The story of one Minnesota couple’s ongoing problems with police provides a pointed example of the systematic overpolicing of rural communities across the country. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis describe the couple’s most recent encounter with cops, then they provide updates on a number of previous investigations into police overreach that they are committed to following.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
Back in April 2016, a Baltimore news report about “police recruiting perils after Freddie Gray” focused on a new police hire with an ideal origin story. Luke Shelley, a National Guardsman deployed here during the Baltimore Uprising in April 2015, had recently joined the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). As a guardsman, he had been stationed at Mondawmin Mall, ground zero for the rioting that took place on April 27, 2015, “an experience that convinced [Shelley] he wanted to serve the city,” local ABC affiliate WMAR reported.
Records show numerous examples of additional corrective training provided to Shelley, and little discipline, for allegations that include harassment, negligence, misconduct, theft, and racial profiling.
“I want to be where the challenge is and where the need is for good police,” Shelley told WMAR in 2016. “To have that impact on countless lives—a hundred or a thousand or whoever you meet on a daily basis—I think is a pretty noble and high responsibility.”
At a moment when the department was being investigated by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations and a federal consent decree was imminent, BPD appeared eager to position Shelley, hired in February 2016, as a future face of policing. In 2017, Baltimore Police posted a photo to its Twitter account of Shelley smiling with a child. In 2019, Baltimore Police posted a photo to its Facebook page of Shelley smiling and surrounded by children, as one child played with his radio.
Less than a month after the 2019 photo was posted, two police officers in Shelley’s unit became increasingly disturbed by his behavior and would later demand they work with someone other than Shelley because he was “no longer fit to be trusted” and had exhibited what they called “bias[ed] practices.”
That’s one of many allegations against Shelley contained in his disciplinary records, which were leaked to Battleground Baltimore.
Battleground Baltimore has also submitted a public information request for the entirety of Shelley’s disciplinary records. In the meantime, many investigative files and summaries of at least part of Shelley’s record were leaked to Battleground Baltimore by an anonymous source.
Shelley, a relatively new officer, is still with BPD, unlike former Baltimore Police Officer Melvin Hill, whose decade of staggering misconduct was recently described by Battleground Baltimore. Records show numerous examples of additional corrective training provided to Shelley, and little discipline, for allegations that include harassment, negligence, misconduct, theft, and racial profiling.
Since joining the police in February 2016, Shelley has developed a reputation among Black Baltimoreans as an especially aggressive cop, first while on patrol, and more recently as a member of the District Action Team (DAT) in the Western District, the police district where Freddie Gray lived and died.
In a 2021 report, the ACLU of MD noted the high number of complaints Shelley racked up in a relatively short amount of time. In his first three years and eight months on the job, Shelley had 28 complaints against him and 67 documented uses of force, including at least 11 for “pointing a firearm,” 21 for “hands,” and 6 for “takedowns,” including one “takedown with injuries.” At least nine times, someone who encountered Shelley went to the hospital to be examined for possible injuries.
A “Rough Ride”?
In September 2017, Shelley was in a police vehicle with Officer Benjamin Brown who, according to a police report, “failed to place a seatbelt on [a man who was arrested] after placing him in the rear of a patrol car.”
The man, who was not seatbelted by Brown, later said that the police in the car with him, including Shelley, “did not listen” when he complained he was not seatbelted in. According to the man, while he was being driven to the police station, a call for backup came through and Shelley, who was driving, sped off to respond.
According to the man, Shelley “began to drive reckless, running red lights with the siren activated” and “slammed on the brakes which caused [the man] to be thrown forward into the rear of the front passenger seat.” When Shelley accelerated again, the man “hit his back on the rear seat.” Along with Shelley and Brown, there were two other cops in the car at the time.
The incident shows that barely two years after Freddie Gray’s death—a death that was attributed by some to Gray not being seatbelted in and enduring a rough ride—officers were still not seatbelting arrestees properly.
When the man finally arrived at the Western District police station, he “complained that his back, neck, and wrist was injured from [a] rough ride in the police vehicle because he was not in a seat belt.” He was taken to the hospital and “treated for a muscle strain.”
Police found complaints of “neglect” against Shelley to be “not sustained.” A sustained complaint is one believed by the police who investigated an allegation to have happened, and to have violated police policy. A complaint that is “not sustained,” as described by the 2016 Department of Justice report on Baltimore Police, “means that investigators were unable to tell either way.”
According to police, body-worn camera footage from Brown “shows that Shelley did not drive in an unsafe manner and that [the man] purposely threw his body into Officer Brown who was sitting next to him in [the] rear area of the police vehicle.”
Documents show Brown refused to provide a recorded statement. Allegations of “neglect” against Brown were sustained. In July 2018, Brown resigned from BPD.
The incident shows that barely two years after Freddie Gray’s death—a death that was attributed by some to Gray not being seatbelted in and enduring a rough ride—officers were still not seatbelting arrestees properly. “Officer Shelley … did not check to see if [the man] was in a seatbelt,” a police report said. Shelley did not have his body-worn camera turned on during the incident.
Training and More Training
Following Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, Baltimore Police embraced the steady rollout of body-worn cameras to all Baltimore Police. Shelley’s disciplinary records show other incidents where he did not turn his body camera on, turned it off during an encounter, or turned it on later than he should have.
Shelley had “searching procedures” reviewed and was scheduled for “remedial training on search procedures.” Less than a year later, in another incident, Shelley did not turn in a backpack full of drugs.
In January 2017, Shelley pulled over a woman because he said the tag light on her car was out. Once he looked at the tag light up close, Shelley told the woman “he had been mistaken about the tag light,” according to a police report. Then Shelley said he could smell cannabis coming from the car.
The woman complained that Shelley had briefly followed her before stopping her, and accused him of racial profiling. When a police sergeant arrived in response to the accusations, the sergeant told Shelley to make sure his body-worn camera was on. “Officer Shelley told [the sergeant] he was 10-62, he meant to say 10-61,” the report reads. “Shelley had actually had his camera on during his stop but turned it off when the sergeant told him he needed to be 10-61. Officer Shelley had confused the two codes.”
As a result, the first few minutes of the sergeant’s interview with the woman about Shelley were not recorded.
An allegation against Shelley of “race-based profiling” was found “not sustained.” According to the police, the woman’s windows were tinted so Shelley could not have observed the woman’s race when he stopped her.
In October 2018, Shelley was cited for not immediately turning on his body camera during the transport of an arrestee: “Officer Shelley was on the scene for several minutes and began the transport before activating his [body worn camera],” the police report reads.
Shelley’s records also show him losing evidence, not thoroughly searching an arrestee, and leaving drugs in a police vehicle.
In November 2016, Shelley was investigated for “failing to properly secure CDS (Controlled Dangerous Substance)” after he seized a small amount of cannabis. Shelley put the cannabis, which was less than 10 grams (and therefore decriminalized) into his pocket, and later “lost the suspected substance.” Shelley told police investigators that the cannabis likely fell out of his pocket when he took out his notepad, which was in the same pocket.
An allegation of “negligent handling of evidentiary and/or non-evidentiary property” was sustained and Shelley was given “non-punitive counseling” and “additional training in securing contraband.”
In September 2020, Shelley and another officer, Jerome Shaurette, were investigated after they had searched an arrestee and did not immediately seize a handgun the man had on him. The gun was discovered later when the man was removed from a police vehicle and police “heard an object hitting the ground.” The object was a handgun.
An allegation of “neglect of duty” was sustained. Shelley had “searching procedures” reviewed and was scheduled for “remedial training on search procedures.”
Less than a year later, in another incident, Shelley did not turn in a backpack full of drugs. In May 2021, Shelley and another officer, Lamont Jett, left a backpack they had seized in the trunk of a police vehicle. The backpack was later discovered by a detective who used the same car as Shelley and Jett. The backpack contained “59 white top vials” of “a white substance suspected to be cocaine.”
An allegation of “neglect of duty” against Shelley was sustained. He was suspended for 16 days.
A found property form filled out by Shelley notes that the backpack was discovered on a bench when a group of men fled the police. Shelley found a gun in the same backpack and turned that in. He did not turn in the drugs.
The Fourth Amendment
Shelley’s disciplinary record shows a series of questionable searches that push the limits of the Fourth Amendment, often resulting in resident complaints.
In August 2017, Shelley “opened an unoccupied parked vehicle’s door and looked inside without the owner’s permission or a search warrant,” according to an Internal Affairs report. There had been a shooting right near the van. The owner of that van watched Shelley open the van and promptly called him out for it. “It looked like there was a gun [inside the van],” Shelley explained.
An allegation of “improper stop/search/seizure” against Shelley was “not sustained.” He was given “non-punitive counseling.”
In February 2020, Shelley approached a man and then patted him down because he believed the man had a gun. According to Shelley, when he drove by, he noticed the man “turned his body” and was trying not to be seen. When Shelley got out of his car and shined a flashlight at the man, the man again moved away from Shelley. “Det Shelley viewed those actions as characteristic of an armed person,” a police report said.
Shelley asked the man if he had any weapons. The man said he did not. Then Shelley told the man to remove his hands from his pockets, and then to put his hands on top of his head. Shelley patted him down. No gun was found on the man.
According to the police report, the man was told by a neighbor that after the arrest, “Shelley went to [the man’s] home, broke in, then left, and returned with a fictitious search and seizure warrant and searched his home.”
Allegations of “harassment” and “conduct unbecoming a police officer” were declared “unfounded.”
In January 2018, Shelley and veteran Baltimore Police Sergeant Thomas Wilson arrested a man for cannabis, and the man told police that Shelley was “harassing him.”
It began on Jan. 15, when Shelley arrested the man for cannabis possession with intent to distribute: He had approximately 25 bags of cannabis on him, which added up to more than 10 grams, the decriminalized amount in Baltimore.
The next day, Shelley arrested the man for cannabis again. The second arrest was ostensibly a sting. According to Shelley, the man who was arrested gave police his phone number during the first arrest. So, on Jan. 16, Shelley and Wilson texted the man and “pos[ed] as a female buyer.” The man responded to what he believed was a customer looking for cannabis (a total of 14 grams, to be sold for $80, according to Shelley’s report) and provided a location for the weed deal. Shelley and Wilson arrived in a marked police car, and the man was arrested.
According to the police report, the man was told by a neighbor that after the arrest, “Shelley went to [the man’s] home, broke in, then left, and returned with a fictitious search and seizure warrant and searched his home.”
Allegations against Shelley for “harassment” and “criminal misconduct/theft” were declared “unfounded.”
Sgt. Thomas Wilson
Sergeant Thomas Wilson, whom Shelley worked with that day, is a Baltimore cop with a history of lying in court and on warrants. Wilson also has alleged connections to the Gun Trace Task Force—the infamous plainclothes police squad who dealt drugs, stole money, planted evidence, and routinely violated Baltimoreans’ rights.
In 2003, Wilson was accused by a federal judge of telling “knowing lies” about a 2002 heroin bust. In 2006, a trial board recommended Wilson be fired after he entered someone’s home without a warrant. In 2012, Wilson was sued, along with a number of other officers, for unlawful search and seizure when camera footage showed Wilson had lied on a warrant. Wilson and others first entered the home of the man in question without a warrant using a key they took from the man during a traffic stop.
By 2017, Wilson was sometimes working with Shelley—including, reports show, coaching Shelley on best practices as a police officer.
In 2016, Wilson was promoted to sergeant. By 2017, Wilson was sometimes working with Shelley—including, reports show, coaching Shelley on best practices as a police officer. For example, Wilson “verbally counseled” Shelley in the August 2017 incident where Shelley searched a man’s van without a warrant.
In February 2018—less than a month after the cannabis sting Shelley and Wilson set up—Wilson was named in federal court by Donny Stepp, a bail bondsman dealing cocaine for indicted Baltimore Police Sergeant Wayne Jenkins. According to Stepp’s federal testimony, Wilson, along with Jenkins and others, had provided security at a Baltimore strip club for Stepp’s New York “drug supplier.”
Not long after those accusations, Wilson left the Baltimore Police Department. Wilson has not been charged with any crimes related to the Gun Trace Task Force.
‘Kill Or Be Killed’
In October 2021, Baltimore Police opened up an investigation into Shelley’s tattoos, based on tweets from defense attorney Jenny Egan, which were sent by the mayor’s office to the deputy police commissioner.
Egan’s tweets noted that, along with a tattoo that reads “Kill Or Be Killed” (visible in 2017 bodybuilding photos of Shelley), Shelley also has a tattoo of a Spartan helmet, an image popularized by the 2006 movie 300, frequently invoked by far right-leaning organizations such as the Oath Keepers. A photo from Shelley’s (now private) personal Instagram account also shows two patches on Shelley’s bag: One is a Spartan helmet with the words “Moaon Aabe” (roughly, “come and take it” in Latin) and the other patch said “Polizei”—or “police” in German.
Another photo Egan pulled from Shelley’s personal Instagram shows Shelley exercising at Exile Fitness in Baltimore County. That gym is owned by Jason Tankersley, who appeared in the 2007 National Geographic documentary American Skinheads, where he discussed leading the Maryland State Skinheads. A 2022 article in Mel Magazine mentions Tankersley “used his small gym to recruit and train white supremacists in mixed martial arts,” and added, “there’s no actual evidence that Tankersley, who once swore by the ethos and code of racist white-power skinheads, has officially walked away from that world.”
Police categorized these allegations against Shelley as “conduct unbecoming of a police officer” and found them “not sustained.”
Battleground Baltimore reached out to Shelley through BPD for comment on these allegations but did not receive a response.
The ‘Profiling Method’
Two police officers demanded to no longer work with Shelley following an October 2019 incident where he instructed a man to destroy the drugs he possessed.
As reported by another police officer, Officer Bruce Dhaiti, Shelley told a white man possessing “approximately 15” gel caps of heroin to “discard the several gel caps by stepping on them in the street and to leave the area.”
“Don’t do it again,” Shelley allegedly told the man. “You aren’t getting locked up.”
The man dropped the gel caps to the ground and “began stepping on them,” and then, the man claimed, Shelley told him he could leave: “Detective Shelley stated he told [the man] to step on the drugs because he was not conducting an investigation and believed he did not possess a felony amount of heroin,” the report said.
Neither Shelley nor Dhaiti turned their body-worn cameras on during this encounter.
Allegations against Shelley for “conduct unbecoming of a police officer,” “failure to operate body worn camera,” and “neglect of duty” were “sustained.” Shelley was suspended for five days and given additional training on controlled dangerous substances.
The incident worried Dhaiti. According to a police report, “Officer Dhaiti advised he was upset by what he saw and went back to sit in the patrol vehicle.” In March 2020, Dhaiti complained to supervisors about Shelley and requested he no longer work with Shelley. “Because of the severity of these allegations, I wanted to be separated from Officer Shelley to avoid from engaging in any future incident that would jeopardize my integrity,” Dhaiti wrote.
Another cop who worked with Shelley on the District Action Team (DAT) in the Western District, Officer Roberto Arena, also complained about Shelley.
“Your officer believes [Shelley’s] integrity has been compromised and your officer believes he is no longer fit to be trusted within the unit due to how he works within the squad.”
BPD Officer roberto Arena, in a statement regarding Officer Luke Shelley
“I would like to clarify that your officer does not feel comfortable working in the same unit because of a recent incident where Officer Shelley destroyed drugs during an encounter with a citizen,” Arena wrote. “Your officer believes [Shelley’s] integrity has been compromised and your officer believes he is no longer fit to be trusted within the unit due to how he works within the squad.”
In a second statement, Dhaiti accused Shelley of profiling. “I do not feel comfortable working with Officer Shelley due to his bias practices towards some citizens of the City of Baltimore. I am uncomfortable with the way Officer Shelley communicated with some citizens of the City of Baltimore,” Dhaiti wrote. “Officer Shelley sometimes utilized ‘profiling method’ to conduct traffic stops as well as armed person investigation.”
The Baltimore Police Department has made District Action Teams a significant part of its recently-announced “short-term strategy” for crime reduction.
Shelley started as a BPD officer in 2016 with a salary of $48,971. His salary increased each year. By 2021, Shelley made $76,219 with an additional $21,422.27 in overtime, adding up to a total of $97,641.27.
Shelley is featured on Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s list of 300-plus officers that she characterized as having “credibility issues,” which was released late last month.
He currently has over 60 active cases going through Baltimore City Circuit Court.
As Wendy Sawyer and Wanda Bertram recently wrote for the Prison Policy Initiative, “Over half (58%) of all women in US prisons are mothers, as are 80% of women in jails, including many who are incarcerated awaiting trial simply because they can’t afford bail… And these numbers don’t cover the many women preparing to become mothers while locked up this year: An estimated 58,000 people every year are pregnant when they enter local jails or prisons.” In this edition of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Debra Bennett-Austin of Change Comes Now about the shocking number of incarcerated mothers in the US today, the barriers keeping incarcerated mothers from staying connected with their families, and the irreparable damage those severed connections cause for everyone involved.
Debra Bennet-Austin is the president and co-founder of Change Comes Now, a nonprofit “focused on assisting those who have been, are in danger of being, and who are currently impacted by the criminal legal system.” Bennet-Austin was formerly incarcerated for 19 years in the Florida Department of Corrections and has been home for four years.
The United States has 25% of the world’s prison population, some 2.3 million people, most of whom are poor, although it represents less than 5% of the global population. Its prisons are notorious for their violence, overcrowding, and human rights abuses, including the widespread use of solitary confinement. But what is often not examined is what happens to those released from prisons into a society where they face legalized discrimination imposed by numerous laws, rules, and policies that result in permanent marginalization, thrust into a criminal caste system. These former prisoners are often denied the right to vote, can lose their passports, are barred from receiving public assistance, including housing, and are blocked from a variety of jobs. They must often repay exorbitant fines, abide by arbitrary rules imposed by probation officers, and avoid committing even minor criminal offenses or they go back to prison. The hurdles placed before them are momentous and help explain why within five years a staggering 76% return to prison.
In the first of a two-part series called The Long Road Home, we look at what happens to those in the United States who leave prison and struggle to reenter society through the eyes of five former prisoners—all of whom Chris Hedges taught in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system—who collectively spent 119 years in prison.
Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.
WatchThe Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.
Chris Hedges:Welcome to The Chris Hedges Report. The United States has 25% of the world’s prison population, some 2.3 million people, most of whom are poor, although it represents less than 5 percent of the global population. Its prisons are notorious for their violence, overcrowding, and human rights abuses, including the widespread use of solitary confinement. But what is often not examined is what happens to those released from prisons into a society where they face legalized discrimination imposed by numerous laws, rules, and policies that result in permanent marginalization, thrust into a criminal caste system.
These former prisoners are often denied the right to vote, can lose their passports, are barred from receiving public assistance including housing, and blocked from a variety of jobs. They must often repay exorbitant fines, abide by arbitrary rules imposed by probation officers, and avoid committing even minor criminal offenses or they go back to prison. The hurdles placed before them are momentous and help explain why within five years a staggering 76% return to prison. Today, in the first for a two-part series called The Long Road Home, we look at what happens to those in the United States who leave prison and struggle to reenter society through the eyes of five former prisoners, all of whom I taught in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system, who collectively spent 119 years in prison.
Mae Owen:When they say 30 to life, you realize your child is being locked up for 30 years, for the rest of his life. So how do you deal with that? Our prayer was that at Christmas time he’ll be home, and each year we just believed by Christmas time, he’ll be home, even this past Christmas. And we were able to hold onto that, believing that one day he would be home for the next Christmas.
Chris Hedges:Russ Owen, an army veteran, after 32 years is released from East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, New Jersey. He is greeted by his father, mother, daughter, grandchildren, and friends. He walks from the prison to the QuickChek, a ritual for freed prisoners who can see the convenience store from their barred windows, and engages in the familiar right of stuffing his prison issued clothes in the trash, as well as buying a few items in the store. But release is only the beginning of a journey that will end with three quarters of all released prisoners back in prison. While this is a day of joy and celebration for Russ, two years after being released, following a 16-year sentence, Robert Luma, whose nickname is Kabir, is still struggling to find housing — He lived for a time in a homeless shelter — And steady employment.
Robert “Kabir” Luma:It’s difficult. Very, very, very difficult, and really there’s no organization to support ex-offenders. And that’s kind of like where we get put in the hole [inaudible]. If you don’t have your own social connections and things of that nature, then you’re going to be done for. And a lot of guys who do a lot of time, like myself and more, they don’t have those connections because they’ve been gone for so long.
Chris Hedges:So when you look back on the whole period since you were released, what have been the hardest moments that you’ve had to deal with?
Robert “Kabir” Luma:I would say right before the pandemic when I was in the shelter, those are the hardest moments. Because a lot of times I did not want to be there, and I had to maybe go spend a night out. I might be with my friend. And they want to go in, and I might try to convince them to stay out more because I don’t want to go back there.
Chris Hedges:Explain to people why it’s so hard to get an apartment?
Robert “Kabir” Luma:Because for one, they want to know about your background check, your credit score, your eviction history. So they basically want to — And I understand that they want to see what type of person they’re putting in their property. Now, a person like myself, I might have to explain, I’ve been in prison for 16 years, and most people will not have you as their tenant. So that is a barrier that is kind of hard and difficult to climb.
Chris Hedges:And Whole Foods, talk about that.
Robert “Kabir” Luma:Oh yeah. I was at Whole Foods. This was two days before they actually called it the pandemic. And I was working there from March to August. That whole period of time, the courts were shut down. So when they did the background check, the courts were closed. So there’s no way they could do a background check. Once the courts reopened and they did my background check, they got rid of me.
Chris Hedges:But it is not only the physical impediments that make re-entry difficult, but the emotional and psychological ones. Ron Pierce, a Marine Corps veteran, explains what it was like to return to society after three decades. In his case to Rutgers University, where he completed the college degree he had begun in prison, graduating Summa Cum Laude.
Ron Pierce:I was in a college class, and I was talking to somebody about the class, and we were walking. Now at the time I was in a halfway back program. So I had to stop into the NJ STEP office, or the Mountain View office. And so when we got to where I had to go, she was busy, still talking. And because of prison mind, you get to your wing, you turn and you go. I did that and she looked at me and I was like, well, I have to go in here. And I just went in, but it was really… I talked to people in the office, and I said I felt really bad, like I was being rude. And they were saying, yeah, you were being rude.
So I went and I apologized to her next class and I said, look, I’m sorry. I was being rude. I’m just trying to re-acclimate back into society. She said, oh, it’s not a problem. I said, yeah, it is and I was rude and I want to apologize. So she accepted my apology and she started talking to me again. But class has started, now you have to sit down in class in the prison society. So I just abruptly got up and went, right in the middle of her sentence, got up and went to sit down. Now, somebody in prison would’ve understood, hey, we all have to sit down. She didn’t. She looked at me and never spoke to me again. So you’re used to that punishment mentality, and you have to break that and re-acclimate you back to a society that’s more free, to a degree.
Chris Hedges:But isn’t it also any emotion that exposes vulnerability? Grief, depression, weeping, all of that stuff is not something that many people within a prison will share with the others. Is that correct?
Ron Pierce:Well, it’s not that they won’t. It’s just, you can’t. It’s not the space for it. You can’t show grief. You can’t show fear. You can’t show sensitivity. You can’t show any of those emotions. If you do, it could be perceived as weakness. And as I said earlier, the perception of being a dangerous person comes with that. So, no, you repress all your emotions. You don’t express your emotions. And if you don’t express your emotions, when you come out, you’re not equipped to understand your own emotions, let alone be able to express them.
Chris Hedges:Thomas Dollard, who spent 30 years in prison, said that six months after his release, he too struggles to cope.
Thomas Dollard:I dream that I’m still there. Like I dream that they’re calling mess out. I wake up like, mess out? I’m getting ready to literally get up to go start preparing for mess. Why, so many things. Dealing, even, my wife sometimes has to say to me, why do you not sleep? Because I’m used to sleeping light because people are moving around me, waiting for the police to come hit my bed to wake me up and say, you got to get up, or you got to wake up so I can see you move. I still deal with these things now.
Though sometimes people say that I want to be free, I want to be free. But after being caged up so long, sometimes you say to yourself, am I really free? I know I’m on parole. That’s not free. I’m still what I look at as being a slave because I can’t go anywhere I want. I have to ask permission. I feel like, I’m 51 years old, but I feel like I’m somebody’s child. My parole officer is at least 20 years younger than me. And when I’m going to him, I have to ask him, I have to text him and tell him I want to go here, or I can’t even spend the night anywhere. These things are like being in prison.
Chris Hedges:Those in prison carry the trauma they endured in prison with them when they leave. The emotional numbness they needed to cope on the inside. The ever present threat of violence. The military-like regime where they are ordered about, made to march in single lines, thrown into isolation for minor infractions, locked in cages the size of bathrooms, and forced to obey the whims of corrections officers. These experiences and the conditioning they engender are not easily discarded, as Boris Franklin, who was in prison for 11 years, explained.
Boris Franklin:Well, one thing I learned when I got in prison, I had never heard more “excuse me” and “pardon me.” Because immediately you have to let the individual know that I don’t have a problem with you. So being rude in a prison comes at a different cost, especially in the maximum security prison in this hyper masculine space.
Thomas Dollard:I’ve seen a guy stab a guy in the yard and he died. I watched it. Did I think that I would see this day? No. I got cut on my face by somebody who was mad at somebody that I was close with. Every day when you wake up and you are in a situation like that in your cage, then you don’t see no way out.
Boris Franklin:When people are rushing, the hustle and bustle with getting on the buses when we were going to Rutgers, they don’t say excuse me. So you don’t know if… So my knee-jerk response is to respond to that disrespect in the way which I might have responded in that prison space. I mean, you were there when I came home and I was so socially awkward. I sat next to Chris at my first family outing, and I couldn’t order off an IHOP menu because choices were overwhelming. I wasn’t used to choices. We had a limited amount of choices. So your senses just get overwhelmed with everything. I couldn’t nail down the timing for crossing the street. I never thought that would be a problem. I hadn’t crossed the street in so long, I couldn’t time the cars. I would be sitting there just waiting for no traffic to come out.
Thomas Dollard:We have stores everywhere. This has been… Whew. This was a culture shock for me, coming back to a world that I really had no idea. When you are on the inside, you think you know what the world is like out here. Trust me. You have absolutely no idea.
Boris Franklin:And then when I went places, I felt like even if I was in a place where nobody knew me, I felt like I was sitting in a room with a prison uniform on with DLC on the back of it, and everyone knew I had just gotten out of prison. But I didn’t know there would be this storm of emotions going on inside of me that people could not see, that this anxiety that people could not see, that I was always under this pressure, which makes you want to leave. And then you get to the point where to be outside at night, I always felt like I was running back home because I was out of place. I’m supposed to be locked down at this time. I’m usually locked in a cell. And I remember I used to just have to stay out later and go further. Just drive a little further, something as small as breaking a rule. Like throwing something out of a window. I was so afraid to do anything for a long period of time, that I had put myself in such a box.
Thomas Dollard:When you hear a knock on the door, you fear that’s the day that the police are coming to say, come on, we’re taking you back. And you know you’ve done nothing, but you’ve seen people go back for nothing.
Boris Franklin:And another thing I was afraid to express, I was afraid to express anger because of what it cost. The first time I expressed anger was against my brother, and my older brother said, there’s a lot of stuff buried in there. It came out in a very unhealthy way in which I had to go back to him and I had to apologize to him. But you learned to choke back your anger so much, because an officer could disrespect you and it costs you to say something back. It causes you to defend yourself. All of that comes at a cost. So you just become a shell of yourself and you shrink a little bit, and you have to figure out how can I assert myself in this world and not be afraid that I’m going to make a social mistake and it’s going to come at cost? And so I lived trapped in that box.
And another thing that I had, I couldn’t ride in an elevator. Because you know the cage coming out of the mess hall? I got trapped in the cage. And I didn’t know I had any trauma, but one day I was going to the cage and I felt my underarm sweating. And I was trying to figure out, why am I sweating? And the closer I got to the cage, my heart started beating. And I realized that that day we got locked in the cage had traumatized me. Having this trauma, we got trapped in the elevator in New York. You remember that?
Chris Hedges: Yeah, I was with you.
Boris Franklin:And inside I was freaking out. I mean, we got trapped in an elevator in New York, where the fire department has to show up. Inside I don’t know, if I didn’t worry about someone else, truthfully, I worried about you. It took my mind off of it. Because I was like, I don’t want Chris to freak out. I didn’t want anybody to freak out, because if anybody lost it, I was done for it. It was just going to be a snowball effect. Because my knee-jerk response, I just wanted to get on the ground and just ball up. I just wanted to get on the ground and ball up.
Thomas Dollard:Let me say that in this way, things change as far as the people around you. Some for guys who you’ve been with in prison for years, they don’t want you to go. And some of the other people that are jealous that you are seeing something that they’re not seeing. And I have a life sentence. And a lot of the guys that I’ve dealt with over the years have life sentences. So for one of us to go home is rare. We don’t expect to walk out those doors when they say life. They said 30 years to life for us. We don’t look at the 30 years, we look at the life aspect. And some of us decided that we were going to do things inside the prison that will harm them when they have to go to the parole board because they didn’t look at this day. Like when I first got sentenced, I couldn’t see 30 years in prison. Can I? I’m 21 years old. I haven’t even lived for 30 years. Once that 30 years was up, it became something different. Like, wow, I can actually see my way out. Sometimes you can’t see no way out and that hole is so small that you are trying to dig your way out of it, but you’re staying in your own way.
Boris Franklin:You have to depend on yourself or a few good comrades. But friendship, I can be friends with these guys, but they’re flighty too, because some of them get paroled. And each time a guy leaves, he’ll take a part of you, because this is the guy you did three years with of a very hard space. And he helped make you laugh. And he helped, talked about sports and whatever. We experienced our life together, and then he’s gone and I got no one. I got to find another guy to bond with. And it’s like, how many times can you do this? How many people are going to keep leaving me? And to the point.
Chris Hedges:Making promises.
Boris Franklin:Yeah. Yeah. Then they make the promises as to, I’ll write you when I get out, I’ll send you something. And then somebody will ask you, hey, have you heard from Ron? Like, nah, I ain’t heard from him. Well, you know how they do once they get out there. So all of those things, it’s not just the anger. It’s everything, to become a complete person again, it takes time.
Chris Hedges:Kabir also described a similar difficulty in adjusting.
Robert “Kabir” Luma:Well, for one you’re not socialized. And psychologically, like when I got out, I still was in prison mode. Like I was uptight, everybody that walked past me I had to look at them, and even sometimes I still do that. I got to know who’s around me as much as I can. I got to take it into my environment because you never know what’s going to happen. So I was on security mode. I had a girlfriend when I got out and we used to go places, and she used to be like, why you looking at her? I’m like, I’m not only looking at her. I’m looking at the kid that walked past me. I’m looking at the dude over here in the car, what we consider being on point. And that was one of the things that we want to consider, the bad habit, or maybe a safety mechanism.
Chris Hedges:Just getting approved for release is a hurdle even if prisoners have completed their mandatory sentences. I sat down a few days after Russ was released with him, Ron, and Boris, to discuss why so many people who are eligible are denied parole.
So the first hurdle for getting out is going before the parole board. And it is a hurdle, and a lot of people don’t make it. So Boris, you didn’t go before a parole board, but both, Russ, you and Ron did. Why don’t you begin Russ and just tell us how it’s set up and how difficult it is to get through a parole board after you’ve done your time?
Russ Owen:When I went before the panel, it was two people. And as I mentioned before, I went in there, and somebody was in there that was in previous to me. And there were some complications with that. The guy stormed out and then they made him go back in. So by the time I got in there, they asked me what my name is, what my number is. And you could tell that they weren’t prepared because right then and there, they were trying to read my case. And my crime involved a knife and the guy asked me, so where did you get the gun from? So it started off rocky, and it’s already an intimidating process, and I was already intimidated. So that made me even more, more anxiety filled me up, and it was aggressive. They questioned me about my education, and it wasn’t like, good job. It was, how did you get this education?
And then, I had caught a couple charges, minor charges, and I never did a time in the hole. I never did ad seg, but they were aggressive with the charges. And I was only in there for 15 minutes. And I got up and I left and I couldn’t believe it, I’m like, what just happened. And I thought it was a dream. And the guy told me to take more programs. And I couldn’t believe he told me to take more programs because I felt like I took every program already.
Chris Hedges:There are certain rules that, when you go before a parole board, you have to fulfill. So Gene Burta, he’s been in almost 40 years, I think. He keeps going before the parole board, and they ask him to express remorse for his crime. And he says he did not commit the crime and he won’t express remorse for something he didn’t do, and therefore he’s thrown right out the door and he’s denied parole. I want to talk about when you go before that board, they have whatever you were incarcerated for three decades plus earlier, they go through that with excruciating detail. And there are all sorts of traps that they set up. And if you’re not very deft about handling how you speak about that crime, you’re sent right back. So maybe begin, Russ, and you, Ron, talk about that process.
Russ Owen:Well, for them, you might have an idea in your head of what really happened, and what really happened might even be true. But they already have your narrative because you went to trial or you pled guilty, whatever it is that happened, they have the narrative on you. They wrote the narrative on you. So the trap is that you can’t go in there and change the narrative. On paper, you’re guilty. So you can’t go, it’s not a guilt or innocence process. For them, you’re already judged guilty. So when you go in there and you start arguing the facts of the case, no well that didn’t happen, this happened. They don’t want to hear that. If it says that you shot somebody seven times or stabbed somebody seven times, that’s what it is. So if you go in there and say, no, that’s not what happened, that’s already the trap. And once you start fighting back or trying to put in your own narrative, I think it’s downhill from there.
Chris Hedges:Even if it’s true.
Russ Owen:Even if it’s true. Even for me, there were a lot of things that came up that weren’t true, but you got to play the game. If you don’t play the game, you can see what’s going on with Gene and so many others, you get caught in that cycle and you’re not saying what they want to hear, unfortunately.
Chris Hedges:But there’s also, it’s not just about facts. There are all sorts of psychological states that they want you to have attained in order to be released. And if you’re not very attuned to what they’re looking for, however innocent and truthful and well-meaning, you’re finished.
Ron Pierce:Yeah. And you had mentioned remorse, and that came up, one of the parole panel told me after I went through the whole panel and talked to everybody, and it comes back and they ask you questions on their way back. They said, in all this process I haven’t heard you say anything that leads me to believe you’re remorseful. Now that in itself is a trap because he’s trying to make you go off and lose focus of who you are. So my answer to him I think helped me immensely in that I relayed to him not only but I’m sorry that you didn’t hear remorse in my narrative, but I’m remorseful not only for what I did to this man, but for how I took his choices away from him from that day to this day, how I took from his family the very dynamic that they can never get back. And I went through the process of how I was remorseful for the good he could have done for any community from that day till then, and how it was even remorseful for what I did to my family, my family has a hole in it. So by answering that, you could see his face change.
Chris Hedges:And when they get a hit, they say, there’s a certain number of years before you can come back. And some of those hits have been, am I right, up to 10 years?
Ron Pierce:The worst I’ve heard was 60, but I think that
Chris Hedges:60 years? You can’t come back for 60 years?
Russ Owen:Steve Perry.
Ron Pierce:Yeah. Steve Perry got a 60 year hit. The court changed it to 15, but the parole board gave him 60.
Boris Franklin:The problem with that is like, I did go to parole once as a short termer. And when you go on a short term and you could very much remember the crime, I hadn’t moved that far from it. But when you’re doing long sentences, first, when you go in, there’s a depression because of everything that you’ve done, everything that you’ve lost, your children, your family, and the fact that you’ve committed this crime. So you spend all of these years trying to come out of this depression and get past that place. And now someone wants you to go back into that space in order to get your parole, which is problematic because now you have to relive the trauma. And I say this because the prison had approached me to do some programs for them. They thought I would be good for the programs to get grants.
So they wanted to put me in the program. So when [Trenton] came, they had to focus on the victim program. And they came to me and they said, well, could you get in that program? And then when [Trenton] comes, could you talk? And I said, first of all, I couldn’t do focus on the victim because I thought it was a bad idea. Because so many individuals were still seeing themselves as victims of their communities, of the systems, of all the social ills, and by then they had done enough reading to realize they had done something to someone and they were remorseful. But then they also were aware of what the system had done to them, which made some tension there. And that’s what you walk into the room with. Because now what you have to be essentially is when you walk into a parole meeting is an actor. When you go to classification, you have to be an actor.
Chris Hedges:Would it be correct, Boris, to say that if you came in and attempted in any way to talk about your own victimhood, however real, that would pretty much destroy your capacity to get parole?
Boris Franklin:You’re done. You’re done. They don’t want to hear you being a victim.
Chris Hedges: Join me next week for part two of The Long Road Home, where we examine the effects of mass incarceration on families, the criminal caste system, and the struggle by those who are released to reintegrate into American society.
Qualified immunity is a legal precedent that has allowed cops to evade accountability for violating civil rights for decades. But recent arguments in front of the federal circuit appeals court by two cop watchers could bring that precedent to an end. The Police Accountability Report examines how the actions taken by police in Lakeland, Colorado, to prevent First Amendment activists Liberty Freak and Eric Brandt from filming a seemingly routine traffic stop could could lead to a legal showdown that might make it easier to hold police accountable.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Adam Coley
Taya Graham:Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. To do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. Today, we will achieve that goal by reporting on developments in a case involving a Colorado cop watcher that might – And I repeat, might – Have a profound effect on a legal precedent that has made bad cops immune from civil rights lawsuits, and how the implications about an upcoming ruling could affect filming cops across the country.
But before we get started, I want you to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at PAR@therealnews.com, and please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments, and 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 consider hitting the Patreon donate link pinned in the comments below, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. All right, we’ve gotten that out of the way.
Now, as many of you know, there is, to say the least, an inherent bias in our criminal justice system. That is, when it comes to accountability, the scales of justice are, generally speaking, tipped towards the institution of law enforcement, as we’ve seen in countless cases across the country that we have covered. Part of this imbalance is due to a concept that we’ve talked about often on the show called qualified immunity. It is a legal precedent that evolved to protect public officials from so-called 1983 suits. Federal Code 1983 was actually passed during the Reconstruction era, and was designed to give US citizens the right to sue public officials who had violated their rights, a history that we will unpack later.
But as the law was implemented, the court began to carve out exceptions in certain cases. Namely, public officials could not be held accountable if the right in question was not “clearly established,” a precedent that we will be focusing on today as we unpack a case brought by a cop watcher who is challenging the precedent in a major civil rights lawsuit.
The story starts when cop watchers Abodi Irizarry, also known as Liberty Freak, and Eric Brandt were recording a traffic stop in Lakewood, Colorado. The pair had been quietly filming a DUI sobriety test being administered by police. That’s when a cop named Yehia decided he would intervene and block Liberty Freak from filming. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Officer Yehia:Can I help you?
Liberty Freak:No.
Officer Yehia:All right.
Liberty Freak:I don’t need your help. Is there a fucking problem, [crosstalk] you fucking goon?
Officer Yehia:[crosstalk] out of my face, asshole.
Liberty Freak:Get the fuck out of my fucking line, man. What’s wrong with you? Clown.
Officer Yehia:Are you a clown?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham:However, blocking Abodi’s ability to record the traffic stop was just the beginning, because shortly after he stood in front of Abodi’s camera, the officer actually backed up into him. Take a look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Officer Yehia:Can I help you?
Liberty Freak:No.
Officer Yehia:All right.
Liberty Freak:I don’t need your help.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham:But that wasn’t the end of the encounter. Not at all, because Officer Yehia got into a squad car and drove at Eric Brandt, who was also filming at the time.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Eric Brandt:Come at me with a deadly weapon. I’ll [buzzing]
Liberty Freak:Get out of his way.
Eric Brandt:I’m not going to get out of the way.
Liberty Freak:He can get through there just fine.
Eric Brandt:Running at me at a high speed. What the fuck is wrong with you, bitch? Zero nine, Lakewood police hot hit bitch right there.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham:Now, this all might have been just written off as another troubling encounter with police bent upon stopping cop watchers from monitoring their actions. But in fact, just the opposite happened, and it’s quite possible that the officer might rue the day he decided to interfere with two citizen journalists exercising their First Amendment rights. That’s because Abodi and Eric Brandt decided to sue Lakewood county police, a case that was initially dismissed by a circuit court in Colorado due to, and you guessed it, qualified immunity. The circuit judge ruled that the right to record had not been established, even though Colorado had passed a law guaranteeing that right in 2016. But then, something really curious happened, perhaps even unexpected.
As their suit made its way through the courts, other organizations joined in, including the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Cato Institute, among others. All of whom argued in amicus briefs that the case was critical to preserving First Amendment rights. And also, in the case of the Cato Institute, a misuse of the concept of qualified immunity.
And all of these arguments were on display last week, as the case was argued before the 10th circuit court of appeals. Now, cameras were not allowed in the courtroom, and it is against the law to broadcast the audio. However, thanks to a friend of the show, friends and code, we have a transcript of the proceedings. Which is why I thought it would be useful to review some of the arguments.
The key question during the hearing was if the right to record had already been established. In other words, would a reasonable officer have known when he interfered with Liberty Freak’s ability to record the traffic stop that his actions were a violation of an already established Constitutional right?
Well, what do you think? Is the First Amendment really an obscure, little known, unestablished right? But the hearing turned truly bizarre when the lawyers for the officer were confronted with a critical question. As you can see in this video, after blocking Liberty Freak from filming, Officer Yehia got into a squad car and drove at Eric Brandt, who was also filming at the time. That action prompted the justice to ask the officer’s lawyer this, “Even if Yehia wasn’t aware of the First Amendment right to record, didn’t he know that driving his car at a person with a camera was a violation of their rights?”
I’m serious. That’s what the justices ask. And to find out how the lawyer responded, I’m joined by a reporting partner Stephen Janis, who’s been reviewing the transcripts. Now just a note. We did an interview with Liberty Freak shortly before he reported to prison in Colorado to serve six months for another case related to free speech, which we will show you later. But for now, we’re going to talk to Stephen. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis:Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham:So what was the lawyer’s response to the judge who asked if the police officer Yehia should have known it was not okay to drive at a person filming police, and why is that relevant to the case?
Stephen Janis:It’s a very tortured argument. And the reason it’s relevant is simply because there are certain aspects of the Constitution, or certain things that a person should know intuitively. In other words, there’s precedent that says, okay, even if it isn’t an established right, you should still know it’s not okay to drive at someone who’s trying to exercise their First Amendment right. And so the lawyer kept trying to go back to the idea which all lawyers for cops use, that somehow this wasn’t established, as if the First Amendment was some new idea. But instead the lawyer ended I think sounding kind of stupid, to be honest with you, because he’s trying to make an argument there’s no way the cops should have known, I can’t drive as someone with a camera. And that’s absurd.
Taya Graham:Now, this case focuses on the legal precedent of qualified immunity. We interviewed one of the organizations about their support for Abodi and Eric’s case. Can you talk about what they said?
Stephen Janis:Yeah. We talked to the Cato Institute, which filed a brief on behalf of Abodi, and we talked to a man named Jay Schweikert, who was a person who is kind of an expert on qualified immunity. And it’s really a twisted story. You’re talking about a precedent that evolved out of a statute that was supposed to ensure people’s rights by allowing them to sue. Let’s listen to what he had to say.
Jay Schweikert:You know, the doctrine of qualified immunity routinely protects public officials, including and especially police officers, from civil liability, even when they have violated someone’s Constitutional rights. And so civil rights attorneys, criminal defense attorneys whose clients had had their rights violated, and scholars who worked in this area all were seeing how meritorious civil rights claims could not go addressed because of what is, in essence, a lawless legal technicality, and that’s qualified immunity.
And so Congress, to give teeth to the 14th Amendment, created this federal cause of action, which simply meant if your rights were violated by a state or local official, you could sue them in federal court and get a remedy. So very straightforward. And the language of the statute is very straightforward. It pretty much says any person acting under color of state law who violates your Constitutional rights shall be liable to the party injured. Period.
That’s it. Nothing about any immunities, nothing. And for about a hundred years, the courts interpreted that statute to mean essentially what it said. There’s actually a very important case in the early 20th century called Myers v. Anderson, which involved a lawsuit against state officials who used a grandfather clause statute to deny the right to vote to several Black citizens. And those citizens sued these election officials under section 1983. And those defendants raised a kind of proto version of what would later become the qualified immunity defense. They said, hey, we didn’t know that this statute was unconstitutional. So even if we did violate their Constitutional rights, we weren’t acting in bad faith. So we shouldn’t be liable. And the court easily rejected that argument and basically said, what are you talking about? That’s irrelevant. Their rights are protected under the 15th Amendment. You violated those rights. Therefore you are liable under this statute. Period.
But then about half a century later, the Supreme Court essentially reversed itself in a case called Pearson v. Ray. This is a 1967 decision that was actually… This is very similar to the Myers decision. It involved police officers who had arrested civil rights protestors under an anti loitering statute that violated the First Amendment. But in this case, the Supreme Court said, well, even if you violated their Constitutional rights, they have to show that you were not acting in good faith. And in this case, the Supreme Court was kind of grounding this decision on the common law tort of false arrest. So in private tort actions in the 19th century, you could sue a police officer for false arrest. But if the officer had good faith and probable cause that you had committed a crime, they wouldn’t be liable for that tort.
So the Supreme Court kind of analogized that and said, so because that was the law of false arrest at common law, we’re going to read that good faith defense into this statute and say that you can raise a similar good faith defense under section 1983. Now I think that decision was wrong. But if that’s where things had stood, I don’t think this would be the issue that it is today. Because at that point in time, the Supreme Court was still requiring actual good faith on the part of defendants sued under section 1983. But that changed in a 1982 decision called Harlow v. Fitzgerald.
And this is really the case that invented qualified immunity in the modern sense. And what the court said there was, actually, it’s irrelevant whether or not defendants are acting in good faith. The only thing that matters is whether they violated clearly established law. And that phrase “clearly established law” is really the key to understanding modern qualified immunity. Because what it means in practice is that a defendant will get qualified immunity unless there is a prior judicial decision involving nearly the same factual scenario as the present case. In other words, it’s quite often the case that courts will say, yes, your rights were violated, but we can’t find a prior case where someone else’s rights were violated in quite the same way. So therefore qualified immunity, and the case is dismissed.
Stephen Janis:So Taya, as you could tell, this is really, really bizarre. You have a statute, it’s there to ensure our rights, and yet this legal precedent evolves that allows public officials to completely ignore it. I mean, really it allows them to be ignorant. It almost, I think in a way, incentivizes ignorance of the law. I didn’t know it was established right. So as you can see, it’s really twisted.
Taya Graham:So wait, they’re saying that this precedent was carved out basically to make it easier for public officials to make the case, hey, I didn’t know it was a right, and absolve themselves from responsibility. Am I getting this right? That ignorance of the law can be an excuse for them?
Stephen Janis:And yeah, Taya, basically really, in a sense, it was like they passed the law to ensure our civil rights and then got cold feet about it and said, you know what? We can’t let this happen. Almost made the whole thing worse. So really, I think it raises a lot of questions about our legal system, a lot about legal precedent. And maybe we have to stop thinking about laws and codifications being some sort of secular Bible. Maybe they’re just, some of them are irrational and need to be tossed out.
Taya Graham:And now we’re going to show you some excerpts from an interview I did with Liberty Freak shortly before he reported to jail.
[INTERVIEW CLIP BEGINS]
Taya Graham: Liberty Freak, thanks for joining me. So you have to turn yourself in. What charges are these related to?
Liberty Freak:This is related to a charge that I got in the city of Inglewood, but it was prosecuted and courted over in Arapahoe County, Colorado. Basically the entire thing was because I called the security guard a name.
Taya Graham:So what name did you call him?
Liberty Freak:I called him a pussy. He was having an altercation with Eric, I was like, wow, you’re a pussy. And he’s like, what’d you call me? I said, a pussy. And he is like, are you… He goes, are you harassing me right now? And I was like, yes, you pussy.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Security Guard:After he told me I was fucking stupid.
Liberty Freak:That’s right.
Security Guard:After you told me I was [crosstalk].
Liberty Freak:Poor baby.
Security Guard:– Disrespected me –
Liberty Freak:Poor baby, poor baby. Aw, you soft tender little girl, you poor Skippy.
Security Guard:Wow, are you recording this?
Liberty Freak:Yes I am.
Security Guard:This is how you’re harassing. You’re harassing me right now.
Liberty Freak:I’m harassing you? You’re a pussy. You’re a pussy. You’re a pussy. Yeah. Write me up. You’re a pussy.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Liberty Freak:Because I called him a pussy three times in a row, I call this my Beetlejuice case, because the judge even admitted in the court that if I just would’ve called him a pussy once I would’ve been okay. But being that I called him a pussy three times in a row, that made it repeated taunts. And I was like, that’s not how that law works, but it doesn’t matter. When it’s corrupt all the way up to the judge, there’s no law you can present. There’s nothing that protects you. There’s no Constitution that protects you, nothing. Nothing like…
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Liberty Freak:Somebody call the Inglewood police department, right. You better not fucking touch me. [inaudible] Hey, touch me. [shouting in distance].
Hey, Hey dude, get your fucking hands off me. Hey, get your fucking hands off me. What the fuck? Hey, I’m a sick man, god damn it.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham:So it seems you’re facing six months in prison essentially for using profanity. How are you holding up?
Liberty Freak:I’m concerned. I’m concerned for my health. You know, as far as the whole [COVID] thing or whatever. I had this tooth removed because the dental plan in jail is they ignore you until the tooth falls out on its own. And that’s not even a joke.
Speaker:Wow.
Liberty Freak:And the judge is adamant that I served six months from my offense, knowing my illnesses, knowing there was no violence involved. There was nothing, it was just simply an issue of words. But she feels that I need to serve six months for calling somebody names.
Taya Graham:Your other case that concerns a cop interfering with you filming a car stop, that is going to circuit court, right?
Liberty Freak:Yeah. We won our arguments and we will be having oral arguments in the state Supreme Court here on May 18. Unfortunately I will not be able to attend the oral arguments of my biggest achievement. But it’s okay. It’ll be recorded forever. So I’m going to request to see if maybe they can give me a writ from the jail to where I can possibly, hopefully, God willing, attend on the phone, maybe.
Taya Graham:You have a lot of people and organizations backing this case.
Liberty Freak:Not on my behalf, but in favor of our argument. They don’t call it on my behalf. They just say in favor of whatever. So I’ll take it.
[INTERVIEW CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham:Now. One of the things we like to do on the show is penetrate the veil, so to speak, of the legal system which governs our lives. That is, consider how the law is often construed in ways that might not seem as fair or even logical as it appears on the surface.
Which brings me to a concept which underlies a large swath of how police can and cannot violate our rights. It’s a legal idea that is the root of the argument in the case regarding Liberty Freak’s right to record the police. In the hearings over Abodi’s case, it was referenced thusly: Would a reasonable officer have known that interfering in Abodi and Eric’s right to record was violating an established right? That is, would a rational actor have been aware that attempting to prevent them from recording police performing their duties in public not be cognizant of the fact that they both had the First Amendment right to film?
Sounds like an odd question. As I said before, the First Amendment is hardly unknown. But what I want to focus on in this case is the notion of reasonableness. It’s a seemingly innocuous word which pervades the legal guidelines that govern police in a variety of situations. Among them, when and if they can use deadly force.
But I also think it’s a word that leads to troubling contradictions and allows cops to evade responsibility for their actions. I mean, just think about it for a moment. This whole notion of reasonableness twists the responsibility of police in ways I think are often overlooked because it sort of assumes that the system which they inhabit and the actions they take are by default reasonable. In other words, there is a presumption of reasonableness which pervades law enforcement, a sense that regardless of how they behave or what decision they make, the whole process is rational and inevitable, and can’t be second guessed.
What do I mean? Well, let’s look at an example of how rational police actually are, especially when afforded the opportunity to act as they see fit. The story involves an obscure law in the state of New Jersey that prohibits anyone from having a frame on their license plate that obscures any of the information on the tag itself. As you probably know, many people like to use frames to show support for their alma mater or sports teams or military service, et cetera. But apparently New Jersey police found these plates a little too enticing. Turns out that from 2017 to 2022, New Jersey state troopers wrote 500,000 summons for minor infractions of the law. Let me repeat, in just five years, law enforcement officers issued half a million tickets for what was at best a minor issue with a license plate. And I’m not talking about obscuring a letter or number.
No, the vast majority of citations were for partially obscuring the words “New Jersey.” Seriously. Does that sound reasonable to you? In fact, cops wrote so many tickets that the New Jersey state legislature decided to intervene and change the law. The new law would allow motorists to have a frame that partially obscures the word New Jersey or Garden State. So in light of our contemplation of the implications of the concept of a reasonable police officer, what does this particular example of officer discretion tell us about the idea in general?
Well, I think it demonstrates that our legal system is, again, premised upon some pretty sketchy legal thinking. Because as we’ve witnessed time and time again on this show, officers have exhibited an inclination to act unreasonably, given the chance. More often than not, when confronted with choices to be reasonable, they often choose to take the least reasonable path possible.
I mean, how else can you explain writing half a million citations to motorists who use something as diabolical as a license plate frame? Or how can an officer argue in court he was reasonably unaware of the First Amendment. The point I’m trying to make is that the language used to ascribe power to officers is just too damn easy to manipulate. That is, the discretion we give to officers is too often simply an inherent bias against our Constitutional rights. And what is alarming about these words is how much latitude they actually give officers to be unreasonable. How it precludes almost any sense of responsibility and accountability in favor of simply letting an officer do as they please and then argue in court they didn’t know any better because they were behaving reasonably.
Oh, and by the way, the new law says the license plate holders are not subject to a fine. And I quote, “If they do not reasonably obscure any of the identifying numbers on the tag.” Are we just supposed to hope that New Jersey police will suddenly become reasonable? Are we supposed to hope that officer Yehia is now aware of the First Amendment? Are we supposed to just hope that our legislatures are going to intervene in every state to correct this double standard of police being able to plead ignorance of the law? I think that might be testing the limits of reason itself. I know it’s testing my patience, and probably yours as well.
I’d like to thank Abodi, also known as Liberty Freak, for speaking with us. Thank you Abodi. And of course I want to thank Jay Schweikert of the Cato Institute for speaking with us and taking the time to explain the possibilities for abolishing qualified immunity. 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, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham:And I want to thank the mods of the show, Noli Dee and Lacey R. For their support. Thank you. And a very special thanks to our Patreons, especially our super friends, Shane Bushta and Pineapple Girl. 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 brutality or misconduct, 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 appreciate them. And we have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So if you do feel inspired to donate, 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.
“As a result of being on or near wastelands, prisons constantly expose those inside to serious environmental hazards, from tainted water to harmful air pollutants,” Leah Wang recently wrote for the Prison Policy Initiative. “These conditions manifest in health conditions and deaths that are unmistakably linked to those hazards.” In this edition of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Paul Wright about the scope and scale of the drastic environmental hazards the prison-industrial complex poses to incarcerated people, prison staff, and surrounding communities.
Mansa Musa:Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-host with Eddie Conway. First of all, let’s acknowledge this, that Eddie is making a lot of progress and he’s continued to get better. And we are thankful for all your well wishes and your concerns. We’re also thankful for your continuing to respect the family’s wishes that Eddie has privacy as he recovers. Thank you very much.
We also thank you for continuing to support Rattling the Bars and The Real News. The prison-industrial complex has a lot of problems, and so many [more are likely to come]. But one problem that seems to be going overlooked is the environmental hazards that take place daily in the prison-industrial complex. Here to talk about the environmental hazardous conditions that take place in prisons throughout the United States and the world is Paul Wright. Paul Wright is the executive director of Prison Law News, and he’s heavily involved in this space. Welcome, Paul, to Rattling the Bars.
Paul Wright:Hi. Thanks for having me on the show.
Mansa Musa:Let’s go here first. How prevalent are these environmental conditions in prisons, be it the BOP, state prisons, or county jails? How prevalent are these environmental conditions?
Paul Wright:It’s actually pretty common. And this is the context that the United States has around 3,500 jails, around 2,000 prisons, plus other types of detention facilities ranging from psychiatric facilities, the civil commitment facilities, military prisons, immigration prisons, and more. And I think it’s important to note that there’s almost two different types, broadly speaking, there are two main types of environmental hazards that prisoners face. One is where the prison or the jail itself is built on literally a toxic waste site. And we have this all over the country. Prisons like the Federal Prison System in Florence, Colorado, where the supermax prison is. That’s built on literally an abandoned uranium mine. We have a lot of prisons in Pennsylvania and Ohio and other parts of Appalachia that are built on abandoned mining sites. And these are literally prisons that are on toxic waste sites.
This is very widespread. So on the one hand, you’ve got the prisons that are built on basically land that’s been deemed too dangerous to do anything else with. It’s too dangerous for any type of industrial activity. It’s been largely abandoned. Then the flip side of it is, you’ve got the prison itself is the source of the toxic waste. We see this literally all over the country, where prisons, in some cases literally due to overcrowding, they’re sources of everything from raw sewage into neighboring waterways, to the prison itself is spewing or dispersing toxic waste, whether it’s heavy metals, it’s dangerous chemicals, or whatever, into the surrounding environment. And those are the two main things that we see. And because there’s so many prisons and jails in this country, it’s literally a pretty widespread problem.
And the big thing is, when it’s the former, when it’s a prison that’s built on the toxic waste site or the prison itself that’s physically in a toxic space, the main people that are being impacted by that are the staff and the prisoners, the people that are literally confined there, working there. But then when it’s the prison that’s the source of the toxic waste, typically, the prisoners and staff are obviously impacted, but so is the surrounding community. And literally of the cases where the surrounding community is the one that’s being most impacted by the toxic waste or the raw sewage or whatever being dispersed or generated by the prison. So those are the two broad categories of toxic waste that we see coming out of or being impacted by prisons.
Mansa Musa:And I know from experience that in terms of the first situation where most prisons are built on toxic sites. In Maryland, for example, Eastern Correctional Facility was built on a swamp. So it’s sinking, and the water that is being used by the prisoners even to drink or take showers in is oftentimes polluted, and oftentimes they’re told to let the water run, or when they take a shower it [feels slimy]. But let’s go, let’s look at prisons regulated by the EPA or OSHA. Are they regulated to ensure that the hazardous environmental conditions are somewhat kept in check, or are they allowed to just run amok?
Paul Wright:They pretty much run amok. I mean, we’ve tried literally for decades to get the Environmental Protection Agency to do stuff about prisons. And it’s interesting that, for virtually all of their entire history, the EPA has done nothing about prisons. And that was kind of interesting is, in the early 2000s, the Mid-Atlantic region, which of the EPA, which was basically Pennsylvania and Delaware and that area there, they actually took some enforcement actions against prisons. And not a lot, but five or six. And they went in, they inspected prisons, they fined them for everything from having old coal fired water heating plants on prison grounds that were causing air pollution. Those were the main ones. There were also things where fuel storage facilities on the grounds of the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg in Pennsylvania were leaking, and they also fined him over that.
And they did this for around five or six years. And then not only did they stop doing it, but it was kind of interesting. They also stopped posting this on their website. And not only did they do that, but then they removed it from their website. We were trying to research what the EPA was doing, if they’re doing anything else. And we had the documents on our website, we downloaded theirs, we put them on ours. And then when we went back to see what else they’d done, we found that the documents they had showing their previous enforcement actions were no longer there. So we called the EPA and asked them, hey, why’d you take the documents down? And they said, oh, we’re updating our website. Well, since when does updating mean you take the old stuff down? And they never answered that.
But basically, the EPA, that was almost an exception to the rule. And I forget how many regions or zones the EPA has. I want to say it’s 10 or 11 around the country, but this was the only one. The Mid-Atlantic region was the only one where they ever took any type of enforcement action around prisons. And they only did it for a very limited period of time. They only did it for a couple of years, and then they stopped. And the EPA is not a very transparent organization. So when we’ve tried to get answers to these questions, we haven’t been able to get them. But the upshot though is, in answer to your question is that yes, they very much do run amok. The interesting thing is that then when we’ve tried looking at whether state agencies are doing any type of enforcement action, you talk about Maryland in years past, we’ve reached out to… I think this would be the Department of the Environment in Maryland, to ask them what they were doing about environmental issues in Maryland prisons.
And their response was that all their records were on paper. They had them in filing cabinets. And if we wanted copies of these reports, we’re going to have to pay thousands of dollars to get the hard copies. They had nothing electronic, they had nothing they could otherwise share with us or tell us about. And we found this with a lot of states. Some states are a little bit better, California is one that’s interesting. The California Department of the Environment, they’ve taken enforcement actions against literally dozens of prisons. They impose millions of dollars of fines every year for prisons doing everything from dumping raw sewage into waterways around the prisons and the surrounding environment, to prisons dumping toxic chemicals and dangerous chemicals into the waterways and the environment around the prison. But their whole model is literally one of imposing fines.
They don’t stop the actual pollution. And it’s interesting because when you delve into the reason for this, the federal law under the Clean Water Act, for example, is that no one can sue a toxic polluter if a state agency or another regulatory agency is taking action against them. So what they’re doing in California, for example, is the Department of the Ecology is fining the Department of Corrections, another state agency, millions of dollars every year for all these toxic water and toxic waste violations. So the money’s going from one state bank account into another state bank account. But by doing so, it keeps anyone from suing them privately to get them to stop the pollution in the first place. And the upshot is that there’s nothing being done to actually stop the pollution. Also in California, for example, there’s prisons in Kern County, the Kern County State Prison, for example, they have incredibly high levels of arsenic in the water. And it’s a naturally occurring chemical. It’s also a known carcinogen, and obviously, I mean, that’s what they use in rat poison.
So in high enough quantities, it is fatal to humans. In low quantities, prolonged exposure tends to cause cancer and then it kills you. And the CDCR, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, they’ve known this for years, and basically, they keep the prison open. They keep exposing prisoners to the arsenic tainted water. And the other state agencies that are tasked with regulating this, they do nothing because it’s another state agency.
Mansa Musa:Which brings me to my next question, because as you outline, I remember reading in, I think it was Wolff v. McDonnell case that dealt with the adjustment. And I think I read where it said, it’s no [inaudible] between the constitution in prisons. Which brings me to my next question. And I was researching this, I saw where we had made multiple attempts to get some type of judicial resolve on a litigation level. And the standard is so high. Can you speak on that?
Paul Wright:Sure. One of the things that’s kind of bad about this is the fact that the actual successful litigation around these toxic prison conditions is few and far between. One of the exceptions was a case that the Human Rights Defense Center, of which I’m the director of, recently submitted a friend of the court brief on was a case in Connecticut where prisoners were being exposed to radon. And radon is a naturally occurring gas, it comes out of the soil, it’s colorless and it’s odorless. And basically it impacts a lot of buildings. And especially any places that have hard stones like granite, for example, those tend to be rocks that give off radon. And so the prisoners filed a lawsuit saying, hey, we’re being exposed to radon and the state isn’t doing anything about it. And so that was one of the things that prison officials resisted.
And so far, the case is still ongoing, and the prisoners are seeking damages as well as an injunction to fix the problem. And the interesting thing, at least with radon, that’s an easy fix, that’s a couple $100,000 to basically ensure there’s better ventilation in the prison. And that literally takes care of the problem for radon. Other problems like toxic water, those are a lot more expensive, and in some cases they’re impossible to fix. Prisons use a lot of water, so for places like the current state prison in California where there’s arsenic in the water, the only real alternative there is literally to shut down the prison. That’s about the only thing they can do. There’s not a lot of options there. Likewise, I think, when you see a lot of these prisons have been built in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, they’re built on abandoned coal mines, and there’s problems there with everything from contaminated water from mining chemicals that have gotten into the water supply.
And in some cases, literally, the prisons are sinking. And one of my favorite cases was a prison in Ohio, in Lorain, Ohio, that was built on an abandoned coal mine. And they built the prison, they spent 80 or 90 million dollars to build the prison. And then after around 10 years, the ground was settling, as the earth was collapsing and filling in these mining shafts and everything else. And so the prison started to sink on top of that. There’s some great pictures of these cell blocks where literally the earth sunk six feet. And it’s literally cutting a cell block in half, where all of a sudden one part of the cell block is six feet lower than the other. And so, one of the reasons that so many prisons are built on these toxic waste sites is that under federal environmental law, the polluter that basically pollutes the land is responsible for the cleanup.
And so what’s happened, though, is that by selling this land to prisons and to government entities, they’re kind of off the hook, they’re unloading their liability. When you see some of these hundreds of acres of land in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, these mining companies sold land, in some cases for a dollar, in other cases for a couple $100,000, which on the one hand, you look at it and you say, wow, the government got a great deal here. They paid little or nothing for hundreds of acres of land, but it was also really slick on the part of the companies, because what they’re doing is they’re offloading the liability. As soon as they sold that abandoned coal mine or that abandoned uranium mine to the government, they also wiped out their liability for cleaning it up.
And one of the other things that’s really been especially distressing at the federal level is a lot of people, folks that are old enough to remember this at the end of the Cold War, the United States, the military shut down dozens of bases around the country. And the government in its moment of brilliance there then decided, hey, we’re closing down military bases, but we’re building hundreds of new prisons in the 1990s.
So instead what they did, they found that a lot of these military bases after decades of use were literally… The bases themselves were toxic waste sites for everything from spilled fuel, to ammunition, the lead from a lot of ammunition from shooting ranges and artillery rounds and everything else was a huge problem. So what they wound up doing was literally the Department of Defense transferred a lot of this land, a lot of these military bases to the Bureau of Prisons. That’s why you’ve got prisons… And these aren’t little prisons, either, these are big ones, the federal prison at Fort Dix, New Jersey, that’s like a 3000, that prison. You’ve got the federal prison in Victorville in California. And so you’ve got literally dozens of these former military bases that were pretty much left too contaminated and too toxic for any other land use function. They couldn’t turn them into residential housing, they couldn’t turn them into shopping malls or anything like that. So the brilliant idea was, hey, let’s build prisons here.
Mansa Musa:And I’m recognizing what you’re saying because when we look at the prison landscape, most of the prisons are built in Rural America. And it is Rural America where a lot of these toxic environmental things take place, where the government allowed for these companies to dump and do things. But let’s move on to the effects of prisoners living in these environments. I heard you say radon, and when I was doing research on this, it said radon is the number one cause of lung cancer in prisoners who are in those environments. And I know for a fact that Eddie Conway has a form of lung cancer, and we suspect and believe that he got it from the Maryland prison system. Can you speak on some of the health hazards that are in prisons that have these toxic waste environments?
Paul Wright:Sure. I mean, I think that the big thing is, the problem with a lot of this stuff is that prolonged exposure, it doesn’t lead to immediate… It’s not an immediate thing. And the problem is that a lot of this stuff, prisoners are exposed to these, everything from radon, to arsenic in the water, to coal ash in the air, uranium in the water supply and also in the air, and things like that. And it tends not to be an immediate thing. It’s not as simple as, hey, I drank some water with arsenic and I keeled over dead or I got sick the next day. The way it pans out is, you were drinking arsenic contaminated water for five years, and then 30 years later you’ve got bladder cancer, or 30 years later you’ve got kidney cancer.
And same thing with radon, where you breathe in the radon air, and 20, 30 years later, you’ve got lung cancer. The fact that these are slow killers. And a lot of times, people, they’re dying from this and they don’t know why. It’s just like, wow, I guess I got bladder cancer, it’s just too bad. I guess that’s my bad luck. And they’re not making the connection that drinking contaminated water for five or 10 years while they were in prison might be the culprit. Or the same thing with lung cancer. It’s like, hey, I got lung cancer, hey, I never smoked, I wonder why that is.
And they’re not making the connection that being exposed to radon during a period of incarceration may have led to that. I think that’s what’s the bad thing, it’s not necessarily an immediate thing. Some of the other things, too, that we’re also seeing with climate change having an increasing impact on the environment. We’re also seeing this, especially in places like California, in Oregon, as you mentioned earlier, so many of these prisons built in the last 30 years have been built in rural areas. They’ve built a lot of these prisons in areas that are prone to… Let’s start ticking off the list: forest fires, flooding, hurricane damage. I live here in Florida, and in the last 15 years, between Florida, Louisiana, Texas, literally all the states that border on the Gulf of Mexico, have seen prisons and jails literally devastated by flooding and wind damage caused by hurricanes.
So far, no prisons have been wiped out by a forest fire, but we’ve seen a lot of prisons getting seriously damaged and in danger of getting burned down by forest fires. And then it’s one of the things when we talk about the building of prisons on toxic waste sites, there’s a couple of which I call the trifecta prisons, where one of my favorite ones, as an example, is the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. And this is an integration detention facility, it’s built and operated by the private for-profit company GEO Corrections to house immigration prisoners. And it’s built on an abandoned Asarco aluminum smelter. For 40 or 50 years, Asarco had an aluminum smelter there, so the ground is contaminated with cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, all these heavy metals.
And then for good measure, it’s in a lava flood zone. The jails, I don’t know, around 10 miles or so from Mount Rainier, which is one of the biggest active volcanoes in the United States. And they expect that if and when it blows up again, which it does every couple hundred years, that basically the lava flowing to the sea is going to go straight through where this jail is. And the amazing thing is that everyone knows this. Geologists have known that this is a lava flood zone for decades. And when GEO built the prison there, they knew that it was on an abandoned aluminum smelter that was contaminated. They also knew that it was in a lava flood zone. And they went ahead and built it anyway.
Mansa Musa:Right. I think you made the case earlier about how corporations are allowed to pawn off the clean up or the collateral aspect of these toxic environments by just getting somebody to come in and buy the property. You spoke on two tracks, let’s look as it relates to the prison environment in and of itself, a lot of the industry. I worked in the tag shop when I was incarcerated, and I know a lot of the equipment was antiquated, a lot of the ventilation system – Although they tried to upgrade it. But in comparison to what was necessary, they didn’t do a good job. From your environment, how do you see the prison industry playing into the environmental terrorism that we are talking about today?
Paul Wright:The prison industry is a huge source of toxic chemicals and toxic waste in the prison. That’s why, when I mentioned earlier that, in a lot of cases, the prison itself is the source of toxic chemicals and contamination to the outside environment, prison industries are the main one. In Prison Legal News, over the decades we’ve reported so many examples of toxic waste coming out of prison industries, especially stuff having to do… It seems like there’s certain industry categories that it’s almost like you can almost have your checkbox. If they’re doing anything to do with painting. And in most states, it’s prison industries that do the road signs that you see along the interstate and alongside the road, those are all being built in prisons.
And the solvents and the chemicals that they use to make those signs, they wind up just getting poured down the drain and dumped into the waterways or the environment outside the prison. That’s a huge one. It’s almost like, you just check down the list of things that any given prison industry’s doing. As long as it’s anything to do with chemicals, whether it’s road signs, state vehicle work, updating state vehicles, stuff like that. Any time you’ve got prison industries working with any type of chemical, you can almost bet money that they’re being improperly disposed of, and they’re being dumped or used in a way that’s contaminating the environment around the prisons. Those are all the big ones. The other things too, I mean, it’s hard. It’s kind of one of those things that this only applies to older prisons, generally ones that were built before 1970, 1975, as asbestos is a huge issue in these older prisons.
And that’s just because before the 1970s, asbestos was viewed as literally a miracle mineral. And you can do all this neat stuff with it, and it doesn’t burn. So people, the builders, the architects, everyone thought, hey, this is great and especially for public buildings. And it’s not just prisons, but also schools, government buildings of all types, city halls, army barracks, everything else was built with asbestos. And the problem with these older prisons is that you still see a lot of these older prisons that are still using, or they’re still contaminated with asbestos. And the problem with asbestos is as it ages, it deteriorates and it goes airborne. And when it goes airborne, that’s when people are in danger from it. And there’s been lots and lots of cases where prisoners and staff are being exposed to this airborne asbestos. And that’s another illness where people are exposed to the asbestos, they breathe it in, and it’s 20, 30, 40 years later before they start showing symptoms and it kills them.
Mansa Musa:Right. And when you talked about the sign shop, see, Eddie Conway worked in the sign shop. When you talk about asbestos, the Maryland prison system from the period that we went in, we went in the 70s, and that’s basically what you see, asbestos covered pipes. But let’s talk about what can the community do, or what can prisoners do to try to reverse this environmental terrorism that’s taking place daily within the prison-industrial complex?
Paul Wright:Well, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff. A lot of it has to do also with just first off documenting and improving. And we find that a lot of times, the states, if you get the public records that are testing for this stuff. But the thing is, the public doesn’t know about it, and more importantly, prisoners don’t know about it. But I also think that one of the leverage points to keep in mind is that, yes, the prisoners are being exposed to it 24/7, because they’re the ones living there. But it’s also important to remember that staff are also being exposed to this stuff, especially things like asbestos, anything that’s in the air. A lot of times the water, when you’ve got the stuff, the prisons being built on abandoned coal mines and stuff like that. The water, we find there’s a lot of prisons where the staff are pretty clear is, hey, we bring in our own water.
If it’s not coming out of a bottle that we bring in, we’re not drinking it. And that’s usually a pretty good indicator that you probably shouldn’t be drinking the water either if you can avoid it. First off, once you have the awareness about it, you start taking actions to it, and that includes everything from, can you improve the water supply? Or if you can’t, then maybe you need to shut the prison down. Those are very real issues. Other things, as far as stuff like the radon, for example, that’s an easy fix in the sense, as these things go, it’s usually a couple $100,000 for a prison. They just got to improve the ventilation to fix radon.
Asbestos, that’s kind of one of those things, they’ve gotten pretty good asbestos remediation where they go in with crews in hazmat suits and take all the asbestos out. The only problem is it’s slow and it’s expensive. These asbestos removal workers make a lot of money because it’s dangerous work. And it also takes a long time, you know what I mean. I’ve seen the prisons where they go in and remove the asbestos, and usually it’s a two to three year process. In the meantime, they’ve got to close the prison down or close the unit down while they do it. And the trend from what I’ve seen with most of the prisons that do it is they don’t. It’s just, they go in and, hey, let’s just put more duct tape on the asbestos covered pipes and hope the duct tape keeps everything in. That’s a cheap and easy solution, and that’s what they seem to opt for.
But where I think the outside community can and really should be getting involved in, though, are things like where the prison is dumping raw sewage into their water supply, where the prison is the source of toxic chemicals coming from their prison industries, things from the prison industry plants. These are the things that I think that the outside community is literally impacted by. But one of the things that we have found, though, when we’ve tried to organize folks in the community around this stuff is, because all too often, the prison is the biggest employer in the county or in the city or whatever, especially in these rural areas, no one wants to say anything. And I used to think when we started doing this environmental work around prisons, I used to think that, regardless of what your views are on criminal justice or sentencing or crime and punishment, no one wants feces in their drinking water.
And what I found, though, is that a lot of Americans are perfectly okay with feces in their drinking waters as long as it’s the government that’s putting it there. And that’s one of the things that’s been kind of the big head scratcher for me is the fact that, when you have people, you have communities, they know about this toxic contamination, they know what the source is, but because it’s the government doing it, they’re okay with it. They figure that, hey, 500 prison jobs is worth having feces in our drinking water. That’s the price we pay to have 500 jobs in our community.
Mansa Musa:The real news about environmental terrorism that exists in the prison-industrial complex. We’d like to thank you, Paul Wright, for coming in and enlightening our viewers and our listeners to this travesty that’s taking place. This is a human issue.
Paul Wright:Thank you very much for having me on the show. And if anyone wants more information about what’s happening in prisons and jails, please go to www.prisonlegalnews.org. And we have extensive coverage on environmental issues as well as all human rights issues in American prisons and jails as well.
Mansa Musa:And we ask everyone to continue to support The Real News as we bring forth these horrifying but realistic events that’s taking place in the prison-industrial complex. Thank you very much.
After almost two and a half years, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office released a list they maintain of Baltimore City Police Department officers they once said had credibility issues. Officers on the list, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby noted back in 2019, include cops who were involved in “theft, planting evidence, perjury, corruption and fraud.”
While the SAO only provided a list of names, with no details as to what the credibility issues could be, Battleground Baltimore has separately obtained disciplinary police records for Hill. His extensive disciplinary records provide a look at just how serious these issues of credibility can be.
Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT), a nonprofit legal service dedicated to police transparency and accountability, demanded Mosby provide them with the list. But Mosby’s office refused, claiming that the list was part of a police officer’s “personnel record” and therefore could not be publicly disclosed. Last year, a court ruled Mosby could release it. BALT announced this week that the list is finally in the hands of defense attorneys.
“BALT sought this information because an officer’s integrity matters,” BALT said in a statement. “The entire system (from initial engagement with a police officer to determining whether someone should be held pre-trial) relies on a police officer’s word. There is no room for officers with integrity issues on the stand or on the street.”
The list features more than 300 current or former Baltimore Police officers. Battleground Baltimore has obtained a copy of the list, which was provided to BALT but has not been publicly released (Mosby put out a statement that downplayed the significance of the list).
Among the hundreds of officers on Mosby’s list is Officer Melvin Hill. While the SAO only provided a list of names, with no details as to what the credibility issues could be, Battleground Baltimore has separately obtained disciplinary police records for Hill. His extensive disciplinary records provide a look at just how serious these issues of credibility can be.
The Baltimore Police Department veteran, first employed by the police in 2007, has had shocking accusations made against him by citizens, including some complaints that the Baltimore Police Department “sustained”—which means police investigators believed that what a cop was accused of doing happened and that it violated police policy.
Hill’s record shows sustained complaints for criminal misconduct and making a false statement, among others. Also detailed are multiple allegations that Hill provided police information to people adjacent to criminal activity, as well as investigations into Hill’s possible gang affiliations and sexual misconduct.
Now 47 years old, Hill remained a cop until October 2021, when, according to Baltimore Police, he resigned. Before his resignation, Hill had been suspended on desk duty “related to a restraining order, and potentially criminal allegations,” a police report obtained by Battleground Baltimore said.
Before his resignation, Hill had been suspended on desk duty “related to a restraining order, and potentially criminal allegations,” a police report obtained by Battleground Baltimore said.
Accusations against Hill pre-date when the Baltimore Police Department was put under a consent decree in 2017, the start of an era of reforms and claims of greater transparency. Accusations against Hill continued all the way up to last year, long after those federally mandated changes within the department were touted by police commanders.
“We are not the same department we were five years ago,” Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison announced last month during an April oversight hearing about the consent decree.
In early 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union Maryland released a report detailing ongoing misconduct allegations against Baltimore cops since the police killing of Freddie Gray. “Although a few officers will undoubtedly continue to be arrested and charged with criminal behavior,” the report said, “countless others will escape responsibility, and be known as a danger only to those in the neighborhoods they patrol.”
Battleground Baltimore submitted a public information request for the entirety of Hill’s disciplinary records. Due to Anton’s Law, which passed last year, all police officers’ internal discipline records are required to be made available via Maryland Public Information Request. The request has not yet been fulfilled.
In the meantime, a number of investigative files and summaries of at least part of Hill’s disciplinary record were given to Battleground Baltimore by an anonymous source.
Here, Battleground Baltimore makes details of Hill’s records public, while accounting for the privacy and safety of those mentioned in the files. Victims, eyewitnesses, and others who are named in the files have been anonymized. We quote extensively from these documents, especially two substantial investigations into Hill, one for misidentifying possible eyewitnesses to a crime, providing information on a crime to someone in jail, and one for alleged connections to drug dealing.
“I Just Wanted This Whole Thing To End”
In February 2015, police monitoring of the calls of a woman in jail revealed that “the name of Officer Hill was mentioned as providing information regarding a crime of violence,” according to a report detailing an Internal Affairs investigation into Hill.
Hill, the police said, had told this woman about a murder, identified the victim to her, and expressed concerns about retaliatory violence. The woman knew Hill, she told investigators, because, police wrote, “Officer Melvin Hill sold her Ugg Boots and she planned to buy some other items from him.”
This investigation, which was completed in December 2016, resulted in sustained complaints against Hill for “general misconduct” and “false statement.” The report publishing the investigative findings is scathing.
Hill sold “watches, Uggs, and other stuff,” the woman explained.
On another recorded jail call, police heard the woman speaking to her son and referring to observations Hill had made about other recent shootings in the area, which suggested to police he often talked to her about crimes that were still under investigation. Cops also heard her make references to a man whom Hill described as brutally beating someone up, who Hill said could be “trusted.”
“It is … disturbing how [woman’s name] describes [Hill’s] patrol tactics related to how he works when [the ‘trusted’ man] is present in the area,” the police’s investigative findings report said.
The same investigation also looked into why Hill had, as police said, “inaccurately identified” potential suspects or witnesses in a February 2015 shooting. Hill also discussed this 2015 shooting with the woman in jail, going so far as to provide her with nicknames.
That shooting was near Gleneagle Road and the Alameda in East Baltimore, about a half-mile from the Alameda Shopping Center where Hill patrolled. According to Hill, he heard a gunshot, saw two people running away, and called 911. Hill said one of the guys he saw had dreads. The other was bald.
Later that night, when Hill was told to come to the Northeast District police station to discuss what he witnessed, he was argumentative. He “had to pick up his girlfriend,” he told cops, and he had to get to his “secondary” security job—at an Exxon gas station at the Alameda Shopping Center.
Hill was then instructed by detectives to come to the hospital to see if the shooting victim was one of the people he had reported seeing running. At the hospital, Hill said the shooting victim was not one of the people he saw running away.
Later, police showed Hill photos of two men matching the description of the men Hill said he’d seen: one with dreads, one bald. Hill said the photos were of the men he saw. Soon after, Hill hesitated, telling detectives he wasn’t entirely sure about the identity of the guy with dreads. But the other guy, the bald one—Hill said he was sure that was the person he’d seen running after the shooting.
The bald man Hill had “emphatically identified,” as police described it, was actually in prison.
Police soon learned that the bald man Hill had “emphatically identified,” as police described it, was actually in prison and could not have been the person Hill saw that February 2015 night. Hill eventually backtracked on his identification. He claimed that “because of the way he was being treated” by police detectives about the shooting, he just went along with them and said whatever he felt he had to say. “I just wanted this whole thing to end. I was ready to get up out here. I’m ready to go. The whole time they were making me feel as if I’m just ready to leave,” Hill told an Internal Affairs detective.
The report also says that when investigators asked Hill about the password protector app he had on his phone, Hill explained it was “to protect his ‘intel,’” such as other cops’ private information and his own. But when they asked Hill to open up the app, he couldn’t: “Inexplicably, Officer Hill was unable to remember the specific password to the app when requested as part of this investigation,” the report said.
This investigation, which was completed in December 2016, resulted in sustained complaints against Hill for “general misconduct” and “false statement.” The report publishing the investigative findings is scathing.
“It is concerning that [woman’s name] has detailed knowledge of information related to crimes and investigations conducted by the Baltimore Police Department around the area of The Alameda Shopping Center. And, that she is discussing these events with her son, an individual who engaged in illegal activity in that area,” the report said. “Officer Hill has obstructed and hindered a non-fatal shooting investigation through knowingly providing false information and knowingly omitting vital information from investigation detectives.”
Hill was suspended 20 days without pay.
In April 2015, a few months after allegations that Hill was providing information about crimes to someone in jail, a man told Baltimore Police detectives “that Officer Melvin Hill setup and orchestrated with [another person] to falsely accuse him of attempting to commit a robbery,” the report said. “[The man] further alleges that Officer Hill has ties to drug dealers that operate out of the Alameda Shopping Center and that he extorts money from those drug dealers to allow them to freely operate.”
Police began a second, broader investigation into Hill’s alleged criminal connections, though they said it revealed little. Internal Affairs surveilled Hill following these accusations and said that they did not make “any pertinent observations” to suggest the accusations against him were true. Internal Affairs also obtained a search warrant and searched a cell phone of Hill’s, though, again, they said “no pertinent information was recovered.”
Hill was not interviewed during this investigation. This wider investigation into Hill, completed in February 2016, declared allegations that Hill “was associating with drug dealers” to be “not sustained.”
The Alameda Shopping Center
The Internal Affairs’ report following the investigation into Hill noted that the 2015 events for which he was investigated “occurred in and around the area of the 5600-5900 block of the Alameda, which is Officer Hill’s post.”
The Alameda Shopping Center has played a key role in police corruption. In 2017, it was revealed by federal investigators that a Baltimore cop, Detective Momodu Gondo, was working closely with a heroin-dealing crew who, in part, operated in and around the Alameda Shopping Center, including the Exxon gas station in that shopping center.
Antonio Shropshire, currently in federal prison for his drug dealing role in the Gun Trace Task Force scandal, said over email that he “never heard of a Melvin Hill,” though it’s possible he “may have seen him working at the Exxon.”
This loose-knit group of neighborhood friends, some of whom grew up with Detective Gondo, admitted they dealt heroin and used the presence and knowledge of their cop friend, Gondo, in order to more effectively evade law enforcement.
That heroin dealing operation’s activities helped lead to the indictment of a number of drug dealers, as well as drug-dealing Gun Trace Task Force cops, including Gondo, and another cop, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, who was dealing cocaine through a bail bondsman friend. Some of the heroin dealing described by federal prosecutors was happening during the same time Hill was policing the area.
A source familiar with the drug trade around the Alameda Shopping Center did explain to Battleground Baltimore that the shopping center actually contained a number of different drug dealing crews, existing near one another but often separate.
Antonio Shropshire, currently in federal prison for his drug dealing role in the Gun Trace Task Force scandal, said over email that he “never heard of a Melvin Hill,” though it’s possible he “may have seen him working at the Exxon.” Hill held a “secondary” job working security at the Exxon gas station in the Alameda Shopping Center, the same location where heroin was sold by admitted and convicted dealers connected to the disgraced cops in the federally indicted Gun Trace Task Force police unit.
In 2016, that “secondary” Exxon security job got Hill in some trouble. A woman reported Hill to police for “patrolling the Alameda Shopping Center … in his personal vehicle.” According to the report, a woman complained that Hill was seen driving “either a Mercedes or a Hummer” while he was supposedly on the job.
Hill was eventually investigated and a complaint against him for a “secondary employment violation” was sustained in 2017.
Patterns and Practice?
Baltimore City Police Department Internal Affairs detectives are prevented from evaluating patterns among police misconduct, which means each accusation against an officer such as Hill must be handled entirely separately from previous ones. Hill’s record shows other incidents over the past ten years in which Hill told other acquaintances more about crimes than he told his fellow cops, seemingly slowed down another criminal investigation, and allegedly threatened people.
Hill’s record shows other incidents over the past ten years in which Hill told other acquaintances more about crimes than he told his fellow cops, seemingly slowed down another criminal investigation, and allegedly threatened people.
In February 2012, Hill was accused of tipping off a friend who had a warrant out for her arrest. Both her lawyer and bail bondsman couldn’t locate the warrant, so she called her cop friend Hill, who confirmed there was an outstanding warrant for her arrest.
“It was after this call that [the woman] changed her daily routine of going to school and then to her home,” the report said. “She stayed in a motel room … in an attempt to avoid capture.”
The report goes on to note that Hill, once he confirmed there was a warrant out for this woman, “did not contact Warrant Apprehension Task Force or relay anything about [the woman] to include her whereabouts or other pertinent information.”
This complaint against Hill was not sustained, although the summary of the incident notes, “it is believed that due to this encounter with Officer Hill, [the woman] was able to elude capture.”
In June 2012, there were gunshots on the 600 block of East 36th Street. Hill, who was working voluntary overtime on the night of this shooting, “failed to respond to multiple attempts to reach him via police radio” about the gunshots, the report said. Hill “also failed to respond to calls made to his personal cell-phone” by “several” police officers.
Hill said he did not respond because he was near the Alameda Shopping Center, about three miles away from the shooting. According to the report, Hill also claimed his “radio was turned down very, very low” and, as a result, “he could not hear any of the attempts to reach him.”
The police suggested that had Hill been present, this nonfatal shooting might not have happened. “Due to P/O Hill’s inattention to his assigned duties and his absence from his post, not only did this violent incident occur, but other officers were forced to assume his responsibilities and to conduct the preliminary investigation into what later proved to be an aggravated assault by shooting,” the report said.
The police suggested that had Hill been present, this nonfatal shooting might not have happened.
Complaints against Hill for “general misconduct” and “off post/leaving assignment without permission” were sustained in 2013.
Twice, Baltimore Police documented accusations of child abuse against Hill by his stepson.
In 2013, the stepson said Hill “grabbed [the stepson’s] left wrist and twisted his arm behind his back.” Due to a lack of injuries, “both the Baltimore County Police Department and Baltimore County Child Protective Services deemed the case ‘unfounded,’” the report said. In 2014, the report said, “[the stepson] sustained bruises to his body… [and] stated that he was assaulted by his stepfather, Mr. Melvin Hill who is a Baltimore City Police officer.” Both the stepson and the stepson’s mother had called the police on Hill.
A February 2015 complaint against Hill from an ex-girlfriend claimed that while the two were seeing one another, the officer showed up at her house “nearly on a daily basis while he is working.” There, Hill’s ex told Internal Affairs, “they watch television and engage in sexual activity”; furthermore, Hill’s ex told Internal Affairs, while they were hanging out, Hill “will receive calls from the police radio … frequently ignore the call and not go and then tell the dispatcher he did go.”
That same report says that when the ex threatened to go to Hill’s supervisors because he wouldn’t give her house key back, Hill “threatened” her.
“I’m more vicious without my badge,” the ex claimed Hill said.
The woman, the report said, “took the statement as a threat against her physical safety and was in fear for her well being.”
These complaints for “criminal association” (the ex had a criminal record) and “general misconduct” were “not sustained” in 2017.
“A Possible Abduction”
In August 2020, Hill was involved in what police characterized at the time as “a possible abduction,” which led to an Internal Affairs investigation into Hill for “criminal/sexual misconduct.”
The mother of a woman in her early twenties called Baltimore Police and said that her daughter was missing, and that the daughter, when last seen by a neighbor, was “extremely intoxicated.” According to the neighbor, Hill arrived at the daughter’s home and “offered [her] a ride back to her vehicle,” which was parked in West Baltimore, a little over a mile away.
The neighbor told Hill the woman was drunk, but Hill comforted the neighbor. “The male, later identified as Officer Melvin Hill, said it was ok for [the woman] to come with him because he was a police officer. [The neighbor] stated Officer Hill then coached [the woman] to coming with him,” the report said.
Hill did not drive the woman to her car a little over a mile away, but instead to a Holiday Inn about four miles away in Baltimore County.
The woman, allegedly very drunk, got into Hill’s car—“a 4-door silver vehicle.”
Hill did not drive the woman to her car a little over a mile away, but instead to a Holiday Inn about four miles away in Baltimore County.
Police knew this because a Baltimore Police sergeant called Hill, and Hill “admitted to picking up [the woman]” and taking her to the hotel in the county. Police showed up at the Holiday Inn and the woman was interviewed by Baltimore Police, who, the report said, “conducted an initial interview with the victim.”
Baltimore County Police then took over the investigation: “Officer Hill was escorted to the Southwestern District and his police powers were suspended,” the report said. “Baltimore County Sex Offense Detectives arrived at the Southwestern District and took possession of Officer Hill.”
Complaints against Hill were for “conduct unbecoming of a police officer” and “criminal misconduct/sexual misconduct.”
The report obtained by Battleground Baltimore does not show whether or not these accusations were determined to be “sustained” or “not sustained” by the police.
Public records for Hill show Hill was not charged with any crime and do not show the woman who was allegedly abducted filed any criminal charges against Hill.
“Seriously?”
By February 2021, Hill was suspended and on desk duty. Though the police report does not say what exactly those criminal allegations were, his suspension was for something “disciplinary in nature … related to a restraining order, and potentially criminal allegations.”
Hill’s misconduct and accusations of egregious misconduct demonstrate some of the behavior hidden from public view when police officers’ disciplinary files are protected.
One day early last year while Hill worked at a desk, a police officer noticed a gun in his waistband. It was a .40-caliber Glock 27, in a black holster. The gun was loaded. Due to Hill’s desk duty suspension, he “was not permitted to carry a firearm in a departmental facility, the Western District Police Station,” a police report said.
Suspension procedure policy, which Hill had signed, reads, “if you possess any permit to carry a concealed, privately-owned firearm, you may not carry or transport that firearm into any Departmental facility, building, vehicle, etc.”
An officer confronted Hill about the gun and took him to “the roll call room” where Hill was told to place his gun in an unload box, because he was not allowed to have it on duty in the Western District station.
“Seriously?” Hill asked the officer who confronted him about the gun in his waistband that he wasn’t supposed to have.
Hill was investigated for “negligent use/handling/storage of firearms” and “criminal misconduct/misdemeanor.” Those charges were ruled “sustained” in May 2021.
For BALT and many Baltimore residents, an ongoing concern has been the lack of police transparency and accountability. Police have fought to keep disciplinary records inaccessible to the public, have refused to fully acknowledge police transparency laws, including Anton’s Law, and had offered up the same argument as Mosby’s office: that police disciplinary files are “confidential personnel records” and do not need to be disclosed.
A look at files such as Hill’s shows that these records contain issues much more significant than what most would reasonably consider a “personnel issue,” although some complaints do fall under that category (for example, Hill reported his badge lost in 2018). Hill’s misconduct and accusations of egregious misconduct demonstrate some of the behavior hidden from public view when police officers’ disciplinary files are protected. Hill has not been named in public criminal lawsuits and he has not been charged by the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, which means that, without access to his files, the full extent of an officer’s records is outside of the public record.
Following this week’s release of the SAO list to BALT, Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Harrison sent out an internal email to the entirety of the police department noting that “several members” of BPD “have only unsubstantiated or unfounded accusations related to credibility that were made against them.”
On Twitter, the Baltimore Police union tweeted out its unique version of essentially the same argument.“The corrupt @MarilynMosbyEsq has released her Do Not Call List. The vast majority of those @BaltimorePolice cops on the list are good, brave, & credible. She should be the 1st name on her own list,” @FOP3 tweeted. “Just remember, this list is coming from lying Marilyn Mosby!”
This all recalls, as The Baltimore Sun reminded readers, Deputy Commissioner Brian Nadaeau’s response to this list back in 2019. Nadaeau attempted to downplay the significance of the list, telling a police accountability commission that there’s “nobody on that list that [he] wouldn’t have working on the street, making cases.”
Hill was still on the force when Nadeau said that.
In 2020, Hill’s last full year as a Baltimore Police officer, he made a total of $150,711. His salary was $82,999, with an additional $67,012 in overtime.
In October 2021, Hill, who has had at least 42 allegations against him since 2012, finally left the Baltimore Police Department.
The arrest of a Texas cop watcher for filming in public is the most recent chilling example of how law enforcement across the country is attempting to roll back auditors’ First Amendment rights. Jack Miller, also known as Texas Sheepdog, was filming outside the Olmos Park, Texas, City Hall when police arrested and charged him with multiple crimes. The ensuing five-day trial and jury verdict reveal that citizens’ ability to film in public is facing new obstacles and concerted pushback from the government.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 23, 2022. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Legal experts responded with alarm Monday to a ruling from the US Supreme Court’s right-wing majority that could lead to the indefinite imprisonment and even execution of people who argue their lawyers didn’t provide adequate representation after convictions in state court.
“The court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.”
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Sonia Sotomayor—joined by the other two liberals on the court—also blasted the majority opinion in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, writing in her scathing dissent that the decision is both “perverse” and “illogical.”
The case involved two men, David Martinez Ramirez and Barry Lee Jones, who are on death row in Arizona. The majority determined that inmates can’t present new evidence in federal court to support a claim that their post-conviction attorney in state court was ineffective, in violation of the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution, which affirms the right to “the assistance of counsel” in all criminal prosecutions.
“A federal habeas court may not conduct an evidentiary hearing or otherwise consider evidence beyond the state court record based on ineffective assistance of state post-conviction counsel,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, adding that “serial relitigation of final convictions undermines the finality that ‘is essential to both the retributive and deterrent functions of criminal law.’”
Sotomayor, meanwhile, wrote that “the Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to the effective assistance of counsel at trial. This court has recognized that right as ‘a bedrock principle’ that constitutes the very ‘foundation for our adversary system’ of criminal justice.”
“Today, however, the court hamstrings the federal courts’ authority to safeguard that right. The court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel,” she warned, also noting that the ruling “all but overrules two recent precedents,” Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler.
In a piece for Slatehighlighting how the ruling “will cause profound suffering and perhaps even death as people are denied their constitutional rights,” University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman declared that the majority “took a wrecking ball to those decisions.”
This is a really good policy if you want to keep innocent people in prison on a technicality https://t.co/RJwF9SoU3d
Indigent defense—defense for people who lack the resources to hire their own lawyer—is in crisis in this country. Indigent defense is woefully underfunded, and public defenders handle hundreds of cases per year, many more than they have the time or resources to manage effectively. States also heavily restrict the procedures and resources that would allow public defenders to develop their cases in greater depth…
But just as there is an indigent defense crisis in this country, there is also a post-conviction crisis. Post-conviction proceedings are woefully underfunded, and lawyers are limited in the time and resources they have to pursue post-conviction relief. So defendants who are represented by ineffective lawyers at trial may then be represented by an ineffective lawyer during their post-conviction proceedings, when they are supposed to be arguing that their trial lawyer was ineffective. And—surprise—the ineffective post-conviction lawyer may fail to argue that the trial lawyer was ineffective, or may fail to develop any evidence in support of that claim.
In a series of tweets, fellow Michigan law professor Andrew Fleischman pointed out that “without ineffective assistance of counsel claims, there is no procedural vehicle to bring evidence of actual innocence in most states.”
“So, if you have a shitty conflict trial lawyer, and a shitty conflict appeals lawyer, and a mountain of evidence you are innocent, no relief,” Fleischman said, noting Jones’ argument that there is evidence of his innocence.
Or let's look at Jones, who was accused of killing his girlfriend's daughter on a day she was in his sole care.
He presented evidence that the injury COULD NOT have been inflicted on that day.
Other legal experts were similarly critical on social media. University of Texas professor law Lee Kovarsky called the opinion an “abomination” while public defender Eliza Orlins said: “This is radical. This is horrifying. This is extremely scary.”
Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern tweeted that the “absolutely atrocious” opinion “effectively ensures that innocent people will remain imprisoned.”
“The unceasing stream of callous, radical, reactionary decisions coming from the Supreme Court is fairly easy to miss because so many of them involve complicated points of law,” Stern added. “But the conservative majority is very much in the midst of a revolution. And it is a brutal one.”
Eric King is an antifascist, antiracist, anarchist activist who is currently serving a 10-year federal prison sentence for throwing Molotov cocktails into an empty government office in Kansas City, Missouri, in solidarity with the 2014 uprisings after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. From the beginning of his imprisonment, King and his advocates say he has been targeted and “tortured” by the state, including assaults from prison guards and white supremacist gangs, solitary confinement, communication bans, and unexplained transports to different private and federal prison facilities. Now, even though he does not qualify for maximum security designation, King has been transferred to USP Lee, a maximum security prison in Virginia where his life has been threatened, and advocacy groups, including Amnesty International, are sounding the alarm. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Josh Davidson, a member of Eric King’s support crew, about King’s case, his treatment while serving out his sentence, and what is known about his current condition.
Josh Davidson is an activist focusing on prisoner support and the abolition of the carceral state. He is involved in numerous social justice projects, including the Certain Days collective and the Children’s Art Project, and also works in communications with the Zinn Education Project.
Mansa Musa:Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-hosting with Eddie Conway. We thank everyone for your well wishes as Eddie recovers, and ask you to continue to support Rattling the Bars and The Real News. We also thank you for respecting the family’s wishes that Eddie have privacy as he recovers. This show is dedicated to Malcolm X. Malcolm X was born March the 19th, 1925. Eric King is a political prisoner. And Eric King was locked up August the 10th, 2014. Eric King was a part of the Ferguson uprising, and because of this, Eric King is being subjected to the most harsh, cruel, and unusual punishment. And here to join me to talk about this, I have a guest, Josh, who will introduce himself.
Josh Davidson:Thank you, Musa. My name’s Josh. I live in Baltimore, Maryland, and I am a member of Eric King’s support crew. In addition to that, I work with the Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar Collective. We raise awareness and funds for political prisoners. I also work with political prisoner Oso Blanco, an Indigenous political prisoner. And I work at the Zinn Education Project, where we promote radical history for teachers and educators.
Mansa Musa:So, let’s pick up on, first of all, how is Eric doing today?
Josh Davidson:So, communication has been sparse, to say the least. He has not been allowed any visits. I’ve not gotten any letters from him and I don’t think any of his supporters have, and we don’t know that he is necessarily getting the mail that we are sending to him either. We are trying to get legal visits in to him and get him all the support he needs.
Mansa Musa:Okay. Let’s go and start looking at what exactly did Eric King do, as we travel down this road of this abuse and torture that he’s being subjected to. Now, August 9th, Michael Brown, The Ferguson uprising occurred, Darren Wilson, the racist police that killed Michael Brown. Eric King was a part of this uprising. The following day, he was arrested and charged. What was he charged with?
Josh Davidson:So Eric was charged… He basically had a politically motivated act of property destruction where he threw two Molotov cocktails into a congressman’s office in the middle of the night. No one was around, but he was charged with that. And he received 10 years in prison for that.
Mansa Musa:Okay. And once he received the 10 years, he received 10 years for what they were saying, what, Act of Sedition?
Josh Davidson:Yeah. Like any radical, any political prisoner, they’re going to throw the books at them and throw as much as they can at them. He made it clear from the start – And his sentencing statement and everything is out there, is available – He made it clear from the start that his actions were politically motivated and were done in solidarity with those protesting in Ferguson after the police murder of Michael Brown.
Mansa Musa:Now, since he’s been incarcerated, as I was reviewing and researching for this interview, Eric has been sent to mainly federal correctional institutions, medium security, but more lately, he’s been sent to USP federal prison penitentiaries. Explain why they are subjecting him to moving him into maximum security prisons as opposed to him being… Even according to the bureau of prison, he does not qualify to be put into maximum security. He does not qualify, really, to be in medium security, but he’s really qualified to be in a minimum, and probably pre-released. So explain why they’re keeping him in maximum security prison, why they’ve been constantly subjecting to maximum security environments.
Josh Davidson:Yeah. So in that decade that he’s been in prison so far, he’s been given as much diesel therapy as possible. He’s been shipped around the country from private prisons to federal penitentiaries and usually placed in the SHU, in the hole, no matter where he’s sent. There have been specific instances where he has been put in places and positions with white supremacists, where he’s been forced to defend himself in physical confrontations where his life has been threatened. And that continues to happen now. That’s one of the fears moving forward in his last year in prison. He’s scheduled to be released at the end of 2023, so there’s about a year and a half left. And we’re really just trying to keep him alive in the same sense that we have the whole time he’s been in prison. Like I said, he’s been put in with white supremacists, with Nazi type people who have been twice the size of him, but he’s fought back and he’s survived. But yeah, he’s been going through that for a decade now.
Mansa Musa:And we know that when he was in Florence, FCI Florence, federal correctional institution in Florence, he was assaulted by a correctional officer, is that correct?
Josh Davidson:He was. He was assaulted by a correctional officer. He took it to court, which is fairly unprecedented, and even more unprecedented, he won the case. A jury of his peers decided that he was correct and that the law enforcement guards were not to be believed in that case. And this happened in March, about two months ago. So even in winning his case, he’s still in danger. It needs to be kept in mind that he’s being imprisoned by the same people that he won the case against.
Mansa Musa:And to show you how brutal they’re subjecting him to, this was because he expressed his views about a confrontation between an officer and a prisoner, is that correct? That’s what led to him being assaulted by the officers in Florence?
Josh Davidson:Yes, I think that was part of it. He made a comment either in a letter or in some sort of communication to someone outside and the guards took offense to that. But just in general they’ve tried to attack him and make his life as unbearable as possible the entirety of his time inside.
Mansa Musa:And also, I was reading where in terms of… You made mention of the diesel tour they’ve been taking him for. For our listeners, this is when they just put you on a plane or a bus or a car and just move you around the country randomly if you are in the federal prison system, it’s much like being on slave ship. But I read, I was looking at some of the treatment, or the mistreatment, or the harsh treatment he was receiving in some of these institutions that he’s been in, such as they had a mask that they put on you, strap you to the chair, restrain you, and had him restrained in three pieces, and had him chained to the bed. Can you speak on these things?
Josh Davidson:Yeah.Yeah, he has. He’s been mistreated the whole time. The one instance you were talking about was after the assault, after the guard assaulted him, he was put in a six point restraint and held that way for hours, unable to really move at all. Besides that he’s been, like I said, assaulted by guards, picked up and dropped on his head, assaulted by Nazis, and just kept in deplorable conditions wherever they’ve sent him around the country. Eric is a vegan. He’s never really gotten the food he’s been able to eat inside. So he is always on the very verge of being very unhealthy, but he also practices yoga so he keeps himself in as much shape as possible, which has helped him in all the assaults that he’s faced throughout the years.
Mansa Musa:Has he incurred any chronic ailments as a result of his torture that he’s undergoing by these bloodsuckers?
Josh Davidson:I’m sure he has. To be honest, communications have been so few and so sparse that I don’t think we’re really seeing at this point the long term effects of what his confinement and his torture will have on him. But I will say that his determination and his radical outlook on life has not changed at all. If anything it has hardened during his time inside.
Mansa Musa:And is he in a USP, United States prison, or is he at a federal correctional institution as we speak today?
Josh Davidson:He is currently at USP, United States Penitentiary Lee in Southwest Virginia.
Mansa Musa:Right. And while he was there, was he assaulted?
Josh Davidson:He was assaulted there years ago, yes. And the fear was, even before he was sent to USP Lee, that he would be sent there in order to be assaulted again. At the moment, I believe he’s being kept in the SHU, but communications have been very difficult, but I’m not really sure. Go ahead.
Mansa Musa:Go ahead. No, go ahead.
Josh Davidson:I don’t know really what the plan is, where they plan to send him. He thinks possibly an ADX, which is, as you know, probably the highest level of confinement. But I’m really not sure at this point where they’re planning to send him.
Mansa Musa:And what are their justifications for continuing to subject him to not only the torture, but more importantly, what are their justifications for continue to subject him to this arbitrary security classification?
Josh Davidson:Yeah, they’re basically saying he’s a threat, and almost ignoring the fact that he won the case, that he was not guilty in the case of assaulting a guard. They’re basically still holding that against him and using that as leverage to exact more torture upon him.
Mansa Musa:And we know from history that the prison-industrial complex and the fascist, racist correctional officers, we know that they get allies from different prison groups to do their bidding in terms of assaulting political prisoners or subjugating political prisoners to cruel and unusual punishment. So in this regard, where is the defense committee positioned in terms like… Because of all the restrictions and because of, as you mentioned, the communication restrictions, what are the defense committee and the attorneys doing to try to unjam this situation he finds himself in, or that they are subjecting him to?
Josh Davidson:Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of people acting in a lot of different capacities. I’m not a lawyer, but several different lawyers are working on his behalf to get him out of USP Lee and to make sure that while he is there he is as safe as possible and not mistreated and not given a classification level that is not deserved. We do encourage everyone to go to his website supportericking.org and also follow him on social media. His website has the most up-to-date information, so that’s the best place to go to find out how you can help and what you can do.
Mansa Musa:And we recognize that when we’re dealing with political prisoners and the conditions that they’re subjected to, we know it’s primarily because of their politics, that they’re being subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment that they’re subjected to. How is Eric, in terms of his relationship with other prisoners outside the racist Nazis or the collaborators of the administration, how is he with the prison population, or do you have access to other prisoners, to your knowledge?
Josh Davidson:Yeah, absolutely. That’s one thing that Eric’s been really great at. For him it’s difficult because he literally wears the politics on his sleeve. He has the word “Antifa” tattooed down the side of his face and similar type tattoos like that. But he’s always related well with prisoners and organizing them and helping them understand their place in the class struggle and in the struggle in general, and the larger place of mass incarceration in society. From what I’ve found, he’s always told me and other supporters to write to people that he does time with. His interests and the people he’s communicated with and built relationships with have been vast and far and wide as far as race and ethnicity and things like that go. Eric also communicates with former political prisoners, several of them that did years and decades in prison, and faced some of the harshest torture that the state has to offer. And he’s always gained inspiration from people that he’s served alongside or that have served time before him and talked about that and shared how they lived through those experiences.
Mansa Musa:Are they offering any reason why they’re subjecting them to this, or are they just being the bloodsuckers that they are and ignoring the wills of the people and ignoring the cause for him to have justice? Or are they just ignoring the fact that he hasn’t done anything to merit this type of mistreatment?
Josh Davidson:For the most part, it’s exactly as you described. It’s people passing the buck, it’s people not answering the phone, it’s people saying it’s because of the abuse of the guard and it’s not something they can handle. We are hopeful that the attorneys are able to have better luck than those of us who call during the calling campaigns. We’re still trying on every front we possibly can. I do think it’s important to point out that I think it’s on the government’s part, more of a threat of what will happen to you if you act like Eric, what will happen to anti-fascist people who are willing to stand up against the state and strike back when possible. That this is what you have to face. This is what you have to look forward to. So I think that that’s worth pointing out as well.
Mansa Musa:Right. And both me and Eddie served close to a century in prison collectively, so we’re both aware of the arbitrary and capricious behavior of the fascists and the arm of fascism. But it’s [crosstalk]
Josh Davidson:Yeah, it’s-
Mansa Musa:So, we’re well aware of that. And how is his family doing?
Josh Davidson:His family is doing about as well as can be expected. They’re supporting him as much as they possibly can and trying to create the best world possible for him to come home to. They’re looking forward to him coming home in about a year and a half, and hope that whatever happens between now and then does not lead to him having to do any more time in prison than absolutely necessary. They welcome any support as people are able to offer.
Mansa Musa:And we want to remind our listeners and our viewers that we’re talking about no more than a property crime at best. We’re talking about civil disobedience. And we’re talking about on the heels of where a racist police killed Michael Brown. Eric did not come out with a semiautomatic weapon or automatic weapon and walk down the street and just gun down protestors. He did not publish a diatribe of racist views and then went on to kill people. He basically has been subjected to this primarily because of his political views. Would that be a correct view on that?
Josh Davidson:That’s absolutely correct. And I think it’s probably safe to say that had Eric been out here, he’d be the one attacking the one with the automatic weapon shooting people.
Mansa Musa:Right. And so we want to remind our viewers and our listeners on how they can support Eric. So can you offer some more information on how our viewers and listeners can support Eric King?
Josh Davidson:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. He appreciates any love and solidarity that he can get, that his family can get. The best place to go is supportericking.org. You can follow him on all those social media handles as well. He’s got YouTube playlists of his favorite music. He and I are currently working on a book of interviews with current and former political prisoners. So he’s well attuned to the current political climate and the history surrounding that. And yeah, just go to his website, offer support as much as possible. There’s a current calling campaign, and you can find out all those numbers and information on his website as well, supportericking.org.
Mansa Musa:And in terms of what do you want our people to know about Eric? What would you want our takeaway to be when it comes to Eric King?
Josh Davidson:Really that he’s just a loving, young guy. He’s in his early 30s, he’s a father, he’s got a wife and two kids. He doesn’t deserve to be where he is, not that anyone deserves to be in prisons anywhere. But he’s a guy that’s trying to do good things in life and prison is not helping him do that. He would do a lot better on the outside, as would everyone else inside. And I can honestly say, I correspond with dozens of political prisoners and prisoners in general, but every letter I get from Eric, I feel like I learn something. And I feel like I grow in some way and get to know him better. So I can honestly say that I learn more from him than I’m able to give in this relationship. So that’s always a good feeling. So, yeah, just write to him. Yeah, that’s about it.
Mansa Musa:Okay. There you have it, the real news about Eric King, political prisoner being tortured daily, all because he was in solidarity with the Ferguson uprising, where Michael Brown was killed by the racist police. And because of this, Eric King is being subjected to the most inhumane torture, the most inhumane treatment, that’s been going on for a minute. Over five years now. And we’re hoping that you get behind and support Eric King, because he’s supposed to be releasing 2023, where the rate that the fascists are going and the racist police, and those that they’re using to instigate trouble with him, at the rate that they’re going, we hope that Eric King can survive, and we know that he can if everyone comes out and supports him. Thank you very much for coming on today.
Josh Davidson:Thank you so much, Musa.
Mansa Musa:All right. And I’m Mansa Musa, reminding you to continue to support Rattling the Bars and continue to support The Real News. You can learn more about both by going to our website. Thank you very much for allowing us to be able to express our views on Eric King, and thank you very much for joining us today.
When a Minnesota couple called the police to intervene in a dispute with a neighbor they said was harassing them, they didn’t expect that they would be the ones to get raided and arrested. That’s precisely what happened, however, and the ordeal has left them questioning the motives of law enforcement in rural Minnesota; moreover, it has raised questions about how police in rural areas employ tactics that are not just difficult to explain, but often just as aggressive and dangerous as their urban counterparts. PAR breaks down the sequence of events that prompted police in this small rural town to conduct a swat-style raid on the people who called them for help.
Pre-Production/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 examining this troubling arrest of a man who had actually called the police when he was attacked. It’s not just how this case was mishandled that was so alarming, but also what it reveals about a recurring topic on our show: over policing in rural areas and small towns.
But before we get started, I want you to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, or use our form link in the YouTube description. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, please hit the Patreon donate link pinned in the comments below, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. Okay. We’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, if there is a common theme that has emerged from our reporting on law enforcement, it is this: America is simply over policed. Consider our investigation into the small West Virginia town of Milton. There, we found a series of questionable arrests that you are seeing now, involving residents who had, in some cases, committed no crime at all. Problematic behavior by police, which raised broader questions about what was driving the overly aggressive emphasis on law enforcement.
After a little digging, we found that the town had doubled the amount of fines and fees in a span of roughly five years. And recently, after filing a Freedom of Information request, we received hundreds of pages documenting thousands of infractions. Data showing tens of thousands of citations issued over a four year period in a town with a population of only 2500 people.
But the reason I bring up Milton and the data we uncovered investigating small town policing is because of the video you are watching right now. It depicts the arrest of William Logering in Pierz, Minnesota. A man who had actually previously called police to assist him, but wound up being violently detained and then dragged through a still unfolding legal drama that has engulfed him and his family in an unending battle with the justice system.
The story begins when Logering was assaulted by an employee of a gas station when he was fixing a light on his truck. The encounter, between a former friend, was caught on video. Logering reluctantly filed a complaint with the police due to the continued harassment by the same man. He later obtained a restraining order against the aggressor, which he hoped would bring the conflict to an end. But that was not the end of the story.
In fact, it was only the beginning. That’s because the accuser started to harass and threaten Logering. An ongoing conflict that kept getting more and more extreme, and for Logering, more and more dangerous. But instead of addressing the threat, police targeted him. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Officer 1:Hey. Hey, get back over here. Hey. He ran from me. [inaudible] Get over here with your hands up! Get out here. Fucking ran off. Barricaded the door. I kicked it a couple times. He stepped out, I have a restraining order. Shut it again.
Speaker 1:I have a restraining order [against him]
Officer 1:Step out here! Get out here!
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham:Now, police allege in their charging documents that Logering was actually the assailant, a claim which he vigorously denies. In fact, Logering and his girlfriend, Wendy Acker, have shared dozens of documents with PAR. Legal filings which show not only did the police not take their concerns seriously, but instead focused on them. Which is why when a Sheriff’s deputy showed up at his house, Logering was both scared and confused. That’s why he was worried the police would arrest him. So they were engaged in a standoff, with police urging Logering to surrender. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Officer 2:I’m on you.
Officer 1:Get on the ground! Get on the ground!
Officer 2:I got taser. I got taser.
Officer 1:Get on the ground. [crosstalk].
Speaker 2:Oh, goddamn it. [crosstalk][shouting] I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe, you guys. [pained shouting]
Officer 2:Do not start. Do not. Do not [crosstalk].
Speaker 3:What are you doing to us? Why are you [crosstalk] why he was [inaudible] again, [crosstalk] why won’t you help us?
Officer 2:[inaudible] – Hold onto this. Hang onto her so I can put this away. [inaudible].
Speaker 3:Why won’t you help us?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham:So what we have here is an example of why policing is such a fraught process, and why trust is often missing from the relationship between officers and the community. That’s because the failure of police to take Logering’s concern seriously led to ever-escalating tensions that resulted in yet another problematic arrest. What I mean is, instead of actually working with the couple who had legitimate and documented concerns, police ignored them, criminalized their fears, and ensnared them into the same legal system they were turning to for help. Soon we will be joined by the couple to discuss the long-term consequences of their treatment by their local police department, and what it says about rural policing in general. But first I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis, who has been investigating the case, reaching out to the police for comment. Stephen, thank you for joining us
Stephen Janis:Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya GrahamStephen, you’ve been reviewing the documents, and there is a lot to review. What did they tell you about this case, and why did police act so aggressively against Mr. Logering?
Stephen Janis:Well, it’s a complicated case, but with a very simple thing missing, which is exactly what justified such an aggressive assault on their home. They were home already. They were sitting in their house, and when I looked through the documents, I didn’t really see any sort of sense that police felt that they were armed or had any weapons, or any sort of threat to anyone outside of their home. So the documents talk about a very complicated set of events, but don’t really shine any light on why they had such an aggressive response to it.
Taya Graham:And what were the charges against the couple? What did the police allege, and what happened to their respective cases?
Stephen Janis:Well, what’s really interesting about this case is if you look at the charging documents, most of the charges against them have to do with what happened once police stormed inside their house. Which raises a lot of questions, because basically what you’re saying is that their response to how police behaved is really what the charges are against them, and I think that’s really questionable. We’ll talk to Wendy and Mike later about what happened once the charges went to court. But I think that raises serious questions about the legitimacy of these charges.
Taya Graham:So finally, you’ve reached out to police for their take on the story. What was their response?
Stephen Janis:Well, I sent questions to the police, very, very specific. What justified raiding their house, knocking down the door, and storming in. I haven’t heard back, but that’s the question that has to be answered about this case. I think it’s very, very, very difficult to come up with a reason why they have to knock down a door. It’s a very dangerous, dangerous police tactic. Why take a dangerous police tactic when there’s no imminent threat? That was another question. What was the imminent threat that justified a SWAT-like raid? I’m waiting. When I hear back, hopefully I’ll be able to put something in the comments and enlighten people as to why this happened.
Taya Graham:And now to share more on their concerns about how police have handled their case and what they think needs to be done to improve law enforcement in their community, I’m joined by Wendy Acker and Mike Logering. Thank you both for joining us.
Mike Logering:Thank you for having us.
Wendy Acker:Thank you for having us.
Taya Graham:So tell me what happened to precipitate Mike’s arrest. You were working on your truck in the driveway, right? What happened next?
Mike Logering:So we were working our truck for, I don’t know how many hours that day, and the last half hour, 45 minutes or so, we were both outside. I was under the truck and working on driveline and stuff, and Wendy was running me tools back and forth. And she noticed that Luke was sitting in his truck at the end of the driveway kind of watching us and stuff, and we didn’t feel very comfortable. So we decided we were going to clean up our tools and go in the house and maybe try again the next day, and…
Wendy Acker:Mike had a restraining order against this guy. And that was about a year before that, and we had made five police reports trying to tell the police that he had been harassing us five different times, and the police would not do anything. So he tried 911 at that point.
Mike Logering:At some point he had called 911 and that part of that had happened during the scuffle between me and him, and…
Wendy Acker:When we went back to our house.
Mike Logering:Anyways, yeah. Tried to go back to the house again.
Wendy Acker:Then the police officer pulled into the driveway really quick. Once again, we were scared of the police because we’ve tried reporting this many times and they wouldn’t do anything [crosstalk]
Mike Logering:– Threatening us previous to this. So we were scared of what they were going to do, and so we were just trying to get in the house and trying to get to a safe spot at that point.
Wendy Acker:The officer never identified himself.
Mike Logering:As yeah, he never identified himself.
Wendy Acker:He never told us to stop. And we all walked into the house and it was myself, Mike, his mother, his brother, and his sister. There were five of us. And we all walked into the house. And then the one police officer, Officer McDonald from Morrison County, came and tried to kick in the door at that time.
Mike Logering:And then as soon as he turned away from the door, I tried to open the door and tell them that I had a restraining order on Luke and he pointed his pistol at me right away and that scared me. So I shut the door, and that was the end of that part of that conversation. Because he was scared for me and I didn’t know what to do. And…
Taya Graham:So there are terrible screams coming from inside the house. What were the officers doing to you behind closed doors?
Mike Logering:Well, we were scared out of our minds at that point.
Wendy Acker:Scared for our lives.
Mike Logering:Scared to death. We were all having panic attacks and stuff, I guess you could say. So they come running in the house. As soon as their feet hit the door, I already knew I was screwed. So I laid face down on the ground. I threw my hands behind my back right away and I just laid there as still as I could.
A state trooper, he ran up and he put his boot on the side of my neck right away, and then the other officers came up and started kicking me in my side and stomping on my back and kicking me in my legs. And that happened for about 10 seconds. And then one of the officers put the handcuffs on me. He put the handcuffs on me, and as soon as the cuffs were on, then trooper Owens took his foot off of my neck, and then put one knee on my neck and the other knee in between my shoulders, the other two officers were still kicking me, and I don’t know. Then they got me to my feet and I wanted to give Wendy a kiss, and they said, no way.
I said yes, yes and then you can hear the smack sound. And that was, I don’t know. I think it was officer McDonald. He grabbed my throat and he just swung and grabbed my throat. And you can hear it in the video. And then I start freaking out and I start flailing a little bit cause I can’t breathe, he’s choking off my airway and stuff and it’s scary. What I did was I put my feet on the wall and I pushed a little bit. And the two officers who were standing behind me and grabbing me all over and choking me and pulling my hair and stuff, I pushed on the wall a little bit with my feet and all three of us tipped over, and that’s where they came up with this assault on a peace officer. They said I was kicking them, even though Wendy is on one side of me and my mom’s on the other side of me, and they didn’t see me do no such thing.
Wendy Acker:I was about 15 feet away right in the next room. But I could see the whole thing happen too. And his mom in the video was the one who was screaming and saying, get off our neck, stop hurting him, and please don’t hurt us. She said, don’t hurt me either.
When they came in the door, as soon as they jumped on me, there were a couple more officers. They came and stood by Wendy and my little brother, and two other officers grabbed my mom and threw her on the couch. And she just had back surgery, it jolted her so bad that the scab came off her incision where she had her surgery.
Wendy Acker:So you can hear them kind of tussling her around too. And then they came and arrested me and then, oh, oh, go ahead.
Mike Logering:Back up just a second. Okay, so then they got me back to my they’re, still grabbing and pawing at my throat and stuff and they came out the door with me. They got me bent over and they’re trying to push my hands up over behind my head, and that really hurt and made it a lot harder to breathe and stuff. Well, then they’re standing behind me, one on each side, and I don’t know if you were able to catch that in the video. They smashed, they grabbed me by each side, and they sped up and they smashed my face into the squad car. And there’s a couple different views of that. You can see the squad car wiggle and you can see in the left corner of the video that they did aggressively hit my face on the squad., And so I got a boot mark on my back and there was a cut on my shin and stuff from where they’re kind of kicking and stomping on me. And then they get me out to the squad car and then they decide to arrest Wendy.
Wendy Acker:Then they decide to arrest me, saying that I was obstructing justice and trying to stop them from arresting Mike. But I wasn’t. I was nowhere near there. And I think they got me mixed up with his mother, because she was the one kind of closer to the door and closer to Mike and hollering at them and trying to get them to stop hurting him. But I was further back. And then they just decided to arrest me. And when they arrested me, they grabbed my arms and pulled me up by both my arms. So I was up in the corner of a cabinet, like a foot off of the ground and they twisted my shoulder and caused a torn rotator cuff on my shoulder.
Taya Graham:So what are you charged with?
Mike Logering:So I was charged with second degree assault with a dangerous weapon, fourth degree assault of a peace officer, third degree damage to property, fifth degree assault inflicted or attempted bodily harm.
Wendy Acker:That’s all.
Mike Logering:That’s all.
Wendy Acker:That’s four.
Mike Logering:That’s the four charges they had brought against me, and I was only convicted of the fifth degree assault. Our public defenders, they guaranteed we were going to prison no matter what. And you know, we didn’t like that, and I decided that I wanted to try to get a private lawyer. And we scrimped and saved and borrowed from everybody, sold everything. We had to come up with this retainer fee, and Caroline Field was her name. She took the money and promised to help. And then as soon as she saw the videos and knew that I wanted to talk about how I don’t think I was lawfully detained and arrested. I think they violated my rights and…
Wendy Acker:Put you in a choke hold lock.
Mike Logering:They were using choke holds and stuff on me. I know that law was in effect when they had done that. She didn’t want to talk about any of that. And shortly after that, she…
Wendy Acker:Three weeks before your trial.
Mike Logering:Three weeks before my trial…
Wendy Acker:She quit.
Mike Logering:She quit as my lawyer. She had promised three times previously to give me back my money, and she never did. She took my money. She quit as my lawyer. Then I was lawyer-less three weeks before trial. They put me with the same public defender who would not defend me in the first place. And then meanwhile, all the time, Wendy’s public defender was threatening me.
Taya Graham:How has this experience changed how you see law enforcement?
Wendy Acker:Well, emotionally and personally, we’re scared for our lives that the police will retaliate. Especially if we try to make it public at all. They follow us around. With the date that he signed his plea agreement… We were living 50 miles away just to get away from all of this, and we were in a different county, and they kicked us off of our property, this new city…
Mike Logering:The local police.
Wendy Acker:The local police.
Mike Logering:At our new place.
Wendy Acker:So they’re still tracking us, like kind of watching us and trying to get us to move away.
Taya Graham:Now, this is usually part of the show where I take a recent example of police malfeasance and break it down in a way that provides context to the topic at hand. In other words, I try to find an example of police malfeasance that will further illustrate the point I’m trying to make about why law enforcement has to change and what we all can do to facilitate it.
But today I’d like to approach the theme of our show, over policing, from a broader perspective. Especially because, as we’ve seen consistently on the show, the process which fuels bad policing is rarely examined from an existential perspective that goes beyond the rhetoric of law and order. Meaning we simply can’t accept that the processes that define policing are beyond reproach and all we need to do is tweak the particulars to make things better. But thanks to a recent investigation by The New York Times, we actually have some very helpful and far reaching data about this strategy that has become the linchpin of American policing that deserves some thorough analysis: the pretextual car stop.
Of course, anyone who has watched this show knows that we have reported on a litany of questionable car stops. Some that have resulted in false arrests. It’s actually such a common problem with our viewers that we could easily turn this show into – And I’m not even kidding – Into the Car Stop Accountability Report. But what The New York Times found actually provides a critical perspective on what drives pretextual car stops, but also what makes them so dangerous. In fact, despite propaganda that car stops are more dangerous for police than civilians, it turns out that the opposite is true. In fact, The Times investigation found that over a period of roughly five years, nearly 400 unarmed motorists were shot and killed by police during a car stop.
Mind you, these were not people accused of violent crimes, or robbery sprees, or other manners of mayhem. No, most were pulled over for a broken tail light, or rolling through a stop line, or for some other – Forgive my French – BS infraction, which is why The Times also reported that some police chiefs are considering rolling back the practice. However, these same law enforcement officials did not want to go on the record out of fear of reprisal for a policy that has been unpopular with the police unions.
Wait. You mean police chiefs managing cops paid for by taxpayers can’t discuss a very dangerous public policy out of fear? Fear of what I wonder. While The Times said police unions have been pushing back against anyone who tries to roll back random car stops. And of course we can’t forget our friends in the mainstream media, who, as we’ve said before, are always willing – Except The Times in this case – To bolster any police policy that engenders just enough fear to keep the clicks and the ad dollars rolling in.
But what really disturbs me about this story is not just the pushback, but something deeper and more pervasive. That’s because the one thing missing from the debate over car stops is an essential part of any effective form of policing. The evidence. That is, there is very little evidence that making a bunch of car stops, or even making less, has any impact on crime. In other words, like most police policies, we have very little understanding if a particular strategy works and if the benefit of using it outweighs the cost, which in this case would be 400 lives lost.
I think my point here is that the rhetoric that informs the debate over policing seems almost purposefully hostile to asking a fundamental question: Does any of it work? Do more cops mean less crime? Do more arrests make a city safer? Do proactive car stops for minor traffic infractions really accomplish anything? As someone who reports on policing quite regularly, I feel like we carry on a one-sided conversation continually within the same set of parameters. Let’s call it the All or Nothing Dilemma. Either you embrace and support the police in whatever you do, or, simply, you’re against them in every form or fashion. And thus, you’re an anti-American liberal socialist cuck who doesn’t back the blue.
Seriously? I mean, why can’t we ask questions? Why can’t we delve into the data? Why can’t we debate whether we want to be subject to random police powers and indiscriminate arrests? I am tired of being accused of being hateful or anti-American because I ask questions and expect the Constitution and Bill of Rights to be respected. That would be like saying I hate all sanitation workers because I was upset that instead of taking my trash, they dumped a truck worth of garbage onto me and my car. I would have a right to be angry, but that wouldn’t mean that I would hate everyone who’s ever worked for the sanitation department. Who actually thinks that way? Case in point is a book I worked on with Stephen almost a decade ago called Why Do We Kill? The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore.
Now, we wrote this book with a cop, a former homicide supervisor named Kelvin Sewell. But before we wrote a single word, we decided it wasn’t going to be another book glorifying a cop and focusing on a bunch of horrific cases. Instead, we wanted to try to answer a question at the root of much of the dysfunction in our city: Why do people here regularly pick up a gun and point it at someone else? It’s a question we tried to answer ,and in some respects we did. But without going into details, I think what’s more important is that we asked the question in the first place. In other words, instead of starting with foregone conclusions on what causes violence, we sought to understand and seek answers. Answers that would perhaps offer a new perspective. We thought by asking to understand a phenomenon, we could actually offer better solutions to fix it. Which is why the rhetoric and debate surrounding police is so… For lack of a better word, nihilistic.
I mean, just asking the questions as we did in the book was considered by many police partisans to be offensive. We received comments like, who cares why someone commits a crime, we just need more arrests. Or, you are just coddling criminals, stop asking questions and start supporting the police. Or, are you siding with criminals? It’s sort of the same refrain we’ve seen from police unions on a variety of reform issues around the country: Stop asking questions, stop trying to understand a problem, and just trust us. I mean, a bunch of police chiefs were literally afraid to discuss why car stops might be a bad policy because of the same lack of curiosity that, for some reason, seems to arise from the same institution: policing. And the whole point seems to be that you have the right to remain silent.
But from our perspective, asking questions is not just critical to improving our beleaguered criminal justice system. It’s also crucial to maintaining a vibrant and responsive democracy. Being able to challenge assumptions and raise critiques of public policy is not just essential to good governance, it is a key component of freedom. In fact, it is the root of one of the oldest methods of philosophizing known to human civilization, otherwise known as the Socratic method of inquiry, where ideas are explored to a series of questions rather than assertions. The point is we have to break down the rhetoric of force and replace it with reason. We need to challenge the idea that there is nothing left to learn about human behavior. And mostly, we must respect the rights of the people to question when, why, and how they are policed. Or, as the rarely quoted Ninth Amendment of the Constitution states: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” I think you see my point.
I want to thank my guests Wendy and Mike for speaking with me and for sharing their experience with us. Thank you both for your time. And of course I want to thank Intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his impeccable 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 both. 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 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 Facebook and Twitter. And please like and comment. I do read your comments and 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 do feel inspired to donate, we don’t run ads or take corporate dollars. So anything you can spare is truly appreciated. My name is Taya Graham, and I’m your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
“Prison food in the United States is a public health and human rights crisis,” the Maryland Food & Prison Abolition Project states on their website. “By weaponizing the experience of eating, the state transforms one of our most basic needs into an everyday form of violence. The short- and long-term effects of poor food conditions on incarcerated individuals’ health also constitutes a form of ‘premature death’—oftentimes damaging a person’s physical and mental health and well-being for the rest of their life.” In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa, who spent nearly 50 years eating prison food himself, speaks with Kanav Kathuria, co-founder of The Maryland Food & Prison Abolition Project, about the institutionalized cruelty of the system that keeps incarcerated people malnourished and fed barely enough to stay alive.
Charles Hopkins: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-hosting with Eddie Conway. Before we get started, I want to thank everyone for your heartfelt concerns for Eddie’s health and your well wishes. We continue to urge you to continue to pray for Eddie. We also ask you to continue to respect the family’s need for privacy as Eddie goes through this difficult process, and we look further for you to continue to listen to Rattling the Bars and supporting Rattling the Bars. In the April 2022 edition of In These Times magazine, published an article entitled, “Bad Prison Food can Cause Problems that Linger After Release,” reporting on how the food being served to prisoners in the prison-industrial complex not only lacks nutritional value, but is responsible for high numbers of physical and mental health problems that prisoners suffer during their imprisonment. Here to talk about bad prison food in the prison-industrial complex is Kanav Kathuria from the Maryland Food & Prison Abolition Project. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.
Kanav Kathuria:Yeah, thank you for having me.
Charles Hopkins:As I said earlier, your group has been primarily looking at the food landscape and the lack thereof, and the lack of nutritional value, in Maryland in particular, but it can be used as a template for how food is being served in the prison-industrial complex. In your observations, how much money is allocated for food in prison, if you have any knowledge of that?
Kanav Kathuria:So I think just to begin, we have some numbers, but just to even contextualize those numbers, I want to just start by saying that food in prison is not really defined by its capacity to nourish. The purpose of prison food, really, is to keep people alive on as small of a budget as possible. So the food is really ultra processed, hyper industrialized, et cetera. So these numbers come from 2018 and just for the state of Maryland. But as of 2018, on average right across all Maryland state prisons, the state allocated about $3.83 for one person for all three meals in a day. So that comes out to like $1.27 per person per meal, which is just an absurdly low number. And that’s on average. So the prisons, I believe it was MCIJ, that had the lowest per person per meal count came out to about $0.80 per meal, or about $2.40 for all three meals per day.
So the food that’s procured on this extremely small budget is food that people most commonly refer to as unfit for human consumption. People say, I wouldn’t even feed this to my dog or a pet whom I love. But this is what people are being given to eat. So I just really want to center that prison food is really inhumane and it’s more than just a question of poor nutritional value. It’s really a human rights and a public health crisis, too.
Charles Hopkins:Right. Right. And that’s interesting because we’re looking at $1.15 or $1.20, but in terms of what they’re actually saying. But let’s look at what industry supplies the food for prisons and the main foods, the foods that are supposed to have nutritional value, such as the bread, the milk, eggs, and the meats, and the vegetables. From your observation, your studies, what industries supply these food substances?
Kanav Kathuria:Yeah. So, prison food service is kind of run differently throughout the US. A lot of states fully privatized their food operations to companies like Aramark, Crystal, Trinity, et cetera. So Maryland actually is fully self-operated, which means that these companies aren’t the main sources of food provision, the state of Maryland itself is responsible. But within that, they contract out to different companies, or as you’re saying, for specific items.
So, for example, I have a list here – And again, this is from a few years back prior to COVID, so things might have changed – But, Dory Foods, Hill Foods, Shenandoah Foods for milk. Most of the food, if not actually the vast majority, if not all, of produce is fully canned. So a lot of the produce that’s coming in is really of D- or F-grade quality. And then something else, just to touch on when we’re talking about meats – And this is written into Maryland state law – There’s an arm of DPSCS called MCE or Maryland Correctional Enterprises. Which is, when you think of prison labor on the inside, it’s housed at Maryland Correctional Enterprises. And each state kind of has this arm. One of the items that MCE, or one of the activities they engage in, other than having folks make furniture and license plates and road signs and print shops, et cetera, is also meat production.
So all of the meat that’s processed and then sold to every single Maryland state prison comes through MCE, which uses incarcerated labor. And the quality of that meat is just… It’s just horrendous. People call it slop, they call it dog food, they call it mystery meat. It’s really inedible. And prisons are contractually obliged by state law to buy from MCE. So, yeah, that’s just a smattering of some of the companies. And in 2015, I’ll just mention this real quick, Baltimore was actually privatized in terms of food. There’s this company’s Trinity, and this other food service corporation, Crystal, got into this huge bidding war. And what that brought to light is just how inhumane food conditions are in Baltimore prisons. So since then, Baltimore went self-operated or publicly run as well.
Charles Hopkins:And that’s an interesting point of view, because I was incarcerated in Maryland, and I worked for MCE – I was pressing tags. But I remember when they privatized, I remember when they got where they took and absorbed the food contract. And as you say, I was in the super max, and that’s when they had a contract with a different agency. And we’re talking about a dollar a meal, it seemed like they were trying to see how they could give us $0.25 for all three meals, because we were getting a lot of processed food. We were getting a lot of bulk food. We were getting a lot of beans, we were getting a lot of mystery meats, and we were getting a lot of soups that were unidentifiable.
But let’s stay on this course about the foods that are being given to prisoners in the Maryland system. And we recognize that MCE is the major source of supplying the meats and the meat products, and we know that they’re making this a multimillion dollar corporation. Because, like you say, they’re also involved with all industries within the Maryland prison system. But in terms of the dietary department, who oversees the serving of the food and as far as the processing of the food? While we recognize that poor food is coming in, but then when it’s being prepared, who is responsible for oversight on the preparation of the food?
Kanav Kathuria:So there’s a few different regulatory bodies and then correctional associations that come together for oversight, inspection, et cetera. So the state had a statewide dietary services manager that oversaw dietary for all prisons. But within that, each region of Maryland also had its own regional dietary services manager, at least in theory. There’s a lot of staff shortages, et cetera. But the nutritional standards that prisons use to determine what they should serve come through COMAR, so the Code of Maryland Regulations, as well as the Maryland Commission of Correctional Standards. And that’s on the regulatory side. But those standards are just so incredibly vague. All they say is a “nutritionally adequate meal” or a “well-balanced meal.”
And they’re really unenforceable. What they do is they say, okay, you have to have a nutritionally well-balanced meal, but it’s going to be up to DPSCS to create these food service manuals to talk about how food should be prepared, served, procured, et cetera. And that really falls under the purview of institutional wardens. So the wardens and the institutional dietary services managers, they just have so much power over what food in their facility looks like. And in some places, like in Baltimore, there’s one central facility that has a kitchen, MTC, that creates food, or prepares food, and then ships it out to like five or six other prisons in the city.
So we have state regulations, we have wardens, we have these service manuals, and then we have these associations like the American Correctional Association that has guidelines around what food service on the inside should be. And then prisons adopt these guidelines. But the thing is, they’re fully unenforceable. They’re not written into law, they’re just guidelines written by former correctional folks. So some of the prisons in Maryland that we’ve been into – And we’ve seen cockroaches, rats, insects in the kitchen – They receive a 98% approval rating from ACA, which is just nonsensical. And then in terms of oversight specifically, supposedly local and state health departments come in to do very infrequent inspections. The thing is, those inspections are voiced very far in advance. And then on top of that, there’s no real power to do anything other than maybe like some type of loose mandate, if they do find something wrong. So it’s really just vague and unenforceable on almost every single level in terms of how prison food is actually governed.
Charles Hopkins:And I want you to elaborate on the dietary department, because I know when I was incarcerated, they had a five cycle menu, and on the menu they had portion size. And according to them, in theory, the portion size was representative of a nutritionally balanced diet. From your observation and your investigation, how does this play out? Are prisoners, in fact, given a nutritionally balanced diet on a daily basis? Are they being given three nutritionally balanced meals per day?
Kanav Kathuria:I can’t stress enough of how nutritionally bankrupt all of these meals are. So I think one, we can look at what’s written on paper. And even if that is nutritionally adequate, which a lot of times it’s not, what happens in practice is if you look at what’s on the plate, as you’re sharing as well, the biggest category of food item that’s going to be on a tray, whether it’s breakfast, lunch, dinner, or bag meals, et cetera, is going to be starch. So pastas, rice, potatoes, just all carbs just to fill people up. And then on top of that, whatever’s remaining, maybe you have canned produce, that’s supposed to be four ounces. It’s definitely less than four ounces, and the quality of that produce is just really poor.
You have meats from MCE, or some type of protein. But the vast majority of the food you’re given in terms of, as we were talking about quantity, Which is, again, people are saying it’s not even enough to feed a child much less a grown person, is that the health impacts – Which I think we’ll talk about in a little bit too – Of receiving such nutritionally inadequate meals, means that a person who’s leaving incarceration is going to be in much worse health, likely to be in much worse health than when they entered because of how nutritionally insufficient these meals are.
And I think just to end on this, to go back to what I was saying in the beginning, the goal of food service on the inside is not to say, how do we make sure a person is physically, emotionally, spiritually nourished through food, it’s really, how do we just keep sew alive on as cheap of a budget as possible? And because the food is just hyper processed, just hyper industrialized, the food items that you do get a lot of times are also spoiled or rotten or moldy, or the list goes on and on and on. So the nutritional value in conjunction with how this food is stored and prepared means that people can barely eat what’s on a tray, and people are just eating to survive, which is why folks turn to commissary, which is also so exploitative too.
Charles Hopkins:Right. And to go back to your point about food being spoiled and who they contract with. I remember Cloverland, which was supplying milk, like 60% of the milk that came in was spoiled. And when they served it on the line, every fourth person was like, man, my milk is sour. And then they pull the milk off the line, bring another, and it becomes the same process.
Kanav Kathuria:Yeah. There’s such a long list. And I think I’ll share this with y’all too, but we put out this report in the fall of 2021, this six-part report that talks about each aspect of eating on the inside. And there’s an entire section that’s focused on prison food as a form of violence, dehumanization, and punishment. So I think for folks who want to learn more, I want to bring that up. There are so many ways that food is used as punishment. We can divide it into sanctioned, as in what’s written in the rules, versus unsanctioned, too. If you look at COMAR, one of the opening lines is “Food should not be used as punishment on the inside.” It’s written in the regulations, but that doesn’t mean that that’s actually what’s happening.
So for some examples… Okay. I’m just trying to think of where to start. One is, let’s say movement. So much of the food is inedible, when there are rare fresh produce items, and if you try to take something from the kitchen back to your cell, the punishment if you’re stopped by a CO can range from being strip searched, to being thrown in solitary confinement, to not receiving a meal the next day. Especially if you’re being fed in your cells like folks are during COVID.
Another one is using food as a form of retribution. So let’s say you receive a bad meal or a spoiled milk, and you write up a grievance against the CO who served it to you and you said, so and so did this. I’m not getting actual nutrition or food that’s edible, that CO might withhold food from the whole tier for some time, or play around with meal times and serve food much later than when it should. So your gaps are like 14 to 20 hours from one meal to the next. Or they might not serve you specifically. Or if they send you to solitary, literally for any reason at all, they might not just give you food in solitary itself, or they might give you a bag lunch, or just food of considerably lower quality.
So I think when we’re talking about food as this form of violence and dehumanization and punishment, we can really think of prison food as almost a form of currency that COs look to in order to manipulate behavior. If someone’s acting up, acting out, what they call acting up or acting out, they just might not give them any food at all. Or again, as I was saying, the food might just be of drastically reduced quality.
Charles Hopkins:Okay. And that’s a good observation, because I know that when they have incidents where they lock the jails down, and I’ve been in one jail where they locked it down for nine months, we were fed bag lunches three times a day. And there was no way in the bag lunch was any equivalent of a nutritionally balanced diet. And the number one thing that was given that had any nutritional value was when they offered fresh fruit. But let’s examine the health factors associated with the prison-industrial complex and this bad food that’s being served in prisons. Talk about the health problems that come out, that prisoners suffer from eating bad food while they’re in and when they’re released.
Kanav Kathuria:Yeah. So I think one thing that we’re really trying to center, even when we talk about punishment – A lot of folks say all of the food is punishment. Just eating on the inside is punishment – Is that prison food is not defined, again, by its capacity to feed someone or to nourish someone. But it’s really defined by its capacity to kill you or to contribute to premature death. Because as I was saying, a person who’s leaving prison is most likely going to be in worse health than when they came in, and a lot of that is because of food. So if we’re talking about physical conditions, there’s such a long list of abuses that folks have shared. For example, acid reflux and indigestion, because folks have such a short amount of time to eat, people are just scarfing foods down in case COs just take the food and throw it in the trash. So people are vomiting after, or they just can’t keep it down in any shape or form.
Another is constipation or diarrhea. When you come in, just the shock to the system that prison food induces means that your bowel movements are just so irregular and inconsistent for weeks on end. We can also talk about diabetes, chronic heart conditions, hypertension. There’s a person on the inside who we’re working to get out, his name is Mr. Williams, he developed ulcerative colitis because of prison food. And their treatment of him was just so inhumane that he needed a walker to get around. And they took away his walker, and he had ulcerative colitis on top of that, which meant that he had no control over his bowels because of what prison food did to him. Other folks have developed hepatitis B on the inside from eating food that was contaminated with fecal matter. People are finding cockroaches, rat droppings, maggots, not just in the kitchen, but in the trays themselves. And the health impacts of that are obviously obscene.
People are also developing cysts. The other side of this is, as you touched on in the beginning, are the mental impacts. The food is creating depression, it’s creating anxiety, it’s leading to drastic weight gain or weight loss as well. And especially during COVID when people are locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, people are just eating just to eat. And that kind of exacerbated the already depressive environment, deeply depressive environment of being incarcerated by yourself for so long and having one hour, maybe one hour a day, to leave.
Charles Hopkins:Yeah. And I know when I left prison in 2019, when I got a physical, when I finally got – And medical’s another issue – When I finally got a physical, I came to find out I had hepatitis B, I had high blood pressure, I had cholesterol, I had diabetes. Now, mind you, I’m in good physical shape, I’m always running in the yard, but it was only then that I was made aware of these things when I got out. And the other part of this debauchery when it comes to food is a lot of prisoners have actually died in prison. But let’s look at, take us to society when a prisoner comes out. How much does it cost when a prisoner comes out to help him or her to resolve these health problems that they acquired while they were in prison? Have y’all looked at that?
Kanav Kathuria:Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think the answer is we don’t know. I think we as a society don’t know what the health impacts of this are. So I think one thing that we talk about a lot is that it’s the same neighborhoods in Baltimore, for example, that are hyper incarcerated that also exist under food apartheid. So the same people who are denied access to fresh, wholesome, nutritious foods on the outside are being cycled between these spaces, between prisons and their home neighborhoods. So food in both cases is used as this form of oppression. It extends far beyond the wall.
So when people are coming home to, as we know, just a deeply oppressive healthcare system, too, we don’t know what the toll really is on people’s bodies and minds, and on caregivers. The average length of incarceration in Maryland is about seven years. And studies show that even one year or two years of being incarcerated takes away a certain amount of time from your life expectancy. So people, again, are being cycled through both these spaces, we don’t know what the true impact of the violence of prison food or the violence of eating under food apartheid really is, but the two systems work in conjunction to really deprive someone of their, again, their mental health, their physical health, and their emotional and spiritual health, too.
Charles Hopkins: Thank you. As we close, what’s your last words on this? And give us your information how people can contact you and some of the things y’all got coming up.
Kanav Kathuria:Yeah. So I think just to close, I think now that the issue of prison food is kind of gaining more momentum on a national scale, I just want to be very clear, as we’ve been talking this whole time too, is that there’s really no such thing as a humane eating environment on the inside. That the only way to really ensure that a person remains healthy is to not incarcerate them in the first place, and for folks who are on the inside to decarcerate. So what we’re really trying to do is mitigate the inhumane or the dehumanizing conditions of eating on the inside while building power on the outside. Especially looking at urban farms working towards Black food sovereignty, such as Black Yield Institute. So yeah, I just kind of wanted to center that. And for folks who want to get in touch, hit us up. Our website is foodandabolition.org. Instagram is @foodandabolition. Or if you want to send us an email, just info@foodandabolition.org as well.
Charles Hopkins:And there we have the real news about inhumanity as it relates to food. Thank you Kanav for joining us at Rattling the Bars, and we look forward to your good works and continued work in this area. Thank you very much.
In this special investigative livestream, Police Accountability Report hosts Stephen Janis and Taya Graham discuss some of their findings from their ongoing investigation into the town of Milton, West Virginia.
Milton first came to our attention with the arrest of Cody Cecil, a Michigan man whose trailer was raided by Milton police while parked in a private campground. But a series of successive investigative reports have produced mounting evidence of overzealous ticket writing and exorbitant court fees that raised even more questions about the town.
In this special livestream episode, Graham and Janis report on some of their latest findings about the city, its police department, and a questionable deal to build a luxury hotel with the help of taxpayers.
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
The troubled police department of the Northern Colorado city of Loveland is already under fire after a civil rights lawsuit alleging a pattern of overzealous DUI enforcement leading to multiple false arrests. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis break down the body camera footage of one encounter between a Loveland police officer and an innocent motorist, revealing how the creation of financial incentives to overpolice the public has dangerous consequences for police and residents alike.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
Last week’s oversight hearing for the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) consent decree fell just two days after the seventh anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray, but the focus was on “progress.”
“The problems at BPD were many years in the making and we are pleased with the progress that has been made since the consent decree was put in place,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division said.
That progress, all parties involved boasted, includes technocratic reforms such as changes to policies regarding use of force and other policing practices, a stronger internal affairs unit, better training facilities, and better record keeping. Much less attention was given to discriminatory policing.
BPD already spends more on policing per capita than any other city in the country. The current police budget is $555 million. The proposed budget gives them $4 million more.
Five years ago BPD was put under a federal consent decree, a response to the police killing of Freddie Gray in 2015 and a subsequent civil rights investigation into the department by the Department of Justice (DOJ), which revealed patterns of racist policing. That investigation resulted in an August 2016 compendium of police malfeasance and misconduct and, in 2017, BPD entering into the consent decree’s ongoing process of reform overseen by the federal government.
“We are not the same department we were five years ago,” Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said during the oversight hearing.
One of Harrison’s examples of how BPD isn’t the same department it once was: The police are no longer unconstitutionally shutting down entire neighborhoods the way they did back in 2017. Harrison, who has been commissioner since 2019, was referring to the illegal lockdown of the Black West Baltimore neighborhood of Harlem Park that followed the death of police detective Sean Suiter in November 2017. In contrast, Harrison noted, when Baltimore Police Det. Keona Holley was killed this year, police didn’t shut down the whole neighborhood; instead, they investigated the homicide and soon made two arrests.
The bar for progress within the police department is quite low in Baltimore City. Earlier this week, a study by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights was released. The study shows that Baltimore police were “vastly undercounting police uses of force” in the years leading up to the consent decree.
According to the report, in 2011, there was one reported use of force by a police officer. In 2013, there were three, and in 2014, there were five. In 2015, that number increased to 891. (The report notes that these low numbers are “implausible”).
In 2016, that number increased to 5,030 and then to 8,254 in 2017.
The report notes that in 2017, when police reported 8,254 uses of force, the police made 29,042 arrests, “suggesting use of force is as common as 1 in 4 arrests.” That year, when the consent decree was enacted, “is the first full accounting of Baltimore Use of Force,” the authors of the report note. Since 2017, reports of use of force have decreased: In 2018, there were 5,189 reported uses of force, and in 2019, 3,461.
Use of force was one of the 16 key provisions in the consent decree that needed to be improved.
During a consent decree public forum held on April 18 (an hour-long Facebook live event in which people could submit questions but not actually comment), member of the Consent Decree Monitoring Team Roberto Villaseñor noted this decrease in reported use of force.
“We have seen continued decreases and use of force year over year since the new policies have been put in place. What we’ve concentrated on now in the past two years is the review in the assessment of use of force incidents,” Villaseñor said.
The bar for progress within the police department is quite low in Baltimore City.
As the report notes, however, these numbers were, until 2017, almost entirely unreliable, so progress is difficult to determine. A 2021 American Civil Liberties Union Maryland report about Baltimore police violence noted that, between 2015 and 2019, more than 90% of reported use of force was against Black Baltimoreans.
One key provision of the consent decree is discriminatory policing—or, as the consent decree calls it, “impartial policing.” One marker of “impartial policing” is racially disproportionate traffic stops. With data provided to us by City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey, Battleground Baltimore has reported on traffic stops in Baltimore City by council district. And what that data consistently shows is that the poor, majority-Black neighborhoods endure the most traffic stops.
“There is no discernible benefit to what is being done, and yet it is happening in flagrant disregard for the consent decree that resulted from doing exactly this: intentionally targeting Black communities with disproportionately aggressive policing efforts,” Dorsey told Battleground Baltimore last year. “The greatest mystery is why it seems to be of no concern to Judge Bredar or anybody else involved in monitoring implementation and compliance with the consent decree.”
Judge James Bredar, who oversees the consent decree, has primarily focused on the side of the consent decree that affords the police more money and technology, and he has called for the hiring of more police. The consent decree, many activists have stressed, pretty much prevents the city from attempting any kind of defunding of the police. BPD already spends more on policing per capita than any other city in the country. The current police budget is $555 million. The proposed budget gives them $4 million more.
At this week’s consent decree hearing, Judge Bredar complained about how Baltimore Police appear to the public and are portrayed by the press, who come “running at every opportunity,” he said. He wondered aloud why there wasn’t more “attention [on] the accomplishments” of the consent decree.
BPD, however, continues to provide ample “opportunity” for people to question their authority and competency.
The day before this hearing, a recently-hired Baltimore Police Department employee was fired after it was revealed that the Baltimore police believed he was a person of interest in a murder and that he had a 2018 gun charge. Dana Hayes, the fired employee, spoke to the Baltimore Sun and it seems that the story is more complicated and actually makes the BPD look even worse: Hayes’ gun charge never led to a conviction and he had the charge expunged, so it shouldn’t be listed anywhere anymore, which makes Harrison mentioning it to the press a major violation. Hayes’ stepfather was murdered in 2020 and Hayes told the Sun that the police have continued to focus on him as a “person of interest”—a not-surprising claim in a city with homicide detectives known for aggressive, questionable, and illegal investigative tactics.
Earlier this month, another group of federally-indicted Baltimore cops got on the witness stand and testified under oath that, for years, they lied on police reports and warrants, stole drugs, guns, and cash, and planted evidence.
Meanwhile, the February police killing of 18-year-old Donnell Rochester continues to gain attention. Rochester, whom police say they followed after the license plate of the car he was driving came up as having an open warrant, was shot through the windshield of his car. Rochester fell out of the car, bleeding, telling the officers, “I can’t breathe.” They handcuffed him immediately. He died not long after.
Malcolm Ruff, a lawyer for the Rochester family, told Huffington Post that he sees the shooting as “unconstitutional,” adding that “If officers properly trained [and] followed the policies that were put in place for them, then Donnell would still be alive today.”
Another key provision of the consent decree is improving “interactions with youth.”
This quarterly consent decree hearing was held on April 21. Seven years ago on April 21, 2015, hundreds took to the streets of West Baltimore, calling attention to the 25-year-old’s death at the hands of the cops. People in Gilmor Homes, where Gray lived, had been organizing while Gray was still alive—in a coma, after he was chased, grabbed, and thrown into a police van—but his death a week after he was brutalized moved many more outside of his neighborhood to come out.
“All night, all day, we will fight for Freddie Gray,” hundreds of people chanted that night.
A group of protesters gathered in front of the Western District police station, faced by angry and scared cops lined up in front of the building, some of them recording the march.
“I’m scared for my babies,” someone with a megaphone announced at one point that night. “A mother is about to bury her child—as a mother, that’s the worst thing you can imagine. We gotta stand up for him. We gotta stand up for ourselves.”
It is hard to imagine anyone there that night would have imagined that, seven years after Gray’s death, “progress” would look like a judge and a group of lawyers and police officers telling each other they’re all doing a great job.
“Much has changed in the last five years,” DOJ’s Timothy Mygatt said at the quarterly hearing. “Much has changed at the Baltimore Police Department.”
The continued arrests of a group of Texas cop watchers is raising serious questions about how the law is applied to citizen journalists. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis investigate two recent arrests of Corners News, whom police charged after he tried to film a series of accident scenes. We discuss the applicable laws and rising legal threats against YouTube activists, examining the implications of the push by Texas police to charge people exercising their First Amendment rights.
Pre-Production/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 you this arrest of a cop watcher in Texas for trying to protect his First Amendment rights. But it is also another attempt by Texas police to curb the freedom of citizen journalists, a move that comes shortly after they charged the same man with organized crime for a similarly peaceful use of his camera.
But before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and that I appreciate them. And of course, you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, please hit the Patreon donate link pinned in the comments below, because we have some extras there for our PAR family. Okay, that’s out of the way.
Now, one of the trademarks of this show is that we follow up. Meaning we don’t just cover a story once and then just walk away. Instead, we pride ourselves on continuing to investigate police misconduct when the situation warrants it. And boy, does the arrest of the Texas cop watcher Corners News warrant another closer look. As you might recall, Corners news, [HBO Mat], and two other cop watchers were not even filming police when they were accosted by a Laredo Texas cop who grilled them as they sat in the parking lot of a convenience store. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker: No, no they’ve been following me around. They’re suspicious as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know if they’ve got partners that are committing crime somewhere else and they’re keeping an eye on our location. So you’re going to give me your ID or I’m going to arrest you for failing to ID.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Well, despite the relatively conflict free encounter, the officer later charged Ismael and another cop watcher, HBO Mat with organized crime. And not only did they slap these felonies on all four of the citizen journalists, but they also added a roughly $100,000 bail to each, entangling all of them in a dicey legal situation that continues to ensnare them to this day.
But that’s not the end of police targeting this group of YouTube activists for crimes that seem questionable at best. That’s because we were recently sent this video of another encounter between Ismael of Corners News and Texas cops that warrants further reporting. Encounters with police over his right to film that led to not just one, but two arrests. The encounter started April 1 this year, when Corners News was attempting to film a group of police officers who had deployed what are known as tire shredders to stop a speeding driver who had fled law enforcement after a traffic stop. As you can see here in this video, Ismael has positioned himself well outside the range of a hundred feet often required, though not legally prescribed by law enforcement, to film an accident scene. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Officer Lopez: Sir, I’m afraid the lane is closed, okay.
Ismael Rincon: What’s closed?
Officer Lopez: All this. So we’re going to have to, you’re going to have to go, all right, sir?
Ismael Rincon: Okay.
Officer Lopez: All this is closed off.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But as the encounter unfolds, the officer decides that, in fact, a hundred feet is not sufficient, and begins to order Corners News to stand back even further. A request he complies with. Take a look.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Ismael Rincon: [crosstalk] This is open now, just public. [crosstalk] It’s not taped up.
Officer Lopez: We have it. We have it closed up.
Ismael Rincon: It’s not closed.
Officer Lopez: It doesn’t matter, but I’m telling you, sir…
Ismael Rincon: That’s not the way it works.
Officer Lopez: It’s real simple, sir.
Ismael Rincon: That’s not the way it works, man.
Officer Lopez: You move over there.
Officer Florez: You just step back, sir.
Ismael Rincon: You going to prevent me from recording?
Officer Florez: Sir, you can record from that side of the patrol car.
Ismael Rincon: Okay. So what’s your name?
Officer Florez: Florez.
Ismael Rincon: Your name?
Officer Lopez: It’s Lopez.
Ismael Rincon: Lopez. You’re preventing me from recording, right?
Officer Florez: You can record from that side of the patrol car, sir.
Ismael Rincon: If I don’t?
Officer Florez: Interference.
Ismael Rincon: You know what interference is?
Officer Florez: I’m telling you –
Ismael Rincon: I know it by heart.
Officer Florez: We are processing a crime scene here, sir.
Ismael Rincon: Okay.
Officer Florez: So I need you to step back behind that patrol car.
Ismael Rincon: Or else?
Officer Florez: You will be arrested.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: As Corners News points out, police have not established a crime scene. And of course, he’s standing on public property. As you can see here, there is no doubt he’s filming quite far from the accident scene. Far enough that it is truthfully difficult to see what’s going on, which is of course the point of journalism. Still. Despite the fact Ismael is clearly acquainted with the law and clearly exercising his First Amendment rights, the police threaten him with criminal charges. Finally, after refusing to relinquish his right to record, police turn to the most destructive, yet commonly used tool: an arrest. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Ismael Rincon: What was that?
Officer Florez: You see that patrol car, right?
Ismael Rincon: Who was that making the threat?
Officer Florez: Don’t worry about it. You see, behind that patrol car?
Ismael Rincon: Who was that making the threat?
Officer Martinez: I’m Officer Martinez [inaudible] police motorcycle division. Put your hands behind your back.
Ismael Rincon: Oh, it’s you –
Officer Martinez:This is an active investigation.
Ismael Rincon: He already told me behind the –
Officer Martinez: Hands behind your back.
Ismael Rincon: He told me behind the unit.
Officer Martinez: Yeah, but we’re working the whole scene.
Ismael Rincon: He told me –
Officer Martinez: Hands behind your back.
Ismael Rincon: Who has higher rank?
Officer Martinez: I’m telling you hands behind your back. [crosstalk].
Ismael Rincon: Who has higher rank? [Inaudible].
Officer Martinez: Put your hands behind your back. [inaudible]. Do not reach for it.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: So as we can see, a cop watcher attempts to exercise his First Amendment rights by filming police. He maintains a reasonable distance from the crime scene, and he then commits the heinous crime of pushing back against these same police officers, demanding that his First Amendment rights be respected. But this was not the only incident that reveals just how difficult the fight to maintain the right to record in this part of Texas has become. Just nine days ago, Corners News was again trying to record a vehicle accident outside near Laredo, Texas, when a police officer asked him to move. Again, he complied with the officer. Watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer: You need to get out of here, sir. You need to get out of here.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: And then the officer asked him to move back again.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer: Sir, that grass fire is going to cross. I need you to move your car. Move your car over there. The grass fire is going to cross. Move your car over there. You can videotape from farther and farther away.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But even after he moves for a second time, the officer asked for his ID, although he has not been accused of a crime. And then again resorts to another arrest.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer: Hey sir, I told you twice.
Ismael Rincon: Twice what?
Police Officer: I need to see your driver’s license.
Ismael Rincon: No, you’re not.
Police Officer: I need to see your driver’s license.
Ismael Rincon: You’re not.
Police Officer: I’m not requesting that, sir. You’re failing to ID. I need to see your driver’s license right now. I told you clearly, to move out of the way.
Ismael Rincon: I’m out of the way.
Police Officer: You weren’t out of the way, you stayed right there. You stayed really close to the fire. It could have crossed –
Ismael Rincon: You told –
Police Officer: So right now –
Ismael Rincon: Come on. My safety is my, my own concern. I just need –
Police Officer: Yeah.
Ismael Rincon: My safety is my own concern. You’re not concerned.
Police Officer: [crosstalk] because we have to work –
Ismael Rincon: I moved already.
Police Officer: I need your driver’s license.
Ismael Rincon: No, you’re not getting anything, man.
Police Officer: Look, last time, sir. Are you going to give me your driver’s license?
Ismael Rincon: I don’t need to give my license.
Police Officer: What I was going to do, I was going to close the road, but since you did not cross –
Ismael Rincon: Ah, come on.
Police Officer: You did not listen to me and I had to come over here.
Ismael Rincon: I already dealt this with, with you at once. Stay back from me. Get away, get away from me. You’re getting close.
Police Officer: We don’t have to get away from you. You walk up to here and you’re like, oh, now you’re in my space.
Ismael Rincon: That’s my truck. This is my door.
Police Officer: That’s like right here. Oh, oh, you’re in my space, bro. You’re in my space. [crosstalk] Go back, please. Go back, go back, man. We’re not talking to you anymore. Hey, I could, if I would, man, we’re helping this guy. It’s obvious.
Ismael Rincon: I told you twice, you took me away from everything. The traffic. You see where my truck is, right?
Police Officer: No, that’s the second time. Put your stuff over there.
Ismael Rincon: Okay. [inaudible]
Police Officer: No, put your stuff right there. I’ll put it away right now for you.
Ismael Rincon: Okay.
Police Officer: Hands behind your back.
Ismael Rincon: All right.
Taya Graham: Which is why we decided to dig deeper into the details of the case and also explore this idea of organized crime and this attempt by authorities to limit cop watching, not just in Texas, but across the country. I mean, there is nothing more essential to the future of journalism than the ability to film matters of public interest and disseminate them to that same public. And nothing is more of a threat to that right than the indiscriminate use of police power to make exercising that fundamental right to record impossible. And that’s why, shortly, we will be joined by Corners news to discuss these arrests in detail. But first, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis, who’s been looking into the case, and also what the law says about filming police. Stephen, thank you for joining us.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: First, what are the latest developments in the organized crime case? What have you learned?
Stephen Janis: Okay, so the update on those charges is that I contacted the Livingston Police Department, I specifically emailed the chief asking him if he was proceeding with these charges, and also how the charges apply to the law, which seems to me to be legally insufficient because there’s no underlying crime. I also contacted the Polk County Prosecutor’s Office, which is a county where this crime allegedly occurred, and I asked them the same question. They said to me specifically, we don’t talk about cases. So I would recommend anyone else calling the Polk County prosecutors if you have concerns about this, because I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer.
Taya Graham: You found an interesting exemption from the interference law in the Texas state code. Can you talk about what it is and why it shows a bias against citizen journalism?
Stephen Janis: Well, it’s really interesting because the Texas state code actually goes about determining who’s a journalist and who has the right to film these accidents up close and who doesn’t. It specifically carves out an exemption for people who either A, work for a TV station that has an FCC license, or a newspaper that publishes weekly. So what it’s basically saying is the First Amendment right to be free press comes with ownership of something, either a newspaper, the ability to publish it, or a television station. I think it’s highly problematic.
Taya Graham: And finally, why is it important to cover the effort by YouTubers to defend their right to record? What’s really at stake?
Stephen Janis: Well, I think it’s problematic because the government should not be in the business of determining who is a journalist, ever. In other words, you know, it’s not up to the government to make the law that says I’m a journalist or you’re not, or a YouTuber is a journalist or a television reporter is… I don’t think the government should be in that business, regulating free speech, deciding who’s a reporter, or otherwise circumscribing people’s First Amendment rights. I think it’s very problematic. I think it’s scary. And I think all of us deserve the right to be free press if we’re willing to put in the work and the effort.
Taya Graham: And now to get more on why he was arrested and what the action of the Laredo Police mean for cop watchers, I’m joined by Corners News. Ismael, thank you for joining me.
Ismael Rincon: Thank you for having me here.
Taya Graham: So tell me, what are we seeing in this video? You stopped to film a scene after officers deployed tire spikes or shredders to stop a car, right? From what I can see from the video, you certainly seemed to be over a hundred feet away. What happened next?
Ismael Rincon: So I got out of the car, started filming. Two officers approached me, which, one of them happened to be an investigator, and the other one was a sergeant, one of the sergeants on scene. They walked over from more than a hundred feet away from me just to tell me to get back from the scene, which I never was in. After that, I kind of challenged their orders, but eventually I went back, I would say 20, 25 feet, even more back. Then one of the officers that had previously threatened me before stopped what he was doing in the investigation. He was a regular officer, he was not a supervisor. So he walked over from more than a hundred feet even, and then told the sergeant to arrest me because I was interfering with his investigation. Then he made it his goal to approach me and arrest me even though the sergeant had already told me to move and he told me I was fine where I was at.
Taya Graham: So, the officer said you were inside a crime scene and that you would be charged with interference unless you walked to the other side of the patrol car. You walked back as was directed. And then you heard an officer yell. What did he say?
Ismael Rincon: He yelled, no, you need to arrest that guy. He’s interfering with my investigation.
Taya Graham: So then suddenly officer Martinez charges towards you and puts you in cuffs. And in the video you can hear the cuffs, and it looks like you were tackled. What happened next?
Ismael Rincon: Right. In his sworn affidavit he stated that I said no twice, which I never said no on the video. I’ll send you that affidavit later if you want. I never said no. The only thing I responded to him is, who has higher rank? Which, it was obvious for the sergeant that had already told me where to step and told me I was fine right there. And then an inferior officer comes and tells me that I’m interfering and tells the sergeant to arrest me. It was like he was giving orders to a sergeant instead of the sergeant giving orders to him. So I think that was kind of weird. So I said, who has higher rank? And then he is like, well, this is an investigation, and he threw me to the ground. Broke my body camera, cracked my phone. And then they just, he kept pressing on my head real hard on this side right here, which I requested EMS. I didn’t know if I was bleeding or anything, which they went, they checked me out and everything was okay. But I still felt that for a week or two.
Taya Graham: Now, what we saw in this video happened over a month ago. And this video here of the car fire we’re showing happened roughly two weeks ago. Now, this car was on fire after the car tires have been purposefully spiked by police, right?
Ismael Rincon: That is correct. And at the time I didn’t know any of that information. All this information I started getting when he was talking to his fellow officers, when the trooper that arrested me started, as we call it, copsplaining or explaining the incident to his fellow officers, to his superior, to the ABA. So that’s how I noticed that the car got spiked and the car was involved in a high speed chase.
Taya Graham: The officer accused you of interference, but you moved your car each time the officer asked. You moved twice, and you also stood quietly by your car and filmed from across the street. And yet the officer said, the grass fire was coming for your car across a three-lane highway. What interference is the officer referring to?
Ismael Rincon: The interference he mentioned is that I, because I was there, I took his attention from his scene to come over to me and give me orders. So that’s the interference he is talking about.
Taya Graham: So to some of the people who watched your video, it seems that the officer came to interfere with you, and was more concerned about your camera than the fire. Why do you think the officer was so intent on controlling your actions?
Ismael Rincon: I can’t say why, but I can surely speculate why the car had just been involved in a high speed pursuit. And then the car caught on fire. And there’s been so many chases involved with the DPS that when the chase terminates, somehow all the cars are catching on fire. It’s not the first one. It’s not the second one. I’ve seen a couple of them, especially here in Texas, they’re involved in [smuggling]. So it’s very weird that they end up on fire. And that’s super weird. We don’t know why. I don’t know why. But maybe they know why, and maybe they’re trying to hide something.
Taya Graham: What were you charged with, and what is the status of your case?
Ismael Rincon: Right. So my charges, there were interference with public duties, and they added a second charge, which would be unlawful carrying of a weapon, which here in Texas, it’s open carry. It’s an open carry state. I carry everywhere I go. And they added that charge simply the fact that I was legally armed while I was recording. So, every time you get charged with a class B or above, they have to charge you if you have a firearm.
Taya Graham: So you were involved in the case we covered with HBO Mat, where a warrant for the rest of you and your fellow YouTubers was given because you were accused of organized crime. If I understand correctly, it was because your YouTube channels are monetized and there were two or more YouTubers in the same place at the same time, so it was considered an organized criminal action. What is the status of these cases?
Ismael Rincon: Right. So at this date, we don’t have any updates. We don’t have any court dates. We’ve never had a call from the district attorney, from the county, from the Livingston police department. I’ve tried calling everywhere, Polk County, the police department, no answer. I leave voicemails, nobody returns a phone call. So we don’t have anything to this day. We don’t have any updates.
Taya Graham: Do you think this tactic could be emulated by other police departments to stop cop watchers and other YouTube activists?
Ismael Rincon: I really don’t think, or I really sure hope not, because there was just a Supreme Court ruling last week, that’s Thompson v. Stark, which would be like any Fourteenth Amendment claims by the police department or by the district attorney. They would no longer have qualified immunity because of the malicious prosecution. So Thompson v. Stark will eliminate the qualified immunity on malicious prosecution. So I really sure hope they will not try and do this in any department in the US, cause they will be held liable for that.
Taya Graham: Now, if you think efforts to suppress the First Amendment rights of cop Watchers is limited to a few officers in a Texas town, you would be mistaken. Take for example a new law just passed in the state of Oklahoma. The bill, known as Oklahoma 1643, was signed into law last year and prohibits citizens from posting a picture of a police officer with harmful intent. Supporters say the measure is only intended to prevent doxing of police officers, meaning posting their personal information. But the law has been controversial because its wording is so ambiguous. That’s because, in reality, any prosecutor could easily use the language embedded in the statute to prosecute someone who simply filmed a police officer, since the text that prescribes what constitutes a criminal posting only requires harmful intent.
Making matters worse, language slipped into a companion bill will make it a crime to simply publish, and I quote, “a photograph or any other realistic likeness of the person who also happens to be a cop.” Apparently, Oklahoma is a First Amendment free zone. But I guess you can see my point of why this measure is so concerning. Law enforcement authorities, fearful of the horrific act of filming cops executing their public duties, have decided it’s time to crack down. Just like the police in Laredo who are pressing an organized crime case against HBO Mat and Corners News, it seems that prosecutors have taken off the gloves and are ready to focus on the terrifying and reprehensible act of posting videos of cops on YouTube.
Thank God our massive law enforcement-industrial complex has started to address this existential threat of citizen journalists, also known as organized crime. But while we’re on the topic of organized crime, it might be worth giving a nod to a group of police accused of exactly that, and how their crimes compared to the First Amendment auditors authorities seem to believe are such a grave threat to American civilization.
Just recently, Baltimore police detective Keith Gladstone, a 25-year veteran of the department, admitted to engaging in decades of organized crime that seems far more disturbing than picking up a cell phone and filming. Gladstone was initially accused of helping Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, a member of the now notorious Gun Trace Task Force, to plant a BB gun on an innocent man who Jenkins had run over with his car. But recently, the veteran detective reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors, who granted him immunity so he could testify against a fellow cop. And just a note about the so-called Gun Trace Task force. They were a group of roughly nine Baltimore police officers who were convicted of robbing residents, dealing drugs, and stealing overtime. A stellar community of crooked cops who have not only cost taxpayers millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements, but while on duty, they were actually working to wreak havoc on dozens of innocent civilians, destroying their lives in the process.
But back to detective Gladstone. On the stand, Gladstone recounted some of these stellar achievements of his tenure as a career criminal. He admitted to stealing crack from drug dealers and giving it to informants to sell on his behalf. He admitted to planting guns on innocent citizens and transporting illegal drugs for sale, for his benefit, while armed. An act prosecutors pointed out is called drug trafficking. He also admitted to pretty much stealing whatever he wanted, no matter the value, including taking tools from a tool shop and stealing fireworks for a summer celebration. In other words, no crime was too petty for Gladstone.
But what’s really extraordinary about detective Gladstone’s case is how prosecutors were able to get his cooperation. That’s because all the heinous crimes he has admitted to will not result in additional jail time for the disgraced detective. No. Instead, Detective Gladstone received immunity from the prosecution for his role in terrorizing – And I do mean terrorizing – The people of Baltimore for dealing drugs, stealing, planting a gun on an innocent victim, and for basically operating as a crook with a badge. Gladstone will never serve a minute behind bars for literally ripping the fabric of a community apart and selling the pieces for his own personal profit.
So let’s do a little comparison between the troublesome YouTubers and citizen journalists and the crimes committed by actual members of law enforcement, and see which group is truly worthy of the moniker organized crime. The YouTubers film police performing their public duties and upload them for anyone to see. The crooked cops use their badge and guns to transport harmful drugs into the community and then pocket the profits for themselves. The YouTubers cover accident and crime scenes and film them, a right, as Stephen reported, afforded to all members of the media, provided they are backed by a rich corporation. The crooked cops plant a gun on an innocent man who had been run over by another cop, consigning him to prison and destroying his life.
The YouTubers work together to drive to crime scenes and document what they see, sometimes pushing back against cops who attempt to limit their First Amendment rights. Crooked cops conspire to steal millions of dollars of overtime pay for hours they did not work, and then cost taxpayers millions or more in lawsuits over their misdeeds.
So, which group of people are the most destructive and pose the greatest threat to the health and safety of our community? I wonder. And I leave it to you to decide: A bunch of cop watchers who simply want a video police, or a group of drug dealing cops who hand out false charges, steal and deal drugs, all the while picking up stolen overtime to enrich themselves. Do you have any thoughts on who poses an existential threat to our fragile democracy, or any idea of which group is worthy of the charge of acting as organized criminals? I mean, if this group of overachieving cops had simply decided to take out their cell phones and take pictures and upload them online, would they be charged with organized crime? Would we even be having this one-sided conversation? I’ll let you think about it. And if you want, share your thoughts in the comments, because, as always, I would like to hear what you think.
I’d like to thank my guest Ismael of Corners News for taking the time to speak with us today. Thank you, Ismael. And of course I want to thank Intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank the mods, Noli Dee and Lacey R for their support. Thank you both. And a very special thanks to our Patreons, especially our super friends Shane Bushta and Pineapple Girl. We really appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. Unfortunately, we’re only two investigators, so we might not be able to respond to every email, but we appreciate everyone who takes the time to reach out to us.
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, share, and comment. I really do read your comments and appreciate them. 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 really is appreciated. My name is Taya Graham, and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
The debate over defunding police has become part of a broad ideological battle over how and when law enforcement should face public accountability. Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis examine this debate in the context of their own reporting on police overreach and abuse. The pair breaks down the flaws in the anti-defund argument by revealing how law enforcement partisans have successfully avoided substantive oversight and public accountability.
Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis
Transcript
The transcript of this podcast will be made available as soon as possible.
A study of budgets in over 400 American cities over the last 5 years shows that, despite persistent claims by politicians, pundits, and police unions, there was no mass defunding of police. Police departments got the same average cut of the city budget in 2021 as they did in previous years.
Defunding the police became a mainstream political topic in June of 2020, when nine members of the Minneapolis City Council announced their intentions to dismantle the city’s police department with cardboard signs saying “Defund Police.” George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police officers had set off a nationwide wave of protests which often called for cuts to law enforcement budgets as a way to curb police violence—and, briefly, it was floated as policy.
The call to “defund” was less of a unified call for abolition, and more of a general sentiment that directing nearly a third of taxpayer money to the police seemed inconsistent with the regular high-profile incidents of police violence. Opponents worried that fewer police would lead to more crime, and these ideas could have been the start of a long-overdue conversation about policing in America.
Our analysis of over 400 American municipal budgets found that police departments in America got more or less the same amount of money in 2021 than they did in the previous three years. The budget cuts that did pass in a handful of cities were modest compared to the size of the total budget.
But far away from the reasonable policy debate, defunding the police quickly became a right-wing bogeyman. As cities across the country reconsidered their police budgets, any insufficiently pro-police politician could be accused of wanting to defund. Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the burning precincts and looted Targets would naturally follow. Right–wingpublications, politicians, and otheroutlets accused the “defund” movement of spurring a national crime wave, both directly and by decimating police morale so much that it was affecting hiring.
“They defunded the police. What do they get?” said former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton in May of 2021. “Rising crime, cops leaving in droves, difficulty recruiting. Now, they’re waking up to the fact that our cities are unsafe.”
49% of participants in a Politico/Morning Consult poll from February 2022 blamed defunding police for rising violent crime rates in America. 69% believed increasing police budgets would decrease crime “a lot” or “some.”
The problem is there was little if any “defunding” of the police. Our analysis of over 400 American municipal budgets found that police departments in America got more or less the same amount of money in 2021 than they did in the previous three years. The budget cuts that did pass in a handful of cities were modest compared to the size of the total budget.
We acquired budgets from 2018 to 2022 from 419 American municipalities, selected for prominence, size, location and diversity. We then extracted the amount of the city’s general fund—the bulk of city funding—which was directed to the police department, and compared those amounts across locations and years. A more thorough statistical analysis of our data is available here.
Our model found that the percentage of the general fund dedicated to law enforcement stayed consistent from 2018 to 2021—around 29%—after accounting for city- and state-level trends. If police budgets shrank (or grew), they did in proportion to the overall budget. In 2022, cities allocated about 3% less for police, but did so after the “defund” backlash was in full swing.
Police budgets grew or shrank in proportion to overall city budgets, but the percentage of the general fund dedicated to law enforcement stayed consistent from 2018 to 2021—around 29%.
Police budgets did increase less in 2021 than in previous years. From 2020 to 2021, budgets grew an average of 1.8%, compared to 3.8% between 2018 and 2019, and 4.5% between 2019 and 2020. From 2021 to 2022, average growth was 5.0%.
However, city general funds (the entire budget, more or less) followed the same pattern. While general funding grew by an average of 3.7% from 2018 to 2019, and by 5.6% from 2019 to 2020, it only increased by 1.5% from 2020 to 2021. Growth returned to 7.4% from 2021 to 2022. The similar patterns indicate changes in police funding have as much to do with overall changes in budget size as anything else.
While general funding grew by an average of 3.7% from 2018 to 2019, and by 5.6% from 2019 to 2020, it only increased by 1.5% from 2020 to 2021. Growth returned to 7.4% from 2021 to 2022.
So what about the fights over police funding in cities like Minneapolis and Seattle? While Seattle City Council members initially aimed to halve the Seattle PD budget, the actual decrease was around 11%, from $406 million in 2020 to $360 million in 2021. SPD still gets $363 million for the 2022 fiscal year. The Minneapolis City Council initially backed a plan to replace its city police department with a redesigned “Department of Public Safety.” (This new department’s intended budget was unclear, but its critics still considered the move a form of defunding.) That support faded, and eventually voters rejected the redesign by a 56% to 44% margin in a citywide election. Meanwhile, Minneapolis PD did take a 14.7% cut in 2021 (from $188 million to $160 million), but recovered almost all of it in 2022.
Austin reduced its police department’s budget by 32.5% in 2021; then, like Minneapolis, gave it all back in 2022.
Comparison between the proportion of city budget spent on police departments in Austin, Minneapolis, and Seattle in years 2018-2022. Minneapolis PD did take a 14.7% cut in 2021 (from $188 million to $160 million), but recovered almost all of it in 2022.
Most controversies about attempts to “defund” in 2021 involved fights over a small fraction of a department’s budget. A push to redirect $865k of the $23 million Norman, Oklahoma, allocated for law enforcement erupted into citywide outrage. Asheville, North Carolina, shaved $770k from the $30 million originally earmarked for police. Despite its anti-cop reputation, Portland, Oregon, reduced its $229 million police budget by only $8 million.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, successfully launched a community safety department as an alternative to policing, but only reduced police funding by 12%, from $205 million to $180 million. It jumped back up to $222 million in 2022.
Even with their budgets “cut,” Seattle, Minneapolis, and Austin police were still getting 22.4%, 33.1%, and 31.1% of their city’s budget, respectively. None could be realistically considered “defunded.”
This raises a question as to what actually counts as “defunding.” None of the adjustments made in response to the demands of protesters are unprecedented, either in size or proportion. In 2020, Tulsa, Oklahoma, reduced its police budget by $12 million (11%). Honolulu, Hawaii, PD took a $15 million cut (6%) in 2019. Corpus Christi, Texas, Naperville, Illinois, and Grand Junction, Colorado, all reduced their police funding by over 12% in 2021, with no reason to believe they were motivated by protests. Budgets are complicated, carefully negotiated documents that adjust to new circumstances every year. Sometimes the numbers go down, and as previously stated, there is no indication the numbers went down any more than usual in 2021.
In light of this data, Joe Biden’s plea to give the police more resources (“Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with more resources and training”) in his 2022 State of the Union is just a request to throw more money at a government program with a questionable track record. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s “Re-fund the Police” initiative funnels $150 million of state money correcting a mistake nobody actually made.
Still, any public conversation about municipal police funding is progress. After all, while a more recent poll put support for “defunding the police” at a scant 28%, 43% of participants did support “redirect[ing] local police funding to community development programs.”
Baltimore resident Yolanda (whose name has been changed to protect anonymity) was charged with attempted murder in November 2020 and was denied bail. That means she spent months in pretrial detention at the notoriously corrupt and dangerous Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC) for a crime she had not yet gone to trial over or been found guilty of—and that she says she did not commit.
Yolanda complained of deplorable medical care behind bars and borrowed money from family members to hire a lawyer to help secure her release, which for her could have meant the difference between life and death. Just months before her arrest, doctors told her she was suffering from heart failure and required a second open heart surgery. Her preexisting conditions put her at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19—and jails are an inevitable superspreader of the coronavirus.
An analysis by the legal advocacy group Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT) found that in 2019, 75% of defendants who were not granted bail had the charges against them dropped, or they were acquitted at trial.
“I not only suffered from heart failure, I had other medical issues like asthma attacks, but nurses refused to treat me,” Yolanda told Battleground Baltimore. “I was really afraid I would die in there.”
With court cases delayed by months in Baltimore City, Yolanda was among hundreds of people held behind bars during the pandemic for increasing lengths of time before they faced trial. The vast majority of those charged with crimes in Baltimore and held in pretrial detention are not convicted. An analysis by the legal advocacy group Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT) found that in 2019, 75% of defendants who were not granted bail had the charges against them dropped, or they were acquitted at trial.
“People want to get their day in court, they want to be able to prove they’re not guilty,” Samantha Blau, BALT’s policy and engagement director told Battleground Baltimore. “And a lot of times people end up not being found guilty in Baltimore City.”
As courts faced backlogs of cases and COVID-19 spread rapidly behind bars, calls to decrease the prison population moved Maryland courts to take action: Judges began releasing select clients to home detention with private electronic monitoring, a technology that, until that point, had primarily been used for post-conviction release.
Unlike bail, home detention fees are not returned to the client after their trial. A scathing 2021 study by the George Washington University Law School details the proliferation of such monitoring devices, which confine people to their homes, intrude on their privacy, undermine personal and family dignity, extract wealth from those who can least afford it, and set up people to fail and face reincarceration.
In his new book, Understanding E-Carceration, author and “survivor of prison and e-carceration” James Kilgore asks, “Why are [electronic monitoring devices] tools of incarceration and punishment instead of vehicles for change?”
Unlike most other Maryland jurisdictions, in Baltimore, where Yolanda lives, pretrial home detention fees are not paid for by the city. This means that, while her trial was delayed and she was allowed to be released, the cost of her electronic monitoring quickly reached thousands of dollars—and even though the state determined she qualified for a public defender, she had to personally cover those expenses.
“I can’t afford home monitoring. My law bills? I can’t pay. It’s really a hardship trying to pay the home monitoring fee,” Yolanda said. “What am I going to do when nobody is there to help me? My dad’s on oxygen. His funds are exhausted.”
In 2021, criminal justice reform advocates in Maryland helped pass a state law that covered these fees for poor people in localities that did not pay for them, such as Baltimore City. Hundreds of people have successfully utilized the program since it went into effect in October 2021. That measure is set to expire in June of this year. During the legislative session which just ended, the legislature passed Senate Bill 0704, extending the program for 18 months. But the fate of this legislation remains uncertain, Senior Policy Advocate Christopher Dews of the Job Opportunities Task Force (JOTF), a leading advocacy group working to reform pretrial detention, explained.
“Privatized electronic monitoring agencies have siphoned millions of dollars, specifically out of lower income pockets. It’s our job to eliminate barriers to employment, and it’s our job to decriminalize poverty. We don’t want to see people incarcerated because they can’t afford a fee.”
“If [the bill fails to become law] you’re going to have 400 Baltimoreans per month using this program that are just going to be left in the wind. They’re all gonna have to go back to just paying $500 a month that most of them cannot afford,” Dews told Battleground Baltimore. “All of this can be alleviated if we just extend the program.”
Maryland’s expansion of electronic pretrial monitoring is a temporary fix for crowded jails and a clogged criminal legal system, and it is a boon for private companies seeking to profit off the low-income communities of color who are disproportionately targeted by the criminal legal system.
“Privatized electronic monitoring agencies have siphoned millions of dollars, specifically out of lower income pockets,” Dews said. “It’s our job to eliminate barriers to employment, and it’s our job to decriminalize poverty. We don’t want to see people incarcerated because they can’t afford a fee.”
After languishing in prison for seven months and facing deteriorating health conditions, Yolanda was released into home detention with electronic monitoring in June of 2021—almost eight months after her arrest. That relative degree of freedom came with a price tag and created new ways to possibly incarcerate her. If she could not pay the $490 a month charged by the private, Baltimore County-based company Advantage Sentencing Alternative Programs (ASAP) to monitor her ankle bracelet, she would return to jail.
As Yolanda awaits her day in court, she is on the hook for thousands of dollars in fees and unable to earn a living to pay them. As a condition of her release she is only allowed to leave her home to receive medical care or legal advice—not to work.
“I had to lean on family members to help me,” Yolanda said. “If they stopped paying this bill, I’m truly doomed.”
Advocates say charging exorbitant fees for those unable to work can trap people in poverty and push them into debt: “Anecdotally, what we’re seeing is a lot of people are not being given the leeway to look for jobs or go to work,” BALT’s Blau said. “If you’re at home most hours of the day and not earning a wage, then you’re paying for your food, you’re paying your rent or mortgage on your house, and you have no income.”
As Yolanda awaits her day in court, she is on the hook for thousands of dollars in fees and unable to earn a living to pay them. As a condition of her release she is only allowed to leave her home to receive medical care or legal advice—not to work.
Yolanda was forced to sell her personal belongings and continued to borrow money from family members to pay for the home monitoring, rent, food, and legal fees.
“Trying to pay home monitoring has put stress on me. My health has declined. I don’t want to go back,” Yolanda said. “It’s a hardship to absolutely go anywhere. You can’t work under any circumstances”
In October 2021, Yolanda’s lawyer connected her with Dews at JOTF, who helped her access financial relief under the 2021 Maryland law that paid home monitoring fees for those with low income. HB316 allocated $5 million from the American Rescue Plan to cover such fees for low income residents. The measure was the result of lobbying by a coalition of groups including JOTF, BALT, Out for Justice, and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.
“400 Baltimoreans per month since the program started have been using the program, so it’s a massive success,” Dews said. “Again, these persons have not been found guilty, they are awaiting their trial.”
A second primary provision of HB316 required Gov. Larry Hogan to appoint a working group to study the issue of pretrial detention in Maryland to come up with a long term solution. Hogan never did that, so advocates went back to Annapolis this 2022 legislative session to seek continued relief for the hundreds of residents like Yolanda who utilize the program.
Delegate Stephanie Smith and Senator Shelly Hettleman sponsored legislation to extend the program by 18 months and to again call on the governor to appoint a working group to study the issue. SB0704, Hettleman’s version of the bill was passed by both chambers of Maryland’s legislature in the final days of the 2022 General Assembly Session and now sits on the desk of Gov. Hogan.
Ending the program prematurely would be a “terrible shame,” Hettleman told Battleground Baltimore. “Number one, there’s still funding available to be able to continue the program,” Hettleman said. “I fundamentally believe people who are deemed to be safe in the community should be allowed to be released in the community pretrial and not be criminalized because they’re poor.”
Advocates became concerned when John P. Morrissey, chief judge of the District Court of Maryland, objected to language in the bill that requires “Maryland’s Judiciary” to administer the program. Hettleman said while a longer term fix to the issue would need to involve other state agencies, she believes the judiciary will continue this function on a temporary basis.
“I would be surprised, shocked, disappointed if the judiciary would all of a sudden say now that they have the infrastructure in place… ‘Sorry, we can’t do this,’” Hettleman said. Hogan has until May 30 to sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action, which would allow the bill to become law without his signature.
There is also the issue of those whose income is too high for them to qualify for the state’s program but still can’t afford home detention fees. BALT has been covering home monitoring fees for 30 low-income clients that weren’t eligible for the state program. Since March 2020, BALT Legal has covered electronic monitoring fees for 234 clients. But later this month, on April 30, BALT Legal must end that program.
“We’re out of funds,” Blau said. “We can’t continue to pay.”
Todd Oppenheim, felony trial supervisor at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, told Battleground Baltimore that while the public defender’s office supports expanding pretrial release options, which include home detention, its privatization should be reconsidered.
“We’re not married to the idea of having these private monitoring agencies have people under their control, but it’s definitely better than being in a jail or prison,” Oppenheim said.
Dews stressed that with bail the majority of the money is returned to the accused after their case, while privatized pretrial home detention fees are lost forever:
“Unlike bail where you get that money back, you don’t get that money back [from privatized home detention],” Dews said.
Yolanda’s trial is currently scheduled for September 2022—nearly two years after she was arrested and nearly a year and a half since she was able to return home on electronic monitoring. As she waits to schedule her heart surgery in the upcoming days, she says she remains hopeful the program will be extended.
“I got to eat. What am I going to compromise? Do I buy two rolls of toilet paper or do I buy one? I try to stretch,” she said. “If they stopped the program, I can’t afford this home monitoring and trying to pay my rent and my bills. This is a real hardship.”
The indiscriminate use of arrest powers is one of the most destructive forms of overpolicing in a country accustomed to aggressive law enforcement. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, we examine the questionable arrest of a Mississippi woman who was detained by an officer and later charged for reasons that appear to contradict what was caught on body camera—an analysis which reveals just how potent police powers are, and why the ability to arrest requires more scrutiny.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/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 do so by showing this video of the arrest of a Mississippi woman for talking back to a cop. But it’s not just a story about a single arrest, but also about how another small town in rural America is using policing in ways that are punishing the poor and exploiting the power of the law.
But before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, please hit the Patreon link pinned in the comments below, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. All right, we’ve gotten that out of the way.
Now, as we’ve talked about on this show before, the license to arrest is one of the most unassailable but nebulous powers in the American legal system. Meaning it is an act sanctioned by the government whose devastating consequences are not fully grasped. That’s because the ability to arrest has, in a sense, broadened over time. Let’s remember American police arrest roughly 10 million people per year. And as this study by the Vera Institute found, roughly 80% of those arrests are for low-level offenses such as disorderly conduct or substance possession.
The reason I cite these statistics is because while the numbers are stunning, it’s only through the individual stories that we can understand their implications. And no story could be a better example of how the vast power of arrest has become problematic than the tale of Columbus, Mississippi, resident Rebecca Hall. As you can see in this video here, Rebecca had actually called the police to the home of a friend in September of 2020 after getting into a dispute with the daughters of that same friend during a visit. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer 1: Except for, because Rebecca, [crosstalk] we just asked you a simple question and you’re still talking.
Rebecca Hall: What is disorderly?
Police Officer 1: You are still talking.
Rebecca Hall: Because I’m talking, it’s disorderly? I’m not raising my voice. I’m not, [crosstalk].
Police Officer 1: Rebecca, you are still talking. We’re not going to –
Rebecca Hall: I would like to leave.
Police Officer 1: Listen to me.
Rebecca Hall: Can I leave?
Police Officer 1: Rebecca. We’re not going to go back through this again. You understand me?
Rebecca Hall: Can I leave? Can I leave?
Police Officer 1: You understand me?
Rebecca Hall: You understand me? I want to leave.
Police Officer 1: Can you understand me?
Rebecca Hall: I’m ready to leave.
Police Officer 1: Do you understand me?
Rebecca Hall: I’m ready to leave, sir.
Police Officer 1: If you say one more word you’re going with me.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But it’s actually, after police showed up that things get dicey. Especially when police ask for ID. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer 2: …Over here to help me.
Police Officer 1: No, I don’t want to hear it no more. No, I don’t want to hear anything else. You ain’t got to tell the police. I don’t want to hear anything else. I had enough.
Rebecca Hall: Daddy, back up away from everything.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now there are several facts we need to unpack here before we show the events leading up to the actual arrest, because, technically speaking, Rebecca called the police. And for that reason we should acknowledge that if you do call the police, it’s not unreasonable for the police to expect you to identify yourself when they arrive. Simply as a practical matter, it makes sense for police to speak to the person who asked police for help, and to ensure that people who make false charges are held accountable as well. However, it’s how the police handled the situation when it was clear that she didn’t want to give her ID that is the focus of our show today.
As we see, as the video continues, she was standing next to the police car as the police talked to several family members who she’d accused of assaulting her prior to the officer’s arrival. But even though she was not herself accused of a crime, this is what happened next.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer 1: I’ve had enough.
Rebecca Hall: Wait A minute. Look, look.
Police Officer 1: We had [crosstalk] turn around. Turn around.
Rebecca Hall: I was going back there to get pictures of the marijuana plants. Why are you acting like this?
Police Officer 2: Failure to obey a police officer.
Rebecca Hall: You didn’t, you didn’t tell me to do anything.
Police Officer 2: I didn’t have, I didn’t have to. I got all this on. This is enough to tell you, I’m in jeopardy. You’ve been told – [crosstalk]
Police Officer 1: – To central. Come on over here. We had enough
Rebecca Hall: Sir.
Police Officer 1: Come on.
Rebecca Hall: For what? What am I being arrested for?
Police Officer 1: Failure to obey.
Rebecca Hall: What did you tell me to do?
Police Officer 1: We’re not going to listen to all this ma’am. [crosstalk]
Police Officer 2: Hold still. Stand still.
Rebecca Hall: But that’s what you were saying, is failure to obey. But what command did you give me?
Police Officer 1: We told you to be quiet and you still interfering when we trying to talk to everybody else [crosstalk].
Rebecca Hall: So that’s a crime, you told me to be quiet?
Police Officer 1: Yeah. You interfering when we trying to do our duty.
Police Officer 2: [crosstalk] Right there, you failure to obey.
Rebecca Hall: I was walking around there to get pictures of the marijuana.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now I know it’s easy to just write this off as police just dealing with a dicey situation with the best tool at their disposal: an arrest. I mean, even though Rebecca has not committed a crime or was even accused of one, she was being a bit defiant, as we can see in this video prior to police putting her in handcuffs. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Rebecca Hall: I’m free. I don’t want to go anywhere.
Police Officer 1: No, no, go ahead. We’re not going to listen to all this.
Rebecca Hall: Well – [crosstalk] if you don’t want to listen.
Police Officer 1: This is your friend right? You don’t tell me [crosstalk].
Police Officer 2: Rebecca please.
Rebecca Hall: I can ask for a supervisor for me. That’s not right. Why are you walking up on me like you’re trying to –
Police Officer 1: You’re going to end up warming up. Do me a favor –
Rebecca Hall: No I’m not. For what?
Police Officer 1: Sir.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But the reason we’re talking about this case at all is how it directly points to a problem with American law enforcement that needs to be called to account: Just how readily, and falsely, police turn to arrest as a tool against dissent. Let’s watch again, and this time, let’s pay really close attention to what finally prompts an officer to take out the cuffs.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Rebecca Hall: But wait, what command did you give me?
Police Officer 1: We told you to be quiet and you still interfering when we trying to talk to everybody else.
Rebecca Hall: So that’s a crime, you tell me to be quiet?
Police Officer 1: Yeah. You interfering when we trying to do our duty.
Police Officer 2: Right there you failure to obey.
Rebecca Hall: I was walking around there to get pictures of the marijuana.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: So it’s clear. The reason she was arrested was not because she posed a threat, or had committed a crime, or was otherwise imminent harm to the officer or bystander. She wasn’t put into handcuffs because the officer witnessed her break the law. It seems that the cop that took her into custody was simply annoyed. Meaning he found her behavior bothersome and decided to use the power of the law to abate it. And that is why the story is important, because it points to a deeper problem with law enforcement. And for more on this arrest and what it says about policing and, in particular, in rural America, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So first, you’ve reached out to the Columbus, Mississippi, Police Department for comment. What have you learned?
Stephen Janis: Well, firstly, this arrest was executed by Lowndes County Sheriff’s Department, who are the people that actually made the arrest, although that includes Columbus, but not actually the Columbus Police Department. But what’s really interesting is we had some breaking news here. There was an FTA issued for Rebecca’s arrest because she hadn’t paid a fine related to this actual arrest of $278. And because of that she had to spend three to four days in jail, she’s told us. So, really, we reached out to them and asked them why and why are they doing this? They haven’t gotten back to us yet. But obviously it’s astounding that there was a very high fine related to this, which seems to be not only a questionable arrest, but a questionable fine.
Taya Graham: But like other cities, you did some digging on the finances and the political economy of the town with regards to policing. What have you uncovered?
Stephen Janis: Well, this is astonishing. The town of Columbus, Mississippi, as far as I can tell, does not share their financial information with the public. I searched the website over and over again. Couldn’t find the budget. So I emailed every single council person on the council, saying, could you please release the budget? Where are the budget figures? Now, they may be somewhere else, but they’re not easy to find, so obviously they don’t like to be too transparent about their finances. And I’m assuming there’s a reason why.
Taya Graham: And finally, we’re talking about the overuse of arrests by American law enforcement. You’ve been looking into the data. What is it telling you?
Stephen Janis:Well, if you look at the Vera Institute, they say that there are 10 million arrests a year, which is an astonishing number. But I think the best way to look at it is to see how much more efficient our criminal justice system is than other social processes which might benefit us. Like for example, is healthcare as effective as being able to process 10 million people a year? 10 million people a year through local jails, prisons, federal facilities. It’s an amazing amount of people, it’s extraordinary. And yet we have nothing similar, I think, in our social services, in the things that would actually help us, make us healthier, make us more productive, provide us jobs. So I think it’s an astounding fact that so many people are arrested and the cops are able to arrest so many people without more pushback from the public.
Taya Graham: And now we’re joined by the woman who was subject to this questionable arrest. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us.
Rebecca Hall: I appreciate your time.
Taya Graham: So it seems on the video that the police officer put you in the handcuffs just for talking back. Is that correct?
Rebecca Hall: In the video that they gave me, in the body cam footage, he said, she’s trying to get smart and we ain’t going to have that. That’s what he said. And when he put me in the back of the car, I said, you’re telling me you are arresting me for not being quiet? He said, yep. Yes ma’am. I called them for help.
Taya Graham: After you were arrested, what were the exact charges you were facing?
Rebecca Hall: That time it was failure to obey a police officer, which is actually a secondary charge. You have to be detained before you have to obey a police officer.
Taya Graham: Have you heard of other people having issues with this police department?
Rebecca Hall: Yes ma’am. ‘Cause see, nobody has the balls to record them like I do. I’m just telling you the truth, because I know who I am. You have to realize, realization versus knowledge. You know what I’m saying? You can know it, but you got to realize who you are, man. And once you realize I ain’t taking no shit, I’m sorry. I’m not. No, I’m not sorry. Like I said in the video. But I want to educate the people in my town. Because I love y’all, man. And these police have been doing that to y’all too long. They kill the Black people. They shoot them in the back here. I’m telling you, Taya, it’s out of control. They be murdering people.
Taya Graham: How do you think officers should have handled the situation?
Rebecca Hall: Man, they should have been concerned about, did I get hurt? Was I okay? They never even mentioned it was a stop call, they called it a disturbance. They called it a disturbance on the fake ass report they made, the investigative report. They lied. They sounded like robots in court. But let me tell you, I know it was all staged. It’s so stupid, because they think I’m stupid.
Taya Graham: So how has this affected you and impacted your life?
Rebecca Hall: Taya, I preach to strangers. I look crazy as hell around here. Y’all know me. If you live in Columbus, y’all have seen me. And I tell you, under any circumstances, record the police, record them no matter what. When they tell you to put that phone down, don’t do it, make them throw you down. Cause baby, that’s your right.
Taya Graham: Now I’m sure anyone who watched my interview with Rebecca and the video of her arrest would ask a simple but reasonable question: Why should we care about the fairly uneventful arrestable woman who wouldn’t identify herself? And why, given that there are many more extreme examples of police overreach, should we take the time to unpack an incident that simply resulted in a short stay in jail and some unpleasant court time? Fair question. Let me try to answer.
Now as I’ve mentioned on this show before, I live in Baltimore City, Maryland. It’s a town that’s known for crab cakes, the Ravens, and, unfortunately, the popular copaganda-esque show called The Wire. But we also invented another less heralded concept that became a law enforcement tool for mayhem and communal destruction that continues to have consequences for residents today. The concept emerged during Baltimore’s massive experiment with a strategy called zero tolerance, which we’ve referenced on the show before.
During a period from roughly 2000 to 2007, police arrested 100,000 people a year in a city with a population of 600,000. And these arrests weren’t targeted at hardened criminals. Instead, police scooped up anybody sitting on stoops, drinking a beer, spitting on the sidewalk, or simply walking in a neighborhood where they didn’t live. It was a policy the Department of Justice eventually concluded was unconstitutional after a lengthy investigation, but it also created a problem for Baltimore Police. Zero tolerance led to so many people facing charges, the court system could not process the number of cases it generated. So in order to alleviate the burden, prosecutors would drop hundreds of cases almost daily with a notation that they had been, and I’m quoting, “abated by arrest.” Now this is a legal concept that didn’t really exist before people started arresting everyone. It’s sort of an odd legal limbo between adjudicating a case and dropping it.
And while this might sound innocuous, I want you to think about how this idea plays out for a second. First, the Baltimore City Police make so many arrests that the system becomes overloaded with cases. People’s right to move about freely is restricted to the point where courts simply cannot adjudicate. Then, instead of simply dropping the cases, prosecutors invent a new legal concept to deal with the overload that allows them to skip the process of deciding whether the charges are justified or if the officer violated the law. Mind you, the basic underlying idea of the Constitution is that everyone has the right to defend themselves in court. In fact, it is a right so inviolable it is consecrated in a series of key amendments that outline a variety of legal stipulations that in part bolster a key idea behind all of our legal jurisprudence: the presumption of innocence.
But here in Baltimore, thanks to police overreach, that right was simply buried by a system addicted to policing space with the stroke of the pen and the acquiescence of politicians and prosecutors alike. The imperative of policing was able to overwhelm and bury the basic Constitutional rights of the people. And the concept of abated by arrest ended up denying people the right to defend themselves in court, and perhaps cut off a vital venue where government sponsored violence of bad policing could have been exposed for what it truly was. But that didn’t happen, because, truthfully, as this example and as Rebecca’s arrest makes clear, we think very little about the consequences of using arrests indiscriminately and how that overuse can evolve into a dangerous political tool that can literally wipe out our rights if it’s allowed to expand – No pun intended – Unabated.
But again, you could ask the question, why does it matter? Why should I care?
Well, as I’ve mentioned before on this show, you can literally see the consequences here in our city. Vacant houses standing in disrepair, one of the highest murder rates in the country, rampant poverty. And, of course, all of it fodder for Hollywood elites like David Simon, who can turn our misery into million dollar programming for entertainment titans like HBO. But if you’re still not convinced, then consider an entirely different source. It’s a book by a Russian novelist, no less: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn is perhaps best known for his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a dark and foreboding realistic portrayal of life inside Russian forced labor camps. But, I’m going to use another of his works that best applies to this discussion called the Gulag Archipelago.
It was a novel that delved into further detail about the forced imprisonment and death of millions of Russians under Joseph Stalin. And what is most notable about this book and my topic today is simply the title of the first chapter, “Arrest.” In a short 16 pages, Solzhenitsyn describes the terror and trauma and the violence and vileness of the use of arrest as a tool of oppression. He recounts how the Soviets of Stalin’s era would arrest people in their homes at all hours of the night for crimes unknown and for violating laws that didn’t exist. It was the precursor to all the suffering that followed. A way to subsume the people into a system of exploitation that caused untold suffering and still reverberates today. Now, I am not suggesting that we face anything similar in the present here, but what I do want to point out is how powerful the ability to arrest actually is. How a license to put someone in a cage is a profound capability that cannot be underestimated.
And that when it is abused, it is literally a vehicle for anti-democratic impulses that are always evolving and always seeking a path of less resistance to create more power for the elites and less for the people who deserve better. Which is why even in a case like Rebecca’s, we must be vigilant. It’s why we do need to continue to watch the police and expose their abusive powers that are anything but innocuous. It’s why it’s important to examine any use of arrest that does not take into account the consequences of misusing it. And that is why any example of police overreach is critical to parse, regardless of circumstance. And that is why we will continue to report on cases like Rebecca and others, because we will not let police abate our rights.
I want to thank Rebecca for sharing her experience with us, and I also want to wish her the best on becoming a cop watcher. Thank you, Rebecca. 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 really appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And of course, I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And of course, a very special thanks to our Patreons, we really do appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram or @eyesonpolice on Twitter.
And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook. And please like and comment. You know I read your comments and appreciate them, and I try to answer your questions whenever I can. And we do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So if you do feel inspired to donate, please do because we don’t run ads or take corporate dollars. So anything you can spare is always greatly appreciated. My name is Taya Graham, and I’m your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
On March 10, the Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility in upstate New York closed its doors. Opponents to the closure said that the Moriah Shock facility provided essential jobs for the community and that the military bootcamp style of the program at so-called “shock” camps helps inmates recover from issues with alcohol and drug abuse. But is this true? What are “shock” camps? What goes on there? And do they actually help incarcerated people? In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Keri Blakinger about the closure of the Moriah facility and about her recent article on “shock” camps, ‘‘A Humiliating Experience’: Prisoners Allege Abuse at Discipline-focused ‘Shock’ Camps.”
Keri Blakinger is a staff writer for The Marshall Project whose work focuses on prisons and jails. She writes “Inside Out,” a regular column published in collaboration with NBC News. She previously covered criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, VICE, the New York Daily News, and The New York Times. She is the The Marshall Project’s first formerly incarcerated reporter. Her memoir, Corrections in Ink, comes out in June 2022.
Charles Hopkins: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-hosting for Eddie Conway. Moriah correctional prison, shock camp, is one of six prisons that’s closing upstate New York. According to the State of New York, $1.7 million will be saved from this prison and others closing. Opposition is saying that closing this prison would decimate or devastate the economy in upstate New York. Here to talk about this and other things is Keri Blankinger. Keri Blakinger wrote the article with the Marshall Project outlining what shock camps are, how they function, and what they’re doing to the people that are incarcerated there. Thank you. Welcome, Keri, to this edition of Rattling the Bars.
Keri Blakinger: Hey, thanks for having me.
Charles Hopkins: Shock camps. A lot of people might not know what they are. Can you explain what they are, how they are operated, and how they came into existence?
Keri Blakinger: Yeah, sure. So, the shock camps in New York are some of the last in the country, but not the very last. But shock camps came about as a way to theoretically reduce prison populations after several states… Well, after lots of states built up prisons and didn’t have room for all the prisoners. The idea with shock camp has generally been that people who are in prison for addiction-related crimes or certain other subsets of crimes can complete some program that’s sort of a military bootcamp style program. Something like a 90-day or a six-month program, where you’re doing a lot of running and maybe cleaning toilets with toothbrushes and dealing with some very confrontational therapy. In the best case scenario, that’s how these programs would work. You would endure that for a set period of time, finish, and when you finish the program, you usually get some amount of time shaved off your sentence.
In New York, the way it works is you do this six-month program, you can go home up to two and a half years early. The problem is that these programs have really lent themselves to abuse over the years. And we see that especially in New York, where time and again prisoners have reported beatings and abuse, and there’s been some amount of sexual abuse, and on a somewhat daily basis people say that they’re being called crack heads and junkies, being made to shovel snow with spoons, having shoes thrown at them as a punishment. There’s a lot of degrading treatment, being made to eat off the floor like a dog. And these are not one offs.
I’ve been reporting on these sorts of programs in New York for a few years, and these are things that we routinely hear out of several of the facilities that have had these kinds of programs. But over the years, many states have closed their shock camps. In some cases because they’re not effective, they’re prone to lawsuits, and I think there’s a growing understanding that traumatizing people is not therapeutic. New York has some of the last few programs left. And one of them, Moriah, the one that I was writing about here, has been earmarked for closure and has recently closed, actually, in upstate New York. And now there’s only one of these programs remaining in upstate New York, and that is Lakeview Shock Facility.
Charles Hopkins: And let’s flesh this out. We’re talking about mental health issues in terms of people that’s suffering from substance abuse, and it’s known throughout the world now that substance abuse is a disease. The disease model is prevalent in terms of evaluation. Where is the connection between the mental health and the torture that these people are receiving? Or is it purely torture, and to try to torture a person out of wanting to use drugs? What’s your read on that? And why?
Keri Blakinger: Well, I think there’s a few things going on. I think that first of all, a lot of these started during the war on drugs. And I think that the whole idea of a military inspired program really played into the visuals of a war on drugs. If we’re having a war, it makes sense that you’re wanting to engage in military style programs as a way of combating it. So, I think part of it was that it really appealed to the ethos of the era in which it was created. But I also think that there’s a lot of people, and I think some of these people have a significant overlap with the population of people who are running and working in prisons, but I think there’s a lot of people that think the military teaches discipline. And they think that, oh, the military cleans up people’s lives, troubled teens get old enough and they go into the military and they turn out all right.
And I think that there’s some belief that transferring that treatment to an addiction, to dealing with an addiction would be an effective way of dealing with addiction. And you can understand the thought process behind that. Like, oh, the military straightened out my troubled cousin, maybe it’ll straighten out these troubled prisoners. But the problem is that prison is not the military. Prison doesn’t have any vested interest in your health or wellbeing or success. Whereas the military does need you to be healthy to do your job. And the military, also, this treatment you know is a means to an end and you end up with some skills and a respected career coming out of it.
None of that is true in prison. You are not getting some job skills or some resume credentials from surviving this shock incarceration. And I think fundamentally, beyond all that, you really can’t traumatize someone into wanting to be sober. And a lot of the people that are coming into these programs are dealing with a lot of existing trauma. And especially when you’re talking about women in the women’s facilities, a lot of them are coming in with trauma at the hands of men. So in those scenarios, you can imagine that having drill instructor type male screaming at you may actually undermine what you might need to have a sober and more stable life.
Charles Hopkins: And in your article, you spoke on how it’s an incentive-based program and that you have to have a substance abuse problem. Talk about the attitude of the people in these facilities that choose to go in these areas and some of the stories they told you about, the ones maybe that didn’t complete the program. And if you got any insight on the ones who completed then recidivate, if you could talk about these things.
Keri Blakinger: Yeah, sure. So, I actually did time in New York prisons before I became a reporter. So this was actually a choice that I was faced with in that, when you go through reception, which is what they call it when you get to prison and they do tests and they figure out what prison they’re going to send you to and what programs you’re going to be required to do. When you go through reception, you know that one of the possibilities is shock, if you qualify. Typically, that means that you have to meet some sort of age requirement. You usually have to be at least 18 at the time of your crime, and you usually have to be under a certain age, although the exact age that you have to be under has changed over the years. And at the time that I was going through, you also couldn’t be on any mental health medication.
So you couldn’t be on Prozac. You couldn’t be on anything for, I don’t know, bipolar. There’s all sorts of pretty necessary psychiatric medications that would be in and of themselves disqualifying. Not because the program was so rigorous that they were worried you couldn’t make it through if you needed mental health care, but more because the facilities were all considered low security facilities. And if you were on any psychiatric medications, they simply didn’t have the mental health staff at those facilities who would be able to give you those medications. Recently, like in the past two years, this has theoretically changed, and the Department of Correction says that now people who are on mental health meds can qualify. I don’t actually have any evidence as to whether that is happening or not, because just because they say a thing is permitted by policy doesn’t mean it’s something they’re doing on a widespread basis.
So, the verdict’s kind of out on that one. But for years, one of the decisions when you came into prison was if you knew that you otherwise qualified for shock, you had to think about, did you want to go off your mental health medications in order to qualify for this program that would allow you to get home earlier? You can imagine that’s a very powerful incentive. If you’re talking about like, geez, I struggle with depression, I’m on Prozac. But if I go off it for six months, I can get home to my kids two and a half years early. That’s a pretty coercive situation. So, I think that this is one of the things that people think about a lot when they’re coming into prison and trying to figure out if they are going to go to shock or not.
And then of course when they get out they’re now off mental health medications that were helpful to them. Now, the exact impact of that and how that influences recidivism numbers is really difficult to understand because there isn’t data on this specific population that has been released in terms of recidivism and the degree to which changes in mental health medication did or didn’t play a role in that. But it’s also difficult to look at the success of these programs, because frequently the Department of Correction says these programs have lower recidivism than the rest of prison. And that is true by the numbers, but it is also misleading in a few ways. First of all, you’re only having a narrow segment of the population that qualifies. For years, people with mental health medications didn’t qualify. That’s a demographic that’s at high risk of recidivism.
So there’s that, but also a large percentage of the people who go to shock fail out and don’t complete. And those people are not included in the recidivism numbers. So what you end up with is only the most determined, most motivated prisoners are the only ones who are graduating from shock to even be considered in these recidivism numbers. So, it’s really hard to measure the success of these programs, and it’s really hard to measure the impact of these programs on people’s lives. Also, of course, as is often the case with prison, we’re just not getting good data, reliable data, or trustworthy data. So a lot of what we find ends up being anecdotal and hearing about what people tell us. And as you can see from the story, what people say has often been pretty shocking.
Charles Hopkins: Talk about the… Because I’m looking at the mental health of substance abuse, and I’m also looking at relapse. And I’m a recovering addict, and I’ve been through the NA, and I understand the NA philosophy. Talk about this aspect of it from, okay, we are acknowledging that you cannot quantify the numbers in terms of the success of the program. But in terms of relapse, to your knowledge, has this program been successful in creating a mindset where a person would not be inclined to go back and use drugs? Because in essence, the program is supposed to be designed to, wherever their methodology is, to stop a person from wanting to use drugs. That’s how they got where they were.
Keri Blakinger: Right. I think, again, that’s a pretty complicated question. I think we do know, for instance, that there’s been some studies around the fact that confrontational therapy is not the best option. It simply… There’s a lot of studies around this, because this idea of the confrontational therapy where they yell at you and call it treatment, this is something that’s been tried before, especially when there were those troubled teen boot camps where they’d send troubled kids out into the wilderness that were real big in the ’90s and then people started dying. Those also were based on the tough love, confrontational therapy idea. And that generated some research around the success of that as a method. And it’s not, it’s not successful. It’s not the best way to treat people.
Of course, actual relapse data would be even harder to come by than just recidivism data. Because recidivism data, at least you can know whether someone is in or out of prison. But when you’re talking about relapse, somebody may, if they’re not on parole, you have really no way of knowing what they’re doing. And even if they are, it’s pretty spotty because it’s dependent on whether the parole officer is testing or not. But we can look at these methods and say that it is using a method that is not considered the gold standard, for sure.
And it is not using what is considered the most recommended practice at this point in addiction treatment, which has been medication-assisted treatment. Clearly, it’s not for everyone. I didn’t use medication-assisted treatment in getting off drugs, and a lot of people don’t. But it is considered the standard evidence-based approach at this point, and it is not allowed in shock incarceration facilities. If nothing else, there’s solid data that medication-assisted treatment using things like Methadone, Suboxone, Vivitrol, significantly reduces the risk of death by relapse. And again, this is something that these shock camp programs do not use.
Charles Hopkins:Right. And that’s really why I asked that question, because when you look at substance abuse and you look at a program that in fact uses torture to round to try to stop a person from having the desire to use drugs. And that’s what got me where I’m at, the desire to use drugs, and your program has nothing in there to try to get me to understand that part of my disease. Then I’m asking the question. Because I’m asking, well, if you are not having a mechanism to do that, and then you’re not utilizing the prohibitors to help with that, then really you’re just saying that I’m going to shock you out of wanting to use drugs. Which leads me to my next question.
In your article, you say that saving the state, the state alleges that these programs, which have been in existence for over 35 years according to your article, have saved over $147 million. Have you found any truth to that? And what percentage of this, when you say $147 million and you’re talking about upstate New York, and basically you talking about the camp system versus the other systems, you’re saying $147 million in lieu of…?
Keri Blakinger: Yeah. I think that it stands to reason that there’s probably some money saved on these programs in New York in the way that they run. And I say that because I think part of what they’re counting, and they haven’t given us a solid accounting as to how exactly they’re arriving at that number, but I can imagine that they’re probably including fewer days spent in prison as part of that metric. For instance, if you did shock camp and you got out two and a half years early, I imagine they’re counting that as two and a half years of incarceration money saved. And those are significant saving., But of course this is not the only way to arrive at them. If you think that someone can safely be released after six months of being yelled at and made to shovel snow with a spoon, then presumably they could also be safely released after six months even if you didn’t traumatize them. And then you would also save the state that same amount of money.
I would imagine – And again, they haven’t given us a detailed breakdown of this – I would imagine that part of the savings could also be in the cost of running a facility like this, because typically low security facilities cost less to run than higher security facilities. If that’s something they’re counting, I’m not sure that would necessarily be a fair metric. Because if someone can qualify for a low security shock camp, they could also qualify for another kind of low security prison, which would also be cheaper than a higher security facility. So I’m not sure if that’s something they’re counting or not. But the point, the overriding point regardless, is whatever cost savings are coming from this program could also be realized in more productive ways.
Charles Hopkins:And I’m going to be inclined to question the cost saving because unless everybody is released unconditionally, you’re not on parole or probation and you’re not in the collateral aspect of the system, then the money is just being deferred there. Can you address the opposition’s views on why the prison should not be closed? And we did a thing on small town America, rural America, where the major industry is prison. Can you talk about that? And what type of information did you get from your research and your interviews [crosstalk] to that?
Keri Blakinger: Yeah, sure. So, I’ve actually done a lot of reporting on prison towns in general. And I do think that, obviously, as you’ve alluded to, we hear a lot about prison towns who would oppose the closure of prisons because it will decimate the local economy. And that is real. Yes, there are people, even people that don’t work in prison and never plan to, who will be harmed by this closure. I’m not saying that means you should keep prisons open for that purpose, but it is a reality that we need to grapple with as prisons are closing. A lot of these towns were promised this economic boom decades ago when mills closed down, when factories closed down. When other means of stimulating small local economies began closing and prisons came in, they were heralded as something that would save these towns. And how much they delivered on that promise is subject to debate.
But in many cases, it did at least sort of keep these towns bumping along. And now when they close, even the people who’ve never worked in the prisons are going to be harmed. Because in some cases this means that utilities won’t be able to be provided. There are some towns that end up losing their sewage and water systems because of prison closures. In some cases, it harms local hospitals who are now not getting supported by the prison and the prisoners being sent there. I actually just talked to a community college president in California who is not opposing prison closures, but simply pointed out that the closure of a prison near his community college will mean that they lose about 200 students who were at that prison and were completing coursework behind bars.
So, I think there’s a lot of ripple effects out into the community. And again, that should not be a reason to not close prisons, but I do think it’s something that we’d need to seriously consider, that we don’t leave behind these rural towns. And what else can replace a prison. Because that is one thing that I don’t think I’ve seen many satisfactory answers to. What do you do to salvage a local economy in the absence of a prison?
Charles Hopkins: And in that regard, that’s really why I asked that question because I was wondering if the town was looking at some innovation outside of relying on torture and relying on all this misery to be the source of their livelihood. I was thinking that maybe they would try to attract a business or different things, and whether or not this was something in your research or in your article, that you had actually somebody saying that they like, we’re trying to attract business from international community, we’re trying to develop some type of manufacturing model, or we’re trying to track tax credits. I was wondering if you, have you seen that coming out in your article, in your interviews?
Keri Blakinger: Yeah. So, I actually, until yesterday, heard no real viable or good-seeming ideas as to what you do in the absence of a prison. Because first of all, most of these places that we’re talking about, the places that are going to be decimated by the closures, are in such rural remote areas that don’t have big workforces. It’s not a great incentive to be attracting new industries or businesses. But this community college president that I was talking to pointed out that he thought a national cemetery would actually be exactly a perfect fit for that area. Because again, it’s rural, there’s…
And this is, to be clear, in California, although I think many of the same things would apply to this area in upstate New York. But it’s rural, there’s a lot of space, you’d have the ability to have the space for a cemetery. And also if it’s a national cemetery, then you’d have people coming in and making use of the businesses, staying at hotels, you’d have funerals occurring there, you’d have apparently more jobs than I would’ve thought. It didn’t really occur to me that a cemetery would generate quite so many jobs. But a lot of these prisons are also the ones where a single remote prison in a small town are typically not huge prisons with thousands of employees. These are typically small and midsize prisons. So, these are things that the jobs could be replaced by something like a national cemetery. And I haven’t seen that done anywhere. I think it’d be interesting to see what happens if it is. But honestly, that is the only real viable alternative that I’ve heard floated in the time that I’ve been reporting on this.
Charles Hopkins: And before we close, you were very candid in the article, talking about your own substance abuse problems though. Talk a little bit about that and where you are at now in terms of your views on substance abuse and drug addiction.
Keri Blakinger: Yeah. So as I mentioned in the story, I did heroin off and on for about nine years. I also did pretty much any drug you would put in front of me. And then I got arrested and did about two years in prison. And I cover prisons a lot, I’m sober now. And I write a lot about addiction issues and mental health issues. And I also have a book coming out in June, which is a lot about addiction. It’s my memoir, and it’s about how I got into drugs and how I got off of them in prison, because I think that one of the things that a lot of people not familiar with this may not understand is that there are drugs everywhere in prison. And you can get high in prison. I could get heroin delivered to my bedside along with a needle while I was in prison. So getting sober in prison is not necessarily the easy task that people assume it is. And this is one of the things that I grapple with in that book. And yeah, I think it deals a lot with addiction and life after addiction.
Charles Hopkins: All right. Thank you, Keri. And thank you for this enlightening and engaging conversation about shock camps. We recognize now that it is a continuation of the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration, we recognize that rural America is benefiting from mass incarceration. We are not insensitive to people working, but we definitely don’t have no sympathy towards nobody working and benefiting from slavery and the labor that’s coming out of that. But at the end of the day, we’re thankful for you and what you’re doing in terms of educating us about these torturous activity that’s going on in prison. We’re thankful that you were able to give us some insight into this disease model that’s taking place in New York, upstate New York prison. And do you have any last words?
Keri Blakinger: No. Just thank you for having me.
Charles Hopkins: Okay. And there you have it. This is another edition of Rattling the Bars. We want to encourage everyone that views, that listens to Rattling the Bars to support The Real News, because it’s not an alternative news, it is actually the real news, as you just saw Keri as the example of real news.
The billboard atop a vacant building loomed over Baltimore’s Station North arts district, announcing “DEFUND BPD”—broadcasting, in tall white letters, activists’ demands that the Baltimore Police Department’s annual $500 million+ budget be reduced.
Activist artists have used the billboard a number of times over the years, calling attention to the police who killed Freddie Gray, mocking elected officials and developers, and at the start of the pandemic, declaring “Cancel Rent and Fuck The Police.”
After George Floyd’s murder, as activists painted “DEFUND BPD” in the street in front of City Hall, and Baltimore residents began more loudly questioning police spending, the billboard was changed to “DEFUND BPD” (an accompanying “Free Palestine” was added last year).
After George Floyd’s murder, as activists painted “DEFUND BPD” in the street in front of City Hall, and Baltimore residents began more loudly questioning police spending, the billboard was changed to “DEFUND BPD” (an accompanying “Free Palestine” was added last year).
That’s how the billboard has remained over the past two years—at least until the end of March, when over a few days “DEFUND BPD” was painted over and replaced by an advertisement for the upcoming Charm City Smoke Fest, a 420-friendly hip-hop festival featuring a number of local rappers.
“CHARM CITY SMOKE FEST” was there instead of “DEFUND BPD,” and the cat from Alice in Wonderland with a weed leaf in its mouth covered up the words “Free Palestine.”
Baltimoreans were angry at or amused by (and maybe a little of both) a call for changes to policing painted over to promote a festival for cannabis. It is a drug that, while decriminalized in Maryland, continues to disproportionately incarcerate Black Baltimoreans and is commonly used by cops to justify searching someone’s car, place, or person.
Battleground Baltimore reached out to the artist who created the commissioned “CHARM CITY SMOKE FEST” mural, who declined to comment. They instructed Battleground Baltimore to speak to Andrew Ensor, who runs Charm City Smoke Fest. Ensor also declined to comment.
Battleground Baltimore also reached out to the activist artists behind the “DEFUND BPD” billboard, who explained their frustration.
“As the city budget comes around and we consider the impact of the police on our communities, and the toll of the drug war, we are disappointed that the weed industry decided to erase an important message for an advertisement,” they told Battleground Baltimore.
The artists behind “DEFUND BPD” have been persistent, always reclaiming little space on top of an abandoned building they’ve expropriated for radical sloganeering.
As of Friday, Apr. 8, the billboard had been repainted and again says “DEFUND BPD.”
“Defund2Refund”
Covering up the billboard’s “DEFUND BPD” message right now was especially poorly timed. While April may be the month of 4/20, it is also the month where Baltimore City’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year is released, and over the next couple months, the city council, community organizers, activists, and any Baltimorean who care, will try and weigh in and make the budget just a little bit more equitable.
Top of mind for many is the Baltimore Police Department’s allotment of that budget, which adds up to more than 25% of the total city budget. According to the group Organizing Black, one of the key organizers in the local push to defund BPD, “the city spends more than $900 per person on policing,” and “for every dollar spent on policing, 50 cents is spent on public schools, 20 cents on public housing, 12 cents on homeless services, 11 cents on recreation and parks, and 1 cent on mental health services.”
Currently, BPD receives $555 million a year. These budget increases, activists stress, are approved despite an ongoing failure to reduce crime and a never-ending stream of corruption scandals.
Already, groups such as Communities United and Organizing Black are pushing back against an imminent police budget increase for this year. For Communities United, the message has become “Defund2Refund,” both questioning spending on police and reminding people that money going to the cops is money not going to the city’s severely underfunded schools, for example.
“The city’s spending should reflect the values and needs of its communities, yet Baltimore’s Black community lacks stronger schools, better city services, and other basic resources,” a press statement from Communities United explained. “Instead, Baltimore spends more per capita on policing than 72 of the biggest U.S. cities and the Mayor’s budget is expected to continue this pattern of violence and abandonment.”
Organizing Black is once again engaging residents to show up for the city’s two Taxpayers Nights, where residents can show up and comment on the budget to the Board of Estimates and then, the City Council. In 2021, more than a hundred people showed up from all across the city calling for defunding but those wishes were ignored and the police got another $28 million.
Currently, BPD receives $555 million a year. These budget increases, activists stress, are approved despite an ongoing failure to reduce crime and a never-ending stream of corruption scandals. Just this week, former Baltimore Police Sgt. Keith Gladstone testified in federal court about stealing drugs and guns. Another cop under oath said he frequently falsified police reports.
In more encouraging cannabis news, thanks to two measures that passed in the Maryland House last week, legal, adult-use cannabis will finally be on the ballot in November.
Consistently derailed by hedging during legislative sessions (from many of the same Democrats who said they supported legalization), cannabis legalization has also been dogged by legislators’ inability to come up with an approach that accounts for the thousands of mostly Black lives harmed by pot prohibition.
House Bill 1, which puts legalization on the ballot, does not need Gov. Larry Hogan’s approval. If Maryland voters approve, those 21 and older would be allowed to legally possess 1.5 ounces or less of cannabis as of July 2023.
House Bill 837, which does go to Hogan, establishes some of the basics of a legalized cannabis for adults in Maryland: That bill would legalize possession of up to 1.5 ounces, reduce criminal penalties for low-level possession to a fine, and allow for the growing of as many as two plants per household. It would also automatically expunge past offenses for cannabis and create a Community Repair Fund, moving tax revenue generated by cannabis to those most affected by the racist war on drugs.
The bill also retains quite a bit of the power the police—and, after arrest, the entire criminal legal system—has over citizens due to cannabis.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland (ACLU MD) and Leaders Of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS) have noted some of the limits of HB 837. Namely, possession over 1.5 ounces remains a criminal offense (and could become a possession with intent to distribute charge), “which given Maryland’s history will be enforced in a racially biased way,” ACLU MD and LBS wrote.
A 2018 Baltimore Fishbowl study showed that between 2015-2017 (the first three full years of cannabis decriminalization), 96% of those arrested for cannabis possession of 10 grams or more (over the decriminalized amount) were Black.
ACLU MD and LBS also noted that the bill headed for Hogan’s desk does not curb the ability for police to use claims of cannabis odor to make traffic stops—a frequent police justification for searches and tool for racial profiling. Additionally, HB 837 adds cannabis to the open container law, which means no one in a car can be smoking cannabis. This, ACLU MD and LBS argue, “could ultimately contribute to more race-based traffic stops and searches.”
According to a 2020 ACLU report, a Black person in Maryland is 2.1 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than a white person, and despite 2014’s decriminalization, 50% of the drug arrests in Maryland each year are still for cannabis.
Even such half-step legalization measures are historic for Maryland, and it has been a long time coming. Consistently derailed by hedging during legislative sessions (from many of the same Democrats who said they supported legalization), cannabis legalization has also been dogged by legislators’ inability to come up with an approach that accounts for the thousands of mostly Black lives harmed by pot prohibition.
“This is really, really complicated,” State Senator Bill Ferguson, who was on the Marijuana Legalization Workgroup, said back in 2019.
The bill going to Hogan’s desk does begin to address “complicated” things, though it is important to stress that this bill does not establish a regulated cannabis program. It simply legalizes cannabis. State Delegate Luke Clippinger and others have promised that next session in 2023, they’ll figure out the regulation and tax elements of legalization. “The legislature is focused to get this right and we have more work to do—but this is a huge step forward on our journey to legalize cannabis,” Clippinger said.
Video of the police killing of 18-year-old Donnell Rochester is harrowing.
Baltimore Police officers chase Rochester, who runs and then retreats back to his car, a white Honda Accord, and drives off.
“Get out the car, get out the car now,” cops yell at Rochester, who drives forward. Officer Connor Murray shoots at Rochester, whose car bumps Murray. Soon after, Officer Robert Mauri shoots at Rochester through the windshield and the Honda Accord stops, the car door opens, and Rochester, with his hands up, says, “I can’t breathe.”
He collapses into the street and repeats, “I can’t breathe.” Cops pull Rochester to the ground and try to handcuff him.
“Put your fucking hand behind your back,” Mauri, who shot Rochester moments before, yells.
“Start a medic,” Murray, who also shot Rochester, says over the radio. “Suspect in custody.”
Rochester, handcuffed, gasping for air, blood leaking out of him and onto the pavement of Chilton Street in Northeast Baltimore around 3PM on Feb. 19, is now surrounded by cops.
“What’s your name?” a cop asks.
Rochester can’t get it out: “My name is…”
“Where you hit at?” one cop asks Rochester. “Huh?”
Rochester struggles to answer. He has been shot in the chest.
“Where you hit at?” the cop asks again, impatient.
“He’s hit up top,” Murray says. “Upper chest.”
10 seconds later, another cop walks up to Rochester.
“Are you ok?” that cop asks Rochester.
“No,” Rochester responds.
Officers kneel over Rochester, trying to tend to the gunshot wound—or a “GSW,” as Mauri calls it over the radio at one point.
“Bro, where you shot at?” a cop asks.
Rochester struggles to answer.
“Where you shot at, bro?” the cop asks again.
“My stomach,” Rochester says, hard to hear.
“Turn him over, turn him over,” another cop advises.
The cops turn Rochester’s body around, still looking for the wound or wounds.
“I can’t breathe,” Rochester tells the cops.
Approximately 15 minutes after he was shot, Rochester was dead.
The killing of Donnell Rochester by Baltimore Police officers Mauri and Murray has been handled the way most police shootings have been handled under Commissioner Michael Harrison: The body-worn camera footage was released days after the shooting at one of those press conferences where the footage is prefaced by a few minutes of police explaining what you’re going to see and selecting certain portions to be slowed-down to really drive their point home.
Back in February, a few days after cops shot and killed Rochester, Scott said the police in Baltimore were doing a “fabulous job.”
Harrison began the press conference by calling Rochester’s killing a “police officer-involved shooting” and acknowledged “the high level of public scrutiny” that comes with a police shooting.
From there, Deputy Police Commissioner Brian Nadeau took over, he said, to “put some context to what you’re about to see” in the body camera footage. Here is what happened, according to Nadeau: Police noticed Rochester’s car and ran the license plate, and it came back with an outstanding warrant for a failure to appear in court. The charge for that court date he didn’t show up to was carjacking, the police said. So, the cops followed Rochester and, at some point, turned their lights and siren on. Rochester sped off and got away. Police then went looking for Rochester and found his car parked on Chilton Street. Rochester saw the cops, ran, and then turned around and jumped in his car to drive off, by which time cops were yelling at him to stop his car, weapons raised.
Rochester accelerated and Murray shot into the car. As the body-worn camera footage shows, Rochester was not going particularly fast, but fast enough to seemingly knock Murray to the ground: “Donnell then starts to drive towards officer Murray, who discharges his weapon, and officer Murray falls to the ground,” Deputy Police Commissioner Brian Nadeau told reporters at the press conference.
Mayor Brandon Scott, who has disappointed many activists by adopting many of the tough-on-crime policies and rhetoric of past administrations (while occasionally tempering it with references to root-cause solutions and “trauma-informed” care), explicitly praised warrant apprehension when he spoke to local television news outlet Fox45 last week. He discussed additional funding provided by Maryland governor Larry Hogan, which included $6.5 million for a Warrant Apprehension Task Force, and said, “We know that our Warrant Apprehension Task Force is going out doing great work and now having the state be a deeper partner in that is going to benefit… the City.”
Back in February, a few days after cops shot and killed Rochester, Scott said the police in Baltimore were doing a “fabulous job.”
Rochester’s family has been demanding officers Mauri and Murray be charged for killing Rochester, questioning the cops’ hard-charging tactics. On Mar. 25—the same day Scott was praising warrant apprehension—students marched from Morgan State University to Baltimore’s City Hall, calling for accountability.
“Back in 2014, that was the first time we heard the words ‘I can’t breathe’ when our brother Eric Garner said those words in New York City as he was being strangled by a police officer. Then again in 2020, we heard those same exact words, and now standing here in 2022, we hear those same exact words echoed by our brother, Donnell Rochester,” Joshua Turner of the organization B.R.E.A.T.H.E told the crowd of 50 or so, the MSU Spokesmanreported.
“My son didn’t deserve it,” Rochester’s mother Danielle Brown said in front of City Hall. “They killed him for nothing.”
There is another protest scheduled for Saturday, Apr. 2, at 3PM at the Northwood Appold United Methodist Church.
Reckoning with the legacy of Baltimore’s ‘zero tolerance’ crime policy this election year
To make this strange political moment even stranger, Katie Curran O’Malley, former prosecutor, career judge, and wife of Martin O’Malley, is running for Maryland Attorney General. The platform, as described on her campaign website, is a combination of reform-heavy, Biden administration-style gestures to more training (which also means more spending on police) and tweaks to the criminal legal system.
Like many Democrats two years out from the nationwide George Floyd uprisings, Curran O’Malley intends to split the difference between police reform and public safety: “We don’t need to choose between public safety and accountability in policing. We can and must do both,” Curran O’Malley tweeted earlier this week.
Marilyn Mosby, the trials of Keith Davis, and the death of Tyrone West
Family members of victims of police violence, along with activists who have been advocating on behalf of those victims, are challenging federally-indicted Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s progressive bonafides this week on social media, in court, and in front of City Hall.
Mosby has made claims that her indictment—related to a number of tax and mortgage issues and interconnected perjury charges—is a political attack on her and her “progressive prosecutor” policies. To hear the State’s Attorney tell it, as she did on MSNBC last month, she is “fighting for racial justice in the criminal justice system, fighting to end mass incarceration in a state where we have the largest incarceration of Black people in the entire nation,” and the feds are coming after her for it.
Two high-profile cases in particular complicate Mosby’s claim that her focus on police corruption and getting people out of prison is why she was indicted.
Baltimore City’s $1 Homes proposal rejected by City Council
Baltimore City Council President Nick Mosby’s $1 Homes program was voted down by council members last night, Thursday, Mar. 3.
The program would make vacants owned by the city available to longtime residents for just one dollar if they are able to repair and then live in the property themselves. Primary concerns about the bill were communicated to Battleground Baltimore back in November by City Hall sources; namely, that most Baltimoreans who could benefit from the program lack the funds to fully renovate homes and could end up owing money on a home they could not rehabilitate.
During last night’s hearing, Councilperson Odette Ramos stressed the need to ensure that “everyone who participates in this program isn’t going to be underwater.”
Maryland’s huge surplus two years into the pandemic is bad, actually
Immediate relief to Maryland families—and all Marylanders—would, of course, be actual immediate relief, such as putting the surplus money directly into their hands. It would require being far more inclusive than Franchot’s $2,000 to low-wage earners idea. Immediate relief is not people paying a little less at the pump for one month or maybe three months.
Indeed, the desire to project “fiscal responsibility” is so strong among state officials that it normalizes propositions such as using part of the surplus towards the state’s “rainy day fund,” where additional funds are held for economic instability and other crises.
Two years into the pandemic, many Marylanders might think back on how much more the state and federal government could have done for them, and ask what a “rainy day” looks like compared to all the days they’ve endured since March 2020.
Workers demand Baltimore Museum of Art live up to ‘progressive’ bonafides and let them unionize
While Baltimore artists, influencers, and reporters shuffled into the Baltimore Museum of Art for a preview of Guarding The Art, an upcoming exhibition that the BMA’s very own security guards curated in collaboration with curatorial staff, workers stood on the steps of the museum demanding their union be recognized by management.
On Tuesday, March 22, a group of seven workers who are part of the ongoing effort to unionize the Baltimore Museum of Art held signs with slogans such as “1 Voice, 1 Union” and “No More Delays”; one sign had “Guarding the Art” changed to “Guarding the Guards.” They were demanding that the BMA’s director, Christopher Bedford, sign the union’s election agreement. Bedford, the union stressed, has had two months to sign the agreement, which is needed in order to allow a union election organized by the city to proceed.
According to The Sentencing Project, “Private prisons in the United States incarcerated 115,428 people in 2019, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.” However, while private prisons still make up a minority of carceral institutions in the US, the infiltration of privatization has spread throughout the prison-industrial complex. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Paul Wright about the dehumanizing practice of prisons digitizing mail, which allows for increased surveillance, and for profit-seeking companies to charge inmates and their families exorbitant fees to read mail on electric portals.
Charles Hopkins:Welcome to this edition of Rattling The Bars. My name is Mansa Musa, co-host with Eddie Conway. The Nation magazine published an article entitled “Why Prisons are Banning Letters” which outlines a current censorship trend that the prison-industrial complex is adopting. Here to talk about it is Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News. Welcome Paul.
Paul Wright:All right. Thanks for having me on the show.
Charles Hopkins:Okay. Why is mail guard a danger to prison’s ability to communicate with their families and society?
Paul Wright:Well, basically what we’ve seen in the last 30 years is a massive increase in both censorship and surveillance of mail by prisoners. But the bigger thing has been the trend starting in the early ’90s about monetizing prisoners and their families. You have companies, specifically Securus, Global Tel Link and now another company is focusing on mail called Smart Communications or Smart Com, who, basically what they want to do is they want to monetize and make money off of every form of contact prisoners have with the outside world. And for decades, prisoners and their families have been paying outrageous rates for phone calls to stay in touch with their families. It hadn’t been uncommon for prisoners and their families to be paying up to $25 for a 20 minute phone call with loved ones. We’ve seen, we’ve had some success regulating that at the federal communications level.
One thing that’s happened is as we reign them in a little bit on the telephones, the companies look to diversify their revenues. And their business model is that every communication that a prisoner has with a loved one or a family member outside of prison, they want to be able to make money off of it. So they start offering video calling, and one way for video calls to work is by cutting off, restricting, or eliminating in-person visitation. Then they started moving into text messaging and emails where they charge outrageous rates for that. Most people accept free email as a part of life. Not in prison. These companies charge anywhere from $0.50 to $1 or more just to send a single email. But they’ve realized that for this to work, they need to cut off the free alternative, which is the government mail service.
What they’ve been doing with that is in the past couple of years now they’ve been starting this trend of basically banning letter mail from prisoners, to and from prisoners, and forcing people to send their mail to these processing centers where the letters are scanned in, digitized, and then either they’re sent to the prison and they’re printed out and delivered to the prisoner. Or the bigger trend is the prisoner gets it in an electronic form on a kiosk, and then the prisoner is charged to access the kiosk or the tablet to view their mail on or their letter on.
Same thing. When prisoners go to send mail out of the prison, their mail is then digitized as well. These are all things that these companies are doing to basically exploit and monetize prisoners and their families. The other thing that they’re really selling to the government is they’re creating vast surveillance databases. Smart Com boasts the fact that they claim they’re only going to keep the letters for seven years, but then in an interview their president or one of their managers said, we’ve actually never deleted a single letter. Once we have it in our database, we just hold onto it. Then they make these letters available to other law enforcement agencies without warrants, without any type of controls or anything like that.
I think these are all issues that… They’re happening. There’s no legislation about it. It’s just happening in back rooms. This is just another trend on the monetization of prisoners and their families where prisoners and their loved ones are basically seen as money making profit centers by these for-profit companies and their government collaborators
Charles Hopkins:Let me ask you this here. That’s a good point, let’s flesh that out. Who’s financing, other than the corporations, who else is financially benefiting from this? Who’s regulating them? Because as you just noted that they are monetizing the prison-industrial complex, they are monetizing that.
Paul Wright:Well, there’s no regulation. As far as who’s benefiting, I mean, the American police state, basically it’s widening its web of surveillance. As a society here in America, I mean, every email message we send is collected by the government through its Carnivore program, which is run by the FBI. All of our phone calls are recorded and monitored by the NSA. The post office records the outsides of all letters that transit through the mail system. Now this is just one step further of opening up the contents of the letter, digitizing them, storing them, and making them available for government surveillance and intelligence gathering throughout the mail system.
Eventually the goal of this is to, I think, eventually have all prisoner mail being scanned and digitized and making it digitally searchable. I think that’s what these companies are touting and that seems to be the trend that the government is moving forward and towards.
Charles Hopkins:Okay. In terms of what we are seeing, do you think that we are moving into a quasi-privatization of prisons, and that all the infrastructures of the prison services are being privatized? We know medical, visits and all those things that you have outlined?
Paul Wright:The overall trend. I mean, as far as the private prison companies, which at this point are mostly CoreCivic and Geo Corporation, they’re only controlling around 7% of the American prison population, but a lot of the sources around prisons have been privatized and outsourced. This includes the medical services, as you noted, money transfers. I think that one of the things that’s really critical about a lot of this stuff is that these are services that were previously performed by the government. Now they’re being performed by private for-profit corporations. At the end of the day, one of the promises of privatization, which has turned out to be a big lie, is that somehow taxpayers are going to benefit. And it may well be true that these companies can provide the same crappy, murderous services that the government does, but the taxpayers don’t see any type of relief or savings from it. They’re providing it cheaper. The only people that are benefiting are their shareholders and the owners of these companies.
But I think it’s important to distinguish there’s two types of prison privatization model, or how they make their money. One, is the government procurement or contracting model. That’s what companies like Geo and CoreCivic do. In other words, they sign contracts with the government for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, where they come in and say, we’ll run your prisons, we’ll cage your people, and we’ll take care of everything. But the government’s their customer. The legislators, the governor’s office, the president of the United States, Congress, these are the people that approve these contracts. These are the people that appropriate that money. I look at it that, if legislators or the public or Congress has a problem with it, they won’t sign the contracts.
At this point it is well established that these companies engage in a lot of fraud. They overcharge, they don’t provide the services they’re contracted to. But that said, the reason they keep these contracts going is they provide a lot of campaign contributions. They give money to politicians. We also know they engage in criminal bribery. They personally give money to the politicians that just pocket the money as criminal bribes. And they also do this to prison officials, both as criminal bribes. There’s also the cronyism factor where they hire a lot of these government prison officials, they all retire and a lot of them go to work for these same private prison companies. That’s one model of prison privatization.
The other one is where basically they’re not looking to make their money in profit off of the government, but rather they’re looking to monetize and profit off of prisoners and their families. These are the phone companies like Securus, Global Tel Link, some of the mail companies, the mail companies like Smart Com. They seem to be going back and forth between two models. On the one hand, they contract with the government where the government’s giving them millions of dollars. On the other hand, they’re also looking to monetize their services by charging prisoners and their family members. I think the one that monetizes prisoners and their family members is, in my view, in a lot of ways it’s far worse because the public, the prisoners, the families, they have no choice in this. Basically it’s some government bureaucrat who’s making the decision to give this monopoly contract to one of these companies. Again, we know the telephone companies and these other companies, we know they engage in criminal bribery.
They give criminal bribes to people. They also have a kickback model where they give money back to the government in exchange for these monopoly contracts. The people actually paying the bills have no choice in who chooses, who’s providing the service. They have no choice about the quality of the services being provided. They’re just stuck with it. And the government and these for-profit companies, nearly all of which are owned by hedge funds, just use prisoners and their families as a commodity to be monetized, profited off of, and exploited. That’s their goal, is to squeeze every last penny out of prisoners and their families as they can. Unfortunately, they’re pretty good at it.
Charles Hopkins:In that regard, what do we do? What do the prisoner population do in terms of finding redress? Because as you said, and as was noted in this article, the services are crappy. They digitize your mail, some of your mail comes in, [inaudible] the head of the photos is all, a lot of the things that you could have done such as the children, giving, sending drawings to their parents, they can’t get that. What do we have as prisoners? Do prisoners have any redress, a constitutional redress in this regard?
Paul Wright: So far they don’t. But one of the things to keep in mind is that the Constitution guarantees a right to free speech, and that also includes mail. And not just the prisoners, but also the senders of the mail have a right to send their mail, to send their mail and have it read and received. They also have a right to receive mail from prisoners. I think there are other issues too, is that there’s also a privacy right protected under the Fourth Amendment that says that the government’s not supposed to conduct unreasonable searches and seizures. And the wholesale mass digitization and data basing of people’s mail, we’re talking millions of letters every year for prisoners and their families around the country, that’s not contemplated by the constitution. I think that one of the things that we’re seeing is because this is still a relatively new area of law, we’re still seeing just a new area here in terms of how this is manifesting itself or what’s going to happen.
I think the legal challenges are still new. I think that one of the things that’s critical to note is that a lot of these prison privatization schemes are basically taking what used to be free government services and they’re slapping a price tag on it. A really good example is prison money services. 20 years ago, if you wanted to send money to someone in prison, you got a money order at the post office or a cashier’s check and you sent it, you mailed it to them in the prison or the jail they are being held at. It was added to their prison trust account so they could buy commissary or whatever. Starting around 17 or 18 years ago, a guy named Ryan Shapiro starts a company called Jpay and his thing is, hey, we’ll, we’ll do it electronically, but we’re going to charge 15 or 20% or more to do it. But then he also realizes that if people still have the option of sending money for free, they’re probably not going to use his service. So like everything else, these crappy services that exploit people and charge a lot of money for, they’ve realized that their business model can only succeed if they cut off the free government alternative.
In other words, if people can still send the mail, they’re probably not going to use the email or the messaging service. Some people will, but you know what? For 500 years you can buy a stamp at the post office, put it on an envelope, and pop it in the mail and it gets delivered. That’s about as American as you can get is using the postal service. These companies realize that to succeed and monetize their services and make a lot of money, they need to cut out that government provided alternative of the post office. Just like they’ve done with making sure prisoners can’t do video calls. Prisoners around the world can use video calling services like WhatsApp or Skype to communicate with their loved ones. In this country you’ve got to pay Securus or GTL a dollar a minute or more to use the same services with lower quality that just aren’t as good as prisoners and other countries are using for free. Again, like I say, this is the business model that these companies have come up with to exploit prisoners and their families.
Charles Hopkins: Like you said, they’re taking these free services and putting a monetary value on them—is there something that they can be doing to try and mobilize their families to get the legislators to get involved and enact laws or policies that could directly impact these bloodsuckers?
Paul Wright:We’re starting to see a little bit of progress. We’re starting to see a couple of cities like Rikers Island, the jail in San Francisco, and a couple others where they’re now providing prisoners with free phone calls. This is a new thing. I think, and there’s no reason these services shouldn’t be free, or at least not charged for, or at least prisoners and their family should not be the ones paying for them. That’s one trend and that’s actually happening. We have not yet seen it at the DOC level. Connecticut seems to be poised to become the first state in the country to provide free telephone services for prisoners. That hasn’t quite happened yet. But I think that one of the things is by pushing back and why are these services being… Why are prisoners being charged for these services, and their families?
I think one of the things to keep in mind, if you look at things in terms of a big picture, so many of these prison agencies have literally billion dollar budgets. Then you look at the amounts of money that they’re charging prisoners and their families, or they’re getting millions of dollars in kickbacks, which millions of dollars is a lot of money when it’s coming out of the pockets of the poorest people in America.
On the other hand, a couple million here and there for an agency that already has a multi-billion dollar budget, it’s beyond chump change. I mean, they spend more money than that on paper clips and Post-it Notes. But again, it seems almost like it’s an ideological fixation for a lot of legislators and the people who run prisons and jails to literally pillage every last penny they can out of prisoners and their families. Rather than looking at this as these are, or should be, government services that we provide to members of the public or that we provide to prisoners and their families as tools to reduce recidivism, to strengthen community ties, to make our society and our country safer and a better place. Instead, they look at how many pennies or how many dollars can we take out of the pocketbooks of our poorest citizens.
Charles Hopkins:To your knowledge, is any of the money that’s being taken out of prisons any with these disservices or so-called services, is any of the money being put back into the institution to help advance some of the things that you spoke about? Building community relationships or providing prisoners with opportunities to advance themselves prior to getting out?
Paul Wright:Yes. It varies from state to state, and a lot of states claim the kickbacks are going into so-called inmate betterment funds, offender welfare funds, or whatever they call it in that state. Some states the money just goes into the state’s general revenue account. In other words, the government is like, hey, it goes into our budget. Whether it’s paying for roads or cops or school lunches, that’s where it’s going. Then to the extent that a lot of these prisons and jails claim the money’s going to some offender betterment fund, that’s a big old lie, because the reality is when you start looking at what they use this money to pay for in places like Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Jail gets around $40 million a year in kickbacks from their phone revenues, and they’re using this money to do everything from pay for food – I mean, they have a legal obligation to feed the prisoners. They’re using $7 million of that money to pay for food. And you know the corruption’s there as soon as you see hundreds of thousands of dollars going to unspecified consultants. But then they use the money to pay for guard salaries, they use it to pay for tanks, for shotguns, squad cars, everything else. The claim is that they… And I think anyone that’s done time or knows anyone who’s done time in America, you know that prisoners are not really being given even a fraction of the services for the millions of dollars that are being peeled off the backs of prisoners and their families. You go to jails, they’re lucky if they got a basketball or two and a couple of sets of dominoes in the day room, and the jail’s getting millions of dollars in kickbacks. And part of the problem is that most of this money, it’s not regulated.
There are no controls on it. If the sheriff says, hey, I’m going to take my girlfriend and my cronies and we’re going to go on a ski trip to Aspen with the prisoners’ money. This is documented. They do this, and there’s nothing illegal about it. This is also one of the things that I think that people have to think about too, is the very anti-democratic nature of this type of slush fund money. I’m not aware of any other agency in government where private corporations are giving government officials millions of dollars with no accountability. Every other branch of government, if you need or want money to spend, you got to go to the legislature, the county commission, the treasurer, you got to go ask someone for that money and there are strings attached to it.
You don’t get to… The school superintendent can go ask for money from the county and then get the money and decide hey, I’m going to go buy a Rolls Royce and tool around town in it. Yet that’s exactly what happens with the so-called prisoner trust fund money or offender betterment funds, or again, whatever they call it. There’s no accountability, there’s no control over it.
Charles Hopkins:In terms of the prisoners that can’t afford to interact with mail gram, as we know that they got tabs that you have to pay for to get to read your mail. To your knowledge are they providing indigent prisoners with opportunities to interact or engage in this mail system? The visit system?
Paul Wright:I don’t know if that’s happening or not. I haven’t seen any reports on it one way or the other. I would like to think they would, but if the purpose is to make money, maybe not. I don’t know the answer to that question
Charles Hopkins:Okay. And closing out, Paul, what do you think we should be doing outside in terms of one, educating the public, and creating some type of direct action to get this regulated? Because it needs to be regulated. Like you said, it’s the only slush fund where millions of dollars can be handed out to people with no recourse or no kickback. What can we in society and the public be doing to try to get some kind of control over this?
Paul Wright:Well, part of the problem is I think that a lot of people that think that prison reform and jail reform are A, they also think the word reform is good or positive and that’s not true. I mean, most of what’s happened in this country regarding prisons and jails in the last 40 years is all bad or negative, at least as far as the prisoners are concerned and their families are concerned. The bigger thing is they also think that reform happens in legislatures, in Congress and places like that. But we’re seeing, with regards to telephone contracts, these mail policies, and stuff like that, this stuff is happening behind closed doors, contract by contract, county by county, prison system by prison system. And there’s no public input on this. It’s just the prisons and the jails are just rolling it out as, hey, we’re digitizing our mail. Take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, it’s tough to be you.
I think that this also goes to the bigger picture, I think, of a lack of any type of accountability or oversight of prisons and jails. If you start asking legislators hey, what type of oversight are you guys having over it? There really isn’t any. These are all kind of like major problems. I think just having some type of accountability, some type of oversight. But you know what? These institutions have been really good for decades at not having any of that and I just don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Charles Hopkins:Okay. Thank you, Paul, for joining me on this edition of Rattling the Bars. On behalf of Eddie Conway and myself, we thank everyone for listening and viewing this. We appreciate all the work that you are doing, Paul, it’s a great service that you’re providing to those of us inside. I definitely benefited from it when I was incarcerated. I read the Prison Law News and utilized a lot of the cases that came out of it to get redress. I think that’s the message that we want to leave for the prisoners that’s there and their family members is to take and seek redress by taking direct action. On behalf of Eddie Conway, myself, and The Real News, continue to support The Real News and continue to support Rattling The Bars. Thank you, Paul.
Paul Wright:Thank you. And I’d just like to add, if anyone who wants more information, go to our website, www.prisonlegalnews.org. That covers detention facility news and information. Our other magazine at www.criminallegalnews.org covers criminal law and procedure and what’s happening with the police and prosecutors as well. Thanks for having me on the show.
When a Terre Haute, Indiana, man was arrested for not walking on a sidewalk on a street that doesn’t have one, the Police Accountability Report investigated. We obtained body camera and dashcam video evidence that offers a rare glimpse into the indifference of American law enforcement—evidence that not only contradicts the allegations made by the arresting officer, but that also reveals how difficult it is to escape the tendrils of this country’s law enforcement-industrial complex.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
From her world-famous book Dead Man Walking to a life spent educating the public about the inhumanity of the death penalty, the work of activist nun Sister Helen Prejean is known around the globe. What is less widely known is the story of how Sister Helen came to do this work and, as the description for her latest memoir River of Fire notes, how she evolved in her “spiritual journey from praying for God to solve the world’s problems to engaging full-tilt in working to transform societal injustices.” In this special conversation for Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Sister Helen about River of Fire and about the deep historical roots of the racist, colonialist violence that is embodied today in America’s prison-industrial complex.
Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. We are fortunate today to be joined by the foremost expert on abolishing the death penalty, the author of Dead Man Walking, which was turned into a movie, and now she has produced the latest book about her ride toward consciousness. So joining me today is Sister Helen Prejean. Sister Helen, thanks for joining me.
Sister Helen Prejean: Glad to be here.
Eddie Conway: Okay. So we want to start off by just finding out how your life was before you moved into the Black community. Give us a brief overview if you will.
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah. Eddie, it was a perfect picture of white privilege. Grew up white Catholic family, French descent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ’40s, ’50s. Jim Crow in full swing. Had a couple, my daddy, a successful lawyer in Baton Rouge. A couple, Ellen and Jesse, never knew their last names, worked in the house, lived back in the servant’s quarters. A kind mother and father who actually helped Ellen and Jesse buy a house. Daddy helped Jesse get a job, but that was charity and that was kindness, but not working to change systemic injustice. Not awake about Jim Crow. And to me, looking at that, it was a perfect example of what culture does. Culture gives us eyes, gives us ears. Honey, it’s better for the races to be separate, never questioned it. And my whole book River Of Fire is about awakening to justice and getting out of my little white bubble in the suburbs and moving into the St. Thomas housing projects.
And that awakening had to do with a deep spiritual awakening that the gospel of Jesus was not just about being charitable to people who happened to be around us, but getting involved with the struggling and [marginalized] and suffering people of our day. So when I moved into the St. Thomas housing project, it was like I had moved to another country. I mean, I had everything to learn. I had an open heart, but I had everything to learn, and wonderful African American people who became my teachers, teaching me about racism and linguistic racism. For example, looking in the dictionary, white’s always pure, always good. Black, black ball, blacklist. Teaching me. And I saw the suffering just a 16th of a mile from where I lived it was like another… People didn’t have healthcare. People are dying. One man had a heart attack because he didn’t have health insurance, an ambulance wouldn’t come pick him up.
The kids are graduating out of high school, public high school and they can’t read a third grade reader. Violence everywhere, drugs everywhere. Police grabbing people, witnessed this with my own eyes, throwing them in the back of a police car. And they’re yelling to the nuns on a porch, sister, y’all are my witnesses. I got no drugs on me. And seeing everything from another point of view, and my heart catching fire for justice. And then one day coming out of that adult learning center that we had. And it was the one thing I could do. Black people had been my servants all my life. It’s a chance for me to serve so I could be a teacher and I could help people get their GED.
And coming out of that adult learning center, it was a simple invitation. Hey Sister Helen, you want to be a penpal to somebody on death row? All I was learning about it, all the injustices. I said, sure, I could write some letters. I thought I was only going to be writing letters. And it ended up I witnessed the electrocution of a man in Louisiana’s killing chamber, and came out of that experience and been on fire ever since. I noticed that it was almost a secret ritual, people thought it was fine. And so my mission was born. I had to get out, had to tell the story to wake people up, and that’s what led me to write Dead Man Walking.
Eddie Conway: Okay. You mentioned culture being responsible for this. Do you mean when you say culture the same thing as socialization?
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah.
Eddie Conway: Is there a difference?
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah. Socialization, of course they might be synonymous. Socialization is what makes us see, well here’s what it means to be a nice, good human being. With everything around us, people’s attitudes, the way people act, what people accept as white people. Well, it’s okay if Black people sit in the back of the bus. It’s okay if they don’t have their rights, it doesn’t affect us. We’re kind to the Black individuals we know. Socialization maybe is a good word for it, Eddie, because it’s what you see all around you, and it leads you not to question things, see. It’s the minute when you begin to question, which is what I loved about the ’60s in the United States. We really began to question things. And what’s happening now with George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, Confederate statues coming down. We can see there’s a shift of consciousness going on. Once you start asking questions, hey, wait a minute. Why is this? Then things can begin to change. So socialization would do it, I think.
Eddie Conway: Okay. I want to step back in history when you talk about culture, and maybe you can comment on this. When you go back to the first European invaders to the North American continents, the first thing you see is violence, warfare, and enslavement of the Indigenous population.
Sister Helen Prejean: Right.
Eddie Conway: So that culture goes back, and I want to go back even farther than that to the – And you are an exception in my mind – To the holy Roman Catholic Church and the vision of the world of people of color among the European powers. It seems to me that this culture goes back to, and I don’t want to be crude and say it goes back to the caveman, but I don’t know where. I guess I’m having problems understanding what… You are college educated, maybe university educated. How could you not see the history of this culture and realize that it was divisive and destructive for anybody that wasn’t white?
Sister Helen Prejean: About Indigenous people, look at that, the decimation, killing of Indigenous people. And missionaries came with the conquistadors, you always had the missionaries with. I have been blessed enough to be adopted in a family in a Northern Cheyenne tribe in Montana where I got to experience sweat lodge, Sundance, got really steeped to come to understand how Native American people pray and how they experience the world. And the thing, when you were saying to me, you were college educated. How come you didn’t learn this? Really interesting question, because it’s a thing Brian Stevenson says all the time: proximity. Who do you have proximity to? Not what are you studying in the books in academia, but whose lives do you have contact with? What people do you know where they can share their experiences? And that’s what happened when I got to know the Northern Cheyenne people in Montana. They began to tell, I mean, I learned more from one conversation with them and being in that sweat lodge with them, than all the courses I took in college. And learned how this oppression – And here’s the thing.
The Native American people thought it was a joke that these Europeans came over and they planted a little flag with their country on it and said, now this is ours. They knew the earth, mother earth did not belong to anybody. They thought it was really stupid that they were doing this, that whole mindset. We come and conquer you. We take your land and now it’s ours. So that violence has been built in from the beginning. I mean, there was a T-shirt that we all used to love to wear and it showed Native people there fighting terrorism since 1492, because it was terrorism, pure and simple [inaudible]. And it’s a mindset that’s still very present in the US. And the death penalty is an example of the way you solve social problems or get control is you use violence to get what you want. And so it’s been extended. And religion right in there. So religious institutions have a really bad history going back to the crusades, Muslim people, the Moors conquering the holy land. It’s just such a long, long history of religion being tied to violence.
Eddie Conway: Because you are a nun, you took a vow of poverty and you probably don’t own anything. I mean, you live somewhere and you eat.
Sister Helen Prejean: Right.
Eddie Conway: But it’s not like people in poverty in the projects. Most people in the projects want to get out. They don’t want to be in poverty.
Sister Helen Prejean: That’s real hard.
Eddie Conway: What’s the difference? You went into that environment to learn to help people who are trying to come out of that environment. So you talk in your book, River Of Fire, you talk about the nuns that went in 10 years before you, that kind of cleared the pathway and made you accepted by people in the community because of their work. I guess my gut feeling is, the reform work that had to be done only made the conditions more tolerable. Well, I mean, what could be done to really change the conditions of people that’s forced to live in projects?
Sister Helen Prejean: Right. One of the main things, first of all, it is very clear that, as nuns, we were not really poor. It’s the opposite. We came to redefine that. That we’re not poor people at all, but it was the spirit of the first Christian communities that you share all your goods in common with each other and you don’t own anything personally. Okay. And we have done that. But what I was learning about poverty, when I moved into St. Thomas, the big thing poverty does is reduce your choices. And talking to Geraldine Johnson, she could see her boys were changing once they moved in the projects. Experiences they were having with the police being taken under the New Orleans Bridge, threatened with being thrown in the river.
And she said, we can’t move. We can’t move. We don’t have the money. And they’re gentrifying the city. We can’t move. We got to be in here. It’s like we’re on a reservation. So what do you do? What do you do as a middle-class white woman coming into this? You know you want to be of service. And one of the first things I learned was through this great lawyer who represented poor people, Bill Quigley, is you got to learn the law and you got to learn your rights, and then you work for those rights. One of the first public demonstrations I was ever part of where I marched down on the street with the people in St. Thomas of the tenant association was because there were rats in the building, you couldn’t ever get maintenance to fix anything, and they needed lights.
So Bill Quigley is in there with the tenant association. Here’s the law, here are the rights. Now we’re going to march down the street to public housing and demand our rights. I was part of the support for the people. I joined my voices to theirs and I began to learn that Sister Lillian Flavin worked with her. She said, sometimes you have to pray with your body, with your legs. Put your body there. And so it was in solidarity with the people. And you got to raise your voice. You got to say, we’re not taking it anymore in order to get change.
Eddie Conway: Okay, so this whole process led you to oppose the death penalty. And you explained earlier that somebody asked you to write a letter. You wrote that letter. What followed that? How did you end up in the killing chamber?
Sister Helen Prejean: Right. Well, my image of it is almost like tumbling down a laundry chute. I knew nothing about the criminal justice system. Nothing about the courts. I hadn’t even noticed that the Supreme Court had put the death penalty back in 1976. What do I know about the death penalty? You got to know this, Eddie, that when Tim Robbins was working on the film, writing the screenplay of the film of Dead Man Walking of my book, he kept saying with his little laugh, the nun is in over her head. And indeed I was. I knew nothing. I didn’t know the importance of having a lawyer by your side when you went to trial. I didn’t know how race played in the death penalty overwhelmingly when white people are killed. How poverty, when it’s poor people who end up on death row. Knew nothing, but I wrote a letter and I met a human being on death row.
And of course, one of the ways that the death penalty had been sold to people is that these people who are on death row are not just murderers. These are the worst of the worst. Either by the nature of the action they have done or by the nature of their character. They are evil. They are unredeemable. Of course, that whole thing is done to people politically, too. Like our friend Samsa, politically of Black Panthers. These are evil, violent people. They want to destroy democracy and the whole thing. So you make citizens afraid. You demonize people. And so the very first time I went to death row and visited this man, I expected him to be Black. He was white. Of course, what the big crime was, of course, that he had killed white people, but they brought me in a room. They locked me in a room.
They had him in handcuffs, locked him in this little cubicle, had a heavy mesh screen between us. I’ll look through that little mess screen. And I went, my God, he’s a human being. And I mean, I just saw it. I could see it right away, whatever he had done. And I was going to come to grips with that. He is more than the worst thing he’s ever done in his life. No human being can ever be defined as an essence of an action, ever. And I began from that day forward to learn about him and to learn about human rights. And when I went to write Dead Man Walking, Eddie, you never would’ve heard of Dead Man Walking. That never would’ve been a film if I hadn’t had a great editor. I’d never written a book before. I had this great editor at Random House, Jason Epstein. He just died a month ago.
And the way I structured the story of Dead Man Walking, I was so into the human rights of this person who should be executed. And when Jason read the first draft, he said to me, nobody’s going to read your book. And the reason they ain’t going to read it is you wait far too long before you really face the crime this guy did. So all of the people are going to be reading, they’re going to be suspicious of you. She’s a nun, she believes in Jesus, forgive the poor murder and all that. And if within the first 10 pages, if they don’t see the crime that this man, Patrick Sonye, and his brother, Eddie Sonye, in cold blood shot and killed a teenage couple and left their bodies to rot in a sugar cane field, nobody’s going to read your book.
Because the challenge that you have on your hands is you have to take people into the moral outrage people feel when innocent people are killed and feel that moral outrage with them. And then step by step you got to take them into the situation of that killing chamber, where they get as close as possible to witness a human being being taken from a holding cell and strapped down and having 1,900 volts of electricity pumped through his body. Reading, I found out, can be a powerful thing because people are quiet. They’re not debating, they’re using their imaginations and you can come very close to bringing them into where they will never actually get to be a witness.
Eddie Conway: Okay. You look at institutional racism, you look at poverty, you look at the prison-industrial complex, you look at the lack of choices. And just until recently, healthcare and housing conditions and so on, education. You pointed out all those things. What’s your position on reparations for Black people?
Sister Helen Prejean: Absolutely. Reparation. I’ll give you one little example. A woman in our parish at St. Gabe’s, it’s an African American… Well, it’s a Roman Catholic parish, but it’s mostly composed of African Americans, who until the 1970s in New Orleans could not buy property and have a house. So the parishioners that are in St. Gabriel’s parish are mostly made up of those people. And one of the women in it, Sheraline Branch, good friend. She is one of the descendants of the slaves from Georgetown University, the Jesuit university that made this discovery that they had been slave owners. The Jesuits had been slave owners and helped build the university and all that. Well, they are serious about making reparations. The way they’re doing it is they have begun to meet with the families who are the descendants of those slaves and are offering scholarships and education to their children and great, great grandchildren to get an education.
That’s reparations. That’s not just an apology or we’re so sorry we had slaves, but that’s taking concrete steps to make up. And we have a long way to go in this country to acknowledge it. For a long time in the books here that kids were learning at school, they didn’t acknowledge slavery. And I know for a fact that the Texas textbooks didn’t even say that it was slaves they had. They were free workers who came. So we are doing a huge reckoning in this country right now with all the backlash that’s going with the 1619 Project going on and learning about slavery and our role in it. And its repercussions in the penal system.
I mean, and the more you learn, Eddie, even to get property, to buy a property, to get a house, the law of the land was written in there that Black people couldn’t. The law of the land was in there when Black GIs came home after World War II. They couldn’t get the loans to get a mortgage on a house. They couldn’t get the loan to get the GI bill to go to school. All that is built in and inherited generation after generation. Reparations are the only way to go. And so we got to wake up to that fact and we got to start taking concrete steps for that to happen.
Eddie Conway: Okay, great answer.
Sister Helen Prejean: Great question.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. I’m wondering, you talk about Georgetown. You could talk about Brown University, you could talk about any major corporation pretty much because the wealth was accumulated off of the backs of enslaved people. And even though it’s not the same thing, I would include indentured servitude of people also that wanted a new life and sold seven years of their life to get over here. The wealth was accumulated off of those backs. Is there ever going to be any way of education, beyond education, that we can ever catch up? I mean, the house always wins and we are playing by the house rules, and the house is so far ahead.
I just want to back up a minute and just add this one fact. During the Obama years when the economy around 2008, when the economy was in serious crisis, Black people lost 50% of their wealth that had been accumulated from the end of the civil war up until Obama. 50% of the collective wealth of the Black community disappeared because of Wall Street and the stock market and being forced to, well not being forced to, but thinking that you create a retirement fund, and you put your money in stocks and when you get old you’ll have it. Well, it disappeared. Grandma’s house disappeared. So how can we catch up? I mean, education is not going to get it. We need some kind of help. You got any comment on that?
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah. When you look at the Bible and you see people up against great odds, the house always wins. There’s this prophetic dimension that causes social change, the prophetic dimension. And I turned to one, one of our best known was Martin Luther King. Who thought when they did that boycott of the Montgomery buses that anything could change? They didn’t know if they could carry off that bus boycott for a weekend. Word spread in the community, people walked to work, carpooled, and it lasted for a year. It was an economic boycott, and it was a step. And it has in it, the same dynamics that need to be present today for social change. And you pointed to something that’s been so disastrous, it’s that how do Black families inherit wealth? Everything’s been stacked for the white community and the estate tax and all of that, of inheriting wealth.
Instead, it’s generation after generation knowing nothing but poverty and the welfare system. And so you start now, I mean, David and Goliath is an understatement next to the Black community, but we do have now social media and wherever you have a committed group of people that are going to work for change and begin to raise their voices, we are seeing change. Look at Black Lives Matter. Now nothing’s perfect. And you’re going to have the squabbles among the leadership and all the human things going to come into it. But once you have consciousness in a group of people and they start raising their voices, and then you start putting pressure on political people to make the changes, change happens. And we are in the midst of that now. In a way we’re going to look at it and be, it’s always going to be their struggle, especially in a capitalist society like ours where even prisons are private. Privatized prisons where people are making money off of people suffering and incarcerating other people.
And you mentioned indentured servants. 13th Amendment when slavery was abolished had two exceptions: slaves, except for [the incarcerated] and except for indentured servants. Slavery is abolished, no, except for incarcerated people and indentured servants. So it’s built into the constitution. So we have such a long history, but all we got to do is when we meet people, I learned this at St. Thomas. Here was that Black tenant association standing up, marched down the street and made the public officials pay attention to their needs, and they got change. And that change happens, as you know, incrementally, and every now and then there was a big thing that happened. Obamacare was a big thing. And it’s going to be the thing, I think, that’s going to keep creating waves of change, because people with preexisting conditions realize we are going to lose that without Obamacare, but look at the struggle to get that.
But we got some hopeful signs going on in the Congress, because we got rid of Trump and we got a decent president. It’s not perfect, but at least we got people standing up now and white people beginning to realize. My main job has been to educate the white people of this country about the death penalty. Most of my audiences, I go to universities, talk to civil groups, it’s to educate the white people. It’s white people that got to understand just how endemic it is in the systems. People have good hearts and I’ve found they’re not entrenched. They just need to wake up.
Eddie Conway: Okay. River Of Fire details your ride into consciousness as I pointed out.
Sister Helen Prejean: And I love it. I should have put that as the subtitle of my book.
Eddie Conway: This is the final question, too. What do you think people can get from your book if they get it and read it?
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah. It’s just one person coming to consciousness and then making a decision and making a change out of it. See, hope Eddie, hope is an active verb. If you’re not participating in some way in change and you’re standing on the banks of the river and just watching everything happen, especially now through the internet, you get all this news pouring over us and all the bad news in the world. If you’re not active, if you are not pulling on that rope with a group of people to work for change, you feel despair.
And maybe my story can just show people, look what happened when one person woke up. And a key factor of my waking up is I moved into another neighborhood where I could be with people who were different from me and who were suffering. It’s hard to manage all that change from your little bubble where you just read books or look at videos, have a little study group, but you’re always with other white people, none of whom are struggling. You got to be in the struggle some kind of way, which means you got to move. You got to make a move. And that’s what I did and maybe people could learn from that.
Eddie Conway: Okay. All right. Good answer. So Sister Helen, thanks for joining me.
Sister Helen Prejean: Eddie, I love being with you. I wish I had you before I put that subtitle of my book and I’d have riding into consciousness. Man, I like that.
Eddie Conway: Yes.
Sister Helen Prejean: Thank you. My visit with you is quite a ride today. Thank you for doing this interview with me.
Eddie Conway: Okay. And thank you for joining us.
Sister Helen Prejean: All right.
Eddie Conway: All right. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.
Another questionable arrest in a small town is raising more concerns about the state of policing in rural America. A man was repeatedly struck by police in Paducah, Texas, during an encounter that was caught on video and shared with PAR. We examine the arrest and discuss how it demonstrates the unchecked power of law enforcement in rural communities to inflict suffering on the people they’re ostensibly serving and to extract a disproportionate share of public resources.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
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 reporting on a questionable arrest in rural America that you are seeing now in this video. It is yet another example of police violence in small communities that continues to surface as we broaden our investigation into over policing in small towns across the country.
But before we get started, I want you to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, and please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and that I appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly at @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And if you can, please hit the Patreon donate link pin in the comments below, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. All right. We’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, as with any topic we report on, individual stories can sometimes be merely anecdotal, not necessarily an exemplar of a trend. But occasionally when we see similar stories surface over and over again, it behooves us to examine if they are representative of broader systemic problems, and I think the video you’re watching now is an example of the latter. The video you’re seeing right now shows the arrest of Travis Bateman by the Paducah, Texas, sheriff’s department six months ago. Deputies had stopped Travis and his fiance after his ex-wife called 911 when the couple walked past her house with their dog. The officers accused Travis of entering the property of his ex-wife. The pair denied the accusation, and the sheriff promised to return after reviewing video from the home in question. But as one of the deputies was driving away, Travis called out to his dog, prompting the sheriff to stop his car and jump out, and then this ensued. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Travis Bateman: Mark, hear me.
Mark Box: Hands.
Travis Bateman: My hand is right here. I’m not fucking resisting you.
Mark Box: Hands behind the back.
Travis Bateman: Dude, I’m not –
Dorian Turner: Mark, he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Mark Box: Hands behind your –
Dorian Turner: God damn. This is fucking ridiculous.
Travis Bateman: We’re recording him.
Mark Box: Hands. Last order.
Travis Bateman: My hands are right here. You can handcuff me in the front.
Dorian Turner: Mark, stop. Leave him alone.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: We spoke to Travis’s fiance Dorian Turner, who described to us what happened when Travis was taken to the ground by the deputies. Let’s watch. And as we do, let’s listen to her explain.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Dorian Turner: Well, we were walking, and his ex-wife called and said that we were in her house. And so they didn’t even go and ask her any questions. They came straight to us and started asking us questions. We just walked by her house, and she called and said that we were in her house.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: And finally, with Travis protesting his arrest and police refusing to relent, this happens. A physical assault. Let’s watch. And before we do, I want to warn viewers that this video is disturbing.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Travis Bateman: …Me in the front.
Dorian Turner: Mark, stop. Leave him alone. Leave him alone. God damn it. Mark, you’re a pussy. Baby, baby, here. Y’all are fucking mean. Y’all are wrong for what you’re doing. He wasn’t doing anything. [Duchess] get over here.
Travis Bateman: Record him [inaudible] going down.
Dorian Turner: God damn. You’re fucking mean, Mark.
Mark Box: One more and I’m going to fuck you up.
Dorian Turner: Baby, stop. Just don’t move.
Mark Box: [inaudible].
Travis Bateman: For what?
Mark Box: Give me your arm.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: And unfortunately, Travis’s ordeal is only just beginning. That is because the Cottle County court ordered him held without bail. Separately, the sheriff’s department has also convinced a judge to declare him incompetent, meaning he has been in jail for six months with no prospects for release. Let’s remember, up until this encounter with the deputies, he had not been formally accused of committing a crime. The only charges that have arisen are specific to the arrest itself, namely resisting arrest and obstruction. So, how does a man who has not been convicted of a crime end up in jail for six months, bloodied and bruised by police, while authorities stonewall? Well, that’s just the question we will try to answer today. And for more on that, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis, who has been investigating the case. Steven, thank you for joining me
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So, first, you reached out to the sheriff’s office. What did they tell you?
Stephen Janis: Well, this is what’s really interesting. I called the sheriff’s office like two or three times. No one answers the phone. I mean, I don’t really know what to say. There was no one answering the phone there, no one answering the phone at the prosecutor’s office. They didn’t even have an answering machine. So, it’s been a very weird thing. I would encourage anybody to call them. If they can get in touch, let me know.
Taya Graham: We know from our investigation so far, no paperwork has been given to his family regarding his arrest. What have you learned about that lack of transparency?
Stephen Janis: Well, what the problem is is that I think looking at some of the budget and the way this particular town operates, is that everything’s kind of part-time. So, what’s really scary about that is someone can just be put in the system, and it’s very hard to figure out where they are and why they’re there and how long they’re going to be there, because nobody is actually manning the phone. So, it’s a very scary system that I think you can almost disappear a person into.
Taya Graham: And finally, what can you tell us about this rural community and the sheriff’s department? What have you discovered about the political economy of policing there?
Stephen Janis: Taya, you have a $1.1 million budget, but a lot of those revenues go to law enforcement and it’s not really clear why. but as you can see, that law enforcement has a tremendous amount of power. I think what’s scary about this is because you don’t have sort of the other institutions that are as well funded, there’s so much power concentrating in the sheriff that I think the sheriff feels like he can make arrests like this and doesn’t really have anyone to be held accountable to. I think it shows the great risks of powerful law enforcement in rural communities that are poor, because law enforcement sucks up a lot of the money, and therefore there are no institutions to hold them accountable like media. And it’s really ultimately very scary.
Taya Graham: And now we’re joined by Travis’s fiance, Dorian Turner, to give us an update on the case and how this arrest has affected both her and Travis. Dorian, thank you for joining us.
Dorian Turner: Thank you.
Taya Graham: So, can you tell me why the officer approached you and your fiance?
Dorian Turner: Well, we were walking, and his ex-wife called and said that we were in her house. And so they didn’t even go and ask her any questions, they came straight to us and started asking us questions. We just walked by her house and she called and said that we were in her house.
Taya Graham: But wasn’t there evidence that you did not go into the house?
Dorian Turner: Yeah, she has cameras on the outside of her house. So, they could have gone over there and investigated it before they came and talked to us.
Taya Graham: Why did you walk by the house?
Dorian Turner: Well, we were just taking the dog for a walk and we went a block up, and then just all the way down the street, and then back around to our house. And her house is on the next block over.
Taya Graham: What did the officer first say when he encountered you?
Dorian Turner: Well, he’s like, Dorian, can I talk to you? And I was like, for what? Did I do something wrong? And he was like, well, did you? And I was like, walking the dog. Is there something with walking the dog? And he’s like, no, did you go into somebody’s house? I was like, no? And then here comes the sheriff and he pulls up and he’s like, you know people have video cameras on outside of their house? And I’m like, yeah, and they’re allowed to. I said, can you go check and see? Because we didn’t go in her house. We walked right by her house.
Taya Graham: How did the officer respond to your request to review the homeowner’s footage?
Dorian Turner: He’s like, well, if I go over there and find out differently, I will come back for an arrest warrant for you, Travis.
Taya Graham: How did things turn so badly? How did things escalate so suddenly?
Dorian Turner: Well, I was like, are we free to go? Can we go now? And he’s like, yeah, you’re free to go. So, they both get in their vehicles and start driving off. And we have our dog with us, and it’s a big old lab. We don’t have her on a leash, she just walks right next to us most of the time. And we started walking off and T started yelling at the dog, and I guess Mark Box thought he was talking to him. And he slams his vehicle and parks and jumps out, was asking T for his driver’s license, knowing that we don’t have it on us because we’ve been walking.
Taya Graham: Why was your fiance in cuffs? Did the officer ever say what the probable cause was or why he was being arrested? Did the officer ever explain why he was arresting him?
Dorian Turner: No. He just kept on asking him for his driver’s license, and I’m like, Mark Box, you know we don’t have our stuff on us. We’ve been walking. We can go down to the house and get it if you need it. And he tried to grab T, and T just went like this, and he missed him. And that’s when Mark Box jumps on him and I wasn’t even thinking. T’s like, get your phone out and record this, Dorian. And I’m like, okay. So, I get it out. And by that time I’m yelling at the officer, and he’s already done elbowed him in the head. He’s got a big old gash on top of his head. I got the pictures of him when he was in jail with that on his head. He’s got scrapes on his arms and stuff like that. Knowing that T’s wrists are messed up, he could’ve arrested him and put his handcuffs in the front, but he won’t. So, that’s why T was like, put them on in the front and I’ll let you do it. And he wouldn’t do it.
Taya Graham: I noticed the familiarity with the officer didn’t seem to help. He said that he knew that Travis had mental health issues and that he had a medical issue with his wrist. Why didn’t this familiarity help you? I mean, this is a small town, so why did it make things worse?
Dorian Turner: We live in a little small town and everybody knows everybody. He knows T has not had his medicine and stuff, because we haven’t been able to get the [inaudible] to go get his medicine. And he knows how T is because he’s the one that arrests him. He’s been arrested nine times before that.
Taya Graham: Why did the officers start hitting your fiance? At a certain point you can see the blood pouring out of the back of his head. He didn’t appear to be fighting or attempting to run away. So, why did the officer strike him so many times?
Dorian Turner: He came and served T with some papers one time and he took his belt off, his gun off, his badge off and pulled T to come out to the street and we could fight out there a couple months before this happened.
Taya Graham: So, tell me about the sheriff’s department. Have there been other complaints about them? What is their reputation in the community?
Dorian Turner: Well, my mom’s friend, Carolyn, she has a daughter that’s mentally ill too. And he’s done almost the same thing with her. I asked her to send me pictures yesterday of the incident, and she has had cancer and she has a port right here in her chest area. And he already had her in handcuffs, and he put his knee in her shoulder right here right on top of the port on concrete. She’s got scrapes on her arm right here. Yes. He’s done it to several people here in town. Well, one guy, he can’t talk about it. I don’t know if he got compensated with anything or had to sign a paper or something. But yeah, he’s done it to several people.
Taya Graham: Has the media done any reporting on this police department?
Dorian Turner: He wanted me to send it to the news and I was kind of scared to, because I don’t know if they’ll come and, you know what I mean, try to say something to me about it or anything like that. I don’t know. But I was like, I got to do something because we haven’t heard anything. Nothing. His lawyer doesn’t want to help us. His lawyer hasn’t even called him since he’s been in there and it’s been six months. I had to call his lawyer the other day to see what was going on with this case. Because I mean, there’s no bond set. He’s sitting there just wondering, and nothing’s happening.
Taya Graham: I know you told me he had nine arrests before this, but what is his life like now?
Dorian Turner: ‘Till I either go talk to the judge and he’ll finally go and set a bond for him or something, but I’ve been having to work to go and try to get something done about it. We’ve been together a year and a half, and in the last six months of it he’s been in jail. And before that it was the nine arrests, and it’s been going on for the last year. So, ever since he got divorced from his ex-wife. See, I’ve never been in a relationship like this, and this is something out of this world. This is insane. Insane.
Taya Graham: What was your fiance actually charged with?
Dorian Turner: It was resisting arrest, terroristic threat, and assault on a police officer.
Taya Graham: You mentioned something here I almost didn’t see, which was that the officer took photographs of your fiance’s blood on his clothes and photos of his injuries. Do you know why he did that?
Dorian Turner: In the video you can see where Mark Box has blood on his pants from T, and he kind of did it on purpose. If you really pay attention, you can see where Mark Box kind of rubs his head to get it on his pants. And the officer walks over to his vehicle in the background and you can see him taking a picture and smiling where he has T’s blood on him. And in the emergency room he does the same thing. He takes the phone and holds it up like this, where he’s right here and T’s in the background, and taking a picture with T in handcuffs. Because he calls me as soon as he gets into the jailhouse, because you get that one phone call and that’s the first thing he tells me.
He’s like Dorian, he was taking another picture. This is the second time he’s done that. He came in and arrested him out here one time and there was no reason for him to take him to jail. And he had one handcuff on one wrist, and he was taking his arm and putting it all the way behind his back, pulling it up to his head and kicking his feet out from under him. Hey, three or four times he did that. He didn’t have his body cam on either. And I was like, why are you doing that? There’s no need for that. T’s wrists were so swollen when he got to the emergency. They had to take him to the emergency room that day, and that’s when he was taking that picture like that. Yeah.
Taya Graham: So, you said your fiance has been in jail for six months now without bail. Do you know why he is being held without possibility of bail? And do you know how much longer he may be locked up?
Dorian Turner: Well, all the lawyer tells me is because he’s incompetent. He’s not incompetent. He’s not at all. He’s taking his medicine. He can tell you everything. He just doesn’t understand why he is there.
Taya Graham: Now, as I said at the top of the show, there’s a difference between a few anecdotal stories,and an actual trend that points to a broader, more troubling reality. And that’s the question we of course have to answer as journalists. Is there more to these stories of bad arrests than meets the eye? Well, according to a presentation we just attended, absolutely yes. So, what do I mean? Well, the talk we attended was on a topic we have referenced many times on this show. It dealt with a surprising statistical analysis that controverts the current notion of mass incarceration in America. What we learned is that when it comes to larger state prisons, the trend is decidedly downward, meaning states and big cities are not building prisons and are decreasing inmate populations as a whole. But that doesn’t mean America’s addiction to mass incarceration is taking a breather, not even close. That’s because the construction of local jails is exploding.
If you look at this chart, local facilities are being constructed and expanded in rural communities around the country. And as the statistics show, when they build it, police fill it, often with nonviolent offenders and people addicted to drugs, the favorite fodder of our well-oiled drug war machine. And what’s really disturbing about this emphasis on local jails is how the data shows the primary goal is cash. That’s because jails often house people at the behest of the state. Inmates who have broken state laws and less need to be housed in a way that makes it look like mass incarceration is decreasing. And when local jails take on excess prisoners the cash rolls in, the inmates disappear from the state populations, and the local jails keep expanding. What’s really distressing about this trend is that much of the construction takes place in communities where other industries and drivers of economic growth have disappeared.
Take for example Eastern Kentucky, where the coal business has stalled, but jail building has boomed. I think the point here is that when we see an inexplicable arrest like Travis’s, we have to probe deeper to understand the imperative that is driving these arrests. When cops literally fabricate crimes to put people in handcuffs, we need to look at the systematic trends that incentivize the behaviors that would otherwise seem impossible to explain. What I mean is that we can’t just show a shocking arrest without talking about the broader and less visible power that rewards bad policing and punishes the people subject to its extremes. That’s why we will continue our investigation of rural and small town policing. And that’s why we’ll also hold the departments accountable who deserve the system instead of serving the people who deserve better. I want to thank Travis’s fiance, Dorian, for speaking out on his behalf. Thank you, Dorian. And of course I have to thank Intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks from me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Nole Dee. And a shout out to our awesome mod Lacy R. Thanks, Lacy. And a very special thank you to our Patreons. We really do appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook. And please like and comment. I do read your comments and appreciate them. And we do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So, if you do 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.
In January of this year, on the 20th anniversary of the opening of the notorious military prison at Guantánamo Bay on the eastern tip of Cuba, the United Nations’ top human rights office issued an excoriating report on “Gitmo” and its continued operations. “Guantánamo Bay is a site of unparalleled notoriety, defined by the systematic use of torture, and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment against hundreds of men brought to the site and deprived of their most fundamental rights,” the report stated. However, “Despite forceful, repeated and unequivocal condemnation of the operation of this horrific detention and prison complex with its associated trial processes, the United States continues to detain persons many of whom have never been charged with any crime.” TRNN correspondent David Kattenburg speaks about the continued horrors of Guantánamo Bay and the international fight to shut it down with Fionnuala Ni Aolain and Alka Pradhan.
Fionnuala Ni Aolain is the lead author of the recent UN report on Guantánamo Bay. She is the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, University Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, and faculty director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Minnesota School of Law. Alka Pradhan is Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an expert on the application of human rights and humanitarian law in counterterrorism situations, and on the impact of torture on fair trials. Pradhan is currently Human Rights Counsel at Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions and has represented over a dozen of its detainees. She currently represents one of the defendants in the capital case United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.
Pre-Production: David Kattenburg Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
David Kattenburg: Hello, and welcome to The Real News Network. I’m David Kattenburg. Guantanamo Bay, two words synonymous with cruelty and injustice. This past Jan. 10, on the 20th anniversary of the opening of that notorious military prison on the Eastern tip of Cuba, the United Nations top human rights office issued a report describing Gitmo in graphic terms, “A site of unparalleled notoriety.” The report’s 14 experts wrote, and these continue on with quotations, “Defined by systematic torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment against hundreds of men deprived of their most fundamental rights. A horrific detention and prison complex. A stain on the US Government’s commitment to the rule of law.” Quotes continue, “An ugly chapter of unrelenting human rights violations, state sponsored torture, and impunity” end of quote. And I add, with no end in sight. The Americans call the place Camp Justice.
Today, two guests join me to talk about the Guantanamo Bay facility and its unfortunate inmates. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is lead author of the United Nations report. She is the special UN rapporteur on the promotion and for protection of human rights while countering terrorism. Ní Aoláin is a university regents professor at the University of Minnesota and faculty director of the Human Rights Center at U Minnesota Law School. Ní Aoláin is also a professor of law at Queens University of Belfast. She joins us today from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Alka Pradhan is adjunct professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s an expert on the application of human rights and humanitarian law in counterterrorism situations, and on the impact of torture and unfair trials. Pradhan is currently the human rights council at Guantanamo Bay and has represented over a dozen of its detainees. She currently represents one of the defendants in the capital case United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The so-called 9/11 case.
Warning to listeners, some of the stuff we’re going to talk about today is disturbing. So, warning. Fionnuala, can you give us a rundown on the history of the facility and its detainees? I mean it began in 2002, the first detainees arrived in 2002 shortly after 9/11. Since then, in 2006, more folks arrived from America’s black sites. There have been something like a total of 800 detainees there charged over these years. I’m wondering, have any of them actually been charged with a specific crime, been tried or convicted over the past 20 years? And where do things stand at the moment?
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Well, I think there’s a lot of questions in there. To start, to say, at least the first official notice we have of a person being transferred to Guantanamo is in 2002 officially. What we know is that the United States chose this site specifically because they thought it would be outside the ambit of the law. That it would be a place where law would not reach. Where the reach of the courts would not touch and therefore safe to continue to engage in the kinds of practices that had predated men’s experiences before they arrived in Guantanamo. We know that hundreds of individuals were brought there. They were rendered through various cooperating third states. Some of them democratic, some not democratic. The 2010 report, issued by my mandate and three other UN special procedure mandates, detailed at least to that extent what we knew at that time, which was the scale of collaboration and support that the United States received in order to engage in these wholesale practices of rendition and transfer.
More information has continued to come into the public domain in the past 20 years, including from court cases in the European court of human rights, in investigations by the European parliament, and some information that’s come out through the highly redacted forward to the Senate investigation and Senate’s intelligence committee’s investigation into the events of that time. But we really have never had a full accounting of everything that has happened in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We do not know exactly what happened there. And that makes the release, in particular of the Senate’s intelligence committee report, all the more compelling. Of the hundreds of men who were transferred there, only a handful – And Alka will keep me right on the numbers – I believe 12 have ever been charged with a crime. But many of us, UN experts, have deep concerns about the process which led to that charging. Namely that anyone who was charged with a crime had been the subject of torture, and any of the information upon which such charges are based is a torture-induced basis.
The whole process by which those people were charged with crime is fundamentally flawed. In the meantime – And again, Alka will speak to this – Guantanamo, although there’s been a number of efforts to ensure that people are transferred out of Guantanamo, I think two points can be made about that. Not a single person who was rendered into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who experienced torture, arbitrary deprivation, the loss of the most fundamental rights a person can have, has ever been adequately compensated for what happened to them. No one, not a single person of all those hundreds
David Kattenburg: Many of them were brutally tortured at these black sites.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Indeed. I mean, we have evidence, we know that people were subject to persistent, pervasive acts of systemic brutality, including waterboarding on multiple occasions
David Kattenburg: Sexual assault, sexual humiliation at the hands of women guards and police, and sexual assault, and hanging from ceilings. It’s a horror show.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Well, it’s a catalog of serious sustained brutality. More importantly from a legal perspective, what is deeply concerning is that these methods were authorized. These weren’t things happening by virtue of rogue individuals. This was a systemic process of the use of certain methods which were authorized by law. Fundamentally, despite the fact that we’ve had a repudiation of torture methods by the United States, those individuals who experienced that torture have never had a remedy for it. Not only do we have a small cohort of individuals remaining in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but we have hundreds of men living overseas returned either to countries of origin or third countries who’ve had their lives entirely shattered and no remedy, compensation, acknowledgement, criminal process, apology, or even the means for many of them to reconstruct their lives in an adequate way has ever been put in place.
David Kattenburg: How many of them actually are there right now? I read that there are like 39 of them there. Of these only, I don’t know, a half a dozen have been actually charged with anything. 13 have been cleared for release, but who knows when they’re going to be released? What’s the current status, the numbers we’re looking at?
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Well, we have an official tally of 39. An additional individual has recently been cleared for return to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Of that number, as you say, a sizable portion have been cleared for return. The challenge is that we have a concept in international law called non-refoulement. You cannot return a person to a place where they are likely to be the subject of torture. Many of these individuals, particularly Yemenis, who have been cleared, do not have a safe third country to go to. We should also just make clear, while there’s plenty of blame to go around here, the United States has certainly its fair share of blame, but no third countries, including the countries who were responsible for the cooperation in the rendition and torture process, are stepping up to take these men. If they cannot be returned safely to their home countries, a third country has to step up and the conditions have to be made possible for them to be safely taken out of Guantanamo. There’s both responsibility for the United States, but there’s a broader global responsibility for the failure to address the rights of these individuals.
David Kattenburg: Alka Pradhan, you are an attorney, a human rights lawyer. You’ve represented over the course of the past years, I think, something like 10 Guantanamo detainees, you’re currently representing one of them. Before these military commissions, it’s plural, is there one military commission or are there various military commissions? What are these military commissions? You’ve said that practicing law at Guantanamo is something of an oxymoron. Tell us quickly about these military commissions and how they work.
Alka Pradhan: Sure. Well, what happened is, and Fionnuala, I think encapsulated the problem very well. You yourself had mentioned, David, that a number of so-called high value detainees were brought from the black sites to Guantanamo in 2006. When they were brought to Guantanamo, there was a decision made that something had to be done with them. Their disappearance for several years at a time had to be justified. At that point, we already had this concept of military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, which really are… The concept of military tribunals is not new, right? In war time, you’re allowed to try combatants before military tribunals and the jurors are members of the military. You try them under the laws of war. The difference with this is that this is not a traditional war.
It involves non-state actors like Al-Qaeda. And so this is really the first time that you have people who, certainly the defense would argue, but I think even the ICRC have argued should be civilians being tried on terror charges, being tried in regular courts, instead being tried in these sort of brand new military commissions – They’re called military commissions – At Guantanamo Bay for which a courtroom was built at Guantanamo. Really, the purpose of trying them in a military commission at Guantanamo Bay is so that they could write an entire new set of rules for these particular trials at Guantanamo. There are different standards of evidence than you would find in a normal courtroom in the United States. There are completely different conditions of confinement at Guantanamo than there are in prisons in the United States. That’s not to defend prison conditions in the United States, which are horrific. It’s a completely different system made of whole cloth just specifically to prosecute Muslim men brought to Guantanamo Bay, which is illegal.
David Kattenburg: The US Supreme Court rendered a ruling in June of 2006. The quote from that US Supreme Court ruling was that the commissions “Lack judicial guarantees recognized as indispensable by civilized people.”
Alka Pradhan: Yeah, that’s right. So that was in the Hamdan decision in 2006. What happened was after that, the Bush administration scrapped the first set of military commissions and then the detainees just sat there for a few years. There wasn’t really anything being done. Then, the Obama administration, after the failure to bring them to the United States for prosecution, reconstituted the military commissions again under a new statute, and that was in 2009. The new statute really didn’t have all that many improvements, in my opinion, from the old statute. For example, there’s still a provision in that statute, that we’re now laboring under, that allows the use of evidence that we consider to be torture acquired, that was taken from the men shortly after they were tortured at the black sites when they didn’t have legal representation and were being held in the same conditions of confinement that they were held in at the black sites. Things like that, that’s why I say that it’s sort of kafkaesque or an oxymoron to say we’re practicing law at Guantanamo. Because the entire place, and certainly the military commissions themselves, were built to be outside of our recognized system of law.
David Kattenburg: I’d like to get back to these arcane theories of, well, the exclusionary principle and a law that you can’t use evidence that was procured through the use of torture. It’s tainted evidence. But then this counter theory – Well, it’s a theory, the exclusionary theory – Or no, the attenuation theory. Let’s get back to that in a moment. But Alka, can you tell me about Ammar? Ammar al-Baluchi, the gentleman who you are now representing, the one person you’re now representing. Who is he and what’s his story? I mean, it’s a huge story, one could go on. Could you describe him and his story kind of concisely?
Alka Pradhan: Of course. Ammar al-Baluchi, he’s a Pakistani citizen. He lived most of his life in Kuwait and then in the United Arab Emirates, he is turning 45 this year. Goodness. Yeah, he’s turning 45 in August. He’s just a few years older than me. He was arrested in 2003 in Pakistan and very shortly thereafter transferred to CIA custody. In CIA custody he was, we were talking about earlier, just brutally tortured, and actually his specific torture and the techniques used on him were depicted in the film Zero Dark 30. The first 20 minutes or so of that film show a detainee being abused, tortured with water, hung by his wrists in a site code named Cobalt. That is Ammar. They call him Ammar in the film, what happened to the detainee in that film is what happened to Ammar.
David Kattenburg: He was used as a “training prop.”
Alka Pradhan: That’s correct.
David Kattenburg: Talk about that.
Alka Pradhan: And that is so interesting because we had one of the architects, or what we would call the architects at the torture program, Dr. Mitchell, on the witness stand a couple of years ago. We asked him about what happened to Ammar. He didn’t personally torture Ammar, but we told him what happened to him. He said, the people who did these things to Ammar – Even though Dr. Mitchell himself sanctioned the techniques as a whole, he said, the way they were applied to Ammar was as if they were experimenting on him. As if he was being used as a training prop for interrogator certification so that these new interrogators could literally be certified as people authorized to do these techniques. They were practicing on him, which is how he ended up with a traumatic brain injury from having his head bashed into a wall dozens of times at this site.
He was detained by the CIA in multiple sites for three and a half years during which he was sleep deprived. He was sleep deprived for nearly three of those three and a half years. He had 24 hour fluorescent lights on him. Such that he now cannot sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time. He’s been at Guantanamo since September 2006, so more than 15 years now. What we’ve seen in the past two years is a really alarming decline in his cognitive abilities. I’ve been working with him for about six and a half years. When I started working with him we could converse for hours at a time. I could show him motions, sometimes really lengthy motions we were about to file. We could talk about advocacy strategies. Now, it’s really difficult for him to write letters that are more than a couple of lines at a time.
It’s difficult for him to read long documents. He has to wear dark glasses often because of that fluorescent light that – He’s in a prison setting and in the courtroom, it’s fluorescent light. So he has to wear dark glasses most of the time. It’s horrific to watch someone deteriorate in front of you in real time. It speaks to not just the torture that happened to him years ago, but the ongoing conditions of confinement at Guantanamo and the withholding of what Fionnuala pointed out, not just reparations, but any kind of medical care for the torture that he suffered.
David Kattenburg: I was reading in one of the articles that you wrote about, and this is brings us to this idea, this theory of attenuation, that if you wait a certain number of years after people have been tortured, they kind of recover. Then you can start to ask the same questions you did in the beginning, and they’re okay, that’s admissible, but there was something. Let’s talk about that in a second. But this idea of neurotoxicity, that torture actually inflicts long-term, if not permanent damage that amounts to actual… I don’t want to say destruction, but toxic effects, long-term permanent effects on the nervous system. I’m not sure how much you can talk about that. Let’s talk about these ideas of the exclusionary principle. What is the exclusionary principle Fionnuala? This counterposed theory that people are cooking up about attenuation. Can you talk about these two?
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Sure, and maybe just to add on the comment around the idea that torture victims are somehow, that they rehabilitate in a short period of time. Which is really a convenient excuse. It’s like a charter for torturers to continue to do their work. I think there’s zero, the evidence – We have a lot of knowledge about torture because we’ve been tracking torture in the international human rights community for decades. We have organizations like the Center for Victims of Torture and rehabilitative centers for torture victim survivors in parts of the world where, actually, we understand as both a physiological, as a neurological matter. Torture victim survivors struggle for the rest of their lives with the harm that has been done to them. We know this from Holocaust survivors who were tortured and who survived. The long-term impacts on them, but also on their family members, which is a form of secondary trauma survival and sometimes meets the threshold for torture, inhuman, and degrading treatment in its own right in terms of being generationally subject to the harm, the extreme harm experienced by individuals. There’s little or no, I think, scientific legs in the theory that individuals can somehow be put back into the saddle of torture and that that’s okay. And that, in fact, being subject to the same kinds of patterns of behavior over the long run is sort of negligible harm for them. One of –
David Kattenburg: This is actually a theory that’s being put forward, isn’t it? It’s been put before courts and there’s, I gather, case law regarding attenuation theory that people get over their torture.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: I defer to Alka on the litigation, so maybe she’ll want to say something about that. But I can tell you from an international human rights perspective, in terms of the treaty law we have and the kind of jurisprudence of international courts, these theories are not accepted. I’ll pass over to Alka on what domestic courts are saying about it.
Alka Pradhan: Absolutely. I have to say, I’ve been working on this case at Guantanamo for a few years, and I’m actually also working on a case of the international criminal court with similar issues. The problem is that the courts are split on this theory of attenuation, right? Scientifically, as Fionnuala mentioned, the science doesn’t support the theory of attenuation. The theory is basically, years down the line, given a enough time, change in circumstances, medical care, change in interrogators, you can get a person to a point where their statements will be reliable and not the product of their torture.
David Kattenburg: They’re trying to use this at Guantanamo.
Alka Pradhan: Exactly. And so the science doesn’t support this anyway, but there is a body of case law, both domestically and in certain regional courts, where they’re sort of analyzing criteria as in, how long has it been? Was there a real change in interrogators such that the detainees would understand that they were no longer in the same danger from the same group of people? Really super subjective criteria. At Guantanamo, the way this is applied is they’re brought from the black sites in CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay, they’re told they’re now in military custody, although they’re being held at a camp that was purpose-built for these CIA detainees. Still, as we know from the Senate report, still under operational CIA control. Then, they’re left alone for a few months by and large. And a few months later FBI interrogators come in, introduce themselves as FBI, give them McDonald’s hamburgers and french fries and desserts, and say, eat as much as you want and now we’re going to ask you a few questions. They ask them the same questions they were asked at the black sites –
David Kattenburg: They have access to those questions that got asked that’s black sites –
Alka Pradhan: Not only do they have access to them, they wrote those questions. Those exact interrogators, the FBI agents, wrote the questions that were sent to these men to be asked of them while they were tortured at the black sites. So they know the answers that they gave under torture at the black sites and they know how to ask the questions again. To us, it’s one long interrogation. There’s no attenuation whatsoever. The government’s argument though, is that it’s a totally different location. They’re told they’re in different custody. They’re not being tortured. They’re very comfortable, they’re smiling. All of this is voluntary, right? We’re really having to combat this. I’ll tell you, the government has a decent amount of domestic case law on their side in this. It’s not just domestic case law.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is one of the regional courts that actually says, attenuation is not possible. Don’t try it. We don’t buy it. The European Court of Human Rights has actually carved out this standard to kind of judge, okay, well, when is attenuation enough? How can you determine when that change has taken place? The International Criminal Court at the moment, in my other case, is turning out a whole bunch of new decisions that adopt that attenuation standard. That say, look, even if the prosecutors interview these detainees while they’re in torturous custody, as long, the interviewers are not torturing them, that’s acceptable. You know –
David Kattenburg: The bottom line in all this is, of course, that they’ve got the 39 detainees still at Guantanamo and they really want to try them. I guess top of the list is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, number one. They can’t put them on trial in anything other than the most absurd kangaroo court situation in a gulag because the evidence has been acquired under torture and it’s completely inadmissible.
Alka Pradhan: That’s the dirty secret, right? That the United States can’t admit to the population. It’s incredibly embarrassing that you cannot really try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind, or anybody we think was associated with 9/11, because the whole case has been tainted.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: It’s also the case that one presumes that a trial is wanted. I think that really one has to ask, interrogate quite consistently, the presumption. Because states that want to move quickly to trial release evidence. If you’re a defense lawyer – And I think Alka can speak to this – The challenges that defense lawyers have had to have documents released, the slow walking of evidence, the slow way in which the proceedings have played out. I think it’s important to stress this isn’t a lawless court. It’s not a gulag. Law is extremely important to this process because law provides the cover by which, in fact, serious human rights violations take place. In fact, there are many, many, many places where the most extreme violations occur under cover of law. This is what makes Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, particularly challenging as a site of… Because it shows what can be done under cover of law.
David Kattenburg: Do you think that it’s in a certain real sense that, under cover of law, this supposed Camp Justice is a little bit of a legal fraud? It’s this huge legal fraud. Maybe that’s not the way you’d put it, but it’s really a miscarriage of justice.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: I think it’s certainly a miscarriage of justice, but I think we shouldn’t underestimate how law is used. One of the long-term legacies of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is not even so much what’s happening in Guantanamo, but in other sites where indefinite detention is taking place under the framework of law. For example, the mandate I hold has done quite a bit of work on Xinjiang, China. We are very closely watching the ways in which legal process can justify the arbitrary detention of hundreds and thousands of people. The reason, again, is that law is put into the service of the state in a way that actually undermines the rule of law. It’s one of the extraordinary challenges of our time. That the moment, the post World War II moment in which, in some sense, the triumph of the rule of law through the UN charter, through human rights treaties, is in fact being done away by a thousand cuts when law itself comes into the service of undoing the fundamental human rights of individuals. I think in that sense, the impact of Guantanamo is not only felt by the hundreds of individuals who came through it, but also for the broader impact on the rule of law across the world.
David Kattenburg:Well, this brings me to my possible penultimate question. That, given the huge gravity of the situation and situations we face here in 2022, that all involve profound human rights issues and the violation of fundamental norms of international humanitarian and human rights law. I mean, think about Uyghurs, and you think about the horrible situation that Syrians are facing at the hands of the regime there. You think about allegations of apartheid in Israel. You think about the situation that First Nations people face in Canada that’s been described by the government itself, genocide happened in the past. And the situation facing people of color in the United States. I mean, international law, human rights are huge, huge. My question to you is, Fionnuala and Alka, what impact, what damage do you think this whole Guantanamo experience over the last 20 years is having on the integrity of international law? On the integrity of human rights law and international law, kind of at large? What’s at stake when you look at Guantanamo?
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: I mean, what’s at stake is the rule of law, which is a quite big thing. Also, I think on the one hand, I think we would all recognize some of the challenges that have existed for the US executive to address the situation in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That includes a Congress which is unwilling to accept transfer of individuals and that has put obstacles in place to prevent resolution. At the same time, my mandate continues to hold the view that the United States executive is under an absolute obligation to take every single measure open to it, which includes releasing individuals unilaterally, that they are unable to convict or charge expediently with the crimes that they’ve been charged with. That is both politically unpalatable, but morally necessary when you have subjected people to the scale of harm that has been meted out to these individuals. The broader challenge we see is when the leading democracy engages in these practices, and neither holds anyone accountable.
Not a single person has been charged with any crime as a result of the scale of torture that took place. No one who performed torture, acquiesced in torture, enabled torture, or authorized torture has been held accountable. The signal that that sends to states across the globe is that impunity rules. That you can engage in mass torture practices with no consequence. The second thing that we’ve seen is the failure to ensure reparations or remedy to the individuals who experienced torture, who were sent back to their countries of origin or third countries, many of whom exist with serious financial, many of them live in penury. Many of them have, as Alka has described, longstanding health and psychosocial challenges because of the torture they received. None of them have received adequate remedy. Thirdly, we have not put in place, in my view, adequate systems to prevent the recurrence of transporter rendition as took place in 2000.
Again, my mandate closely follows events in other parts of the world. We’ve been tracking the evolution of extraordinary rendition to what is now lawful transfer, where states make deals with one another to lawfully transfer one person to another jurisdiction based on allegations of terrorism. In many cases, which are used to transfer dissidents, to transfer human rights actors, to transfer people who simply disagree with their governments. The sum of that is to say the failure to address Guantanamo in all of its dimensions has had serious, profound repercussions for the rule of law around the world.
David Kattenburg:Alka Pradhan, I’d like to finish with you. You’re engaged in this process that you’ve described as reconstructing personhoods. When you deal with folks that you’ve been representing, detainees, and thinking about Ammar al-Baluchi, you aim to try to reconstruct personhoods in the course of your counseling work. Can you talk briefly about that?
Alka Pradhan: Sure. I mean, the way I see Guantanamo and certainly what happened at the black sites, but Guantanamo writ large, it’s just a big experiment in dehumanization of people. I tend to draw a straight line between, for example, the fact that the American public has gotten very, very comfortable withholding specifically a group of Muslim men in this kind of offshore prison for so long. A straight line between that and the fact that we eventually got comfortable with holding women and children and families on the border. People of color again. Everybody was up in arms for the first few weeks, months, and then it petered off. It’s still happening. I think that eventually the government’s campaign of dehumanization is so profoundly successful in the worst ways, that in order to be able to represent these men you really do have to reconstruct who they are as people. Because they themselves don’t always see themselves as people anymore.
They’re sort of going through the motions. It can take a long time and it can be very difficult through no fault of their own. You really do have to strip away what’s happened to them and what the government is saying about them and what perceptions are of them and get back to who they are fundamentally, which is separate from what they have or have not done. No one is only one thing. No one is only one action in their lives. You have to reconstruct them as a whole human being in order to represent their interests.
David Kattenburg: Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is a lead author of the January United Nations report on Guantanamo Bay. She’s the special United Nations rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism. Alka Pradhan is adjunct professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and Human Rights Council at the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, representing Ammar Al-Baluchi, one of the defendants in this case entitled United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 case. Alka and Fionnuala, thank you so much for joining me.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Thank you.
Alka Pradhan: Thank you very much.
David Kattenburg: Before you go, please don’t forget to subscribe to The Real News YouTube channel and head on over to the realnews.com/support to become a monthly Real News sustainer. Your contributions help us keep bringing you important coverage and conversations like this one. Thank you so much for joining us. Take care. Bye bye.
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