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Category: Prisons and Policing

  • Cops made his life a living hell. Judges are making it worse

    Offensive Facebook posts led to the arrest of activist Joshua Martinez. But his treatment in court and $1 million bail reveal the often-overlooked role played by judges in the questionable and unequal implementation of the law—a role that judges often fill with little to no democratic accountability. Martinez is currently under a gag order, so in this episode of PAR we speak to auditor and cop watcher James Freeman about his case, and about the challenging task of reforming the judiciary.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Connecticut made prison phone calls free. Other states should do the same

    Transcript

    Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. The prison industrial complex gets money from people, the poorest people in the nation. It gets billions and billions of dollars. One of the things that sticks out the most is the amount of money taken by multinational phone call systems that work with prisons and the state governments. And something tremendous just happened recently in Connecticut. Connecticut passed a law, and the governor signed it, making phone calls free for families between families and prisoners.

    Joining me today is Dr. Venezia Michalsen who is an associate professor who worked on this campaign, and she’s going to walk us through this and tell us what happened, why it happened and why it’s important. Dr. Venezia, thanks for joining me.

    Venezia Michalsen: Thank you so much for having me today.

    Eddie Conway: We could start off by maybe you talking about why the cost of phone calls is such an important factor in what happens to prisoners and their families.

    Venezia Michalsen: Absolutely. You know, we could be here all day talking about that. You have to think about it in terms of the people who are on the outside, the families who are supporting their loved ones who are on the inside. They have to pay these inordinate costs to just keep in contact with their loved ones. People often say, “Well, I don’t want the taxpayers paying for these phone calls.” Except the taxpayers are already paying for these phone calls. Overwhelmingly, they are women, they are mothers, they are grandmothers who are holding it down on the outside, often taking care of children. And they’re the ones that are paying the cost for the phone calls on the outside so that people who are on the inside can stay connected to their families and to their communities.

    Now, as you know better than I do, people on the inside need that tie to the community, need that tie to their families so that they can both plan for their inevitable, for almost everyone, their inevitable return to the community, and maintain those ties that will remain when they come out and will be the bedrock of their re-entry. But also so that they can reduce their stress while they’re inside. We know that connecting people to their families, whether it’s through visits or through emails on these tablets that are being given out now, or whether it’s phone calls, we know that those not only do they reduce infractions while people are inside, but they also reduce recidivism while people are coming out after they’ve reentered.

    Eddie Conway: Okay. And of course, I’ve experienced that for decades myself and I can testify that the phone system is a lifeline to not only your family, but to keep violence down inside the prison. Because a lot of times prisoners are frustrated, they’re angry, and they need somebody to talk to. They can’t talk to anybody. They talk to their family, their families talk them down, or they get a chance to talk to their children and they talk their self down. So it’s very important. Had a campaign like this been organized anywhere else in the United States for free phone calls?

    Venezia Michalsen: You know, Connecticut, I’m very proud to say that I and, but even more than me, my team members. I’d just like to name them quickly, Bianca Tylac, who’s the director and founder of Worth Rises, Diane Lewis with Voices of Women of Color, whose son was incarcerated for many years and she had to talk to her son in the dark because she couldn’t pay the light bill, or she chose to pay the phone bill before the light bill. And then J.O. Richardson, who himself was incarcerated for many years. We’ve fought together with a number of other people for free phone calls in Connecticut as the first state in the nation to have free phone calls. But before us, New York City in its jails has free phone calls and also a few cities in California, San Diego, San Francisco, but there are also a number of states now if people are interested in fighting for free phone calls, we should be fighting for it in every state and federally obviously.

    But Massachusetts has a campaign that’s pretty active. Michigan, Louisiana. Miami’s got one. So there are a number of places that are fighting for free phone calls around the country. And activists are ready to make this happen all over the country. And then once we’ve got phone calls, then we’re coming for everything else. All of these other places where the prison industrial complex is bleeding our communities, particularly our black and brown communities, and particularly women within those communities, where the prison industrial complex is bleeding those communities dry. We’re ready to come for that next.

    Eddie Conway: Yeah. One of the things that that struck me was that in Connecticut phone calls costs 10 times more than other states. There’s no regulation across the board for phone calls, because that seems like exorbitant?

    Venezia Michalsen: It was. We got to a place where it was almost 33 cents a minute for a phone call. We were 49th in the nation. And then during COVID, we dropped to 50th, which, as you say, when people are on the inside and they’re stressed out, they need their families. And COVID made that even worse. People worried about getting sick. People were worried about their families getting sick. They were isolated because visits were stopped. So that we got to a place where it was even more imperative that people got to connect with their families and with people on the outside, and Connecticut maintained that lack of affordability. But at the end of the day, there were kickbacks going to the state. We had a 68% commission going to the state of Connecticut and then Securus on top of that was making 10 cents a minute off of these calls. So what’s the incentive to stop them?

    But what happened here in Connecticut is tireless, tireless advocates who spent countless hours talking to legislators, turning legislators over. We had people from both sides of the aisle who were looking at this and saying, “This is wrong.” And this was a bipartisan. The bill passed in a very bipartisan way because people finally heard the voices of directly impacted people and said, “This is wrong. We have to change this. We cannot be making money off of the backs of our most disadvantaged people.”

    Eddie Conway: Just for the public’s sake, what kind of money is involved nationally in these prison phone calls?

    Venezia Michalsen: I mean, this is a multi-million dollar business. The man who runs Securus is Tom Gores, who owns the Pistons. And not only that, but these are businesses that are in all of our… You know our 401ks, our investments, everybody’s got a toe in these profits and what we need to do, and what an organization like Worth Rises is doing, is finding ways to move towards starving the prison industrial complex out. How do we make it so that they cannot make money any more off of caging people and so they will look towards somewhere else to make that money. But it’s absolutely a multi-million dollar business. The same as with food services, the same is with commissary. All of these ways, sheets and architects, all of these ways in which the prison industrial complex makes money off of caging people, in particular black and brown people.

    Venezia Michalsen: So how across the nation can other people and other prison rights advocates get involved?

    So a way for people to get involved is connecting families. If you go to the Worth Rises website, you can see there are a number of campaigns. If someone is interested, they can go into either, if their state… You know, somebody in Louisiana, for example, or Massachusetts, they can connect immediately with advocates who are already fighting this fight with bills in those states, or in some cities like Miami. And if there isn’t currently a campaign, then they can contact Worth Rises to get more information about how to start the fight in their state or in their city. Because it’s absolutely time. If we went, in Connecticut, from 50th, from last place in the nation, to the first in the nation to be free, then anyone can do it.

    Eddie Conway: Yeah. That’s amazing. I get this all the time, people in the public, conservatives, even church people, et cetera, “Well, prisons are not supposed to be comfortable. Prisons are supposed to be where you punish people at and so why should we be making their life any better?” And I think early on when you first talked about it, you touched on it a little bit, but talk a little more about the impact that kind of attitude has on both families, prisoners, and society at large later on in life.

    Venezia Michalsen: Absolutely. So what I love to say in response to that is that such things as prison phone calls, or making commissary more affordable, or paying people for their labor, unionizing people who are incarcerated. I know that’s something that you worked on where prison labor happens, making it so that they’re actually making a minimum or living wage. All of these things, they may make people uncomfortable. They don’t make me uncomfortable, they probably don’t you uncomfortable, but they make a lot of people uncomfortable. But to me, the point is that its a win, win, win, win, win across the board. It’s good for the incarcerated people because they’re able to make a plan for their re-entry to society. And as I say, almost everyone that to prison is going to come back into the community.

    So you’ve got to stay connected to people. You have to make it so that while you’re inside dealing with inhumane circumstances, you’re able to cope and stay connected. But it’s not just good for incarcerated people. It’s also good for their families because we’re not making it so that we’re even widening the racial wealth gap. So that black and brown women on the outside are even poorer because corporations are bleeding them dry. So if we cut that out, it’s even better for them. It’s also better for children because when children can remain connected to their family members, no matter whether their family members have made mistakes or not, they still are better for their children when their children are able to stay connected to them. It has better effects on them educationally, emotionally, academically, all of these different… Physically, all of these different ways it’s better for children when they can stay in touch with their loved ones.

    So children, families, incarcerated people, but even if you’re conservative in such a way that you’re worried about CO’s and you’re worried about tax payers, it’s still better for them as well. If you’ve got a correctional officer working in a facility and you’ve got the people that you’re working with who are caged there, who are more able to cope, who are less stressed out, who are engaged less in infractions, your job is better. And let’s be honest, CO’s on the outside have astronomical rates of domestic violence, of substance abuse, of suicide, all of these different things because prisons are not humane and they are not places where we should have anyone, whether they’re working there or caged there.

    And then lastly, when it comes to taxpayers, would you rather pay a little bit upfront or pay a whole lot later. When we’re talking about connecting people to their families, if we’re able to connect them with their families, recidivism rates absolutely plummet, whether it’s phone calls or visits or whatever it is. Recidivism rates plummet. And if we’re paying for jails, hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, per person, or in prisons, tens of thousands of dollars per year per person, if I only cared about my tax dollars, I would much prefer that someone get released and then stay outside, get a job where they can become a taxpayer themselves, go back to their families so that their kids can excel in school and do better, than have them caged on the taxpayer’s dollars.

    So even though people may feel uncomfortable in a way that is sort of related to blood thirst, if you’re really concerned about humanity, then connecting people with their families and frankly not caging people in the first place is in the best interest of absolutely everyone.

    Eddie Conway: Okay. So now that brings me to the point you said earlier that a billionaire up in Detroit was gaining obviously from people missing their meals or electricity on the ground. Who’s the major players in this telephone network across the country. It’s like three or four major systems. Who are they?

    Venezia Michalsen: It’s very few organizations. Securus, which was related to JPay. You know, I’ve got JPay on my phone so that if I want to send money to somebody who’s inside, that’s how I can do it, and they’ve sort of got a corner on that market. And in Connecticut, Securus is the one that has the corner on that and through most of the country.

    Eddie Conway: Okay. All right. I know it’s part of the prison industrial complex itself, but it’s the state in Connecticut, obviously the state was benefiting from it and showed no interest in not getting that profit. Is states across the country-

    Venezia Michalsen: Well.

    Eddie Conway: Okay, talk to me about that a little bit.

    Venezia Michalsen: You know, it depends state by state. So in Connecticut, for example, they were getting a 68% commission, but you know other states are getting far, far less commission. But they certainly are getting a commission off of this. And one of the reasons that we weren’t able to pass this bill last year was because people were worried about how we were going to pay for the things that the kickbacks from phone calls we’re paying for. So that was the major hurdle was, “Well, how are we going to make the money?” And ironically, the kickbacks were paying for probation programs, so it was sort of this odd cycle where communities were even paying for the community supervision of their own family members. But you got to find that money somewhere else.

    Eddie Conway: Okay. So talk a little bit about where this campaign needs to go next. Okay, I understand it’s like October 2022. October the first, it will be in place for juveniles I believe, and the 22nd it will be in place for adult prisons. Where does this campaign go now beyond this?

    Venezia Michalsen: Obviously we want to spread this throughout the country. We’d like phone calls to be free everywhere. But then in terms of what we fight for next, there’s all of these places where we can starve the prison industrial complex of its profits. We can fight for commissary to not have these exorbitant fees attached to it. There’s so many things. Fighting for the decriminalization of sex work, for example. In Connecticut, we also just had marijuana become legalized and that’s something that should be happening around the country. At the end of the day, the point is, how can we empty our prisons? Not only do they not work as so-called correctional facilities, but they are counterproductive in every which way. They do not work. They are bad for everyone.

    So how can we empty out our prisons? And then also in the meantime, how can we facilitate that emptying by starving it of its profits? There’s so many millions of ways that people are making money off of it. The DMV, for example. You’ve got people who are on the inside who are getting paid pennies an hour to answer phones for the DMV, for example. It’s unconscionable. So how can we sort of move forward in emptying our prisons in that way by making it not profitable anymore?

    Eddie Conway: Okay. So if you had anything to say to the public, like final words, especially for those… And I like the fact that one of your team members is like a mother. I kind of like watched her talk. I watched some of the interview and the poverty of most prisoners, I mean, most prisoners are in prison because of probably the need to get money or for something. A small percentage is for passion and so on, but most people are in marijuana or drugs or whatever. And so these are the most impoverished people and then they in turn impoverish their families. And it’s a hardship for the family members to organize and have time to do stuff. So if you could talk a minute about what they can do from whatever position they’re in economically, that would probably help.

    Venezia Michalsen: Yeah. For me, my greatest honor is to be able to be connected to directly impacted people in the community, whether they’re formerly incarcerated people or whether there are people who have family members incarcerated. I think really most of all, what I’ve learned in my life, is that every tiny little bit counts. So even if you’re just liking something on Facebook or following something on Twitter, so that you can just be a little bit more informed every day and talk to people every day. It’s about showing the humanity of people on the inside and people who are supporting their loved ones on the outside.

    And once we all recognize that we’re all in this together and that caging people doesn’t do anything at all, then slowly those tiny little steps that no step is too small and then just making that connection, making that friend, subscribing to that newsletter, that all of us collectively together can really make that change over time. I believe that very strongly.

    Eddie Conway: Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that. That’s good information and continue to keep up the good work.

    Venezia Michalsen: Thank you so much. I very much appreciate you having me on today.

    Eddie Conway: Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

    After Gov. Ned Lamont signed a new bill into law in June, Connecticut became the first state in the US to make phone calls free for incarcerated people, including those in juvenile detention facilities. Studies show that having access to phone calls reduces violence in prisons and prisoner recidivism rates, so why have prisons and private companies been allowed to charge such exorbitant prices for communications between incarcerated people and the outside world? In this week’s episode of Rattling the Bars, Eddie Conway speaks with Dr. Venezia Michalsen about why Connecticut’s new law is so significant and why other states should follow suit. Dr. Michalsen is associate professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University and author of the book Mothering and Desistance in Re-Entry.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Cops hate citizen journalists, but they’re not the only ones

    Transcript

    Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham ,and welcome to 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 individuals. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today we’re going to achieve this goal by focusing on how the investigative work of cop watchers has been ignored and even blocked by the purveyors of copaganda, and what this disturbing pattern says about the efforts of citizen journalists to hold police accountable. And I’m very pleased to say we speak with Laura Shark, Tom Zebra, and Dale Lackluster to illustrate this point.

    But before I get started, I want those 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 or Twitter. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. It really does help us. And we now have a Patreon account called Police Accountability Reports. So if you have a few dollars to spare, it would really help us keep doing these investigations for you–investigations the mainstream media simply won’t do. So please check for the link pinned in the comments below. Okay, now we’ve got all that out of the way.

    Now, we continue to highlight on this show the work of cop watchers and auditors, citizen journalists who go out day after day to attempt to hold police and the government accountable. It’s a phenomenon that has been growing consistently over the past decade, and continues to uncover police misconduct and government malfeasance, all based upon the use of cell phone cameras and YouTube channels and, of course, of participation of viewers like you.

    That’s why when we received the call from a popular cop watcher named Laura Shark, we immediately jumped on the story. Turns out that some very important work she had done was at the risk of being appropriated by the mainstream media without acknowledging her role in obtaining it. And it’s how this happened and the implications of this misuse we will unpack today. And she’s not the only cop watcher who suffered at the hands of mainstream media. We will also be talking to Dale Lackluster, a cop watcher and respected auditor whose report on this public body camera footage was subject to a copyright strike on YouTube. That’s right, a video created by our tax dollars was claimed by corporate media as their property in an effort to suppress free and fair citizen reporting. But first, let me start with this story of what happened to Laura Shark.

    Shark, along with her reporting partner Tom Zebra, has been a tireless cop watcher for years. Her work in the Los Angeles area documenting police malfeasance has been unflinching. In fact, her reporting has been so effective that she was brought into questioning by internal affairs investigators over this brutal beating that she caught on camera. The victim was driving home from work when he was stopped by the police. Soon, he was dragged out of his car and then this, a brutal beatdown that Laura captured on camera. Let’s watch the footage. And just a warning to viewers, what you’re about to see is very disturbing.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Interviewer: Okay, and is there anything else?

    Laura Shark: Well, what else would you like to know?

    Interviewer: I guess I just wanted a little more detail about whether he had a weapon or anything, or what were the circumstances that led to that brutality?

    Laura Shark: I just know that at this time it said it was a traffic detention for a vehicle [inaudible]. The situation escalated into one where he became combative with deputies and deputies had to subdue him.

    [END VIDEO CLIP]

    Taya Graham: Now, for months, despite her efforts to find out the fate of the victim and even his name, Laura was stonewalled by the police. Meanwhile, as we said before, the department eventually dragged her in for questioning as part of their internal affairs investigation into allegations of police brutality. But what happened next shows not just the importance of cop watchers like Laura, but what an uphill battle they face combating the power of the corporate media–a struggle best exemplified by how the media elites used her work as fodder for their product without acknowledging her role in exposing questionable actions by the police.

    That’s because when the lawyer for the man is seen in this video asks Laura to turn over her footage as evidence, she was happy to oblige, but that favor turned out to have unforeseen consequences. That’s because one day Laura was scrolling through YouTube when she saw this: her video being used without attribution by MSNBC, a major network news channel and a billion-dollar corporation.

    Now, it’s important to note why this lack of acknowledgement by corporate behemoths who make billions on news operations is indicative of a larger problem. It’s not just a matter of hurting her feelings or simply making an honest mistake. And for more on what’s really going on here, and before I speak to Laura, I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.

    Stephen Janis: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

    Taya Graham: Stephen, you’ve worked for some pretty large corporate media outlets, but you also had your own website. What did you learn that’s applicable to Laura’s experience?

    Stephen Janis: Well, in the media ecosystem, capitalism is applicable. If I use someone’s story, I would get sued or they would threaten me, but they were free to use any content that I made and I had no recourse. And an interesting thought about this is that, if there’s a documentary filmmaker, which we are, if we want to use a clip from 20 years ago from a TV station, they’ll charge us $2,500, $3,000 for 30 seconds. If they wanted to take stories off my website or use stuff that I did, no problem, you have no recourse. So it’s a really unfair system, but very similar to how capitalism works.

    Taya Graham: What do you think would have happened, say had the shoe been on the other foot, and Laura had taken their footage and not giving them credit?

    Stephen Janis: I think quite clearly that if, in the case of Laura, if she used video from a television station or a network, they would have not just copyright strike it, but probably would have sued her or had a corporate lawyer call her, which is what they do. So I think basically the reciprocal–sort of, I can use yours, you can use mine–does not exist. And I think the respect that auditors deserve as journalists is not there, and that’s something that has to change.

    Taya Graham: Now, I’m going to go back to Stephen a little bit later in the show, but first I want to talk to Laura herself and have her tell us how she feels about what happened to her reporting and how she was treated, and what it means for citizen journalists like herself. Laura, thank you so much for joining me.

    Laura Shark: Hi, it’s great to be back.

    Taya Graham: So, Laura, first, just talk about the brutal beatdown that you captured on camera, what happened, and what you documented.

    Laura Shark: What happened–it’s funny, I know I’m hesitating because for a year he was a nameless man. Basically he was, oh, I remember the guy that was beat by… He was nameless, and it was surreal, it was bittersweet when finally that was found by the lawyer, that she found the video, finally. But what had happened is Chris Bailey was on his way home from work–he works for a contractor, the post office, okay, so for mailing–he was on his way home. And apparently he, according to the sheriff, straddling the lane, which I don’t… Straddling the lane is either BS or it’s like you’re making a… Getting in the next lane without it–and whatever, anyway, it’s not anything that ever would deserve what happened to him basically.

    So they approached his window, they asked for his license. Like any other man he has it in his wallet, I would assume in his pocket. When he went to get it, they’re like, “Whoa, we don’t know if you have a weapon here, get out of the car.” And so he stepped out of the car, he completely was… Everything they were asking of him, he was doing. He was tired, he wanted to go home. He gets out of the car. And, this is basically my assumption, is that when they went to put handcuffs on him, it startled him and their report it says… What did it say? His elbow… What did it say?

    Tom Zebra: His elbow moved backwards.

    Laura Shark: His elbow moved backwards, is in the official report. So I can only assume that he gets out and they immediately handcuff him and it startled him. That’s just me assuming. But anyway, at that point, instantly the deputies attacked him, the two–which was Walker and Groves, Deputy Walker and Deputy Groves. They called for backup. That’s probably around the point that we heard it over the scanner, never mind me seeing–we were actually covering LAPD, but then I see a Sheriff’s vehicle just hightail it down… And so we basically followed and we were listening to the scanner.

    So at that point, I believe, four more deputies arrived for backup, and several others. But the lawsuit that has now been filed is on six deputies that… In the documents it says that one of them held him in a chokehold while the other ones beat him. He had so much facial… Was it called his orbital…? He has orbital fractures, his eye had literally popped out of the socket momentarily from the pressure of the beatings. They knocked out his teeth, they apparently pulled down his pants and lifted his shirt, tased him in his abdomen and groin area. These are all very extreme. And how do you even explain that these are necessary actions to subdue?

    Oh, he’s had already three facial reconstruction surgeries, he is basically almost legally blind in his left eye, he will forever be… He is affected for the rest of his life from this incident. There’s just no… Not that you could forget it, but he would never be able to, because he has a physical… He’s only got, like, 60% sight in the eye, he wears a patch to this day. This is a year later. He’s got another surgery already scheduled. This man has been maimed, basically. It’s horrific.

    Tom Zebra: Every night of the week we see and record these guys. The only thing unique about this case is that hopefully there’s going to be consequences. But we’re not kidding when we say every night of the week we record these guys conducting illegal searches, making unlawful stops. And like Laura just mentioned, they’re being promoted, they’re being rewarded, they’re not being disciplined.

    Taya Graham: Now, recently you were saying your video was used by some pretty big mainstream media outlets. Can you talk about who used it and how this happened?

    Laura Shark: I was… When we met, when the lawyer had contacted us and we went and met with her and I turned over all completely all the raw files that had to do with this incident, and I signed over the waiver. So she had every right to do anything she wanted with it. So she is the one, when she did the press release, she had given over a video, I would assume, or something, for the news agencies. Somebody contacted me on Instagram or something, saying, “Your video’s all over the news.”

    And I was like… And I already knew, mind you, the lawyer did call a month ago to give me a heads up that they’re moving forward with the thing. So I had it in my mind that something was going to happen soon, and at least… Or whatever. I don’t know if I necessarily knew that my video would be shown, but then I look and it was, it was exciting to see things to come to fruition. It’s a bittersweet… It honestly never should have happened, obviously. This never, ever, I would never wish this upon my worst enemy. But I feel like, thank God that she had found me. The agents… Most of the articles and the news called me a bystander with cell phone video, right. So I don’t know if that’s necessarily the lawyer’s fault. She said she called me an angel or something. I think they just put that into their own words. In my mind, I felt like it was a little belittling to claim that it was a cell phone video because it’s like, oh, cell phone videos, somebody just…

    We were discussing this, Daniel and I, I don’t know why they wouldn’t have… If it was just a common citizen or just somebody walking down the street, they would have never been able to record that the way that Daniel and I have the ability to get into these scenes or these incidents. To be perfectly honest, I just don’t think that anybody could have done what we did, just to be a common bystander. And I just feel when I was, no, no, no, no, no, it was on my camera, we were there very specifically because they were there, and that they do what they did.

    And then all these news, they never identify deputies, they never name them. And for whatever it’s worth, it’s like–in any incident that you ever see, you never see… Only recently, Vanessa Brian was able to release five deputy names in her lawsuit, but that seemed like a struggle for her. And to be able to have that ability… And she’s known the names. We were told by the lawyer, well, they gave us these pictures of the deputies, we were given a list of the deputy names, but they didn’t connect any names to any faces. So they just did the minimal amount of turnover for them. So I was like, that’s Kano, that’s [inaudible name]. There’s only two deputies it came down to, which is the first two that actually pulled him over, Walker and Groves, that I’m not sure which one is which, because we weren’t familiar with those deputies.

    Taya Graham: Have you contacted any of these organizations for credit? And why do you think they don’t want to acknowledge your work?

    Tom Zebra: The story is… This information is finally available. It’s years and years later. These things have been ongoing, finally the story is coming out, and they’re not going to even say the names of the deputies. So the people involved are still on the street for us to record doing this every night, but they’re not even… The story should be related to the people involved. If it was me or Laura committing the crime, the story would have our names, and we would be publicly humiliated or shamed for our actions.

    It’s not enough to just mention the sheriff department that has 10,000 deputies. The six guys involved need to be named, because that would hopefully discourage them from continuing to do this night after night after night. But the mainstream media is still not going to publish their names. It’s up to us to publish their names. And we don’t have the audience to get that information out there. So what happens is we end up facing retaliation on the street for trying to expose them. Mainstream media protects the police and the police protects the mainstream media. And yeah, that’s what I think.

    Taya Graham: But Laura is not alone in her battle against mainstream media. In fact, another popular cop watcher found himself on the wrong end of corporate journalism when he had to take down a video because a local television station claimed that they owned the copyright to dashcam footage. That’s right, this footage you see here was claimed by a local television station who filed a copyright strike against this popular channel run by Dale Lackluster. The strike was perplexing, given that the video in question was created with taxpayer dollars by supposedly public servants. The video was obtained by Lackluster through a public records request. And for more on what happened, I’m joined by Dale Lackluster himself. Dale, thank you so much for joining me.

    Dale Lackluster: Thank you for having me.

    Taya Graham: So, first, just give us a sense of why you started this channel. What prompted you to decide to hold police accountable?

    Dale Lackluster: Well, for a number of years, I was watching a lot of the First Amendment auditing community. And I have a background in public service. I was a combat medic for the infantry, and after that I became a dual function firefighter-paramedic for Los Angeles City Fire Department. So I had a lot of experience working with the LAPD. And I was kind of aligned with them. I guess most people would commonly refer to that as a bootlicker. And so, for a long time, I was of that mindset. And then I got just kind of interested in these various experiences I was seeing in the First Amendment auditing community. And for a number of years I was paying attention to it and getting more and more sucked into it.

    And one day I had my own experience. And I had actually called the cops to help my neighbor, as he had told a bunch of our friends in a friend group that he was going to commit suicide. And so that interaction went real negative, for me. And luckily I wasn’t arrested or anything, but it just showed me, you see it happen on the screen so much, but when it finally happens to you is the moment that you realize this can happen to anybody. No matter who you are, what your background is, how much time of your… How many years of your life you’ve devoted to public service, they can still just as easily turn on you. So I figured I had to do something.

    Taya Graham: So what did the police do to you that changed your mind?

    Dale Lackluster: Well, basically, I was recording from my front doorstep. And I had one foot in my home and one foot out. And I’d been recording them for about a half an hour, because I was very worried about my neighbor. He was actually a good friend of mine, I’d helped him get a job. And so… It was about 30 minutes that I was standing out there recording them. And they finally geared up, and they had their vests, helmets, riot shields, and all that, and they were going to kick the door in. And it was at that moment where one of the officers turned to me and he said, “Go inside.” And I said, no, I’m over a hundred feet away, the houses were at an angle, so I couldn’t even see the front door. And he’s telling me, “You’re going to get arrested if you don’t go inside.”

    And so I immediately saw that as a violation of my civil rights, my right to record, not to mention I was on my own personal property. So I mean, that was it, it was real simple. Luckily I wasn’t arrested, I wasn’t summoned. A supervisor was called to the scene. There was an internal investigation. They never said what happened to the guy, or anything. But that little tiny experience for me was enough to say, you know, go do something.

    Taya Graham: What have you learned about policing through your investigations?

    Dale Lackluster: I guess quite a bit. The channel started off with me actually actively looking for things to report on. And then it slowly turned into something where I’m getting between 50 and 100 emails a day from people who are saying, “This happened to me. Can you check it out?” “Will this fit on your channel?” And realistically, I could probably put up a dozen videos a day, if I had the time to do that. And it takes me six to eight hours per video that I put out to research and produce and edit and publish. I think what that’s taught me is how big of a problem it is.

    And that’s just me. I know that for a YouTube channel I have a decent amount of subscribers, but the United States doesn’t know about me. Like one tenth of a percent of the population has heard about me. And I’ve got that many people looking to share their experience with me and trying to get it out to the public. And most of them are egregious violations. And a lot of them are cover-ups or have some sort of sense of cover-ups. And not only that, most of the time the experiences or the interactions and encounters are things that we see over and over and over again. Like, the departments aren’t learning, the cops aren’t learning, and they just keep happening and growing. And maybe that’s just a result of my space as a creator in this field, but to me it looks like it’s an ever-expanding and growing problem.

    Taya Graham: So do you think the auditing community gets the respect it deserves? Do you think people take it seriously?

    Dale Lackluster: That’s a really good question. I think it gets the respect that it deserves from the people who know they need it. It’s one of those divisive communities; you’re either all in or you’re all against. And I guess there’s even some division within the community with the way people audit. I hear a lot of people make the argument that the cool, calm demeanor is the right way to go–you catch more flies with honey type of thing. And then you have some of the really volatile auditors that start off with vulgarities immediately.

    And even in that sense, my view on that is I think that law enforcement needs to be exposed to both. They’re going to scenes where people aren’t going to be sugar and honey or milk and honey, and they need to know how to approach those scenes appropriately. So if it’s always clean and sterile, they’re never going to know how to act appropriately on those calls. So I personally see a benefit from both styles of auditing. But as far as just in general, no, I think the back the blue crowd hates the auditing community, and the auditors love it.

    Taya Graham: Now, you had a mainstream media outlet exercise a copyright strike against you for posting dashcam footage. Can you talk about what happened?

    Dale Lackluster: Yeah. I don’t know fully what happened as far as why the copyright strike happened. All of the footage that I used in the video was public domain. It was from the Arkansas State Police. I attempted a FOIA request. They denied me, because I’m not an Arkansas resident. I reached out to my viewers. My viewers responded. And one of them actually obtained the bodycam, or the dashcam footage, for me, sent it to me. And I consulted with my lawyers, made sure that’s all legal, and yes, we got the green light. And so once I got that dashcam footage, I made that video. It went crazy viral. And they had made a story about it, too, because it happened in their little local jurisdiction for their local news channel.

    And I called the news desk and said, Hey, you guys just copyright striked my channel and took down my video, but it’s public domain and that video was actually featured on The Young Turks, DL Hughley re-posted it, and a bunch of other people. But for some reason, the news channel either thought it was theirs or they had a computer system that just automatically identifies videos that could be theirs and just strikes it automatically without any human review, or they did it maliciously to try to stop my video from getting so many views so that their video could get more views. I don’t know, but I’ve consulted with counsel and we are taking it to court.

    Taya Graham: So just understand, how can body or dashcam footage, which is created basically by public tax dollars, belong to anyone? How is that not public property?

    Dale Lackluster: It is public property, there’s no doubt about that, it’s never owned by anyone. So either they have a guy in their copyright room that doesn’t understand Section 207 of the Copyright Act and what public domain is, or they did it maliciously, or it was just really an accident. But either way, the video is back up, the strike’s been taken down.

    Taya Graham: Can you talk about a video that is of particular importance to you? A video that you feel encapsulates what you do.

    Dale Lackluster: I guess there’s quite a few. I very rarely have a video that gets some sort of . And it’s something that I get a lot of complaints about, actually, on my channels, that they never see the resolutions from these interactions. And that’s because, simply, litigation takes years. Eric Brandt took seven years to litigate one of his cases. And internal affairs and all that stuff take so much time. And settlements sometimes get slapped with gag orders. So my personal favorite ones are… I guess I don’t have a specific one. But there have been quite a few within the past five or six months where we have an immediate reaction from the local police department, where they either shut down their Facebook page, they terminate the officer, some type of suspension. We’ve had a couple that have resulted in settlements within just a couple months after the incident, so those ones would be my favorite, I guess.

    Taya Graham: Now, I just want to toss back to Stephen, because I know he’s reached out to the television station in question, and I want to hear if he’s heard back. Stephen, thanks for joining me again, and tell me, what have you heard from the station about their copyright strike?

    Stephen Janis: Well, I sent them an email with a very specific question: How did you claim a copyright on publicly created documents, information, et cetera? And I have yet to hear back, but I’m going to keep pressing them, because I think this is a fundamental question, and is very important to the auditing community and people like us, who are independent, nonprofit-funded journalism. They’re going to answer the question. They haven’t answered yet, but they will.

    Taya Graham: Now, I know that the battle between the cop watching community and the mainstream media can seem like inside baseball, I’m even aware of the fact that the plight of a cop watcher with a YouTube channel can seem like a diversion from the true focus of the show, which is watching cops and holding them accountable. But please allow me to push back on that idea a little bit, not just to be ornery, but to make a case for what the alternative media really represents and why it is critical to the health of our fledgling democracy.

    To do so, I’m going to reference a book called Seeing. It’s a fictional novel by an esteemed Spanish writer, José Saramago. And the book tells the tale of a city where very odd and inexplicable thing happens. During an election, most of the residents of the capital city go to the polls, and almost all of them cast blank votes. This is despite actually dropping a ballot in the ballot box. Most of them did not check off a specific candidate.

    The appearance of the so-called blankers creates confrontation, confusion, and even threats of violence from the political elites. In fact, the ruling class is so confused the entire government abandons the city completely, expecting the community to erupt into chaos. But instead, the opposite occurs, promoting the country’s leadership to resort to even more extreme measures.

    Now, I don’t want to give away the whole story, but the reason why I bring up this book is because I think it makes a point about what the mainstream media ignores, or, in some cases, even tries to thwart, with cop watchers. Because I think the people who seek alternative media sources like Laura Shark and Lackluster are the contemporary equivalent to blankers: people who refuse to buy into the status quo and seek truth where it can exist without fear or favor.

    And that’s also why mainstream media hits back: because of fear. Fear that people who choose to assemble and obtain knowledge outside of the purview of the status quo represent a threat to it. That those who don’t turn to the greed infused media for the truth are skeptical of the irrational narratives it espouses.

    As we discussed last week, the nation’s war on drugs was an utter disaster that did nothing–and I mean nothing–to reduce addiction or the suffering associated with drug use. Just consider the fact that this year the DEA, our huge drug enforcement administration, is spending billions and making thousands of drug possession arrests, but overdose deaths rose to their highest level ever: 90,000 people dead. Now, compare that to the breathless coverage from the mainstream media about the heroic efforts of drug warriors, about the scourge of drug dealing in our dangerous cities, about all the wonderful successes that have led to the largest experiment in mass incarceration in the history of human civilization.

    And so, like the people in the book Seeing, if we collectively decide that this narrative is simply not worth paying attention to, the corporate media fights back with their rational acts, like using a video without attribution, or copyright striking body camera footage. This is how they fight back when we ignore their offerings and do our own reporting or watch auditors like Laura Shark or Tom Zebra and Lackluster, and this is what happens when we choose to ignore their irrational narratives, seeking to justify that the possession of mind-altering substances should lead to arrest, loss of freedom, and even sometimes loss of our lives.

    We simply become blankers, and they just can’t stand it, so they try to stop it. Maybe, just maybe, the people we spoke to today are a threat to the insanity that our corporate media counterparts have embraced for years. Maybe journalism for and by the people is the only thing that will save us from the idea that it’s okay for people to get sick and go bankrupt, or for cops to take property without charging people, or making an arrest.

    Maybe that’s why large corporations either appropriate or block the work of these auditors. But that’s also why we will keep reporting on what they do, and holding the people that want to stop them accountable. I want to thank Laura Shark, Tom Zebra, and Dale Lackluster for their important work and for taking the time to sit down with us and discuss it. Thank you all so much. And, of course, I have to thank intrepid journalist Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. And, of course, I would be remiss if I did not thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee.

    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. 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. Of course, you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook, and please like and comment. I do read your comments and appreciate them, and I try to answer your questions whenever I can. And if you want to help us continue, please consider donating to our Patreon, Police Accountability Reports.

    My name is Taya Graham, and I’m your host to the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.

    Citizen journalists continue to play a critical role in holding police accountable, which is why they face increasing pushback from the underlying system that bolsters bad cops. PAR speaks to cop watchers Laura Shark and Lackluster about the challenges they face when reporting on police, and how auditing law enforcement has become an increasingly dicey occupation.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Kip Kinkel, the establishment’s poster child for juvenile incarceration, finally speaks

    Kip Kinkel was publicly reviled when, suffering from undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, he shot and killed his mother and father before killing two of his classmates and wounding 25 others in a mass shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, in 1998. Kinkel pled guilty to murder and attempted murder and was sentenced to 111 years in jail without the possibility of parole. Since then, Kinkel’s case has been repeatedly weaponized to justify extreme punishment and sentencing for juveniles. After twenty years of silence, Kinkel finally spoke to journalist Jessica Schulberg in an exclusive interview published in HuffPost in June. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Schulberg speaks to TRNN’s Eddie Conway about how Kinkel’s story fits into the fight against over-incarceration and juvenile life sentences.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • The drug war destroyed her family. Decades later she’s breaking her silence

    The nation’s endless war on mind-altering substances has many casualties, some who refuse to be forgotten. That’s why Catherine Freeman is coming forward after 47 years to describe how her family was set up by a drug informant. In this episode of PAR, we listen to her story about how the intersection of law enforcement and politics tore her family apart, and why the truth must finally be told.

    The post The drug war destroyed her family. Decades later she’s breaking her silence appeared first on The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • In Maryland, organizers fight to give juvenile lifers some measure of hope

    Sonia Kumar, senior attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, explains the movement to restore the parole option to people sentenced for serious crimes in childhood. Kumar notes that in Maryland, juvenile lifers are mostly Black, and says that the laws keeping them behind bars without possibility of parole are remnants of the tough-on-crime stances of the 80s and 90s.

    The post In Maryland, organizers fight to give juvenile lifers some measure of hope appeared first on The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Battleground Baltimore: Ghost Guns in Baltimore

    Ghost Guns in Baltimore, Explained

    Earlier this week, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) and US Department of Homeland Security announced the arrests of four men involved in a significant drug dealing operation, boasting that “1200 grams of suspected ecstasy, over 1900 pills of suspected fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, scales for drug distribution, [and] 15 firearms and parts to manufacture 40 additional handguns also known as ghost guns” were seized.

    The “ghost guns” displayed during the presser were polymer kits—boxes of plastic, unserialized gun parts that can be ordered online by anybody and usually cost between $300-$500.

    ‘Ghost gun’ is the catchall term for guns that do not have serial numbers (and are untraceable, as a result), that have been privately made, though it most often means guns that have been personally 3D-printed or assembled from a kit.

    During the press conference for the raid, BPD Commissioner Michael Harrison explained that “[ghost guns] have found themselves in the hands of criminals, prohibited convicted felons, and gun traffickers because they know we cannot track them back to their origin.” 

    Last month, Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy held a virtual event where Deputy Police Commissioner Sheree Briscoe emphasized the increase in ghost gun seizures and warned of a rise in these untraceable guns. Some of these guns have already been connected to homicides, and more of these guns are being seized by police each year, she explained.

    “We’re on pace to surpass last year’s numbers and potentially come in between 250 to 300 privately made firearms that will make their way to the streets of Baltimore,” Briscoe said last month.

    The major talking point, and one repeated the most by local news back in June, was that ghost gun seizures increased by 400% between 2019 and 2020. WBAL wrote, “there’s new evidence to suggest that ghost guns are Baltimore’s newest crime epidemic.” That 400% increase, however, was from just 30 guns to 128 guns—in a city where police officers regularly seize thousands of guns each year. And the increase in ghost guns is hard to convincingly connect to an increase in violent crime.

    For some perspective, Battleground Baltimore reached out to the Baltimore Police Department for the number of ghost guns seized each year since 2018, as well as the number of guns with the serial numbers “obliterated” (the old-fashioned way of making a gun untraceable) and the total number of gun seizures.

    “A legitimate weapon will always have a serial number per Federal Law. A weapon in which the serial number has been removed, regardless of method of removal, is referred to as ‘Obliterated,’” Lindsey Eldridge, director of public affairs and community outreach for BPD said. “Some obliterated serial numbers are able to be ‘Raised’ either fully or partially in which case, the department can then run the serial number.” 

    According to BPD, in 2018, the department seized 9 “ghost guns” and 46 obliterated guns out of a total of 3,910 guns.

    In 2019, BPD seized 30 ghost guns and 43 obliterated guns out of a total of 2,202 guns.

    In 2020, BPD seized 128 ghost guns and 59 obliterated guns out of a total of 2,242 guns.

    This year, as of May 19, 2021, BPD seized 140 ghost guns and 60 obliterated guns out of a total of 823 guns.

    Easy access to these guns which cannot be traced is troubling. However, the increase in the number of ghost guns seized each year, as gun seizures overall decrease, has not had a discernible impact on crime. Daniel Carlin-Weber, a Maryland-based firearms instructor and founder of C-W Defense, explained:

    “Baltimore City has seen multiple years now with murders exceeding 300 people and assaults with firearms roughly three times that number, yet there does not seem to be an obvious correlation with how many guns the BPD are taking versus how many lives are being lost or violence committed with guns,” Carlin-Weber said of the gun seizure data. “Three years ago, BPD took nearly 4,000 guns and a year later, almost half that number. Baltimore violence did not double from 2018 to 2019 despite the dramatic drop in gun seizures.” 

    The focus on ghost guns is primarily “political,” Carlin-Weber argued. In particular, he explained, “ghost guns” are often invoked as part of the world of right-wing militias. But as the “ghost guns” seizure by BPD illustrates, it is primarily, as it is with all gun law enforcement, Black men who are targeted, arrested, and incarcerated for gun possession.

    “While [politicians] portray that white supremacists, extremists, and only those with hate in their hearts would want a privately-made firearm, the people being arrested on the streets will overwhelmingly and disproportionately continue to be Black men,” Carlin-Weber said. “We may hear that there exists a desire to demilitarize police departments or decrease the prison population, but that’s not the reality caused by the laws so focused on guns that we currently have and it will only get worse with more of them.”

    Carlin-Weber reflects a growing number of gun rights advocates who stress the racist elements of gun enforcement and how gun policing in cities such as Baltimore is another way to target Black men. Gun laws and how they are policed in racially disparate ways in cities such as Baltimore, Carlin-Weber argues, creates the underground market for ghost guns.

    “Maryland law in general sets forth a complicated and expensive regime to legally purchase handguns and legal carriage of a gun in public is out of reach for most Marylanders, whether they’re prohibited by law from owning guns or not,” Carlin-Weber said. “It should come as no surprise that so many decide to acquire or carry a gun illegally in a place where the police have a less than poor reputation and the impoverished conditions pervasive in Baltimore help to fuel so much violence.”

    Baltimore Courtwatch, a watchdog group that tweets out court proceedings, told Battleground Baltimore, they have noticed more cases involving ghost guns, and prosecutors and judges using the same kind of rhetoric used by the police to make the guns seem especially nefarious.

    “They’ll say, ‘A polymer gun was recovered and we know this is a rising issue especially in Baltimore City and we can’t trace these guns,’” Baltimore Courtwatch explained. “They try to make it a bigger thing than it is.”

    Baltimore Courtwatch is also worried about the ease with which police could be planting these guns on people. In Baltimore especially, where the city has had to pay large settlements to residents who had guns planted on them and where the police are incentivized to increase their gun seizure numbers, this is not an outrageous accusation. Courtwatch noted that they often hear of ghost guns being found by police in cars and in houses much more than they find them on people.

    “That raises the red flag for me,” Baltimore Courtwatch said. “You hear that the gun was hidden in the trunk of the car and the lawyer swears up and down that their client has never seen it.”

    For Carlin-Weber, the focus on gun seizures is not only ineffective in reducing violence, it is “futile.”

    “Serialized handguns made by licensed manufacturers still comprise the majority of firearms taken by police,” Carlin-Weber said. “We are in a country with more than 400 million firearms in private hands. Even if one could not physically make their own gun, the supply of guns in general makes prohibition more than futile.” 

    During the BPD press conference, BPD Commissioner Harrison also argued for harsher sentencing for those caught by police possessing a weapon, calling for “real consequences… for gun offenders and those illegally possessing firearms within our city.”

    Carlin-Weber noted that Harrison’s rhetoric was ostensibly more of the same, with one difference: Now, he is able to invoke “ghost guns” in his argument for more incarceration.

    “The city cannot confiscate their way out of mitigating violence in Baltimore,” Carlin-Weber said.   “Yet Commissioner Harrison pleaded yesterday in his press conference for more police resources and made ghost guns a big part of that plea.” 

    Baltimore County Tries To Reduce the Power of its Inspector General

    Baltimore County can have a little bit of accountability, as a treat. That’s pretty much what Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski said earlier this week when he helped introduce a bill that would have severely limited the powers of the county’s inspector general, Kelly Madigan. 

    As first reported by Baltimore Brew, Olszewski, a Democrat who ran as a progressive, introduced a bill on Tuesday, July 6, that would put the inspector general under the oversight of a board that includes three people appointed by Olszewski and two appointed by the County Council Chair Julian Jones Jr., and two that would be agreed upon. The result would have the IG overseen by some of the most powerful people in county government—the kind of people the IG is supposed to be holding accountable.

    Olszewski even claimed the bill he introduced was approved by IG Madigan, though Madigan said this was untrue. She said her office “identified several issues with the proposed legislation that would affect the independence and undermine the ability of the office to perform its mission.”

    Back in May, Madigan was attacked by Council Chair Jones and Middle River Councilwoman Cathy A. Bevins for, well, doing her job. Bevins said the Inspector General’s Office was “giving Baltimore County a black eye.”

    These attacks and attempts to legislate away accountability measures recalls elected officials in Baltimore City—primarily City Council President Nick Mosby and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby—criticizing Baltimore City IG Isabel Cumming for, again, doing the job of the inspector general. That job is to investigate local government for corruption, fraud, and waste.

    The county’s attempts to control the IG’s office were quickly condemned, and Olszewski put a pause on the bill.

    “Our administration is proud to be the most open, accessible, and transparent in Baltimore County’s history. In just a few years we have taken unprecedented steps forward, including creating and expanding the County’s first-ever Inspector General,” a statement released by the county said. “We remain committed to filling gaps in the current law to provide appropriate accountability measures, but we want to ensure all concerns are thoughtfully considered. In the coming weeks, we will engage a diverse group of expert stakeholders to review and strengthen proposed policies so that we can help ensure the success of this important office.”

    Also: Score another one for Baltimore Brew, which is consistently breaking news and getting scoops such as this one and then reporting the hell of it, making sure readers and the people in charge don’t forget about it.

    “From Poppleton to Cherry Hill”

    There’s a deal in the works that could avert the eviction of Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden  for six months, according to a video posted to Twitter by Black Yield Institute, the Black-led group that administers the space. Last month, Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) issued an eviction notice to Black Yield Institute, only to spark public outcry over the targeting of the garden, which is the only source of fresh food for the Cherry Hill neighborhood. 

    Servant Director of Black Yield Institute Eric Jackson said Black Yield has a “very promising opportunity” to remain at the community garden for the next six months, averting immediate eviction. 

    The HABC echoed what Jackson said: “We had a positive & productive meeting with BYI and hope to reach a resolution as soon as next week,” HABC said to Battleground Baltimore in a statement.

    On Saturday, July 3, activists from across the city gathered in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Cherry Hill to call attention to the eviction. An online petition has received 44,000 signatures to date to oppose the eviction of the garden. 

    HABC previously said the Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden was occupying the land without permission and the city had “long term” plans to build affordable housing on the site. But with over 8,000 vacants controlled by the city, and a large vacant lot across the street from the farm, many were left wondering why the HABC wanted to develop that specific lot. 

    Jackson said public pressure was successful in preventing the garden’s immediate eviction, and bringing the city to the table to negotiate a long-term home for the garden.

    “We’re grateful for the mayor’s office, and the Housing Authority or any other agency that’s willing to help us, as Black Yield Institute is committed to continuing to provide food and opportunity for agriculture and opportunities to address food apartheid,” Jackson said. 

    Westport resident and Westport Neighborhood Association President Keisha Allen, who frequents the community garden because her neighborhood also lacks a grocery store, told Battleground Baltimore the impacts of unhealthy food are compounded by local environmental hazards. 

    “Weight, diabetes, hypertension, we already live near an incinerator and a landfill and other pollutants,” Allen said. “So most people here have asthma, or some kind of breathing issue. So it just makes us sicker and sicker. And this is just one more thing.” 

    Allen, also the chair of the Harbor West Collaborative, said that the community garden  negotiating their eviction is a testament to the power of collective action.  

    “What we do know is our elected officials, as well as our city agency, don’t like negative attention, and they don’t like pressure,” she said.

    Westport is no stranger to the struggle against displacement and harmful development. In 2018, Allen helped win a ban on oil trains in Baltimore. She is also currently fighting Maglev, a high-speed and high-priced connection from Washington D.C. to Baltimore.

    “There is nothing beneficial about coming into a majority Black neighborhood once again, and putting some fancy bourgeoisie rail line running through the middle of it,” Allen said.

    At Black Yield’s rally last weekend, a group of residents held a banner that read “From Poppleton to Cherry Hill #Black Neighborhoods Matter” and “Community Control of Land Now.” They were there to raise awareness of their fight against a private developer displacing residents in Poppleton neighborhood located just northwest of downtown Baltimore. 

    “One of the issues is that this is a farm that they’re fighting for land rights. And we’re doing the same thing in Poppleton, fighting for land rights,” said Sonia Eaddy, a longtime Poppleton resident and organizer. 

    The group Organize Poppleton is seeking a meeting with city officials over their fight against  developer La Cité Development, which received $58.3 million in tax increment financing (TIF) in 2015, but has displaced the community instead of serving it, activists say. 

    “We just have a small portion, like a block that’s left,” said Eaddy. 

    Eaddy said the city used eminent domain to target individual homeowners before the community could organize collectively: “These laws allow the city the power to come in, and take private property for public use. But this is not the reality, these luxury apartments are not for public use, that’s a private investment for a private developer to benefit, this development is not going to benefit the community as a whole.”

    Allen said Cherry Hill, Westport, and Poppleton have all become targets for displacement because they are located on prime real estate.

    “City governments and special interest groups are too comfortable with just coming and bulldozing Black neighborhoods,” she said. “All because they don’t want us to be here.”

    Organize Poppleton is holding a rally to “Save Our Block”  Saturday, July 10, from 6 – 8 pm at the Sarah Ann Street park (1100 Sarah Ann St.).

    Hogan Fights To End Federal Unemployment Benefits 

    Attorneys for the state of Maryland and plaintiffs suing the state for ending federal unemployment benefits head back to court on Monday, July 12 at 9:30 a.m. after a judge placed a temporary restraining order blocking Gov. Larry Hogan from halting unemployment payments.

    Hogan faces two lawsuits for seeking to end the enhanced benefits before they expire in September. He is among 25 Republican governors who have sought to end the payments, arguing they have created a “worker shortage,” a claim challenged by numerous economists and shown to be untrue by business owners who pay a living wage and provide benefits to their workers.

    “I’ve given 40 years of my life to my job,” said one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “I can’t find anything comparable, and my old employer isn’t able to hire me back just yet. I’m very worried about losing benefits next month. I don’t know if I will be able to afford prescriptions for high blood pressure and diabetes, and fear that my wife and I will lose the home we’ve lived in the past 20 years.”

    This week, judges rejected three immediate attempts by Hogan to overturn the restraining order, which is set to last 10 days and will be reviewed on July 9.

    Obtaining unemployment benefits in Maryland has not been easy. Unemployed workers sounded off at a July 6 protest about the difficulties they continue to face getting unemployment. As of Tuesday, agents with the Maryland Department of Labor were denying unemployment claims on the false basis that benefits expired on July 3, but the state says employees have since received updated instructions. Robbie Leonard, one of the attorneys suing the state on behalf of plaintiffs, tweeted that as of July 7 there were currently no available in-person appointments to review unemployment claims.

    At the protest, longtime community activist Rev. Annie Chambers urged “every legislator in Annapolis” to protect benefits for the unemployed, which many are clinging to as a lifeline. 

    President Joe Biden so far has backed the efforts of Republican governors like Hogan to end unemployment benefits before they expire, but over 34,000 people have signed an online petition by the progressive group MoveOn urging Biden to reconsider. 

    “Instead of focusing on addressing the real problems that harm working people and businesses every day, such as starvation wages, poor benefits that limit access to health care, and union-busting by large corporations, Republicans are trying to take unemployment benefits—that are already low to begin with—away from the people who need them,” the petition says.

    The post Battleground Baltimore: Ghost Guns in Baltimore appeared first on The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • U.S. Supreme Court ruling makes it easier for judges to give young people life sentences. Now what?

    ACLU legal expert Sonia Kumar says the ruling slows but does not stop the movement toward more just sentencing for juveniles.

    The post U.S. Supreme Court ruling makes it easier for judges to give young people life sentences. Now what? appeared first on The Real News Network.

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  • Former cop became cop watcher after this fraught encounter with police

    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. 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. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at a phenomenon we’ve examined on the show before: auditing and cop watching. But this cop watcher has a unique perspective, because he’s a former cop.

    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. You can also message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter, and please share and comment on our videos. It really helps us.

    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 the investigations mainstream media simply won’t do. Please take a look for the link pinned down in the comments below. Okay, now we’ve got all that out of the way.

    Now, as you know, if you’ve watched the show before, we have continued to follow a growing phenomenon called “cop watching” or “auditing.” It’s an organic movement of citizen journalists who pick up cell phone cameras and observe police or survey buildings to ensure our elected leaders are protecting the rights of the people. That’s why we were in Denver when Eric Brandt was sentenced to 12 years in prison for threatening speech, and why we continue to check in with auditors like Blind Justice, Otto the Watchdog, Pajama Audits, John Filax, James Freeman, and LackLuster. But the auditor we’re going to speak to today not just caught our attention because of the work he’s doing behind the camera, but because of his backstory.

    His name is James Madison, or James Madison Audits, and he has used his camera and YouTube channel to fight back against police overreach for years. But what makes his story even more interesting is the path James followed to become a cop watcher. James is not just a popular auditor. He’s a former cop, a man who seen the other side of policing up close, and is willing to discuss what happens behind the blue line candidly and critically. It’s a sense of openness that is not only rare in law enforcement, but we also say is necessary. What I mean is that having someone who wore the badge criticize it is the kind of insight we need to help hold police truly accountable. And what’s particularly interesting about James’ conversion from cop to cop watcher is how he decided to pick up a camera and fight back. It all started with this video, an encounter with a cop from his own front yard, that changed his attitude and prompted him to embrace activism full stop. Let’s watch, and as we do, I’ll let James explain what happened.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    James Madison: Due to those disputes. Officer Fischetti came onto our property to address a civil complaint from the neighbor, which means no crime. The recording began where my wife is holding the camera, and Officer Fischetti was so set on that it was unlawful to record police, even though he was recording with a hidden audio device. Officer Fischetti will effect an arrest, which means he arrests me without handcuffs, by saying, “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

    Officer: Okay, well now we got to put that away.

    James Madison: No, sir. We don’t.

    Officer: Yes.

    James Madison: No, we don’t. What property are you standing on, officer?

    Officer: Right here.

    James Madison: Where is this?

    Officer: Right here where I’m standing.

    James Madison: What address is it?

    Officer: Okay, well, I don’t want you recording this, and it’s against law to record this.

    James Madison: It’s against the law for you to record me, and your recording’s on right now.

    Officer: Okay. You ready to go to jail then?

    James Madison: If you want me to go to jail, when are we going to go to jail? I will shut it off.

    Speaker: Tell us-

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Taya Graham: As you can see, James Madison was confronted with the very same threat that many of our other cop watchers encounter: jail time. But since that encounter, James has fought back like so many others, brandishing his camera and recording police to hold them accountable. By monitoring cops for bad behavior while bringing his own unique inside view of policing to bear, James has become a popular cop watcher who’s made some very important videos. Before I speak to him more in depth about what he does, I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, to discuss how cops who become whistleblowers can help journalists, and vice versa, to reveal truisms about policing that might not otherwise be known. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.

    Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

    Taya Graham: Stephen, I think one of the best known examples of a famous police whistleblower was Frank Serpico. Can you talk about what he did and what happened to him?

    Stephen Janis: Yep. Frank Serpico was a New York City cop who refused to take bribes. Basically, at that point, the entire New York City Police Department was on the take, and Frank Serpico refused to take the money. It cost him personally. He was shot and almost died, but what happened was they started a commission called the Knapp Commission, which investigated police corruption, and determined that the entire police department was basically a bribery racket. It was harrowing for him, but also very necessary for the public.

    Taya Graham: But Stephen, you have a lot of experience with cops, sharing their stories and you writing about it, right?

    Stephen Janis: Yeah. One of the first books I ever wrote, called Why Do We Kill? The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore, was with a former Baltimore City homicide detective in 2011. Among other things, he reveals that police were stealing from crime scenes, that homicide detectives were extending cases instead of making arrests, but, of course, the department ignored it. Then we had the 2015 Freddie Gray dying in police custody, and then the Gun Trace Task Force scandal, so even though we revealed these things, it didn’t really have an impact, although I think at this time we were trying to do some of the same work that Serpico did.

    Taya Graham: And what about your book You Can’t Stop Murder? What did that cover?

    Stephen Janis: Well, Taya, this book was written with a detective who was much older for cases back in the 1970s, and much of it had to do with police corruption. One of the cases we wrote about was a massive gambling sting that caught police officers gambling, taking receipts from gambling, basically very similar to New York in the 1970s. The whole case vanished when the evidence vanished in the evidence locker. There was another case where officers were accused of stealing 1,000 grams of heroin, and that case, too, vanished. So you can see in the ’70s, just like with Serpico, police corruption was really starting to come to the fore, but nobody was doing anything about it here in Baltimore. And look what happened.

    And now I’m joined by the former cop turned auditor, James Madison. James, thank you for joining me.

    James Madison: Thank you. I’ve watched your videos, I see the work that you put in, so it’s pretty awesome. A few of my viewers have told me a bunch. “You need to get an interview with her,” “Get an interview with them,” and let’s do that. I was like, “All right,” so now we’re here. We’re finally here.

    Taya Graham: First, tell me a little bit about your career as a police officer and why you left. And what do you think is wrong with American policing?

    James Madison: It started right out of high school, when I was 19 years old. Jumped into law enforcement there, went to the basic law enforcement academy, picked a department near my hometown here, and decided to go into it. My grandfather worked for DOT, and he’s like, “Get a good job with the government. Good benefits, good retirement, and things like that,” so I was like, “Yeah, let me try it.” Then about, I would say three years into it, I started to realize that it wasn’t for me. I did stick it out so that I could vest and collect my retirement. It’s just a negative environment.

    Taya Graham: How do you define being a cop watcher or auditor, and why did you become one?

    James Madison: If I define it… When I had an audit from the Florida Department of Revenue, which was miserable if you ever have any audit from IRS, they come in and check everything. They make sure that you did everything right. A lot of people will coin that term as an auditor. We’re just going out there checking, whether it be a First Amendment, Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment rights violation, and even Fifth Amendment. You can do a Fifth Amendment check, too. If you want to remain silent and have a cop berate you, then he’s failing that Fifth Amendment right there. Even if he says to you, “Well, if you’re innocent, you would tell me,” that’s violating your Fifth Amendment right, right there.

    Defining all that is just going out there and checking and seeing what they’re doing, if they’re doing it right, because a lot of law enforcement will tell you it’s a big statute book. There’s a lot of stuff that you can do, and we can get you on nearly anything. Well, it’s also a big policy book, so we can check and make sure you’re doing it right. They have policy, law, and Constitution, which is kind of moot for most of them, because they don’t really care. Some do, but most don’t.

    What actually got me started in auditing is, there’s an officer in my hometown. His name is Officer Fischetti, and he is a police officer here. I think he’s still there. I don’t know. But we were having a neighbor dispute, and he came to my house, and I document everything. We have security cameras outside just like everybody does. It’s nothing special. But at this time, my wife was holding the camera.

    He came onto my property well beyond the right of ways and all that, and I was telling him what my neighbor did. Well, when I was telling him what my neighbor did, I say also we’re recording this here, because we’re going to eventually sue my neighbor for what he’s doing here, just constantly aggravating us for a remodel that we were doing. Once I did that, he told me, “Well, if you record me, I’m going to take you to jail.” There is a video about that. I recorded it. And I said, “Wow, all right. Well, I’m going to record you.” He then said… What’d he say? He said, “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.” That’s effecting an arrest, no matter what state you’re in. When someone does that, a law enforcement officer made an arrest, whether he puts handcuffs on you or not, by citing that to you and saying, “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.” That is effecting arrest.

    But the weird thing is, my wife was the one holding the phone, not me. That’s what got me started right there. That man in my front yard telling me that I’m going to go to jail for filming him, well after Smith v. Cumming was established in the courts, well after the First Amendment was established, and well after many, many times that it was legal and lawful to film the police.

    Taya Graham: Why do so many auditors refuse to give their IDs? Is that an important way to test a police department? How do you respond to people who say what’s the big deal about giving your ID or answering questions?

    James Madison: It’s the basic test, because police have, what, three types of encounters. They have a consensual encounter, then they have a custodial detention and then they have an arrest. They have those three types of encounters. If it’s consensual, then you need to know about that, and you don’t need to submit to a Fourth Amendment search. Even though it’s not a pat down, it’s still seizing your papers and property. It’s taking your information. They’re going to put you in some type of a database, like they have me. It says that I’d rather film police, and it’s just a silly database. Then they can share that with other law enforcement like that. Which, again, it’s not that big of a deal, but the fundamentals of it are we have rights not to submit things to law enforcement because they’re not there to say hi to us and be friends to us, like when they put them in the elementary schools and do that.

    When they’re there, they’re conducting an investigation, and the less that they have, the better off it is, no matter who you are, if you’re a suspect in the crime. Now, if you’re a victim, that’s a little bit different. But if you’re a suspect in a crime, you don’t want to give them anything, because if you look at the way the statutes in almost all of the states work, you have to be committing a crime, about to be committing a crime, or already have committed a crime in order to be ID’d. Now, there’s some states that only require you to submit once you’ve been arrested, but those are all essentially after you’ve committed a crime, about to commit a crime, or going to. That’s it. And law enforcement don’t need to know anything about you other than that. Period.

    Taya Graham: Why do you think police behave in a way that seems like their power is unlimited? What makes them so entitled? Why do they act as if their power is unchecked?

    James Madison: There’s no why about it. Their power is unlimited and unchecked, that’s it. Period. All right. It’s just that. They don’t have anybody that they have to answer to. The law enforcement don’t have any accountability. They do when a citizen complains and makes a really big stink about something, but as I mentioned, I will go out, and I will go out with a tint meter and check officers’ tint on their cars. In Florida, the police cars are not exempt, and I go up and just say, “Hey, listen. Due to my training experience, your vehicle looks a little bit dark.” Some of them will let me check it, some of them don’t, but the ones that I do check mostly are in violation. When I tell them that, they’re like, “Well, I didn’t put the tint on here. The department did.”

    Well, we don’t have that ability to say something like that. Even if we buy it from the dealership like that, then the dealership says, “All right, this is your car now.” It’s that. The police say, “Well, this is your car. You’re driving it, you’re in constructive possession or actual possession of this vehicle, and here’s your citation for it.” And that goes all the way through nearly to everything. They have unlimited power and unlimited access to do whatever they want. Police departments are one of the most highest-funded departments, besides the Department of Education, in any government. They get the most money. You think about that. They have the most money. He who has the most money, has the most power. Period.

    Taya Graham: I’ve seen excessive arrests for minor crimes in my city of Baltimore. For example, there were over 100,000 arrests a year, and it was a policy called “zero tolerance,” and now there’ve been an extreme increase of arrests in rural America, especially in lower income areas. What role do you think police play in inequality, and how do they enforce the social boundaries of poverty?

    James Madison: There’s so many idioms that you can think of. Low hanging fruit, the weakest in the pack. That’s exactly what I think is happening. If they stop me and they want to do something, they’ll know that I’m going to fight it. They know that I’m going to have an attorney that fights it. Yeah, they might put something cheesy on me, but a lot of the times what happens for the people that have lower income, or lower education, or something along those lines, unless they’re really, really hurt bad or they’re injured traumatically, they can’t afford an attorney to go out there and fight their case for them. So what do you think’s going to happen?

    They’re going to say, “All right, we’ll pay the fine,” “We’ll do it,” “I just need time to pay this fine, your honor. I don’t have a job right now.” “Okay. Well, we’ll give you 90 days to come up with the money.” And they’re going to go ask a family member to do it, because they don’t want to go to jail and see them go to jail, so someone else is going to hop in.

    When you talk about inequalities like that and how it’s exploiting… I just did a little video, it’s not really an in-depth video, about PayTel. PayTel is a company that you got to put $10 in to talk to someone in jail. You can talk to them for five minutes, and then you don’t get any of your money back. That company is making major profits. They’ve got big companies like that, so they’re getting that, “I have to contact him because I want to be able to get him out of jail.”

    It was Soleaker. He’s a guy that does Second Amendment. When I went to pick him up for jail, he had $40 on him. When he left, he had $20 on him, and they took that money without any ability for him to protest it or anything like that, and says, “Well, this is your daily state money, like your lunch money and something like that,” and took the money and it was gone. That was out of Brevard County. That’s just their policy. They took $20 per day or whatever it is from him for amenities or something along those lines. I’m paraphrasing. I don’t know exactly what it was, but what he told me is he was missing $20 and they justified it with food or lunch, and why he was there.

    Taya Graham: What would you like to see change policy-wise in law enforcement? What do you think would really help the public and even help police do their job more effectively?

    James Madison: They need to hire people that are not out there lifting weights and being a quasi-military badass. Simple as that. They need to hire people that know how to talk to people. They need to hire people that know how to deescalate, and they need to hire people that can communicate well with someone and understand what someone’s going through, rather than on the calls where someone’s distressed and they might have a weapon, or something along those lines, they don’t need to go in there and order someone, “Drop it, now! Do it now!” because that person is hanging by a thread, and they don’t care about anything. They need to bring that back down. They need to talk about something.

    Honestly, I always talk to my viewers about defunding the police. That is something that needs to be done, and it doesn’t need to be… take away what they have currently. It is stop giving them things. I think it’s $200,000 in drones that our local sheriff got, and I don’t know why they need $200,000 of drones. They have X amount of officers on there and four supervisors per shift. If I can do the math properly, I don’t think you need that many drones. You can have each one of those officers have one, and I could probably pay for it myself. Defunding, when I talk about that, they need to bring down what they have the ability to obtain. The technology that they have, $5,000 worth of license plate readers on nearly every intersection, that’s where you got to start defunding the police, saying, “Yes, we could be out there maybe just checking each one of the tags. We want the technology to be able to do it.” But at the same time, defunding is not taking away what they currently have. It’s just stopping what they keep spending and spending and spending and spending on.

    Taya Graham: If you could educate the public about one thing in relation to their rights, what would you want them to know? What do you want your YouTube channel to teach people?

    James Madison: Well, the fundamentals, [Amendments] One through Five. One, you can do and say pretty much what you want, as long as there’s no threats attached to it. Two, you can protect yourself and carry your own firearms, because police take anywhere from 12 to 15 minutes to get to you. When they say that we need the police to protect us, it’s very rarely that they actually protect you in a life or death situation. Three, we really don’t have that much, but when officers come into your home and they want to set up there and just kind of crash. It’s happened a couple of times where offers come into homes and just kind of take over the home. That’s one, but primarily the Fourth Amendment is it.

    You don’t have to consent to a search. Take the citation. Officers may let you off if you let them search, but that is the game that they’ll play like that. Going into the Fifth Amendment, we really don’t need to talk to the police, and you need to search your rights when you’re doing that. Now, one of the things with the First Amendment, when I go back through that, is make sure that you film law enforcement, no matter what they’re doing.

    If you see them on the side of the road and you have a couple minutes, throw the camera on them. Just make sure, because they have cameras on us everywhere. I’m talking about every intersection. If you look up at these streetlights, film it. Film that, film your traffic stops. If you have to go into the police department, film it. Make sure it’s legal and lawful in your town, just in case they have some weird ordinance or something along those lines. But from what I know, you can film anywhere in public in the United States, and I don’t know where there isn’t, a place that’s like that.

    Taya Graham: Certainly, we’ve seen numbers across the country touting the rise in shootings and murder, and we have seen the mainstream media posit the increased violence as justification for more, not less, police. But perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions. Maybe as Stephen discusses in his books, policing has little to do with solving crimes or public safety. Instead, as his book suggests, police sometimes serve as an extension of bad policies of state power that seek to enforce both the economic and racial inequity that results from it.

    Well, what do I mean? Consider this video shot in our home state of Maryland. It shows officers on the boardwalk of Ocean City, a popular tourist destination, using brutal force after two Black teenagers were accused of vaping. That’s right. The brutal takedown and tasing of these teenagers seen here was over nothing more than taking a drag of vaporized nicotine. As you can see, the teens were not accused of violent crimes, injuring others, or any of the things that we would think would result in this sort of police reaction. Kneeing someone in the stomach over a vape is not just ridiculous. It’s revealing the true imperative of American policing, as we’ve said before, which is fabricating disorder.

    But the reason I bring this incident up is not just because it’s a shocking example of police overreach, or because it shows how drastically laws are enforced against people of color. No, the reason I’m raising this incident is because it displays, for all of us to see, the extreme disregard police have for the people they serve. It’s a prime example of how the power of law enforcement has become beholden only to itself. State-sponsored violence is one of the most troubling and potentially devastating forms of government power. When the government gives somebody full license to inflict bodily harm or death, the levers for accountability for those actions simply vanish.

    How else can we explain what we see in this video? And how else can we even try to understand the dozens of videos we’ve shared on this channel, if not for the fact that the police feel fully empowered to hurt us? [They] have little fear of reprisal if they do.

    The point is, the reason we produce the show is not just to show these videos, but explain the implications. The reasons we speak to people like James Madison, it’s not just to highlight their work, but to understand why it’s important that they do what they do. That’s why I always state the purpose of the show from the onset, why we make clear our job is not just holding bad cops accountable, but examining the system which bolsters them.

    That’s what we did today, because in the experience of James Madison and the cops on the beach, on the boardwalk, we see the system at work, a system that puts profit over people and turns the law into a tool to do so. A system that prioritizes punishment over productivity and conspires to profit off the suffering it inflicts.

    Which is why I make this promise to you. We won’t stop watching, we won’t stop reporting, so long as this injustice afflicts the many for the enrichment and satisfaction of the few. I’d like to thank our guest, cop watcher James Madison, for joining us today. Thank you. And of course, I have to thank Stephen Janis for his writing, research, his editing, and his intrepid reporting on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.

    Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

    Taya Graham: And of course I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks ,Noli Dee. 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. Please reach out to us.

    You can email us tips privately par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us @policeaccountabilityreport 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. Of course, I do read your comments and appreciate them, and I try to answer your questions whenever I can. If you stuck around to the very end, maybe you want to donate to our Patreon link pinned below. I hope you do. My name is Taya Graham, and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.

    What would cause a former cop to cross the thin blue line and use his camera to monitor law enforcement and hold police accountable? For well-known police auditor James Madison, it was a fraught encounter with a police officer who threatened to falsely arrest him on his own property for filming him.

    In this week’s PAR, we speak to Madison about his conversion from cop to cop watcher, and about the deep issues that plague law enforcement.

    The post Former cop became cop watcher after this fraught encounter with police appeared first on The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • What everyone gets wrong about the ‘Defund the Police’ debate

    Public debates about “Defund the Police” have seemingly devolved into an all-or-nothing rhetorical war with little room for nuance. But opponents of the slogan and the movement behind it routinely ignore the decades of profligate spending and wasteful use of taxpayer dollars that has become commonplace for many police departments. In this TRNN podcast, the hosts of the Police Accountability Report take a close look at the numbers and expose some of the most egregious police spending.

    The post What everyone gets wrong about the ‘Defund the Police’ debate appeared first on The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • International commission indicts American policing system for “crimes against humanity”

    In our first segment for this week’s episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc talks with Marjorie Cohn about the highly anticipated report from the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States, which issued a blistering indictment of police-perpetrated racist violence in the U.S. As Cohn writes in Truthout, “The Commissioners concluded that the systematic police killings of Black people in the U.S. constitutes a prima facie case of crimes against humanity and they asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to initiate an investigation of responsible police officials.” Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the advisory board of Veterans for Peace.

    In our second segment, we bring you the latest installment of our ongoing series “Not in Our Name,” which highlights the diverse voices of Jewish activists, artists, intellectuals, and others who are speaking out against the Israeli occupation. In this installment, Marc talks with writer and translator Joanna Chen about the role of literature in understanding and resisting the inhumanity of occupation. Chen teaches poetry at the Helicon School of Poetry and her work has been published in outlets like Guernica, Poet Lore, Consequence, Poetry International, Narratively, and the L.A. Review of Books. Her full-length translations include Less Like a Dove, Frayed Light, and My Wild Garden.

    Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Tuesday on TRNN.

    Studio/Production/Post Production: Stephen Frank

    The post International commission indicts American policing system for “crimes against humanity” appeared first on The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Cops keep pulling him over, and their reasons are increasingly bizarre

    Shortly after our story aired on how police put LA resident Daniel Alvarez in handcuffs for a bogus traffic violation, he was pulled over again for allegedly switching lanes without signaling.

    In this episode of PAR, we explore the continued use of questionable traffic stops to harass people like Daniel, and what these troubling tactics say about the state of American policing across the country.

    The post Cops keep pulling him over, and their reasons are increasingly bizarre appeared first on The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Prison violence like Alabama’s demands a national reckoning

    facing-south

    This story originally appeared in Facing South on June 18, 2021, and is shared with permission.

    During the early fall of 2017, just three days before the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would descend on the Alabama prison system to investigate reports of brutality and sexual violence, an atrocious incident occurred at the Bibb Correctional Facility’s Hot Bay, a dormitory “housing men in bunkbeds multiple rows deep,” as the DOJ would write in its subsequent report. In the back of the room, two prisoners repeatedly stabbed their victim, and when another prisoner attempted to stop the assault he became the next victim. In a desperate struggle to stay alive, the initial victim “dragged himself to the front doors of the dormitory,” the DOJ later wrote, where other prisoners banged on the locked doors to summon the guards. By the time a correctional officer finally arrived, the victim was dead on the prison floor, having bled out from his open wounds. One prisoner witness offered the haunting testimony to the DOJ that “he could still hear the prisoner’s screams in his sleep.” Numerous other prisoners reported that rapes, torture, and physical assaults are routine. Despite the atrocity of such violence, it is not an isolated happening: The DOJ report concluded that “an excessive amount of violence, sexual abuse, and prisoner deaths occur within Alabama’s prisons on a regular basis.”

    At what point do we see such rampant violence not as a function of prisoners’ individual pathologies but as state violence itself?

    While the guilty verdict against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd has delivered some accountability for police violence, the routine nature of violence within America’s prisons is hiding in plain sight and yet receives little public scrutiny.

    As a historian of U.S. prisons, I have studied civil rights lawsuits demanding prison accountability and have written about prison violence as a matter of state violence. My most recent book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America, offers a historical narrative of state violence in Southern prisons from 1945 to 1990, particularly in Texas. We Are Not Slaves draws upon court documents, affidavits, depositions, prisoner letters, and over 60 oral histories to excavate details on how prison violence was state-orchestrated. In Texas, for example, prisoner field drivers drew from the culture of slavery on East Texas cotton plantations to force the work of fellow prisoners. Within the prison, the administration deputized select prisoners to act as guards who employed coercive and violent means to maintain control over other prisoners. As some prisoners worked the fields effectively as slave labor, privileged prisoners known as ‘building tenders’ went about openly armed and constructed an internal slave-trade economy where they bought and sold the bodies of other prisoners as sexual slaves, subjects of often violent rape, and as domestic cell servants. Because the bodies of other prisoners served as an unofficial state reward for their service, I argued that this was an example of state-orchestrated sexual violence. The building tender system was eventually overturned after two decades of prisoner organizing, work strikes, and legal documentation—an effort that culminated with Ruiz v. Estelle, a lawsuit filed in federal court in Texas that led to a 1980 ruling that conditions in the state’s prison’s constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

    This is among thousands of photos taken at Alabama’s St. Clair Correctional Facility, obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2019, and authenticated by the Montgomery Advertiser and other news outlets. St. Clair is Alabama’s most violent prison with the country’s highest prison homicide rate, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.

    But despite civil rights victories like Ruiz, prisons continue to be spaces of physical brutality and sexual violence, especially against incarcerated people of color. To consider one state prison system, let’s take a closer look at the Justice Department’s 2019 report on Alabama’s state prisons for men. The 56-page document is so replete with descriptions of violence, sexual assault, and state neglect that it reads more like a perverse horror story than a government report. As a result of the findings, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in December 2020 against the Alabama Department of Corrections for violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

    According to the DOJ report, Alabama’s prisons are increasingly overcrowded, understaffed, and violent. By 2017, for instance, Alabama’s prisons had a homicide rate eight times the national average of prison homicides in 2014. Between January 2015 and June 2018, 27 Alabama prisoners died in verified homicides. Moreover, Alabama prisons are dangerously overcrowded as they incarcerate over 15,000 people in a system meant to hold 9,882. Meanwhile, Alabama employs less than a third of the needed administrative staff—just 1,072 out of 3,326 authorized correctional officers.

    Weapons, from makeshift knives to hatchets and full-length machetes, are easily acquired by prisoners, as evidenced by the security staff at one Alabama prison collecting 166 makeshift knives in just one sweep in May 2017. Violence is so common in the state’s prisons that many incarcerated Alabamians report taking up arms in self-defense.

    Prisons should face the same kind of social and political reckoning that our police now face.

    Once armed, some prisoners engage in internal economies of buying and selling tobacco and illicit goods, such as the dangerous drug known as “flakka” that’s popular in prisons. The readily available synthetic cannabinoid, known technically as 5F ADB, can lead to “rapid loss of consciousness” as well as “delirium, agitation, psychosis, and aggressive and violent behavior,” as the DOJ noted. In March 2018, a prisoner at Holman prison passed out from smoking flakka and “awoke to one prisoner punching him in the eye” and then four or five prisoners “took turns raping him,” the DOJ found. Compounding matters, widespread drug use leads to debts, which create a complicated web of internal economies that accelerate sexual violence when prisoners cannot pay what they owe.

    In other cases, the DOJ report found outright extortion in Alabama’s prisons. In one 2018 case, a prisoner was threatened with rape for his alleged debt. When he couldn’t pay, the DOJ said, his mother received lewd text messages from another prisoner who “threatened to chop her son into pieces and rape him if she did not send him $800.”

    When incarcerated victims do report the abuse, prison administrators have a “tendency to dismiss claims of sexual abuse by gay prisoners as ‘homosexual activity,’” the DOJ found, and thus suggest that “gay men cannot be raped.” Making matters worse, if the victim files a report that admits he accrued debts, the prison administration cites the victim with a disciplinary charge. Some prisoners are so afraid of retribution from reporting an assault that they turn to an old Southern prison practice of cutting their wrists out of desperation to stay in protective custody or the hospital wing.

    With the US now officially celebrating Juneteenth as a federal holiday, we need to confront modern-day prison violence and coerced prison labor that treats incarcerated people as slaves and disposable without the sanctity of bodily protection.

    More often than not, however, prisoners fail to report a sexual assault at all “out of fear of retaliation, shame,” the DOJ said. Out of 600 incident reports of sexual assaults from 2016 to 2018, the department could not find a single instance when correction officers intervened to stop the attack.

    As a state institution, a prison is accountable to the public: At what point do we see such rampant violence not as a function of prisoners’ individual pathologies but as state violence itself? Unfortunately, incarcerated people today have fewer outlets to redress grievances over prison abuse because of national legislation and politically motivated changes in DOJ practices that were intentionally designed to silence prisoner complaint. For instance, the Prison Litigation Reform Act signed by President Bill Clinton in the wake of the conservative revolution of 1994 restricts prisoners’ ability to turn to the federal judiciary to make civil rights claims of violent abuse.  During the Trump administration, the DOJ had all but ended the long-standing practice of consent decrees where federal judges had enforcement power over prisons, jails, and police department in cases of civil rights violations. Without consent decrees, the federal judiciary has little power to compel states to address civil rights complaints of prison violence. Although the Biden administration reversed the Trump decision against the use of consent decrees, the back and forth shows the politicization of the Justice Department and civil rights for incarcerated people.

    With few other avenues available, incarcerated Americans have turned to political organizing in parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2016, they organized the first national prison labor strike to bring public attention to the fact that prison violence and coerced labor are akin to modern-day slavery. Drawing upon potent historical legacies, prisoners called the 2016 strike a “Call to Action Against Slavery,” with the prisoner organization the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) played a leading role in the action. As one of the co-founders of FAM alongside Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun (Marvin Ray), the prison organizer Kinetik Justice (Robert Earl Council) brought national attention to the strike when he was interviewed by Democracy Now and WBUR. Since the 2016 strike, however, Justice has spent much of his time held in solitary as punishment for his outspoken organizing and whistleblowing. And this past January, just as the movement was planning a new wave of prison labor strikes, correctional officers beat Justice so badly that he was flown to the University of Alabama’s trauma hospital to recover from injuries that included the loss of sight in one eye, multiple head lacerations, and a knocked-out tooth. Justice awoke from the assault to find, as he told San Francisco Bay View, “stitches in the front and back of my head, my left eye was swollen shut, I had three fractured ribs and multiple bruises across my back.”

    As a historian of prisons, I see the ongoing horrors experienced by Alabama’s prisoners as a familiar historical pattern of state violence. Nelson Mandela, who himself spent 27 years behind bars in South Africa, offered this reflection: “No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Forty years after the victory in Ruiz, our prisons are still spaces of state violence, yet our nation pays little attention to the endemic brutality that routinely dehumanizes, tortures, and endangers the lives of other human beings. Incarcerated lives matter. With the US now officially celebrating Juneteenth as a federal holiday, we need to confront modern-day prison violence and coerced prison labor that treats incarcerated people as slaves and disposable without the sanctity of bodily protection. Prisons should face the same kind of social and political reckoning that our police now face.

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  • Cops wanted to make her a felon, but missed a key piece of evidence

    Michelle Lucas is a pizza delivery driver, a proud grandmother of four, and a community activist who alleges that she was railroaded into a felony conviction that carries up to two years in prison. As part of PAR’s ongoing coverage of the expansion of mass incarceration in rural America, we take an in-depth look at the shoddy police investigative work and the imbalanced levers of justice that lead sheriffs to attempt to prosecute her twice for the same alleged crime.

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  • The latest on the deadly effects of COVID-19 in prisons

    Ever since COVID-19 came to the United States, its been ravaging prisons in this country. Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein and Kathryn M. Nowotny tell Rattling the Bars’ Eddie Conway that vaccines seem to be helping to slow infection rates, however it’s hard to know for sure because of lingering issues with transparency inside of prisons.

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  • Cops lied to put him in handcuffs, but a camera caught the truth

    A birthday date goes awry when a Los Angeles resident and his passenger are profiled during a traffic stop resulting in the cuffing of the driver and arrest of his passenger. PAR investigates the legality of the traffic stop and the violation of the passenger’s right to film the police.

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  • Battleground Baltimore: What does George Floyd mean to Baltimore?

    Although many Baltimore leaders are adept at paying lip service to the movement to protect Black lives, they still have a long way to go in their efforts to confront the systems that work together to kill Black people. 

    This was apparent in the way Baltimore’s Police Commissioner Michael Harrison and Mayor Brandon Scott marked the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of former police officer Derek Chauvin. 

    On May 25, Commissioner Harrison told a group of residents and activists who gathered near Johns Hopkins University for the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by police, that the Lord put him in Baltimore to make a difference.

    “I’m here because I was called by God to be here.” Harris, who has been commissioner since 2019, told attendees. 

    At the event, Harrison, like a lot of officials all across the country, sought to make Floyd’s violent and public death the exception to policing rather than the rule. Harrison, a police veteran of 30 years, called Floyd’s death “a shock to the conscience.”

    During the event, attendees said the names of victims of police brutality all over the country. They said Floyd’s name, of course. They said the names of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner. They said Freddie Gray’s name, but the killings of Black people in Baltimore did not stop with Freddie Gray, and there were others before him. They did not say the name of Tyrone West, whose sister Tawanda Jones has been calling attention to her brother’s death and police brutality since 2013.

    Baltimore has already gone through all of this. The one year anniversary of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising arrived with similarly milquetoast panels and town halls and those played out a lot like this George Floyd event. A moment where the revolutionary fervor was fully absorbed by those in power, taken from the people that understood why Baltimore had to rise up, and replaced by reform and accountability talk that played well to news cameras. 

    But very little has changed in Baltimore since Gray’s death. The police budget continues to grow. The department remains under a federal consent decree and refuses to reckon with one of the country’s most egregious police scandals, in which the BPD’s Gun Trace Task Force was shown to be robbing residents, dealing drugs, and planting evidence. 

    Just this week, Kevin Jones, the sergeant who oversaw the corrupt unit in the months leading up to their indictment, was promoted to chief of patrol.

    Harrison took some time to tell the crowd who came out in honor of George Floyd, a feel-good story about a police department that has failed to reckon with its own racism and corruption.

    “This is what we now call the greatest comeback story in America,” Harrison said.

    “The greatest comeback story in America” is the Baltimore Police Department’s 2019 recruitment campaign slogan, by the way.

    Meanwhile, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott released a statement on the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death.

    “The murder of George Floyd last year provided a gut check for the nation and forced leaders to reimagine the future of public safety and policing,” Scott’s statement said. “Since then, leaders have successfully made strides to improve transparency, integrity, and accountability, but there is much more work to accomplish.”

    As he often does, Scott said the right things. And it seems as though he actually means it, though many also bristled at how the statement mostly focused on good governance—how Scott is “committed to approaching public safety as an urgent public health matter” and how “the Baltimore Police Department is addressing long-standing racial and gender disparities in their ranks by issuing a new strategic framework to advance equity.” 

    This, as Battleground Baltimore’s Lisa Snowden-McCray noted in a deep dive into Scott’s mayorship, is Scott’s approach: running the city “at a basic level of competency” and at the same time, trying to address “a rising, progressive call for bolder action from dedicated activists.”

    “Everyone must accept the moral challenge to be better and do better, and ultimately show Gianna Floyd that her father did in fact change the world,” Scott’s statement concluded.

    Immediately, many pointed out that Scott’s budget increases the police budget by $28 million dollars. Others noted that Scott, while ready to declare “George’s life mattered,” has been silent about the ongoing prosecution of Keith Davis Jr., a Black man shot by police in June of 2015, later charged with a homicide, and prosecuted four times for the same crime (and likely to be prosecuted a fifth time). Davis Jr.’s case has become a local and national activist cause due to the sheer amount of prosecutorial misconduct and police corruption surrounding the case and the advocacy of Davis Jr.’s wife Kelly.

    After Commissioner Harrison spoke, Battleground Baltimore took a moment to ask the commissioner a couple of questions.

    When Harrison was asked about the growing demands across the city for Baltimore to defund the department, he said the budget was out of his hands, that he had no control over it.

    “There are no operational increases,” Harrison said. “What you’ll see when we do our budget presentation, it’s all things that are out of our control, like pension and healthcare and stuff like that. So there’s no extra money going to the police department for operational costs. It’s just things that are beyond our control that happen in all city agencies.” 

    When Harrison was asked about Keith Davis Jr., he said he didn’t know anything about Keith Davis Jr.

    “I’m not familiar with that one. So I don’t know that I can speak to it,” he said. 

    Taxpayer’s Night

    While the May 25 event for Floyd gave Harrison a chance to make a case for himself and provided those who attended a moment to reflect and mourn, the second Baltimore Taxpayer’s Night on May 27 gave Baltimoreans a chance to say what was on their mind: “Defund the police” and “Free Keith Davis Jr.”

    “I love Baltimore so I must speak out and urge you to reduce the amount of money we are investing in policing while ignoring the root causes of violence,” Dr. Gwen DuBois, a primary care physician who lives in the Mount Washington neighborhood said.

    This Taxpayer’s Night gave resident’s an opportunity to speak to the Baltimore City Council and followed a previous Taxpayer’s Night in April that was directed at Mayor Scott. At that April event, due to the efforts of Organizing Black, nearly 100 people from across the city called in to demand the police budget not be increased. May’s Taxpayer’s Night went similarly.

    “That the City of Baltimore has to scramble together on two nights to say something and hope that it changes is not a participatory process,” Rob Ferrell of Organizing Black noted, before stressing that residents in Baltimore want more of a say in how their tax money is being spent.

    Organizing Black’s demands are that the police budget be reduced by $100 million. The overwhelming majority of speakers at May’s Taxpayer’s Night event not only called for defunding the police (only two people who spoke praised the department), but also called attention to Keith Davis, Jr.

    “These trials have resulted in two mistrials and two overturned guilty verdicts. They have cost the city of Baltimore an estimated $1.2 million dollars,” said Bilphena Yahwon, who has been advocating for Davis Jr. for years. “It is clear that Baltimore residents are directly paying for the unjust prosecution of a police brutality victim.”

    The day after dozens of residents declared “Free Keith Davis Jr.” or some variation of that sentiment during Taxpayer’s Night, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office announced additional charges against Davis Jr. 

    The announcement came in the form of a Friday news dump, released around 6 p.m. on May 28, heading into Memorial Day weekend. He was charged with attempted murder due to a stabbing in jail last year. The charges arrived just a couple of weeks after Davis Jr.’s previous conviction was overturned.

    Davis Jr.’s growing supporters argued that the timing of the new charges were suspicious and explained that the incident from over a year ago, was in self-defense. 

    On the day the new charges were announced, Keith’s wife Kelly spoke out.

    “Marilyn Mosby is continuing to be vindictive and retaliate against Keith. Keith is now being charged with attempted murder on a detainee who threatened my life and attacked him,” Kelly Davis said on the day of the new charges. “I just want the city to know this is what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with this powerful woman who continues to use the criminal justice system she is supposed to be shepherd of, to attack Keith, a police brutality victim.”

    “Free Keith Davis Jr.” Rally

    On Tuesday, June 2, a group of over 50 supporters gathered outside of the Baltimore City Circuit Courthouse to call attention to the ongoing prosecution—and as defense attorney LaToya Francis Williams said, persecution—of Davis Jr. and more broadly, to the all-encompassing cruelty of the prison system.

    “This conference is to show you all that Keith Davis Jr. is not just the case,” Yahwon told the crowd. “Keith Davis Jr. is not just a ward of the state. Keith Davis Jr. is not just a property of a prison. He is a father, a loving father.”

    Yahwon again mentioned the economic cost of continuing to prosecute Davis Jr.

    “We are saying not only drop the charges against Keith Davis Jr. But that no tax money, no tax payer, none of us should be implicated in the filing of the state,” Yahwon said. 

    The event highlighted the voices of young Black people in Baltimore, as well as educating attendees and passersby about the harmful impact the criminal justice system has had on people in Baltimore and how deep its roots go.

    Nineteen-year-old activist Solomon Mercer, noted that Davis Jr.  has been prosecuted not once, but five times by “a Black woman herself,” referring to Mosby. Then Mercer asked the question that many Baltimoreans have been asking themselves as they watch, year after year, public officials saying the right thing but rarely doing the right thing.

    “How can you claim that you want to change your city and change our system, but do nothing to change it?,” Mercer said.

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  • Cops told him the First Amendment doesn’t apply, then they arrested him to prove it.

    The arrest of a cop watcher by Texas police raises serious questions about the rights of citizen journalists and the state of the First Amendment. We examine the unlawful detention of cop watcher David Boren within the context of the right to film police and to document the actions of public officials.

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  • Texas’ prison plantation model was a brutal remnant of slavery


    Texas’s prison system from the end of the Civil War to the 1980s used perhaps one of the clearest continuances of slavery, the prison plantation system. Prisoners were used for agricultural work and overseen by other prisoners using a structure that barely differed from the one used during slavery. The hard work of prison activists and a series of legal challenges in the 1970s and 1980s was able to remove this brutal vestige. However, neoliberal reforms left Texas with a system of intense state control, and outsourced the violence used to control prisoners to prison gangs, including the Aryan Brotherhood. 

    As the civil rights movement changed the landscape of American society in the 1960s and 1970s, prisoners all over the United States were radicalized. Prisoners were both inspired by and leaders of the Black Power movement, the Chicano rights movement, and other social movements of the time. The activism of George Jackson, the Attica prisoner uprising (itself inspired by Jackson’s murder at the hand of prison guards) and a series of prison labor strikes all speak to this increased activism behind bars, including in the area of racial justice. 

    “As the Black power movement turns to Black liberation there is a deeper critique about the ways in which the prison system itself is a reproducer of relationships of racial inequality,” said  Dr. Robert Chase, an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University and the author of the new book “We Are Not Slaves: State violence, coerced labor and prisoners’ rights in post war America.” 

    Prisoners are learning about their ties to world-wide liberation movements, studying the works of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist thinkers such as Frantz Fanon. “There is an intellectual transformation. Prisoners are creating a life of the mind; if you can’t escape your cell, you can escape by what you read,” said Chase.

    Prisoners have turned to the courts to expand their rights. One of the first cases that broke the hesitation of federal courts to address the needs of state prisoners was Cooper v. Pate, in which the court allowed a prisoner the right to practice Islam and have access to a Quran in Illinois prison. This case did for prisoners’ rights what Brown v. Topeka Board of Education did for desegregation by creating a system in which prisoners could petition the federal courts for their own civil rights. This caused an increase in federal civil rights cases from prisoners from a mere 218 in 1966 to over 18,000 in 1984. 

    Within this framework of simultaneous court actions and activism behind bars, Texas prisoners began to challenge the ‘Prison Plantation’ system. Texas prisons, and many prisons in Southern states, were highly focused on work—particularly agricultural work. This stands in contrast to the more rehabilitative model that was employed in Northern states. According to Chase, this allowed Texas to create a mythology that their prisons were cheap, productive, and that their “control” method prevented uprisings like those seen in the rehabilitation models of California or New York.

    In order to maintain this Prison Plantation model, Texas prison used building tenders. Building tenders were prisoners who were given power within prison systems to control the work of other prisoners. These building tenders were able to gain special privileges by ensuring other prisoners completed work. Building tenders often used brutal means to control worker output, including torture, and even conscripting prisoners into sexual slavery. They were allowed to run informal prison economies whereby they exercised a great deal of power over the life of every inmate under their control.

    While Black and Mexican inmates did become building tenders, they were almost never given control over white prisoners. White prisoners, on the other hand, were able to advance to much higher positions of power in the prison, and were often given power that was almost comparable with the (almost exclusively white) prison guards. It is no coincidence that this system echoes the slave driver system, where some Black enslaved people were placed in positions of greater power, but still subject to white overseers. 

    Political dissent in Texas prisons was also dealt with harshly. Political prisoners and dissenters were often placed in “protective units” which were typically reserved for gay prisoners, in an attempt to make them less accepted by other prisoners, or even to make them the subject of sexual assault. They also would place white political prisoners in Black or Muslim units in an attempt at intimidation. However, these attempts often backfired; frequently, prisoners were able to find solidarity with each other, and inter-prison organizing flourished throughout the 1960s and 1970s. 

    In 1979, Texas prisons became the battleground of the Ruiz v. Estelle case, one of the largest and most important challenges to prison conditions in the United States. The Ruiz case challenged many aspects of the Texas prison system, but specifically focused on the building tenders system. The courts ruled for the dismantling of this system in 1980, but it took several subsequent lawsuits (including one in 1997) to ensure its complete demise. 

    The end of the building tenders system coincided with the increase of the Texas prison population (climbing to 165,000 prisoners in the late 1980s) due to increased sentencing and the “war on drugs.” The Texas justice system ends up with the largest prison population, the highest number of executions, the highest rate of prison privatization, and the second highest rate of prisoners in isolation.

    These two events, unfortunately, led to a different sort of brutality against Texas inmates. Prisons responded with a dramatic increase in state power and militarization of the penal system with the use of SWAT teams to enforce order, often in a brutal fashion. But they also responded by outfarming the internal work of violent prison regulation, which used to be done by the building tenders, to prison gangs, particularly the Aryan Brotherhood. 

    “After they win the prisoners’ rights lawsuit and the building tender system begins to be disassembled and the gangs arrive, I argue it’s a kind of neoliberalism with gangs,” said Chase, “The building tender system privileged white prisoners … after that system is disrupted, that’s disrupting white supremacy within the prison system … so the gangs, the Aryan Nations start to assassinate the prisoners who have been politicized … and prisoners made [the claim] that prison administration was working with Aryan Brotherhood, or at least allowing them free reign of violence, particularly when it was targeted against the more politicized prisoners.” 

    White supremacy within prisons did not end with the removal of building tenders; it merely morphed into a new violent system that upholds the same white power structure.  “They built out of the ashes of the Prison Plantation model a new modernized system with outsourcing of violence [to gangs] and bringing in militarized systems of control and isolation,” said Chase. 

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  • What corporate media got wrong about this brutal arrest caught on bodycam

    While PAR conducted two separate investigations into the case, the brutal arrest and tasering of cab driver Lufti Saalim at a Toledo, Ohio, Walmart went unreported by local news for over a year after the incident. In their reporting, moreover, these local corporate media outposts did not receive comments from law enforcement or the victim of police brutality. This superficial coverage of a case involving excessive force by police highlights larger problems with corporate media’s for-profit model and its ability to interrogate or challenge the official (and well-funded) law enforcement narratives. In this installment of PAR, we look at what gets “lost in translation” when corporate media covers police brutality and overreach.

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  • Mass incarceration is an environmental justice issue, and vice versa

    Prisoners in the United States are forced to drink contaminated water, breathe poor quality air, and live on or near land full of hazardous materials. Kempis Songster, David N. Pellow, and Salvatore Engel-Di Maur discuss the ways this environment affects prisoners and their families—and the ways that the fight for climate justice intersects with the fight to end mass incarceration.

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  • State doles out severe sentence for threatening speech while cops kill people with ketamine

    From 2018-2020, over 900 Colorado residents were injected with the drug ketamine while in police custody, giving Colorado the grim distinction of administering the highest number of such injections out of any state in the U.S., with over 17% resulting in serious and even deadly complications. Hunter Barr, age 26, is one of the recent victims who died after police detained him and injected him with ketamine, a powerful dissociative anesthetic.

    In this week’s PAR, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis investigate Barr’s death and the troubling expansion of law enforcement’s use of tactical pharmacology. Graham and Janis also counterpose the unjust killing of Barr, for which none of the perpetrators have been held accountable, with the harsh punishment of Eric Brandt, a veteran, anti-police brutality protester, and member of Occupy Denver, who has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for “retaliation” against a judge using graphic verbal threats.

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  • How prisoners expanded the civil rights movement

    “From Attica to the Texas work strike of 1978 to the most recent nationwide prison strikes in 2016 and 2018,” Robert Chase, associate professor of history at Stony Brook University, writes, “prisoners have offered a repeated historical refrain that prisoners are not slaves, that incarceration cannot deny people their right to humanity, and that coerced prison labor remains a constitutional fixture that requires a reconsideration of what constitutes prisoners’ civil rights.”

    In this episode of “Rattling the Bars,” Eddie Conway sits down to talk with Chase about his latest book, “We Are Not Slaves,” and the often untold history of prisoner uprisings in the 1970s that expanded the scope and meaning of the Civil Rights movement in the US. Conway and Chase also discuss how the institutional response to these uprisings would pave the way for the prison-industrial complex we have today.

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  • After an alleged overdose days before his release, Bobby Sneed may lose his parole and spend the rest of his life in prison

    This story originally appeared on The Lens on May 4, 2021, and is shared with permission from The Lens.

    In March, after spending 47 years in prison, Bobby Sneed was unanimously granted parole after a hearing that lasted under 17 minutes. 

    “You’ve done a great job, worked hard, and done all the things you’ve needed to do,” said Tony Marabella, one of the members of Sneed’s parole board, as he informed him that he would be voting for his release. The other members of the board followed suit, commending Sneed for his accomplishments in prison—and thanking him for his service. 

    But now, over a month after his scheduled release from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Sneed remains incarcerated, facing disciplinary action due to what the prison alleges was a drug overdose. His lawyer, Thomas Frampton, warns that if Sneed is officially sanctioned for contraband, he will likely have his parole rescinded—and die in prison. 

    Sneed, a 74-year-old Vietnam veteran, was convicted in 1975 after returning home from the war for being “principal to murder” for his involvement in a robbery along with five other men in 1974, during which an elderly man was killed. According to his parole file, Sneed was serving as the lookout as three other men entered a Bienville Parish house to carry out the robbery. The men who went into the house beat the couple who lived there—Curtis and Maude Jones—and tied them up with wire. Maude Jones was not able to escape and summon help for hours, by which time her husband was dead. 

    Sneed never even entered the residence where the murder took place—and he had no other criminal history—but he was convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. According to the parole packet, some of Sneed’s co-defendants agreed to cooperate with the state, receiving reduced sentences or no time at all. One died in prison, and another was previously granted parole, leaving Sneed the only one of the six men who remains behind bars today.

    Though the parole board asked very few questions of Sneed at the hearing, a number of people were there to speak on his behalf—including Kerry Meyers of the Louisiana Parole Project, and Norris Henderson of Voice of the Experienced—and promised to provide support as he transitioned out of prison. 

    His family, too, was eagerly anticipating his return home.

    “We have private charities who are willing to foot the bill for 100% of inpatient drug treatment, where he can actually get the help that he needs, and apparently hasn’t received over the past 46 years. Prison officials, however, seem like they’d rather spend $24,000 a year of taxpayer money every year until Bobby dies to not treat a sick man who does not pose any sort of risk to public safety.”

    Thomas Frampton, lawyer for Bobby Sneed

    “We were planning to meet him in Baton Rouge the day he was released with open arms to welcome him home,” one of his several siblings told The Lens last week. The sibling asked not to be identified by name or gender in this story. “He has four children. And they were all ready to come and welcome him home.” (Sneed also has several grandchildren, one of whom is a professional football player with the Kansas City Chiefs.)

    Sneed was set to be released on March 29. But on March 25, he collapsed in prison, and had to be hospitalized.

    “Someone just called a family member and said that Bobby had had some type of medical issue, and they actually thought he was dead,” his sibling said. The Department of Corrections did not provide details about the medical incident, but according to Frampton, he was hospitalized for several days in an intensive care unit. 

    At some point during that time he was given a drug test by prison staff, and according to prison disciplinary documents, it came back positive for amphetamines and methamphetamines. Sneed was written up for possessing contraband in the prison. He has since recovered and has been transferred back to the prison, where he is being held in administrative segregation pending a hearing that is set to take place on Wednesday, May 5, according to Frampton. 

    “The stakes are going to be whether Bobby dies in prison, or gets to come home and spend the final years of his life with his family members,” he said.

    Frampton said that even if Sneed did have drugs in his system, that is not reason to keep him locked up for any longer. He has been appealing to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections to drop the disciplinary proceedings against Sneed. 

    “If everything that prison officials are alleging is true, then Bobby has a medical problem— substance abuse disorder,” Frampton told The Lens. “We have private charities who are willing to foot the bill for 100% of inpatient drug treatment, where he can actually get the help that he needs, and apparently hasn’t received over the past 46 years. Prison officials, however, seem like they’d rather spend $24,000 a year of taxpayer money every year until Bobby dies to not treat a sick man who does not pose any sort of risk to public safety.”

    Frampton is planning to be at the hearing to represent Sneed. 

    “We are just at wait and see mode right now,” his sibling said. “Hopefully, that something positive will happen. All we can do at this point is stay hopeful.” 

    ‘Wait and see mode’

    The Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole is also waiting to see what happens at Bobby Sneed’s disciplinary hearing. Its policy says that if a prisoner receives a disciplinary report after being granted parole, the board may choose to rescind the parole without another hearing. Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole Executive Director Francis Abbott suggested that is likely in Sneed’s case. 

    Frampton [Sneed’s lawyer] said he believes it’s unlikely that Sneed will have another real shot at parole.

    “The decision to grant Offender Bobby Sneed a second chance at freedom was not an easy one to come to given the second degree murder conviction for which he was incarcerated,” Abbott said in an email. “Should his parole get rescinded the Committee encourages Offender Sneed to take advantage of the certified treatment and rehabilitation programs the Department of Public Safety & Corrections has to offer and to reapply for parole consideration when eligible.”

    Abbott said that Sneed would be eligible to reapply for parole again on March 8, 2022. But even then, the board will have the option of declining another hearing. Frampton said he believes it’s unlikely that Sneed will have another real shot at parole.

    “If in fact his parole is rescinded, from what I can gather, the chances plummet that he ever gets parole again,” he said.

    Abbott was not immediately able to provide numbers for The Lens regarding how many people who have had their parole rescinded are ever subsequently granted it. 

    In a letter to Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc, Frampton asked the prison to dismiss the disciplinary charges, and instead allow Sneed to get any necessary treatment outside of prison. 

    “If the Disciplinary Board Hearing results in a conviction, Bobby’s parole will almost certainly be rescinded; Bobby will in all likelihood die in prison, costing Louisiana taxpayers $24,670.35 per year until that day arrives,” Frampton wrote. “There is a far better option. Bobby has a robust support network—including family members and nonprofit organizations—eager to welcome him home.”

    A spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections did not respond to questions or repeated requests for comment before publication. 

    Meanwhile, Sneed’s sibling who spoke with The Lens says they continue to call Angola to track his recovery. Even before the incident, his health has suffered. Sneed was exposed to Agent Orange during his time in Vietnam, according to a parole packet, and in 2005 he suffered a stroke “that forced him to relearn how to walk, talk, and function.”  It had lasting effects. According to his sibling, he has slowed considerably, his speech is slurred, and permanently damaged one of his hands.

    In addition, while at the hospital following the alleged overdose, Sneed apparently tested positive for COVID-19, putting him on oxygen for several weeks, according to his sibling. (His disciplinary record also indicated that he was positive for the disease.)

    “They keep telling me that he’s doing fine,” [Sneed’s sibling] said. “But when I talked to him, he didn’t sound fine. I just say stay prayerful.”

    Sibling of Bobby Sneed

    While prison officials are ensuring that Sneed is recovering, they are still concerned.

    “They keep telling me that he’s doing fine,” they said. “But when I talked to him, he didn’t sound fine. I just say stay prayerful.”

    ‘Nothing serious’

    According to his parole packet, Sneed’s last disciplinary infraction in prison was in 2016 for having cigarettes. At the parole hearing in March, a warden at Angola described his writeups as “nothing serious.”

    “Nobody is disputing that Bobby Sneed is no longer any sort of risk to public safety,” Frampton said. “So ultimately, the question is, do we want taxpayers to pay to continue incarcerating Bobby in a situation where we know he won’t get any sort of help? Or do we want private charities to help somebody live out their last years of their life, in the free world with their family, and get the medical treatment that they need?”

    While in prison Sneed has gained the status of Class B “trusty”—a status that grants a certain amount of freedom within the prison, and is given to prisoners with a history of good behavior. He coached sports, taught music theory, and worked as an inmate counsel, helping other prisoners with their cases. 

    “He has always worked very hard to help other people get their freedom since he’s been incarcerated,” his sibling said. “He is a strong, strong advocate for helping others. He believes in justice. You know, he’ll work hard to make sure justice is served.”

    Sneed’s sibling said they had talked to him about his plans for when he got out—which included continuing to do some legal work, and spending time with his family. 

    “He has a big heart,” they said. “He loves his family dearly.”

    The post After an alleged overdose days before his release, Bobby Sneed may lose his parole and spend the rest of his life in prison appeared first on The Real News Network.

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  • Mother of Richard Risher, killed by LAPD, speaks out against BLM leaders

    A number of parents of Black children slain by police, including the mothers of Tamir Rice and Richard Risher, have accused the Black Lives Matter Global Network and certain BLM leaders of raising money from their children’s deaths without distributing that money to victims’ families. In this episode of “Rattling the Bars,” TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway discusses these allegations with Lisa Simpson, the mother of Richard Risher. Risher was killed by LAPD officers in 2016.

    Editor’s Note: Please find below links to an official statement from Simpson and Samaria Rice, as well as an article from The Root detailing what appears to be a response to the allegations from activist and Until Freedom founder Tamika Mallory.

    The post Mother of Richard Risher, killed by LAPD, speaks out against BLM leaders appeared first on The Real News Network.

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  • Another police killing in rural America, another case without accountability

    The horrifying body camera footage of Chico, California, police killing 31-year-old Tyler Rushing is another troubling example of why police violence is not a problem limited to urban communities. As part of PAR’s continuing coverage, we examine Rushing’s death in the context of the broader phenomena of rural overpolicing and the persistent use of unwarranted violence by law enforcement across the country.

    The post Another police killing in rural America, another case without accountability appeared first on The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Chauvin trial ‘felt like something because I’m used to so much nothing’

    Last week the country watched anxiously as Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd last May, was found guilty of third-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter, and second-degree unintentional murder. While many breathed a sigh of relief that some modicum of justice had been achieved for Floyd and his family, we were reminded of the continuing inhumanity of the U.S. policing system as Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo, Ma’Khia Bryant, and others were killed by police during and immediately after the Chauvin trial. When coupled with the fact that so few police officers are ever convicted of violent crimes, this all serves as a sobering reminder that we have a long way to go to get to justice.

    In this important, extended panel discussion on “The Marc Steiner Show,” we reflect on the Chauvin verdict, the state of police accountability in the U.S., and the cultural and political backlash that is already taking shape. Marc is joined by Kali Holloway, columnist for The Nation and The Daily Beast, and the director of the Make It Right Project, a new national campaign to take down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history; Stephen Janis, co-host of the Police Accountability Report on TRNN and director of the new documentary “The Friendliest Town”; and Taya Graham, co-host of the Police Accountability Report, co-creator and producer of the “Truth and Reconciliation” podcast, and producer of “The Friendliest Town.”

    Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Tuesday on TRNN.

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  • When prisoners met to discuss fascism, freedom, and revolution

    In 1980, TRNN’s Eddie Conway helped organize a prisoners’ educational outreach program called “Say Their Own Word,” where thinkers and scholars came to Maryland Penitentiary and spoke about topics like impending U.S. fascism, the prison-industrial complex, capitalism, increasing surveillance, and many other issues that have become even more pressing today. These speakers included Amiri Baraka, Askia Muhammad, Bruce Franklin, Nijole Benokraitis, and Charlie Cobb. As part of a TRNN series, Conway revisited the predictions made by these speakers in 1980 and discussed how they resonate today.

    The 13-page booklet reproduced below (PDF download) was created as part of the original To Say Their Own Word series, and documents photos of participants in the project. The text inside the booklet reads:

    For fifty weeks, once, they/we emerged from a culture of silence to say our own word.

    Confined in the bowels of a great American city, 200 men, alive, in a stoned village, designed and constructed in 1811, came each, alone, to become, some, together, to examine a history, to portray a reality, to probe an enigma. To risk a trip into consciousness, an odyssey through fields of Humanities, an exploration of society. And so it went, the fantastic Monday night celebration of will and spirit and human determination. In an atmosphere of archaic conception and medieval deprivation, forged to the purpose of solitary introspection, by moral indignation, we proclaimed to dialogue about humanity.

    To describe the constraints in which we mounted our weekly festival would result in extreme admiration for our endurance. In lieu of an attempt to describe the correctional problems created by this production, an expression of gratitude on behalf of the project staff to the management and staff of the penitentiary must suffice. Toward an attempt to describe those who came along on the journey, we created this album. Brenda Vogel, Project Director.

    Robert Chapman, Photographs. STAFF: Judith Uhlmann, William Peck, Marshall Conway, James Ray-Bey, Spenser Hurst, Harrold Haskins, Dennis Hale, William Collins, Tony Lightfoot, and Sharrieff Abdullah.

    VOLUNTEERS: Samuel Cortijo, Stephen Briggs, James Wallace, James Norris, Kemry Hughes, James Carmichael-El, Charles Davis, David Murray, Wayne Plant, Floyd Bockman, Arnold Wilson, Thomas Barksdale-Bey, Alondo Edwards, Eric Lynch, Robert Hamlin.

    To Say Their Own Word – A National Endowment for the Humanities Library Humanities Project

    Prisoners worked closely with librarian Brenda Vogel, who wrote the grant that funded the To Say Their Own Word project. Brenda Vogel was one of the project directors, along with Eddie Conway, a former member of the Black Panther Party and political prisoner during that time. Their leadership is an example of the synergy in community organizing that transcends prison walls.

    To Say Their Own Word – PDF

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  • He refused to follow a cop’s illegal order and police have made his life hell ever since

    Police demanded that a visually impaired passenger show them his identification, even though he was just sitting in a cart. His refusal led to probation, monitoring, a $50,000 bail, and a relentless legal battle. But at the root of this story is the question of police power: how they wield it and why we grant it to them. A Police Accountability Report investigation into the unfettered growth of law enforcement overreach in rural America.

    The post He refused to follow a cop’s illegal order and police have made his life hell ever since appeared first on The Real News Network.

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  • Is the Chauvin verdict a sign of change, or the policing system saving itself?

    Derek Chauvin’s defense used every tool at its disposal to keep him from being held accountable for killing George Floyd last May, including David Fowler, former chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland, whose testimony was used to push the all-too-familiar narrative of “no fault” policing. However, with a result that surely surprised many around the country, the jury was not swayed and found Chauvin guilty of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. PAR hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis examine the verdict and what it means for the power and political economy of policing.

    The post Is the Chauvin verdict a sign of change, or the policing system saving itself? appeared first on The Real News Network.

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