesn’t apply, [inaudible] law doesn’t apply, international Geneva Convention law doesn’t apply. So what they call us… They were smart. You know, when you deal with those minds, they weren’t stupid or idiots. No. They have consultants, they have advisors, they have experienced people to tell them what to do and how to do it. So they constructed the language. We’re Muslim, I’m Muslim. If you ask me, it is war on us. And they call it war on terrorists. Actually, war of terror. They call kidnapping rendition, torture they call it enhanced interrogation technique.
Families that were killed or wiped out or during assassination, they call it collateral damage. Detainees or prisoners of war, they call them detainees. That’s it. So also when they constructed the language, they invented new realities, and they also legislated some kind of law for those realities. So, war of terror, it doesn’t just affect Muslims. It affects… Muslims overseas in our countries like Afghanistan, it also… As I told you, 9/11 was misused and abused. War on terror that was used by the American government, for military expansion, in Asia and Africa. And so at the same time, it was also affecting people, especially Muslim minorities, within Europe and the United States.
We can see how they start targeting those minorities, spying, surveillance, all kinds of violations. Also we have… When I was in Guantanamo I used to read about the FBI entrapment. How they used to entrap people. I mean, when it comes to… What happened to us? I mean, that system we created to serve humanity and to preserve us and to protect us and to make us safer, we are [teething] that system to misuse it for our own gain. I mean, to the extent the ones who should protect and treat people equally, they use the system to entrap those people and to – What more injustice more than that? I felt so sad sometimes at Guantanamo, honestly. I felt I was lucky because my family didn’t want to be wiped out ever.
At the same time, at least at Guantanamo I’m safe. I haven’t gotten injured, or at least I haven’t been killed yet. And when you ask Muslim to what extent how the war on terror affect them, especially the young generation, when those who born after 9/11 or when 9/11 happened they have no idea, they were like five or six or so on. When they grew up, they grew up in that stigma of being targeted, being harassed, Islamophobia, hate crime. So those young Muslims start looking back, is our religion really that bad? Is our religion really… Is our religion is the source of terrorism? So they start investigating. No. That’s not the truth. Whatever you’re trying to say, no. We can read, we can understand, we can observe, we can ask.
So those Muslim felt… The youngest, the first generation feels they are being oppressed. So when I talked to them after I left Guantanamo, because I have been researching Guantanamo for the last five years, I felt those generation, they want to leave United States and Europe, and want to live within a Muslim country. That way they can feel free as Muslim to the extent. So the system, as I told you, starts to raise those who have no connection whatsoever. And if you ask, I don’t know, like 1.8 billion Muslims what they think about 9/11. We used to argue with their tradition. I said, look, we as Muslims, every single life is sacred. Even animals. As Muslim, we are allowed to kill animals just to feed. If you kill it for fun, or [so on] it becomes sin and you have to be punished for that. You have to pay and are punished for this.
So, but as I told you, Guantanamo was used. The United States also used Guantanamo. They want to send some kind of… I mean, the George W. Bush administration, they used Guantanamo. They wanted to send some kind of message to the world, we are going to cross any boundaries. We are not bound by any laws whatsoever. We understand this, but peace can’t really be achieved by justice, simple as that. When you violate your own rules, your own boundaries, your own morals, ethics, chaos. Look at what happened to the world now. And the first ones who were affected by the war on terror, Americans themselves. Look now when you look at the casualties inside, the economic losses and so on.
But also on the other side, when we talk about how many Muslims have been killed, displaced, countries occupied. Look in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Syria and elsewhere, because the United States holds a very sensitive very important position in world politics. When they move in the wrong way, they shake the whole world. Whether we like it or not. Whether anyone, Chinese, Russia, likes it or not, the United States is like an umbrella. So when it started shaking, something dropped down. That’s what happened here. It is the most super powerful country that ever existed in history, no exaggeration. So any move affects the entire world.
Eddie Conway: Mansoor, let me just stop you right there. This is good information, but I want to know, you survived 14 years in that Guantanamo. And I know your book, Don’t Forget About Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo, probably talks about this, but how did you survive? I’ve heard music, art, et cetera. I mean, you look healthy, you look whole, and that’s a miracle compared to the stuff that we know that goes down there. How did you survive?
Mansoor Adayfi: Story of survival, it’s long and complicated. And it’s not just a story, it was a way of life to survive at Guantanamo. You have no choice. Either die or survive. So, but as I told you, as human beings, what makes us a human being, as individuals, unique as beautiful humans. Because I believe that there is kindness, there is good in every single soul, every single human being, regardless. Because that’s the way we are born, that’s the way we procreated. At Guantanamo, like in my experience and the experience I wrote about it, I noticed there the thing that helped us to survive. First of all, our faith as Muslims and our religion and faith, played a key and important role in our survival at Guantanamo, because you turn to Allah subhanahu wa ta-ala, to our God. We are hopeless, we are helpless in that place, please we need your help.
At the same time, the things that help us to survive, each other. Supporting, standing with each other, comforting each other. One of the things also, the packages we brought with us. What I mean by that, I always say that what makes us unique as humans and individual souls is the things that we hold and that make us who we are. Our names, language, faith, morals, religion, memories, experience, knowledge, emotion, relationship, time. Those things, that’s what make you as a person, what make us a unique person. So when we came to Guantanamo, the policy of Guantanamo changed that. We become just numbers. We were not allowed to talk, to stand, to practice daily lives.
So for me as a tribal teenager, I couldn’t accept that. It’s not the way I was brought up. It’s not the way I was raised in my tribal society with my tribal family and life. So I guess, I’m not going to do that because it doesn’t make any sense. We didn’t care about rank or titles or military or Navy or army or Marines, I didn’t care. It’s just like respect man to man, face to human, to human. So the things that we brought to us first, knowledge, of course, because as I told you, there were doctors, nurses, scholars. We started teaching each other about whatever you have. Your knowledge, your experience, because we weren’t allowed to have any kind of pen or access to the world. We were totally disconnected from the world and we didn’t have much there.
So we start sharing with each other what we have. Part of us, part of our life, part of our memories, knowledge, experience. So those things helped us to survive and learn at that place. Also defending each other and protesting, and trying to help each other. Because Guantanamo keeps evolving, it’s changing. And it was the way it is. It’s like machinery that doesn’t have any kind, because as I told you there was not any kind of rule of law that you can know, how can you… Because in other jails, there is a routine that happens every single day, people understand. But in Guantanamo, the guards and [inaudible] and interrogators rotated every three, six [months] or one year. And every new group, every person, they have their own way of running the camp.
Plus from 2002 until 2010, we call it the dark age. Their main focus, everything controlled by interrogators and they went to extract information, but the truth or existence in Guantanamo, it wasn’t about American safety or American security or about information, it wasn’t about that at all. When General Miller arrived by the end of 2002, he had one mission. He united all the forces at Guantanamo into what they call the JTF, Joint Task Force, and he created a back channel, communicated with the Pentagon, passing all the chain of command. He was communicating with the [inaudible]. So Guantanamo would turn what they call it a liberatory, or they call it Guantanamo America’s battle lab. If you just Google, Guantanamo America’s battle lab you can read a whole [piece of] research, like 80 some pages about how Guantanamo was turned by the military minds, by the military officers into experimenting.
At that time General Geoffrey Miller… When I’m saying General Geoffrey Miller, I mean, that same person who would torture prisoners and detainees in Iraq, in the [inaudible] and other places. So that [inaudible] started at Guantanamo. So at Guantanamo, they started constructing and developing what they call enhanced interrogation techniques. Play with words. It sounds friendly, it sounds something like modern, enhanced interrogation technique, which is actually torture. Sleep deprivation, waterboarding, beating, sexual assault, rapes, all kind of things. Physical, mental, psychological. And you have a whole team, it’s not just one person. There were also experiments, there was also a consultant, there were also psychologists, doctors. And everything was designed around you to break you.
The whole program, your life every single day, was designed to the extent, to make you with the interrogation. But it’s not about interrogation. They wanted to know what kind of enemy they were up against. So what I told you, there were over around 15 nationalities, over 20 languages spoken. Different mindset, different countries, different age. That made it the best opportunity for them to experiment and study those minds. Because when you come from the military perspective, we are going to fight against those kinds of people for maybe the next 20, 30, 50, 100 years, so we need to understand what we are up against. How they behave, how they communicate, how we can interrogate them. What’s the best thing to deal with those people?
So, yeah, I mean, especially now, when you come to modern science and every field, the same way. Especially in the military the same way. So that’s what happened there. And we were not just the victims of Guantanamo. When I’m saying that, there were also guards, [inaudible]. There were people who tried to… People who either tried to [inaudible] or people who tried not to lose their humanity. Because they were victims of Guantanamo. When you bring someone and ask them to torture someone, it will have side effects, it will have impact. That’s what happened there. Before they brought the soldiers or the guards to Guantanamo, they used to take them to ground zero, or to the 9/11 site, and tell them the people responsible for that, they are in Guantanamo.
So when the soldiers arrived, they were full of hate and grudges, they wanted revenge. You can see it in their voice, in their faces, in their behavior, but they’re also human beings. They’re not robots, they are just following instructions. They mix with us, when they live with us every day… Because we become part of each other’s life, whether we like it or not, it’s the way it tends. Now I’m talking to you, I’m spending some time with you, I will be part of your memory, of your life, and so on. So they watch us. Some of them [cads] we were, and there was just praying, eating, crying, laughing, joking, get beaten, get tortured.
They also can differentiate who is bad, who is good, who is a terrorist or not. They found out the people are not what they were told they were. So many of them changed their mind, [inaudible] apologize, but again, when you come to the military, people follow orders. If you need to take any action that would affect the rest of your life. I remember one of the examples I use. I always talk about it because of an American army captain, James Yee. I think his story is well-known, one of the things we saw… Yeah. But when he started, both the General Miller policy of torture at Guantanamo, he was viewed as an obstacle, so they want to get rid of him.
Eddie Conway: He was the Islamic captain in the United States army.
Mansoor Adayfi: Yeah.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Go ahead.
Mansoor Adayfi: Yeah. He was a graduate of West Point University, and was sent to Guantanamo as an army captain, as a chaplain, to ease cultural tension, to educate the guards and to help the detainees in their religious issues. But he found out that the religion, is some of what was used as part of torture. Torture and people using the security of the holy Quran, stripping people naked, proven to confront praying, all kinds of things that you can put pressure on us [with]. So we used to talk to James. Like, what’s going on here? He tried, honestly. And we know he was a sincere person. But the Pentagon, and General Geoffrey Miller, they had another function for Guantanamo, or another project for Guantanamo. So he was accused of espionage, sympathizing with terrorists.
I saw, and I’m like, so ridiculous. He was arrested, interrogated, and so on. We are talking about an American army captain who came to serve his own country. Who might at some point sacrifice his life to protect and serve his country. And I mean to that extent just because he was a Muslim. Sympathizing with the detainees was [inaudible]. Like I told you, as a person, if you got caught laughing, or try to [inaudible] the detainees you will be punished. You will never come back to the sad luck. It’s not just tough for detainees, this is for you because you try to be yourself, simple as that. Because it’s not your position to judge people. It’s not your position to interrogate them, it’s not your position… You were required as a human, to treat them as human. And when we took on the justice system, but Guantanamo it was out of the law, as I told you, and it’s just a dark black hole or black site within the military bases at Guantanamo.
So what’s Guantanamo now? Guantanamo now has become a symbol of torture, lawlessness, abuse of power, oppression, indefinite detention, also death sentence for the people who was there. Also it gives some kind of legitimacy to tyrants in the Middle East and other countries. They started to construct and build their own Guantanamos. China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Emirates, other countries, they have their own Guantanamos. If the boss can do it, why not us? And it’s the same style. Counter-terrorism, extremism, and… Come on think that you have to be Muslim to apply that. So by default, as Muslim, you are terrorist. So that’s it.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. Let me ask you, because you said earlier, and I think this is an important point for survival, you said together from 15 different countries, 20 languages, you all found a way to protest. And I know part of the protest was hunger strikes where they use force feeding that turned into terror and torture. But I also understand you all did culture and music and art. Talk a little bit about the protest that you all did and how you all supported each other.
Mansoor Adayfi: Yeah. As I thought it was 50 nationalities, not 50 [it was 20]. So at the beginning, we used to just react to whatever they throw at us. Because at Guantanamo, as a person, as a Muslim, as a human, you try to preserve yourself, who you are. Because that place and that policy and that way of treatment will change you. And you didn’t want that to happen. They already take your name. You are dealing as a number. So also at the same time, part of you, you try to live your day life. I mean you think substantive change because it’s not who you are. If you’re 19 or 20 or 25, 30, it’s not that just one order or written law can change your 30 years just like this? No, it’s not going to happen.
Also when they started the intensive interrogation and the torture, we tried to resist. The best way we started was the hunger strike, as you know. And that took until that day people on hunger strike, because it is just you feel the pain when you see someone being tortured. And they took it as a challenge. Our hunger strike or our protest was taken as that we were doing some kind of jihad activism on the camp, we were accused of being an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell inside Guantanamo, announce jihad against [inaudible] to the extent. So, yes, I mean, at the beginning we take things seriously. Then we find out if you’re going to take things seriously, we are actually driving ourselves crazy, just live our lives. So we’re starting, as I told you, teaching each other. We had one night in the week, which is like… [each cell block] they have one night in the week, celebrating, time to escape the pain of being in jail.
Escape the feeling that you are being caged in those open cages. So [within one block] there were about 48 detainees from different nationalities. As I told you, everyone came with his package. You have artists, singers, crazy people, kind of people. So we used to sing in different languages, in Arabic, English, French, Farsi, Pashto, it was so beautiful and so amazing to hear those songs in just the same time. It’s like we didn’t have an iPad or mp3, because at that time [they weren’t even] invented. But you can hear, just listen to it and enjoy it. Dancing, poems, stories, and so on. Even that was taken as an act of challenging, and we would sometimes get punished, closing the windows, turning on the vacuum, the ventilation, the fans, and everything.
Sometimes they will take us into separate, as in different blocks. So it was a way of surviving. It was like it took years and years and years. And we could do what we do, because it is important for you. Because if it gets [death] after the situation, I didn’t think we could survive. And if you ask me, and sometimes people ask me, how did you survive? I don’t know. But to some extent I tried, at least I tried because they wanted to change you. They wanted to break you, they wanted to drive you to insanity. And seeing you happy, seeing you laughing or making jokes… One of the things we did there, it’s like we did have a sense of humor. Making joke about everything, about interrogation, about torture, about so on.
And when the dark age period ended in 2010, when Mr. Obama came, when the White House turned to a Black House, the way you call it. So we entered what they call the Golden Age. Things happened so fast. When Obama failed to close the detention, we negotiated with the camp administration about the life. And we negotiated stopping the torture, stopping the interrogation, improving the life in the detention cells, having access to the world outside, news, TV, communication with our families, letter, phone calls, improving the healthcare, food, clothing, and everything. And things changed. And we also demanded some kind of classes. There the art started. Art started early, but art classes started with the art search, really flourished, and started taking a huge part in our day life.
Because before that, no one could have access to a pen and paper. But in 2010, everything had changed. So we start demanding classes in English, in painting, different classes. One of the most important classes was art, which is also because art is so important. Because when you live in that detention for so long, you start constructing new memories, a new way of life, a new personality, a new person. Whether you like it or not, that’s what it is. You become not just part of that detention, you’re that period of life connected to that time. So emotion, time, memories, experience, people around you, relationship with people. So that’s like a turning point in our life. So when you start painting, art connects us to ourselves, to our memories, to the world outside, to our families, to everything.
Because when you start extracting what is hidden inside you, those emotions. We painted things that we missed. Sea, sky, sun, stars, families, trees, horses, you name it. We paint about our struggle and suffering and so on. So what they call art, it is a soul’s language. It is a soul to our soul language. So sometimes we will look at… When you ask someone about painting, everyone has different opinion, experiences about the same painting. But also those paintings hold tears, secrets, memories, time, life, and so on. So yeah. Art also was a way of therapy, and a way of communication. And I wrote a book about arts from Guantanamo in 2017, 18. And we couldn’t find a publisher so far. I hope… We are trying to find a publisher to publish… It’s not just art, it’s a beautiful story about [inaudible], art and survival. And it’s an amazing story. Art that was created at Guantanamo, it’s unlike any other art created in other places.
Eddie Conway: Well, okay. Let me just ask you this, I noticed you had that orange on, and I spent… You have no way of knowing this, but I spent 44 years in prison here in America.
Mansoor Adayfi: What? Are you serious?
Eddie Conway: Yes. As a former Black Panther Party member. And I simply refuse to put on anything that is associated with prisons. But I understand in Guantanamo, they had you all wear orange from head to toe the whole entire time you were there. And I understand that people get out, they don’t want to even be near orange. How do you manage to sit there with your orange on and why?
Mansoor Adayfi: You know, simply I’m telling them, you didn’t break me, you didn’t tear me, I still love the orange color. And I’m using Guantanamo to fight Guantanamo. And also I’m showing them that they want to implant… When I was talking to the psychologist in the ICRC and so on, they say, when you get out, when you see the orange, you’re like [frightened yell]. I said, nope. I love the orange. I have made peace with Guantanamo. I’m like, dealt with that. Also, I use the number 44, I own it. I pay for around 15 years of it. So I guess the message of the things that you used try to break me, try to change me, try to [inaudible] it’s not going to happen.
I’m going to use this part of my life, I won’t [inaudible], but I will take it, make peace with it, and I will use it. And trust me, I’m sure when they watch me wearing the orange [inaudible], because they know to their core Guantanamo was a mistake all along. They know they detained innocent men there. So why not use it? I’m just telling the message, reminding them what happened there. Also I wear this the main reason, to show solidarity for the people who stripped their own freedom, what they call the [wear and tear] or anyone else, because no one should under any circumstance prefer her or his freedom unless there is a law. If something really happened. It’s like accusing someone, mistreating them, torturing, abusing indefinite detention and so on. So to what? I mean, as I told you, it’s also to show that I took up part in activism and so on. So yeah, it is my approach to the story,
Eddie Conway: I guess one last thing, what are you… I know you’re in Belgrade, you’re trapped in Serbia, you can’t can’t leave so to speak. You call it Gitmo 2.0, but what are you doing there?
Mansoor Adayfi: We have done this, we have managed to publish Don’t Forget About Us Here. It’s the book that actually, I would love to talk about it the way it was written at Guantanamo, alhamdulillah. That book was first written between 2010 and 2013. I wrote it while learning English, and so on during the Golden Age. It was taken in 2013, confiscated, classified as classified and secret, taken away. Then I wrote it again in 2015 to my lawyer. I wrote it as legal letters while chained and shackled to the floor. So I used to write it every week, chunk of legal letters and send it there. [Alhamdulillah] she managed to get it out. And since 2018, my friend Antonio and I worked really hard to put it that way, alhamdulillah we managed to publish it. Second thing, last month, I graduated from my university, a bachelor’s degree. So there is a huge gap in my life, it’s like 15 years. I tried to capture it, but after I just… People ask me, how old are you? I say, like 20, 23? Okay. 23 and a half.
I haven’t counted Guantanamo. So alhamdulillah, I graduated. My thesis was about rehabilitation and reintegration of former Guantanamo detainees into social life and the labor market. Because I tried to help my brothers, because there are a lot of problems. When I’m telling you, we live in Guantanamo 2.0, this is here. This is my next book, Life After Guantanamo. Can you see it? So actually those stickers, it took me five years to [put them] together because every time I would [inaudible] about specialist stories about my story, my other brothers’ stories, stories of the world and stories of [Guantanamo, it would set off] lawyers and politics and so on. So yeah, this, my next project in sha’Allah will be the next work, Life After Guantanamo.
Also, we are working with Sundance, developing a TV show: From Guantanamo with Love. But life after Guantanamo is tough. Honestly, yes. When I did my research, I found there are some brothers who managed to rehabilitate and reintegrate into society and become productive members of their societies, families, jobs, “normal people” to some extent we can quote that. But in other parts, we live under restrictions. We are being treated like terrorists. And many difficulties and challenges intentionally, just because simply people… We live in the stigma of Guantanamo. And also some of those countries treat us like a threat of terrorist. And also worse cases, people who lost their life, and also there are brothers who were sent from Guantanamo as a [inaudible] in the United Arab Emirates. They have been in jail since 2015, 16 until that day, unfortunately. And even treated worse than Guantanamo. No family visits, only limited three minutes to five minutes every other month, two or three months of call, no access to lawyers, NGOs, and they have no rights. They cannot dare challenge their detention. And they don’t know until when they are going to stay that way. And this is Guantanamo… Still Guantanamo hasn’t left us yet.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Mansoor, thanks for joining me. I know it’s been a journey and [crosstalk]
Mansoor Adayfi: I don’t think it’s like your journey, 44 years. I can’t imagine. I think next time I should interview you, not you interview me.
Eddie Conway: Well, both were rough, but we survived. Tell me when your next book comes out, can we come back and revisit you and talk about it?
Mansoor Adayfi: Yeah. Of course.
Eddie Conway: Okay. All right. So thank you.
Mansoor Adayfi: Thank you so much for having me today. Last, one thing I would like to call on the people to write to Mr. Biden to close Guantanamo once for all, and to end the indefinite detention, just a simple request. It’s not about Guantanamo, it’s about us all as human beings.
Eddie Conway: Okay. That is good. Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.
Another act of defiance from the last residents of Poppleton, West Baltimore’s historic, Black neighborhood, who are fighting to preserve their homes. On Nov. 1, a local artist, who asked to remain anonymous, and activists with Organize Poppleton helped residents paint a 20-foot mural that reads “SAVE OUR BLOCK. Black Neighborhoods Matter. Losing my home is like a death to me. Eminent Domain law is violent.”
The quote is from Sonia Eaddy, a third-generation Poppleton resident whose family has lived in the same house since the 1940s. Eaddy has waged a years-long campaign to preserve this Poppleton community, which dates back to the 1860s.
The words are painted on the side of Eaddy’s 321 North Carrollton Ave. property, which the city claimed from the longtime resident and community leader by exercising its rights under eminent domain. The rights to develop the neighborhood were acquired by New York-based La Cité Development, which has already built luxury apartments in the neighborhood that start at $1,925 a month for two bedrooms.
Having received $58 million in tax breaks from the city, the developer is required to make 20% of 2,800 overall housing units affordable to low-income residents. Back in July, Battleground Baltimore spoke to longtime Poppleton resident Parsha Macfadden, who has lived in her home for four decades.
“It seems like it’s not fair for the homeowners who have invested so much, whose homes have so much history and meaning for their families,” Macfadden toldBattleground Baltimore.
Department of Public Works “tightens up”
Baltimore City Council’s Rules and Legislation Oversight Committee held a meeting on Thursday, Nov. 4, about the Department of Public Works’ ongoing issues with correctly billing Baltimoreans for water usage.
City Councilmember Mark Conway began the hearing by mentioning “some of the problems that were plaguing our water billing system,” which included “open service tickets, broken meters,” and “breakdowns in the adjustments processes for resolving water billing problems.”
In December of last year, the Office of the Inspector General released a damning report about DPW that suggested severe mismanagement of money, a staggering number of unaddressed service requests, and many broken water meters. According to the report, 14,000 newly installed water meters were not fully operational. As Food & Water Watch said when the report was released, “that means that 7 percent of the city’s 200,000 accounts are being improperly billed.”
DPW now has a new director, Jason Mitchell, hired in March, after former director Rudy Chow had essentially no response to the damning OIG report, which also suggested Chow had overseen some particularly reckless expenditures.
Conway stressed that with a new director and more attention to the issue, reforms would happen, but he also highlighted just how bad DPW responsiveness remains.
“My office—and I suspect many of the offices of many of my colleagues—still get multiple new water billing issues per week that go unresolved for months. We still see adjustments that do not fully compensate for the exorbitant bills being issued, communication on the status of adjustments in water meter repairs are often lacking, and even when I personally get involved, we still see these things happen,” Conway said. “These aren’t just issues falling through the cracks. There remain systemic deficiencies that enabled these problems to persist. Reforms are only as important as their results.”
And, Conway stressed, those results were going to come through “pushing DPW.”
For the most part, DPW explained themselves (Chow’s disastrous directorship seemed to underline every explanation), though they also pushed back. According to DPW, there were actually 6,310 service requests, not 8,000, and 5,086 have been resolved as of the end of October. Moreover, the DPW explained that the backlog was the result of COVID-19 and the 2019 ransomware attack that suspended the city’s billing system.
DPW director Mitchell tried to stay positive.
“If you look a year ago, we were responding to phone calls in three-plus minutes. As of yesterday, we responded to our calls in 58 seconds,” Mitchell said. “So we’re looking at that every day. We had 48 abandoned calls, we’re looking at that every day… when they call can we pick up? And can we be responsive and helpful? And that’s where our process is [and] where we’re trying to tighten up.”
Baltimore Tree Trust questions mayor’s commitments to nonprofits
Earlier this week, Baltimore Brew highlighted the plight of Baltimore Tree Trust, a local nonprofit whose bid to plant 3,000 trees on Baltimore’s streets was rejected. The contract was given to a for-profit, county-based group, Lorenz Inc.
Baltimore Tree Trust’s bid for the job was $946,490. Lorenz Inc. said it would cost $1.6 million—$651,000 more.
The contract was given to Lorenz Inc. because they were the only remaining bidder once Baltimore Tree Trust was disqualified on the grounds that they were “not in good standing” with the city. Supposedly that was because Baltimore Tree Trust did not file a corporate renewal application. But that was an error with the Minority and Women’s Business Opportunity Office’s database.
“In a city that’s trying to encourage nonprofits and NGOs to get contracts to do work in the community, employ local people and train youths, why would they turn us down for minor technicalities?” Baltimore Tree Trust Executive Director Bryant Smith said.
Due to Baltimore Brew’s reporting, Mayor Brandon Scott withdrew the city’s contract with Lorenz Inc., which was set to be approved by the Board of Estimates this week.
In a follow-up piece, Baltimore Brew also revealed that Baltimore Tree Trust had not learned that they were rejected sooner because of a typo.
“Although the Tree Trust’s bid was disqualified on October 6, thereby paving the way for Lorenz’s higher bid to be submitted to the board, City Purchasing Agent Keasha L. Brown did not formally notify the organization until yesterday afternoon,” the Brew reported. “A review of emails by The Brew found that Brown’s office had sent an earlier notification, but it was never delivered because the Tree Trust’s email address had been spelled incorrectly.”
Baltimore Action Legal Team responds to Mosby’s “do not call” list
Back in 2019, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that her office had a list of 305 Baltimore Police officers with integrity issues.
Naturally, defense attorneys wanted a look at this list of ostensibly dirty cops. Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT), a legal advocacy nonprofit created after the Baltimore Uprising that, as their website says, is “dedicated to politically-conscious lawyering and to using creative, collective solutions to support the Movement for Black Lives in Baltimore,” sued to obtain the list when Mosby’s office wouldn’t just give it to them.
“In December 2019, she identified a list of 305 officers with questionable integrity that could not be relied upon in a prosecution or a trial to obtain a conviction,” lawyer Matt Zernhelt told Battleground Baltimore. “I think it’s in the public’s interest to know what police officers have violated their trust and in any capacity.”
Last month, after going through the courts, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled that Mosby’s office must release the list. Last week, Mosby’s office released a list of 91 officers, not 305. Many in the legal world, including Zernhelt, were left wondering what happened to the 200-plus officers on the larger list—the very list BALT sued over and Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals said Mosby must release.
“We requested the list of 305 names, which existed at that point, and what has been turned over has not been 305 names. So we’re still waiting for that,” Zernhelt said.
On top of that, the list was primarily officers whose corruption and lack of credibility was well-known. Of the 91 officers on the list, only 26 are currently working in the police department and nearly all of the officers on the list have transgressions that are already known to the public.
“We were surprised when this list of 91 officers was released. We recognize it is a list of officers with integrity issues that has been compiled. But we do find that it falls short of what we requested. We find it to be performative,” Zernhelt said. “We will continue pushing for transparency. Do we get what we’ve been fighting for all along and for what the court found the public is entitled to? These are the public records and these records being in the community benefits all.”
Disclosure: Battleground Baltimore’s Brandon Soderberg is a plaintiff along with BALT in a separate court transparency lawsuit. He did not conduct the interview with BALT’s Zernhelt.
Man shot by police in 2016 receives $240,000 settlement
A man who was shot by Baltimore Police in November 2016 had his $240,000 settlement with the city approved by the Board of Estimates this week. Richard Gibbs was shot by Officer Jeffrey Melo because other police on the scene claimed Gibbs—who was stopped for speeding and for an obliterated license plate—had a gun in his hand when he exited his car.
When Gibbs finally went to trial, however, he was found not guilty on a number of charges, including felony handgun possession, resisting arrest, and carrying and transporting a gun in a vehicle. Gibbs’ lawyer, Richard Woods—who represented rapper Young Moose, who was frequently targeted by Baltimore cop Daniel Hersl—contended that the gun the police found on Gibbs was planted. The gun was a .38 caliber revolver that was spray painted black. Police claimed that the gun had Gibbs’ DNA on it and that it was thrown in the air during the arrest, landing on the hood of Gibbs’ car. Woods questioned the police officers’ story (there were no marks on the hood from the gun) and said that Gibbs’ DNA was not found on the cartridges police said they recovered.
Gibbs was arrested on Nov. 23, 2016. When news that police had shot someone broke, Baltimore Police referred to Gibbs as a “repeat violent offender.” Gibbs went through surgery and physical therapy for injuries he received during the arrest. Meanwhile, Gibbs spent the time between his arrest and his June 2017 trial in jail before he was found not guilty on all of the major charges. He was only found guilty of driving without a license.
The investigation into the shooting (the report can be read here) revealed that police noted that the eyewitness who claimed Gibbs did not have a gun was smoking cannabis, and another witness, who said the cops entered Gibbs’ car looking for the gun (the same gun cops claimed was on the hood of the car), was drinking wine. It would seem this helped discredit their accounts.
None of the cops present during the shooting had body-worn cameras (the roll-out of body cameras was relatively new and not all cops had them yet). The Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Officer Melo for the shooting.
Now, nearly five years after the initial arrest, Gibbs has finally received a settlement from the city.
The settlement was approved during the same Board of Estimates hearing in which nearly $759,500 in funding for the ShotSpotter technology was approved.
This week, it was also announced by the State’s Attorney’s Office that David Morris, a man found guilty of a murder in 2005, would be released after 17 years in prison. It was revealed, thanks to the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and the SAO’s Conviction Integrity Unit, that DNA evidence should have exonerated Morris, a key witness was unreliable, and the arresting officer, Michael Nelson, was convicted of wire fraud.
ShotSpotter contract renewed, despite ‘skeptic’ mayor
Baltimore City’s Board of Estimates voted to approve an additional $759,500 to continue the usage of ShotSpotter, gunshot detection technology that uses artificial intelligence to identify gunshots and reports the location of those gunshots. Read Battleground Baltimore’s story here.
ShotSpotter has been in use in Baltimore since 2018 and the approval of the $759,000 to extend the contract puts the total amount of money spent by the city on ShotSpotter at a little over $3 million.
Thread of the week: @OpenJusticeBaltimore on police salary
This thread from Open Justice Baltimore, radical transparency advocates responsible for, among other things, the public database of Baltimore Police officers BPD Watch, provided some updates on where police salaries are since last year. Baltimore police salaries increased by 7.3% since 2020 and “the number of officers who more than DOUBLED their take home pay with overtime has increased by 197%.”
Tweet of the week: @mariyastrauss on supporting the Farm Alliance of Baltimore
We’re just going to pretend that Leana Wen tweet didn’t happen. Anyway, the executive director of Farm Alliance of Baltimore is calling for support, so, well, consider doing so: “If you would like to become a donor whose contributions go directly to supporting programs that support urban farmers here in Baltimore, this is the link,” Strauss tweeted.
Did prosecutors silence a progressive activist under the guise of enforcing an obscure law? That’s the issue PAR explores as we look at the case of a pot legalization activist who was charged with two felonies for livestreaming an encounter with a conservative congressman’s aide during a protest.
Transcript
Taya Graham:Hello, my name is Taya Graham. As the host of the Police Accountability Report, I always promise that this show has a single purpose: holding police accountable. And sometimes keeping that promise requires a follow-up to a story that we’ve reported on before. I mean, think about it, you can’t hold the politically powerful institution of law enforcement accountable if they don’t think you have the tenacity to keep reporting on their misdeeds.
So, this brings me to the story from the past that we’re going to highlight today. It’s a tale that starts with the prosecution of a young college activist. His name is Jake Burdett. His crime: Streaming the comment of a congressman’s aide during a protest on Facebook. Now, before we replay our interview with him and explain the circumstances of why he was charged with, wait for it, felony wiretapping, I also want to give you a little background on some important breaking news that makes this story even more vital.
The ordeal for Jake started when he attended a protest outside of the office of conservative Congressman Andy Harris. He was there because Harris was trying to block the efforts of DC residents to legalize marijuana, which the residents had voted to enact. The protestors met with one of the congressman’s aides in his office. And even though the public officials office asked the activist not to record the encounter, Jake did, and the felony wiretapping charge came as a result of Maryland being a two-party consent state for recording any communication.
What happened due to that decision is an example of the scary power and the constant overreach of prosecutors. And just for the record, when Jake was asked to take the Facebook recording down, he did within minutes of being asked. But the other reason we are covering the story again is because of some new developments regarding the office that prosecuted Burdett. Just recently, Maryland’s highest court ordered a special hearing to determine if the same prosecutors who charged Burdett, engaged in misconduct in a different case. And for more on this, I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Stephjen, thank you for joining me
Stephen Janis:Taya, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
Taya Graham:So, Stephen, can you tell me about the recent decision and what the court ruled?
Stephen Janis: Well, first let me establish that Kelvin Sewell was the first Black police chief of Pocomoke City, a small town on Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore. It’s about half white and half Black, about 4,000 residents. He implemented a style of community policing which was very popular. He had his officers get out of their cars and walk and talk to the community, and crime went down. In 2015, he was fired by a nearly all-white city council. And to this day, they haven’t said why they fired him, but it created a lot of controversy.
But during the time when Kelvin filed a discrimination lawsuit against the State of Maryland and the City of Pocomoke, prosecutors filed charges of police misconduct against him, alleging that he’d interfered in an accident involving a Black Mason, who he was in the same Mason’s organization with, involving two parked cars. That’s it. The case alleges that Kelvin intervened on behalf of his friend, that he should have charged him with something. Of course, all that Doug Matthews did, who is the man who was in the accident, was hit two parked cars and drive home a couple blocks and call police. But they made it into this big thing about corrupt policing and that Kelvin was corrupt. So, it’s really a strange case. A lot of people say it’s retaliation for Kelvin filing a discrimination lawsuit against the city and against the state.
Taya Graham: Now, the court says there is some evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. What did the court cite?
Stephen Janis: Well, the court said that first of all, there is evidence provided by Kelvin himself, an affidavit, and one of his associates, an affidavit that recounts that Tanya Barnes, who was a key witness in the case, said that prosecutors forced her to lie. They also tried to cite us as sources of evidence because we tried to interview Tanya Barnes about these allegations. She refused to talk to us. So, we really have nothing on that. But that’s what they cite as the evidence, and of course the prosecutors have notes from investigators that said that Tanya Barnes was an unreliable witness who was under suspicion for taking some money from a drug fund. So, there was a whole lot of evidence that they knew that Tanya Barnes would be a problematic witness, including the words from Tanya Barnes herself.
Taya Graham: So, what happens now?
Stephen Janis: So, now the case goes back to Worcester County Circuit Court, where it’s up to Kelvin’s lawyers and the prosecutors if they want to have this hearing about prosecutorial misconduct. What’s unusual about this is that they did not vacate the conviction. They only gave Kelvin the chance to fight this in court, down in Worcester County, and if he wins, then he’ll get a new trial. If he loses though, the conviction stands, so it’s not really a great outcome for him and there’s much to be seen as to what will happen next.
Taya Graham: Now, in light of the information Stephen shared with us, we’re going to show you an interview and report about the case of Jake Burdett we produced two years ago. It’s a show we originally aired in 2019, but is now more relevant than ever and deserves to be seen again. As always, please like, share and comment, and I will try to respond to your questions. It really does help us and we really appreciate it. Thank you. Now onto the rest of the show.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Taya Graham: Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. Today we’re going to shift a bit and focus our attention on another aspect of the criminal justice system that has an outsized influence, but rarely gets the attention it warrants. I’m talking about prosecutors, the legal gatekeepers of our criminal justice system. Prosecutors play a pivotal role in how our laws are adjudicated and even more critical, the duty of holding police officers accountable for their actions. In fact, as we’ve reported before on the show, Baltimore’s top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, disrupted our city’s penchant for making racially biased marijuana arrests by refusing to prosecute possession cases.
Marilyn Mosby: Even since the decriminalization of marijuana in October of 2014, there still is this desperate sort of enforcement. So, just recently the ACLU put out another report in which now, legally, if you have less than 10 grams of marijuana, you are given a civil citation. Well, the Baltimore police department in 2015 issued citations to about… 89% of those citations that they issued were to Black people.
Taya Graham: It’s just one example that shows how important prosecutors are to maintaining a fair and balanced system of justice. That’s why today we’re going to focus on a prosecutor who’s made some controversial decisions to charge cases that have tipped the scales the other way. Decisions that show just how important it is to pay attention to how these so-called legal guardians choose to implement the law.
So, let’s start with some background. Maryland state prosecutor, Emmett Davit, has a unique role in the state’s legal system. He’s a quasi-special prosecutor, tasked with investigating corrupt politicians and government malfeasance. But it is his decision to prosecute two less high profile cases that is the topic of our show today. And it shows just how easy it is for a prosecutor to take an already racist and fraught criminal justice system and make it worse.
The first case involves what would seem like a basic American right: holding government officials accountable. That’s what a group of marijuana activists were doing when they apparently committed a crime so heinous, state prosecutor Davit chose to prosecute a college student. That’s right. Our state prosecutor, tasked with investigating corrupt politicians, chose to use precious resources to go after a student activist and charge him with a felony for using Facebook Live. And to tell us how that happened and the consequences, we are happy to be joined by our guest Jake Burdett.
Burdett is a student at Salisbury University on Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore. He’s also a passionate, progressive activist who’s played an important role in the state’s political debates over topics like marijuana legalization. Jake, thank you so much for joining us.
Jake Burdett: Thank you for having me on.
Taya Graham: So, tell us about what happened to you and how you ended up being charged with the unlikely crime of wiretapping.
Jake Burdett: Yeah, so I attended a protest as a guest. I didn’t have any real planning of this protest, but it was put on by a group called Maryland Marijuana Justice, which is an offshoot of a group called DC Marijuana Justice, which is very influential in getting marijuana legalized in Washington DC. We were protesting the representative on the Eastern Shore in Maryland’s first district, Andy Harris, who is a super far right wing guy, vehemently opposed to any type of marijuana legalization, actually ranked in the top five worst congress people on the issue of marijuana.
Taya Graham: Wow.
Jake Burdett: So, we protested at his constituent office in downtown Salisbury, which is taxpayer funded. So, I consider that a public space. We went to his office, which was on the seventh floor. The building itself was a private building, but his office within that building was paid for by taxpayer funds, so a public office.
There were about 30 of us. The staffer came out into the hallway. We were all live streaming the entire time because it is a protest after all. So, we go into the office, he says only about six of us can go in. I was one of the six that went in. Once we got in the office, they said if we continue to record, we will be escorted out, which I was fine with being escorted out. Also, I’m thinking, why can we not record taxpayer funded staff [crosstalk] or a public representative and in a public space? During a protest of all things, why can we not record? So, I went ahead and recorded anyways, being fine with being escorted out, not aware that Maryland is actually one of 12 states to have a two-party consent law where you need both parties’ permission to record. Which even if I did know about that law, I might not have known that that applied to public representatives and whatnot in a public space.
Taya Graham: Certainly.
Jake Burdett: But nonetheless, I didn’t know that that was the law. The following day when I found out that that was the law and I had been live streaming it on Facebook. So, when I found out, within 24 hours I deleted the live stream. I called the staffer personally and apologized.
Taya Graham: Wow.
Jake Burdett: But still, because representative Andy Harris is kind of a petty person and this feud between the marijuana activism community and Andy Harris has been going on for a long time, he wanted to make an example out of me.
Taya Graham: Wow.
Jake Burdett: And saw taking action against me as taking action against all of us, which it is in a way. So, he decided to go forward and press two felony charges on me. One for the recording, one for the distribution, because it was a live stream on Facebook Live. Now, so I got a lawyer just in case, and the lawyer said, look, you got nothing to worry about. This would be an incredibly controversial thing for any county state’s attorney to actually prosecute on, even if you did technically break the statute. Which even that is debatable. But even if you did, it would be just such bad PR for a county state’s attorney to move forward with it, that they wouldn’t do it.
Taya Graham: You would think so.
Jake Burdett: Because it’s cracking down on a citizen peacefully protesting an elected official. So, a lot of First Amendment rights questions involved there. So, he was telling me it’s not going to go anywhere, I have nothing to worry about. I knew that they were doing a police investigation at the time, but a couple days went by, then a week went by, we didn’t hear anything. Then two weeks went by, then three weeks and then a month. My lawyer said the case isn’t going anywhere. If something was going to happen, they would’ve decided to prosecute by now. The county state’s attorney didn’t do anything, I’m considering this a dead case. He literally told me he’s considering it a dead case. Then after a little over a month, we hear back, not from the county state’s attorney who this was up to, but from the state prosecutor’s office.
Taya Graham: Wow.
Jake Burdett: And we were never told that it was being handed to the state prosecutor’s office. We had no idea. So, we were contacted by them saying that they were deciding to prosecute our case. Which, my lawyer and myself were shocked by because so much time had gone by, and my lawyer was so confident that nothing was going to happen if it had waited that long. Again, to our knowledge, it was up with the county state’s attorney. So, we were really shocked that it was a county state prosecutor. So, that’s how those charges came about.
Taya Graham: So, I’m just curious, were you scared, nervous? How did you feel when you found out that this was being bumped up to Special Prosecutor Davit?
Jake Burdett: Yeah, I mean, I was scared when I found out it was being investigated at all and that Harris’s office even wanted it to be prosecuted. I was reassured a lot by my lawyer saying it’s not going anywhere. But yeah, when I found out it was literally with the highest prosecutorial authority in the state…
Taya Graham: Absolutely.
Jake Burdett: …That is very scary. And especially considering I was facing two felony charges with a maximum penalty of five years in jail each and $10,000 penalties each. So yeah, I mean, I was 20 years old at the time. Like to think that I hopefully have a good future ahead of me in terms of activism and whatnot, and getting two felony charges at a young age like that, is definitely not good for your record and for your future. So I was very scared.
Taya Graham: Absolutely. I can’t believe it. 10 years and $10,000 for Facebook live-streaming. So, let me just make sure I understand this. You’re trying to hold a congressman accountable who’s basically interfered with the will of the people in Washington, DC, and you end up being charged with a felony. Do you think this was political payback?
Jake Burdett: I can’t say for certain, I can only speculate. All I can say is it was… It’s uncanny that so much time went by, and that it took so long for them to decide to prosecute this. From my understanding, the prosecutor, Emmett Davit, does seem to have a bit of a history of questionable prosecutions, including the Sewell case, which you all have been covering from the start. He does seem to have a pattern of politically motivated prosecutions. I would think as a state prosecutor, your duty would be to really make sure that you are protecting citizens from overreach by people in power, rather than protecting the people in power from the citizens.
Stephen Janis: That’s a really good point.
Jake Burdett: Protecting them from something that’s not even against the law in 38 other states, and had I done what I did in Harris’s DC office, it would’ve been completely fine and legal. In fact, groups have done that and nothing’s happened. But when a progressive activist does it in Maryland I guess it’s an issue for whatever reason. So, I can’t speak 100% to his motives, but it does seem like he’s taking the side of the people in power rather than the average person.
Taya Graham: You know, Congressman Harris has played an enormous role in trying to prevent DC residents from deciding to make marijuana legal. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jake Burdett: Yeah. So, marijuana got legalized in Washington, DC. I believe they put it up for direct ballot initiative and it got passed by the will of the people, as it’s happened in most states that have gotten it legalized. So, the people voted through direct democracy that we want to legalize marijuana for the consumption, possession and to have it legalized so that stores can sell it, like alcohol or any other product. That’s what the people wanted. But Andy Harris, because he was so vehemently against it, he was on one committee in Washington, DC, I believe it might have been the appropriations committee, and he used his power on whatever committee he was on to basically water down the legislation and make it so that marijuana is legal for possession but stores cannot sell it legally over the counter.
So they actually have to do this weird loophole where it’s like, rather than going to a pot store in DC and just getting an eighth for like $30, you have to buy a pair of flip flops for $30, and then it also happens to come with a free gift of an eighth of weed, which costs about the same price. So, he’s made it significantly harder for businesses to operate and for people to use marijuana without having to jump through all these weird legal loopholes so that they don’t get locked up. It’s a completely anti-science based position. And interestingly enough, when you look at Andy Harris’s OpenSecret account, he actually took over $40,000 from the pharmaceutical industry in just the 2017 to 2018 election cycle.
Taya Graham: That’s incredible. That is absolutely incredible because I was wondering what would motivate him to work against the will of the people, and it seems like it’s the almighty dollar. So Jake, I know you were forced to take a plea deal. Can you tell me what happened?
Jake Burdett: Yeah. So, it depends on who you ask, whether or not what I even did was against the Maryland’s two-party consent law, just because they have to have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and you can make the argument that considering it’s a public office, a taxpayer-funded staffer of a public representative at a protest, talking about issues of public importance, you can make the argument that does should that person really have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Should public officials have the same privacy expectations as private citizens? So, even that’s a question and part of me really wanted to take the case forward, challenge the case, and either I win and they find I didn’t break the law, or maybe they find that I did go against the statute, but that the statute itself is unconstitutional and an invasion of people’s freedom to protest and whatnot.
Taya Graham: Absolutely.
Jake Burdett: So, a big part of me thought that I might have a chance challenging the case. But unfortunately, considering I was facing two five year charges, two five year felony charges, each with a maximum potential of $10,000, there’s a lot to risk there. And sure, the payoff could be good for winning the case and possibly maybe even setting a new precedent, but 10 years in jail is not what I want to do either, especially at such a young age. So, what they did was they offered me a plea deal, the state prosecutor’s office, a plea deal where I would take a probation before a judgment deal, so technically no convictions…
Taya Graham: Okay, that’s good.
Jake Burdett: …But still on probation for three years with 100 hours of community service.
Taya Graham: Wow.
Jake Burdett: Which I mean, of course, that’s better than two five year felony charges, but –
Taya Graham: Of course.
Jake Burdett: …I don’t want to be on probation for three years and it opened my… I always knew as a progressive activist that the criminal justice system is very much rigged. But now living through this firsthand, it’s opened my eyes to how it’s rigged in that they can just throw such harsh penalties at you, and even if you’re moderately confident that you’re going to win the case, if they offer you a probation deal, it traps you into taking the deal because it’s such a big risk in challenging it. Then you’re in a contract for three years and one little slip up can get me the original charges, essentially. So yeah, I feel like people in the justice system, they act like you’re given a choice, but it’s not much of a choice. You’re trapped into taking it just because what you’re facing is so monumental.
Taya Graham: So, Jake, I know you’re involved politically in progressive circles. What message do you think this prosecution sends to activists?
Jake Burdett: I mean, I definitely think that they were trying to make an example out of me, both Andy Harris and the state prosecutor’s office, of if there’s a dispute where the people in power don’t like how you’re protesting, or you’re agitating them a little too much, you know whose side the law is going to be on. The law is going to protect the people in power. It’s not going to protect the citizens. It really sends a chilling message and it’s going to make people maybe think twice before they participate in their next direct action. Certainly, I just participated in another direct action recently against Dutch Ruppersberger, around Medicare for All at his DC office, where they don’t have the two-party consent state. But in the moment, I almost had a PTSD-like type thing of just the flashbacks coming back.
Taya Graham: Of freezing, right?
Jake Burdett: Yeah.
Taya Graham: Freezing, being scared to even pull out your phone, I’m sure.
Jake Burdett: And I realized in the moment, okay, I’m not going to do any more direct actions after this until my probation is over, because it’s just too risky. And part of me wants to not do that because that’s exactly what the prosecutor and what Andy Harris want.
Taya Graham: Exactly.
Jake Burdett: But then the other part of me is like, well, it’s also my freedom on the line and other people’s freedom on the line, because… Are you willing to go to jail for your cause? It’s a big thing to commit to and most people aren’t going to do that. So, that’s definitely, I think, the people in power’s goal.
Taya Graham: One interesting development this week that shows a stark contrast to Davit’s decision is what happened in Baltimore. Seven student activists at Johns Hopkins University, protesting a private police force, they were arrested this week. But Baltimore prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, yesterday said publicly she would not prosecute the seven activists that were arrested. Jake, what do you think about her decision?
Jake Burdett: I think she made the right decision. She recognizes that sometimes the police might abuse their authority and that legality is not necessarily always morality. Sometimes the law is not right.
Taya Graham: That’s a great point.
Jake Burdett: The JHU situation is something I’ve been following for a long time. In fact, I was collecting petition signatures to override that earlier today. Yeah, I think private police is something everyone should be concerned about. It’s not just JHU, it might start at JHU, but suddenly every private institution wants their own private police force. If the students themselves don’t want that on their campus, they have every right to protest that.
I’m glad that the state prosecutor recognized that the Baltimore police made the wrong decision by cracking down on them peacefully protesting like that. Even the crackdown itself was pretty bad. I mean, you had the police misgendering some of the protestors and just being generally very disrespectful towards them.
Taya Graham: I want to thank my guest, Jake Burdett, for joining me and my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. And I want to thank you for joining us at the Police Accountability Report on The Real News Network.
Part of this story originally appeared as a segment in Battleground Baltimore on Oct. 29, 2021.
Baltimore City’s Board of Estimates voted to approve an additional $759,500 to continue the usage of ShotSpotter, gunshot detection technology that uses artificial intelligence to identify gunshots and reports the location of those gunshots.
The vote on extending the city contract with ShotSpotter surveillance technology was deferred last week by the Board of Estimates, after City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey and activists such as DeRay Mckesson challenged the technology’s efficacy and called attention to concerns about its surveillance capabilities.
Mayor Scott, who very vocally opposed the use of an evidence-gathering surveillance plane last year, said he is “the biggest skeptic” of ShotSpotter, but approved it anyway.
Mckesson spoke out against the renewed contract last week, tweeting that ShotSpotter “is not a crime-fighting tool, has no scientific validity, & is not a value-add,” and encouraged Mayor Brandon Scott and Comptroller Bill Henry, who are on the Board of Estimates, to defer the vote.
“On their website, @ShotSpotter claims that they are responsible for a 15% reduction in shootings from the prior year. What’s their source? It’s the BPD Crime Reduction Plan that does not support this claim at all. Again, we don’t need ShotSpotter,” Mckesson tweeted. “By delaying the vote, you’ll be able to see more data that shows that @ShotSpotter is a liability in communities and not a value-add. Their tool is *not* a crime-fighting tool and, again, has not been proven to hold up their claims at all. Please delay the vote.”
The vote was deferred by one week. Councilperson Ryan Dorsey criticized the technology after last week’s deferral: “Shotspotter is a joke. It has delivered no better outcomes for Baltimore, and will continue to do so for as long as we waste money on it,” Dorsey tweeted.
ShotSpotter has been in use in Baltimore since 2018 and the approval of the $759,000 to extend the contracts put the total amount of money spent by the city on ShotSpotter at a little over $3 million.
The technology has been challenged because it has the capability to record people’s conversations, and, as Vice reported earlier this year, it has been alleged that ShotSpotter has changed its AI-generated results. In a shooting case in Chicago, Vice reported that ShotSpotter analysts, at the request of the police, changed a noise ShotSpotter categorized as fireworks to gunshots. Months later, Vice reported, the ShotSpotter changed the location of the supposed gunshots—which were initially categorized as fireworks, Vice reported—to put those “gunshots” closer to a suspect’s car.
“ShotSpotter categorically denies any allegations that we manipulate any details of an incident at the request of the police,” a spokesperson for ShotSpotter told Battleground Baltimore over email.
After a week of deliberation, the technology was unanimously approved by the city’s spending board.
Mayor Scott, who very vocally opposed the use of an evidence-gathering surveillance plane last year, said he is “the biggest skeptic” of ShotSpotter, but approved it anyway.
“I am the biggest skeptic of ShotSpotter,” Scott said. “But saying that and also knowing that this is the final renewal for this contract and, as I have already directed CitiStat to do an in-depth analysis of this tool… This really for me is about getting to people who are the victims of gun violence who no one is calling for.”
Scott explained that he intends to use the gunshot location data generated by ShotSpotter for the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. The data, Scott said, can be used to figure out which communities in Baltimore are enduring the most gunfire.
The implication by Herzog and others in favor of ShotSpotter is that the technology captures significant amounts of gunfire that is not being called in to 911 by residents. What was not explained by police, however, is how many of those detections were actually gunfire rather than, for example, fireworks or car backfiring—two loud city noises that ShotSpotter regularly detects.
“We have the opportunity to leverage the technology in a multi-agency, multi-pronged way,” Shantay Jackson, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, said.
Baltimore City Council President Nick Mosby said he is “very supportive” of ShotSpotter being used “in the crime fight.”
City Comptroller Henry alluded to some of the concerns about the technology’s efficiency, saying that he “follows the conceptual” about ShotSpotter’s potential, but hoped it can recover more evidence that can be used to prosecute shootings and homicides.
The Chicago Office of Inspector General, for example, released a report earlier this year that showed that an examination of 50,000 alerts from ShotSpotter in 2020 resulted in evidence of a gun-related crime just 9% of the time.
“I actually wasn’t a skeptic of the program when it was proposed, I thought it was an intriguing prospect, but I wanted to actually see some metrics,” Henry said. “I wanted to see some results.”
During today’s Board of Estimates meeting, the Baltimore Police made the case for ShotSpotter.
“This is an important investigative tool for the [police department]. It’s been around since 2018,” Eric Melancon, chief of staff for the Baltimore Police Commissioner, argued. “It uses a series of audio sensors to alert our officers of gunfire. That’s improved our response time to these incidents.”
Lieutenant Colonel John Herzog of the Baltimore Police Department stressed that 88% of the detections by ShotSpotter had no corresponding 911 call. The implication by Herzog and others in favor of ShotSpotter is that the technology captures significant amounts of gunfire that is not being called in to 911 by residents.
What was not explained by police, however, is how many of those detections were actually gun fire rather than, for example, fireworks or cars backfiring—two loud city noises that ShotSpotter regularly detects.
McKesson noted that the 88% number was intentionally deceiving. “This is wildly disappointing. And doesn’t bode well for a deliberative bodies [sic] that pretends to believe in data,” he tweeted after the funding was approved. “During the presentation today, the @BaltimorePolice openly misled the BOE and all of their members just sat and accepted it. We deserve better.”
Calls to “defund the police” reverberated throughout communities across the US in the summer of 2020, when millions took to the streets to protest a brutal, unchecked, and racist system of police violence and control. Then came the backlash. Since the initial push by activists and protestors to get the public to consider alternatives to endlessly increasing police spending, a forceful chorus has pushed in the opposite direction, demanding more funding for more police who should be given more power over our lives. “Defund the police” has been criticized for being not only a “bad slogan” but a political pipe dream that fails to reckon with the messy realities of maintaining “public safety.”
However, as Geo Maher argues in his latest book,A World without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, America’s policing system is a demonstrably terrible way to keep people and communities safe. In fact, Maher writes, police “don’t prevent violence, and they don’t make any measurable contribution to public safety… The police have wormed their way into the very foundations of American society and work every day to make themselves—and their bloated budgets—seem indispensable.” In this special conversation for the TRNN podcast, Police Accountability Report Host Stephen Janis speaks with Maher about his groundbreaking assessment of American policing and the practical necessity of collectively devising better models for communal safety.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post Production: Stephen Janis, Stephen Frank
The arrest and incarceration of New Mexico resident Chris Dixon provide yet another stark example of the Kafkaesque nature of contemporary police power. Dixon was arrested after police tired to force him to consent to an illegal search of the business where he worked. But the actions of the officer, coupled with the fallout Dixon faced, show that American law enforcement deliberately wields its arbitrary and heavy-handed power to sow chaos and erode the rights of the people.
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today, we’re going to do so by highlighting how this encounter captured on video with a New Mexico cop led to the illegal jailing of one of our viewers. But it’s not just the seeming miscarriage of justice we’ll be covering, we’ll also take a close look at how officers often use arbitrary power to override the constitutional rights of citizens, and in doing so, erode the very foundations of democracy itself.
But before we get started, I want you to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course, you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter, and you might notice there’s a patreon link to donate below. So if you want to, and if you can, there’s some extra there for the PAR family. Okay. Now we’ve gotten that out of the way.
Now, on this show, we obviously highlight bad arrests and scenarios where cops simply make bad choice., But a video sent to us by a viewer in Artesia, New Mexico, highlights another factor of police overreach that warrants attention. It’s a video of an encounter between an Artesia, New Mexico, cop and a viewer named Chris Dixon.
Dixon was working in a pawn shop when police arrived looking for the owner. The police had a warrant for the owner’s arrest, but not a search warrant of the premises. So they made an unusual request. They asked Chris to give them permission to search without a proper warrant. And this is where the example of an unusual type of police overreach occurs because Mr. Dixon was faced with a dicey dilemma: He himself was on parole, a fact that the cop seems to use to put Mr. Dixon in an even more precarious predicament, and get him to concede to an illegal search, or go to jail. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker 1: Chris, nobody wants anything from you today. We just want to get Kevin taken care of. Hey, relax, brother. You’re fine.
Speaker 2: So you don’t care if I go look just to make sure Kevin’s not in there.
Chris Dixon: Kevin is not in the pawn shop.
Speaker 2: So I can go look?
Chris Dixon: It’s not my place to give any kind of consent.
Speaker 2: You live there?
Chris Dixon: I don’t live in the pawn shop. I live in my house. My house is an apartment.
Speaker 2: That inside the pawn shop?
Chris Dixon: [inaudible] –
Speaker 2: So can I look in your apartment?
Chris Dixon: You can look in my apartment but there’s nobody –
Speaker 1: Hey Chris, right here. Right.
Chris Dixon: Where’s my wife at?
Speaker 1: She was walking over there. We’ll let you go over there in just a minute. We just want to make sure everything is safe first. Okay?
Chris Dixon: Can I leave with my wife please?
Speaker 1: Hey, just a second. Okay. Chris, you know me.
Chris Dixon: I know.
Speaker 1: All right. You know I’m not going to feed you no bullshit. We just want Kevin, dude. That’s all we want.
Chris Dixon: Hey, well, I’m not involved in no –
Speaker 1: Oh, I know you’re not, dude because your name didn’t come up until I heard them say, Chris Dixon, I ain’t seen you ass in forever man. Which is a good thing, right?
Chris Dixon: Look, look, I’m healthy –
Speaker 1: No, you do. You look like you’re clean, man.
Chris Dixon: I am. I’ve been going to church and all. Give my life to God now.
Speaker 1: That’s what you need to do brother. That’s what you need to do.
Chris Dixon: I got married and am doing the right thing, man.
Speaker 1: Well good. So then you got nothing to worry about, right?
Chris Dixon: Can I please leave?
Speaker 1: Here, just one second. Okay.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But that’s not where the story ends. Hardly. Because the cops kept pushing him, offering to give him a positive reference for compromising the rights of his employer. Bear in mind, Dixon was not accused of committing a crime. The police were searching for the owner of the property, but instead of focusing on the perpetrator, they hoisted the entire burden of upholding the law on Dixon, and they offer to reward him for compromising it. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker 1: You’re not under arrest, but for right now, I’d like for you to stick right here, okay?
Taya Graham: I don’t want to be that [crosstalk] –
Speaker 1: Well, I know you don’t want to be here, Chris and I don’t want to be bothering you, but we need to try to get this stuff resolved so we can get things going. Okay? If Kevin would just come out, man we’d leave and let everybody do their thing. Let you get back to doing work, or whatever it was you were doing. It don’t matter, bro. I know you’re not trying to get in no trouble because I know you don’t want to go back.
Chris Dixon: No, I’m not trying to go back.
Speaker 1: How long did you go back to… How long were you up for this last time?
Chris Dixon: It was almost five years.
Speaker 1: Five years? Why would you come back here?
Chris Dixon: Well, my mom needed my help. She had a stroke.
Speaker 1: Okay. Now, that’s respectable. A lot of guys that come back here, man they come back for the wrong reasons and end up getting in trouble. Chris, you and I both know that.
Chris Dixon: That’s why I stay away from everybody. I’m not out on the street no more or nothing. I work and I stay home. Thank you. That’s it. There’s no [inaudible] or nothing right there. I promise.
Speaker 1: Relax. You’re cooperating, which is a first for you in some things with law enforcement. You know that? It’s appreciated too.
Chris Dixon: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yes or no. Are you going to unlock the door or give us the keys to unlock it? Because if not, it’s getting booted. We’re going to damage your door. So either show me the key to unlock the damn door or it’s getting booted.
Chris Dixon: I have no keys to that.
Speaker 2: How the hell you get in?
Speaker 3: Why did you lock it? That’s my question.
Chris Dixon: It automatically locks on its own.
Speaker 3: It automagically locks.
Speaker 2: You got a front door pad or anything?
Chris Dixon: The front door and the back open by itself and it always stays locked. I have no key to that. Being honest with you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Because he keeps asking –
Speaker 2: Okay, here’s your problem. You lied a couple times. You didn’t cooperate in the beginning, so I really don’t believe what you’re saying. So just don’t bother talking because –
Speaker 1: He keeps asking if he’s free to go.
Speaker 2: No, he’s not free to go. Because if he’s in there, he’s going to jail. [crosstalk].
Speaker 1: Okay. Let me go explain that to him real quick.
Hey.
Chris Dixon: – In our apartment.
Speaker 1: Okay, Chris.
Chris Dixon: Hold up. If you look, we go in there and that’s where we get dressed at.
Speaker 1: Chris, this is the one thing we need to talk about, okay? And you know me, I’ve always been pretty fair with you. Have I not?
Chris Dixon: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay. I don’t want anything to happen with you.
Chris Dixon: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If he’s inside there…
Chris Dixon: He’s not inside that building, I swear.
Speaker 1: Okay. But right now though –
Chris Dixon: Yeah, y’all –
Speaker 1: …We can’t verify that. I want to believe you, Chris. I really do. I want to believe you.
Chris Dixon: I’m on Scott’s shoes, on God and everything I love.
Speaker 1: So I would love to tell Lorenzo that you cooperated with us. All right.
Chris Dixon: Well you could.
Speaker 1: I’ll make that phone call for you. If everything works out in your favor and you cooperated with us, I will call him personally for you and tell him that you cooperated with us during this, because that looks good on you. Does it not?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: So you have a man trying to do the right thing. Preserve the rights of his fellow citizen while complying with the law. A man who has righted his life after youthful run-ins with law enforcement, and who was forced into choosing between his hard fought progress for a better life, and knowingly compromising the constitutional rights of another. And when he chooses what many would consider the honorable response, police locked him away for 57 days. Let’s watch what happens next.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker 1: Well, here’s the thing –
Speaker 2: …Fucking lied to me. When people lie to me and we’re doing shit like this –
Speaker 1: If you want him to go –
Speaker 2: …They go to fucking jail.
Speaker 1: Okay. If you want him to go then he’ll go. I’m just trying to play that other side of things. I’m not trying to take any decision making process away from you at all, and you know that. I’m not ever going to take that away from you.
Speaker 2: You’re trying to talk me out of taking him to fucking jail. He’s a lying piece of shit.
Speaker 1: Do you want him to go? Then he’ll go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he needs to fucking go [crosstalk].
Speaker 1: All right. Then he’s going to go for [REO]. This is the last time I do this shit.
Hey Chris, go ahead and turn around for me, man.
Chris Dixon: Why? What did I do?
Speaker 1: I’m going to arrest you for REO.
Chris Dixon: For REO, what’s that?
Speaker 1: He can explain it all to you here in just a second. Resisting, invading, obstructing –
Chris Dixon: I didn’t do nothing wrong though.
Speaker 4: Go and turn around, Chris.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Turn around Chris.
Chris Dixon: But I didn’t nothing wrong though.
Speaker 1: Turn around, Chris.
Speaker 4: Just turn around.
Chris Dixon: I didn’t do nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: Just relax for a minute. Just relax. Just relax.
Chris Dixon: Babe, I didn’t do nothing wrong.
Speaker 4: You’re on me. Back up.
Speaker 1: I’ll explain everything to her too and everything. Chris. This was his decision over there, Chris.
Speaker 4: Give us a minute. Okay?
Speaker 1: All right.
Chris Dixon: I didn’t do nothing wrong though. That’s the guy we check in with, right there.
Speaker 4: Just hang tight, okay.
Chris Dixon: [inaudible].
Speaker 1: Chris, Chris, Sergeant [Centerfield] will explain to you here in just a second.
Chris Dixon: I’m going to go back.
Speaker 1: Put him in the backseat of mine I guess, right now.
Chris Dixon: [Inaudible] wrong.
Speaker 1: I’ll talk to you here in just a second, okay?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But before we talk to Mr. Dixon about the event that led up to his arrest and the consequences for him, I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, who is looking into the case. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So Stephen, you’ve reached out to the police department. What did you ask?
Stephen Janis: I wanted to know why they arrested him. It didn’t make any sense to me. He wasn’t a judge. He wasn’t a police officer. It wasn’t his place to have to make a judgment on a warrant, or whether or not a warrant was legal, or whether not cops have the ability to enter. In a sense, when you think about it, they were putting the burden on him of an illegal search, where they could go back and say, yeah, well he said it was okay, if it was illegal, and really putting him in a criminally liable place. So instead they just arrest him, which is even worse. So really, none of it made sense to me. I asked them to make sense of it. I will let you know what I hear.
Taya Graham: Now what happened to the charges against Mr. Dixon?
Stephen Janis: Well, once a prosecutor saw this case and how flimsy it was and how illegal it was, they dropped the charges. The charges were dropped. The problem is, he’d already spent 57 days in jail, so it really didn’t matter. And this showed you how police power is so dangerous, because it didn’t matter if they were making an illegal arrest, he had to suffer with the consequences, not the police.
Taya Graham: Now we’ve talked often about the disruptive power of the police. How would you characterize the officer’s behavior in this video and what it says about police power in this country?
Stephen Janis: Well, what the police… You can see the absolute impetus for arbitrary police power. The point of it is to be arbitrary. The point is to violate the law. The point is to put people like Mr. Dixon in predicaments that have no good resolution, because that’s what makes their power hegemonic. That it can’t be reasoned with or otherwise interpreted through the law, or come from a source of laws or adjudicated laws. It’s simply whatever they decide. And that’s what makes them powerful, and that’s what this is an example of.
Taya Graham: And now, we’re joined by the man who had to deal with this disturbing challenge, both to his rights and to his future, Chris Dixon. Mr. Dixon, thank you for joining me.
Chris Dixon: And thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure too.
Taya Graham: So why did the police approach you?
Chris Dixon: They were there for a warrant for another individual who owned the RV park and pawn shop and stuff, and me and my wife were employed there and we were working at the pawn shop. So he had some pretty bad charges, and when they came to go, and I guess apprehend him and arrest him, my wife had walked out with the dog to use the restroom, and then they called my name out. And then, when I went out there, that’s when they ran into me and then they approached me and stuff.
Taya Graham: What are we seeing in the video? What were the police trying to get you to do?
Chris Dixon: Oh, they were trying to allow me to give them consent to go into the building to search a building without my consent. It didn’t even belong to me. The building didn’t even belong to me, so I couldn’t give them consent to search something that doesn’t belong to me. So they thought just because I walked out of there, that I could let them back in. But it had a business door and a lock, it stays locked on the outside, but unlocked on the inside. And even if I did want to provide them a way to get in, I couldn’t anyway, because I didn’t have no access to that.
Taya Graham: How did the officers respond when you said, well, I literally can’t let you back in because I don’t have the keys. How did they respond to those facts?
Chris Dixon: Yeah, I told them that and they were getting pretty pissed off at me.
Stephen Janis: And the lying.
Chris Dixon: Yeah, thought that we were lying to them and stuff, and pretty much demanded me to allow them to go in. And I showed them, look, these are my keys… I even pulled my keys out of my pocket. I said, look, I have no key to get in. And the officer snatched the keys out of my hand to go and try to, yeah, let himself in.
Taya Graham: So the police said, things will go good for you if you cooperate. What did you take that to mean?
Chris Dixon: At that time, I wasn’t really educated on my constitutional rights and what I could and could not do, because in this small community, you do what the police tell you to do or you go to jail, pretty much. So I was uneducated. So yeah, I feel like now, since that I educated myself, and I went back, and the charges have been dropped, yeah. I see that they had violated my rights, and they really did violate me for really no reason.
Taya Graham: Did the police actually have a warrant to search, and why would they bother you if they did?
Chris Dixon: They didn’t have a warrant to actually search the place, they had a warrant for the individual. So they had to wait to get their warrant signed by a judge before they could enter into that premises. That’s why they kept me there, and they had illegally detained me. Because I kept on asking them, can I leave? Can I leave? They would not let me leave. I’m like, well, why are you still holding me? And then he said, well, now the issue has changed. If he’s in there… Which they already knew that he wasn’t in there already and they said, he’s in there. You’re going to go to jail for this and that. Which, I was still on probation at the time. So yeah, they had kind of a little control thing over me at that time.
Taya Graham: What were you charged with, and were you arrested?
Chris Dixon: I was arrested. They charged me with resisting, evading or obstructing an officer. Which, if you watch the video you could see that I was totally cooperative with them. You know what I mean? But I just did not allow them to go to the building, and I could not give them access to get into the building. They eventually blew the doors off the pawn shop, went in there, and they seen that he was not in there and they should have released me. Because the whole time they kept on telling me, well, if he’s not in there, you’re good to go. We’re not here for you. You’re going to be good to go. And at the end, they totally lied to me, and I wound up being in jail for 57 days.
Taya Graham: So how did this disrupt your life to be incarcerated for 57 days? How did this affect you emotionally, or even financially?
Chris Dixon: All the way around. My whole life. My whole life has been affected by this. We lived there. We worked for room and board and a little bit of money on the side to get the pawn shop going for the RV park. So when I got arrested, they wound up throwing my wife out. We lost everything.
Stephen Janis: And homeless on the street.
Chris Dixon: My wife became homeless on the streets. I was in jail. I had no way to… We totally lost our whole life right there. And we had to start all over from scratch when I got out.
Taya Graham: So what actually happened to the man that they were trying to serve the warrant on?
Chris Dixon: They found him in another residence behind the pawn shop. Not in the pawn shop, but at his own residence in an office where they initially tried to go find him in the first place. And the lady that was there that was working for him, that is also his girlfriend, that also had the bad charges on him at the time, she was the one right there in the office who did not allow the cops to come in either, until they finally got a search warrant and they searched the pawn shop first. And then, they went back into the back where the residence were, into a whole ‘nother trailer, and they searched the trailer and they found him in there.
Taya Graham: Do you feel that the officers were using the fact you were on parole to influence you or manipulate you? Why does the officer say, “I didn’t like the old Chris Dixon?” I feel like there was a lot going on there.
Chris Dixon: He kind of tried to lift me up, I guess. I feel like I was really, at that time being manipulated in the fact that he was just acting like he was my friend, just to try to get information out of me, or try to make it look like, oh yeah. You’re doing the right thing, this and that. And then at the end, turn around and put handcuffs on me and throw me in jail. After he said he was going to call my probation officer and let him know that he had positive contact with police, and try to really butter me up pretty much. And I was like, cool.
I’ve never had that before. When I was younger, yeah, I got in a lot of trouble here in town when I was younger, being wild and being a teenager, and just getting into trouble and stuff. I’ve paid for the mistakes. I paid my price to society for what I’ve done and everything, and now when I was trying to actually do right and change my life and do the right thing, and it just gets all shattered out, thrown out the window, over rights being violated.
Taya Graham: You worked hard to change your life. You paid your debt to society. Five years incarcerated. How hard is it to get out of the criminal justice system once you’re pulled in? It seems like you were finally getting back on track, and then you’re pulled in for a very superficial charge.
Chris Dixon: For me, I’ve been in and out, incarcerated, quite a bit, a lot of part of my life from my mistakes. And then also now, since I’ve been educated, I’ve seen a lot of times where I’ve been incarcerated where they actually have violated my constitutional rights. Because when you’re uneducated and you don’t know, they can keep you in that cycle and stuff. But once you educate yourself, and you go and pay your debt to society, and you start to just try to do right and get on the right track, they’re always going to look at you as that one person that… Hey, there’s a criminal. Hey, there’s a drug dealer, or hey, there’s that person.
They’re always going to have that label over your head, especially in a small community like this. And so they’re always going to be right there harassing you and trying to catch you on anything. They think you’re an easy target, and so they’re going to keep going after you. And that’s the cycle that is always right here in Artesia, New Mexico. The same cycle all the time. And it’s really hard to get out of that until you…
You just kind of pull yourself out of that environment. That’s the only way it’s going to be able to change where you’re not going to keep getting stuck in that cycle. Because every time I go to jail, it’s the same people in jail all the time, and it’s a revolving door. It’s the same people, same people. Violation, probation, anything they can get you on, especially after you’re off probation and stuff.
I’ve completed all my probation, parole and stuff, in jail and stuff and so now since I’m free, I have no more of that over my head. It makes it a lot easier, and knowing your rights make it a lot easier too so that way the cops just can’t come up to you and say, give me your ID. And trying to just be in a policing state, which this is not.
Taya Graham: So what is happening with the charges against you? What is your status?
Chris Dixon: I think they realized that they had messed up. Because they really have no evidence to stand on and if you look at the criminal complaint, it’s nothing but lies. You can count the lies in there compared to the body cam. You can see exactly where they lied at. They asked my wife if they could search the building. Well, my wife told them no, but in the criminal complaint, they said, yeah, she gave them consent. Well if she would’ve given consent, she would’ve had me open the door for them to come in. But no, she didn’t. So they let her move on down. So obviously they lied to manipulate the system to try to make an arrest.
Taya Graham: So why did you stand up for your rights? Having a record makes you vulnerable, and you know how hard the criminal justice system can come down on you, and you knew it could be used against you. Why did you stand up to them?
Chris Dixon:Well, after I got released and stuff, I just got tired of being bullied by the police all the time. Getting bullied, thinking that they have control over me. And then once I educated myself and I realized, hey, look, these guys actually work for us. They really don’t have that much authority over us until we break the law. Once we break the law, then that’s what gives them the authority over us. For them just to come and try to harass an innocent citizen, it’s not right. They need to be trained differently, and they really need to get their egos out of the way so they can do their job better.
Taya Graham: This case reveals an important truism about America’s law enforcement-industrial complex that is more profound than it seems on the surface. Once you are in the system, it never truly lets you go. Yes, it’s a stark example of how fixated the system is on keeping people in the grips of our carceral state. And yes, it is another tale of law enforcement overreach writ large.
There is something even more intriguing about Chris Dixon’s dilemma in the way the officer behaved. An aspect of the officer’s actions that need to be unpacked and better understood. That’s because what we saw in the beginning of the video is something that is often written off as cops simply behaving badly, but is actually an example of an extraordinary anti-democratic impulse that courses through the veins of our entire law enforcement body.
What do I mean? Well, it has to do with power and the inherent limitations on it, allegedly woven into the fabric of our democracy. The idea that our constitutional republic was created to prevent power from being wielded arbitrarily. That our laws and rights could not be annulled at the behest or the whims of an individual. That there were checks and balances designed to protect us all from any sort of arbitrary despotism. But what we have witnessed time and time again on this show is police officers chipping away at these rights through one bad incident after another.
In fact, we have seen over and over again how police seem to contravene the idea that power should never be arbitrary. In a sense, American policing, as it is currently constituted, espouses just the opposite. They are the purveyors of arbitrary power. And as we’ve witnessed over the course of the past few decades, the way these powers have been exercised has become more and more extreme.
But why does this matter? Who cares about a couple bad arrests, or if someone ends up in jail for a few weeks? Why does it matter if cops seem to thrive over overreach? Isn’t that just the reality of being a cop? Well, let me explain. I think the arbitrary expansion of police powers is an example of a phenomenon that is more corrosive than it seems on the surface. I think the reason cops have been given so much discretion to violate our rights is purposeful. It’s clear that the ability for officers to make up laws on the spot is a symptom of a broader disease that has infected our democracy.
Put simply, it is the full expression of latent fascist impulses that find their form imprinted on a badge. The culmination of all the forces of inequality and economic hardship that can only be maintained and preserved through arbitrary power. In a sense, it is the best tool in the toolkits of the elites who don’t like democracy or accountability, and must erode our rights, one unlawful order at a time, in order to get rid of it.
Just consider the war on drugs. The now 50 year cop-empowerment program that has led to more destruction and chaos than any other government policy I can think of. A recent study reveals just how much the idea had little to do with drugs, and more about suppressing rights and spreading the aforementioned latent fascism that is the topic of this show.
It was a study commission by the world renowned Johns Hopkins shortly after our city state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, stopped prosecuting drug possession arrests. The policy was met with stiff resistance from both the police department and police union officials. But Mosby said mass drug arrests were an ineffective policing strategy that led to unjust arrests and unnecessary incarceration. But most importantly, concluded that making drug arrests did little to make the city safer.
Well, it turns out, she was right. The study found that dropping hundreds of cases did not increase crime. In fact, of the 700 people spared prison due to the strategy, only seven reoffended, and the report also noted the lack of drug prosecution did not lead to more complaints from the public. In other words, corralling people and placing them in cages for the possession of a substance actually has nothing to do with public safety. What a surprise.
But think about the implications of this study on the horrifying war on drugs. Think about what it says about the billions of dollars spent and the millions of lives destroyed by the fascist policies fashioned at the behest of this so-called war. Think of the human cost, the families separated, the property seized, the rights annulled, all in the name of an unjust policy that made no one safer, but instead established poor communities and turned cops into super spreaders of viral fascism.
And just a side note, if the war on drugs was effective, would we be facing an epidemic of opioid overdose deaths? Last year, over 93,000 people died from drug overdoses. Does it sound like the war on drugs is working to you? It’s a startling revelation that starts with a single idea: That a person empowered with a badge can chew up our rights and spit them out in the name of a war on the people they purport to serve. That police officers are not just the arbitrators of laws, but inventors of them. A psychological suppression force equipped with the alarming power to criminalize space, seize our freedoms, and conscript our rights, at the behest of a war on substances.
It is a disturbing rebuke of the breathless embrace of drug war. Warrior cops and police heroics touted by politicians in the mainstream media. A startling experiment that proved the corrupt portrayals of poor communities as safe harbors for criminals and drugs is just a purely fictional myth created to sustain the onward march of unjust power, an assault no less on the very foundation of our democracy. It’s also the reason we will keep reporting on police and their use of arbitrary power, because your rights and ours are worth preserving.
I want to thank our guest Chris Dixon for joining us and for sharing his story with us. Thank you, Chris. And of course, I want to thank intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis:Thank you for having me, Taya. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And of course, I want to thank friend of the show, Noli Dee, for her support. Thanks, Noli D. And of course, a very special thank you to our patreons. We really appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have any evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us.
You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course, you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter and Facebook. And please like and comment. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And we do have a patron link pinned in the comments below if you feel inspired to donate. Please consider it. We don’t run ads or take corporate dollars, so anything you can spare is truly appreciated.
My name is Taya Graham, and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please, be safe out there.
As of last week, all Baltimore City employees are required to receive at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine or get weekly COVID-19 tests if they want to continue working for the city. Reflecting a troubling national trend that perpetuates the ongoing public health crisis under the guise of “freedom,” Baltimore City’s police union is speaking out against Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s vaccination mandate.
Organized opposition to vaccination mandates for Baltimore police emerged back in August when Baltimore City’s Fraternal Order of Police (FOP3) and the Baltimore City firefighters’ unions released a joint statement responding to Mayor Scott’s policy.
“It is our desire to remain engaged in collective bargaining over the implementation of this policy,” the Aug. 31 statement said. “We look forward to working amicably with members of Mayor Scott’s administration to ensure this policy and its associated procedures are implemented fairly and equitably while protecting our member’s [sic] personal concern and autonomy.”
Earlier this month, [Baltimore City’s Fraternal Order of Police] President Mike Mancuso encouraged police officers not to reveal their vaccination status to the city and continued the argument that this was about workers’ rights.
The police union’s stance has not eased since then. Earlier this month, FOP3 President Mike Mancuso encouraged police officers not to reveal their vaccination status to the city and continued the argument that this was about workers’ rights.
“Until the city responds to our right to bargain these issues, or the courts intervene, I suggest you do nothing in regard to revealing your vaccination status as it is outlined in the city’s policy,” Mancuso wrote to police union members. “Obviously, this is an individual choice on how each of you handles this situation. Whatever choice you make FOP3 and I will be there to support you in your decision.”
Protesting vaccines to prop up police power
Police unions around the country have been fighting vaccination mandates. On Monday, Oct. 25, the New York Police Department union, the Police Benevolent Association of New York, sued the city over its mandate, which says that by Friday, Oct. 29, all of New York City’s workers (including police and firefighters) are required to have at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The same day the NYPD union’s lawsuit was filed, a few thousand workers—including a large number of police—marched over the Brooklyn Bridge in protest, recalling the infamous 1992 NYPD “cop riot.” Among a sea of American flags were a few “Don’t Tread On Me” flags as the group of cops and anti-vaxxers shouted, “We will not comply.” One sign among the crowd read, “Workers are Essential, Mandates are Not.”
Politicians such as Maryland’s Gov. Larry Hogan have falsely claimed police officers are “under attack” and being “defunded.” But elected officials’ inability to get police to vaccinate themselves so that they don’t spread a deadly disease to a populace they interact with daily is evidence of just how much power police officers actually wield. In Portland, for example, police were simply exempted from a vaccination mandate that applied to all other city workers.
“We’ve heard this story before,” Esther Wang wrote in TheNew Republic earlier this month. “After a year of protests and calls to defund the police, law enforcement officials and police unions repeated on loop that demoralized cops were leaving their jobs en masse, a narrative, coupled with misleading crime statistics and laundered through media outlets, that served only to prop up the punitive power of the police. The refusal to abide by vaccine mandates should be seen as yet another attempt to entrench police authority.”
In Baltimore, no other unions that include City employees have publicly opposed the vaccination mandate.
There has long been a debate regarding whether or not law enforcement should be considered “workers” at all. Kristian Williams argues in the 2004 book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America that “police unions aren’t unions” because they “mostly reflect the interests of the institution (the police department) rather than those of the working class.” In answer to labor’s enduring question “Which side are you on?,” it’s worth remembering that police have historically been the ones arresting striking workers and protecting passage of scab workers across picket lines.
“Police associations provide a stronghold for the most reactionary aspects of the profession—elements that the command hierarchy is often at pains to disavow,” William writes. “When the police command cannot, for legal or political reasons, resist demands for civilian oversight, for more diversity in the department, or for redress in particular cases, the union can defend the departmental status quo.”
In Baltimore, no other unions that include City employees have publicly opposed the vaccination mandate.
According to WBAL TV, 51% of Baltimore Police are fully vaccinated. That’s 1,466 of the city’s 2,881 police. Los Angeles and New York police officers’ vaccination rates are both around 70%.
“They… seem only to despise us.”
Mayor Scott has stressed communication with FOP3 about the vaccination mandate and collective bargaining, and other council members have released statements encouraging vaccination. True to form, though, City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey didn’t mince words.
“I’ve never known the FOP to have an interest in the health and welfare of Baltimore City or its people. They are led by and overwhelmingly represent people who don’t live here, and seem only to despise us,” Dorsey wrote in a statement last week provided to Battleground Baltimore and other local news outlets. “They contribute to and benefit from our city’s epidemic of violence. Why would anybody expect better of them with regard to a global pandemic?”
Throughout 2020, many residents called attention to Baltimore Police officers not wearing masks despite the department’s procedures and guidance requiring N95 masks to be worn while officers are on call.
By April 2020, a month after COVID-19 precautions began, 24 members of the Baltimore Police Department had tested positive for COVID-19. That same month, there were two high-profile incidents of police misconduct related to the pandemic.
On April 8, 2020, a public housing resident recorded a Baltimore Police sergeant intentionally coughing on people after someone greeted him with, “Hey Officer Friendly with the cherry cheeks.” The name of that sergeant, who was suspended for coughing on the citizens he swore to protect and serve, was never released by the police.
On April 19, 2020, Baltimore Police officer Andre Pringle allegedly grabbed 25-year-old Brandon Walker, a Baltimore man who was not wearing his mask and refused to put it on when he entered a supermarket. Pringle shoved Walker out of the supermarket and then slammed him onto the concrete ground face-first. Walker was charged with assault, disorderly conduct, failure to obey a lawful order, resisting arrest, and trespassing, but those charges were later dropped. Pringle was charged by the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office with second-degree assault and misconduct in office. Court records show he has a court hearing related to the charges in February of next year.
COVID-19 is the leading cause of death for law enforcement officers in the United States.
In July 2020, in-service training of Baltimore Police was temporarily suspended after four trainees and two staff members tested positive for COVID-19.
In December 2020, civilian police employee Katiza Melette died from complications from COVID-19.
In January 2021, then-Baltimore Police Sergeant James Rhoden used his influence to get the then-harder-to-obtain COVID-19 vaccine for a family member. Rhoden is no longer with the police department.
Nearly 80% of Baltimore Police officers do not live in Baltimore City. Most Baltimore cops (many of them unvaccinated) return to their homes somewhere else in the state where they can and may spread the virus.
According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, Baltimore City is one of the state’s six counties whose transmission rate is considered “substantial,” which means 50-100 new cases per 100,000 residents over the past week, or 8-10% positivity rate. 16 Maryland counties are categorized by the CDC as having a “high” transmission rate, which means 100+ new cases per 100,000 residents over the past week, or 10% positivity rate or higher.
Only two Maryland counties—Montgomery and Howard—have positivity rates considered “moderate,” which means 15-50 new cases per 100,00 residents over the past week, or 5-8% positivity rate.
COVID-19 is the leading cause of death for law enforcement officers in the United States. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a website that commemorates the deaths of law enforcement, 245 law enforcement officers died nationwide of COVID-19-related causes in 2020.
In 2021 so far, 240 law enforcement officers have died from COVID-19.
The mysterious death of Rey Rivera made national headlines when the case was investigated on the Netflix reboot of Unsolved Mysteries, which became the number one show on the popular streaming platform. Many viewers who have learned about the case are skeptical of the police theory that the young filmmaker jumped to his death from the roof of the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood. In Part 1 of this three-part podcast series, TRNN investigative reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis re-open the unsettling case that has captivated audiences and amateur detectives alike, exploring new evidence that points to a more sinister theory of how Rey Rivera died.
This podcast was originally publishedon Oct. 13, 2020.
Transcript
Stephen Janis:Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is, through high tech forensics, moral resolve, or simply the near mythic competence of American law enforcement, killers are ultimately sent to jail. But as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you, this is not true.
Taya Graham: And that is the point of this podcast, because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics. It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community. The final violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.
Stephen Janis: I’m Stephen Janis.
Taya Graham:I’m Taya Graham.
Stephen Janis: And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore city.
Taya Graham: Welcome to The Land of the Unsolved.
Welcome to The Land of the Unsolved, the podcast that explores both the evidence and the politics of unsolved murder in Baltimore. Today, we’re going to revisit a case that has received international attention. A mysterious death that still continues to reverberate throughout the city.
Stephen Janis: It’s the death of Ray Rivera, the 32-year-old filmmaker that disappeared from his North Baltimore home in May of 2006.
Taya Graham: By now, thanks to the Netflix show, Unsolved Mysteries, the entire world knows the story. Rivera left his home in a rush carrying only his keys and a credit card, never to be heard from again. Eight days later, his partially decomposed body was found in the conference room of the Belvedere hotel in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood.
Stephen Janis: A hole in the roof above where Ray lay led some to say he committed suicide. The theory was that he jumped to his death for reasons that remain unknown. But others, like his family, vehemently disagreed. Shortly after he was found I spoke to his wife, Allison, and his brother, Angel, and they were adamant. Ray had every reason to live.
Taya Graham:That’s because Ray was newly wed. He had just started his own film production company. He was planning to move back to California, where he had met his wife, and he just finished a screenplay. Hardly the life story of a man who was going to kill himself.
Stephen Janis: But again, there was a hole in the roof. The mysterious sequence of events that led to his disappearance, hints of danger before he died, including twice when an alarm went off in his home.
Taya Graham:But much of that evidence didn’t make sense. Ray didn’t tell anyone where he was heading the day he disappeared. Found on the roof near the hole where he died, one flip flop and a cell phone, not broken, but in full working order. And even more troubling, no witnesses who had seen him at the hotel. Surveillance video of the upper floors of the hotel inexplicably erased. His car was found in a lot nearby, but there was little indication of how it was parked there. All of it intriguing, but not conclusive.
Stephen Janis:And that was the problem with the case. With so little direct evidence, it’s hard to draw conclusions, except one: That Ray, for reasons unknown, had jumped or been pushed from somewhere, that somehow he had made his way to the top of the Belvedere hotel or the adjacent parking garage and jumped, or was pushed, to his death.
Taya Graham:It’s worth noting that Ray, a tall, handsome water polo player was hardly someone who could sneak into a public building and leap into the abyss unnoticed. He had the appearance and demeanor of someone who stood and always left an impression. That fact by itself made the idea he fell from a height even harder to believe.
Stephen Janis: And then there was his family. I spent many hours talking to his wife, Allison, listening to her talk about the man she called her soulmate, recounting his ambitions to make a movie about a water polo player, and his generosity of spirit, and his love for family and friends. The bottom line, there was simply no evidence Ray had ever considered or would consider suicide.
Taya Graham: Still, there was the hole. The gap in a flimsily constructed roof that kept the focus of the police staring upward to the ledge of the building, both hard to access, and even harder to comprehend as the place where Ray spent his final moments. A fact that allowed investigators to write the case off as suicide and the medical examiner to rule Ray’s death as undetermined, leaving the case in limbo and his family in despair.
Stephen Janis: But enter Unsolved Mysteries, the Netflix reboot, which highlighted Ray’s death in its first episode. The show was a massive hit, reaching number one in the country and putting Ray’s death on center stage. Since then myself and investigative reporter Jayne Miller, who appeared on the show, have received dozens of tips. And among them was one that caught our attention. Not because it referred to a specific person, but because it addressed the most problematic aspect of the case.
Taya Graham: The person in question is a scientist, not a cop. Her name is Miryam Moya, and she specializes in studying the impact of accidents on the human body, among other disciplines.
Miryam Moya: I’m a forensic expert that has been, and can be, called upon to testify at trial. These include homicide cases, vehicular and otherwise, using the technique of aviation mechanics as applied to impact, which is exactly what I’ve done in this case. I conducted an analysis as to whether the injuries coincide with what is alleged to have caused them. I’m a postgraduate level criminal justice professor at the United Nations University, and have experience in educating world leaders on issues relating to conservation, safety, maintenance, and security of road and traffic matters.
Stephen Janis: During our first interview, we discussed the trajectory of Ray’s fall, how she, like other people, suspected his leap off the top of the Belvedere was improbable.
Taya Graham:That of course was due to the speed Ray would’ve been traveling to land where he did on the second floor concourse.
Stephen Janis: But during our discussions we learned she had not seen the autopsy, a piece of information she felt could help her really delve into the details and come up with a fresh perspective on Ray’s death.
Taya Graham:And so we provided it to her. And a week later, she’d come up with one of the most intriguing theories on what happened in May of 2006 that we have heard yet. First, she had much to say about the extent of Ray’s injuries, especially how his injuries were distributed across his body.
Miryam Moya: The conclusion of the autopsy, of course, I didn’t have much information about it before, but from what I’ve seen now, after reviewing it, and what stands out to me now… I’m not a medical doctor, but I’ve conducted many autopsies, particularly autopsies involving incidents like motor vehicle accidents, et cetera, throughout my career. What I see, is that it’s impossible that someone can land feet first through that hole in the roof, like he supposedly fell through, because he had a fractured tibia and fibula on his leg to such an extent that the bone was sticking out, but only on the right side. But he didn’t have these injuries to the left leg. And it would be impossible for him to land on one leg, and have the other one not fracture also.
He also had injuries and fractures to his groin and pelvis. But again, only on the right side, not on the left. It is impossible for him to land on one leg and land on his feet. And from the positioning of his body, it is evident that he would’ve had to have landed feet first. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have had those leg injuries.
Taya Graham:But what was most intriguing was her sense that Ray’s injuries were much more similar to what she had witnessed studying car accidents. That Ray had not fallen from a building, but was hit by a car.
Miryam Moya: After reviewing the autopsy, I’ve determined his injuries correspond more to someone who has been run over by a car. Because in those cases, there are specific areas that will break like the sternum. Yes, as was shown in the autopsy. But he does not have any arm breaks or left leg breaks. He has injuries throughout different areas of his body. He has contusions, lacerations, and other injuries on his skin that correspond more with being hit or beaten in some fashion. They don’t correspond to falling from a building. He would not have been able to land vertically. At any rate, if he were to throw himself off the parking garage, which is 7.71 meters, around 20 something feet or more, he would’ve landed in a horizontal position, never a vertical one. So he could only land feet or head first.
Taya Graham: A conclusion that made her question the suicide theory.
Miryam Moya: When a suicide victim lands on their feet, their head is still going to split. You can think of it like, and it’s been described like, cracking a Chestnut, for example. Because the cranium splits completely, like a shell would on a nut. Raised cranial bones are broken, but not to the extent we would see from someone who had fallen from a height of… His cranium would have split entirely, and his arms have no fractures. Plus, there are no abrasions or fractures in his left leg.
Another detail is that the broken flip flop that is of the shoes he had on, those flip flops, it’s only slightly scuffed. And it is the strap of the right sandal that is a bit broken. The right side, which corresponds to the side of the body with the most damage where there are broken leg bones. On the left side, the sandal for the left foot is intact. So the hit or hits, or simply if it was a car that hit him and ran him over, these impacts would’ve come from the right side. When he falls, if he were to fall, it would have to be through the hole. He wouldn’t have fallen on his right side. He would’ve had to fall vertically. So the injuries would’ve shown up equally on both sides of the body. That’s just how it works. So that’s the way it is.
Stephen Janis:Now, it’s important to remember that the medical examiner here still believes Ray fell from a height. I also ran those conclusions by noted pathologist, Dr. Sorell Whit, a doctor who has performed many high profile autopsies, and he felt the ME’s conclusion was right.
Taya Graham: But what is most intriguing about her theory, is that it explains a great deal about the case that has thus far been inexplicable. Why didn’t anyone see Ray in the building? If he had jumped, why didn’t anyone recall hearing anything?
Stephen Janis: Why would a young man so afraid of heights either voluntarily, or even under duress, throw himself off the top of a building? Why doesn’t any of it add up?
Taya Graham: Which is why Myra’s perspective is so compelling.
Miryam Moya: Because a death can happen in one of three ways. You’re either thrown from, you jump from, or you fall from the building. Homicide, suicide, or accident. And it wasn’t an accident because I mean, you’re not just going to scale like 35 meters up or 40 meters, roughly 114 to 130 feet. It’s not an accident because you’re not up there working, for example, on or in the building. So only two options are left, suicide or homicide. And when the suicide theory doesn’t correspond to the hole and where the body would’ve landed, what you have left is homicide. Why? Because the physical evidence, the evidence left at the scene, as well as the evidence as to the state of his injuries and the marks to his body, shows that it couldn’t have been a suicide.
Taya Graham: If Ray didn’t fall, if his injuries don’t match the profile of a suicide from a height, if the hole in the ceiling is nothing more than a ruse, well then suddenly the case of Ray Rivera becomes much less of a mystery, and more a tale of murder most foul.
Stephen Janis: And to discuss the implications of that, we’re joined by investigative reporter, Jayne Miller. So we’re here with Jayne, investigative reporter, the best investigative reporter in Baltimore, I think, Jayne Miller, right?
Taya Graham: Absolutely.
Stephen Janis: I think we can all agree on that. Who probably knows more about this story than anyone. And I guess that the most interesting thing about what we just heard, is this analysis that it’s mathematically impossible for him to have jumped and to land where he landed, at least off the… We’ll start with the building first. Jayne, what are your thoughts about that? Because, always it’s been this sense that he jumped or fell from somewhere. But now she’s saying, at least from the hotel perspective, that’s not possible. What comes to mind when you hear that?
Jayne Miller: Well that’s been really a question from the beginning, and I think part of the fuel for this question is the lack of evidence of anybody seeing him in the building. As we know that there’s just nobody that puts him in the building in that period of time, that he would have to be in the building to end up in that room, which was part of the building on the ground floor or on a lower floor. And so the fact that you have that hole, and that question, allows for consideration of other theories. And then when you add that Allison Rivera hired an engineer to do a calculation that calculated he would have to have been traveling at 11 and a half miles per hour to reach that point, and that’s nearly impossible to reach that with that. There’s not a whole lot of distance up there on the top of that roof.
And certainly you couldn’t reach that crawling along the ledge. So I think that the analysis that says, wait a minute, we can’t make this work. It’s not surprising. And it is only exacerbated by the lack of conflicting evidence to a theory like that. So some people theorize, oh, he had to come out of a helicopter. You know, when you… Let’s go back. When you think about how this all unfolded, again, because there is no witness that puts him in any part of that building of the Belvedere. It was just kind of an automatic assumption. Oh, the body’s on the floor in that room, hole is in the roof, and okay, well then he must have gone through the roof.
Stephen Janis: Right. And that’s what’s interesting. We’ve always been working out that assumption that because there’s a hole and there’s a body underneath it, he comes off the roof.
Jayne Miller: And because there are certain things that belong to him, glasses flip – Whatever, cell phone, on that surface of the roof that had the hole in it then, oh, well he had to go through the roof. And then you look at the… Which we have video from when this happened from our helicopter, that really shows the size of the hole is, the size of the hole indicates he would have to go perfectly. Something would have to go through straight through vertically.
Taya Graham:Exactly.
Jayne Miller: Can’t go splat, can’t go… It’s not that the roof caved in, in any fashion, it looks like something went through a weakened spot of it. That’s what it looks like. So it is almost… You’d almost expect there to be conflicting theories.
Stephen Janis: Right.
Jayne Miller: Because there’s just no evidence to explain why he was in that building.
Taya Graham:I also think it’s interesting that Ms. Moya said that if he had come off the parking garage, he would’ve made an elongated hole.
Jayne Miller: He would have to.
Taya Graham: What do you think of that?
Jayne Miller: That’s right. No, I agree. I mean, if you stand on the parking garage at any point where he would have to be to get to that point, it’s a long way. It’s a stretch from the parking garage. There’s been discussion of whether he was hit on the parking deck and propelled. But still if that was hit by a vehicle or something like that, I mean, again, this is a case with wide open theories. And so, but again, that would require a different kind of hole in the roof than we have.
Stephen Janis:Well, and so it’s interesting because we went even deeper into this. She went even deeper and said, and this is another component of that. So let’s recap, we have this situation where he couldn’t have come off… It looks very likely that there’s not a point where he could have come off that makes any sense with the hole and where his body was. Right?
Jayne Miller:And the injuries.
Stephen Janis: And yeah. So it almost makes it seem impossible. But the next thing she looked at were the injuries, which I thought was even more interesting because she’s saying, one half of his body has injuries that are much more reminiscent of being hit by a car or some other type of injury rather than falling because…
Jayne Miller:Brutalized.
Stephen Janis:Yeah, right.
Jayne Miller: Very brutalizing injuries. And there’s a lack of certain injuries, if I recall correctly. Didn’t have a broken neck.
Stephen Janis: Right.
Jayne Miller:Had really only superficial injuries in certain cases.
Stephen Janis: Yeah.
Jayne Miller:His hands weren’t injured.
Stephen Janis: Right. And she fixated on that. Because she said, if he had been falling, let’s say head first, he would’ve put his hands out.
Jayne Miller: One would think.
Stephen Janis: One would think. But he had very few abrasions in that area.
Jayne Miller: And then he has that really severe leg injury.
Stephen Janis: Which she said is another reason that it’s impossible for him to have fallen from a height, because only one leg is a compound fracture, and said much more reminiscent of having something roll over half your body or something.
Jayne Miller: Or in a way that you would be struck by something, that’s correct. That’s correct.
Stephen Janis: Right, right. So what do you think, I mean, do you think this is leading up to the idea that maybe this was a great case of misdirection, where we’re all supposed to look up at the hotel?
Jayne Miller: That’s a really good question.
Stephen Janis: And keep talking about him getting…
Jayne Miller: About the hotel. About the hotel building, coming off the roof.
Stephen Janis: Coming off the roof. And, but on the other hand, with her conclusions, it seems pretty clear that it’s mathematically and physically impossible that he fell off the building. So are we looking at something where it’s time to start considering a different theory that he was put in that room? What do you think?
Jayne Miller: Well, yeah, sure. And I think that, look, we all know that this is Baltimore, which has year after year after year, including at that time in the mid 2000s, has a very high homicide rate. So the homicide division of the Baltimore Police Department is built to investigate your typical homicide. I hate to call any homicide typical, but in Baltimore we have a particular characteristic of our homicides, which generally nine times out of ten involve gunshots, involve some kind of dispute, turf war, whatever between people who know one another, are acquainted with one another. So the kind of investigation that homicide detectives in a city like Baltimore do most of the time involves shell casings, security camera video.
Stephen Janis: Right.
Taya Graham: Right.
Jayne Miller: Maybe a witness that wants to drop a dime on someone, maybe an informant, that’ll give you some information. Maybe every once in a while some DNA evidence or fingerprint evidence that really can come through for you, but certainly not… This is not a typical case that any homicide division in a municipal police department is going to handle. And you just have a lot of entanglements to the life of Ray Rivera at the time of his demise. And without clear evidence that he took his own life, and without clear evidence that someone else took his life, that you’re in this place. And sure, I think that it would be really a useful exercise for someone to really try to figure out what happened here and to go back through… I mean, there are people that I’m sure that, based on how quickly the posture of this case went to suicide at the time in May of 2006, I’m sure there are a whole lot of people that have never been questioned.
Stephen Janis: That seems clear. One thing, we have some notes from the detectives and we’re going to be looking at those, but the investigation only went on for a couple weeks.
Jayne Miller: Oh, and it very quickly went to suicide. And that again was, I’ve pointed out a couple of times about the timing here. I mean, think about what was going on in May, in the summer of 2006. We had Mayor Martin O’Malley, who had run for mayor on the promise of lowering the number of homicides.
Taya Graham: Right.
Jayne Miller: And never really hit that number, but definitely was trying to run on a record of violent crime reduction. And right smack in the middle of that you’ve got this case involving a rather high profile individual, because of his connections to the Hopkins polo team, and his connections to his former employer and others, and very persistent relatives that really wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to him. So this wasn’t the… It’s just not the kind of case you want dominating the headlines every day.
That’s for sure. And so, yeah, I can remember at the time of how quickly it went to suicide. And then it just kind of fades. One thing I think that’s important is that we don’t have a process in the state of Maryland, to my knowledge, that you have in some other states, where you can have a coroner’s inquest where it takes a different form of inquiry. There may be something like that. I think the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner used to have, at any rate, kind of an infant death review process. But sometimes you need a different kind of investigatory process that may allow you to take more time, whatever, but to pursue… Issue subpoenas, et cetera, that might get you fresh information.
Taya Graham: So, just so people understand, how did the medical examiner rule his death in this case?
Jayne Miller: Undetermined.
Taya Graham:Undetermined?
Jayne Miller: Yes. Which is a very important element of this whole situation, because again there’s no finding of, was it an accidental death? Was it suicide? Was it homicide? It’s an undetermined finding.
Taya Graham: It seems that you’re alluding to the idea that perhaps it was in the favor of the police department and for the mayor at the time to perhaps bury some homicides or violent crimes in the undetermined category, is that a fair statement?
Jayne Miller: Well I don’t know if you can call it buried. I wouldn’t use that word. But if you have an undetermined case, that means that something’s got to happen, something’s got to give, somebody’s got to come forward or something has to develop to give you a lead, to give you information. When a medical examiner makes a ruling like that, what they’re depending on the investigation and the investigatory material that’s provided by the police department, in terms of the circumstances of this individual’s… At the time of his disappearance, at the time of his death. So had been a suicide note, clearly a suicide note, we may have gotten that kind of ruling. Had there been evidence of a gunshot obviously, and no gun found, then we would have a homicide ruling. But the fact that this was ruled undetermined means that the medical examiner could not determine the manner of death, because there wasn’t enough information to determine the manner of death.
Stephen Janis: Well, let’s do the Occam’s razor application to the idea that Ray did not fall, where it makes things much more simpler. So one of the things that was interesting when I was talking to the producers of Unsolved Mysteries, they were talking about how that roof itself is extremely fragile. It’s not like a normal roof, right? That you could literally peel it back with your hands. And that when the detectives went out on the roof, they went out flat.
Jayne Miller: That’s right.
Stephen Janis: Because they were scared.
Jayne Miller: Falling through it. Yes, correct. That’s right. That is correct.
Stephen Janis: If Ray doesn’t fall, a lot of things start to make sense, like the things about his flip flops and everything being separate from his body, being on the roof itself. The fact that no one saw him at the hotel. And then you and I went, walked around a little bit, and it would be possible right, to get his body into that second, that concourse without going through the hotel.
Jayne Miller: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. There’s multiple ways you can do that. From the garage, you can do that from the ground floor. I mean, there are multiple ways to get it and through that building. Yes. That’s correct.
Stephen Janis: And it also will explain some of the injuries, the fact that the injuries aren’t consistent with a fall. A lot of things start to make sense when you stop looking up at the top of that building and start looking at the ground floor itself, and both you and I have been contacted by a lot of people. We don’t have any proof of this, but there are some people who believe that Ray was either beaten or brought there. Right? I mean…
Jayne Miller: There’s no question that since the episode aired on Netflix to take on this case, 14 years later, it’s remarkable actually. I’m sure you feel the same way. It’s remarkable how many people…
Stephen Janis: Passionate.
Jayne Miller: Yes. And, first of all, you have people that just have a theory, but we have indeed heard from people who have pieces of information. We have indeed heard from folks who have pieces of information that are pertinent to the time and contemporaneous with the time that have been helpful, and have been worth checking out. But this remains this kind of box of puzzle pieces that are, boy, I’ll tell you, to try to fit them in together.
Taya Graham: So Jayne, would you say that it’s a consistent theme that people believe that it wasn’t a jump, that it wasn’t a fall to his death?
Jayne Miller: I would say that of the people that speculate on theories, of the people that have looked at the geometry that’s required for certain things to happen, angles, et cetera, I would say that yes. That there’s a lot of skepticism that that’s indeed what happened to him.
Stephen Janis: And I mean, I think, like I said before, what that does is that simplifies this case quite a bit, because once you… the hole, itself, the idea that he fell gives that ambiguity, but once you get rid of that, then you just have a body that’s been brutally beaten, and that’s an entirely different case. And I think that’s what you’re talking about in terms of homicide.
Jayne Miller: Right. And well you also do have his stuff up there. But I’ve often wondered, and this is strictly, I’ve often wondered, but it’s provoked by the knowledge we have that when… I thought it was a contractor, when anybody was on that roof, it’s so fragile that they spread out, so they wouldn’t poke through it.
Stephen Janis: Right.
Jayne Miller: And so that raises the question is whether somebody was standing on it and stuck their foot through it, because it’s like being in your attic and you don’t realize that, oh, that’s the insulation, right. There’s nothing there. And so there is that, there are those items that belong to him that weren’t damaged, that are on the top of that roof somewhere near that hole. And so the question is then, I know that detective Bear’s theory about that is that it felt staged.
Taya Graham: Yes.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. And once again, the idea that he didn’t fall from anywhere fits that theory, and everything starts to align when you start looking at it from that perspective, and you stop looking up at the building. And someone was talking about how they could have taken his stuff and thrown it up through the hole, and then it looks like it fell there. But of course it didn’t, right? I mean, that was very simple. And I think people should look at the hole itself, the roof. I had some people look at it who were contractors, who said it doesn’t have the… It really is flimsy to say the least, I don’t know, I don’t build roofs, but if it’s incredibly flimsy, it means it would be easy to create a hole.
Or like you said, mistakenly create a hole. But the truth is that the body could… Ray’s body could have been brought in there. He could have been beaten there. You can’t rule it out. [Miryam Moya] analyzes car accidents, and what happens to the body in a car accident. And she’s saying, this is incredibly consistent with someone being either hit by a car or beaten, one way or the other, but not with a fall. She’s adamant about that. And I think that raises some really important questions. That we can get beyond this idea of the fall, that I’ve always thought of as kind of weird, but especially there’s no evidence. And I think that creates this great gap that you’re talking about with a homicide, right? They solve point and shoot murders.
Jayne Miller: This is not a point murder, that’s right.
Stephen Janis: This is not. And whoever did it, let’s say, let’s speculate that someone did do this. They were pretty smart about how they set it up to make it very difficult for our homicide unit to address it.
Jayne Miller: Sure. And well, and any… This is not just the Baltimore homicide unit. I mean, any homicide unit, this is not what they’re built for. This is not how they… We’re not talking about the kind of Scotland Yard type TV show here.
Taya Graham: Right.
Jayne Miller: At all. I mean, they have a case about every day, day and a half consistently in the city of Baltimore, and they’re not built for this kind of case that really may require sorting out very complicated situations that Ray may have been involved in, may have known something. I mean, I know a lot of people believe that, that he must have known something. And we don’t know.
Stephen Janis: Yeah, he was a whistleblower. I get a lot of tweets from people or I get a lot of messages, people saying he was a whistleblower. He stumbled onto something, but of course there’s never anything definitive about it, you know?
Jayne Miller: No, but what we do know, and this comes from his wife, Allison, is that in a few days prior to his disappearance, is that he seemed to be really rattled about something. And we know that.
Stephen Janis: Well, and what you always bring up is that he makes a phone call. And says, I figured it out. Right? You’ve talked about that.
Jayne Miller: That’s the situation that seems to be the information, is that the Sunday before he left the message and yes, the message was, hey, I figured it out.
Taya Graham: Wow.
Stephen Janis: All right. Well, so this is great. I think we are making some progress here.
Taya Graham: Absolutely.
Stephen Janis: We’ve now got the files and Jayne, myself, and Taya are going to review them, and get back and come back. Now just to tell people, if you hear some background noise it’s because of COVID, and we’ve had to record this outside.
Taya Graham: We had to record this outdoors.
Stephen Janis: And so I apologize for the trucks and whatever, but we want to do this. We want to keep reporting on this story. And Jayne, we really appreciate you. Your knowledge is incredible and if anyone’s going to solve it, it’s going to be you.
Taya Graham: Absolutely.
Stephen Janis: We’re just coming along for the ride, basically. It’s okay. That’s okay. I don’t mind being a supporting cast member to you.
Taya Graham: Neither do I.
Stephen Janis: What our next step is, we’re going to present this evidence to the medical examiner’s office and the police, and we’re also going to review the 300 page file that we just got from the police department. And then in two weeks or so, we’ll get back and we’ll update everyone on that. Okay?
Taya Graham: Absolutely. We’ll be back in two weeks.
Stephen Janis: So, Jayne, thanks for joining us. We appreciate it. We’ll see…
Jayne Miller: Fascinating case. Absolutely.
Stephen Janis: All right, we’ll be back.
Taya Graham: Thank you for joining us for The Land of the Unsolved. The Land of the Unsolved is produced for Ace Spectrum Productions. It is edited by my co-host Stephen Janis. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider hitting the support button and donating. Every penny counts. Also, if you’d like to read more of our work in print, Stephen and I have written three books on policing, a all available on Amazon, Why Do We Kill: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore, You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths About Policing in Baltimoreand Beyond, and The Book of Cop: A Testament of Policing That Works. All are available on amazon.com. We’d also like to thank our associate producer, Katherine Concepcion, for her work translating the interview with Myra and for helping to put together a transcript that made this show possible. My name is Taya Graham.
Stephen Janis: My name is Stephen Janis.
Taya Graham: And thank you so much for joining us for The Land of the Unsolved.
This story originally appeared in the Garrison Project on Oct. 26, 2021. It is shared here with permission.
Murder rates go down; people exalt policing. Murder rates go up; people exalt policing. The defund movement advocates reducing and reallocating police funds; police budgets remain high. The backlash comes; police budgets get higher. The public becomes aware that policing is violent, racially biased, and counterproductive in marginalized neighborhoods; police get more resources to “improve.”
Policing has an amazing ability to fail up.
Last week, sexual assault victims told New York City Council’s Women and Gender Equity and Public Safety committees about the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Division’s dreadful handling of their cases. One woman said that despite providing investigators with a “comprehensive 13-page document detailing the incident,” the detective didn’t interview witnesses and her case was closed twice without her knowledge. Another woman told the council that a sergeant dismissed her sexual assault claim because she was sleeping when it happened, explaining “he has sex with his wife while she’s asleep and she’s not reporting him for rape.” Despite such testimony revealing the NYPD’s profound misogyny and a deeply rooted disinterest in solving sexual assault cases, the problem is routinely framed as an issue of resources, staffing, and training.
While such scandals and high-profile cases of police brutality cause people to recognize the harms of policing, the public still views them as remediable failures of an institution designed to “serve and protect.” Perhaps it is time to view them not as failures of the system but as part of the system itself.
Policing in the United States was never mainly about fighting crime: It was meant to manage people and communities to serve the interests of the powerful. Police forces did not originate to fight crime, they did not expand in response to crime spikes, and it remains contested whether they fight crime at all.
Police forces emerged in the early 19th century and became the norm by the Progressive Era.
The development of police forces is not a unified story but hundreds of local stories. Nevertheless, there is a striking consistency—the stories have little to do with everyday crime interdiction.
In the Reconstruction-era South, organized policing emerged as part of the effort to maintain postwar social and economic White supremacy. “Black Codes,” with their broad definitions of vagrancy, rendered freed people perpetually subject to state detention and forced labor.
An 1865 column in the Lynchburg Virginian explained that these “stringent police regulations” were “necessary to keep [freedmen] from overburdening the towns and depleting the agricultural regions of labor.” The police forces created to enforce these regulations included former slave catchers and patrollers, and as historian Sally Hadden notes, they “kept blacks off city streets, just as patrollers had done in the colonial and antebellum eras.”
In the North, wealthy industrialists organized police forces to control factory workers. In Buffalo, New York, industrialization exploded in the late 19th century, and along with it, the Polish migrant population. The Buffalo police force grew substantially from its inception in 1871 to 1900, but this growth, according to historians, “had no direct relationship to either the growth of the population or to an increase in crime.” Instead, the police department, whose commissioners were the manufacturing barons themselves, existed and expanded to thwart workers’ demands for decent labor conditions. As in the South, these police forces relied on vagrancy laws to prevent worker assembly and arrest labor organizers.
Police departments expanded steadily throughout the 20th century. President Nixon’s 1968 campaign’s “Southern strategy” invoked narratives of Black criminals and society-saving police to court Southern Dixiecrats to the Republican party. The 1980s ushered in an era of precipitous government investment in—and expansion of—law enforcement. President Reagan condemned “welfare queens” and “privileged” street criminals. Even though the effect of President George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad is widely disputed, his landslide win in 1988 sparked Democratic fears that the entire party would be “Hortonized.” Then-Representative Chuck Schumer and then-Senator Joe Biden helped create the 1994 Crime Bill—today regarded as a primary driver of mass incarceration—to wrest pro-law enforcement politics away from Republicans. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops,” Biden boasted. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.”
Policing expansions served political interests, but commentators often describe them as reactions to a crime wave. In the latter half of the 1980s, well after pro-policing politics had ascended, there was an increase in the violent crime rate due to a rise in homicides of and violence against young Black men, which researchers attribute to the urban crack cocaine trade. Media narratives of the crack epidemic incorporated longstanding tropes of Black criminality and whipped up fear, providing a boon to police departments, despite crack’s geographic specificity. But it appears there was no overall crime wave.
A 1993 study sought to put numbers to the “widely held belief that the level of serious criminal activity increased during the 1980s, particularly among the urban underclass.” Examining crime data from 1979 to 1992, the researchers concluded that “statistics do not support the notion that there [was] any overall rise in the level of criminal activity.” Instead, “there was a large increase in the incarceration rate, primarily attributable to an increased probability of incarceration . . . and a sizable increase in the number of arrests and incarcerations for drug law violations.”
A caveat on research is warranted here. For every study, one can likely find another with a different conclusion or spin on the data. I leave it to empiricists to battle over methodological and interpretive superiority. What is clear is that the data on crime in the ’80s paint a very different picture than one of an America under siege.
In fact, when President Clinton signed the Crime Bill in 1994, crime rates were already in decline. They continued to decline for the next quarter century, while policing continued to expand. In 1990, there were, on average, 12 violent crimes per 1,000 people, and cities spent an average of $182 (in today’s dollars) per resident on the police. By 2017, the violent crime rate had decreased by 56 percent to five crimes per 1,000, and budgets for police increased by 59 percent to $292 per resident.
Did the expansion in policing cause the crime decline? Probably not. A study on police deployment and crime rates from 1991 to 2000 found “increases in police strength during the 1990s [had] little to do with changes in all measures of the crime rate after controlling for other demographic factors.” A comprehensive 2014 study found “police manpower levels” had no effect on deterrence. The study’s authors concluded that policymakers should “reconsider whether increases in police manpower bring sufficient crime reduction benefits to justify their costs” and consider “alternative investments that are more likely to reduce crime.”
The findings casting doubt on whether police expansions reduce crime should not be surprising.
Flush with funds and officers, police departments have used their bounty in the traditional manner: to exercise strict and total control over Black urban areas, a process I call “bluelining.”
The police deployment study also revealed that every one percent increase in Black population in a neighborhood correlated with an increase of 5.54 police officers per 100,000 residents.
Contemporary research continues to challenge the presumption that policing is more about catching criminals than controlling communities of color. Policing experts report “a consensus that the standard model of policing, which focuses on random preventive patrols and rapid response time, does not significantly reduce crime or even fear of crime.”
Studies also undermine the claim that “proactive policing”—including racially biased broken windows and stop-and-frisk practices—decreases crime, leading criminologists to comment, “there is a substantial lack of evidence in favor of proactive policing having any substantial effect on crime.” New research questions the efficacy of so-called “hot spot” policing that uses data and technology to target certain geographic locations, and scientists warn that the tech often replicates the biases of human police decision making. All the while, cold homicide cases pile up and rape kits languish.
After 150 years of policing being a daily fact of American life, we still cannot proclaim with certainty that it has ever actually foughtcrime. And yet the cop-as-crime fighter trope is intractable, drilled into the American consciousness by decades of sensationalist news, politics, and TV shows like Law & Order: SVU—what critics call “copaganda.”
Before we can achieve meaningful reform, Americans—especially liberals—need to sever their instinctive connection of policing and crime interdiction. If not, every case of horrific brutality or systemic failure will remain cause for more policing resources. Every decrease in crime will remain cause for doubling down on policing. Every uptick in crime, no matter how narrow or local, will remain cause for expanding policing. And even after millions of people took to the streets to plead for change last year, things will remain the same.
President Joe Biden signed a major $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that provided funds to cities and states around the country to recover from devastating effects of the pandemic. Regardless of widespread condemnation and criticism, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey and the state legislature have pushed through plans to use a significant portion of those federal COVID-19 relief funds for the construction of new prison complexes. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, founder of The Ordinary People Society, about the shocking move by the state of Alabama to divert desperately needed relief funds to build up its carceral system.
Eddie Conway:Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. Recently, there’s been newspaper articles about the Alabama government using COVID-19 relief funds to build new prisons, to build a couple of super prisons. So we want to look into that. So joining me today is pastor Kenneth Glasgow of the Ordinary People Society, to bring us up to date on what’s happening in Alabama. Kenneth, thanks for joining me.
Kenneth Glasgow:Man, thank you for having me. I consider it an honor, you know that anytime you can be with Eddie Conway it’s me who gets the honor. Thank you.
Eddie Conway:Okay, so this is some scary kind of stuff going down in Alabama. It’s got the highest COVID-19 rate in the world, I believe, and one of the highest poverty and illiteracy rates and so on. Why is the governor using COVID-19 funds to build prisons?
Kenneth Glasgow:Well you know, even worse than that is the fact that no one… I mean that they feel like they could do that. That’s the worst, that’s the bad part about it. Not only are we looking at the Department of Justice have a lawsuit against the Alabama Department of Corrections at, right now, since 2019 and 2020, they just said that they’re going to continue with their lawsuit and enhance it because of their inadequacy of management, inadequacy of security. There are violations of the 8th and the 14th Amendment. And at this particular time of having to deal with the Department of Justice lawsuit, you would turn around and violate even more laws and more rules by wanting to use allocated funds, earmarked funds for COVID-19 and people’s health.
And you want to build three new prisons, two new prisons for men, not doing anything for the women. There’s only one women’s prison in Alabama. This just shows the mindset of the leadership that we have. And what’s so disturbing about it and disheartening, is that the lawmakers agreed with the governor to do so. Now that’s the scary part to me.
Eddie Conway: Yeah, I noticed the vote was like 29 to one in the Senate. It was pretty much full support in the House of Representatives with a few Democrats speaking out. Why is the Democratic Party and Black representatives [crosstalk] supporting this?
Kenneth Glasgow: And that’s the scary part Eddie, because it shows you the mindset that we have here. and so it goes across racial boundaries, it goes across religious boundaries, it goes across party boundaries. It’s just a mindset of lock them up, throw away the key, and let’s enslave them and get us some free labor. We are doing the thing across the country with our abolition of slavery, and we’re going and telling them to take away the exception clause out of the state Constitutions and out of the federal Constitution, that states that no man should be enslaved doing voluntary servitude except [inaudible] as a means of punishment. But at the same time while doing so, we are asking our Democratic friends, our progressive and liberal friends, to be on that side of the board with us. But how could we ask them that when they’re on the side of the board to use COVID-19 money? Now listen, that in Alabama where I’m at it’s called ultra conservative, right?
But we have a governor, our former governor, a governor before that, Riley, that refused to take the Obamacare for healthcare. Then, we had a governor that refused to take any kind of healthcare, right? Which was Gov. Ben, Bentley, and they call him the death doctor because he was a doctor. Now, we got a governor who wants to take the healthcare funds, and build three new prisons, which started back with the same governor, Gov. Riley, that didn’t want to take Obamacare. So, this is a continuous thing, and it’s a continuous mindset of taking away the healthcare and locking people up inside prisons. And that’s what you have to realize is going on in the state of Alabama. So it’s like the South never stopped its mindset of enslaving people, not giving them healthcare, not producing any kind of progress when it comes to the literacy rate, and keeping us in control and those manners of being in poverty. Yeah.
Eddie Conway:I understand that [CoreCivic], which is one of the largest building builders of private prisoners and operators of private prisoners, are there and deeply involved, and they just recently lost $600 million worth of funding because of an effort down there by a group to defund them. And now, they’re pushing for the use of the COVID funds, and they got a commitment of keeping the jails either at capacity, or either they’re going to sell the private prison that they had to Alabama. Do you know anything about that?
Kenneth Glasgow:Well I started laughing because I loved the way you said a group that stopped their funding, and that group happened to be us and the coalition that was with us. We arranged to send like 5,000 emails a day to Barclays and stifle [crosstalk] finance and all, that was going to fund them, and stop the funding. Because CoreCivic actually not only played a role in the part, but CoreCivic was kind of like, down here leading the legislators and advising the governor on what to do. And we found that out, took it to court, filed a lawsuit. our lawsuit got thrown out because they stopped the funding and all, and so they found to be moot on the fact that the funding had stopped anyway. But now they coming back for that.
So we definitely know about that, but we also know one of the highlights that you just pointed out, is the fact that they wanted, in order for them to have the contract. Right? First of all, Alabama would not own the property. Let’s get that. First of all, Alabama would not own the property. Second of all, [inaudible] CoreCivic would own the prisons, and not Alabama. But Alabama, the state of Alabama, would have to pay CoreCivic for housing its citizens within CoreCivic prisons. So here you got the property owners, and you got CoreCivic that the state of Alabama would be responsible for paying for. Now, if there’s no accountability there, and you own the property, and you own the prisons, then you can pretty much charge me whatever you want for rent for my citizens being in there.
And then the contract also said that you got to have what? A 130%, 120%, 130% capacity at all times. So what that let you know is that Alabama is not only concentrated on locking people up, but they’re projecting that for the next 30 years… these are 30 years contracts. Eddie, these are 30 year contracts. So they’re projecting for the next 30 years that they’re going to keep it at this capacity. This is the contract. And who do you think is going to be the target of keeping that capacity? I’ll just leave that question right there.
Eddie Conway: Yeah, well I will answer it, because right now you can see in the present day that the population of people of color is less than 25% down there, but the jail capacity of people of color is approaching 50%. So, it’s clear that they’re going to be locking up Black and Brown bodies into this foreseeable future, and causing them to be unemployed, causing the families to be broken up, causing the families to be forever impoverished and causing a continued recidivism rate. So I mean, that’s institutional racism in the criminal justice system, but who can – Is it the federal government? – Who can do anything about the use of those funds to stop it?
Kenneth Glasgow: Yeah. So we have appealed to [inaudible] who is the secretary of treasury, the secretary of treasury would have to be the one that would have to be that would address it. The use of those funds, how you can use, would have to sue them about the funds. But then, you know, we are hoping that he acts a little bit more firmer, and holds them a little bit more accountable than the DOJ has. The DOJ and their lawsuits have let it linger on for almost two years now, and these are the results thereof. So it’s clearly showing that the state of Alabama has no regard for the Department of Justice.
They don’t care about getting sued by the secretary of treasury. And they’re just like okay, come on with it, we’re ready for the fight. You know, we have to look at the fact that, that mindset when I keep going back to. Because surely if me and you was to get some funds, and our funds were earmarked, and they were allocated towards a certain project or certain thing that we have to use them for, the federal government would come in to me and you, if I ever want to see the receipts for, they want to see whatever we got.
And they will surely charge us criminally, or either the IRS, you know, for misuse or misappropriations of those funds. If they are earmarked, listen to me good now, if those are earmarked, are allocated funds. So I’m trying to figure out, and the rest of the country is trying to figure out, how could you take earmarked allocated funds that’s from the federal government? We’re not talking about from your friends, and your campaign. We are talking about from the federal government, sent to you for you to use at COVID-19, when you have a state with the highest death rate of COVID-19, not only in the country, but across the world. And you use 20% of those allocated funds, 20% of it, to build three new prisons and not what it’s earmarked allocated for. If that was somebody else, they would be charged.
I’m trying to figure out what kind of standards do we have? It shows our double standards. But what example, what is it really, really showing to the people, to our children, and to the other countries around here, about how we operate and how we function? What is it saying about us?
Eddie Conway: That’s a good question, because as you were saying it I was thinking that Alabama was the last to desegregate. You know, Alabama is like the first to incarcerate. Alabama is setting examples for the red states in the South all the time, and I’m concerned that this might spread to other red states. This might spread, other states might misuse those funds like that. And maybe the Treasury Department or somebody somewhere must have the ability, is it Biden maybe to say, you can’t use those funds in that manner?
Kenneth Glasgow:It has to be Biden or it has to be the secretary of treasury, but I love what you are saying. I mean I hate that it’s happening but I love what you’re saying. Maybe Alabama is trying to say, hey, we got 2024 coming up. Everybody knows what we are trying to do. Everybody knows who we are trying to push and what we are trying to push. That was made very, very evident on Jan. 6. Nothing came about from that, so Alabama is saying, hey, we’ll be the example to show you how to make America great again. And we all know what that means. Who is it being made great for? Because those of us that are still in poverty, still being in prison, still being locked up.
Still being, living up under these double standards, and all of these different demeaning factors, we know it was never great for us. So, maybe Alabama is saying we’re the example to show you how to just totally defy our government, our rules, our regulations, policies, and procedures that’s in place. And we are just going to do what we want to do. And we’re going to continue to lock people up, even if we have to use healthcare money to save their lives, we’re going to use that to lock them up and take it away from healthcare to keep them living, and invest it in death traps so that they could die.
Eddie Conway: Okay, well, one final question. You know, pastor Glasgow, I know they have been harassing you for your organizing effort and so on. So, what’s happening with The Ordinary People Society, and what’s happening, well with you ,because you, like you said, that coalition that took away that $600 million, that was a brilliant and a good effort. You know, and then the state is trying to make a run around it.
Kenneth Glasgow:That’s right.
Eddie Conway:How is the society and how are you, what’s happening?
Kenneth Glasgow: So TOPS, The Ordinary People Society, is being ran by Ms. Rodreshia Russaw, she’s running it very well. She’s executive director, new board chairman, everything. I’m in a semi-retired state, standing back, that has nothing to do with daily operations or anything, I’m just standing in an advisory state, for more to speak and advising during the transition and all. And top stands on its own, I stand on my own. I’m starting now, pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow ministries, KSG ministries. And what I’m doing is, I still got some court proceedings I got to deal with, still got some investigations that’s coming forth and all.
And you know, you’ll be hearing a lot about that, depending on what they do, how they act, because this is one of the things that’s going to be really, really highlighted. How could you come at people like me and say this and that and the other, but here you have your governor that’s doing the same thing you might want to accuse somebody else of, and there’s no standards there, but there are standards for us but not for them. And you know, I get confused at that sometimes, you know, are we living in America? Are we living in a third world country? Are we living in a communist country? Or, where are we?
Eddie Conway: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay, all right. On that note then, is there anything you want to say to the public in relationship to supporting this effort to stop the building of the new prisons in Alabama? [crosstalk] is there any kind – Go ahead.
Kenneth Glasgow:I would say to the public that there’s a lot of people that claim that I talk to, why did they build, or why did they support the building of the new prisons? When I talk to somehow comrades in the Democratic Party, and those that’s supposed to be aligned with us. And they said, because of the dilapidated buildings. I said, so why wouldn’t you use money to fix up the buildings, instead of trying to use the COVID money to take away from the healthcare? No one was able to really give me that answer. So what I would say to some of you that’s across the country, if you know anybody, have anybody, is anybody that lives or knows somebody in Alabama, whatever. Call these legislators, call some of your family members and all and have them call the legislators and call and find out and ask them what’s going on.
Why would you support something like this, of this nature, when you are already under a lawsuit from the Department of Justice? And why are you allowing or participating in contributing to the Alabama Department of Corrections in the state of Alabama government treating people inhumane? And those are not my words, from pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow. Those are the words from the Department of Justice itself. I will also ask people to call the secretary of treasury, call the federal government and say, hey, how did Alabama use this kind of money? Because you wouldn’t let no one else do it. You would lock anybody else up for doing it, so how are you allowing them to do it, and why they are not being held under the same standards and enforcements rules, regulations, policies, and procedures, as everybody else in America? Either this is America and it’s a fair and equal country, or it’s not.
Eddie Conway:Okay, That’s the final word there. Thank you for joining me, pastor Glasgow.
Kenneth Glasgow: And thank you for having me, God bless y’all so much, man. And if you are not listening to Eddie Conway, then you ain’t getting the real information, you getting part of it. God bless.
Eddie Conway: And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.
President Joe Biden came to Baltimore on Thursday night for a town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper and aired live on CNN. There, Biden fielded questions from realtors, college professors, college students, and other members (or future members) of the professional–managerial class, and mostly told them that much of what Americans want is going to take “several years.”
Free community college likely wasn’t going to happen soon but would happen later on, he assured the Loyola University professor who asked about it. Biden explained to a Morgan State University faculty member that he was busy with other concerns but would soon get around to maintaining voting rights and police reform.
In Baltimore, a majority Black city whose median income was, as of 2019, $29,943, the pomp and circumstance of the town hall and the lack of urgency from the president were especially stark.
“We need police officers to protect us,” Biden said. “I call for more money for police to go to community policing.”
At one point, Biden explained it would be “a reach” to get Medicare coverage to include dental, hearing, and vision.
This is how these sorts of cable news town halls usually operate. But in Baltimore, a majority Black city whose median income was, as of 2019, $29,943, the pomp and circumstance of the town hall and the lack of urgency from the president were especially stark. At one point, while shouting out Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen—who were in the audience—Biden mistook Kweisi Mfume, who was next to Cardin and Van Hollen, for Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.
“Hey, we got two famous guys here,” Biden said. “There’s Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen—and the mayor.”
Perhaps the town hall’s nadir was when a white, Republican, Loyola University student from Connecticut asked Biden how the United States would militarily keep up with China (although Biden’s tribute to Colin Powell, which took the form of an odd tale about the time they went to “the Secret Service race track” together, cannot go unmentioned).
Outside of Center Stage, where the town hall was held, members of CASA protested Biden’s appearance, calling attention to Biden’s immigration policies, which have not undone many of the most malicious aspects of the Trump presidency’s anti-immigrant policies.
“I am not free. I need freedom. I need citizenship now,” Yury Guardado, an undocumented immigrant and activist, chanted. “Now is the time, Biden, to fulfil your promise. Remember when you told us you wanted to make a better America? Give us citizenship.”
Besides the many local reporters and elected officials apparently giddy to be in the vicinity of the president and Anderson Cooper, the event also enabled some serious political sloganeering in Baltimore.
Hogan talks ‘left lunacy,’ then criticizes ‘divisiveness’
Hours before the Biden town hall, Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan released a statement criticizing the president’s inaction on infrastructure.
“I appreciate that Biden has taken the time to visit Baltimore. While he is here discussing his legislative agenda, I hope that the president will address why he has abandoned the bipartisan infrastructure deal which we spent months crafting,” Hogan’s statement said. “During his town hall, I hope President Biden will hear what I hear every single day: that the people of Maryland and the nation are completely fed up with the divisiveness and dysfunction in Washington.”
As Battleground Baltimorereported, Hogan has recently taken to calling the “defund the police” movement “far left-wing lunacy” and misrepresenting police budget spending. State Comptroller (and Democratic candidate for governor) Peter Franchot recently said Hogan was “pouring gasoline on an already raging fire of political discord” with his anti-defund comments and noted, crucially, that Hogan had recommended reducing the public safety budget by $13.8 million just last year.
Mosby, the city’s top prosecutor, being ‘persecuted’
Earlier in the day, a group of pastors and lawyers that included high-profile civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump held a press conference calling attention to the ongoing federal investigation into Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. They did it, they told the Baltimore Sun, because Biden was in town.
The press conference was the latest salvo in a confusing public relations war Mosby has waged herself and by proxy against the FBI ever since it was revealed that she and her City Council President husband Nick were being criminally investigated for their taxes. During the presser, Mosby’s personal attorney A. Scott Bolden explained that the feds were now pursuing a perjury charge against his client, and from there, the familiar argument returned: Mosby is being unfairly prosecuted because she is a Black woman and a “progressive prosecutor,” not because she has actually done anything wrong in regards to her taxes.
“I’m reminded of Sojourner Truth, who faced persecution for her determination to speak truth to power and to stand up for the rights of Black women,” Baltimore City NAACP President Kobi Little said at the press conference. “The persecution must stop.”
As Battleground Baltimore has reported, the saga of Keith Davis Jr. deeply complicates Mosby’s “progressive” bonafides. Davis was shot by police in 2015 then later charged with a murder police said was tied to the gun police found on Davis after they shot him. Davis has been tried four times for the same murder—two trials were hung juries and two were guilty verdicts later overturned—and will go to trial for the fifth time, for the same murder, next year. Activists led by Davis Jr.’s wife Kelly have worked to call attention to the case and Mosby’s role in allowing this ongoing prosecution to happen, as well as her office’s use of questionable witnesses and previously undisclosed evidence to try and secure a conviction.
Kelly Davis noted that Davis Jr. actually had a pre-trial conference the same day as this press conference about how Mosby, the city’s top prosecutor, is being “persecuted.”
Kelly Davis noted that [Keith] Davis Jr. actually had a pre-trial conference the same day as this press conference about how Mosby, the city’s top prosecutor, is being “persecuted.”
“Keith also had a hearing this morning, where prosecutors are still going forward with this vindictive sham of an attempted murder charge!!! While @AttorneyCrump @KobiLittle are out here playing captain save’em!! Prosecutors still lying about filing these charges a year later,” she tweeted.
Deray McKesson, who has helped call attention to the Free Keith Davis Jr. movement, criticized the Mosby press conference.
“I’ve been quiet #onhere but enough is enough,” McKesson tweeted. “Mosby is not ‘under attack’ & this framing has allowed her to avoid any accountability for the decisions that she does not issue press releases about. This press conference today is political cover and is offensive.”
Maryland NAACP President Willie Flowers said during the press conference that the NAACP will be encouraging its members to donate to the Mosbys’ legal defense fund. As local news channel Fox45 noted, Marilyn Mosby makes $238,772 a year and Nick makes $128,583 a year.
One more time: The median income in Baltimore City as of 2019 is less than $30,000.
In other Mosby news:
A Johns Hopkins study shows that Mosby’s policy of no longer prosecuting people for drug possession or sex work slightly reduced incarceration and did not lead to increases in crime;
Last week, a Maryland Court of Special Appeals opinion made clear Mosby’s office must release the 305 names on a list of untrustworthy Baltimore cops—a list that the courts said she could have released all along.
Thread of the week: @melissa_schober on school cops
This thread from Melissa Schober, whose insights into Baltimore City schools are always welcome, went deep on school cops, adding to The Real News Network’s recent story on school police in Baltimore monitoring students’ laptops.
Tweet of the week: @DanRodricks on the apparent end of chivalry
“Just held the City Hall door open for not one but three women. Not one said thanks. Thanks must be so old school. I really need to get up to speed,” Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks tweeted on Oct. 18 to enough mockery that he temporarily locked his account. “Today’s main character has arrived,” MEL Magazine said when they quote-tweeted Rodricks.