An unnamed motorist was stopped by Baltimore County police, held at gunpoint, and manhandled by multiple officers before being arrested. Body cam footage reveals the motorist, who has requested anonymity, requesting multiple times to speak with a supervisor and know the crime he was being arrested for to no avail. Police claim the 60-year-old motorist was doing donuts in his car in a local parking lot. TRNN reporter Stephen Janis was unable to find any sign of skid marks at the scene, and further deduced that the area was likely too narrow for such activity. The police statement further reveals that the motorist was known to local police as a citizen watchdog, raising the question of whether this arrest was a form of political retaliation. Police Accountability Report reviews the available footage and the details of the case, as well as what this man’s ordeal can tell us about the police war against our civil rights.
Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Justice for Kevin march will be taking place at 6:30pm EST on Wednesday, Dec. 7, at 4020 E. Lombard Street in Baltimore, Maryland, not on Thursday, Dec. 8.
Kevin Torres was beloved by his family and his community. After emigrating from Honduras decades ago, Torres built a life in Baltimore, where he and his wife ran a concrete and construction company, along with raising their family. In his spare time, Torres coached the Villanueva adult Soccer Team. On the night of Nov. 6, Kevin was out with family and friends at ChrisT Bar in Highlandtown celebrating his team’s victory in their league championship. But the festive atmosphere took a quick turn after a dispute over a missing cellphone resulted in an altercation involving the bar’s security guard. Kevin tried to intervene when the security guard began to argue with his stepdaughter. Moments later, Kevin was dead. As The Baltimore Sunreported, “The security guard told Baltimore Police he discharged his gun early Monday morning because Torres threw a brick at him. But three witnesses disputed that account… The security guard has not been arrested and officials declined to release his name.”
What really happened on the night Kevin Torres was killed at ChrisT bar? Why do these shootings at the hands of private security guards keep happening? And what can be done to secure justice for Kevin and his family? In this exclusive interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with Sor Torres, Kevin’s wife, Erick Vicenty, Kevin’s stepson, and Kevin Medina, a close friend of the family.
A GoFundMe has been set up to help Kevin’s family pay for funeral costs, and the family and their supporters are planning a march to demand justice for Kevin on Wed, Dec. 7, at 6:30pm EST. The march will begin at 4020 E. Lombard Street in Baltimore, Maryland, and all supporters are invited to attend.
A flyer (with text in Spanish) including information about the Justice for Kevin march that will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022, at 6:30pm EST. The march will begin at 4020 E. Lombard Street in Baltimore, Maryland, and all supporters are invited to attend.
Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
TRANSCRIPT
The transcript of this story is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.
This story originally appeared in Prism on Nov. 11, 2022.
Hours before dawn on Sept. 26, the incarcerated workers who run the prison kitchens across Alabama were slated to begin their shifts when they refused to take up their posts, kicking off one of the largest prison strikes in US history.
“Everything was electric from then on—[people] were excited and anxious for action,” said Antoine Lipscomb, a founding member of the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) who spoke with Prism Reports from Limestone Correctional Facility, one of the largest and deadliest prisons in the state, currently housing nearly 2,300 people.
Contrary to ADOC’s characterization that the strike has “ended,” incarcerated organizers describe the strike as having merely been paused.
The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) classifies 14 prisons within the state as “major facilities,” and there are almost 17,000 people incarcerated in those prisons. In a highly unusual move, the ADOC publicly confirmed the strike action across “all major facilities in the state” on the very first day of the strike. Acknowledging a prison strike and its scope goes against the prevailing wisdom in prison administration. In 2018, leading up to the national prison strike, prison associations advocated the use of disinformation campaigns when dealing with prisoner resistance to manage the disruption and discourage further participation.
While acknowledging the strike, a spokesperson for the governor said the demands of the incarcerated strikers were “unreasonable and would flat out not be welcomed in Alabama.” The strike demands included:
repealing the habitual offender law
making presumptive sentencing retroactive
repealing the drive-by shooting statute
creating a statewide conviction integrity unit
developing consistent criteria for mandatory parole
streamlining processes for medical furloughs and elder release
reducing the minimum sentences for juvenile offenders
eliminating life without parole sentences
Advocates say far from being “unreasonable,” those changes would constitute a program of substantive decarceration. They would also address the unconstitutional overcrowding of Alabama’s prisons and increase opportunities for prisoners to return to their communities.
The work strike continued for three weeks in at least five prisons before prisoners in all facilities returned to work. While the strikers’ demands remain unfulfilled, organizers both inside and outside the prisons are encouraged by the strike’s organization and the mass support it received. Contrary to ADOC’s characterization that the strike has “ended,” incarcerated organizers describe the strike as having merely been paused.
“It will resume,” Lipscomb said, adding that incarcerated organizers and supporters are resting, regrouping, and discussing strategy. For many who participated in the strikes, future strikes or protests aren’t just vehicles for decarceration, they’re also about survival and the possibility of life beyond incarceration.
Striking against despair
Long before three strikes statutes became popularized during Clinton era in the ’90s, Alabama’s version, the 1977 Habitual Offender Law, drew the ire of academics and correctional facilities staff in 1985, who argued life without parole sentences removes “all incentive for good behavior,” and fuels “frustration and rage, which in turn produces prison riots and threats to staff.” Currently, 75% of prisoners sentenced to die in Alabama prisons under the Habitual Offender Law are Black, despite Black people representing less than 27% of the state’s population.
One of the key motivations behind widespread strike participation is the state’s draconian parole board. In a recent interview with the Montgomery Advisor, organizer Diyawn Caldwell said, “More people are coming out in body bags than they are on parole.”
Relatedly, one of the key motivations behind widespread strike participation is the state’s draconian parole board. In July, more people died inside Alabama prisons than were granted parole. This year, the Alabama parole board has revoked parole in 67% of hearings, a rate over six times the rate that it has granted it. According to ADOC data, their rate of granting parole has fallen from 54% of eligible prisoners in 2017 to 6% this past August. In a recent interview with the Montgomery Advisor, organizer Diyawn Caldwell said, “More people are coming out in body bags than they are on parole.”
Advocates believe that while individually, the changes demanded by the strike might have minimal impact on the state’s incarceration rate, together they would provide thousands of prisoners expanded avenues toward release. Crucially, the strike is an attempt to combat the despair that comes from indefinite incarceration with no foreseeable path to freedom.
According to prisoners, that despair is an essential ingredient to the violence and drug use that make Alabama’s prisons the deadliest in the nation. Amid six years of scrutiny, the DOJ describes confinement in ADOC prisons as “constitutional deficiencies.” That scrutiny, however, has produced no tangible improvements. The death rate in Alabama prisons has more than quintupled since 2005, from 33 deaths in 2005 to 173 in 2021.
The methods Alabama state officials used to repress the resistance of the strike further illustrate how incarcerated people suffer at the whim of the carceral system. Family visitation was canceled, prisons implemented new “security measures,” the Corrections Emergency Response Team (known inside as riot squads or goon squads) was deployed, prisoner activist Robert Earl Council, aka Kinetik Justice, was placed in solitary confinementagain, and ADOC used the strike as a pretext to reduce the number of meals.
Officials claimed the shift to two cold meals per day in major male facilities was logistical, arguing without the prisoner labor force, they lacked the workers to cook for three meals a day for nearly 23,500 people. Prisoners called the practice “bird feeding,” an attempt to starve prisoners into submission. Prisoners argued these meals did not meet the needs of prisoners with dietary restrictions and medical conditions, putting more lives at risk. ADOC also put out a statement about the health of a prisoner named Kastello Demarcus Vaughan to refute allegations of medical neglect.
Under these circumstances, incarcerated organizers say that a widespread strike and their demands shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“You’re looking at individuals finally [coming] to the realization, ‘Hey, I’m gonna die in here,’” said K. Shaun Traywick, aka Swift Justice, who is currently incarcerated at Fountain Correctional Facility. “Once they hear it enough, once they see it in the actions of ADOC and the parole board and society, they finally realize maybe it’s best that we [strike]. Maybe it will make a difference.”
New developments in the prison strike era
Local news in Alabama referred to the strike as “an unprecedented move” by incarcerated people. While the duration, discipline, and scale of the strike are monumental developments in the prisoner movement, the strike in fact is an extension of many similar actions in recent years. Prisoner resistance, including work and hunger strikes, boycotts, and other forms of organized disobedience like “sit-downs,” have a history as lengthy as incarceration itself. In the US this is most well chronicled in the captivating and tragic story of the Attica Rebellion and the massacre that ended it.
Prisoner resistance, including work and hunger strikes, boycotts, and other forms of organized disobedience like “sit-downs,” have a history as lengthy as incarceration itself. In the US this is most well chronicled in the captivating and tragic story of the Attica Rebellion and the massacre that ended it.
The Georgia prisoner work strike of 2010 is frequently cited by today’s incarcerated organizers as a point of origin and source of inspiration for a new phase of prisoner resistance. Strikers released their demands to state prison officials and the press, including the demand that workers be paid a living wage, noting that prisoners in Georgia received no wages, which they argued violated the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude. This demand would later be adapted to the movement to abolish exception clauses to anti-slavery statutes. That push has been embraced by many legislative advocates, but has yet to lead to any decarceration or changes in labor practices.
As The New York Times noted, cell phones had already been in prisons for some time, but this was the first known example of incarcerated people using them to coordinate resistance across different facilities. They also became a critical tool in circumventing the prison system’s ability to monitor and prevent their communication, not only to each other, but to the general public and the press, often via social media.
The following year, people who were incarcerated in California’s supermax Pelican Bay State Prison went on massive rolling hunger strikes that eventually grew to over 30,000 prisoners in the state through multiple phases over three years. Incarcerated organizers facilitated an agreement to end hostilities inside the prisons and mobilized a large outside group of families and advocates in solidarity. Strikers raised multiple issues, but key among them were California’s practice of indefinite solitary confinement, especially for those it classified as “gang members,” and its “debriefing” process, which required prisoners to provide information on “gang activity” to secure their release from solitary. The UN has described solitary confinement for 15 days or more as torture, and prisoners argued this practice amounted to torture with inadequate pretext toward due process or avenues for redress.
While the outcomes of those strikes and the related successful lawsuit have been varied, complex, and partial, the strikes provide a powerful example of how dynamic inside-outside action can shift policy and practice, potentially opening up new contradictions and arenas of struggle against the carceral system. For instance, FAM has adopted many tactics and lessons learned from the Georgia work strikes in their efforts. In 2014, incarcerated organizers mobilized twostrikes in Alabama, the larger of which led to the shutdown of two facilities—St. Clair and Holman—which at the time incarcerated roughly 2,400 people. Additionally, FAM released “Let The Crops Rot In The Fields,” a manifesto that would inspire the coordination of national prisoner strikes, the first of which was led by FAM in 2016 and supported by the fledgling inside-outside solidarity organization the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWOC-IWW).
The 2016 national prison strike saw “[l]ockdowns, inmate suspensions, and full-unit strikes lasting at least 24 hours were reported at 31 facilities,” which housed approximately 57,000 incarcerated people across 24 states, according to Shadow Proof’s Brian Nam-Sonenstein. Repressionagainst the strike was widespread. The following year Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a group of incarcerated paralegals and human rights advocates who organize nationally, launched a Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March with support from outside organizations. Prison officials in Florida were so concerned about solidarity action inside that they locked down the entire state’s nearly 100,000 prisoners. The march was followed by Operation PUSH in 2018.
Since 2018, outside organizations have taken different directions, some more focused on politicization and building infrastructure. The most frequent acts of resistance by incarcerated people have taken place on more local and regional scales against conditions that local authorities can directly address. While those efforts have seen some victories, there hasn’t been a widespread state-wide or national incarcerated-led campaign over the last four years.
Tactics of strike repression
It has been precisely those workers with the most to potentially lose from participating in the strike who had the most impact. Many of those workers controlled the essential duties of social reproduction inside—cooking, cleaning, trash removal, laundry—which enabled them to shut down the entire Alabama prison system.
In the wake of the 2016 national strike, incarcerated organizations like Jailhouse Lawyers Speak raised concerns about the efficacy of work strikes as a sole tactic in galvanizing collective action among prisoners. Having a job can significantly affect someone’s circumstances during incarceration. Labor arrangements within prisons vary from state to state, and in some states, it is quite rare for prisoners to have jobs. Imprisoned organizers have noted instances in which prison administrators exchange certain sets of privileges with jobs, such as better housing situations, greater freedom of movement, greater access to commissary or phones, and perhaps more time outside. Stevie Wilson, who is currently incarcerated in Pennsylvania, and former political prisoner James Kilgore point out that the precarity of jobs inside and enticement of special privileges make it even more difficult to convince incarcerated people to sacrifice those jobs and act in solidarity with strike efforts.
Additionally, incarcerated people in some form of solitary confinement don’t have jobs, which means they can’t materially participate in a labor strike. The 2018 national strike addressed this issue by expanding the tactical repertoire of resistance to include commissary boycotts, acts of protest like “sit downs,” hunger strikes, and labor strikes. While this may have enabled more prisoners to participate, it can also potentially make strike participation less legible to the media, and it can be easier for public officials to deny and repress the strikers.
Since 2018, organizers have discussed the possibility of additional major prison strikes, but amid concerns that there may not be enough support to swell into collective action, they have not come to fruition. Swift Justice said that he had initially stepped away from organizing for the most recent Alabama strike, quoting the definition of insanity often misattributed to Albert Einstein, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Despite the pessimism around strike participation and support, the Alabama strike among incarcerated workers defied expectations and was strongly reflected over social media and local news over the past month, often with the hashtag #ShutdownADOC2022.
Swift Justice works in a so-called “honor dorm” in ADOC, a prison space that some have characterized as inhospitable to collective protest organizing, and was shocked by the level of solidarity and commitment he’s seen by others incarcerated there, most of whom he said, “couldn’t make it in general population.” Defying conventional wisdom, he said that it has been precisely those workers with the most to potentially lose from participating in the strike who had the most impact. Many of those workers controlled the essential duties of social reproduction inside—cooking, cleaning, trash removal, laundry—which enabled them to shut down the entire Alabama prison system.
“The weakest link has actually turned into being the strongest link,” Swift Justice said.
Political education pays off in the long term
The New York Times and ADOC have both intimated in their reporting that outside organizers had significant influence on the strike activity inside Alabama prisons, but both the mass scale of the strike and the responses of those incarcerated there belie this notion. One prisoner who spoke with Prism Reports and wished to keep his criticism anonymous acknowledged that prisoners appreciate the outside support and organizing of solidarity protests, but he scoffed at the notion that people on the outside were leading the way or coordinating the action of those on the inside.
“You know things don’t work like that,” he said.
“They enable us to do the teaching and networking in a peace and solidarity like I’ve never seen before,” Lipscomb said. “I commend the youngsters for their courage and respect for revolutionary thinking and change.”
Lipscomb attributes the sustained commitment of the recent strike to incarcerated people’s frustrations with the parole system and fears over the likelihood of dying before being able to be released. Most crucially, he believes that the long-term investment that organizers like FAM have made by engaging in mass political education with their incarcerated peers is paying dividends. Incarcerated people in Alabama have studied the organizing of the Black Panther Party, and the thoughts of figures like Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael.
According to Lipscomb, the support of street organizations, which command a considerable amount of influence inside, has been critical.
“They enable us to do the teaching and networking in a peace and solidarity like I’ve never seen before,” Lipscomb said. “I commend the youngsters for their courage and respect for revolutionary thinking and change.”
As incarcerated organizers regroup and discuss when and how to reconvene the strike, they do so with a proven ability to bring about a powerful and widespread strike against prison operations in Alabama.
“I’m a student of history, and struggling has always been a part of life,” Lipscomb said. “So I’m studying from those who came before me as a guide to [get us] where we’re trying to be, and that is free.”
Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
A recent HBO documentary entitled The Slow Hustle has brought renewed attention to the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter in 2017. Police initially claimed Suiter was the victim of a lone assailant after his body was found in a West Baltimore alley with a gunshot wound to the head. But as details began to emerge regarding Suiter’s involvement with some of Baltimore’s most corrupt cops, the case took a turn that raised serious questions about what actually happened and if his death was part of a broader cover-up.
Shortly after Suiter died, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis produced a podcast series that looked behind the scenes and examined how Suiter’s death told a more complex story about police corruption in Baltimore. In Part IV of this podcast series, Graham and Janis return to the case five years after Suiter’s death with Baltimore veteran reporter Jayne Miller to review a previously unreleased investigation conducted by the Maryland State Police.
Jayne Miller was a reporter with local Baltimore tv station WBAL-TV for over 40 years.
Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis
Transcript:
The transcript of this story is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.
Recent years have brought greater attention to the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The consequences of this legal exception can be seen across US prisons today. Four states do not pay incarcerated workers any wages at all, and the rest pay wages far below the minimum wage. Prisoners are routinely compelled by threat of violence or punishment to work, including through the use of solitary confinement.
While much emphasis has been placed on the 13th Amendment, 25 state constitutions also uphold the punishment exception. This year, 5 states are considering amendments to their constitutions to remove this language. Historian Robert T. Chase joins Rattling the Bars to discuss what altering these state constitutions would really mean for incarcerated people.
Taya Graham and Stephen Janis of the Police Accountability Report host a live discussion on the rapid growth of police budgets and aggressive tactics around the country. Are cops the ones preventing crimes, or actually causing them?
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham, Kayla Rivara
Studio: Dwayne Gladden, Kayla Rivara
TRANSCRIPT
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
Chelsea Manning was imprisoned in 2010 after leaking 750,000 military documents to the website WikiLeaks. Chelsea’s revelations exposed heinous war crimes by the US military. While the perpetrators of the atrocities she exposed have never faced justice, Chelsea herself spent seven years behind bars, including several months in solitary confinement before her trial. README.txtis Chelsea’s first full-length memoir detailing what led her to speak out, and her experiences in prison. In an event organized by Baltimore worker cooperative bookstore Red Emma’s, Chelsea Manning joins Baltimore-based activist and independent journalist Ryan Harvey for a special discussion on her memoir.
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning is an American transparency activist, politician, and former US Army intelligence analyst. She lives in Brooklyn and works as a security consultant and expert in data science and machine learning.
Ryan Harveyis an activist, independent journalist, and musician based in Baltimore, MD, and the National Field Director for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. He has worked extensively in support of active-duty military members and veterans organizing against the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and has co-founded several organizations including the Riot-Folk Collective (2004), the anti-war Civilian-Soldier Alliance (2006), Firebrand Records (2015) and Rebel Lens (2017).
TRANSCRIPT
The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.
In 2020, San Quentin State Prison in California had some of the worst rates of COVID-19 infection in the nation. At least 23 people died from COVID-19 after contracting it at the prison. Prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US proved similarly vulnerable to the pandemic, which easily spread among incarcerated populations and into surrounding communities due to the already abhorrent health, sanitation, and human rights conditions of such facilities. Two years later, COVID-19 remains a challenge for San Quentin and California officials. While prisoners are tested regularly multiple times a week, guards and other prison staff are exempted from testing. Sanitation within the overcrowded prison remains atrocious, and prisoners who are exposed to COVID-19 are often quarantined in solitary confinement units. Although California has a more rigorous COVID-19 policy than much of the nation, the state’s inability to protect prisoners is a reflection of the fundamental violence of the mass incarceration system. Incarcerated journalist Juan Moreno Haines calls in to Rattling the Bars from San Quentin prison with his colleague, journalist Katie Rose Quandt, to discuss COVID-19 policies at the prison, how the ongoing pandemic has made life considerably worse for prisoners, and why freeing people could be a better solution than the band-aid solutions California has attempted thus far.
Juan Moreno Haines is an award-winning incarcerated journalist and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the editor of the San Quentin News.
Steven Headrick and his wife had spent two weeks cleaning up trash at Coconino National Forest near Flagstaff, Arizona, when park police approached them and asked them to leave. National parks have a 14-day limit to visitor stays, but this regulation does not apply to official volunteers. Headrick explained to the park ranger that he was still awaiting his volunteer paperwork to be finalized, but that his nonprofit had already communicated that volunteers would be present in the park. The officer said he would call the nonprofit to confirm and left. As the co-founder of the nonprofit, Headrick expected to receive a call from the rangers, but never got one. The same officer returned and attempted to forcibly remove Headrick and his wife. He told Headrick he was under arrest for “noncompliance” and ordered him to the ground. When Headrick refused, the park ranger tased and then tackled him. Headrick reports that his wife’s arms were also severely bruised by the officer. Headrick joins Police Accountability Report to talk about his ordeal, which fits into a common pattern of law enforcement resorting to violence for frivolous “compliance”-related matters.
Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
In May 2006, Rey Rivera disappeared from his North Baltimore home. Roughly a week later, his body was found in the second floor concourse of Baltimore’s historic Belvedere hotel. The 2020 Netflix reboot of Unsolved Mysteries brought international attention to Rivera’s mysterious death. The Real News journalists Taya Graham and Stephen Janis have previouslycoveredRivera’s death, asking why his injuries were more consistent with being stuck by a car instead of falling from a rooftop, as the discovery of his body suggested, Taya and Stephen return with Jayne Miller to break down the latest evidence in Rey Rivera’s death.
Post-Production: Stephen Janis
Transcript
Stephen Janis: Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is, through high tech forensics, moral resolve, or simply the near mythic competence of American law enforcement, killers are ultimately sent to jail. But as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.
Taya Graham: And that is the point of this podcast, because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics; It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community, the final violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.
Stephen Janis: I’m Stephen Janis.
Taya Graham: I’m Taya Graham.
Stephen Janis: And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City.
Taya Graham: Welcome to the Land of the Unsolved.
[music interlude]
Welcome back to the Land of the Unsolved. My name is Taya Graham. And today we are going to be discussing a case that made national headlines several years ago after it became the subject of Netflix’s reboot of Unsolved Mysteries. The show jumped to number one in the US partly because of the story we will be exploring today: the death of Rey Rivera. And with the release of a new season of Unsolved Mysteries, we thought it would be timely to revisit the latest evidence and where the case stands.
In 2006, Rey Rivera, a 32-year-old filmmaker, left his North Baltimore home in a rush. He took only keys, a cell phone, $20 and a credit card, and then disappeared. For days family and friends searched frantically for him, but to no avail.
But then, one of Rey’s former colleagues from the financial publishing firm, Agora, spotted a hole in the second floor conference center attached to the historic Belvedere Hotel. And inside, police discovered a grizzly scene: the decomposing body of Rivera sitting below the hole, apparently dead from a fall.
But the day the body was found was not the end of the uncertainty surrounding Rey’s death. Instead it marked the beginning of a story of a young man whose death still remains shrouded in mystery. The police concluded Rey killed himself and shut down the investigation, but his family said it was simply impossible that Rey killed himself. They pointed to his decision to start a production company just before he died, his plans to move back to Los Angeles and shop a screenplay he had just finished, and his recent marriage to the love of his life, Allison. And the evidence of suicide was murky at best. Yes, there was a hole in the roof where Rey’s body was found, but there was not a single witness who placed him in the hotel the night of his death. In fact, security cameras that surveilled the staircase that led to the roof had been erased on the night he died.
All this has led to speculation about what really happened to Rey Rivera, a question we will try to answer today, because luckily I’m joined by my co-host Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller, who reported on the case when it occurred and also appeared in the Netflix episode, which examined the evidence and brought national attention to it.
So first, just for those who aren’t familiar with Rey Rivera’s case, could you please just give me a little bit of background on Rey, who he was, and what his life was like?
Stephen Janis: He was, many say, a larger than life person literally because he was tall, he was six-foot-five, I think, handsome young man. Ambitious, from everyone I spoke to, who had moved to Baltimore based on the request of a friend who ran a financial publishing firm here in Baltimore. And, really, I think, wanted to be a filmmaker director, an active blogger, and a very curious mind, I think I would describe him.
Jayne Miller: Yeah, I would agree. He wasn’t in Baltimore all that long before he met his demise here. But yeah, I think that would be accurate. He’s not a native Baltimorean by any stretch, but he and his wife moved to a house in Northwood in the Northern part of Baltimore City and settled in.
Stephen Janis: And before he moved here, he was a water polo star. When he came here, he actually coached at Johns Hopkins. So he is someone who was involved in a lot of things, a well-rounded person, certainly not someone who sounds like they’re about to go on, you know –
Jayne Miller: No, and I think it’s also interesting that, for the short amount of time he was here, he really developed some close relationships with folks. And when he went missing, there were a lot of people that turned out to try to find him, including members of the water polo theme at Hopkins and others in the community outside of his connections to Agora, the publishing company where he had worked and others who knew him in other ways. But definitely he had ties in the community.
Taya Graham: I think that’s really important, how you mentioned that in such a short time he had already made such an impact on our community, made so many friends and coworkers who really cared about him. So I wanted to know, in this investigation, there are a lot of details that just don’t seem to add up. I think there’s two competing theories on what happened to Rey. Maybe you could flesh those out for me.
Stephen Janis: So the first thing to know is that there’s two schools of thought – And Jayne’s going to talk about, actually, because we’ve looked at the investigative files – But just to lay out so there’s a framework for people. There’s a school of thought who think he did jump from the building or jump from a window and are obsessed with the angles and the speed because it seems like it would be very difficult for him to end up where he did based on jumping. But since the Unsolved Mysteries case and since the Unsolved Mystery series, Jayne and I have been flooded with people of all sorts of ideas, and some of them have been quite interesting and intriguing. One being that Rey Rivera didn’t fall from anywhere but instead was placed or beaten or killed there in the actual conference room or somewhere near the conference room, placed in there, and then a hole was made to make it look like he killed himself. So those are the two frameworks which we’ve been looking at with the case.
Jayne Miller: I think we got to also set the scene here. So the Belvedere Hotel is an old building and it had this room that had been added on much later and it was an abandoned meeting room or ballroom or whatever. But what’s significant about it is it was accessible from the street because of the way the hotel’s entrances are. And it’s a place of public accommodation because it was, actually it had been converted to a condominium by the time this incident occurred. But it was originally a hotel and it had retail spaces on its ground floor and on its first floor. So it was an open building in that regard and people would come and go.
And the room that was where his body was found was accessible to the outside. You could come in from off of Charles Street, which we’ve done, and it is relatively accessible. It’s also accessible from the parking garage, which is attached to the building, and that’s also significant.
And then the third location – And we’re really talking here, just everything within the same block – Is the parking lot next to the hotel, open parking lot, surface lot, where his car was found. And the car was parked in a way that looked like he had arrived in a hurry and didn’t straighten it out, just parked it and left. I think it’s true that the significance of the questions about this have to do with, we’ve heard from no one who could put him in the building that night, that evening that he went missing, or at any time, until his body was found in the room.
Stephen Janis: And let me just contrast, let me just add, because you’ve done such a good job of describing, anyone who’s seen the Belvedere hotel. If you go through the front entrance, there’s usually somebody sitting there because it is an apartment building, a condominium, there’s usually a security person, and there’s a bar. So there’s a lot of traffic of people coming in and out.
Jayne Miller: In and out. Correct.
Stephen Janis: Which contrasts very much with what you mentioned, the parking garage. There’s not as much traffic there. There’s not as many people just standing around. So the idea that Rey could suddenly just walk in the front and no one sees him is hard to believe compared to someone going down into that basement.
Jayne Miller: Well, he apparently, we also had information at the time that he was known to frequent what was called the Al Bar, which is on the ground floor, the first floor of the building.
Stephen Janis: So people knew him.
Jayne Miller: Sure. So if he had been there that night, if he had been inside the building that night, somebody probably would’ve noticed it.
Taya Graham: So there are some questions about the way Rey was found, and one of the strange details is that in the hole where he allegedly jumped or fell through, that it just had his cell phone and a pair of flip flops looking like they were placed at the edge of that hole. You’re an investigative reporter. Is there anything at that scene that stands out to you as being unusual?
Jayne Miller: Well, it’s always struck me as unusual that the cell phone was intact. So if, in fact, he came off the 13th floor of the building, which is the roof, and this is technically the second floor, that’s a steep… It’s quite a distance. The cell phone was not broken, it wasn’t damaged. It just seemed odd at the time that… And there are pictures in the investigative file of, I think it was a flip flop, the cell phone, and where they were on the roof of that meeting room. And then the hole is… I have to tell you, this is strictly an observation, but I’ve always thought the hole looked like the kind of hole that someone was walking across a roof and hit a soft spot and punched through it with their leg.
Stephen Janis: I would totally agree with that. It did not look like a hole made from an impact of 260 pounds from 13 floors up, which is 400 feet.
Jayne Miller: And it just always struck me as it just didn’t seem to add up to… And then they have the injuries that are described in the autopsy, which have been noted significantly because there’s a leg injury that just doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of… I think we’ve had a forensic person look at that.
Stephen Janis: Yeah, we had a forensic person who said it more resembled being run over by a car because of the nature of the fracture –
Jayne Miller: Hit by a car.
Stephen Janis: …Hit by a car rather than falling from a distance. And this is a person who analyzed accident scenes and just said she thought it was much more like he got hit by a car. So that’s another notch on the wall in terms of thinking about this case not being a matter of a fall or someone being in the hotel, but someone getting into that room some other way.
Jayne Miller: And I think the other thing that’s important is to frame the coroner’s finding in this case in terms of manner of death. Obviously the cause of death were these severe injuries that he suffered, but the manner of death was left to be undetermined. So the police wanted to close this as suicide literally as soon as his body was found. And I thought it was interesting when we went through the investigative file that we received through public information request, is that the missing person investigation seemed to be pretty thorough. There was a lot of tracking down of his last steps and talking to people and family. Notably the detectives did not find that Rey suffered mental problems, he didn’t seem distraught. They could find no one that told them that in the time leading up to his disappearance. I thought what really struck me about the investigation is how quickly it stopped. It just seemed to stop, or at least the file that we have seemed to stop after his –
Taya Graham: That’s interesting.
Jayne Miller: …Body was found, it was just like… And there’s something that is, I have asked about this and I have yet to receive an answer, and that is that the parking garage adjacent to the Belvedere apparently had video surveillance, and the detectives inquired about it. And in the investigative file there are notes where the parking garage manager, whatever, said that the video from their cameras would be available on June 7th of that year. This is now about a week or two after his body was found. There is not one note, piece of paper in the file that says it was ever followed up.
Taya Graham: Jayne, could you describe a little bit about how the parking garage connects to the concourse where Rey was found?
Jayne Miller: Well, the parking garage is literally attached to the building, the Belvedere building. So it overlooks, if you get to the third or fourth level of the parking garage, it is open on the sides and you can look down onto the roof, which has the hole and where the cell phone was, et cetera, of that meeting room in which his body was found. So it’s significant that the parking garage is attached to the building.
Stephen Janis: And when we walked through there, we found that you could get into the building from the parking garage –
Jayne Miller: Correct.
Stephen Janis: …There was a direct entrance –
Jayne Miller: Correct.
Stephen Janis: …That’s on the second or third floor.
Jayne Miller: Not locked. You walk through.
Stephen Janis: You could just walk in there. And also, similarly, you could walk up from the back of the basement. So there’s a basement, and on the first floor that Jayne talked about with retail, you could actually get into that concourse from there as well.
Jayne Miller: Correct.
Stephen Janis: It was locked and you couldn’t get up there, but there was a staircase that went up there. It’s pretty eerie.
Taya Graham: I have to ask the question, and there might be some people who are listening who are wondering the same thing. Why would a police department want to close that investigation so quickly? What would be a possible motive for wanting to rule this as suicide, closing out the case so fast?
Jayne Miller: Well, I can answer that from a media perspective. Okay. So from a media perspective, the minute that there is the specter of suicide over a case, media coverage stops, media doesn’t cover suicides.
Taya Graham: That’s interesting.
Jayne Miller: So if you want to end interest in something as an investigator or whatever, then if you start to put the specter of suicide on something, you’re going to lose media attention, and you’ll lose the public attention, too. And look, this had all the markings to be what they call a red ball case. This isn’t a gunshot victim, which obviously Baltimore has more than its share of gunshot victims. This wasn’t something that seemed to be a corner dispute about something. This was a very different kind of case. And it’s also the kind of case that could be difficult to solve because he had perhaps a lot of connections in his life and his business associations, his associations personally, et cetera, in something like this that you really have to run out. And this isn’t your everyday investigation, no question about it.
Stephen Janis: And as you point out, he was an employee of Agora, which is one of the largest employers in Mount Vernon with 2000 employees, I think –
Jayne Miller: …400, something like that.
Stephen Janis: Is it 400 in Mount Vernon by itself?
Jayne Miller: Yeah.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. So it’s a complicated case. Because –
Jayne Miller: And Agora was very, very insistent, in my reporting with discussions I had with their lawyer, was that they saw no connection to his death and Agora and the company.
Stephen Janis: And… Go ahead, I’m sorry.
Jayne Miller: And they were very insistent, and that very hard line was drawn, and were very… They commented on a few things, but they were very reluctant to comment on much of anything.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. The only way I got anything about Agora, just because it was of interest, because that’s where he worked when he came to Baltimore, was just to talk to people off the record who would pick up the phone and talk to me. But really no one at Agora would ever give me a comment on the record or anything official.
Jayne Miller: The other thing I think that’s interesting is, here we are now in 2022, the Netflix episode, which got global attention, no question, July of 2020, probably because it was also the pandemic, a lot of people were watching streaming at that time. So it definitely got a lot of eyeballs. And it’s the kind of story that generates everybody’s own theory of what happened.
But the other thing that happened, which happened as a result of that episode, was I received some information that I thought was real information, not speculation, not somebody from afar saying, oh, this is what probably happened. But these were people that were familiar with Rey, they were familiar with Rey’s business associates, and they were filling in a few blanks.
Rey’s wife, Allison, who obviously has devoted a lot of the time and attention to her pursuit of what really happened to Rey over all these years, it’s always been her theory that this is the kind of case that somewhere, someone’s going to pry open a lid to something. And once that happens, the whole story will be there. And I think that all these years have passed and we’ve gotten some hints of it, but we haven’t yet been able to throw open that lid and really answer this one way or the other. The problem is that this is a case that doesn’t have a clear answer to what really happened.
Taya Graham: So Jayne, I know you’ve been reviewing the notes that you made on the case. Is there anything you found in there that suggests to you that Rey didn’t jump?
Jayne Miller: Well, if he jumped, then they would suggest that he was trying to take his own life. So what’s in the notes from the detectives that they found nobody that would say he was suicidal, was mentally distraught. There was no note left. There was a note taped to the back of his computer, but it was just a weird note and we’re not positive he wrote it. There were some references to things, but it clearly wasn’t a clear suicide note. In fact, the FBI ruled at the time, their opinion at the time was that it was not a suicide note. So I think that stuck out to me when I went through the file, is that they interviewed a lot of people and they went through financial records, et cetera, and they didn’t find anything, no one told them anything that would suggest that he was distraught.
I have notes from when he disappeared, I have notes from when he was found, I have notes from a year later when we did the story, and then I have notes from when the episode aired in 2020 which filled in some of the blanks.
I think that, for example, there was somebody that worked in the building that told me that Rey went missing, I think, on the 16th of May. And they started to notice an odor in the building on the 19th. But it’s another five or six days until his body is found, because the room was never used. And then she described the inside of the room as what would indicate to me is that it doesn’t indicate a fall, but it indicates that something may have happened in the room.
Now there’s no witness to any of this, there’s no witness to him coming off the roof, there’s no witness to him going in that room, there’s no witness to him coming in off the street. We know a big missing piece of this whole thing is that security cameras were inadvertently deleted. The footage from that day. So that obviously would be a critical piece, would provide, perhaps, some critical information.
So the problem is that you have bits and pieces of information from people who were in the building that day, in the building a lot because they worked in the building, knew this or knew that. But to try to put it together into a puzzle that makes sense has really been the biggest challenge.
Stephen Janis: Well Jayne, let me raise something, because you and I both got a ton of tips and people contacting us. And one theme that came from a bunch of people who said they were familiar with it but wouldn’t identify themselves was they really were pushing me – And I don’t know if you got this – But to look at ways that Rey’s body could have been brought in there were or killed there. But they all felt pretty confident from what they’d heard that Rey did not fall off the building in any way, shape, or form. One time we actually went looking, because they said there were tunnels underneath Mount Vernon that they could have brought Rey in, and we found that wasn’t true, we checked that out and it wasn’t true.
But I was in constant contact with people who were urging me to look at the way the body could have been brought in there or that the hole in the roof and that suicide was a red herring of a really major variety. And it could be an amazing red herring. That hole has definitely taken any attention off other ways that this could have happened in other –
Jayne Miller: Absolutely.
Stephen Janis: Correct?
Jayne Miller: Well, because what the hole does is that it provides an answer, or a possible answer. Oh, well he came off the roof. Oh, he came off the side of the building, because he went through the roof. And you’re right, that is exactly what that could be, because there’s nothing to refute it specifically. There is a possibility of what may have happened in the parking garage. Did something happen in the parking garage? Was he in the parking garage? And again, the investigative file shows that the parking garage was ready to provide security footage for review by investigators, but it doesn’t appear –
Stephen Janis: But they never picked it up.
Jayne Miller: …We don’t know. We don’t know.
Stephen Janis: That’s true. We don’t know.
Jayne Miller: We can’t find any record that they actually went and looked at the video.
Stephen Janis: From everything we can tell, just so people understand, homicide has this Lotus Notes program from the ’90s, but they put in daily reports of what they do. They’re called progress reports. And the progress reports stop around June.
Jayne Miller: And really, really abruptly. Correct.
Stephen Janis: And because you’ll see, Jayne and I have both reviewed homicide files, and you’ll see there can be points where nothing happens, but then three weeks later you say, we received a call or something.
Jayne Miller: Correct.
Stephen Janis: But this is total stone silence, cut off. Just like somebody said that’s enough. We dealt with this. We’re not… Because there’s not even anything from getting a random phone call or anything.
Jayne Miller: No. And they were… In fact, I think the last thing that I found notes on in the file was at the end of June of 2006 when they interviewed Rey’s former friend and person he came here to work with, and met with that person and a lawyer. And that seemed to be the last thing that was noted in the file.
Stephen Janis: Now I want to talk about something that frustrates me about that file, because there’s certain things that the police could’ve done. And I made a call to a homicide detective who was in the DEA, because over those seven days, there are a lot of things in that file that are missing. But one of them is that one way police can use to figure out what happened is just ping their cell phone. It’s a common thing to do, and it could have been done in the aughts. And yet there’s nothing in the file about pinging his cell phone. If they pinged his cell phone, they would’ve known where he went that day. Why on earth would they not do that, Jayne?
Jayne Miller: Well, I’ve seen Rey’s telephone records, but I’ve seen them because Allison has them, his wife. I don’t find anything in the file where I think they took his phone, but I don’t see any reference to what was on the phone.
Stephen Janis: No, they never got a warrant or anything to look through his phone, or to look through the numbers, or to figure out who –
Jayne Miller: That’s what it appears. There’s no reference to it.
Stephen Janis: That’s what it appears. You make a good point. We don’t know for sure. But there’s nothing that I see in there. But to me the big mystery is where did Rey go? If he went to Fells Point or he went somewhere that would give you some clues, if he went straight to the Belvedere, that would give you clues. All those things are discernible with the technology that existed that time. And I think –
Jayne Miller: Well, the biggest question is why did he go there? We know he went –
Taya Graham: That’s a great question.
Jayne Miller: …Went to. We know he went there because –
Stephen Janis: Do we know?
Jayne Miller: Well, we know his car went there.
Stephen Janis: We know his car went there, we know his body ended up there.
Jayne Miller: And we know his body was there.
Stephen Janis: We don’t know where he went between leaving that… And I think from the notes you have, you can surmise he died pretty quickly. He wasn’t wandering around Baltimore.
Jayne Miller: Yes. If there’s an employee of the building that says we started… Yeah, correct.
Stephen Janis: Three days.
Jayne Miller: Exactly. Three days later you’re starting to smell an odor in the building. Correct.
Stephen Janis: Someone said, his brother Angel had told me he’s six-foot-five, he’s not going to be inconspicuous. And so I think we know that he didn’t drive around Baltimore for three or four days, but of course we don’t know exactly where he went when he ran out of the house. He didn’t tell –
Jayne Miller: We do know, however, that his car was in that parking lot the next morning.
Stephen Janis: Yes.
Jayne Miller: Because there was a ticket on it. So we know that it was there. So we don’t know when it arrived, but we know it was there at least by the next morning.
Stephen Janis: Now the other thing missing from the files that I find quite annoying, that is generally in homicide files, because we review them, are statements, like statements from the people who found the hole in the roof. I think that would be of great interest. I’m not saying there’s anything untoward, but where are the statements? Wouldn’t the homicide detectives have asked them, what made you decide to go look at the hole in the… I think that’s a reasonable question.
Jayne Miller: You’re right. These are normally things that are included. There are statements from people, well there’s interviews, I should say there are interview summaries.
Stephen Janis: Summaries, synopsis, but not –
Jayne Miller: Correct. That the detectives have written based on their interviews with people relevant to the investigation.
Stephen Janis: The reason I bring this up is because every detective I let look at this says, well, the first thing I would’ve done with the people that found the hole was take them down to homicide. And that doesn’t mean they’re suspects, but get a written statement from them and put it in the damn file. And that, to me, just shows absolutely either negligence on the behalf of the police or something worse, because that’s just basic detective work. I think that speaks to your… Not your theory, but your thought about how incomplete the file is that someone just said, whatever we found the body, that’s the main thing. And after that, we’re not really going to be curious about any other aspect of the case.
Jayne Miller: Well, they have a body, they have a hole in the roof.
Stephen Janis: What else do they need?
Jayne Miller: What else do they need?
Stephen Janis: And as you pointed out many times – And you can talk about this – Is that this is the point and shoot city, where you point a gun and you shoot. And that’s what people expect in homicide.
Jayne Miller: Well, the vast majority of our cases that involve both suspicious death and homicide involve gunshots. This is a very different kind of case. This involves an extraordinary amount of trauma and some injury that has been questioned about whether it really would be indicative of a fall. But to the point, yes, they have a body underneath a hole in the roof, and that roof is below the top roof of a 13-story building. So it’s like, okay, well that’s what happened.
Taya Graham: So looking in from the outside to this case, we see the hole in the roof. We see that with his flip flop, cell phone, sunglasses case, it could almost appear to be staged, you know that Rey was living his best life. He had friends that were looking out for him. He had just gotten married, he was working, he had just finished a screenplay. This doesn’t sound like a man who was suicidal, but it doesn’t necessarily sound like a man who has enemies. Is there any theory as to why he might have been killed if this wasn’t a suicide?
Jayne Miller: Yeah, there you go. That’s the even bigger question is it would seem that he was not the victim of a random crime because of the circumstances that we know of, his location, where his body was found, et cetera. So that’s a good question. There doesn’t appear to be anything in the information that was gathered in the week he was missing by detectives that were working a missing person’s case. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that he had a threat against him, someone who was trying to do him harm. There’s nothing in the file that indicates that.
Stephen Janis: And to Taya’s point, which is a great point and a great question, if someone did kill him this way, they are good at what they do. These are not some random person who got into a fight with Rey and just decided to kill him. They staged a killing and staged a suicide and made it convincing enough to fool the Baltimore Police Department.
I’m not going to comment on how easy or hard it is to fool the Baltimore Police Department. But you’re looking at people who were smart, and if they killed Rey someplace else and then came up with the idea to put him in the hotel, you need to think about that.
And, Taya, I think that’s a great question, because that takes some planning and some thinking, it’s not just a random thing like, let’s dump his body in the… You could easily have dumped his body in the harbor somewhere. But it would’ve raised suspicion, but you came up with the one way to make it ambiguous enough so that police could take that out and say, you know what? We can call this a suicide because there’s a hole in the roof and his body was right below it and –
Jayne Miller: And we don’t have any witnesses.
Stephen Janis: And we don’t have any witnesses. And that is something of what I would say would be a professional hit kind of thing. And that, Taya, raises the question, who would want to kill Rey Rivera, for what?
Jayne Miller: Well, and we get back to the circumstance of how he left… According to the woman that was staying in the house, the friend who was staying in the house at the time, Rey was working on something, got a phone call, and was like, oh, got to go. Like oh, forgot, got to go. So he left the house in what she described in somewhat of a hurry. And the way he parked his car in the parking lot where his car was found suggests that he parked in a hurry. So does that mean he was called to meet somebody? Does that mean, what? What does that mean? And we don’t know. We don’t know what that… Because we don’t have anybody that is filling in that blank. Who called him? What was the point of the call? Why was he in a hurry to get there?
Stephen Janis: But the one thing we do have, or don’t, is not a single person who said that he was contemplating suicide, angry, or distraught. The last person that spoke to him was a person who worked at Apple, at an Apple store and had rented him editing equipment so he could edit a project that he had been working on. So what we don’t have is anybody who said, oh yeah, Rey was suicidal. There’s just nobody that… Did you ever talk to anybody?
Jayne Miller: No. And that’s what I mean, the detectives didn’t find anybody that would tell them anything like that either.
Stephen Janis: Well, let’s think about it this way. People kill for two reasons, love or money. I don’t want to sound… But that’s basically most of the cases I’ve covered. So it’s one or the other. And –
Jayne Miller: Well, sometimes people kill people to keep them quiet, too.
Stephen Janis: Right, and that usually has to do with love or money.
Jayne Miller: At the beginning of the story.
Stephen Janis: But you’re right, you’re right that those two very simple ideas evolve and branch off into very complex reasons. But Rey didn’t have any business entanglements to speak of. He –
Jayne Miller: That we know of. That’s correct.
Stephen Janis: …That we know off. He wasn’t running some offshore company. So it really, I think that, I guess that’s why people are so obsessed with this case, because the mystery is so confounding.
Jayne Miller: Sure. And it doesn’t have clear cut answers. That’s exactly right. It has –
Stephen Janis: Not even close.
Jayne Miller: …And it has elements of it that cause questions to be asked and raise suspicion about things that we don’t have firm answers to. So this is the kind of case where it’s easy for people to fill in the blank.
Taya Graham: Well, I want to thank you, Stephen Janis, and you, Jayne Miller, for joining me for this episode of Land of the Unsolved. Wherever you’re listening to Land of the Unsolved, whether it’s on Anchor or Apple with iTunes, please make sure to leave a comment below to let us know what you think happened to Rey Rivera. I’m your host, Taya Graham, This is Land of the Unsolved. Thank you for joining me.
Chase Hasegawa had been sitting on the side of an empty rural road for six hours next to his broken-down car when he was approached by two San Diego County sheriffs. Instead of asking if he needed help or offering him assistance, police demanded identification. Knowing his rights, Hasegawa refused, and began asking questions. Cell phone footage shows the police not only threatening to arrest him, but also saying they could charge him with ‘burglary’ or ‘stalking.’
Hasegawa’s ordeal reflects a dangerous trend of officers demanding identification from people in public spaces, in violation of our First Amendment rights to assembly and Fourth Amendment protections from unlawful search and seizure. He still has not been able to recover his car from the police impound lot. Police Accountability Report speaks to California resident Chase Hasagawa about the charges, arrest, and the impact the experience is having on his life.
Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible.
And today we will achieve that goal by showing this arrest by the San Diego County Sheriffs – Now wait for it – For refusing to provide an ID while standing on a public road. But it’s not just a questionable action of these cops we will be exploring on the show today. We will also be examining the fraught history and legal implications of empowering police to demand identification, regardless of circumstance. Not just the perils of this practice, but what it means in the broader context of America’s expanding law enforcement-industrial complex.
But first, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @EyesonPolice on Twitter. And of course, you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook. And please like and comment. I do read your comments and I appreciate them, even if I don’t get to respond to each and every one, I really do read them. And we also have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below, so if you do feel inspired to donate, please do. We do not run ads or take corporate dollars, so anything you can spare is truly appreciated.
Now, one of the troubling aspects of police power is a simple act that might, on the surface, appear harmless. I’m talking about the endless variety of circumstances when police in this country can request your ID. It’s become a tool of law enforcement that, in many ways, represents just how much police power has expanded. But it’s also a concept that has not been adequately parsed to understand the far reaching implications of how its growing use has even broader implications for the state of our rights throughout the country.
Let’s remember the Fourth Amendment is pretty specific about the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizures. Add that to the right to free assembly outlined in the First Amendment, and it’s pretty clear that empowering the government to ask for ID on demand wasn’t very popular. I mean, let’s face it. Empowering armed agents of the government with nearly unchecked power to demand your ID or face legal consequences sounds pretty dystopian to me. One can only imagine what would happen if this power is allowed to grow unabated, and how it could be subsequently abused.
That seems to be the direction we’re headed based on the reporting on police that we’ve done for many years. Which brings me to the case and the video I will show you today. It is the perfect example of how problematic this power can be. An example of how and why police can easily abuse the ability to demand identification and what can happen when it is abused without consequence. The story starts in rural San Diego County, where Chase Hasegawa was dealing with a common problem: His car had broken down. And because he was far from a gas station or repair shop or even a residence, he had been stuck for several hours when police arrived. But instead of asking Chase if he wanted help, the officer demanded that he produce an ID. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Chase Hasegawa: If I’m not suspected of a crime, I don’t need to produce my ID.
Police Officer: Actually you do. Because we got a radio.
Chase Hasegawa: Actually.
Police Officer: So we have a legal –
Chase Hasegawa: That’s not the law.
Police Officer: Okay –
Chase Hasegawa: I’m recording, just so you know.
Police Officer: Okay, That’s totally fine.
Chase Hasegawa: Okay.
Police Officer: I’m explaining to you, okay, we have a lot of facts out here.
Chase Hasegawa: Do you see anything around here to be stolen?
Police Officer: Okay. Yes –
Chase Hasegawa: I’m parked on a public road –
Police Officer: – Okay.
Chase Hasegawa: Public roadway.
Police Officer: I’m explaining to you –
Chase Hasegawa: Parked on a public roadway.
Police Officer: We have a legal, lawful right to contact you and obtain your information –
Chase Hasegawa: [crosstalk] If I’m suspected of a crime, and you have to reasonably articulate it to me, too.
Police Officer: [inaudible] You’re not…
Chase Hasegawa: So what crime do you suspect me of committing?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, it’s interesting to note that all Chase was doing when police arrived was standing on the side of the road. That’s right. He was simply waiting by a car that wasn’t moving. He wasn’t driving or even sitting in the car itself. He was simply stranded. But still, the officer escalated the situation. Take a look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Chase Hasegawa: So what crime do you suspect me of committing?
Police Officer: I can have you stalking, I can have you –
Chase Hasegawa: No, not the things that you can make up. Not “I can have you.” What do you suspect me of?
Police Officer: So I’m –
Chase Hasegawa: You just said you were, “I can have you this”. That’s making stuff up. Come on, man.
Police Officer: Do you want me to explain, or what?
Chase Hasegawa: Hey, I know my rights. I’m not going to let them just get trampled all over.
Police Officer: [crosstalk] I’m just trying to explain it to you, though.
Chase Hasegawa: You heard it too, right?
Police Officer 2: Are you going to let him explain? Okay.
Chase Hasegawa: By all means.
Police Officer: Here’s what’s up. I have a legal, lawful right to contact you and obtain your information. We received a radio call regarding you for suspicious activity, okay?
Chase Hasegawa: And what crime is that? Is that a felony or a misdemeanor? Being suspicious?
Police Officer: Okay. It is activity that is intended to discover if you are in the process of committing a felony or a misdemeanor –
Chase Hasegawa: No, no, no.
Police Officer: I’ll tell you what –
Chase Hasegawa: If I’m suspected of a felony or a misdemeanor –
Police Officer: Let me explain something to you real quick. So you have a choice right now. You can go with the program, you can give us your ID. If you choose not to do that, that’s considered obstructing us from performing our job.
Chase Hasegawa: Actually, obstruction is a physical act.
Police Officer: No, it is not.
Chase Hasegawa: It actually is.
Police Officer: So if you continue down this road, we’re going to place you in handcuffs here in just a second. And you’re going to be under arrest. Under arrest for obstructing a police officer.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, what happens next embodies all the problems with the power to identify that are discussed at the beginning of the show. That’s because Chase does something surprising. Under the threat of a cop, in the middle of nowhere, he simply refuses to produce an ID. And what the cop does shows why this power can be so treacherous. Take another look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer: Is that clear?
Chase Hasegawa: Okay, that’s just litigation for you guys.
Police Officer: That’s fine. Is that the direction we want to go with?
Chase Hasegawa: I don’t want to go that route at all.
Police Officer: Okay.
Chase Hasegawa: I said I don’t need any assistance.
Police Officer: Okay. I’m explaining to you –
Chase Hasegawa: You guys got a call.
Police Officer: Yes.
Chase Hasegawa: Right?
Police Officer: So I’m explaining to you right now, you have a choice. You can either provide your identification, we can conduct our investigation, or we can place you in handcuffs. And then –
Chase Hasegawa: But see, the thing is [crosstalk] –
Police Officer: – We arrest you –
Chase Hasegawa: Go on.
Police Officer: For resisting, obstructing a police officer and delaying our investigation.
Chase Hasegawa: Resisting? That’s a secondary offense.
Police Officer: Okay.
Chase Hasegawa: That’s why I’m being placed under arrest.
Police Officer: It is all part of 148.
Chase Hasegawa: Am I being detained right now?
Police Officer: Yes.
Chase Hasegawa: I am. What am I being detained for?
Police Officer: You are being detained while we conduct our investigation of a suspicious activity.
Chase Hasegawa: Okay, what –
Police Officer: – And person in the area.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: I mean, I think it’s very revealing what the officer did when he was confronted by a person willing to push back. It is revealing what tools he used to get Chase to comply. Namely – And I can’t really think of any other word to describe it – False charges. Let’s watch again. And while we do, I want you to think about what you’re seeing.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Chase Hasegawa: What crime do you suspect me of committing that you’re detaining me for?
Police Officer: Okay. Burglary, how’s that? You’re in an area where you don’t live.
Chase Hasegawa: [crosstalk] Is that what the call was for, burglary?
Police Officer: Nope. No. It was for a suspicious person.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: And so, as often occurs during police encounters we cover on the show, the cop resorted to the go-to law enforcement tool: imprisonment.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer: You know what? We’re all done. Put him in handcuffs. I’m done.
Police Officer 2: Put your hands behind your back. Hey, excuse me.
Chase Hasegawa: Don’t… Please don’t touch me.
Police Officer 2: Put your hands –
Chase Hasegawa: Please don’t touch me.
Police Officer 2: Put your hands behind your back.
Chase Hasegawa: This is an arbitrary arrest.
Police Officer 2: We’re not going to use force, okay?
Chase Hasegawa: This is an arbitrary arrest.
Police Officer 2: And if that’s the case…
Chase Hasegawa: I am sitting handcuffed in a Vista Sheriff’s truck because a neighbor called the cops for a suspicious vehicle. When I asked what I was being detained for, he said I was being detained for his investigation. And the call was for a suspicious vehicle. And I asked him, is that a felony or a misdemeanor? And he said, you’re not hearing me. You’re being detained.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: That’s right. Even though Chase had not been accused or even committed a crime, even though he was exercising what is, arguably, one of our most fundamental Constitutional rights in our country, the officer ignored the law and put him in a cage. But this harrowing encounter with the rural cop was just the beginning of Chase’s ordeal. That’s because the officer involved and the criminal justice system they represent were not done with Chase. Not at all. In fact, the law enforcement-industrial complex was just beginning to inflict pain on the man who simply wanted to get his car repaired.
Which is why we soon will be joined by Chase to hear about what happened after the arrest and how the consequences of this encounter are far from over. But first, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis, who’s been looking into the case and reaching out to the police for comment. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So Stephen, you have been reaching out to the police. What have they said?
Stephen Janis: Well, I asked them, number one, why was Chase arrested? It didn’t make any sense to me. They said that it was because of narcotics, which they wouldn’t tell me what kind of narcotics. And I asked them, and they would not specify. And then I said, well, why was the car impounded? And they said, due to the fact… First they cited a California statute about speeding. And I said, are you sure? And then they said, oops, we made a mistake. It was because the car was an obstacle or an impediment to traffic, which seems so absurd to me, because he was out in the middle of nowhere. And even when you watch the video, you could see there are no cars driving by. It was absolutely, patently absurd. And my next question was, well, any car that’s stuck on the side of the road can be impounded? I mean, come on. So I really didn’t like their answers and I think it’s really problematic.
Taya Graham: You’ve also been looking into the department behind this arrest. What have you learned?
Stephen Janis: Well, it’s amazing. The San Diego County budget is a $7 billion budget. What’s the biggest ticket spending? The sheriff’s department. Over a billion dollars. This is a huge agency, I think, that has to generate a lot of revenue.
But I want people to look at something for a second. I want you to look at these sheriffs out in this rural county and what they’re wearing on their body. I mean, this is a military style gear that they have on, and imposing and intimidating, and I’m not really sure why a sheriff who works in a rural county would be armed to the teeth like this and look like he’s about to go out on reconnaissance for three months. But even so, I think part of the problem is there’s too much money. If you look at other line items and the county budget like health and recreation, it doesn’t even come close. The sheriff’s department is the biggest expenditure. They got a billion dollars, and I think they act like it.
Taya Graham: So you’ve done quite a bit of reporting on impound lots and how police have a habit of impounding vehicles. What have you learned about this lucrative process?
Stephen Janis: Well, in a lot of jurisdictions, impound lots are cash machines, ATM machines for the police department. They seize vehicles, they make it very expensive to retrieve them, and then they auction it off. And that’s been the case in our town and many other places we’ve looked into. So they’re basically a way to make money. Take your vehicle, impose lots of fines and fees, storage fees, whatever, can’t get the vehicle out. Next thing you know, it’s up for auction. I’ve been looking into San Diego County, I haven’t found that yet, but I’m going to keep looking into it and we will update you on it. But that’s usually what happens.
Taya Graham: And now, to learn what happened after the arrest and how the ordeal itself has impacted his life, I’m joined by Chase. Chase, thank you so much for joining us.
Chase Hasegawa: Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to share the video with people.
Taya Graham: So first tell me why were you stopped in the road?
Chase Hasegawa: Well, I was giving my friend a ride home, and my vehicle broke down. It just shut down completely. Wouldn’t… The lights shut off, everything. And this was at like 6:00 in the morning. And I’d been broken down there for about seven hours when the cops showed up.
Taya Graham: How would you describe how the officers approached you?
Chase Hasegawa: Aggressively. By the time I became aware that they were behind me, they were surrounding me already. And asking me what’s going on. And I had the same question for them, what is going on?
Taya Graham: So what happened when you refused to give the officer your ID?
Chase Hasegawa: Well, I could say he didn’t like that very much. He immediately started threatening me, essentially. Saying that he was going to charge me with stalking and burglary, just making stuff up, wild accusations. And I was just getting my car ready to get towed. There was going to be a tow truck there within a half hour.
Taya Graham: Did it surprise you to hear the officer essentially offer to create probable cause or a reasonable suspicion when he didn’t actually have one? I mean, did it surprise you to hear him say, well I’m just going to say you’re here stalking? I mean, he essentially fabricated probable cause.
Chase Hasegawa: Sadly, it didn’t surprise me. I kind of come to expect something like that from police officers these days. They seem to just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, and not have to face any consequences for just making up outright lies.
Taya Graham: So was this a rural area?
Chase Hasegawa: I was in a rural area, absolutely. I was about an hour from my home. And I was not by anything, there weren’t any businesses around there. No gas station to walk to. I was in the middle of nowhere. As a matter of fact, you couldn’t even see any houses where I was at. There was nothing out there. It was an empty road.
Taya Graham: So you’re in a rural area, basically stranded, with no one around to help. Why did you refuse to give the officer your ID?
Chase Hasegawa: Because I hadn’t committed any crime. He was demanding my ID for whatever reason. He said that he got a call about a suspicious vehicle, and a suspicious vehicle isn’t a crime. When he came and asked me what was going on and I said I was waiting for a tow truck, that should have been the end of it. I told them I didn’t need any assistance.
Taya Graham: So what were you charged with?
Chase Hasegawa: Well, they ended up charging me with obstruction of traffic, which is a moving violation, and I wasn’t even in my car at all. It was actually locked all the way up until they had it hooked up to the tow truck. And it was broken down.
And then he ended up charging me with paraphernalia from inside my vehicle that he opened up after the fact. And I mean, frankly, I wasn’t found in possession of. But pretty much just charged me with things that weren’t going to even stand up or anything and arrested me for no reason, just to take me to the station, write me a ticket, and then just released me. Just to displace me from the area and tow my car. And I still haven’t been able to get it out of impound. Now, because they didn’t even tell me where it was at. They towed it two cities away, when there was a yard in the same city right down the street. They went ahead and made it so it was extremely expensive just to take it out initially. And it’s just getting more and more expensive. I’m about to lose my vehicle because of it, essentially.
Taya Graham: So how did this impact you financially? I mean, I know there’s the cost of your car being towed, there’s impound fees, there’s loss of time from work, there’s court costs, there’s lawyer costs, there’s tickets. I mean, how has this impacted you?
Chase Hasegawa: Pretty much everything you named. I’m not so sure that retaining counsel for the ticket will even be necessary, cause I doubt that that’s going to go anywhere. However, I’m probably going to have to cover costs for an attorney for the civil suit. I’m a good hour away from work, and not having a vehicle… And I mean, I’m at least 45 minutes away from anything, where I live. I live up in the mountains. So I’ve been out of work for the last… A little over a week now, week and a half. Like I said, I can’t even afford to get my car out of impound, can’t make it to work. It’s a struggle just to get to the grocery store, just to survive, really.
Taya Graham: Why do you think the officer was so aggressive with you? How do you think the officer could have better handled this situation?
Chase Hasegawa: Frankly, I think the officer was aggressive. I mean, it seemed that that’s just how he conducts himself. The guy who was doing most of the speaking was a sergeant. He was kind of the gang leader among them. And I mean, it was right off the bat. Right off the bat, he started making stuff up and threatening me right out of the gate. I mean, I started recording just seconds before the interaction started. They had just walked up behind me, asked me what’s going on, and I said, I’m waiting for a tow truck. And I started recording because he started asking me for my ID right away, and I can kind of see where that’s going. And I’m not a criminal, I wasn’t doing anything. I was broken down on the side of the road, and as far as I’m… I know it’s not against the law. My car was parked on the side of the road. Him saying he was going to tow it because it was there since 6:00 AM. I mean, this just sounded ridiculous to me. There was no good reason.
He was just doing it. He was literally doing it just to inconvenience me. Along with taking me to the station. Arresting me, putting me in a holding cell just to write me a ticket. The last time I checked, when an officer’s going to write you a ticket, they’re not allowed to hold you any longer than it takes to write the ticket. So as far as I’m concerned, that entire interaction where he cuffed me up just because I wouldn’t identify myself, and then taking me all the way back to the station and put me in a holding cell just to give me a ticket that he could have written where we were at. But he didn’t have any reason to write me a ticket. Everything that he put on there was completely fabricated.
Taya Graham: If you could speak to that officer or their police department, what would you want to say to them?
Chase Hasegawa: Well, frankly, I would exercise my right to remain silent if I was face to face with them again. Because yeah, I don’t trust them. I don’t feel like they’re public servants. They were treating me like I was the enemy when I was a citizen in need of help. Not a criminal to just throw in a jail cell.
Taya Graham: Okay. At this point in the show, I usually recount an example of police misconduct or corruption to make a broader point about American law enforcement. In other words, I use the particular to better understand the general. But today I want to focus on something that has been irking me for several months now that I feel I must address directly. A trend that I’ve noticed in my interactions with police departments that I have to talk about, because it is literally driving me crazy.
As anyone who has watched the show knows, we spend a lot of time trying to get comments from the police departments we cover. Almost every case we report on, Stephen and I send an email or call the department with a detailed set of questions about the incident which we hope will shed light on the officer’s actions. We do this for several reasons:
First because it’s our duty as journalists to make every effort we can, to get the other side of the story. Even though the mainstream media goes out of its way to bolster the police narrative, we still believe in the basic tenets of journalism, and the idea that reporting just one side of a story is not just unfair, but honestly it’s lazy.
But there is another reason we go through extensive efforts to contact the police. We do this because it’s important for you, our viewer, and the public at large, to know police are listening. What I mean is that even acknowledging us with a “no comment” is better than simply ignoring us completely. Because being responsive to the independent media when their actions are in question is one of the best ways to show that law enforcement takes allegations of misbehavior or misconduct seriously.
I mean, it’s a basic tenet of accountability to have to communicate with the people you purport to serve. Nothing is more intrinsic to maintaining a free society than embracing the duty and the obligation to be responsive to the people. Acting like you don’t have to or simply ignoring questions from independent media sends a very clear message: We don’t have to explain what we do or why to anyone.
But what really bothers me about the silence of police is what it implies. Meaning that the fact that police feel they have – And I’m saying this without irony – The right to remain silent reveals an aspect of law enforcement that has much to do with the encounters we report on week after week than any other intransigence I can think of. As we have seen across the country, police do not have a problem posting mugshots and unflattering posts about arrestees on social media when they want to sully somebody’s reputation. They seem to be pretty adept at labeling a person a suspect or criminal.Just look at the Milton Police Department Facebook page, where they post photos of people suspected of crimes and then allow anyone at all to share and comment on the significance of the presumption of innocence.
So the police can communicate when they want to, but the fact they can’t answer simple questions about disturbing incidents and troubling use of force is really just indicative of the whole problem with law enforcement in the first place. Being able to simply ignore independent journalists is just a symptom of a broader issue of how insular law enforcement is, and how they feel no obligation to the people who pay their salaries.
And it’s not like we don’t try. As many of you know who watch the show, Stephen and I traveled to Trenton, New Jersey, to get comment after we caught cops lying on body camera video. Even though the department promised to grant us an interview, when we arrived, the spokesperson for the troubled agency simply disappeared into thin air.
I mean seriously, a person whose job it is to answer questions from the media and the public about police misconduct ghosted us like a bad Tinder date. The point I’m trying to make here is one that bears repeating. This lack of responsiveness isn’t about just blowing off independent journalists or not wanting to answer uncomfortable questions. This isn’t about the fact that we’re just YouTube based reporters who don’t warrant the attention they afford journalists who work for broadcast TV or newspapers. Which in itself begs the question, do they only speak to journalists who they know will paint them in a good light? Will they only speak to reporters who they know will take their side of the story without question? No. It’s not just that.
What I think we see in this refusal to acknowledge independent media is something far more troubling about American law enforcement, an imperative that drives it and sustains it, which is not always obvious but needs to be explored. I think the fact that police feel empowered to not have to answer reasonable questions about unreasonable actions reveals an anti-democratic impulse that runs throughout policing. That is, their right to outright ignore a simple query is emblematic of how law enforcement is often incompatible with the basic tenets of a free society.
Let’s remember, as we have often discussed on the show, the process of policing has been the biggest impetus to the erosion of our Constitutional rights in contemporary history. Time and time again, the court has expanded the power of cops to ignore or otherwise override the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. And that same system has pretty much given officers the discretion – Provided it’s so-called “reasonable” – To take our lives.
All of this, however, means nothing unless we as journalists do something about it. There is no point in complaining about police intransigence if we don’t also hold ourselves accountable to do more to ensure cops answer when we ask. And so I want to state here, publicly, on this show, that our visit to Trenton, New Jersey, is just the beginning. That, when it is both feasible and affordable, we will travel to the city we are reporting on and demand answers in person from the cops in question.
Now, I can’t say we will do this every single time or in every single case, but when we can, we will make the extra effort to be heard. If and when we can raise the money, we will make sure of our voice, and by extension, your voices are not ignored. We will, when we can, travel to ensure that police malfeasance and misconduct does not occur in darkness. This is not a pledge I make lightly. It’s not something I say just to create drama. And it’s not even a process I have, honestly, entirely thought through, to be perfectly frank.
But what I do know is I simply cannot allow a powerful institution to simply ignore my questions or your questions. I can’t allow this country’s massive law enforcement-industrial complex to remain unscrutinized by independent media like TRNN. Now, I know there are critics out there who are saying, Taya, you don’t need to do this. Let the local media handle that, or, just wait until the story becomes national news, and then the police won’t have a choice but to respond. We could just wait and see if they ever deemed a story worthy of their coverage.
Well, that’s okay if you want to entrust the truth to organizations that are funded with corporate dollars and owned by the top 1%, that’s fine. If you think national TV anchors, who make millions in salary, really understand what it’s like to be entrapped in our criminal justice system, which literally functions as an ad hoc debtor’s prison. That’s totally copacetic. If you think that the current system, which houses more prisoners than any country on earth and yet suffers from constant unending violence, should only be accountable to the people who helped create it?
Well, I might be biased, but I think I’m going to make a bet on The Real News Network and the Police Accountability Report and the journalism that we do. It might not always be pretty or perfect, but I can guarantee we do it because we care. Because we care about this country, we care about our community, and we care about you, and hopefully making the world a better place for both of us.
I’d like to thank my guest Chase Hasegawa for being so open with us and sharing his experience with the Valley Center San Diego Sheriffs. Thank you, Chase. And of course, I have to thank intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, his research, and his editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee and mod Lacey R for their support. Thank you so much. And a very special thanks to our Patreons, especially super friends Shane Bushta, Pineapple Girl, and Code, and my new Patron associate producers Louis and John Roe. We appreciate you, and I look forward to thanking each and every one of you personally in our next live stream.
And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @EyesonPolice on Twitter. And, of course, you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook. And please like and comment. I do read your comments and I appreciate them, and I try to answer your questions when I can. And we do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below, so if you feel inspired to donate, please do. We don’t run ads or take corporate dollars, so anything you can spare is greatly appreciated.
My name is Taya Graham, and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
Michael Q. Banks was in his car one evening when a specialized crime unit of Trenton police suddenly pulled him from his vehicle and slammed him on the pavement, breaking his nose. Police proceeded to tear apart Banks’ car without his consent. Banks invoked his Fourth Amendment rights, but to no avail. Police later justified their search by claiming Banks had displayed “aggressive behavior” and given police a “startled look” upon being accosted. The crime rate of the neighborhood Banks was parked in was also used to justify police actions. One of the officers, Michael Gelton, was later responsible for shooting and paralyzing Jajuan Henderson.
Banks’s ordeal exemplifies how police departments treat poor communities and communities of color across the country, as well as the dangerous implications such tactics have on the erosion of Fourth Amendment rights. Police have used the high crime rates that often occur in poor neighborhoods to justify violent tactics that frequently result in civil rights violations. Yet police aggression has failed to have a measurable impact on local crime or its underlying causes of poverty and systemic neglect. Banks spoke with Police Accountability Report about his ordeal. A Trenton police spokesperson failed to appear for a previously scheduled interview with PAR.
Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
This transcript will be made available as soon as possible.
On Monday, Sept. 26, incarcerated workers at all major Alabama Department of Corrections prison facilities began a labor strike. The strike is focused on both improving the living conditions of prisoners and demanding changes to Alabama’s draconian parole and sentencing laws and practices. A 2020 Justice Department lawsuit found that the Alabama prison system “fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff.”
TRNN contributor Michael Sainato returns to Rattling the Bars to discuss the issues at play in this prison strike. The labor of Albama’s prisoners not only keeps the facilities that cage them operational, but also contributes to the economies of depressed rural regions of the state. This economic dependence on incarceration is one of the factors driving Alabama’s inhumane parole practices—some 97% of parole cases in the state are rejected. Striking prisoners and their loved ones protesting in support from the outside are calling for the repeal of the state’s Habitual Felony Offenders Act, along with other major changes to Alabama’s parole and sentencing laws. Current updates on the prison strike are being released by the organization Free Alabama Movement. This conversation was recorded on Sept. 27.
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
This transcript will be made available as soon as possible.
Married couple Wesley and Eshanae Chumbler were traveling with their 3-year-old child across the Illinois border into Kentucky when they were stopped at a police checkpoint by Kentucky law enforcement. For reasons that were hard to discern, police asked law enforcement to park their car on the side of the road. After asking Eshanae, who was driving the vehicle, to show her insurance information and driver’s license, police asked her to step out the car, and would not provide a reason when asked for one. When the couple refused, police violently forced them from their vehicle. Wesley was thrown to the ground in the process, and lost three teeth as a result. Officers proceeded to conduct a search on the vehicle, finding a small amount of marijuana. Cannabis is legal in Illinois, but not in Kentucky. The Chumblers say they were not aware that the marijuana was even in their vehicle. Kentucky police proceeded to arrest the couple for possession, and slapped additional charges on husband Wesley for obstruction.
The Chumblers’ case exemplifies how law enforcement is conducting itself across the country. Police departments emphasize the collection of fines and fees needed to continue feeding their ever-expanding budgets, rather than activities that promote the safety and health of communities. As cannabis laws change at an uneven pace throughout the country, states that still criminalize marijuana are increasingly targeting interstate travelers for legally questionable “fishing operations” that often trap unwitting drivers into legal nightmares far from home.
Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.
All across the United States, city and state governments have increasingly turned to fines and fees to make up for budget shortfalls. This has required a corresponding explosion in police department budgets, creating a perverse cycle where local governments must consistently expand policing in order to continue to pay for policing. Rural America has not escaped this trend, and a new Vera Institute report has found that small and rural counties are now the main drivers of growth in the prison industrial complex. According Vera’s research, the boom in county jails appears to be driven by an increased amount of people who are either held pretrial or warehoused for federal, state, or other municipal authorities.
Stephen Janis and Taya Graham of Police Accountability Report join Rattling the Bars to discuss these findings in light of their own reporting on rural policing. In a wide-ranging conversation, Stephen and Taya help connect the dots between the rural jail boom and the rural police boom, the opioid crisis, and the decades-long economic crisis in rural America.
Dramatic video shows a Texas police officer brutally beating a man who refused to turn over his phone to police. The victim was not suspected of a crime and was voluntarily cooperating with police. Nevertheless, the police turned on him. The attack raises even more questions about the tactics of rural law enforcement and the failure of the police to police themselves.
Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome back to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. But to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible.
And today, we will achieve that goal by showing this video of a man who was attacked during an interview with police. The attack occurred as the victim voluntarily sat down with cops to discuss a crime for which he was not even a suspect. But it’s not just the attack itself, it’s the circumstances that led up to this moment and what happened after that we will unpack for you today.
But before I get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and that I appreciate them. And of course, you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And, if you can, please hit the Patreon donate link pinned in the comments below, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. Okay, now we’ve gotten all of that out of the way.
Now, if there is one area of the country that we have encountered a disproportionate share of police overreach, it has to be Texas. The Lone Star State seems to have a penchant for aggressive policing and protracted prosecution that has been the ongoing subject of our efforts to expose police malfeasance.
I mean, I could run off a laundry list of cases that we have covered in the state, including the arrest of Otto the Watchdog for holding a sign, cop watcher David Boren for filming a car stop, the arrest and the assault of the Holguin family in El Paso, Texas, and this disturbing video that you’re seeing right now of Travis Bateman enduring a beating from a Paducah, Texas, sheriff during an arrest that can be best described as the result of questionable circumstances. But nothing in our past coverage prepared us for this video which we are showing you now.
It was sent to us by a viewer who was not even accused of a crime. Instead, he was voluntarily cooperating with the police in an investigation, and for his efforts he had to endure a seemingly brutal beat down. His story starts in Nacogdoches, Texas. There, Corey Roland agreed to speak to the Nacogdoches sheriff’s deputies about a series of thefts near his home involving a person who is living with him. However, during the interview, police asked to access his cell phone, a query that Roland said made him uncomfortable.
For one thing, Roland was not a suspect, but police also failed to give him any possible justification for taking his property. Roland was willing to show the officers his screen, but unwilling to hand over his phone. For that reason, Roland refused – As is his right – To allow police to rummage through his private data and personal interactions. Still, police apparently found his assertion of his Constitutional rights to be offensive, because when he declined the seizure of his property, they began to escalate. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Sheriff: [inaudible] Anything, there’s anything like that on there. We’re just wanting to see the conversation about our cases here.
Corey Roland: Look, it’s just pressure. I’m in the compressor. No, you can’t have my phone. You can look, but cannot have my phone.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, it should be noted that it has been well established that a cell phone is protected by the Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches and seizures. That means police simply have no right to browse your phone without your consent or a warrant. And there have been a series of rulings which have reaffirmed that access to the contents of our phones is expressly protected by the same amendment.
But clearly, as we have seen in many cases we have covered involving Texas police and sheriffs, they either find the Constitutional rights inconvenient, or simply chose to ignore some of the pesky guidelines designed to protect us enumerated in our Constitution. Instead, when Roland flatly refused to turn over his phone, the Nacogdoches Sheriff’s department decided to respond with violence. Take a look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Corey Roland: [inaudible] Pressure. I’m in the compressor. No, you can’t have my phone. You can look, but cannot have my phone.
Sheriff: [inaudible]. Hey, hey. You get back. Move. Get back.
Corey Roland: What the hell?
Sheriff: What’s wrong with you?
Corey Roland: What the hell?
Sheriff: We’re going to take it as evidence right now. What’s wrong with you?
Corey Roland: I didn’t do shit.
Sheriff: Yeah. You did.
Corey Roland: You took my phone. That’s my personal property.
Sheriff: Because I see.
Corey Roland: That’s my personal property.
Sheriff: Well, that’s the evidence.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, let’s remember, as we watch this brutal assault again, Roland was not, had not, and did not threaten violence, or even have the means to initiate a violent act. He hasn’t reached for something in his pocket or made a furtive movement, actions police often use to initiate force. He had not even been in the least disrespectful or uttered a single word that justified this response. Yet still, the sheriff attacked. Take a look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS].
Corey Roland: [inaudible] In the compressor. No, you can’t have my phone. You can look, but cannot have my phone.
Sheriff: [inaudible] Hey, hey. You get back. Move. Get back.
Corey Roland: What the hell?
Sheriff: What’s wrong with you?
Corey Roland: What the hell?
Sheriff: We’re going to take it as evidence right now. What is wrong with you?
Corey Roland: I didn’t do shit.
Sheriff: Yeah. You did.
Corey Roland: You took my phone. That’s my personal property.
Sheriff: Because I see.
Corey Roland: That’s my personal property.
Sheriff: Well, that’s the evidence.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: In fact, this aggressive assault is so outside the boundaries of use of force protocols, that it would not be unreasonable to characterize it as nothing less than a crime itself. But what’s even more disturbing about this video is how the officers responded after the attack. Because as you can see, the assorted members of law enforcement just sat around like nothing happened. That’s right. After what was an obvious violation of both Roland’s rights and his persons, the fellow deputies simply said nothing.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Sheriff: I see.
Corey Roland: That’s my personal property.
Sheriff: Well, that’s the evidence.
Corey Roland: Oh. [inaudible]
Sheriff: No. We’re not done here. You’re trying to scroll real fast from that.
Corey Roland: I’m not trying to scroll fast. I was just scrolling. Shit.
Sheriff: Is there something on the phone that you don’t…
Corey Roland: There’s nothing on my phone. It’s just mine.
Deputy: And we understand that. That’s why we at least want to see the conversation, but you [inaudible].
Corey Roland: I was trying to show him the conversation. I was trying to show him the conversation.
Deputy: I mean, when there’s suspected stolen property on the phone and we asked for the phone, you can’t sit there and try to remove possible…
Corey Roland: I wasn’t trying to remove anything.
Deputy: …Evidence from the phone. Okay?
Corey Roland: I wasn’t trying to remove anything. There’s nothing. I mean, the phone is the phone.
Sheriff: Why was it a big deal for me to look at it?
Corey Roland: Because I don’t trust Nacogdoches County.
Sheriff: Okay.
Corey Roland: Period.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: And, as you will learn later, he was not offered medical attention or even the option of seeking care. So, soon we will be talking to Corey Roland about how this ordeal has affected him, the consequences, and what he is doing to fight back. But first, to learn more about what happened and how police are justifying this use of force, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis, who has been reaching out to the police for an explanation. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So, Stephen, you have reached out to the Nacogdoches Texas Sheriff’s office. What did they say?
Stephen Janis: Well, I sent them a very detailed question about the issues raised in the lawsuit and about what we saw in the video, and their big answer to me was, no comment at this time. So, at this time, they are not commenting, and I don’t think we’ll get a comment from them, honestly, given the way they responded.
Taya Graham: So, based on your extensive reporting on use of force, what stands out to you in the video we’ve just seen?
Stephen Janis: Well, you can’t use force to obtain evidence. That’s a number one rule. You can’t literally punch a person to give your phone or punch a person. The only time you really can use force as a police officer, mostly, is when you feel like someone’s life is in danger. And I don’t see that here. I don’t see anybody’s life in danger. I think they just saw… Now, if you could do a no-knock warrant, if you say there’s obviously a problem if evidence would be destroyed, but that’s not the case here. The guy was sitting there with his phone. He’s not going to throw his phone in the toilet while he’s sitting there facing the cops. So, there was absolutely no justification for this.
Taya Graham: So, I have to ask. You’ve reported on at least half a dozen cases involving a variety of Texas law enforcement departments. Are there any trends that stand out to you?
Stephen Janis: Well, just anecdotally, looking at what I report on, there seems to be this idea with the Texas police that we make the law up as we go along. In other words, a lot of the judicial restraint – If that’s even a thing – That you might see in other jurisdictions or other states, maybe don’t apply to any of the cases we’ve seen in Texas. Kind of like, hey, I make up the law. I’m not worried about judicial oversight or some lawyer coming in. I’m just going to do what the hell I want. And if you push back against me, I’ll make you disappear into a system where you’ll never see the light of day forever. So, I think what scares me about Texas police is how little regard they have for the law, and seemingly how little training they have. So, it’s a little scary.
Taya Graham: And now, to get more on the sequence of events that led to this disturbing video and how it has impacted his life, I’m joined by Corey Roland. Corey, thank you so much for joining me. So, first, can you explain why you were at the station with the Nacogdoches Sheriffs? What were they looking for? What were they investigating?
Corey Roland: They were investigating a guy that was staying with me, him stealing stuff. And I went up there to clear my name, and then they did what they did.
Taya Graham: Were you there voluntarily? And what kind of questions were they asking you?
Corey Roland: I was not under arrest, nor was I being detained. First question asked [inaudible] message with me and Seth. And I started showing them messages between me and Seth. It is what it is.
Taya Graham: Why did the sheriff suddenly grab your phone?
Corey Roland: He said he saw a picture of something stolen in the messages, but in the messages there wasn’t anything stolen, but he thought there was.
Taya Graham: What were you thinking when the officer started punching you? What was going on in your mind?
Corey Roland: Really didn’t know what was going on. It happened so fast. And I only remember him hitting me one time, but when he hit me, my head hit the wall. So, I blacked… It knocked me out for a few seconds.
Taya Graham: When he started punching you, it looked extremely painful. Did they offer you any medical attention?
Corey Roland: No, they did not.
Taya Graham: Do you plan on filing a complaint against the officers involved?
Corey Roland: I already have him under federal lawsuit.
Taya Graham: What is your federal lawsuit contending? What’s the basis of the case?
Corey Roland: Official [inaudible] and assault. And they did an internal investigation, and then they straight up lied on their paperwork on that. In their internal investigation, it says I was non-compliant and he hit me in the right arm and right shoulder to get me to comply. I wasn’t supposed to get the body camera, but I did. So, the guy that’s sitting on the right in the video, he’s a constable for Shelby County, his lawyer kept trying to get him out of the lawsuit said, well, if you watch the video, you can tell he didn’t do anything. My lawyer said, what video? And he said, you don’t have a copy of the video? And he said, no. So, he sent it to me. My lawyer requested it 43 times from Nacogdoches County and they never would give it to him.
Taya Graham: Has this officer actually faced any disciplinary action?
Corey Roland: He has not missed a day of work yet.
Taya Graham: So, what happened after he took your phone? Did you receive your property back?
Corey Roland: They kept my phone. They said they were going to get a warrant for it. I said, well, until you get a warrant on it I want my phone back. They said no.
Taya Graham: Did they ever get a warrant to go through your phone? I know they forced you to give your pin code.
Corey Roland: That happened on March 5. They got the warrant. The judge signed the warrant on the 17th of March, but it wasn’t filed with the district clerk’s until the 24th of March. But it wasn’t actually filed with the district clerk’s office until the 24th [inaudible]. It was 12 days after they hit me that they got a judge to give a warrant and, was another then seven days after that before it was filed with the district clerk’s office.
Taya Graham: So, they had already gone through your phone…
Corey Roland: They sat there and went through my entire phone. [inaudible] Whole hour and a half video of the body camera footage now.
Taya Graham: Are you aware of other people having problems with the Nacogdoches Police Department or Sheriff’s Department? I mean, are they known for being aggressive with the public?
Corey Roland: They have six different… My lawyer has six different known complaints filed against them right now for them jailers beating up people in jail, protocols, and one custodial death.
Taya Graham: Has this interaction changed how you feel about law enforcement? You were there to help the police voluntarily. So, has this incident changed the way you think of police?
Corey Roland: I’ve always been skeptical of Nacogdoches County, but I showed up. I don’t trust none of them now.
Taya Graham: Now, usually when I report on cases like the abuse of Corey Roland, I often receive pushback that has less to do with the circumstances and more to do with the severity of the police overreach we just witnessed. So, what I mean is that because there are so many examples of even worse police behavior in this country, sometimes people will simply say, why should I care about his case when he went home alive? Well, I think that’s a fair question, and one that I will try to answer.
First, I think it’s important to understand that when it comes to systemically bad policing behavior, there are often clues and cues that hint at broader, more intractable problems that might not be readily apparent at first glance. In other words, an act that seems otherwise compartmentalized to a specific case such as Mr. Roland’s is often just a symptom of a more serious disease.
So, what do I mean? Well, consider the shocking and alarming case of false murder convictions unfolding in Chicago right now. There, prosecutors just asked a judge to vacate the sentences of eight – Let me repeat this, eight – People convicted of murder. You heard me right. Law enforcement there has concluded that no less than eight people serving out decades-long sentences are more than likely innocent. It is, in fact, one of the broadest mass exonerations in the history of the US justice system, a sweeping indictment of our criminal justice system, and its capacity to protect the innocent while in the pursuit of the guilty.
So, how does this story of widespread injustice relate to the story I just shared with you? Well, simply because all the tossed convictions and apparently innocent people who were previously deemed to be murderers were all put behind bars by a single cop.
That’s right. All the unjust convictions and personal mayhem wreaked upon a group of innocents stemmed from bad behavior of one rogue officer. His name is Reynaldo Guevara, and he was a former Chicago police detective and officer who was involved in roughly 36 cases which have now been overturned. A former cop who, since he retired, has not been punished, despite pleading the Fifth each and every time he has been asked about his work which led to the illegal and unconscionable imprisonment of dozens of innocent people.
And might I add, a man who Chicago authorities have set aside $75 million to defend, and perhaps for payout settlements in response to lawsuits filed by his victims. A cop whose reputation was questioned by those same victims decades prior, but who were ignored by the same city that is now prepared to use taxpayer money to pay for their past negligence.
So, as you can see, this example gives us a really good reason to highlight bad behavior by cops as much as possible. Why? Because if there is one lesson Detective Guevara’s case teaches us, it’s that our country has given enormously spectacular powers to individual cops. And I’m not talking about the power to stop you unlawfully and ask you to hand over your ID or the power to hand out speeding tickets. No, I’m talking about the power to put someone in a cage for decades who didn’t do a damn thing wrong.
The type of power I am referencing here is the type of broad overreach once afforded to kings, the absolute right to simply annul the freedom of an individual, falsely accuse them of a crime, destroy their lives in the process – Oh, and, incidentally, let the actually guilty party roam free. And then, on top of it, make these same people immune from any accountability, and make taxpayers who had to suffer through their destructive behavior pay off the people they abused.
I mean, it is truly amazing to think about the breathtaking power one city bestowed upon a single person. It’s just startling how quickly a police officer can be transformed into a monster of oppression. A single man with a single badge, empowered to falsely imprison, arrest, disparage, and disgrace dozens of people. And that same person, when exposed, is still protected from the consequences of the law that he’s so brazenly imposed on others. And that is why it is important to report on any and all instances of police misconduct we encounter, not just to nitpick or hound a specific officer or department, and not just to create dramatic journalism that will hold your attention. No, the reason we follow up on these types of stories is simply because ignoring them can lead to the same type of overreach we see in the case of Guevara. Deciding that a single questionable arrest and a violation of a person’s rights is just not worth reporting only expands the sense of impunity which has informed the state of policing across this country for decades.
I mean, you heard the mantra over and over again, that we are a nation of laws. It is a philosophy touted by the powers that be as the bedrock of our republic. But I think cases like Guevara’s and the assault we witnessed on video challenges that assertion. If that were indeed the case, why would the people who enforce the law not be subject to it? Why would cops who violently violate people’s rights do so without a sliver of real accountability? And that’s why we will continue to report on cases like Mr. Roland’s, and why we remain committed to holding police accountable, however and wherever it’s needed, so that the idea of a so-called “just society” is a reality for all of us.
I’d like to thank my guest Corey Roland for coming forward and sharing his experience. Thank you, Corey. And, of course, I want to thank intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank mods of the show Noli Dee and Lacey R for their support. Thank you. And a very special thanks to our Patreons. We appreciate you. And I look forward to thanking each and every one of you personally in our next livestream. I’ve missed you guys. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct.
You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @eyesonpolice on Twitter, and of course, you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook. And please like and comment. I do read the comments and appreciate them. Even if I don’t always get a chance to respond, I promise you I read them. And we do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So, if you feel inspired to donate, please do, because we don’t run ads or take corporate dollars. So, anything you can spare is greatly appreciated. My name is Taya Graham, and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
Mark Akkerman has been studying the militarisation of Europe’s borders since 2016. A researcher for the anti-militarist NGO Stop Wapenhandel, he has published, with the support of The Transnational Institute, several landmark reports on the ‘Safe Borders’ industry. For Mediapart, a PI Wire partner, he looks back at years of European border surveillance policies.
Mediapart: In 2016, you published a first report, Borders Wars, which maps border surveillance in Europe. What’s the context in which you started working on this?
Mark Akkerman: We have to remember that Europe has a long history of tracking migrants and securing borders. As Dutch investigative journalist Linda Polman has shown, it goes back to the Second World War and the refusal to support and shelter Jewish refugees from Germany. Since the creation of the Schengen area in the early 1990s, the opening of the borders within this area was closely linked to the strengthening of the control and security of external borders. Since then, it has been a continuous process marked by several phases of acceleration.
In addition to their use for a racist migration policy, surveillance technologies are also “tested” on migrants who have difficulty asserting their rights. Later, they are then introduced to the wider public.
Our first report emerged during one of these phases. I started this work in 2015 when the term “migration crisis” first appeared, which I would rather describe as the tragedy of exile. Many people, mainly escaping the Syrian war, are trying to find a safe future in Europe. In response, the EU and its member states concentrate their efforts on securing the borders and returning people in exile from European territory.
A significant part of this involves militarising borders, strengthening Frontex’s powers, and increasing its funding. Refugees are portrayed as a threat to Europe’s security, and migration as a “security problem.” This is a narrative largely driven by the military and security industry lobby, which has been the main beneficiary of these policies, with growing budgets and contracts concluded in this context.
Five years after your first report, how do you analyse the European border security policy? Has the pandemic influenced it?
Since 2016, Europe has remained on the same path. Strengthening, militarising and outsourcing border security are the only responses to migration. More walls and fences have been erected, new surveillance, detection and control equipment has been installed, new agreements with third countries have been secured, and new databases have been developed to track exiled people. From this perspective, the policies visible in 2016 continued, intensified and expanded.
The COVID-19 pandemic certainly played a role in this process. Many countries introduced new security and border control measures to contain the virus. It has also served as an excuse to target refugees again, presenting them as threats responsible for the spread of the virus.
As always, some of these temporary measures will become permanent. We are already seeing, for example, the evolution of border controls towards the use of contactless biometric technologies.
In 2020, the EU chose Idemia and Sopra Steria, two French companies, to build a biometric control file to regulate entry and exit from the Schengen area. What do you think of these databases?
There are many biometric databases used for border security. The European Union has been encouraging their development for several years. More recently, it has insisted on their necessary connection, their so-called interoperability. The objective is to create a global system for detecting, monitoring and tracking the movement of refugees on a European scale to facilitate their detention and deportation.
This contributes to creating a new form of “apartheid.” These files are intended to speed up border control processes for national citizens and other acceptable travellers, but above all, to arrest or expel undesirable migrants through the use of increasingly sophisticated computer and biometric systems.
What are the concrete consequences of these surveillance policies?
It is becoming more and more difficult and dangerous to migrate to Europe. Because they are confronted with violence and turned away at borders, these people are forced to seek other — often more dangerous — migration routes, which creates a real market for smugglers. The situation is no better for refugees who manage to enter European territory. They regularly end up in detention, are deported or forced to live in disastrous conditions in Europe or in neighbouring countries.
This policy does not only affect refugees. It poses a risk to the public freedoms of all Europeans. In addition to their use for a racist migration policy, surveillance technologies are also “tested” on migrants who have difficulty asserting their rights. Later, they are then introduced to the wider public. Refugees are the guinea pigs for future control and surveillance policies in European countries.
If they flee their countries, the civilian populations exposed to war in these parts of the world will almost certainly be confronted with technologies produced by the same manufacturers as they cross the borders. This is a deeply cynical way of profiting twice from the misery of the same population.
You also point out that the manufacturers who supply weapons to the belligerents in non-European conflicts, which are often drivers of migratory movements, are those who benefit from the border business.
This is what Thales does in France, Leonardo in Italy or Airbus. These European security and military companies export weapons and surveillance technologies all over the world, especially to countries at war or to authoritarian regimes. For example, over the last 10 years, Europe has exported technology to the Middle East and North Africa to the tune of €92 billion, involving countries as controversial as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey.
If they flee their countries, the civilian populations exposed to war in these parts of the world will almost certainly be confronted with technologies produced by the same manufacturers as they cross the borders. This is a deeply cynical way of profiting twice from the misery of the same population.
Which companies benefit most from the European border surveillance policy? Through which mechanisms? I am thinking of research programmes such as Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, in particular.
I identify two types of companies that benefit from the militarisation of Europe’s borders. Firstly, the large European military and security companies, such as Airbus, Leonardo, and Thales, which all have a wide range of weapons and surveillance technologies. For them, the “border market” is one of many. Secondly, specialised companies, which work in niche markets, also benefit directly from this European policy. This is the case of European Security Fencing, a Spanish company that manufactures barbed wire. They get rich by winning contracts, not only at a European level, but also at national and local levels.
Another source of funding is the European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. It funds projects over seven years and includes a border security component. There are also programmes under the European Defence Fund.
One of your research projects, Expanding the Fortress, looks at partnerships between Europe and third countries. Which countries are involved? How do these partnerships work?
The EU and its member states are trying to establish cooperation on migration with many countries in the world. The focus is on countries identified as “transit countries” for those who aspire to come to the European Union. Europe has many agreements with Libya, including the provision of military equipment. This is a country where the torture and killing of refugees have been widely documented.
Agreements also exist with Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and Ukraine. The EU has financed the construction of detention centres in these countries; serious human rights abuses have been documented on several occasions.
Are these non-European countries as laboratories for European surveillance companies?
No, it is rather the European borders, such as the Evros border between Greece and Turkey, that serve as laboratories. The transfer of equipment, technology and knowledge for border security and control, on the other hand, is an important part of this cooperation. This means that European states provide training, share intelligence or supply new equipment to the security forces of authoritarian regimes.
These regimes can thus strengthen and expand their capacity for repression and human rights violations with the support of the EU. The consequences are devastating for their populations. This then serves as a catalyst for new waves of migration.
Visiting Lassen County Judge Robert F. Moody ruled against the town of Susanville on Sept. 8 in a lawsuit which aimed to stop California Correctional Center (CCC) from closing. Judge Moody’s ruling lifts the preliminary injunction and allows the state to move forward with plans for closure effectively immediately.
On Sept. 2, the state requested an expedited ruling to dissolve the lawsuit, arguing that the court’s stalling tactics were a “disregard of clear law” which amounted to “an abuse of the court’s discretion.” The ruling marks the end of the town’s year-long fight to keep CCC—a six-decade-old facility requiring $503 million in repairs—open indefinitely. Gov. Newsom’s 2022-2023 Enacted Budget mandates that CCC must close by June 30, 2023.
The case has been drawn out, contentious, and has attracted national media attention. In May, people incarcerated in CCC filed an amicus brief demanding the process be expedited, which was rejected by the judge. Incarcerated organizers released a public statement on Tuesday, Aug. 23, which decried the process and asked the court to do “the right thing,” stating it was time to “move on” from this case and shut the prison down. Advocates see the decision in this case as a decisive victory.
Brian Kaneda is the deputy director for CURB, Californians United For A Responsible Budget and a leader of the statewide campaign to Close California Prisons. He is a founding chapter member of California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) Los Angeles and has spent the past decade monitoring and challenging the incarceration crisis and advocating for the rights of incarcerated people.
Shakeer Rahman is an attorney and organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network and Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. He represented Timothy Peoples, Duane Palm, and Patrick Noel Everett in their effort to bring the perspective of prisoners inside the California Correctional Center into the City of Susanville’s lawsuit to halt the prison’s closure.
General Dogon is an organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network. He previously served 27 years in the California prison system.
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars I’m mass Mansa Musa, co-host with Eddie Conway. To give you an update on Eddie Conway, Eddie Conway is doing good. And hopefully, answer my prayer, that he makes a cameo here at some point in time.
Imagine this right here. Imagine if you live in the country or state where you could save $500 million monthly in your budget. Imagine also that annually, you could save $1.2 billion in revenue. Just imagine this in the face of the economic repression and economic degradation that’s taking place in this country, it would stand to reason that all citizens in this state will be cheering to have this done.
Here to talk about the closing of the California Correctional Center in Susanville, which is a recently came out opinion from the courts came out saying that the state has to go forward, can go forward with closing it, here to talk about it are three people that’s in this space and has something to do with the closing of it or live there. I’m going to let them introduce yourself, starting with you, General. Introduce yourself to the Rattling the Bars audience.
General Dogon: Good morning, first and foremost. Thank you for having me. My name is General Dogon. I’m a Fight Back organizer here on Skid Row with the Los Angeles community action network. I’m also a former California prisoner. I did 27 years in the California prison system from level one all the way to a level five of men’s most dangerous row in a [inaudible] program.
Mansa Musa: Okay. Shakeer, introduce yourself to Rattling the Bars, or tell us a little bit about yourself.
Shakeer Rahman: Hey, all. Thanks for having me. My name is Shakeer Rahman. I’m an attorney and organizer here at the Los Angeles community action network and with [inaudible] peace fine coalition. I represented three men who are currently incarcerated at the California Correctional Center in Susanville, in their efforts to bring their perspectives about what’s going on inside the prison and the stakes of the efforts to keep the prison open. So that was the lawsuit that just resolved last week.
Mansa Musa: Okay. And Brian, introduce yourself to the Rattling the Bars audience. Tell a little bit about yourself.
Brian Kaneda: It’s a pleasure to be here. My name is Brian Kaneda, and I’m the deputy director of CURB, Californians United for a Responsible Budget. We’re working on a campaign to close California prisons. And we are saying that it’s time for California to close at least 10 prisons by 2025.
Mansa Musa: Okay. Let’s start with you Shakeer, because, like you said, this decision that came out after the struggle of the community in Susanville fighting to keep the prison open. Walk us through the process of the finality of this particular litigation.
Shakeer Rahman: Yeah. I mean, as I said, the case finally ended this week. And the thing about it is that it never should have gotten this far. Basically, the city of Susanville, as soon as the governor announced pursuant to the legislature, told him California’s prison infrastructure needs to be shrunk, it needs to be much smaller, and you need to prioritize especially old, dangerous kinds of prisons to shutter. So the governor then announced another prison as well as CCC in Susanville as the first two he was going to close. And he announced that kind of early, giving the city extra notice to start preparing for that shutdown.
Immediately, the city’s residents and the city’s officials, the city’s government sued the state, saying that the state doesn’t have the power to close that prison, or they should have chosen a different prison. All kinds of claims that, basically, because of the effect of closing the prison and their, more than anything, the city’s kind of financial stake in needing for that prison to be there, needing for the prisoners to be there, needing for the prison to be full, and because of their financial reliance on the revenue that they get from that prison, the revenue that they extract from people being caged there, for that reason, the prison needs to stay open.
It needs to stay open as long as they financially need it. And so, as soon as that happened, prisoners at CCC, organizers incarcerated at CCC started mobilizing against this, writing to the judge, bringing in their perspective of, first of all, these are the conditions inside the prison. And second of all, this argument that a prison needs to stay open because of the revenue that it’s generating for people… And people, by the way, the city of Susanville is a predominantly white community. Obviously, as we know, from the reality of incarceration in California, the population of CCC, the incarcerated population, is disproportionately Black, disproportionately Indigenous, disproportionately Brown, and poor.
And a lot of them shipped from places like Los Angeles, all the way up to Susanville, which is kind of on the Nevada-Oregon border, far away there. And so, yeah, bringing up the point that this kind of argument is akin to the logic of slavery. And this is the [crosstalk] that slavers were saying of, oh, you can’t get rid of slavery because that’s going to upend our way of life. So they were bringing that perspective in, but the judge kept ignoring it. So then we decided to support with an amicus brief formally laying out these arguments.
Mansa Musa: And General, he spoke on, he just spoke on… I mean Rahman, excuse me, Rahman just spoke on the conditions of the prison that’s being closed. Can you educate our audience on some of the conditions that exist in that particular plantation?
General Dogon:
Yes, for sure. So when I went there, it was quite a while ago. It was 1996, and I was a parole violator. I was there. I went there for my addiction. I think I had a nine month parole violation. And so I’m surprised to hear that, you know, talking about conditions, because back in 1996, I could tell you right now. So first of all, as soon as I got the docket saying that I was going to Susanville, everybody’s like, oh, you’re going to lose your girl world. I was like, what? The prison was nicknamed lose your girl world because it was so far, just like you said, you got to go all the way out to the Oregon border. The bus went all the way out there. We had to go outside the California line and then come back in, go around, come back in to get to the prison.
And I remember being shackled up for all that long time. It is like you’re on a slave trip, because halfway there you run out of water. The bus stop only two – I mean, well it’s the guy that drives the bus, the guy that sits in the front with a gun and the guy that sits shotgun in the back of the bus and they ain’t stopping that bus to give you no water or nothing, he’ll be like, oh no, that’s security reasons. So they push all the way on, man. We had to go there, starving, hungry, people using the bathroom on themself, all kinds of stuff. And so then when we got to the prison, the prison was very old. It was my first time there. I believe it was a level two and three prison. And so the majority of the prison was dorm living and stuff like that.
But it had triple, they had already started the triple bunks, they had already started… They had already closed down the gym and were putting bunks in the gym. And as you walk through the prison, I mean, it was like, I went to Folsom. And when you go to Folsomy you see old gunshot wounds on the wall, you see blood stains on the wall and stuff like that. And Susanville was no different. It was an old prison. So you see stuff all chipped up, paint that ain’t been fixed in, I don’t know how long, decades have gone by, it looked like you were walking through an old castle.
Mansa Musa: Let me ask you this, let me ask you this, General. Are you surprised, then, that the court has come out and ruled that they should close it? Are you surprised at that? In 2020, we’re talking about in 2022.
General Dogon: Back in those… Back in, when I was there, inmates were filing complaints about the prison. Like I said, the only reason, and it was a majority of all white males that was working there, and you could clearly tell the prison was the town’s bread and butter. And then also I’d just like to say real quick, though, my prison number is C65343. Here’s my card right here. So when I came to prison, it was like 1981. When Al Capone came to the California prison system was in the ’30s. So I came 50 years after Al. When Al came, he had an A number, I got a C number. So I only went through one letter and a half in 50 years. Right?
Mansa Musa: That’s right.
General Dogon: The time that I got there from the early ’90s, from ’92, all the way to where it is now, they would flip the alphabet. Within 10 years, they would flip the alphabet and start doing double numbers. And all this was because of the war on drugs. And I remember PIA prison industry authority in ’82 when I went there was a multi-billion dollar industry then. I don’t know what it is now. So yeah, we need to get rid of some prisons, California has the largest prison system in the world. When you look at it, over 85% of the people that’s in there are for a non-violent offense. People are in there for medicating and stuff like that. And so it’s the 13th Amendment all over again, where it is slavery. They found the way, justify slavery under the new 13th Amendment. And they build these prison systems. And in California, being leading the nation in many years for this. And it’s just not Susanville that’s got bad conditions, a lot of those old prisons like Tehachapi there means still toe up like that. Chino, CMC, CRC. I can do roll call on them –
Mansa Musa: Hold up, hold up on roll call, hold up on the roll call. And rightly so, you can do roll call. And this is a great day for us. And that’s why we want to go with Brian. Brian, as I opened up, I talked about how much money is going to be saved by the closure of CCC. And I talked about the fact that if you lived in a state where you were going to save this money, which ultimately would be reinvested in the infrastructure of Medicaid, housing, and other things that society would need, it stands to reason that people would be cheering. Why do you think, and walk us through your role and in terms of responsible, budgeted – Walk us through your organization and how your organization fits into this design to get rid of the prison industrial contracts in California.
Brian Kaneda: Yeah. Thanks for that. And I’m here for the roll call too, because we can name all kinds of prisons that need to shut down. And we can make an argument for every single one in California, because more than anything, we know that prisons are racist. And we know that so many people from our communities are being disappeared into them. And that’s been the case for decades. And cost is real, not just human costs, but closing CCC, for instance, is going to save Californians at least $122 million per year. And ,Mansa, you really said it. We’re not looking to save that money. That’s not going back into the government. We want them to spend the money. We want them to spend the money on services. We want them to spend the money on the things that we know actually keep people safe like healthcare, housing, all of the things that we actually know build strong communities.
And this isn’t just us saying this as advocates and organizers, the state’s own nonpartisan legislative analyst office produced a report in November of 2020 that outlined at least $1.5 billion in annual savings if California committed to closing five prisons by 2025. And that’s where we come in, CURB, Californians United for a Responsible Budget. We do budget advocacy. We know that the state spends upwards of $18.6 billion on corrections annually, and we and our allies and member organizations, people inside prisons who organize with us, we’re saying that there is a more responsible way to spend this budget other than human caging.
Mansa Musa: And Shakeer, in terms of the litigation – And I think that it’s final in this regard, the prison is supposed to be closed in 2023. Has the city or has Susanville filed any type of appeal to try to keep it open? Because that’s the reason why, like you say, it shouldn’t have been going on this long, but it’s their bread and butter, so they’re really fighting to maintain the plantation.
Shakeer Rahman: Yeah, I mean the prison was supposed to be closed in June 2022. It was supposed to be closed three months ago. That was the original announcement back in 2021. And it was only delayed because of this bogus lawsuit and the judge giving the lawsuit a lot more air than it deserved. So the prison already should have been closed. The prison’s right on the line of the… It’s in wildfire country, so it’s imperiled by the wildfire season that’s starting. It’s a whole nother year that it’s going to exist, that it was never supposed to exist. And it’s only because of this kind of opportunistic lawsuit that the city filed. I mean, hopefully the decision this week is the final word on all that. But the city of Susanville is trying everything, has not shied away from frivolous claims to try to keep the prison open.
Mansa Musa: And General, all right, going back to you, look, we are going to go, because you are the expert in terms of these decadent conditions, living conditions and environment. So in your mind, what would be the next one up to close? If you had to go down the list, we ain’t talking, we know we want Quentin closed. We know we want Folsom closed, but what would be the next logical prison, to your knowledge, if you have any insight, that you think should be closed?
General Dogon: So most definitely, I think they need to dismantle death row, the death house and all that. I know that Newsome came through and took some of the stuff out. But most definitely San Quentin. San Quentin probably still, one of the old prisons. Tehachapi probably would be another one. And then you got some like Chino. Chino was down here. I mean, Chino was so bad when I was there and they continued to keep it open. It was destruction, it’s like about to fall down on itself. It’s probably older than Rome. So any of those old prisons like that, the ones with the bars.
So now I’m surprised because I know the system has changed towards these prisons that are more like gas chambers, ones that are isolated, where they can use these gas when people lock cells and stuff like that, pepper spray and all that kind of stuff. So the more isolated type gas chambers that the prison system is creating now. So they’re getting rid of the old prisons with the bars and stuff. But the ones with the bars are the ones that have the oldest and the worst, probably, conditions that are in them.
And then a lot of them are just bad because of overcrowding right now. Now the medical issues that are in prisons are really bad. People are dying in prison because they can’t get the right treatment and stuff like that.
Mansa Musa: And if memory serves me correctly – And Shakeer, you can probably talk about this – They did file a lawsuit, dealing with the 8th Amendment. They did raise a couple of 8th Amendment claims pertaining to the inhumane conditions in California prisons. I think they got a ruling that came out that gave them the court’s ruling in their favor, that California prisoners had made an 8th Amendment claim on a class action. Do you have any knowledge of that?
Shakeer Rahman: Yeah. I mean, Brian can speak more to the broader picture across the prison system in California, but every day prisoners are filing 8th Amendment claims about conditions that they’re experiencing. There’s been a number of class actions. The Brown v Plata litigation that took a very long time was about grave neglect of both mental health and other health access within the prisons. And what was monumental about that decision is it was the first time that the US Supreme Court ordered a massive reduction of prison, saying, along the lines of we’re all saying, and coming from a conservative Supreme Court, that there’s no way you can humanely deliver health services and meet the basic kind of dignity and needs of prisoners at the level that they’ve got. And the only way to address that is not reform, is not putting more resources into it, but it’s just to reduce the prison population.
Mansa Musa: And Brian, and in terms of, because in this whole conversation, the reality is – And I think you best represent this reality – Is that we’re talking about saving money. We’re talking about saving taxpayers money, and we’re talking about eliminating a system that relies on human suffering to be able to provide jobs for people. From your perspective, where do we stand at now? Do you think we got the momentum to see more prisons? Because I read in the decision that other prisons need to be closed. Newsome has said that other prisons will be closed. Do you think that, from your organization’s perspective, that we got the momentum to start dismantling the California prison-industrial complex institution by institution?
Brian Kaneda: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that’s what we’re trying to harness now is that momentum. And prisons that could close in tandem at the same time with CCC are already being actively discussed in the public sphere. So I really think that this is a rare, ripe, perfect opportunity to go as hard as we can and demand that we close as many prisons as possible over the next few years. And I think it’s important to remember we’re talking about which prisons to close. There’s no such thing as a bad prison to close, but CDCR should expand the criteria for prison closure to include the voices of impacted people. The General was just talking, clearly people who have been inside these prisons are some of the most informed to know why they should close. And that’s why we did a survey of over 2,000 system-impacted people that helped rank what people inside were saying, or the primary issues that should influence which prisons should be selected next.
And that included unsafe health conditions, so we’re talking about water contamination, poison, asbestos, mold. Which prisons are the most overcrowded, the cost of incarcerating people there, and the location of the prison. We talked earlier about distance from loved ones and being inaccessible and travel. And the highest number of homicides and suicides, because we know prisons are deadly. We believe CDCR should be incorporating these criteria for closure.
But all state prisons are toxic and California would collectively cumulatively benefit by any state prison closing. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re demanding a concrete plan to close more prisons from the Newsome administration, hopefully by the January budget. So we want him to outline the plan for which prisons will close next. That can’t just be an announcement about closures. We want that, but we also want a plan for how the cost savings is going to be captured to best support people who have been impacted by the incarceration crisis, people who are formerly incarcerated, and also to create new opportunities in prison towns that are reliant on these economies.
We know that everybody deserves the right to dignified employment if that’s what they want. So even these people who are the ops, we’re not trying to leave anyone behind. And with the state’s leadership, these closures could actually be a much more smooth process compared to what happened in Susanville where there was this outcry, a reasonable outcry in terms of the fact that it’s scary when anybody loses a job, it’s scary when you don’t know what your future’s going to look like. But economies that depend on human caging and the people who profit from them need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and start thinking about what’s next.
Mansa Musa: And you know what we had, we had a conversation with Nicole Porter from the Citizen Project, and to resonate your point, Brian, she did a study on repurposing the prison. And in her articulation, she made it known that it’s the state’s responsibility to do just what you said, to find alternative ways to provide an income or economic impetus in the society. Because we’re not trying to make people unemployed. We’re not opposed to people working. We’re just opposed to people working in the plantation and becoming the chattel.
But Shakeer, where do we stand now in terms of monitoring and watching the outcome of this particular announcement and the potential closing? Where are y’all positioning ourselves now in the event we have another year delay or we have another justification for why they’re dragging their feet? What are, from the legal perspective, what are y’all plans? Or are y’all preparing for something like that?
Shakeer Rahman: Yeah, well June 2023 is a deadline. So that’s the latest that the prison can remain open. Hopefully CCCR is working on shutting that place down like they originally had planned. It was already supposed to be shut down. We haven’t had an opportunity yet to really strategize about any other kind of legal tricks that the city might pursue. Hopefully none of that’s going to happen, but CURB and others are going to be obviously watching it closely. And hopefully CCC and the other prison that closed, the Deuel Vocational Center, are the first of several that the state will continue closing.
Mansa Musa: And Brian, in regard to the abolition movement, because this is the conversation that we’re starting to see take shape nationwide. People are starting to look at the prison-industrial complex as being a new form of slavery, and mass incarceration, and prisoners being the chattel. In terms of the abolition aspect, where does CURB stand at in terms of their relationship with the abolition movement, if any?
Brian Kaneda: I mean, I think what’s so important for CURB is that we utilize an abolitionist strategy for organizing. So you don’t have to be an abolitionist to be a member of CURB. But when we do advocacy, when we run legislation, we use the lens of abolition to make sure that we don’t disrupt any of the work that’s happening on the front lines at the grassroots. And that includes things like making sure that we don’t create anything that we have to tear down later. A good example of that is there is this movement to create a kinder, nicer prison. And we know that there’s no such thing. So while a lot of reformers and a lot of centrists, a lot of Democrats are interested in things like the Norway model of incarceration and trying to find a nice way to put people in cages, that’s something that CURB stands against, because we know that there’s no such thing as a kinder prison.
Another thing that’s a big guiding principle for us is not leaving people behind. So we want everyone to get free. And we know that there can be a tendency for folks to go for the low-hanging fruit. We don’t think anybody should be in prison for doing drugs or having some kind of drug-related conviction. But the reality is unless we create a pathway for people who are convicted of more serious kinds of harm to get out too, and that includes people who have been convicted of murder. That includes people who have been convicted of serious offenses. We need to deal with the reality that the vast majority of those people are going to come home someday. And we have to create policies that include them in freedom opportunities and make sure that they’re not left behind. So abolition is our guiding principle for how we do all of our prison closure organizing.
Mansa Musa: Shakeer, you got a final word, and I’m going to come back to you, Brian, for your final word. What’s your final word on this, Shakeer? Like I said earlier, in September in Attica they did the Attica documentary where it showed where Attica was the number one economy for that state, for the city of Attica. What’s your final words on what happened, and what we look forward to in the future when it comes to the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration?
Shakeer Rahman: I mean this whole case, this saga, just goes to show kind of what we’re up against. And that is a society that’s invested in imprisonment, and that, because of the legacy of enslavement and the history of this country, can comfortably in court entertain arguments that prisoners need to be treated as revenue, that prisoners can be treated as property, that the value of a prisoner is what kind of money it’s making for the city. Just the fact that that is accepted with a straight face in a courtroom goes to show what we’re up against. At the same time, seeing this fight led by people inside, exposing what’s going on, similar to the lineage of stretching back through Attica, of prisoners organizing for their liberation within the most surveilled, oppressive conditions, that goes to show that all of us, those of who are out on the outside and aren’t facing that kind of surveillance and domination, we need to do everything in our power to support this fight and to contribute.
Mansa Musa: And Brian, give your final word on this, and also give us your information on how Rattling the Bars viewers can get in touch or network with y’all. And Shakeer, you can do the same if you have some information you want to convey. But Brian, in turn, and before I close, I want to just acknowledge that this is some woodwork on y’all part. I’m familiar with the California prisons. Since I have never been there, I told you I did 48 years, but the entire time in the 48 years, we were doing a lot of networking with the California prison system and California. The founder of this program, former Black Panther Eddie Conway, has a lot of friends and family members that were in the California prison system. So talk about where we go from here, Brian, and what you look forward to.
Brian Kaneda: Yeah, well I think what Shakeer said is beautiful, and ultimately this is a campaign that’s co-led by people inside California prisons that we’re co-organizing with. And this case specifically reached a wide audience and got national media attention. And really, I think its resolution proves that the town never really had a great case, and the state has taken steps to make it easier to close more prisons in the future. So it’s time to close this chapter, because additional prison closures seem to be on the horizon. And we know that CCC’s slow closure is actually hurting people inside of the prison. It’s hurting the most vulnerable Californians and wasting millions of dollars that could be spent on formerly incarcerated people, and even for Susanville, for new opportunities. And it’s well past time to move on from this and start talking about which prisons are going to close next, because we believe we could close at least eight more over the next three years.
And in order to do that, these discussions have to be underway. You can visit our website, curbprisonspending.org, to learn more about our campaigns, and follow us on social media. Instagram and Twitter is @curbprisons. We have actions all the time where you can send letters to the budget committees and the legislature, send letters to governor Newsome and tell people in your community that prison closure is actually an important issue that affects tens of thousands of people. And it has billions of dollars in play that could be better spent on our community. So care about it. Care about closing California prisons.
Mansa Musa: And Shakeer, you got any contact information you wanted to part with?
Shakeer Rahman: No, I’ll just say the same. And I think this is what General Dogon would’ve said if he didn’t have to run off to another organizing meeting, which is to join the fight. Follow CURB, join the coalition. I work here in LA with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, LA CAN, and the [inaudible] coalition, both of which are organizing on some of the drivers, the policies, and the systems that are feeding people into prisons and that are also then criminalizing people and surveilling them when they come out. So yeah, work closely with your incarcerated neighbors and with people who are coming out of prisons and organizing to end their brutality.
Mansa Musa: Thank you both, brothers, for joining us. And there you have it, the real news about CCC closing. And in Brian’s words, what prison will we close next? We like to end on that note because that’s, for us, this is a great day for us, in that we’re ending slavery as we know it, modern day slavery as we know it.
On behalf of Eddie Conway and myself, we ask that you continue to support Rattling the Bars and The Real News. And you can go to our website to know how you can support both The Real News and Rattling the Bars. Thanks both of y’all for coming, taking your time out, and continue to do the great work that y’all are doing.
Brian Kaneda: Thank you. Thank you for all that you do.
Shakeer Rahman: Thank you. Yeah, it was great talking to you.
A small West Virginia police department, already under scrutiny for ratcheting up the number of traffic tickets issued, is now facing a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing it of not properly training officers to follow the law. The lawsuit also alleges Milton police officer Keith Higginbotham falsely arrested Caleb Dial and violated his rights by imprisoning him without probable cause in August of 2021.
The lawsuit was filed after Police Accountability Report published a story depicting Dial’s arrest. The story featured Ring doorbell camera footage that contradicted Higginbotham’s sworn statement that Dial had been “yelling” and “pushing” and was uncooperative during the arrest, which occurred outside Dial’s family’s home. Higginbotham had responded to the residence after Dial called police following a dispute with his father.
The doorbell camera depicts Dial calmly complying with Higginbotham as the officer places him in handcuffs. However, Higginbotham wrote in his statement of probable cause that Dial “became very agitated and kept on raising his voice at me. I asked him several times to calm down and then decided to detain him for officer safety.”
Furthermore, Higginbotham wrote, “Dial became very irate and pushed me with his shoulder and tried to pull away from me. I asked him to calm down, quit yelling, and get into the cruiser. He got very aggressive once again and was trying to pull away. I asked one more time and then assisted him into my cruiser.”
Again, doorbell camera footage appears to contradict the officer’s sworn statement. At the beginning of the interaction, the camera audio reveals that Dial calls Higginbotham “sir,” and when asked to turn around to be cuffed, Dial does so without conflict. The footage then shows Dial calmly walking towards the cruiser and Higginbotham putting him in the back seat without incident.
Prosecutors dropped charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after Dial’s lawyer submitted the Ring camera footage as evidence. The disparity between the officer’s statements and the video evidence is at the heart of the lawsuit.
But the lawsuit also goes beyond the individual actions of Higginbotham, and alleges the town’s lack of proper training, and poor supervision, of officers precipitated Dial’s arrest.
Lawyers for Dial say Higginbotham violated Dial’s right to due process and protection from false imprisonment. The lawsuit cites roughly 10 actionable counts and seeks unspecified punitive and compensatory damages.
But the lawsuit also goes beyond the individual actions of Higginbotham, and alleges the town’s lack of proper training, and poor supervision, of officers precipitated Dial’s arrest.
The lawsuit accuses the city of training officers “on searches and seizures that, on their face, violate the Fourth Amendment.” The suit also claims the city should have known its lack of adequate training would result in false arrests.
“The aforementioned defendants [the city of MIlton] implemented otherwise facially valid customs and policies in a manner such that constitutional violations were likely to be and were visited upon those inhabiting, visiting, or otherwise within the jurisdictional limits of Milton, West Virginia, including Mr. Dial.”
The latter claim is consistent with the complaints shared with PAR by residents of Milton and the surrounding area. Motorists say they have been pulled over multiple times by police who stand watch on a nearby highway and at stop signs throughout the city. They also claim that Milton officers aggressively enforce traffic laws with the intent to increase the city’s ability to assess fines—an allegation backed up in part by the city’s own financial records, which show roughly a tripling of fines and court fees since 2012.
In 2012, Milton collected roughly $234,000 in court fees and fines; its police department budget at the time was $484,000. Over the next decade, the fees and fines nearly tripled, reaching $600,000 in 2020, according to the official city budget report. Meanwhile, police spending nearly doubled to $1.1 million in 2019.
Lawyers representing Milton did not respond to the lawsuit by addressing the discrepancy between the video and Higginbotham’s charges directly, but by instead arguing that the veteran officer was not working in his official capacity for the city when the arrest occurred. They also stipulated that Higginbotham was entitled to qualified immunity from the suit, a legal precedent that holds public officials harmless for violating constitutional rights that are not “established” at the time of the incident. The legal precedent allows officers to avoid liability if they were unaware of the right in question at the time of the alleged violation.
An email requesting comment from the law firm representing the city was not returned.
Milton residents say they are all too familiar with the town’s emphasis on aggressive policing.
Lynda Jenkins says she has been pulled over three times within the past year for a variety of reasons, including an incident in the nearby town of Barboursville where Higginbotham detained her over an outstanding warrant for passing a bad check. Jenkins told the officer she had already paid the debts and the warrant had been rescinded by the court. She suspects that aggressive tactics are the result of the city trying to bolster revenue through fines.
Jenkins told PAR: “I couldn’t understand why a Milton police officer would follow me all the way to Barboursville. I pulled over and it was officer Higginbotham. This is the third time he has pulled me over this year, and it has cost me hundreds in court costs and fines. I lost my car to the impound lot because I can’t afford to get it out of the impound.”
But her encounter also led to an arrest and to police posting her picture on the department’s Facebook page, which has embarrassed her family, she told PAR.
The department has been criticized for posting pictures of arrestees on Facebook, subjecting them to ridicule and scorn prior to adjudication of their case. Jenkins said a post of her arrest has been shared dozens of times and received multiple negative comments.
The use of Facebook to publicize arrests was the subject of extensive reporting by Kyle Vass. Vass’ article focused on the suicide of Milton resident Jacob Napier shortly after he was arrested and his picture was posted on Facebook by the department.
Dial’s lawyers told PAR they hoped the suit would prompt the department to improve both training and supervision of police officers.
“We look forward to helping Mr. Dial have his day in court,” Bradley Dunkle, one of two attorneys representing Dial, said. “Obviously, Mr. Dial’s life has been greatly impacted by these events. Thankfully Mr. Dial’s doorbell camera, unlike Officer Higginbotham’s report, accurately shows the August 27, 2021, events.”
“If the public has any additional evidence and information relating to this case, we’ll gladly speak with them,” he added.
In September 2020, Lacino Hamilton was exonerated for the murder of his foster mother, Willa B. Bias, and released after 26 years in prison. Convicted at the age of 19, the only evidence linking Hamilton to the Bias’s death were a confession police forced from Hamilton, and the statement of a jailhouse informant. Through his decades in prison, Hamilton educated himself on the nature of the prison system and how to fight back, thanks to the help of existing Black nationalist prisoners’ organizations. Hamilton wrote thousands of letters to journalists and lawyers seeking support with his case, and also became a contributor to Truthout, where he shared his firsthand experience and analysis of the prison system.
Lacino Hamilton is a writer, thinker, and activist who was incarcerated for 26 years thanks to a wrongful conviction. For more information about his case, see “Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions on Young Black Men.” After being sent to prison, he spent four of his first six years in solitary confinement. It was there that he began to read, think critically and distinguish between expressing a desire to change and demonstrating the ability to achieve it. He can be reached for a larger discussion on this and related topics via email.
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.
An estimated two thirds of the more than one million prisoners in the United States today are incarcerated workers. With many prisoners earning less than a dollar an hour, and those who refuse to work often facing vicious retaliation in the form of punitive solitary confinement, labor exploitation is an important part of what makes life in American prisons so brutal. It’s little surprise that prisoners’ resistance often centers around the question of labor, as was seen during the nationwide 2017 prisoners’ strike. In spite of these realities, ‘labor issues’ and ‘prison issues’ are all too often presented as separate concerns. US labor journalist and Real News contributor Michael Sainato joins Rattling the Bars to discuss why the union movement today should see the prison struggle as an essential part of the fight for justice for all workers.
Michael Sainato is a journalist based in Gainesville, Florida, and a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Real News Network.
Black August is a month-long commemoration of Black resistance against oppression, with an emphasis on Black freedom fighters and political prisoners. To this day, dozens of Black freedom fighters remain incarcerated in US prisons after decades. As Black August gains more mainstream currency, many activists want to make sure its original purpose in uplifting Black resistance and the ongoing struggle to free political prisoners is not erased. The Jericho Movement is an organization fighting for amnesty and freedom for all political prisoners, from Leonard Peltier to Mutulu Shakur. On this episode of Rattling the Bars, Jihad Abdulmumit and Paulette Dauteuil of the Jericho Movement speak with co-host Mansa Musa about the work of their organization and the significance of Black August.
Jihad Abdulmumit is the chairperson of the National Jericho Movement.
Paulette Dauteuil is the former co-chair and national secretary of the National Jericho Movement.
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa is a radical freedom fighter who was imprisoned in the US for nearly 50 years. Now, at 70 years old, he is the co-host of Rattling the Bars at The Real News Network, a staunch advocate for the rights of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and a soldier in the struggle to dismantle the prison-industrial complex. We talk to Mansa about his life and about how the labor movement and the fight for prison abolition are necessarily interconnected.
The economic fortunes of rural communities across the United States are often deeply intertwined with the prison industrial complex. This poses a real challenge to the project of ending mass incarceration. How can organizers build political opposition to prisons in areas where prisons are the lifeblood of a community? And what should be done with former prisons once they are closed? The question of repurposing prisons in particular is too often neglected by state governments. A new report from the Sentencing Project finds that while 21 states have closed prisons since 2000, many of these sites have simply become other types of correctional facilities in the absence of clear transition plans. Nicole Porter from the Sentencing Project joins Rattling the Bars to discuss this new report.
Production / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The transcript of this story is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.
Prisoners are on the front lines of climate crises of every type. Heat waves can be especially dangerous for incarcerated people, particularly in prisons that lack proper air conditioning. In Texas, this summer’s heat wave has seen temperatures inside some prisons reach as high as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. A recent survey by Texas A&M University’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, as well as the Texas Prisons Community Advocates group, paints a picture of immense human suffering caused by environmental catastrophe and inaction by authorities. More than 6,000 heat-related grievances were filed in Texas prisons between September 2019 and August 2020. With just 2/3 of the state’s prisoners in possession of their own cup to drink water with, thousands of incarcerated people are being left to languish in deadly temperatures without air conditioning or easy access to water. On this episode of Rattling the Bars, Monique Welch of the Houston Chronicle appears to discuss A&M’s research on the conditions of Texas’ sweltering prisons.
Monique Welch is an engagement reporter for the Houston Chronicle. Monique holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications Media Studies from Goucher College.
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-hosting with Eddie Conway. Next month will be August. And before we get started with our interview, we just want to acknowledge that next month we’ll be highlighting a lot of the situations and conditions and developments in political prisons and prison of war cases throughout the United States of America. Today, we’ll be talking about one of the most inhumane things that exists within the prison-industrial complex: heat, and how institutions deal with heat and heat-type environments, specifically when it’s 110 degrees outside, or when it’s 90 degrees outside, in most cases in prison, it’s 110 or 115. And in most reported cases, 140.
So today we have a situation where in the Texas prison system, the temperature reached 110 degrees. Now, this is not a new phenomenon for Texas, heat and the fact that it exists. And what also isn’t new is the response. But this time with the outlandish heat and with the heat wave, Texas prisoners have been subjected to the most cruel and unusual punishment. Here to talk about this is Monique Welch, who wrote an article on this very thing for the Houston Chronicle.
Welcome, Monique.
Monique Welch: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Mansa Musa: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself.
Monique Welch: I started with the Houston Chronicle not too long ago, just marked a year. Again, I moved to Houston in September of last year, right around Labor Day. So I’m really still getting my feet wet with Texas and Houston and this very topic, the heat that we’re here to discuss today. So a lot of it is really fresh on my mind as a new Houstonian. But I started, I’m originally from Baltimore, Maryland, went to Goucher College there, studied communications and journalism, and just kind of worked my way up with a number of different internships. And then I moved to Tampa, Florida, where I really got started in journalism. I worked at the Tampa Bay Times in a number of different positions. And recently, now I’m here at the Houston Chronicle.
Mansa Musa: Okay.
Monique Welch: That’s a little bit about me.
Mansa Musa: And you wrote an article entitled that temperatures inside Texas prison reach 110 degrees. And just going back on what you just said, you just came down in this environment, and you just started getting into reporting. Why would you take up this particular news report? Why would you focus your attention on this and go in this area in particular? When we talk about prison and we talk about conditions in prison, people have a tendency to do a comparative analysis, like well, we don’t have this in society, so why would we give them that? Why did you choose this particular area to focus your attention on?
Monique Welch: Absolutely. One, just being a new Houstonian, heat is a constant conversation starter. It’s what everyone’s talking about. It’s summertime. Houston is beautiful, but a lot of times you don’t want to be outside just because it’s so hot. But someone like me, I have the luxury of deciding whether I want to be in the heat or not. I can stay in my house all day long and enjoy my 75 degree thermostat. But not all inmates, as we see in this report, have that same luxury. When I got word of the study, it was alarming. It was a new thing for me, not having that much knowledge and understanding that this was going on, so I was really intrigued and wanted to learn more about this issue and some of the failures that were being alleged in this report. So it really was intriguing.
I’m a true believer that, no matter what you do in this life, we’re all human, so you’re deserving of certain conditions. I was really shocked. I think it was the overall shock factor for me. That was just like, wait a minute, this is seriously going on? So it made me want to dig into it a little more.
Mansa Musa: And the report you’re speaking of, was it University of Texas?
Monique Welch: It’s Texas A&M University.
Mansa Musa: Texas A&M University went and did a study or did a report for legislation on the conditions of prisons and the heat, the fact that heat has on the living condition in prisons, is that the study you’re talking about?
Monique Welch: Yes, exactly.
So just to break down the study, they recently released the study. They’ve been researching this for two years. Started in 2018, and then in 2020 they concluded their research. And by “they” I’m talking about scholars within their hazard reduction and recovery center. So a specific department dedicated to studying these issues and how certain things impact vulnerable communities. So that’s what their mission and focus is. So they spent two years analyzing this issue, serving well over 300 inmates. And in the actual report, it’s a lengthy report. It details a number of quotes and direct quotes from prisoners that ultimately are really in fear of dying from heat. That was the theme. And when we’re talking about dying from heat, we’re talking specifically about heat stroke, heat exhaustion, like heat-related illnesses that could lead to death. That is the overall fear that they reported.
Mansa Musa: And this report was given to the state legislators, am I correct?
Monique Welch: Yes. A couple weeks ago they did actually report their findings to the House. I didn’t get clarification. I did go back and ask to see, okay, what came of that? What was the reaction? That part is still unclear, so I’m probably going to follow up again, just to keep tabs on this issue and see, okay, what did it ruffle any feathers, to gauge that overall reaction. So that part I’m not sure of. But I do know that their intent with this research was to bring light and really speak for a vulnerable community that can’t speak for themselves. And take this to lawmakers, the people who have the power to do something about it.
Mansa Musa: As I was researching this and looking at it, and I was… A couple of days ago, I was reminiscing on being released from prison. I had served 48 years in prison prior to being released. When I was coming out and it was so hot, and I reflected on how it was and the environments that I was in. It’d be so hot that the walls would be sweating, but at no time during the entire time I’ve been incarcerated did the temperatures in the units reach 110 degrees. The prisons where the most inhumane suffering took place is in the more modernized or less modernized, if you know?
Monique Welch: Yeah. That’s a good point. So just getting to the 23 – I just want to clarify. the 23 heat-related deaths, that was since 1998. So I don’t want to get it confused, that it was just in one year. That was decades. And while some might say, oh, that doesn’t sound like an overwhelming number, many will argue that one is too many.
And so you’re absolutely correct. There were a lot of heat mitigating policies put in place, mainly because of advocacy and court orders that brought it to light. So with that being said, the department, in Texas… Also let me just run down. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, they operate 100 prisons. And so of those 100 facilities, 31 are completely air conditioned. They’re just 31%.
55 they reported are partly air conditioned, and 14 have no AC. Just want to run those facts out there. And so when a lot of these things were taking place, a lot of the advocacy and the court order wasn’t just calling out the agency for some of their policies, they did work to improve a lot of those things. They didn’t rush to bring in air conditioning, however. A lot of their mitigating policies were bringing in more fans and circulating them throughout the prisons, introducing cooled beds, and just allowing for access to water, ice, etc. And a number of different things that a spokesperson outlined to me, and something that research is criticized in the report as, basically, not enough. And saying that by doing so, they are simply mitigating the impacts of heat, but not actually mitigating the heat.
So that was one thing that stood out to me. And I thought it was really interesting. They have made significant improvements over the years. You cannot deny that. But how effective long-term, not just short-term, how effective long-term are those policies and procedures to inmates’ overall health? Their studies showed that another thing we’re relating to the deaths, the 23 deaths, a lot of those deaths, they pointed out, were hard to tie directly to heat.
So they gave an example. One example was someone who died from a heart attack. And while they died from a heart attack, they couldn’t pinpoint that… They basically said that heat exhaustion. It could have [crosstalk]
Mansa Musa: [crosstalk] With his heart.
Monique Welch: The report argues that the heat exacerbates a lot of these, sometimes preexisting, sometimes they don’t have these medical conditions at all, but it exacerbates them. Conditions that they perhaps would not have had, had they been in less hazardous conditions.
Mansa Musa: Let’s dial down on what you said earlier, that the amount of people that died over a period of time. By your own recognition and the state’s, this has been going on forever. Texas has seasons that are hot. My question in your research, have they ever considered, because you just spoke on how they said that the study said they’re not trying to eradicate the problem. They’re just trying to mitigate it to an extent where it’s more acceptable.
Monique Welch: Less of an impact. Yes.
Mansa Musa: And less of an impact. But in terms of long-term, in your study, has the state even considered any type of long-term solution to this problem? Because heat is going to come today, heat is going to come next year, and the heat is going to come. If the prison is not providing the necessary equipment and environment, then people are going to suffer, people are going to die, people are going to be traumatized. In your study, have you seen them taking any direction in terms of long-term eradication of this problem within the prison system there?
Monique Welch: That’s a great question. It’s a question that I asked the state directly, saying, are there long-term plans? Short-term or long-term, to mitigate the heat in the way that means directly installing air conditioning in all prisons? We’re talking 100 here, so 31 are already fully air conditioned. So my question directly was are there plans, short-term or long-term, to install air conditioning in the remaining prisons? And basically they point to a lack of funding as the main issue that those prisons are not fully air conditioned. And in this study cites this fact as well, this was I believe dating back to 2017, around the time of litigation against the agency. But they basically said that it would cost $1 billion to do so across all units. And then also said that it would be like an additional $140 million annually that they would have to pay to basically upkeep these facilities.
And the utility maintenance, that type of thing. We all know that AC costs money. It costs thousands of dollars to repair. So when you think of the size and the population of a prison, one, just how large they are, to their point, it would be an expensive feat for them. We don’t know exactly how much that would cost. So that part is up in the air. But we know this will easily cost the state millions and millions of dollars, but they point to it as being difficult to obtain such funding.
Mansa Musa: We recognize that, in terms of the prison-industrial complex and these hundred prisons that we’re speaking of, most of these prisons are in rural Texas. They’re in rural Texas. They are the infrastructure for that community. So the fact that you people are saying that it would cost so much money. If you close the prisons, then you would have a ghost town where these people are living off the inhumane treatment of these prisoners. So that argument that they make as far as how much money it costs, that’s the argument they make in every situation when it comes to providing treatment and humanity to people that are constantly…
But answer this here. From your research, what was the guards’ position in some of these environments where they’re not air conditioned and they have to, no matter where they can go and get some air relief, they have to go back into hot units where they have to oversee the security. In your research or in this study, did they mention anything about the prison guards’ attitude towards some of these more decadent environments that exist, or outdated prison environments that exist?
Monique Welch: That’s a good question. It didn’t largely focus on the guards and staff and security. It did basically talk about how they have inadequate staffing and even reduced staffing, making it thus harder to maintain some of their policies and procedures. Researchers argue that perhaps installing air conditioning would help ease that burden of being inadequately staffed. So they did communicate it in a way that puts a lot of pressure on guards to do all the things you mention, and then make sure that people are receiving access to water and ice and taking that relief, but then also protecting yourself. So it definitely communicated that it added unnecessary stress on top of that.
Mansa Musa: My own experience being incarcerated and some of the prisons when I went in the ’70s, and all the prisons that I was in during that period didn’t have any air conditioning, had a fan system, three fans might have been for a cell block that housed over 500 people. And in the summertime when it got real hot, the officers could go into an area where it might have been air, or it might have been more ventilation. But they had to come out and come on them [inaudible], and you could see them walk around with their… They were supposed to have their ties on, they got their shirts buttoned down. Pretty much they were going through the same thing we were going through in terms of the heat and heat exhaustion.
And it took all the way until their union got involved and got more relief for them, but then getting relief for them it ultimately trickled down to us. But talk about, in the study and in your own research, the attitude of a lot of the prisoners. Because you spoke about their fear of dying. Speak on this. Speak on the overall impact it has on the prison population, which is relatively large. I think Texas has either the third largest prison population in the country behind New York and California, or is number one. It’s in the top three.
Monique Welch: It’s definitely up there. I don’t know the exact numbers, but there is a huge prison population in Texas. But just reading through a number of their stories, experiences, they were really graphic and really [inaudible]. Many express experiencing dizziness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, difficulty breathing. One woman said she couldn’t eat. She couldn’t gain weight, muscle cramps, leg cramps, just a laundry list of symptoms. Many, many, many. I think almost the majority of the responses that I read and the feedback I read reported having passed out multiple times, or even reporting at least one heat-related illness. And a lot of times many also said that – They’re called grievances. Reporting such grievances did nothing and was essentially a waste of time. So some even said that when they passed out, they didn’t receive medical attention.
One I’ll never forget. One inmate actually said that they were on their 20th time from passing out and suffering from heat exhaustion. 20 times. They didn’t specify how long they had been incarcerated or how long they’ve been there. So those types of details, I didn’t see anything like that. But again, we’re talking, Texas has been hot for decades. And it has been on an upward trend historically since the ’80s, and this summer alone we’ve been recording record breaking heat numbers.
The previous record set was back in 2009 for having dozens of days consistently over 100 degrees or higher. So we’re not talking normal summer heat, 80s, 90s. And in fact, when a federal judge did basically accuse the TDCJ and the lawsuit, which was in 2017 and 2019 timeframe, they basically ruled, I think it was a prison in Beaumont, but they basically were transferring inmates to a different unit because temperatures exceeded 90 degrees. And so we’re talking 110 here. And one even was like 149. That was the highest that was reported in this study. That one prison got up to 149 degrees. So if they were regulating and issuing sanctions for 90 degrees and above, and they are regularly, consistently, hitting 110. I mean, you think about it. They’re doing it at 90, and there are units and inmates suffering at 100 and above.
Mansa Musa: Yeah, I know this. That’s the height of inhumanity. Talk about the relief. Did the courts order them to start releasing prisoners who, as a result of being in these most inhumane living conditions, or was that taken into account, or was anything being done to minimize the amount of time a person stayed in prison? Was anything being done to expedite their release, to your knowledge?
Monique Welch: To my knowledge, no, I didn’t see anything in this report specifically about that. In the 29 cases, it mainly just resulted in further pressure on the government agency on TDCJ. They just paid millions to rectify. They started improving. I didn’t see any direct benefits to the inmates as far as their prison sentence. It was largely more accountability on the agency to do things, to improve. Again, temporarily moving inmates to other units, but then you’re dealing with issues of overcrowding and other things. So it still is kind of one problem just makes another. So that’s another factor as well.
Mansa Musa: Monique, talk about through prisoners… I know when I was incarcerated, we had jobs, and a lot of times some of our jobs worked outside. Are the prisons still allowing prisoners to work in the face of COVID, and if so, are prisoners working outside in this heat?
Monique Welch: Yes. Numerous inmates reported that was the main job. Working in the fields, working outside. So when you’re working in temperatures of 100 degrees plus and then you come inside, normally, myself, you come indoors, you would get relief. You’d have a cool air system. But when you’re an inmate and you come back to the unit and it’s the same temperature, if not hotter, when do you get the relief? And so a lot of inmates are reporting that and saying that it only made it worse. And then we talked about the conditions about the access to cups and ice and water, and even going deeper into that site.
Some of the inmates even said the conditions of the communal areas, where they had to go to get the water, typically like ice coolers and things of that nature. A lot said they were dirty, a lot said they were unsanitized with food, trash, hair, you name it, all types of stuff, just because they weren’t regularly being maintained and cleaned. Yes, there’s access to it. But just how clean and treated is that water? So that was another thing that inmates reported about, yes, there’s water, but is it really clean? It isn’t necessarily clean and healthy for you.
Mansa Musa: And when this report came in effect and the [inaudible] that it’s taken and the study, but then we have COVID, we interject COVID into this equation of the heat. What did the report and what did your study come up with in terms of the relation between the heat, the conditions, and COVID?
Monique Welch: Oh my goodness. I mean, I think, honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something they’re still studying, just as we are still in a pandemic. But for the duration of this study, it was from 2018 to 2020. And the report focuses heavily on COVID. I think that might have taken up at least a couple of pages. And the effect that when you add COVID symptoms and heat, how it was much harder for inmates to ward off the disease and to fight it without air conditioning. Air conditioning typically helps reduce a lot of diseases, illnesses, et cetera. COVID is a disease that was not exempt from that. And so then you have that, and then you take into account the number of lockdowns that state prisons across the board were seen to implement COVID protocols.
There was a tremendous amount of inmates – And I’m sure you’ve heard the reports – Of inmates dying from COVID. So much so that a lot of the prisons went on lockdowns and they started to restrict the access to the communal areas where the coolers to ice and water are. And of course they did that to social distance. They didn’t want inmates to be on top of each other and crowded, especially those who were suffering from symptoms, because it was so easily widespread in that type of environment. So when you’re stripping that access to one of your heat-mitigating policies, it further lessens the options that inmates have to remain cool or attempt to remain cool.
Mansa Musa: On this last question, let’s talk about, as far as the prisoners’ families and the advocacy groups in your research, what are they doing in terms of keeping the Texas Department of Corrections’ feet to the fire, for lack of a better word? [inaudible]
Monique Welch: Well, doing this study alone and keeping the pressure on for two years. Sometimes when you do research and as soon as you find one nugget, you want to release it. But I think the beauty of this is that they stayed the course for two years to get a pretty decent sample size to represent the overall living conditions. Again, we’re still talking with a small sample though, 300 inmates. But still, when you spend a lot of time and you survey these inmates, it puts pressure on lawmakers, of course, but it also catches the attention of media professionals like myself. The study is available publicly, so I can share it if you want. You can share it with your audience to read the full report, to see firsthand accounts, to see the different heat mitigating policies and procedures that the department outlines, and to basically see the responses to how they are working to approve those conditions.
We talked about the access to ice and water and a cup. And one of the most shocking things to me that I found is that the department, they’re supposed to… So in order to get a cup, basically, you have to have money, and you have to have commissary money to do so. So if you think about it, what happens to those who don’t have commissary money, or maybe they don’t have the help of a friend or a family member to have commissary money to afford a cup? Then what happens to them? So per policy, TDCJ, they are required to provide those who cannot afford a cup. They are required per their policy to provide a cup. But in this report, I think it was like a quarter or most, many inmates reported not having one or not being provided a cup.
Mansa Musa: And that’s the part of the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration that people don’t really recognize is there. People that are incarcerated don’t have a lot of money, and they don’t have the ability to obtain the basic necessities such as a cup, toothbrush, toothpaste. So a lot of that time, they rely on the system, which, [inaudible] system had what they called the inmate welfare fund. But, well, you got the last word on it. What do you want the Rattling the Bars viewers and listeners to take you away from this report and this article and this study that you enlightened us with most eloquently.
Monique Welch: Thank you. I think it’s just being aware of the state of our world, the state of our prisons. We’re all humans, right? And knowing what is happening and the experiences that many inmates are reporting, in our backyard a lot of times. Or you even described the prison in Baltimore, Maryland, right downtown in the city. In Texas they’re not really that close, as you mentioned, but just taking notice of some of the conditions, because it’s… Anybody at any time, this could be your family member. This could be your friend. This could be anyone you know suffering from these conditions.
And I think that’s why it strikes a nerve, because you can put yourself in anyone’s shoes, whether you’re an inmate. No matter what the crime. With this story, I really wanted to inform the public of the issues going on that researchers say are systemic. I wanted to inform readers of that and put it in their hands, let them choose, okay, what am I going to do with this information? Would this encourage me to go to my local council member or city Congressman? What will this spark? Will it spark you to do something about it, or continue having conversations in your networks, community organizations, to keep talking about it. And that’s really what we’re trying to achieve here.
Mansa Musa: There you have it. The real news from Monique, the Houston Chronicle reporter who told us about and reported on the unbearable inhumane conditions in the prison-industrial complex in Texas. We are all human, as she said, and we should be treated as such. We have basic human rights that say we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s supposed to be our inalienable right. But we see in Texas, we don’t have a right to a cup.
Thank you, Monique. Thank you very much for this most enlightening conversation and reporting. We look forward to getting a copy of that report and sharing it with our viewers and listeners. Thank you very much.
Monique Welch: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
The growing and eclectic brand of activism known as cop watching continues to invent creative ways to confront overpolicing across the country. In this episode, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis examine the arrest of two Youtube activists and how they responded in light of recent pushback from police departments across the country. The story illustrates how the grassroots movement of holding cops accountable continues to evolve in ways both unexpected and productive.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Adam Coley, Stephen Janis
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
After 36 years behind bars as a political prisoner, Mutulu Shakur is on his deathbed. The movement elder, radical healer, and former member of the Black Liberation Army was diagnosed with stage 3 bone marrow cancer in June of this year. Despite qualifying for compassionate release and having been eligible for parole since 2016, prison and federal authorities have refused to grant Shakur his freedom. With time running out, activists gathered at the Department of Justice on the weekend of July 23 to demand Shakur’s release. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa reports from the rally to free Mutulu Shakur.
Born in Baltimore and raised in Queens, Mutulu Shakur first became politically active in the 1960s as a member of the Revolutionary Action Movement and Republic of New Afrika. In 1970, Shakur helped found the People’s Drug Program at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx alongside the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. As the husband of Afemi Shakur, Mutulu Shakur was the stepfather of Tupac Shakur. He was convicted in 1988 for his role in the prison escape of Assata Shakur, as well as for his part in the 1981 Black Liberation Army robbery of a Brink’s armored car in Nanuet, New York, which resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a security guard.
Transcript
Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-host with Eddie Conway. We’re here today in Washington, DC, in front of the Department of Justice, doing a demonstration in support of Mutulu Shakur. Mutulu Shakur is a political prisoner, been locked up over three decades for nothing other than being a good human being and a good man. Mutulu Shakur was found guilty, and then found guilty. He was sentenced under what they call the old law. And in the old law, everything that prison had during that time: parole, [inaudible] credits, was allowed to be given to him.
Topeka K. Sam: You have a brother who has served 36 years in prison. Per the law, he was eligible for parole years ago, six years ago, right?
Mansa Musa: Yeah.
Topeka K. Sam: So if the law states that he is eligible for compassion after serving 30 years in prison, then why wouldn’t they give it to him? Yet, they denied him nine times. That’s unheard of in the federal system. This is an old law prisoner who deserves to come home who is deathly ill.
It is a great honor and privilege to be standing here before all of you to ask for the immediate compassionate release of Dr. Mutulu Shakur. Having my mentor Susan Rosenberg to tell me about who he was and who he is over the years since my release from federal prison allowed me to understand why it was important for us to advocate and make sure that I was standing here. For young people like me to make sure that we’re forcing everything and all the might that we have to make sure that Dr. Mutulu Shakur is released from federal prison today.
Mansa Musa: Today, the actions that were taken on behalf of the Free Mutulu Shakur support committee, was they delivered a petition that was signed by over 200 faith leaders to be delivered to the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Parole Commission on behalf of Mutulu Shakur. The purpose of which is to get Mutulu Shakur compassionate release.
We recognize that this government has selective amnesia when it comes to compassion. For example, John Hinckley got compassion. Mutulu Shakur’s co-defendant has gotten compassion. Why do you think they’re so reluctant to give him compassion? Of all the great works he’s done.
Rev. Graylan Hagler: Well, you probably hit it on the head. The great works lead to stature, and stature means that people see you. People admire you. You have an influence. You have an impact just by your presence. And that’s what he has, an impact just by his presence. And that makes the system fearful, particularly a system that wants to basically control the narrative, control the message, control the image. It makes that system very harsh. And evil, in terms of the way it treats somebody.
Taliba Obuya: He has acknowledged his crimes, and he has shown compassion and asked for forgiveness for that. And so at this moment, due to his medical state, like we said, his weight was around 125. He is confined to a wheelchair, and he’s been moved to the medical ward of the federal prison institution.
Nkechi Taifa: Which one? Which prison?
Taliba Obuya: Oh, he’s currently located in Lexington, Kentucky. He’s important because when I did have the opportunity to meet him while he was incarcerated decades later, he was still committed to the betterment of Black people. And not just Black people, but those communities who are marginalized and forgotten about. And he did it so selflessly. Like, he didn’t just stop once incarcerated. He organized. He traded peaceful places where our people were. And I thought that that was just necessary. So why could I not be active on his behalf?
See, my background is I’m the daughter of veterans. Both parents. Family of veterans. I believe, every war fought in this country, I have had family in that war. And so to see that there were conditions in the country that we needed to address like drug abuse, housing issues, literacy, access to food. And this man who did not let his situation and circumstances stop that commitment made me say, hey, we must be active and do something about that.
Currently, on small factors, Baba Mutulu is 71 years old. In two weeks, he will be 72. His birthday is August 8. So age alone, he is eligible, as an aging elder, he’s eligible for a compassionate release. And then on top of that, you add his health conditions. He’s dealing with stage 3 bone marrow cancer. He did not go into remission. He received treatments, and it’s not there. He has gotten COVID three times. So during this pandemic there were even early releases of COVID releases, and he did not meet the [inaudible] of that.
Then on top of that, he is basically now given a six months timeline. And this was months ago. So although we’re stuck with that number of six months, we’re talking three months, maybe even six weeks. It’s very day to day. We have to do this now. And so I just believe in dignity. I believe in sitting in Washington, DC, the capital of this nation, that we are supposed to stand on these principles. He has served his time. He should be allowed to die with dignity. And that’s even sad to say, because he’s been incarcerated since I was three years old. Never knew which pathway I was on. He has family, he has grandkids.
And so I think, with his time served, with his eligibility for parole 10 times. In this moment he meets the declaration of compassionate release, and thus we should do it. It’s the human thing to do. It’s the dignified thing to do. Yeah, the DOJ has the power to do that.
Mansa Musa: In light of everything we already established, that he meets the criteria for compassion, I would like for y’all to dial down on why they are so reluctant to acknowledge these accomplishments? Because parole has been denied, and he fits the criteria for parole, so he should have been released. What is the institution’s offering in opposition to why they don’t want to?
Nkechi Taifa: They claim, they state that he is a danger to public safety, a danger to society, and that he has the capacity to influence many people. That is what their rationale is. They don’t speak to the fact that he’s a 71-year-old elder. They don’t speak to the fact that he has been incarcerated for 36 years. They don’t speak to the fact that, yes, he has influenced, very positively influenced, so, so, so many young Black men in prison to turn their lives around and to be about being productive. They don’t speak about those things.
So it is vindictiveness. I submit there’s racial disparity involved in it, as I spoke earlier. Because it’s not the nature, necessarily, of the crime. Because other people committed offenses that the United States considers as [inaudible] home, and have been let home under compassionate release to die peacefully with family and friends. So we That’s what the call to action must be. We need to really base our collective voices so that we are heard. So that we are heard in the halls of the Department of Justice. So that we are heard in the halls of Congress. So we are heard in the corridors of the White House. That is what is going to free Dr. Mutulu Shakur.
Mansa Musa: He has letters from former wardens, he has letters from former judges, he has letters from the community, he has letters from, as I mentioned, 200 faith leaders, all saying that Mutulu Shakur is not only not a threat, but that he would be an asset upon return. Also, another thing that needs to be recognized about Mutulu Shakur’s case is that under the Bureau of Prisons guidelines, he scored real low, and we scored real low in terms of the points. That means you automatically be reduced to a lesser security and be positioned to be returned to society. So the only reason why Mutulu Shakur is being kept in prison is for no other reason than revenge, vindictiveness, and nothing more.
Here we are, having the Nkechi Taifa, the moderator of the Free Mutulu Shakur demonstration that we’re having today, that in a short time, we’ll be giving a letter to the Justice Department to try to free Mutulu Shakur. Taifa, you spoke about racial disparity and why Mutulu Shakur is not being given the benefit that the law says he should be given. Speaking on that.
Nkechi Taifa: Oh, yes, well, actually, Dr. Mutulu Shakur’s co-defendant Marilyn Bach, a white woman, revolutionary, received the ability to be able to be released several months before she passed. She applied for this release. She was charged with many of the same charges that Mutulu Shakur was charged with. She was released to be able to go home to die. Why should Mutulu Shakur not be granted that same type of relief?
Mansa Musa: His thinking has been so monumental in terms of changing individuals. Yet, you reflected on how they always talk about the crime. Talk about why his thinking is so dangerous to the point where they believe that he will be a threat to society.
Nkechi Taifa: Well, what the government basically says is that Mutulu Shakur will be an influence to people on the outside. What they neglect to say is that he is an influence, a very positive influence. He has been a very positive influence to young people in prison, young Black men, to turn their lives around from a life of crime and criminal activity to productive people in society. To get them to open up a book and to read. The thing they are trying to take out of the schools, Dr. Mutulu Shakur wants that history, the true history of who we are and how we came to this country to be. He’s a healer. He’s been teaching and training people in the act of acupuncture. Acupuncture detoxification, which has been a tremendous help to the community.
Mansa Musa: George Jackson talking about the running of our feet. You’re talking about the running of our feet. Speak on what you think we should be doing? What do you think we need to do when we leave here? Now give the Rattling the Bars viewers our marching orders.
Nkechi Taifa: Well, we need to [inaudible] of our voices as well as our feet. We need to [inaudible] our voices so that they can be heard within the Department of Justice. So they can be heard within the halls of Congress. So they can be heard in the corridors of the White House. Each of those entities have the capacity to do what is necessary to free Mutulu Shakur through either parole, the granting of parole. Through either the granting of compassionate release. Through the granting of executive clemency, so he would be able to walk out as a free person.
None of those things have been allocated to Mutulu Shakur despite all of the great benefits that he’s given to society. Most folk don’t know. He’s a stepfather, a brother, Tupac Shakur. Many people don’t know that because of him, Asada Shakur is living free in Cuba. Many people don’t know that because of Mutulu Shakur and others like him, resources were able to be garnered to the liberation moments in Southern Africa. Many people don’t know these facts about Mutulu Shakur. That because of him, many people who could have died from addiction received a second chance at life through the therapies that Mutulu Shakur was able to provide and was able to teach others.
Dr. Winston Kokayi Patterson: We organized an organization called BAD, Blacks Against Drugs, where we got all of the progressive Black drug programs around the country to come together and to continue to promote a revolutionary, progressive form of treatment. I received my first treatment from Mutulu Shakur in 1972, and then began to study acupuncture. Dr. Shakur started the Lincoln Detox program in 1970, which deems him the father of acupuncture in our Black community. And here today, we have thousands and thousands of individuals using acupuncture and a specific protocol to deal with substance abuse.
So Dr. Shakur is such a threat because of his ability to be able to communicate this. Because of his ability to be able to teach. Because of his ability to bring all people together from all walks of life, to understand the importance of being human and to begin to deal with the problem that we’re faced today, especially with fentanyl. So acupuncture is proven to deal with substance abuse. We go to China, the whole country was addicted to opium, and they use acupuncture. And here we run back here to the ’70s, and through the ’70s up until today, they’ve been using acupuncture in the hospitals.
The Veterans Administration has a protocol based on that same protocol that Mutulu started. They call it battleground acupuncture, where they deal with the post-traumatic stress syndrome that Black folk are dealing with. Post-traumatic slave syndrome that we’re dealing with, and all the stress and repressive kind of emotions that we have that this acupuncture can address.
Mansa Musa: I think we need to demystify what the government is saying about this brother.
Dr. Winston Kokayi Patterson: Yes, for sure.
Mansa Musa: And we need to really humanize him, and make him the human being that we know him to be, but more important, you have actually experienced [inaudible].
Dr. Winston Kokayi Patterson: Yes, and when he smiled, he would light up a room. When he came into a room, he would light that room up. And his energy, and his ability to be able to just mingle and talk and hang out with people. We danced all night long. So he can dance. But the major thing I remember is his being a dad, his being a husband.
Mansa Musa: That’s right.
Dr. Winston Kokayi Patterson: His being a brother to all of the people within his family. Him being a son, his mother who was blind, and me watching him do acupuncture on her and taking care of her. Me watching him taking care of children that wasn’t even his children, because that’s how we do in our community. Him giving his shirt to a guy right off the street. Here, brother, take this shirt. This is the kind of person that Mutulu was. He was so into making sure that Black people got as much as they could to do the best, to come out of the conditions that we were in.
So it didn’t matter whether it was a dollar bill, acupuncture, a sandwich, some clothes, or just a hug. And Mutulu had the best hugs.
Topeka K. Sam: So often we hear, it’s always about the nature of the crime. The nature of the crime never changes. Being incarcerated is supposed to be about rehabilitation, right? Corrections. And if the system is saying that he couldn’t have been corrected in 30 years, then what are we also saying about the system?
Mansa Musa: What do you think the church in particular should be doing in this space? Where do we go from here in terms of trying to get the churches to become more involved and doing the work that Jesus would be doing right about now?
Topeka K. Sam: Well, I mean, we know the history of the church, or has been in the past, to be leaders in these moments of civil rights and human rights. And so nothing has changed. As a matter of fact, we need the church now more than ever before. So we need the churches to be social justice hubs. To bring people together. To be leaders in this moment to free our people. Because the word says we need to set the prisoners free. And so that’s just the bottom line.
Dr. Karanja Keita Carroll: Good afternoon, everyone. I’m sharing these words on behalf of my father, Reverend Anthony Carroll, the First Pilgrim Baptist Church in Camden, Delaware. These are his words. He states, “I first came to know of Dr. Mutulu through my son. Though I was aware of the Black Panther Party and their actions in California while I was in service in the military, I was not so knowledgeable of what they did on the East Coast of the United States. Born and raised in Hackensack, New Jersey, the Black Panther Party was something that I only heard about on the news, but not something I had real interaction with.
“However, after learning more and more about the actions of the panthers outside of California, and those such as Mutulu Shakur, who was in New York, I learned of the many accomplishments and advances he and other Panthers were making in New York City, so close to my home.
“As I learned that Mutulu Shakur was an organizer, alternative health professional, and advocate for so many people, oppressed people, marginalized people. I wondered why this man has been incarcerated for over 30 years and is continuously denied parole. Furthermore, during his incarceration, Dr. Shakur has been a role model to those moving through various penal intuitions that he has been housed in.
“Again, I wondered why this man is locked up and not free. And still, as he suffers from type two diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, glaucoma, I still ask why this man is incarcerated. From all that I have learned from Dr. Mutulu Shakur, I see a man who is about justice, freedom, equality, and someone who is continuously fighting oppression whenever it is faced. And I’m reminded of Isaiah [1:17], which reads in part, ‘Learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression.’ Dr. Shakur has consistently tried to do this, but the real question is why hasn’t been allowed to continue this work as a free man?”
Mansa Musa: There you have it. The real news about Mutulu Shakur. We’ll continue to follow up on this, releasing Mutulu Shakur. Mutulu Shakur has had a positive impact on society at large and people in general. The only reason why Mutulu Shakur is not being released and not being granted the benefits of compassionate release is because of his thinking, and his thinking being that of a progressive individual. With Eddie Conway, I’m Mansa Musa. Thank you very much.
In this live conversation and Q&A, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis discuss a recent win to protect the right to record police in the second highest court in the land. Guest Abade Irizarry (aka Liberty Freak) joins the stream to discuss the cop watching incident that started his quest and how the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment must be fought for.
If you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, or if you have a question for Taya or and Stephen, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com, message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @eyesonpolice on Twitter.
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on July 20, 2022. It is shared here with permission.
In May of this year, I testified at a hearing in San Francisco where city leaders questioned the police department’s funding and use of public relations professionals. That funding was heavier than you might expect.
According to police department documents provided to the County Board of Supervisors, budget items included a nine-person full-time team managed by a director of strategic communications who alone costs the city $289,423; an undisclosed number of cops paid part-time to do PR work on social media; a Community Engagement Unit tracking public opinion; officers who intervene with the families of victims of police violence and who are dispatched to the scenes of police violence to control initial media reaction; and a full-time videographer making PR videos about cops.
Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.
Why do police invest so much in manipulating our perceptions of what they do? I call this phenomenon “copaganda”: creating a gap between what police actually do and what people think they do.
Copaganda does three main things. First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.
For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.
But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.
The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly 40-year lows.
The insistence that increased policing is the key to public safety is like climate science denial. Just like the oil companies, the police are running an expensive operation of mass communication to convince people of things that aren’t true.
The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.
The budgets of modern police departments are staggeringly high and ever increasing, with no parallel in history, producing incarceration rates unseen around the world. Police and their right-wing unions (which have their own PR budgets) want bigger budgets, more military-grade gear, more surveillance technology, and more overtime cash. Multibillion-dollar businesses have privatized nearly every element of these bureaucracies for profit, from the tasers and AI software sold to cops to the snacks sold at huge markups to supplement inadequate jail food. To obtain this level of spending, they need us to think that police and prisons make us safer.
The evidence shows otherwise. If police and prisons made us safe, we would have the safest society in world history — but the opposite is true. There is no link between more cops and decreased crime, even of the type that the police report. Instead, addressing the root causes of interpersonal harm like safe housing, health care, treatment, nutrition, pollution, and early-childhood education is the most effective way to enhance public safety. And addressing root causes of violence also prevents the other harms that flow from inequality, including millions of avoidable deaths.
The insistence that increased policing is the key to public safety is like climate science denial. Just like the oil companies, the police are running an expensive operation of mass communication to convince people of things that aren’t true. Thus, we are left with a great irony: even if what you most care about are the types of crimes reported by police, those crimes would be better reduced by making our society more equal than by spending on police and prisons.
Powerful actors in policing and media both manufacture crime waves and respond to them in ways that increase inequality and consolidate social control, even as they do little to actually stop crime. Copaganda not only diverts people from existential threats like imminent ecological collapse and rising fascism, but also boosts surveillance and repression that is used against social movements trying to solve those problems by creating more sustainable and equal social arrangements.
Hearings like the one I testified at in San Francisco are needed across the country. Local councilmembers should scrutinize the secretive world of police PR budgets, because the public deserves to know how police are spreading misinformation. It is possible to achieve real safety in our communities, but only if we end the copaganda standing in its way.
The death of Christopher Robert Hensley in the custody of Fletcher, North Carolina, police is raising new questions about the use of deadly restraint by law enforcement. In this episode of Police Accountability Report, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis talk to independent pathologist Cyril Wecht, who reviewed footage of the arrest, to shed light on the circumstances surrounding Hensley’s death. We ask questions of North Carolina law enforcement officials to learn why cops are still using a tactic that has been widely recognized as both dangerous and deadly.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today we will do so by bringing you breaking news on a shocking in-custody death at the hands of police in North Carolina that has received little attention, but warrants further investigation.
As you can see in the video we are showing now, Fletcher, North Carolina, police officers knelt on the back of a man for at least four minutes, until he was unresponsive. And I have to warn you, this video is disturbing. The man later died, but the police have said little. But despite their silence, we obtained this video of his death in custody, which suggests that a dangerous and often deadly police tactic known as prone restraint may have caused his death. The reason we are bringing this case to your attention is because of its similarities to the case of George Floyd and Tom Black and others, where police have sat on top of or otherwise laid across a person, causing downward pressure on their lungs, causing what’s known as positional asphyxiation.
It is a well-known, dangerous police tactic that has been all but banned in some areas, but remains common practice elsewhere, which is why we sent the evidence to a noted independent pathologist who watched the video and who will share his thoughts on how this man died, why police may be culpable, and what should be done to prevent this from happening in the future. But more importantly, we wanted to bring this case to your attention, our viewers, as it has otherwise been ignored, and it needs exposure to ensure local officials or an independent body investigate it properly, especially given the evidence seen here in this video.
But first I want you to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, and please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I do read your comments and appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, there is a Patreon donate link pinned below, so we do have some extras there for our PAR family.
Now, as you know, we usually publish the Police Accountability Report on our regularly scheduled time slot of 9:00 PM Eastern time. But when a viewer sent us this video of a man who died in police custody, we felt we had to produce a breaking news piece because the case has received little attention, and many questions about what happened remain unanswered.
What we do know is this: In the evening of June 15, Fletcher, North Carolina, police received a 911 call from a woman who said her husband was preventing her from leaving their apartment. The caller said she thought the man was on drugs. According to reporting from the local media, the man in question was Christopher Robert Hensley, a 35-year-old youth pastor with two young children. According to law enforcement, Hensley grew combative with police when they arrived. Officials say they fought with Hensley and tasered him. However, there are few details about what that means or why it leads to what you are seeing in this video.
I want to warn you before I show it that what you are about to see is very disturbing. The images you are watching were taken by a resident of the apartment complex where the arrest occurred and was subsequently posted on Facebook. They show roughly eight or nine Fletcher police officers and Henderson County Sheriff’s officers restraining Hensley, who is prone on the ground, handcuffed. As several officers lean on his back, Fletcher can be heard pleading for help. As you can see, he’s moving underneath the officers who continue to put downward pressure on his body. Take a look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Audio/Video: [shouting in pain][inaudible].
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now after roughly four minutes and 30 seconds of putting downward pressure on Hensley, police suddenly turn him over and begin administering CPR. Just watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker: [clearing throat] Oh my God. [inaudible].
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: It’s important to know that this video was recorded 10 to 15 minutes into the interaction with police. So it is possible these officers had him in prone restraint for even longer than the four and a half minutes that were caught on camera. However, in our conversation with the noted forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, he confirmed that it can take as little as four minutes to deprive someone of oxygen and cause death.
Now, it’s also worth noting that it’s well known that placing downward pressure on someone’s back when prone is dangerous. When someone is prone on the ground, weight applied to the back prevents the lungs from inflating. This results in a condition known as positional asphyxiation or riot-crush. The downward pressure makes it impossible for the diaphragm to expand and the lungs to absorb oxygen, which can result in death by suffocation. It’s also the same tactic that led to the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and Anton Black in Greensboro, Maryland, right here.
Which raises an important question: Why did multiple officers sit on his back? And why, given the general awareness of the dangers of positional asphyxia, did the officers continue to apply their body weight and pressure? I mean, as horrible as this is to watch, you can see Mr. Fletcher’s legs flailing. He is literally fighting to breathe as the officers casually, and apparently indifferently, continue to apply downward pressure. Someone is even captured in the video watching this while enjoying a smoke.
But even though this case raises these troubling questions about police use of force, there has been little mention of this notoriously dangerous police tactic, or exactly why the officers felt compelled to apply it in such a reckless manner. In fact, like many police-involved deaths, officially local law enforcement has said little about the case, and the local media has made little effort to push back on their silence. Which is why we decided to do this breaking news story.
Police did put out a press release that said, “Hensley became unresponsive after he was placed in handcuffs.” But they did not address or mention what we have seen in this video. And local news reports offered little more than the official police response in a conveniently leaked 911 call. So myself and my reporting partner Stephen Janis have been working the phones and talking to experts about the evidence that is publicly available. And to discuss our findings I’m joined by Stephen, who is standing by now. Stephen, thank you for joining us.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So Stephen, as I already mentioned, we immediately suspect that this might be positional asphyxiation. So you reached out to noted pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, who has conducted many high profile autopsies. Tell us what you sent him, and what did he say?
Stephen Janis: Right. I sent Dr. Wecht the video that you’ve already seen showing the cops sitting on top of Mr. Hensley and had him analyze it, look at it from his perspective as a medical pathologist, and what he said was pretty, pretty damning. Let’s listen.
[AUDIO CLIP BEGINS]
Dr. Cyril Wecht: My initial impression is that this case is almost a twin of the George Floyd, Derek Chauvin situation. It is as brutal, as barbaric as that was, in a way more so because of the multiplicity of officers involved. You have this man on the ground. I do not know what the circumstances were. Whatever they were, even if he were a fleeing felon, you’ve got six, eight officers there. He’s not going anywhere. You see him struggling and moving and kicking, and it’s obvious that he can’t breathe. He’s face down.
Have they not lived in America? Have they not seen and read about the George Floyd case? Are they not aware of positional asphyxiation? Go and find out from that police department, locally Fletcher, North Carolina, and the State of North Carolina, what they are teaching cops now in terms of positioning people and so on.
So you have him, whatever he’s done, whatever you’re thinking, let him sit up. Let him sit up. Where the hell is he going? You’ve got eight officers there, and they’re all solid looking guys. So let him sit up and breathe.
[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]
Stephen Janis: So clearly, Dr. Wecht believes that this is positional asphyxiation. He is a noted pathologist. He has a long history of making judgements on these types of cases. So I think it’s pretty strong science what he’s saying, and we should definitely pay attention to what he thinks.
Taya Graham: See, that’s interesting. I noticed he mentioned training standards. You’ve been trying to get in touch with various agencies in North Carolina about the use of prone restraint. What have you heard, and what are they saying?
Stephen Janis: I reached out to the agency that trains police and certifies them in North Carolina, and they were very emphatic. They finally got back to me in an email and said they do not train officers to do prone restraint beyond handcuffs. In other words, once a suspect is handcuffed, they’re supposed to not have him or she prone anymore. They’re very emphatic about that. I’m showing the email on the screen. Their answer was very firm: “We do not train people to use prone restraint.” But of course, as you can see, that’s exactly what happened.
Taya Graham: Now I know the North Carolina State Police are investigating Mr. Hensley’s death. We’ve actually reported on cases before where it appeared to be positional asphyxiation, but authorities have concluded otherwise. What should we expect from the official investigation?
Stephen Janis: One thing that’s interesting is that we don’t see the five to 10 minutes prior to the camera running from the person who was filming it on Facebook. So they could just conjure some sort of combative person, or some [inaudible] terror or something that we don’t see and that we can’t really prove, and it’d be based upon their word, probably. I don’t know if there are other witnesses.
The second thing they’re going to talk about is what was in his system. I think they’ll wait for the toxicology, and come back and try to make some innuendo that there were drugs in this system. We don’t know. We only know from the 911 call, but we don’t know for sure. I think they’re definitely going to try to use that.
And then finally they might come up with something like excited delirium that they use in cases where, even though they know they’re responsible, they have to conjure a reason that they’re not.
These are the things to look out for. I promise you we will continue to report on it to make sure there’s some counter narrative to the police narrative.
Taya Graham: Now I want to let everyone know we reached out to Mr. Hensley’s family. They told us they hold police accountable for their loved one’s death and that they will be releasing evidence soon to prove their case. And they have also consulted a pathologist to do an independent autopsy. They also say they would be able to speak to us after the funeral.
His mother, as well as a friend of the family, said to me that Mr. Hensley was a great man, loved by his family and friends. His mother also said this, “The level of corruption is beyond human comprehension. I cannot bring my son back, but all of his rights were violated. This cannot continue to happen. He was not given proper CPR or care. Even after he went unconscious from the lack of oxygen and blood supply to his heart, they beat him up when his legs were moving, trying to get air into his diaphragm, and they punched his legs. My son was murdered for no reason. It is not up to the police to do this.”
Unfortunately, I have to agree. I want to offer my sincere condolences to the Hensley family and to all his friends.
But in the meantime, we will keep investigating and providing updates with our live stream, our social media accounts, or through a more expansive show at a later date. I urge all of you to share this video or contact any relevant law enforcement officials and ask that as much information as possible be released to the public and to the family.
Thank you so much for joining us for this breaking news edition of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
