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Category: Prisons and Policing

  • 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.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • 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.

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  • 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

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

    The post Cops wanted to make her a felon, but missed a key piece of evidence appeared first on The Real News Network.

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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.

    The post The latest on the deadly effects of COVID-19 in prisons appeared first on The Real News Network.

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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.

    The post Battleground Baltimore: What does George Floyd mean to Baltimore? appeared first on The Real News Network.

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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.

    The post State doles out severe sentence for threatening speech while cops kill people with ketamine appeared first on The Real News Network.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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  • 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.

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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.

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  • US prisoners are exploited slave labor

    Prisoners are often excluded from discussions about labor rights in America. There can be no doubt that prisoners participate in the capitalist economy in a way similar to other workers, but are victims of some of its starkest inequalities. Prisons are also steadily becoming workhouses for goods made by some of the largest corporations in the world. This privatization as well as the racialized aspect of mass incarceration make it crucial that any discussion of labor under capitalism should also include a discussion of prison labor. 

    The Corporate Accountability Lab lists three kinds of labor that are performed in prison: 1) in-house prison labor, or labor done by inmates to keep the mechanisms of the prison running; 2) work-release, where inmates provide labor to private companies off-site; and 3) prison industries, making goods for external sale. All of this labor contributes to surplus value for either the state or private industries. Marxist economists define surplus value to be the amount of value that is created in excess of the cost of the raw materials and the cost of paying workers; This value is stolen from the workers and redistributed to the employers. Since prisoners usually work for wages well below market averages, or for free, this surplus value is typically very high. 

    The predatory nature of prisons

    The recent surge in labor performed in prison has led to more people laboring in captivity than were enslaved 200 years ago. The surplus value that is created by the labor of prisoners takes a system that theoretically exists to protect society and turns it into one that steals the work of individuals and lowers the market value of all labor. 

    “The prison is a predatory structure that is supposed to provide a common good,” Dr. Joy James told The Real News Network. James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College and  studies incarceration and rebellion against the police. “I feel comfortable saying that this is evil and I don’t care about the discussion of nuances of work because it is an evil that needs to be abolished.”

    Proponents of capitalism often point to its success at removing unpaid or “slave” labor from the market economy. However, while the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishes slavery in America, it leaves a loophole for incarcerated individuals. “Slavery becomes marginalized [in America] but it does not disappear,” explains Dr. Asatar Bair, an assistant professor of economics at Riverside City College and the author of the book “Prison Labor in the United States: An Economic Analysis.” In an interview with The Real News Network, Bair said that he believes that a key part of how this “slavery” was allowed to continue was the creation of the category of “the criminal” and the subsequent dehumanization of that category. 

    For several decades after the Civil War, Southern states used a particularly aggressive form of incarceration called convict leasing, where private contractors would “lease” prisoners in order to work in their farms or industries. While slaves were considered property and were taken care of like one would an asset, prisoners used under convict leasing were considered disposable. If one prisoner died, they would merely be replaced with another. This led to a higher mortality rate for prisoners in the convict leasing programs than that of enslaved people. 

    “People of African descent, formerly enslaved, are literally worked to death, because they are now the joint property of the state itself and corporations coming down from the North,” said James. “You don’t have to keep the workforce alive because if one dies you can get another.”

    Convict leasing eventually became unpopular with both labor and business interests in the United States because of this disposability. Businesses were unable to compete and labor objected to the use of a free workforce. Therefore, this form of work in prisons was mainly abolished by the restriction of markets in the 1920s and 1930s. Prison labor was prohibited from selling products across state lines by the Ashurst-Sumners Act of 1935, and most prison labor for the next few decades was used in service of prisons themselves, or of other state agencies. In addition, private corporations were generally excluded from operating within prisons. This market restriction led to a reduction of the number of prisoners operating within formal labor markets.

    Criminalization over justice

    However, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the government increased its criminalization of dissent in America, which caused the skyrocketing of incarceration rates. Richard Nixon started his war on drugs, which was first used to crack down on Black activists. This led into the Reagan administration increasing the penalties for the possession of crack cocaine and other narcotics. Then in 1994, the Clinton Crime bill, championed by Joe Biden, resulted in the largest increase of incarcerated people in the history of the United States. 

    “We are substituting incarceration for punishments that had before not involved that, or even criminalizing entirely new things,” said Bair. “All of the incentives [in the system] are towards incarceration. At the prosecution level, the district attorneys, the police, everyone has an interest here in locking someone up, not in justice per se.” 

    James argues that it is impossible to not also tie this surge of mass incarceration to the crackdown on Black activism. “1970 Nixon has to put down or eviscerate the political meaning of human rights… so he criminalizes dissent,” said James. “Black activists in the cities we will identify as junkies [so he] proposes the war against drugs. But it wasn’t a war against drugs, it was a war against dissent.”

    During this surge in mass incarceration, state and federal governments also started loosening the restrictions set in the 1920s and 1930s on private corporations using prison labor through the Private Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), which was authorized by Congress in 1979. This program. which allows private industries to form partnerships with prisons to use inmate labor, is supposed to follow certain requirements, including paying a prevailing wage. However, wages under the PIECP program have been reported to be as low as 0.16 cents a day. 

    Over 4100 corporations use the PIECP program to profit from prison labor made available by mass incarceration. 385 of these are publicly traded, and include companies such as 3M, ACE Hardware, Amazon, Microsoft and Northrop Grumman. But Bair isn’t sure if the inclusion of private companies really changes the injustice of the system. “Does it matter if the state or if a corporation is exploiting you?” he asked. 

    Labor without alternatives

    Bair points out that while under capitalism, labor both inside and outside the prison is exploitative, wherein the workers produce surplus value that they do not receive in return for their labor, there are special circumstances wherein the labor done within prisons is particularly alienating. The extremely coercive nature of prisons means that much of the work that is required is not really voluntary, since it is tied to things such as early release. “This is an environment of complete coercion. I mean any choice that is made in that setting is affected by its extremely coercive nature. To say that inmates choose something, I mean, what is their alternative?” he asks. 

    James agrees. “This is not dignified labor, this is coerced labor,” she said. “It’s around prisons that you see the starkest expression of extraction, and not just extraction for accumulation, but extraction for the sake of extraction.” 

    Both James and Bair believe that the way to fight against this coerced extraction is to focus on the humanity of prisoners and to destigmatize the “criminal.” Bair sees a short-term solution (short of abolition) to turn prisons into true sites of rehabilitation, and not punishment or warehousing. “We need to reaffirm the humanity of those behind bars and attack the discourse that says these are criminals,” he said. “People who are incarcerated are not a different kind of person; Anyone could be in this situation depending on what happens. We need to rehumanize them.”

    James further believes that in order to restore humanity to prisoners, you have to legitimize political dissent, especially against racial capitalism. “You have to rehumanize the incarcerated, and progressives tend to say focus on their suffering, that’s going to humanize them. I say that is absolutely right, but you also have to focus on their agency. But there is no way to reconstitute the human without legitimizing political dissent,” said James. “There is no way you can reconstruct the criminal… when police and civilians can kill with impunity just as long as the people are seen as disposable.”

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  • At the Derek Chauvin murder trial, the defense’s secret weapon is exposed

    Dr. David Fowler stunned the world when he testified that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was not responsible for the death of George Floyd. But this is not the first time Fowler has taken a decidedly controversial position on a police involved killing. PAR takes a deep dive into past rulings by Fowler while he was the Chief Medical Examiner in Maryland. We explore three decisions where evidence contradicted his assertion that police were not responsible for in-custody deaths, and his questionable use of quasi-science to bolster these claims to absolve law enforcement.

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  • The parole system is broken

    In the state of Maryland, prison inmates serving life sentences can only be granted parole by final decree from the governor. Even for elderly inmates at high risk of COVID-19 infection, as well as inmates who were sentenced to life in prison when they were juveniles, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has refused to use this power to grant parole to many who desperately need it. The SB0202 bill, which is currently being debated in the Maryland legislature, would repeal this rule, putting decision-making power in the hands of a parole commission.

    In a recent episode of “Rattling the Bars” (originally published on March 22, 2021), TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway spoke with guests Pamela Sessoms, whose incarcerated fiancé contracted COVID-19 inside a Maryland prison, and Marc Schindler, the executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, about this parole policy. To give viewers context for the debate currently happening around SB0202 and why it’s important, we have compiled sections from that conversation here.

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  • Charges dropped in multiple cases after PAR investigative reports

    PAR has three positive updates on cases we’ve recently covered. As part of our coverage of overpolicing in rural America, we update the case of Ohio cab driver Lufti Saalim, who was tasered while waiting for a customer; Texas resident Randal Thompson, arrested for drugs found in a car purchased at a police auction; and activist grandmother Michelle Lucas, who faced two years in prison for allegedly passing along a counterfeit $100 bill.

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  • Did cops retaliate against this activist?

    As we continue our investigation into overpolicing and mass incarceration in rural America, we return to Pocomoke City on Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore to speak with Michelle Lucas. Lucas is a pizza delivery driver, a proud grandmother, and community activist who asserts that she was railroaded into a felony conviction that could result in up to two years in prison.

    Tune in every Thursday at 9:00 p.m. EST for new episodes of the Police Accountability Report.

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  • This bodycam footage reveals all that is wrong with policing

    Video obtained by TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis highlights American law enforcement officers’ lack of de-escalation training and respect for civilians. On this week’s PAR, Graham and Janis investigate the questionable arrest of an immigrant cab driver in Toledo, Ohio, caught on body camera, which shows how quickly police resort to using unnecessary force and how much damage it inflicts upon the civilians they’re supposed to protect.

    Tune in every Thursday at 9:00 p.m. EST for new episodes of the Police Accountability Report.

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