Like many former lawyers, I remember representing a client whose case embodied such a gross miscarriage of justice that I now use it as an example to explain the unfairness of the law to others. My client, whom I’ll call Bobby, was an elderly man with a recent traumatic brain injury that had left him disabled and unable to find stable housing. I was working with him to secure a place in assisted housing and was in contact with him on an almost daily basis. At some point, though, for about a week, he vanished—no notice, no clue regarding his whereabouts. He just disappeared.
When Bobby finally arrived back in my office, he told me that he had been arrested. He had been robbed, and during the robbery his prescription heart medication was taken. The robbers, presumably after discovering it was not a drug with street value, threw his prescription onto the street in front of him. A witness to the attack had called the police, but when they arrived the robbers were long gone. Bobby, however, was still at the scene trying to pick up his medicine from the ground. Bobby was arrested by the officers for possession of prescription medicine outside of a proper container.
Since the non-profit organization that I worked for couldn’t handle criminal cases, Bobby was assigned a public defender. He sat in jail for a few days before meeting with his lawyer, who explained that if Bobby pled guilty, he would be placed on probation for a year and the charge would be dropped at the end of that time. Bobby, who wanted to leave jail as soon as possible, agreed to this and thought that the matter was resolved.
As Bobby told me this story, I immediately began to worry about his housing situation. The assisted housing facility would not allow people who were on probation to reside there. After several calls with his public defender, I realized that there was not much that could be done. Bobby, after all, had admitted his guilt in front of a judge and had waived any rights he had to appeal. So he had to wait a year, living in substandard housing, before he would be eligible for the assistance he desperately needed, all because he had made his guilty plea without understanding the full consequences.
“Defendants don’t know what’s what,” said Dan Canon, author of the new book Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class, when discussing Bobby’s situation with me. “You take a poor or working-class person that gets swept into the criminal justice system and is accused of a felony or something like that and the defense attorney is like, ‘You need to plea…’ and they can’t weigh the strengths and weaknesses of their case—they can’t tell what’s a good deal and what’s a bad deal.”
“When you are doing post-conviction stuff, you see where the system has really failed people in one way or another, guilty people or innocent people. I’ve counseled lots of people in post-conviction cases that were just sort of frog-marched into a plea bargain because that’s what they were supposed to do.”
Canon, a civil rights attorney, law professor at the University of Louisville, and one of the attorneys who represented plaintiffs in the Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized gay marriage in the United States, has seen many cases like Bobby’s that inspired him to write about the evils of plea bargaining. “I do a lot of post-conviction work,” said Canon. “When you are doing post-conviction stuff, you see where the system has really failed people in one way or another, guilty people or innocent people. I’ve counseled lots of people in post-conviction cases that were just sort of frog-marched into a plea bargain because that’s what they were supposed to do.”
97% of criminal convictions in America are the result of a guilty plea, with the vast majority of those pleas resulting from plea bargaining. And yet, the fact that plea bargaining is the primary mechanism for processing charges in the US criminal justice system has not received much discussion in ongoing public debates about criminal justice reform.
“There hasn’t been a serious public conversation about plea bargaining and what it’s doing to the criminal justice system, and that is because we have just gotten so used to it,” said Canon. After the Bordenkircher v. Hayes case in 1978, which allows prosecutors to punish a defendant for refusing to take a plea, “you’ve got the academy at that time just laying down its pens and saying, ‘That’s the way it is… let’s just adjust to this new reality.’”
The systemic overreliance on plea bargaining, Canon explains, is a uniquely American way of dispensing justice. “It seems perfectly natural to us, and yet no place else in the world that I know of tolerates the kind of discretion that we give to our prosecutors in trying to get somebody to give up their right to go to trial,” said Canon.
In the book, Canon further argues that the use of plea bargaining is essential to the repression of working-class solidarity in America, and he does so by tracing its use to the start of the industrial revolution in Boston. “You’ve got people living on top of each other in these concentrated environments for, really, the first time,” said Canon, explaining how the more trial-focused criminal justice system switched to one that ran primarily on plea bargains. “[Workers] are developing class consciousness and starting to talk to each other like, ‘Hey, this is bullshit. Why do we have to do this?’ And that became dangerous to the ruling classes.”
97% of criminal convictions in America are the result of a guilty plea, with the vast majority of those pleas resulting from plea bargaining.
Business and political elites, needing to quash any sign of radicalizing worker consciousness or solidarity, started exerting their influence to turn a justice system that was primarily based on trials or guilty pleas offered with no pre-negotiation into a justice system based almost entirely on plea bargaining. Plea bargaining is a much more effective and callously efficient means of dispensing with criminal cases, and it allows for a massive increase in the number of cases that can be processed—an increase that has never stopped. This vicious vortex has sucked more and more people into an ever-expanding class of criminals.
The creation of this criminal class was an essential assault on working people and working-class solidarity in a long-running class war, Canon argues. “There is this notion in our brains of the criminal class and what criminals look like and what they do; and you don’t work with them, you don’t collaborate with them, you don’t let your kids date them,” said Canon. “There’s a stigma attached to that label, and that stigma is very effective at preventing solidarity. And it’s one thing to apply that label to a small percentage of society, but when you’ve got a full one-third of the adult population in the United States that has some sort of a criminal record… Nothing really crumbles the cookie of solidarity like a criminal conviction.”
Plea bargaining, Canon argues, is the perfect tool for ensuring that many people become part of this criminal (or criminalized) class, because all professionals in the justice system benefit from its use. Because almost every case is resolved prior to trial, Canon explains, police officers can raise their solved crime statistics by overcharging defendants, regardless of how well those charges would hold up at trial. Prosecutors can point to high rates of convictions by offering plea deals designed to ensure that defendants plead guilty, lest they face much more dire consequences at trial. Defense attorneys can present a plea to their client as a good deal that will help them avoid larger charges or more time in jail. Judges are able to have fast dockets in which their main role is merely signing off on pleas that were already agreed to.
Because almost every case is resolved prior to trial, Canon explains, police officers can raise their solved crime statistics by overcharging defendants, regardless of how well those charges would hold up at trial.
“It is the sort of mass-produced coerced confession. We’re really outraged [when police] put a kid in a room under the hot lights and threaten to beat him up with a phone book or whatever and he says, ‘I did it, I did it, just let me go,’ and that’s outrageous,” said Canon. “But that’s exactly what the system is doing to thousands of people every day. They are just doing it in this sort of dry, procedural, legitimized fashion.”
This use of pleas does not ensure that guilty people are more likely to be punished. Canon points to the fact that 75% of the people on death row are there because they did not accept a plea to lesser charges. “Not only are you less likely to take a plea [if you’re innocent] but you’re more likely to get hit with the death penalty,” said Canon. “It makes sense that if you’re innocent you’re less likely to take a plea… but I think the shocking thing is: You’re more likely to get a prosecutor seeking the death penalty in your case because you don’t take the plea, because you’re innocent.”
Canon points out that this plea process also fails to serve crime victims any better than the trial-based system.“If you accept that expedience is the fundamental guiding principle for the [whole system], then the victim and the victim’s wishes just sort of become an annoyance that everyone needs to just speed through because the victim is going to slow down the process,” he said.
Canon thinks that his book lays out an argument that while plea bargaining is currently accepted as an inevitability in the American justice system, it does not need to be. We are capable, he argues, of creating a more just system. “If you look at the roots of the system, a lot has changed in America over the last 200 years and not a lot about the justice system has changed,” said Canon. “If you look from the 19th century until now, what was the big change, what made the shift from the 19th century to now that was this earth shattering egalitarian shift in the criminal justice system in the United States. I can’t find it, I don’t know what it is.”
A police officer who works for a department under scrutiny for aggressive ticketing and a series of controversial arrests has been charged with domestic violence.
The charges against Milton police officer Andrew Lawhon were uncovered during an ongoing investigation into the town’s policing practices by the Police Accountability Report (PAR), the weekly investigative show we host on The Real News Network. Lawhon is facing one count of misdemeanor domestic battery related to an incident that occurred in his home in Barboursville, West Virginia, on Feb. 7.
Court documents state that Lawhon struck his partner’s face with an open hand, then grabbed her legs to prevent her from leaving their home. Lawhon was released on $2000 bail.
In 2012, Milton collected roughly $234,577 in court fees and fines while its police department budget was $484,000. Over the next decade, the fees and fines nearly tripled, reaching roughly $600,000 in 2020. Meanwhile, police spending has nearly doubled to $1.1 million in 2019.
Misdemeanor domestic battery carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison.
Prior to the publication of this article, Milton Police Chief Joe Parsons did not respond to an emailed request for comment on Lawhon’s current employee status and whether he still has police powers. In West Virginia, anyone convicted of domestic violence charges is prohibited from carrying or possessing a firearm.
Milton residents continue to come forward with complaints about the police department of the small West Virginia town in response to our reporting on the dubious arrests of Coty Cecil and Caleb Dial. A follow-up PAR investigation also found that Milton has markedly increased fines and court fees while ramping up policing spending.
In 2012, Milton collected roughly $234,577 in court fees and fines while its police department budget was $484,000. Over the next decade, the fees and fines nearly tripled, reaching roughly $600,000 in 2020. Meanwhile, police spending has nearly doubled to $1.1 million in 2019.
An analysis of similarly sized towns in West Virginia found that Milton has the highest police spending among its peers.
These numbers first came to light during PAR’s investigation into the arrest of Coty Cecil in December of 2021. Cecil parked his RV in a private campground when Milton police conducted a raid. On a video livestreamed during the incident, Cecil repeatedly asked police for a warrant. The officers outside Cecil’s front door repeatedly assured him that a warrant was forthcoming, but did not provide it at the scene. So far, according to Cecil, that warrant has not materialized, though he said he did find an application for a warrant in his RV after he was released from jail.
Police confiscated roughly a dozen immature marijuana plants from the trailer—grown in his home state of Michigan, where they are legal—along with grow materials, a checkbook, business cards, and books on how to cultivate pot. Cecil was charged with possession of a controlled substance, possession with intent to distribute, and transportation of a controlled substance over state lines.
Since Cecil’s arrest, several other questionable cases involving Milton officers have been brought to our attention.
Caleb Dial was charged in August 2021 for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and felony evasion after he called police to a relative’s home to mediate a domestic dispute. That was the official account from the Milton police, at least. However, a Ring camera on the front porch captured the encounter and showed Dial was not combative or disorderly. Based on the unearthed Ring camera video, prosecutors dropped all charges and asked Dial to not sue Milton police.
Dial does not intend to grant prosecutors’ request and has vowed to hold the department accountable. “I am currently looking for an attorney,” he told PAR.
The controversial arrests and increased ticketing have come as the town government has prioritized policing, residents say.
Sources told PAR the city council received monthly reports listing the number of tickets written by individual officers. PAR has filed a West Virginia Freedom of Information Act request for copies of those reports, along with a more detailed breakdown of the court fines and other law enforcement-related fees.
The tactics regularly employed by the Milton police department have made life harrowing for some residents of the small town near the border of West Virginia and Kentucky, according to testimonies shared with TRNN. A vast majority of residents who have contacted PAR with claims of police harassment have expressed fear of retaliation for coming forward, a sentiment Dial says is justified.
“Milton is a very small town, and if you’re poor in that town, it’s hard to go anywhere in the city and not encounter an officer,” Dial said. “With officers blatantly behaving how they do and consistently and constantly getting away with what they do in Milton, I can understand why people are fearful.”
Conservatives in America have long argued that the death penalty is a necessary fixture of our legal and carceral system, both as a “crime deterrent” and as a means of serving justice. But more conservatives today are questioning the moral, fiscal, and practical justifications for this barbaric practice. TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway and Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speak with Demetrius Minor about the new generation of conservatives who are joining the fight to abolish the death penalty.
Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. There’s been a campaign afoot in America to abolish the death penalty, and it’s been going on for centuries, in fact. Recently, 20-some years or so ago, conservatives have joined this fight. And in the last couple of decades the number of conservatives has increased tremendously in support of abolishing the death penalty. Joining me today to help us understand what’s happening is Demetrius Minor, the national manager of Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty. Demetrius, thanks for joining us.
Demetrius Minor: Thank you for having me. Glad to be with you.
Eddie Conway: Okay. You could start off maybe, if you will, by giving us an overview of the conservative push to make changes to the death penalty.
Demetrius Minor: Absolutely. Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty was founded in 2012 in the state of Montana where some Republican lawmakers wanted to get together and raise concerns about the death penalty and how it has been implemented. So basically, we take our message to audiences that’s made up of conservatives, whether it be social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, or whatnot. And our main message is to get them on board to see the death penalty repealed. And so that is a state-by-state campaign. And we have had a visible presence in multiple states as we seek to abolish the death penalty.
Eddie Conway: Well, what’s the argument that you use? Conservatives have always been pro-death penalty even though they’re pro-life. They’ve always been with the stand-your-ground or stop-and-shoot, three strikes. They’ve always been hard toward criminal justice. What do you use to argue to make them change their minds?
Demetrius Minor: So actually there has been a shift. A monumental shift, I would say. So I’m going to point to three key arguments as to why the death penalty should be repealed.
Argument number one. Let’s take the moral case, and that is being pro-life. It’s not enough just to say, okay, I’m pro-life, against abortion for the innocence of the unborn child. Being pro-life is about the totality of life and that includes lives that are lived drastically different than ours. So if I’m pro-life I cannot be simultaneously pro-death. It causes a moral conflict and therefore causes a moral contradiction of my values and of my principles. But the problem with that, or I don’t want to say the problem, but an issue is that morality is subjective. So what’s moral to me may not be necessarily moral to you.
But number two, when you talk about the fiscal component of the death penalty, how it is costly ineffective. From my understanding, this show is based out of Maryland. Before Maryland repealed the death penalty, it spent $186 million on roughly five executions. Five executions, $186 million. That’s an astronomical amount. But what if that number, what if those funds were reallocated elsewhere such as law enforcement, training and resources for them, services and benefits for the victims’ families, mental health training? There’s a plethora of things that money could have been used for instead of the death penalty. So from a fiscal perspective, the death penalty is costly, ineffective. Okay?
And then number three, the death penalty is actually an extension of big government. I do not trust the federal government to give me updated COVID numbers. I don’t trust the federal government to handle healthcare. I don’t trust the federal government to balance a budget. I don’t trust the federal government to even address the deficit. Why would I trust the government with a matter of literally – And no hyperbole – Life and death? So for these reasons alone we have seen a shift in conservatives supporting the death penalty to opposing it.
Eddie Conway: Mansa?
Charles Hopkins: Yeah, Demetrius, let’s dial down on the message. How do you take your message – And it’s a good message as you outline your three points – How do you take your message and coalesce with other people that are not necessarily conservative but have the same concerns that you have in the same light that you have? Moral, economic, and the other one. How do y’all, or have y’all, looked in that direction to build a coalition along those lines?
Demetrius Minor: Sure. So I believe in meeting people where they’re at. And again, people can oppose the death penalty for whatever reason, different reasons: morally, fiscally, racially, culturally. Whatever stance that they have, if they have concerns about the death penalty or if they just want to repeal it, all right, we welcome them on board.
Let me give you an example of some of the coalitions that we’re building. In the state of Ohio. Ohio is a political bellwether state. Ohio has a Republican-controlled legislature including the House and Senate and a Republican governor. Ohio is positioning themselves to repeal the death penalty and the coalition is pretty broad. It includes progressives, it includes conservatives such as our organization, Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, but even progressive organizations such as the ACLU or the NAACP, just to name a few.
So the repealing of the death penalty is actually a bipartisan approach. It’s a bipartisan matter. But it is met with Republican leadership. Let me tell you very quickly about the three states, the last three states to repeal the death penalty. I’m going to start with Colorado. Colorado repealed the death penalty because there was a trio of Republican senators who were very instrumental in getting it passed. In the state of New Hampshire the Republican governor actually vetoed the death penalty legislation. However, 40% of the Republican caucus voted to override the governor’s veto. A Republican governor’s veto, that’s very important.
And then the state of Virginia, which just elected a Republican governor in November, it repealed the death penalty last spring. And that was due to the leadership of some Republican members who were very instrumental in getting that passed. In Utah, even though it came one vote short in the committee, Utah came very close. A deep red state, because Republican leadership wanted to get the bill through to their members. So all across the board, all across the nation, there is a paradigm shift happening in Republicans and conservatives and they’re taking the lead and repealing the death penalty.
Charles Hopkins: Okay. On the note of how do you reconcile this push with the fact of the victims, how do y’all coalesce with the victims? Victims of these crimes that have been committed that result in the death penalty, are y’all networking with them, talking to them, educating them, or getting their input on the positions that y’all are taking?
Demetrius Minor: That’s a great question. Victims’ families, murder victims’ families are actually a key instrumental component in our message. I was just in Ohio two weeks ago. I was meeting with political leadership there and trying to get the bill passed. But one of the individuals I met with the was Reverend Dr. Crystal Walker, and her son was murdered. What makes her story so compelling is she actually knows the perpetrator of the crime, and this person has not been arrested for whatever reason, lack of evidence and so forth. But she looked me in the eye and she said this. She says, I don’t wish this on my worst enemy. She says, because do you know what the death penalty would do? It is just going to repeat a cycle of trauma and grief. She says, I may be hurting right now, but if the death penalty is implemented that means someone else’s family is going to have to go through the grieving process. And it does not bring the loved one back. It’s not going to resurrect that life again.
So a lot of people may think that murder victims’ families automatically advocate for the death penalty. That’s not true. Many victims’ families are advocating for the abolition of the death penalty because all it does is repeat the grief cycle and trauma. And that is something they don’t want to have to go through over and over again.
Eddie Conway: Tell me, what other states are you campaigning in and what’s the nature of those campaigns? And third, how successful is the progress so far?
Demetrius Minor: Sure. Well let me start with the state that I reside in. That is the state of Florida. Now, this is moreso laying the groundwork for 2023, but they are trying to get those who have severe mental illness exempt from the death penalty, which is an instrumental and incremental way of getting the death penalty abolished in its entirety. But sometimes you have to do it step-by-step instead of trying to tackle it all at one time. That’s one example.
There has been some legislation introduced in states such as Georgia, Kentucky, Wyoming, deep red states that are going to be introducing legislation either this session or next session tackling the death penalty. Some other states that are sort of in our peripheral include Nevada and Arizona. Those western states are looking to get rid of it. It is my hope that Ohio will abolish the death penalty by the end of this year. If that happens, what I believe we’ll see is a domino effect in neighboring red states and red states all across the United States that will start to look at the death penalty and say, it’s costly, ineffective. It actually does not serve as a deterrence to crime. And most importantly, it does not line up with the value of life. And hopefully we’ll start to see red states repeal the death penalty following Ohio’s lead.
Eddie Conway: Okay, this is not a personal question, but what’s the reception when you go in front of a conservative audience and you make this argument? I noticed you said there was a shift, a tremendous shift apparently, because from 2000 to now, you can talk about the numbers, but it’s been a great increase. What’s the reception for you in front of these audiences?
Demetrius Minor: So, just like any other issue, any other subject whether it’s taxes, whether it’s education, whether it’s labor, whether it’s national security, you’re going to have different views. You’re going to have opposing views on whatever issue you decide to address.
Here’s why I’ve been receiving a very good reception to these issues. I just attended CPAC, which stands for Conservative Political Action Conference. It is the largest gathering of conservative activists, policy makers, and legislators in the entire nation. For the first time in this conference’s existence, the death penalty was on the docket. It was on the agenda. And I was in a room full of conservative policy makers, conservative activists from all across the country. And I’m telling you, there was a shift that was happening in that room, where people were raising concerns, where people were asking really good questions about why it doesn’t work, and why it is still being used.
I actually saw and heard a former US Senator’s wife stand up and testify that she used to be pro-death penalty until she became an attorney, until she saw how the system does not work for everyone. She started to see the fallacies of the criminal justice system and then she became opposed to the death penalty. That’s just one conversation that I saw in the room. But I’m starting to see this conversation take place. Personally, among my peers, I’ve seen this conversation taking place through our social media outlets. And so therefore I’m getting a really positive reception when I talk about the death penalty.
Is everyone I talk to against it? No, there are some that are for it. But I also have heard some that says, well I’m for it in extreme cases but I’m also open-minded to hear more information about it. That tells me that people are starting to see it as a government program, a government entity that has not been working that has many flaws. We’ve seen innocent people be put to death and therefore people are starting to raise legitimate concerns about it.
Eddie Conway: Mansa?
Charles Hopkins: I noticed, and I want to talk about some of the bills that were introduced. I think I read the bill that was submitted in Utah. I’m looking at the language in the bill, and I want to know how instrumental are y’all in terms of crafting this language? More importantly, you interject in life without parole. But in this particular bill they had alternatives in addition to life without parole. So what are your views on the alternatives?
Demetrius Minor: So, in my role I do not write the bills. I do not sit with legislators and craft out language of the bill. We do have a separate team that is involved in my work. My work is simply to promote it amongst conservative audiences. So whether it’s in Utah, whether it’s in Ohio, whatever state it is in, I reach out to the constituents there, I reach out to the leaders, the policy makers, the advocates, those who have a feel for what’s going on on the ground, those who are involved in the grassroots process. And that’s how I go about my work. I’m not involved in the crafting of the bill.
Charles Hopkins:Let me follow up then, and stay right there in terms of the constituents. Eddie asked for the response from the policy makers. What kind of feedback are you getting from the people on the ground, the grassroots, the people that’s affected by it and ultimately conservative in terms of the criminal justice system? What kind of feedback are you getting when you’re going to these areas?
Demetrius Minor: Yeah. So conservatives in general believe that the criminal justice system is very flawed. The criminal justice system needs to be reformed, if not transformed. Conservatives in general want to see rehabilitation, want to see redemption, and want to see people having access to good education and able to be a part of the workforce. And if that’s going to happen, that means that we need to look at the criminal justice system and acknowledge that it’s ineffective the way that it is currently constructed.
So again, I want to say that the reception that I’m getting is very positive. It’s just a matter of moving from point A to moving to point B, getting the legislators to push the bill forward, to get committee hearings on it, to bring the bill to the floor. And when you’re talking about that process, that doesn’t happen overnight. But the conversations that I am having are very fruitful and very productive.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Well, just a final question. Is there anything our audience can do to support your effort or any place they need to contact?
Demetrius Minor: Absolutely. I’m glad you asked that question. I would encourage your audience to please go to www.conservativesconcerned.org. Please sign up. We send out monthly or biweekly newsletters giving people updates on the campaigns and our work nationwide. And then also they can add to the extended list of conservatives who have lended their voice and opposition to the death penalty. So if they want to go to conservativesconcerned.org there’s more information there on how they can be involved.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. And I will say this as a final thing. Their information is protected by your privacy policy and so they don’t have to worry about you selling their names to Starbucks. Just for instance.
Demetrius Minor: Correct.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Demetrius, thanks for giving us that overview and update. Thanks for joining us.
Demetrius Minor: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, guys.
Eddie Conway: And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.
Are Texas police laying the groundwork to thwart cop watchers by sending them to jail for simply using cellphone cameras to film them? This is the serious question raised by a series of charges that accuse a group of Texas cop watchers of engaging in organized crime. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis investigate the basis for the accusations and possible consequences for the First Amendment, YouTube activism, and the future of citizen auditing, and speak to one of the men facing decades in jail for filming police to understand just how far police will go to evade accountability.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
Closing prisons and reducing the incarcerated population should be a good thing, but when local economies become dependent on the prison industry it creates many perverse incentives for keeping our inhumane system of mass incarceration going. Residents of Susanville, California, are experiencing this firsthand after the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced the impending deactivation of the California Correctional Center. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, is joined by Nicole D. Porter to discuss the prison closure in Susanville and how expanding the prison-industrial complex is neither a just nor viable method for reviving local economies.
Nicole D. Porter is the Senior Director of Advocacy at The Sentencing Project, managing state and local advocacy efforts on sentencing reform, voting rights, and eliminating racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Her advocacy has supported criminal justice reforms in several states including Kentucky, Missouri, and California. Porter was named a “New Civil Rights Leader” by Essence Magazine for her work to eliminate mass incarceration.
A series of explosive investigative reports has revealed a crisis of police abuse in rural America. This week, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis held a live discussion about police overreach and the consequences faced by rural communities across the country, and took questions from viewers about what their investigations have uncovered.
Transcript
A transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Feb. 12, 2022. It is shared here with permission.
In June 1882, a Boston lawyer noticed a man named John Burns leaning against a lamppost in Beacon Hill. Burns was drunk, but seemingly harmless, when a Boston police officer approached him from behind and knocked him “prostrate into the street” with a club to the head. The particulars of the case were quickly lost in a tangle of competing narratives. Was Burns disorderly and resisting arrest, or were these fabrications to cover up yet another instance of indiscriminate police clubbing?
Stripes on coat sleeves are not armored vehicles, but when we place the training, and equipment of police in their historical context, the persistent militarized nature of American policing comes into focus. It’s not a 20th-century evolution in policing—it was there from the start.
News stories like these were standard fare in the late 19th century, but this particular instance prompted one writer at the Boston Globe to reflect on the material culture of the police. Alongside new vice laws, the Boston Police in 1882 acquired “handsome helmets” and “increased efficiency . . . by the introduction of stripes upon the coat sleeves.” The very notion of uniformed police in the 19th century often invited comparison to a standing army, which people from a broad cross section of American society commonly perceived as an affront to their democratic sentiments. At least in northern cities, police power in the 1880s was as contested as it was presumed, although the rhetoric of law and order would prevail in the coming decades.
This Boston Globe columnist continued that the police had been attending regular drills “in club exercise, superintended by the military member, familiarizing the men with the use of their weapons.” We know that military drills were common in this period, as in New York City where Commissioner Abram Duryée was “something of a fanatic with regard to the military nature of police work . . . fond of drilling the force to the point of exhaustion.” The militarism of early American policing was even clearer in the case of 18th-century slave patrols and urban city guards — the latter of which, Frederick Law Olmstead observed when visiting Charleston in 1860, deployed “police machinery as you never find in towns under free governments.”
In the wake of high-profile police killings and subsequent protests in the last decade, more Americans than ever before are asking when and how our police became so militarized. The prevailing narratives are unsatisfactory, usually identifying some recent turning point and obscuring the long arc of police militarism in the United States. To the extent that “the militarization of the police” indicates a fundamental change to the institution over time, the term is a misnomer. Sure enough, stripes on coat sleeves are not armored vehicles, but when we place the training, and equipment of police in their historical context, the persistent militarized nature of American policing comes into focus. It’s not a 20th-century evolution in policing—it was there from the start.
Riot Act
Sierra Pettengill’s new film Riotsville, USA, which premiered at Sundance last weekend, enriches our understanding of police militarism in the United States. The documentary is made up entirely of archival footage, supplemented by onscreen text and narration written by Tobi Haslett and voiced by Charlene Modeste. Riotsville centers on two fake towns constructed in 1967 on military bases in Virginia and Georgia, the purpose of which was to train military and police in riot response tactics and technologies. As told by the film, these sites were both material and symbolic indicators of the intensifying militarization of American policing in response to black rebellion in the 1960s.
There’s something unnervingly comedic about soldiers playing protesters, dressed in hippie costumes and wigs, chanting antiwar slogans—both disturbing and amusing.
Riotsville, USA is an impressive feat of archival recovery. Six years in the making, Pettengill and her team developed the film alongside the mainstreaming and expansion of the Movement for Black Lives. Their production collapses the 1960s into the 2010s, even as Pettengill maintains her historical focus, emphasizing both our failure to respond to the demands of those 1960s rebellions as well at the importance of revisiting archival material to understand why we failed.
Pettengill refrains from interrupting the archival material with excessive cutting, allowing footage—presumably recorded for training and posterity by the military—to run for extended periods, immersing the viewer in the social conflicts of the 1960s. The opening scene is an extended cut of fake protesters marching through the street of a fake town. Some critics have taken issue with the film’s lack of contextualization, but Riotsville’s power owes precisely to the strange and unsettling quality of the archive laid bare.
One need not be an expert in the history of this decade to appreciate the dystopian nature of fake riots tearing through fake towns, overseen from grandstands by military and law enforcement leaders. There’s something unnervingly comedic about soldiers playing protesters, dressed in hippie costumes and wigs, chanting antiwar slogans—both disturbing and amusing. One wonders what’s going through the soldier-actors’ heads. At one point, a Black soldier yells out the side of a bus after being fake-arrested, seeming to carry on the scene a bit too long as the voyeurs in the grandstands applaud. Is there something authentic in his performance of Black rebellion?
Throughout the film, archival media footage and narration remind us that the dramatizations enacted at Riotsville were technocratic responses to real protests. In reconstructing this moment, Pettengill is precise in her framing and language. The decision to term the 1960s uprisings as rebellions throughout the film is significant. Elizabeth Hinton writes that “riot” is a misnomer for understanding this period, robbing activists and common citizens of their political agency.
On the other hand, to refer to the hundreds of Black rebellions that occurred in the 1960s as “civil disturbances” or “unrest” reflects a liberal squeamishness for direct action. These uprisings involved violence and destruction, as have the uprisings of the 2010s. Eliding that fact does not bring us closer to justice and equality, it merely makes the political consciousness of the rebellions more palatable.
The Long Arc of Militarization
The narrative put forth by Riotsville hinges on the Kerner Commission, an 11-person committee appointed by President Johnson in 1967 and tasked with explaining what had happened, why it had happened, and what the government could do to prevent future uprisings. The commission is probably most famous for its conclusion that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” That prediction was no revelation for many Americans, but to have it stated so candidly by a presidential commission was still remarkable.
The decision of the Kerner Commission to comment on racial inequality so explicitly was not, however, unanimous. In an interview with Jelani Cobb last year, the only surviving member of the commission recalled that half of its members wanted to cite “intolerance or discrimination” instead of explicit racism as the root cause of racial inequality and the 1960s Black rebellions. That faction lost in a narrow 6-5 vote.
While neither of these commissions considered race in a meaningful way, both concluded with scathing indictments of police abuse—and nevertheless, both yielded ballooning police budgets for training and technocratic solutions instead of improved police accountability or solutions to poverty.
Riotsville’s narrator tells us that “A door swung open in the late ‘60s. And someone, something sprang up and slammed it shut.” True enough. The opportunity for dramatic change as recommended by the Kerner Commission certainly existed, an opportunity which promised a refocus on root causes and solutions to poverty and inequality rather than the so-called punitive turn that followed. If we widen the historical scope, however, it is clear that someone, something has always sprung up to prevent substantive change.
To truly understand what happened in the 1960s, we need to look further back, to Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Wickersham Commission and, further yet, the New York State Lexow Committee in 1894. While neither of these commissions considered race in a meaningful way, both concluded with scathing indictments of police abuse—and nevertheless, both yielded ballooning police budgets for training and technocratic solutions instead of improved police accountability or solutions to poverty. Commissions such as these have consistently served to fortify police power through expanded training, reform, and professionalization. Whether or not this has occurred by design is another question, but we cannot escape the fact that police have always been further militarized in the process.
Riotsville’s emphasis on the Kerner Commission inadvertently reinforces the idea that police militarization occurred in the aftermath of the Black rebellions, when in fact it is woven into the DNA of American policing and has been steadily fortified since the 19th century. Nonetheless, the film succeeds in telling the story of Kerner Commission’s ultimate legacy.
Some of its members pressed for increased funding for police, resulting in the only tangible outcome of the commission: the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Via the LEAA, the government opened a firehose of federal dollars to local police, which had actually begun earlier via the often conflated, but smaller scale, Law Enforcement Assistance Act in 1965. This marks an important moment that some historians refer to as the “punitive turn,” when the Lyndon Johnson administration turned more definitively away from solving poverty to waging a war on crime.
One of the key tools in this pivot, highlighted in Riotsville, was tear gas. While some considered the emphasis on tear gas a point of digression in the film, the technology is an essential moment for understanding the militarism of police in this period. As Stuart Schrader makes clear in Badges Without Borders, tear gas captures the technocratic approach to American policing that drew on imperial interventionism in order to address domestic challenges. In other words, it brought together militarism abroad and policing at home.
Pettengill demonstrates the point well, using military footage, scenes from Riotsville itself, and the unrestricted use of tear gas to pacify American neighborhoods. In some of the film’s most convincing and unsettling moments, we see tear gas streaming from helicopters or from the end of an officer’s cannon walking down an empty street, blanketing the front porches of suburban communities.
The More Things Change
The key to understanding the trajectory of American policing is to avoid relying on the idea of turning points, even if the so-called “punitive turn” was an important historical moment.
Riotsville is a valuable and meaningful contribution to our understanding of policing in response to the 1960s rebellions, when the militarization of the police definitively expanded and took on new form. Still, abrupt turning points belie the fundamental nature of policing. Would policing be better today if not for the LEAA and the “punitive turn?” Probably, but policing reform has never meant to fundamentally change the police, and more often it has expanded budgets or given them fancier tools.
Likewise, American resistance to policing has always existed, despite the widespread impression that we’ve recently abandoned a tradition of praising law enforcement.
Slave patrols in the 18th century operated as militia forces, and their urban equivalents in Charleston roamed in companies of 30 mounted men, “headed by fife and drum.” Police in Boston and New York used military rankings to organize their departments from the outset. Just after the Civil War, the New Orleans Metropolitan Police deployed Gatling guns and canons against protesters (granted they did so in the name of Reconstruction). During WWI, the New York Police Department donned military uniforms and marched with mounted machine guns down Fifth Avenue.
When we consider the long history of policing the United States, it would be wise to heed the reflection of historian Mark Haller, who wrote that “In more than a century from the Civil War to the present, city police have undergone little change in organization or function. Those changes that have occurred have resulted primarily from technology.” It is easy to claim that police have become more militarized, but the reality is that they have always been militaristic in their tools and internal structure. The changes we see reflect evolution in the technology and tactics of force more than evolution of the police.
Likewise, American resistance to policing has always existed, despite the widespread impression that we’ve recently abandoned a tradition of praising law enforcement. We are rightly disturbed by Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) and full body armor in 2022—just as Americans were disturbed by stripes on blue uniforms in 1882. Police technology constantly changes, but the tendency toward militarization and the public’s discontent have stayed much the same.
Like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Rachael Rollins in Boston, and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Manhattan’s new District Attorney Alvin Bragg was elected after campaigning to bring a more progressive approach to the criminal justice system; he also pledged to reduce the population of people held pre-trial on the infamous Rikers Island jail complex. After two months in office, however, supporters are worried that Bragg’s progressive messaging is already giving way to the same brutal system they elected him to change. TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Olayemi Olurin about Bragg’s first months in office, the ongoing crisis at Rikers, and how “progressive” a District Attorney can be in a broken system designed to protect the wealthy and criminalize the poor.
Olayemi Olurin is a public defender and staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society and an analyst at the Law & Crime Network.
Eric Lurry’s death was a mystery to his family until a police whistleblower leaked damning evidence implicating the Joliet, Illinois, police department. Now Sgt. Javier Esqueda, who came forward with the video evidence, is facing a possible 20-year prison sentence for exposing his fellow police officers. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, we examine the mechanics of a police coverup and the ramifications of holding police accountable, and ask Sgt. Esqueda what he witnessed that made him risk his career and his freedom by becoming a whistleblower.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis 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.
Today we will do so by showing you a video of police brutality that would’ve remained secret had not someone behind the blue wall of silence decided to make it public. It is a troubling tale of police brutality caught on camera that would never have seen the light of day had the man, that we will talk to later, not risked his career and freedom to leak it.
But before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com and please like, share and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course, you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, please hit the Patreon donate link pin below in the comments, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. Okay. Now we’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, as many of you who have watched the show know, there is an underlying purpose behind what we do. We hope that by reporting on actual police malfeasance and revealing the underlying imperatives which drive it, eventually the institution of policing can be reformed. But the purpose comes with a caveat. That’s because, as we said from the onset, the system that enables bad policing can sometimes be worse than the behavior itself. In other words, the power and the imperative of policing ensconced in a system of rampant inequality flourishes because it has become systemic and therefore harder to expose.
There is no better example of this idea than the video we are showing to you right now. It is a video of a man who died in police custody, but whose death could have been prevented. It’s a stark example of how policing is ill-equipped to deal with the social ills that proliferate in this country, but well-suited to cover up their misdeeds when they occur. If you do not wish to see this police violence, please feel free to forward through the first few minutes.
The video you are seeing now shows Joliet, Illinois resident Eric Lurry in the back of a police car suffering from an apparent overdose. Police had placed Mr. Lurry in the backseat after charging him with drug possession. But after he was handcuffed and placed in the police vehicle, it became increasingly clear that Mr. Lurry was facing a medical crisis, which is the point of the show today. Because as you can see, instead of getting medical attention for him, the officers on the scene appear to make things worse. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Officer: Hey, wake up. Open your mouth. Open your mouth. Open your mouth. Open your mouth. Open your mouth.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: For reasons yet to be explained, police appear to cut off Mr. Lurry’s ability to breathe for a minute and 38 seconds and only worsen the medical crisis he was facing with their inexplicable actions. Let’s watch.
[Video clip plays. No dialogue]
Taya Graham: As it becomes even more apparent that Mr. Lurry’s condition is getting worse, cops double down, apparently more concerned about the evidence in his mouth than the condition of his body. But while you’re watching this video, I’m going to have someone explain what we’re seeing who might surprise you. He’s not an advocate or a lawyer or a family member, but rather a police officer who, when he saw this in-car camera footage, did something extraordinary. He leaked it to the public, even though the department wanted to keep it secret.
His name is Javier Esqueda, and he is a veteran of the Joliet, Illinois, police department. He was also a training supervisor, a cop responsible for teaching other officers how to follow the law. But when he saw this video he was so shocked by the conduct of the officers involved that he did something that has had repercussions for his life that are hard to fathom. Before we get into what happened to him, let’s let the Sergeant describe what we’re seeing.
Javier Esqueda: [talking over video] The officers are assisting the drug unit on an arrest. Apparently they claim that Lurry struggled with them and they picked him up, put him in the squad. At that time, they were already saying that they thought he had drugs in his mouth, and that was 10 minutes from the station. A Sergeant comes on and says to them, don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it when we get to the station.
Our policy, when they know that immediately you are supposed to render aid. They should have called for an ambulance or did something. Instead, they transported him, drove him about five to 10 minutes to the station on the East side.
As you’re watching the video, you see Eric slumped over. He’s facing that way – You remember, the camera’s reversed. So he’s chewing on something. The officers acknowledge, look, he’s chewing on something, Still do nothing. Get him to the station. The officer goes back there. There the recruiter officers then say, let’s not do this. Come on, and they start giving him a chest rub. He goes and tells the supervisor of the Drug Unit, which is Doug May, that, hey, it looks like he’s not responsive. Sergeant May comes around on the other side, says, hey, hey, and he winds up, slapping Eric Lurry, and says, hey, wake up, bitch! At the same time, goes for his throat, looks up at the camera. And as he looks up at the camera, the audio gets cut out. He goes for Lurry’s nose and he’s holding his nose.
Well, if you got something in your throat, what’s going to happen if I cut off your airway? You’re either going to try to open your mouth or you’re going to suck in what’s in your throat. What’s obvious, he doesn’t open his mouth because whatever was in his mouth is now down his throat. A minute and 38 seconds, you see him go incoherent. Officer comes in, which is a recruit at the time, which is McCue, and sticks a dirty baton in his mouth, an ASP, and they’re sweeping his mouth and all the baggies or whatever it is is dropping out.
Now, there’s no way that they knew it was fentanyl. It wasn’t tested. It could have been crack cocaine, heroin. They right away said it was fentanyl. There’s no way. They’re assuming what the drug was in his mouth. The baggies drop out, and the next thing you know you see the glove reach in and this huge long baggie comes out. But where do you think that was at? In his mouth or down his esophagus?
Taya Graham: Tragically, Mr. Lurry died, but that’s not where the story ends because, not surprisingly, the leak was apparently more troubling for the department than what occurred on the video itself. That’s because once the video was made public by him, action against the sergeant was swift and vengeful. He was charged with multiple felonies of official misconduct and the police union turned on him even while publicly and vocally supporting the officers seen abusing Mr. Lurry. But it gets worse, much worse. That’s because elected officials didn’t speak up either. The people put into office to control or otherwise manage the police kept silent. And so, the city of Joliet stood by as an important whistleblower was turned into a potential felon.
That’s right. They charged Sergeant Esqueda with four counts, felony counts, of official misconduct. In fact, they twisted the law so that what would’ve been administrative violations ended up being indictments by a grand jury, which threatened to put him behind bars for 20 years. And for what, you ask? Just the fact that he leaked a video that shows how horrifyingly cruel American policing can be. That’s because not only does Sergeant Esqueda face criminal charges, but the police union, the institution that generally runs to the aid of cops, literally abandoned him. That’s right. Sergeant Esqueda was discarded by the very power structure which we have cited again and again as the primary instigator of problematic American policing.
Police commanders, politicians didn’t reward Sergeant Esqueda for ensuring the circumstances surrounding Mr. Lurry’s death would not remain secret and that he gave the Lurry family a chance at closure. Instead, they condemned him and they indicted him. So now we can see in all its ugly clarity how American policing continues to perpetuate bad behavior and destructive policies.
Now, we are going to hear more from Sergeant Esqueda later, but before we do, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis who has been delving into the details of this case. Stephen, thank you for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: Stephen, what are the indictments for, specifically? What are the charges and how many years is he facing?
Stephen Janis: Well, it’s a four-count indictment that goes from two to five years. They’re charges of official misconduct, which is part of the Illinois Criminal Code. They’re pretty much specifically related to conduct in office. If you’re like a police officer or a politician or someone who holds an official office, it’s related to that.
Taya Graham: Stephen, you have been reaching out not just to the police department, but the political leaders in Joliet and asking them about the case. What did you find out?
Stephen Janis: Well, I specifically reached out to the prosecutor’s office who did send me the indictments, but my question was very specific. If you look at the Illinois Criminal Code, it says that police officers can be charged with misconduct in office for leaking or revealing information pertaining to a criminal case. I asked the question, what was he doing that was related to a criminal case? Was this related to criminal charges pending against the officers who had led to the death of Mr. Lurry? I have not heard back, but it’s a very interesting question because if you look at the Criminal Code, it’s very specific that it has to do with releasing information pertaining to a criminal investigation, and that’s clearly not the case here.
Taya Graham: We did a documentary about a Police Chief in Pocomoke City who actually instituted community policing, but when he was fired and later prosecuted, the same police unions abandoned him. Do you think these two cases have anything in common?
Stephen Janis: Absolutely. It shows that, I think, one of the scariest things about law enforcement in this country is that unlike other types of entities or political organizations, they have the tools of criminality to retaliate against people that speak out against them or buck against their business. I think in the case of both Kelvin Sewell in Pocomoke City and in this case, you have officers who have revealed damning information or fought back against the economy of policing, and policing has used the tools of criminality to retaliate. It’s terrifying. It’s not like if you or I have a business and someone charges less for pizza down the street I can go arrest them and steal their equipment, but that’s essentially what police can do. They’ve robbed them of their careers, their livelihoods, and they’ve criminalized them. The tools that police have, and white police, have to be held accountable at a different level than other agencies, institutions, or corporations. It’s terrifying.
Taya Graham: Now we are joined by Sergeant Javier Esqueda who will discuss how this entire ordeal has affected his life. Javier, thank you for joining me.
Javier Esqueda: Like I said, I just wanted to make sure that the story gets out and that they don’t forget Eric Lurry. It seems like through the shuffle of everything, they’re making it about me and they’re forgetting about what they did to him.
Taya Graham: When did you know that you had to release this video? When did you make this decision?
Javier Esqueda: May 30, I’m at the station. I’m doing my FTO work in the watch commanders office where sergeants and lieutenants hang out to do their stuff, read reports and stuff like that. I decide I’m going to log in and do my field training work. As I’m logging in to the computer like normal, I decide I’m going to watch videos and I’m going to watch that video finally. I click on it, go to watch it. I fast-forward it to the back seat of the squad because that’s what I was told was disturbing. I watched it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t pay attention to who the recruit was, the officer sticking the ASP in the mouth, because I was too fixated on what was going on. So behind me – Say I’m on the computer with you right now – Behind me is my Lieutenant at time, which is Lieutenant Malec.
She’s looking over my shoulder and she says to me, I’ve never seen the video, but I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never seen it. She could hear what was going on and I looked at her. I said, I can’t believe this. That day I was very disturbed by it, and I didn’t know what to do. I’m telling myself, this is wrong. How come I haven’t heard of any internal being done on the officers involved? Something’s wrong here. So I wait on it. I wait on it. I talk to several officers. Hey, have you guys heard about this video? Yeah, I tell them it was disturbing for me. It was disturbing. I saw it. Other people had already seen it. Other people at the department. However, the logs don’t show anybody else watching the video except for me. And I’ll explain that.
You fast forward to June 10. That’s the second time I watched the video. I go in my car, go home. I then go to my squad car and I get my computer out of my squad car. Got to unlock it with the key. I go in the house and I start. I watched the video from beginning to end and I realize, wow, it is my recruit, McCue, who had the ASP in his mouth. No wonder that Sergeant Blackburn was telling me I needed to watch this video. I was like, wow, that is just bad. I started crying. I said, I can’t believe this.
When I heard again that the video got cut out, I knew right away there was some type of tampering. I copied the video. Then at that time, June 12, two days later, I go back to work. I’m in the watch commanders office, a little after eight in the morning, and I’m doing FTO work, signing in this new stuff. I get called in by a captain saying, hey, the other captain wants to see you, who’s the captain in charge of the field training program.
I walk in. I say, hey captain, what’s going on? He said, hey, I wanted to let you know that Deputy Chief Rosado wants an interoffice memorandum in reference to why you watched a flagged video. I’m like, flagged? Him being my superior officer, the captain in charge of the FTO program, I go back and I say, hey, Captain Larson, I need to talk to you about what I saw in this video. It’s very disturbing. You need to close the door. He says, oh no, stop right there. Whatever you do, don’t tell me anything. Write your interoffice memorandum, make it short and brief and to the point. I said, Captain, you’re my superior officer. I need to tell you what’s on that video. It’s very disturbing. It involves my recruit and his FTO. Shut the F up right now. Don’t say anything else, write your to-from again, make it short and brief. I walk over to the computer that I was sitting at originally doing my FTO work. I type up a short interoffice memorandum and give it to him.
Then I’m contemplating on what I’m going to do. Remember I got a copy of the video now. I copied the video because it looked like there was something very disturbing, like it was a cover up. To preserve the evidence because it looked like it was being tampered with. So I was right in what I said that they were trying to tamper with the video.
Taya Graham: What were the repercussions? I mean, did you have any idea how bad the retaliation might be?
Javier Esqueda: I knew what was going to happen to me. I knew that if I did the right thing, they were going to come back and try to do horrible things to me. I prayed for so long as to what I was going to do. I needed the strength to do this.
Taya Graham: Oh, okay. Well, you also share with me a personal story about you standing in a grocery line and having a chance encounter with a little boy that was pivotal?
Javier Esqueda: As I’m standing in line, there’s a young woman behind me. The young woman taps me on the back. She says, hey officer, my son wants to say something to you. I said, oh, I’m sorry ma’am, I thought I was a little girl because of the dreads. We all had masks on so I couldn’t tell. I said, hey little man. I get down on one and I say, hey, little man, what’s going on? Well, how could I help you? And he says to me, he reaches over in my ear and he whispers, thank you.
When that happened, I knew what I had to do. That’s why I had to tell the story. I look up at his mother and I say, ma’am, do you mind if I hug him? You don’t know what you guys did for me today. I hugged him and I said, ma’am you and your son are my angels. I know what I have to do. I said, you guys don’t know what you did for me today, but you guys have been my angels today. I know what I have to do. I said, I’m here for people like you, the people of Joliet I swore to protect. If you only knew what I’ve been going through. So I pay for my Combos. I go and sit in the squad what I normally do and I pray to God, you know what, God? I know it’s going to be hard, but I have to do this.
Taya Graham: Exactly what kind of charges are you facing? I know you’re facing four counts of misconduct in office. I hate to ask, but how much time in prison are you looking at?
Javier Esqueda: They charge me with four counts of official misconduct, and it has to do with, they claim I tampered with the computer to watch this video that was locked. They claim the video was locked.
Taya Graham: Do you have any regrets about coming forward?
Javier Esqueda: I thought this was going to be a good thing to do the right thing. And don’t get me wrong. If I knew then what I know now, would I have changed anything? Nope. I’d have still done it.
Taya Graham: What do you think this says to the public about how difficult it is to hold police accountable when a cop does the right thing? I’ve seen this happen to other whistleblower cops. They get kicked off the force. They get ostracized. They face criminal charges, face legal fees, and the police union abandons them. I mean, what does this tell you about holding police accountable?
Javier Esqueda: Through all this, it was hard of course, but knowing what they were going to do, everything that happened, how it was treated, they did it for a reason. They wanted to show other officers in our department this is what happens to you if you cross that line. Yes, it’s honest. Yes, it’s integrity. But guess what? We’re not going to make it that way either. We’re going to make our own narrative.
Taya Graham: Now, the story of a police officer whose career is in ruins and faces 20 years of prison time over revealing a startling case of apparent police misconduct is more revealing than it seems to be on the surface. I mean, we all remember the old phrase “don’t shoot the messenger.” Well, in this case, they’re actually trying to lock him in the cage so the world never hears from him again.
But what does it say about policing as an institution if its very essence is inimical to transparency? I mean, what do we think about a form of governance that when wrongdoing is exposed, actually turns on the person who brought it to light in the first place? Well, I think there’s a lot to learn from this case.
What do I mean? Well, as I’ve discussed on this show before, Stephen and I actually spent six years documenting a very similar case of retaliation against a police officer. His name is Kelvin Sewell and he was the first Black police chief of a small town on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore called Pocomoke. Sewell was a former Baltimore City homicide detective who left his job and took over the department of a town of roughly 4,500 residents in 2011. But when he got there, he did something very different from the way the cops usually approach policing.
He ordered his officers to get out of their cars and walk and talk to the community. But that wasn’t all. Because he also tried to not just arrest people, but to help them. In other words, he worked to assist troubled kids by helping them apply for college. He tried to defuse the war on drugs by pushing back against a drug task force that constantly raided the town and hauled people off to jail for minor drug infractions. He tried to provide opportunity for a community that had been previously abandoned by the powers that be. I mean, Stephen and I spent days driving around the town’s poorest neighborhoods. And like many similarly situated communities in the US, the residents there told us they were accustomed to two things from the government: arrests and social neglect.
Perhaps that’s why the law enforcement community pushed back. Because in 2015, Sewell was fired without explanation and then state investigators launched a broad investigation into every facet of Sewell’s tenure in Pocomoke. They investigated his sex life and rumors that he got a drug dealer pregnant, which weren’t true. They put 24-hour surveillance on his home. They went over each and every ticket he issued. They interviewed dozens of people, turning over every rock they could, and still they found nothing. Except for one case: an accident where a driver hit two parked cars and drove three blocks home before calling the police. That’s the egregious case state investigators used to charge Sewell and destroy him. For not charging the driver, who they claimed Sewell knew from a previous membership of a Mason’s chapter, but evidence revealed he had no relationship with.
Now, the reason I bring up this case is because what I really think is going on here was not Sewell’s decision to forgo charges against the driver. I mean, think about it. Do we really want police to charge every single person they encounter? Do we want cops to go out and enforce laws to the letter to the point that everyone potentially commits a crime every day? At least, we don’t. But I think the rule Sewell really broke was an unspoken code of law enforcement that helping people is simply bad for business. I think that’s why I believe that the trial of Kelvin Sewell was not about not charging a man for running into a parked car. No, I think Sewell’s original sin was fighting back against the law enforcement-industrial complex by refusing to make poor people criminals.
So what am I trying to say here? One of the things we learned when we investigated the case was that the drug task force that had been going into Pocomoke and arresting people for minor drug violations were also some of the highest paid cops in the county. They were the typical plain clothes unit that we saw throughout the country, notorious for disrupting communities and making bad arrests. In fact, they were so notorious that a former member of the drug task force working in the same area actually told us they were so corrupt they would do financial workups on people before they raided their homes. Let’s listen.
[AUDIO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker: A lot of times we were deciding upon what car to go after or what target to go after, what person to go after, we were making that decision upon the value of their assets. We do financial workups on people. Now, it wasn’t always about how much dope you’re bringing into the county.
[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Which is why Sewell’s case has so many similarities to the story we just reported on. When you push back against the business and power of law enforcement, police use the tools of criminality not to just silence you, but to destroy you. No institution has as much power in America to retaliate in ways that are as thoroughly devastating to the person they are focused on. No other government agency can put you in a cage or take your assets or force you to hire a lawyer. No other institution can literally comb through your life and find anything or any pretext to put you behind bars or destroy your career. That’s why law enforcement often seems so out of control in this country, because the tools they have to silence all of us are simply too powerful to be in the hands of any individual without vigilant accountability.
That’s why on the show we spend so much time investigating the mechanisms and the processes that keep policing both insular and, ironically, above the law. That’s why we ignore law enforcement rhetoric and investigate like we did in the case of Cody Cecil, who was arrested in the small town of Milton, West Virginia, a city where police wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars of tickets for a town of just 2,500 people. That’s why we took six years to do a documentary on what happened to Sewell in a film called The Friendliest Town – Which, incidentally, you can watch for free by clicking on the links pin in the comment section below. Not just because we want to document the legal travails of a police chief in a small Eastern shore town, but because of what it says about the project of policing as a whole, how it is in some ways antithetical to a democracy.
I mean, how can policing and our free republic coexist if the police who have done wrong can fight back with the devastating tools of incarceration and financial ruin? What public institution can be both productive and responsive to the community if they can literally rob the political agency of the people they purport to serve? That’s the problem we see in both these cases and that’s why it’s so critical to examine the power and the politics of policing in-depth. Because if we don’t, the story of a whistleblower cop being silenced is just the beginning of how a badge becomes a shield from the truth and a license to punish those who least deserve it.
I want to thank our guest Sergeant Esqueda for his time and for coming forward with the truth about Eric Lurry’s death. Thank you so much, Javier. 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: I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And I want to give a very special thank you to our Patreons. We really do appreciate you. I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. Of course, you can always message me directly at @tayasbaltimore on Twitter and Facebook. And please like and comment. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. We do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below if you feel inspired to donate. We do not 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.
The Baltimore Police Department’s decades of gun seizures have not reduced violent crimes such as nonfatal shootings and murders. Through public information requests, Battleground Baltimore obtained the police department’s gun seizure numbers and other related police and crime data between 1990-2021—a time period of 31 years in which the city surpassed 300 homicides per year 17 times.
A close look at the data reveals what more and more people working in the criminal legal system across the country have argued: Seizing “illegal” guns does not reduce violent crime, although gun seizures and gun possession arrests remain metrics frequently cited by police (and praised as a prime example of “proactive policing”).
Not only are gun seizures not reducing crime, the tactic destabilizes Black communities where “gun interdiction” is prioritized and almost exclusively enforced.
“The current intense focus on illegal gun possession without a license is having no effect on the gun violence crisis,”Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner wrote in a report released in December that looked at 2,000 shootings.
Comparing Baltimore City numbers from 2019, the year with the most homicides over the past 30 years, with 2011, the year with the least murders during the same time period, shows Krasner’s argument is true in Baltimore, too.
In 2019 in Baltimore City, there were 348 murders, 2,203 gun seizures, and 1,161 weapons possession arrests. In 2011, there were 196 murders, 2,178 gun seizures, and 1,224 weapons possession arrests.
The graphs below show, year-to-year, the number of gun seizures and weapons possession arrests and the number of murders and nonfatal shootings (only available since 2000).
Readers should note that the Y-axis for each graph above is significantly different, but splitting the data across two graphs makes the year-to-year fluctuations more apparent. Battleground Baltimore has also provided a graph at the bottom of this article that puts all four of these parameters on the same graph.
Additionally, numbers for nonfatal shootings are not available before 2000. According to the Baltimore Police Department, nonfatal shootings before that year were categorized as “aggravated assault” and fell in with a number of other violent crimes. As a result, the exact number of nonfatal shootings—a core metric of police violence reduction—is not easily accessible. The general trend since 2000, however, has been that the number of nonfatal shootings at least doubles the number of murders.
Gun seizing is a Sisyphean task
It is not possible to seize enough guns to counter the number of guns currently out there, let alone respond to new legal or “illegal” guns introduced into the world. In 2021, Americans purchased nearly 19 million guns.
A year after Baltimore City’s GTTF was federally indicted, and amid city and state-level conversations about police reform and ending plainclothes policing, gun seizures actually increased.
Former Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld told me in 2018 that he began to realize that seizing guns was a bit like fighting the drug war. It felt “endless,” he explained.
“In Baltimore, at the peak of when we were seizing guns—when we were really effective going after guns and trying to get guns off the street—Baltimore PD would take in about 2,500 to 3,000 guns,” Bealefeld said. “Every year in the state of Maryland—every year—30,000 brand-new guns were being sold. We would seize 4,000 and high-five and claim victory and have photographs. But we can’t even keep up with the flow they sold that year.”
Bealefeld was commissioner from the middle of 2007 to about the middle of 2012, a period in which Baltimore City famously reduced arrests while also reducing homicides. In 2006, Baltimore Police made 90,283 arrests and the city endured 276 homicides. In 2011, Bealefeld’s last full year as commissioner, Baltimore Police arrested 60,009 people and there were 196 homicides, the lowest the city has seen since 1977 when there were 171 homicides.
Gun seizures and weapons possession arrests also dropped during this 2007-2012 “Bealefeld era.” In 2006, there were 3,055 seizures and 1,348 weapon possession arrests. In 2011, there were 2,178 seizures and 1,244 weapon possession arrests.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has also questioned the efficacy of focusing on gun possession. “We need to recognize that not every person charged with possessing an illegal gun in New York City is a driver of violence,” Bragg wrote on his campaign website. “My dad had an illegal gun not because he liked guns or because he was ‘dangerous’; he had a gun because of crime in the neighborhood. This was not an idle notion.”
Daniel Carlin-Weber, a Baltimore-based firearms instructor and gun rights advocate who is white, told Battleground Baltimore “that Black citizens have the laws disproportionately enforced” against them when it comes to gun possession.
“Maryland is continuing to effectively eliminate the Second Amendment for whole classes of people who deserve to be able to exercise it like anyone else,” he said.
During a State Senate hearing on “ghost guns” this week, State Senator Will Smith noted that he is “struggling mightily” with navigating additional gun laws and increased penalties for possession because this increases already racially disproportionate policing.
“A lot of the laws we’d put into place for gun safety would disparately impact Black and Brown communities,” Smith said. “Some of the legislation we’ve got before us puts more Black and Brown young men essentially into jail.”
Gun seizing cops create chaos
Not only are gun seizures not reducing crime, the tactic destabilizes Black communities where “gun interdiction” is prioritized and almost exclusively enforced.
Data obtained by Battleground Baltimore shows that since 1990, the annual homicide clearance rate has significantly declined. In 1990, the clearance rate was 75.7%. In 2021, it was 42%.
Baltimore City has seen some of the worst of what gun policing has to offer. The Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a plainclothes investigative unit formed in 2007 specifically to go after the so-called “bad guys with guns,” was federally indicted in 2017 for criminal conspiracy. Publicly, the unit was praised for its gun seizure numbers (very few of which stood up to enough scrutiny to take to trial). In reality, the task force was using its gun-seizing mission to terrorize citizens, often illegally stopping people and then robbing them.
In 2016, the last full year GTTF was active, there were 2,124 gun seizures. In 2017 (GTTF was indicted in March 2017) there were 1,917 gun seizures. A year after Baltimore City’s GTTF was federally indicted, and amid city and state-level conversations about police reform and ending plainclothes policing, gun seizures actually increased.
In 2018, the number of gun seizures nearly doubled at 3,911.
The behavior of Baltimore’s gun unit was extreme, but corruption among so-called “hard-charging” gun units is common. Last year, a former Metropolitan Police Department commander reached out to me because of the behavior they had seen within the Gun Recovery Unit, or “GRU,” in Washington, DC.
“Leadership focuses on how many guns GRU recovers and if an arrest is made with the recovery,” the former commander told me. “There is very little, if any, review of how the gun was recovered or how the arrest was made.”
Following George Floyd’s murder and nationwide demands for police accountability, New York City announced it would be disbanding its so-called “Anti-Crime” units, which operate similar to gun units in Baltimore and DC.
“The Anti-Crime units’ aggressive mentality seeded resentment. Frequent car stops and daily frisks in Black and Latino neighborhoods bred anger over a perceived disregard for residents’ constitutional rights,” George Joseph and Gabriel Sandoval wrote. “Because of the combative nature of their assignments, Anti-Crime and other plainclothes officers generated numerous civilian complaints and were at the center of a disproportionate number of fatal police shootings.”
As Fordham University Law Professor John Pfaff noted in Slate this week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams “promises to revive the NYPD’s undercover ‘anti-crime units’—disbanded in 2020 amid concerns about unconstitutional stops and excessive violence—and rechristen them ‘Neighborhood Safety Teams,’ deploying 400 to 500 officers on the streets to focus on ‘gun removals.’”
More broadly, Pfaff’s article is about the Philadelphia shootings report and how Krasner’s commentary and data analysis counters Adam’s much-ballyhooed tough-on-crime plan.
“Gun violence is an immediate concern,” Pfaff wrote. “But much of the data provided by the Philadelphia report…caution[s] that a broad-brush effort to stop the flow of guns may accomplish little on its own terms, and may even exacerbate some of the underlying causes of violence.”
Baltimore Police’s plummeting clearance rate
Locally, the most vocal critics of this gun-grabbing, statistics-driven strategy have been gun rights advocates, such Maryland Shall Issue. In testimony provided to legislators earlier this month, Maryland Shall Issue cited gun seizing’s inability to reduce violence as reason for opposing laws that would increase penalties for possessing a “ghost gun.”
“There is no correlation (much less cause and effect) between guns seized and violent crime. A more relevant statistic is the clearance rate for serious crimes,” Maryland Shall Issue’s statement reads. “BPD’s arrest clearance rate for murder in 2020 was a merely 28.7% and only 44.9% in 2011. By comparison, the nationwide clearance rate for murder is 54.4%. Baltimore’s clearance rate for homicides is plainly abysmal, a reality that does not go unnoticed by violent criminals and law-abiding citizens alike.”
Data obtained by Battleground Baltimore shows that since 1990, the annual homicide clearance rate has significantly declined. In 1990, the clearance rate was 75.7%. In 2021, it was 42%. Arrests for murders have also plummeted. In 1990, there were 347 arrests for murder. In 2020, there were 102 (Baltimore Police did not provide Battleground Baltimore with 2021’s number).
Krasner has argued that going after gun possession “distracts from successfully investigating shootings” and gets in the way of actually reducing violence through solving cases.
Consider the machinations police in Baltimore are willing to go through to seize just one gun. In a high-profile 2017 arrest, Baltimore Police Officer David Burch searched a Black man named Rasherd Lewis inside of a convenience store because, according to Burch, he had a tip that Lewis had a gun on him. Burch, who said he discovered where Lewis was via Citiwatch surveillance, approached Lewis, claimed he smelled cannabis on him, and used the cannabis smell to search him, where he found a handgun.
Additionally, the police’s inability to reduce violence no matter the number of guns seized puts people at risk, and that means they are more apt to obtain a gun for protection—“illegally,” if they must.
“Most [at-risk youth] possessed or used guns out of a generalized fear of being victimized or a specific fear of retaliation. A history of violence victimization also informed the decision to carry a firearm,” the National Institute For Justice wrote last year. “Many also reportedly felt a pervasive fear of the state, particularly law enforcement.”
Baltimore City Police Department Commissioner Michael Harrison has frequently focused on gun seizures. Following a series of shootings around Memorial Day 2021, Harrison spoke to local television affiliate Fox45 and said that crime in Baltimore is the way it is because there is “a lack of consequences for carrying guns.”
Harrison pretty much said the same thing in 2019 after a burst of troubling shootings around Memorial Day. Then, he promised that police would be “aggressive” about going after guns.
Recently, Mayor Brandon Scott bemoaned an especially deadly January, with 36 homicides and 49 nonfatal shootings, but stressed that police were working on it. There were 111 “gun arrests” in January, he boasted.
One of the reasons for seizing guns is not only to get them “off the street” but to use them as evidence and trace them to other crimes. But last week, when Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison was asked how often guns that are seized are traced back to crimes, he said he did not know.
“I don’t have those statistics at my disposal at this moment,” Harrison said.
Pre-release and minimum security facilities connect incarcerated individuals to essential resources for re-entering society and to opportunities for work release, special leave, compassionate leave, and family leave. In the state of Maryland, there are nine separate pre-release and minimum security facilities for men; for women, there are zero. “At the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (MCI-W) in Jessup, Maryland,” as noted by the grassroots nonprofit Out for Justice, “as many as 1 in 10 women have achieved pre-release status. However, as many as 30% of the women on pre-release status have not been assigned to a work opportunity.”
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Eddie Conway and Charles Hopkins (Mansa Musa) speak with Nicole Hanson-Mundell, executive director of Out For Justice, about the Maryland Gender-Responsive Prerelease Act and the fight to add the construction of a standalone, community-based prerelease facility for women to the Department of Public and Correctional Service budget during their hearing on Feb. 17, 2022.
When a small town police department came under fire for a series of questionable arrests, PAR dug deeper into the finances of Milton, West Virginia. What we uncovered reveals how economic inequality fuels bad policing, and how prioritization of law enforcement over other communal needs is often at the root of bad public policy.
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 do so by digging deeper behind the scenes of a town and its police department which has been at the center of several controversial arrests caught on video. We are following up because after we published our stories we received multiple calls and complaints about the Milton Police Department and the city itself. And what we uncovered illustrates exactly what we’re talking about when we promise to examine the system that makes bad policing possible.
But before I get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, and we might be able to investigate for you. And 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 the PAR family. Okay, we’ve gotten that out of the way.
Now, as you may recall, in our last show we showed you this video, the arrest of Caleb Dial by a Milton, West Virginia, police officer. As we revealed on the show, the report the officer filed depicted a completely different version of events than what was captured by a Ring camera outside the home where Caleb was arrested. In fact, the difference between what happened and the report was so stunning we felt compelled to dig deeper into the town of Milton and what is going on with policing over there. But before I get to that, I want to review once again the disturbing video that shows how the police officer conjured a completely different set of facts surrounding the arrest of Caleb than what was caught on camera.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer: [inaudible] Turn around for me. [inaudible] officer safe. Okay?
Caleb Dial: Yeah, that’s fine.
Police Officer: You’re not under arrest.
Caleb Dial: I know.
Police Officer: You understand [inaudible].
Caleb Dial: I understand.
Police Officer: What’s going on?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: “I observed the defendant struggling to stand. As I began to speak with the defendant, he became very agitated and kept on raising his voice at me. I asked him several times to calm down and then decided to detain him for officer safety.”
But since we aired this video, we have been overwhelmed by calls and emails from people who say they have had similar experiences with the Milton police. In fact, we received so many complaints we felt like we had to revisit this town once again and try to understand what’s going on there. We wanted to dig deeper, not just into a small West Virginia town, but how rural policing works in tandem with the government to extract wealth from those who can least afford it.
But before I get into those details, I want to update you on the first story that brought Milton police to our attention. It involves a young man named Cody Cecil. He was parked in a Milton, West Virginia, campground when police raided his home without showing a warrant. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Cody Cecil: I need a warrant.
Officer: I know what you need.
Cody Cecil: See what I’m saying? Why isn’t that my Constitutional right?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Cody was arrested and is now facing five charges, among them possession with intent to distribute and transporting drugs across state lines. All because he had eight immature Delta-8 hemp plants in his RV. Cody was initially given a $100,000 bail. But after we started making phone calls and sending emails, it was mysteriously reduced to $20,000. And that’s when a friend of Cody’s and one of our viewers decided to go to West Virginia and bail him out. It was a harrowing experience, which he recounted to us via Zoom from West Virginia. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Christopher Shellhammer:The first obstacle was being sent to the wrong offices by security at the front. After we were finally directed to the proper office and handed them the bail order that we were working with, they noticed that the date, the return date for this order had already passed because he had a hearing a few days ago. So without changing the return date on that bail order, they could not allow me to post the bail.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Cody was eventually released. And we’ll be talking to him later for the very first time since he was let go. But of course Cody’s ordeal is just the beginning of the story, not the end. Because as I said, after we published stories on the arrest of both Cody and Caleb, the complaints about Milton were overwhelming. Every day we receive new comments and concerns from viewers about what’s going on in the small West Virginia town. And before I get into our investigation regarding what we’ve uncovered, I’m going to share with you just some of the discussion we’ve had with people who have suffered because of this town’s emphasis on law enforcement. Just a note, many of these people did not want to go on camera out of fear of retribution. So we’re just going to play their audio so you can hear what they had to say or read relevant excerpts from their emails.
For example, one of our viewers has simply stopped visiting Milton because he’s been pulled over so many times. And in fact, a single stop led to nearly 1000 dollars in tickets. Let’s listen.
[AUDIO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker 1: We [inaudible] along and we were going down the road and they pulled us over. And they were just real rude and hateful. And they wouldn’t verbally tell why they pulled us over.
[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, I want to read an excerpt from an email that was sent to us by a viewer. It also recounts abuse at the hands of Milton County police. Let me read them to you on the screen. And again, we are protecting the identity of the person who sent it out of fear of retaliation.
“Thank you for covering the Milton Police Department. They have been corrupt for years and everyone knows it, but there’s nothing anyone could do.” And another. “I live in Milton. The whole government is corrupt. The mayor had the police hold people’s ID when they impound cars.”
And this email, which seems to hint at other problems in the town that, as we noted at the beginning of the show, point to broader problems that come with an overemphasis on law enforcement. “Also, another big issue in Milton is the water. There is always something wrong with the water, and after increases in taxation, nothing has improved. There is more to the water situation that needs to be investigated. I’ve heard that there’s a private investigation going on with the water.”
Which led us to dig even deeper into the finances of the town and why policing was so aggressive. The point is that all the information we received didn’t just reinforce the idea that Milton’s police department was problematic, but also pointed to other problems in the community that had been overlooked while the city built a new police department headquarters, pictured here. So to go through what we uncovered, I’m going to be joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis to break this down. Stephen, thank you for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Thanks for having me, Taya. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So first I want you to review the information about the town’s finances that we uncovered in our initial investigation just for background. What did we learn and why does it matter?
Stephen Janis: Well we learned that there were two things going on. There was an increase in fines which was almost exponential, or was exponential, and then an increase in the size of the police budget. So fines went from a couple hundred thousand to almost 500,000 to 600,000 per year. And the police budget went from a couple hundred thousand to 1.2 million to a million dollars a year. So these two things rose in tandem and that’s what we found.
Taya Graham: So the next thing I want to discuss with you is a public information request you sent to the city. What was the information you were seeking and what has the response been?
Stephen Janis: Yes, I sent a three part information request. Number one and number two was a breakdown in fines, whether they’re court costs, whether they’re related to towing vehicles, so we could just get a sense of what these fines were for, what kind of tickets they’re writing, how many tickets they’re writing. Very specific breakdown.
The other thing I asked about was what kind of contract they had with A-1 Wrecking, which is a towing company which the city prefers to use or has been using in the past. Which, according to media reports that we looked at, the mayor actually owned at one point. So both of those things, I wanted to get as much detail as possible so that we could report back to you to give you breakdowns saying what fines were levied and how much money is going to this company.
Taya Graham: Now we also have been looking into the problem with the water system. You have been digging into EPA records. What have you found? And what have you learned about the city of Milton and its alleged water issues?
Stephen Janis: Well, there’s several things going on. There are multiple citations, EPA violations that have been cited over the past couple years due to a water compliance report that’s been compiled by a nonprofit organization. They’re also, since 2019 they haven’t filed a community water report on the quality of water. And so those two things raise big concerns. We also found out that they have filed an application request to obtain money from the American Recovery Act to pay for an overhaul of the water system, about 7.9 million dollars. Which raises another question as to why or what they did with the money that they got from raising the rates for people. In other words, why did they raise the rates if they’re now seeking money from the federal government to pay for the entire overhaul of the water system? We don’t know if that grant’s been approved. We have asked, but it does raise a lot of questions about the water system.
Taya Graham: And what, if anything, are they doing about it?
Stephen Janis: Well, I think this is the equivalent of a municipal hail Mary pass. That they’re trying to get all the money that they didn’t spend on improving the water system from the rate increase to do the water system overhaul from the American Recovery Act. So really I think, in a sense, it raises great questions about what happened to the money from the raised rates.
Taya Graham: Now there is more you uncovered when you were looking into the financing behind the new hotel in town. They were giving a $10 million tax break called a TIF. Can you explain what a TIF is and how it works? And what would your concerns be as a resident about this TIF?
Stephen Janis: Well, a TIF is what’s known as a tax increment finance. And a really shorthand way of explaining it is it means that money is captured from increased assessed value of property and put back into the property. So in other words, if you put an addition on your house and your house went up in value, the new taxes in your house would go to you to make that addition. So it’s really a way of allowing a developer to use the taxes he or she would pay to pay for their property. And that’s what’s happening with the hotel.
The thing that’s really weird about it is I can’t find any documentation on the deal. Generally speaking TIFs have reports, [but for] analysis, things that looked at whether or not this TIF is justified. Because they’re supposed to go in blighted areas. So what we can’t find out is anything on the deal, how much money has been allotted to certain aspects of the deal and how the deal’s being financed. I can’t even really find the bond reports. So I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to officials in the West Virginia Development Corporation and other places to try to find the information. We’re going to keep working on it. Raises a lot of concerns, but we’re going to keep on it.
Taya Graham: So in part of your research, you also uncover something really startling which is a deal that was done in Cabell County. The same county which contains Milton, where Cody Cecil was arrested for the possession of cannabis plants. What did you find out?
Stephen Janis: Well, the county signed a huge development deal with the Trulieve Corporation to grow marijuana and to manufacture medical marijuana in the same county where Cody was essentially arrested. And this is really interesting because, here’s this big deal. They’re pouring a lot of money into a huge corporation, which is one of the biggest medical marijuana providers in the country. And meanwhile, we learned that when the police raided Cody’s trailer they took his checkbook, his business cards, all of his growing supplies, materials, books on growing marijuana. I mean he was like a budding – No pun intended – Weed entrepreneur who was going around the country sort of speaking the gospel of keeping weed in small businesses. And here they are, they arrest him. They confiscate almost everything of value that has to do with his business. At the same time, that same county is giving money to a huge corporation. It just shows you how this country works and how the political economy of policing keeps the poor poor and makes the rich richer.
Taya Graham: Okay. Wait. So I’m supposed to believe that the county made a deal to open a legal pot grow and yet they arrested Cody for having plants. What does this tell you about the political economy of policing?
Stephen Janis: Yeah. Yeah. Taya, it’s really kind of stunning, but it also is really an example of what goes on in this country. You have small entrepreneurs like Cody who are sitting in jail, who are now facing multiple charges, distribution. But right down the road the government’s literally financing people to do the same exact thing. I mean, how crazy is that? And I think how unfortunate that is, that a small business owner who wants to try to make it in the weed business is being incarcerated and charged as a drug dealer. When, down the road, a major corporation with major Wall Street backing is getting financing from the government to do the exact same thing. It shows how hypocritical this country is and how schizophrenic we are when it comes to marijuana and other things.
Taya Graham: And now I am finally joined by Cody Cecil to talk about his arrest and the difficulties his friends and family have had in trying to bail him out, and their on the ground experience of Milton. Cody, thank you so much for joining me. And also I want to welcome your friend Christopher Shellhammer, who was essential in helping bail you out.
Cody Cecil: Oh, thank you. Thank you. I’m actually super glad to see you.
Taya Graham: So first, Cody, just tell me how you feel. I mean, your mom reached out to us. And hundreds of thousands of people watched what happened to you and they reached out on your behalf. And then also many residents alleged misconduct by the Milton Police Department. How do you feel right now?
Cody Cecil: A little shell shocked to be honest because the police brutality is just, it was shocking to begin with. So I was completely unaware and caught off guard. And I felt as if it just was done completely horribly wrong. It wasn’t, just didn’t seem American. And I just didn’t understand why. It’s just, I’m glad that everyone’s been able to help and I’m very appreciative of it. And I wanted to give a thank you to you and everybody here, and everything that’s been going on. And I’m just glad that it can finally get out, that the horrible stuff that’s been going on, and it was able to be caught on camera and I was just fortunate enough to do so.
Taya Graham: What were the conditions like in the jail?
Cody Cecil: Yeah, the jails were shitty. Absolutely horrible. So I mean, but it’s just another broken system in America. I’ve been to jail in Detroit, so it’s quite the same, but at the same time it’s… The system shouldn’t be that way. It’s not any type of punishment. It’s just re-institutionalizing people and herding them along for the next paycheck. It’s all monetized. So that’s what it’s turned into. Another government official is just reaching in and collecting their dollar for keeping people cattled together.
Taya Graham: How much was paid to get you out of jail? I mean, how difficult was it to post bail? What were the obstacles?
Cody Cecil: My people on my team’s been working on trying to help me and get me out for the last two weeks. And they were down here once before. It took X amount of hours and time and money to drive out of here and take their time to do that. Then they got turned around then because they had to get a different type of bond. It was just all the runaround. Then they were down here for the last two days having to get hotels and stay. And finally later on this evening I was released.
Christopher Shellhammer: The actual bond amount was a $20,000 bond, which we paid 10% of plus fees. And then you also need to factor in the cost of the travel down here, the hotels, food. [crosstalk]
Cody Cecil: Everything. And this is for two weeks, they came down the last time.
Taya Graham: What charges are you facing now?
Cody Cecil: It’s too much of a list. And when you go into the jail, they don’t –
Christopher Shellhammer:Yeah. They stacked them up pretty good.
Cody Cecil: Yeah. And then when you go into the jails they don’t even get you any paperwork to go back with.
Taya Graham: How important did you think it was to film the officers and how did you know it was so important to record them?
Cody Cecil: I just felt like it was the right thing to do. If they’re supposed to be able to do their job then I should be able to protect myself and do mine. And that was my due diligence to do so.
Taya Graham: So Cody, this might surprise you, but we found a legal pot growing operation in West Virginia in Cabell County, the same county that has Milton. The county just approved support for a 100-acre marijuana growth facility. How does that make you feel, to know that they are approving a major dispenser to grow while you’re locked up for your plants?
Cody Cecil: This is the question that I’ve been wanting to talk about. This is welcome to the monopolization of America’s first big green industry that we could have had. But people are letting it walk away. This is the fight that I’m out here fighting for in the Cannabis Freedom Act. This is a plant that should be for the people, and given to the people, and monetized by the people. But it’s something that the government’s stripping from us in front of our faces, and I’m not going to stand around and let it happen. And I’ve been traveling and proclaiming my act in this and people didn’t quite understand until now, I guess.
Taya Graham: And just on a personal note, what I think we see with Cody Cecil and Caleb Dial and the many others that reached out to us privately, is that the politicians of Milton have bent to the will of the wealthy. City hall has been renovated, the police have a new headquarters and doubled their budget, but many of the people of Milton have told me that they themselves feel like they’re being run out of town. While a grand luxury hotel and a golf course is being built, people in Milton don’t have safe, clean drinking water. And while the police department has tripled and the amount of court fees and fines that they bring in have doubled, we’re told that the elderly in the community are losing their houses. This is what happens when law enforcement represents the will of the elites, and their wants are prioritized over the needs of the people.
Now, this is usually the part of the show where I try to tie together all the elements of the story we have just told and then tease out the parts that are most relevant to the overarching issues with American policing. Meaning, I like to examine what a specific story tells us about law enforcement that might not be readily apparent and how that fits into the larger context. I guess you could call it my own attempt at a post reporting analysis. But today I’m going to do something a little different. I’m not going to talk about policing at all. I’m going to focus on an institution that I think has more to do with what we see in Milton than aberrant police powers and an ineffectual city council. I’m going to talk about journalism, or the lack of it. Because I think the story has more to do with the consequences of not having independent journalists than just a bunch of overeager or bad cops.
I mean, what we see in cities like Milton and other communities we cover across the country is a single common denominator: a singular lack of independent journalists to hold people in power accountable. Now it’s worth noting there are many heroic cop watchers and auditors who are trying to fill the gap. People armed with cell phones and cameras and YouTube channels who do the hard work that journalists used to do. But to be fair, cop watchers can’t be everywhere. And sometimes a cell phone video isn’t enough to battle City Hall which has plenty of tools at its disposal to make the work of citizen journalists nearly impossible. That’s why I think the lack of journalists is so critical to what’s happening in Milton. Consider the link I’m showing you on the screen. It’s a link to a story posted by a local television station, West Virginia WCHS, or Fox 11, on the false and possibly illegal arrest of Caleb Dial.
As you can see, the story depicts Caleb as a criminal charged with felony escape. The photo is the same picture posted on the department’s Facebook page that we’ve already pointed out completely violates the Constitutional right of being presumed innocent before trial. But what’s even worse is that after the charges were dropped against Caleb, he contacted the station and asked them to take the story down, but they have not even taken the time to reply. In fact, we reached out to the newsroom and asked them to explain why they won’t respond to him, and guess what? We haven’t heard back either. Now I’m not going to give the station a hard time just because they reprinted a press release from a police department without getting comment from the subject of the story. I mean, it is part of the police propaganda mechanism we discuss so often and it’s also why people don’t trust mainstream media in general. But the facts in the press release were unfortunately true at the time, even though they were based upon a sworn statement from an officer that we have seen with our own eyes was nothing if not inaccurate.
What my real problem with this particular television station and mainstream media in general is how sometimes they simply ignore the communities they are supposed to serve. I mean, why didn’t someone at the station at least address Caleb’s concerns? Why wouldn’t they be interested in speaking to the subject of their breathless story that Caleb was a dangerous felon. I mean, don’t we always want to get both sides of the story? Which brings me back to my point about the media and what the lack of viable local journalists means for towns like Milton and beyond. Because along with our reporting on Milton’s penchant for collecting fines and perhaps lax management of its water supply, another interesting fact has emerged about its ambitions to build a luxury hotel. That’s because it turns out the beneficiary of the tax break to build the resort is none other than Jeff Hoops.
Hoops is not an unknown entity in West Virginia, but his background apparently didn’t receive a lot of attention during the vetting process to approve the deal. Hoops is best known for running Blackjewel Coal, a firm which declared bankruptcy after the West Virginia environmental authorities said it was too reckless to keep mining. But it’s also the company that has been accused of stiffing coal miners for back pay in Kentucky amid allegations reported by The Wall Street Journal that Hoops used shell companies to sign contracts with companies controlled by families and friends, which allowed him to extract millions from the now bankrupt firm. And now he is building a luxury resort with an Olympic size swimming pool, a 500-seat ballroom, a 400-seat steakhouse, and a golf course, right in Milton. And already has a second resort planned with an amphitheater that seats 3,500. That could cause a lot of change to a small town.
Now, the point is that what the city of Milton lacks is not people who care about their community or people who want to hold their government accountable. What they lack are dedicated journalists to bring them the information they need to make informed decisions. I mean, the outpouring of comments from the people of the city exemplifies a community that is both engaged and concerned. What they need are reporters who will amplify their voices and tell their stories and report the facts that will enable them to have a say in how they are governed. And let me say this to the people of Milton and all the other small towns that are off the radar of the mainstream media conglomerates. It’s a message that resonates from the core of my commitment as an independent journalist: we hear you. We are listening, and what you say to us matters. And we will do all that we can with the limited resources afforded to us to continue reporting your stories.
We will work as hard as possible to inform you and to provide you with context on what drives policy in your community, even if we are hundreds of miles away. The point is we respect your voice and we care about your concerns, and we will continue to do stories like these as long as you continue to need us to do them. Which is why I will end the show with a comment from a viewer who sent us this. “Thank you for taking the time to read this. And also thank you for covering West Virginia. That is a forgotten state.”
Well we have not, nor will we, forget the people of Milton, West Virginia, or any of the other people who need us.
I want to thank my guest Christopher Shellhammer, who went to bail out Cody, for his time and for keeping us up to date. Thank you, Christopher. And I also want to thank Cody Cecil for sharing his story with us. I know so many people are relieved that you have finally been released from jail, and we wish you the very best. 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: Thanks for having me, Taya. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And a very special thanks to our Patreons. We appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct.
You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter and Facebook. And please, like and comment. You know I read your comments and that I appreciate them. And we have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So if you feel inspired, please 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.
Under gray skies so dense they seemed impermeable, Gloria Williams was escorted out of the custody of Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety & Corrections on Jan. 25, 2022. At age 76, the longest-held female prisoner in Louisiana and the last living female 10/6 lifer was paroled after 51 years.
Williams, better known as “Mama Glo,” was leaving a lot of friends behind, in flesh and in spirit, including Mary Turner, a sister lifer who’d died in 2017 shortly before her scheduled release. Turner motivated her. Only 16 years old when charged, Williams’ co-defendant Carolyn Hollingsworth, who died inside 15 years ago, also motivated her.
Williams clutched a manila envelope stuffed with papers, cards, and photos in one hand, and a small sack nearly filled with amber plastic bottles of pills in the other. The guard walking with her carried a compact, rolled canvas tote and a single white plastic garbage bag containing all of her worldly possessions, accumulated over five decades.
Williams had been preparing for her release for 918 days, ever since July 22, 2019, when she’d received the Louisiana Board of Pardons & Parole’ 5-0 vote of confidence. During that two-and-a-half-year limbo she caught COVID twice and almost didn’t make it back from the ICU. Double pneumonia has taken its toll. Her overall health is diminished, and she requires oxygen most evenings.
Mary Smith-Moore, her younger sister who’d come from Houston with Williams’ sons James and Darrel to collect her, said she didn’t think any of this was going to be easy for her. “The family will help her through.”
Williams clutched a manila envelope stuffed with papers, cards, and photos in one hand, and a small sack nearly filled with amber plastic bottles of pills in the other. The guard walking with her carried a compact, rolled canvas tote and a single white plastic garbage bag containing all of her worldly possessions, accumulated over five decades.
Her feet were so swollen, her gait so unsure, that just putting one foot in front of the other to get off of prison property seemed a minor miracle. Well-wishers awaiting her at the prison exit shouted their support: “Yaaas, baby! Walk, girl.” From alpha to omega, Mama Glo’s incarceration story, which has spanned 10 US presidencies, was bookended by monstrous thefts. 918 days snatched at the end, tens of thousands of days lost overall. She’d done her sentence, times five. “Waaaaalk!”
Mama Glo leaving prison after over half a century of incarceration on Jan. 25, 2022. Photo Credit: Participatory Defense Movement NOLA.
Before her fate was swept up like so much detritus in the radical reforms to the state’s criminal code in the post-Jim Crow period, Williams had reason for hope. When she was convicted in 1971 by an all-white jury and sentenced to life, she was certain she’d be doing ten years and six months—and, with good behavior, would be eligible for parole. It had been that way since 1925. But state lawmakers revoked the possibility of parole in a well-plotted bait and switch. Without a pardon from the governor, life meant life. All of it.
Before there was Mama Glo
In 1971, Williams was under the influence of a second husband who’d exposed her to heroin. This, according to her younger sister, was her undoing.
“He took her to a dark place; he took her down,” Smith-Moore told The Real News just before the Pardons & Parole Board’s final Zoom hearing on the matter of her sister’s release. Williams was convicted of second-degree murder after what was supposed to be a dramatically staged robbery at a grocery store, including one fake and one unloaded gun, turned into a fatal scuffle with the grocery store owner, Budge Cutrera. “That wasn’t who she was.”
Much like the lives of those who were swallowed into the carceral abyss as a result of a failed and racist 50-year ‘war on drugs,’ Mama Glo’s incarceration has written into it a dark history of white power exerted through the criminal justice system.
One of 12 siblings, Smith-Moore used to visit her older sister every summer back when she was with her first husband. “The house was immaculate, the clothes were washed, the food was cooked when her husband got home,” she recalled. “She was a country girl, a housewife, a mother.”
Much like the lives of those who were swallowed into the carceral abyss as a result of a failed and racist 50-year ‘war on drugs,’ Mama Glo’s incarceration has written into it a dark history of white power exerted through the criminal justice system. Throughout the South, around the time Williams was sentenced, those with the power to rewrite society’s rules to maintain their material advantages—advantages that were temporarily threatened by the legal termination of Jim Crow—were doing just that. And Baton Rouge was no exception. Lawmakers (and the people they listened to) were especially focused on the criminal code.
They whittled away at parole laws in 1973, in 1976, and they revoked the practice altogether in 1979. For the many Black men who were completely innocent of any crime but had entered into plea agreements as an alternative to worse outcomes meted out by racist juries, there was no way out. The same would be true for Williams and her co-defendants. They were the collateral damage of a state asymmetrically warring against its own captured citizens.
Waiting for the hearing to start, Darrell Robertson, Mama Glo’s youngest son, was not yet two years old when his mother was incarcerated for life in 1971. Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022, by Frances Madeson.
In the context of the convict exemption in the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, lengthier sentences are simply good business, more bang for the buck: the longer a person can be held, the more the state agencies and corporations that contract prison labor benefit in reduced training costs for a stable, skilled, and captive workforce.
In Louisiana, as Michael Sainato recently reported for The Real News, “[i]n fiscal year 2021, private corporations spent $2,997,984.68 on contracts leasing prison labor, and the state prison labor system reports more than $29 million in operational sales (for example, the sale of agricultural products or livestock raised by state prisoners).”
The state itself uses prison labor. As Julia O’Donoghue reported in 2018, “Under current law, with the governor’s permission, state inmates are allowed to do custodial work on state grounds and at state facilities. Inmates are regularly used to clean, cook and do gardening work at the state Capitol, governor’s mansion and several office buildings in Baton Rouge.”
Sometimes governors grow fond of their servants and reward them with commutation, as was the case with Williams’ other co-defendant, Philip Anthony “Pee-Wee” Harris. He was put to work in the governor’s mansion as a cook for Governor Bobby Jindal, who pardoned him in May 1977.
But gubernatorial commutations are dispensed annually in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. And as Louisianans subjected to draconian sentences then grow old and sick now, the state faces a moral catastrophe.
That’s when she started escaping
For Williams—who didn’t have a lot of schooling as a youngster, got married at 14, and was a mother of five small children at the time she was sent to Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW)—the impossibility of parole induced a panic so intense that she accomplished what few women in Louisiana penal history have ever attempted: she escaped twice in 1973, and attempted again on Independence Day, 1985, until the impulse to try was quite literally tortured out of her with a long stint in solitary.
Her escapes were recounted in the February/March 1995 issue of The Angolite, a newspaper started in 1953 at Louisiana’s largest prison.
“Back then I didn’t know any other way,” she told them. “I just wanted to be free.”
In May 1973, she walked away from guards at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and made it out to Los Angeles, but after about six weeks her brother-in-law turned her in for a small reward. In August of the same year she cut through the prison fence with a wire cutter, again got out to Los Angeles, then traveled with her second husband to Houston, where they were arrested for robbery; she spent eight years in prison in Texas before being returned to LCIW in 1982. In her last attempt, on July 4, 1985, she slugged a guard with a sock full of billiard balls and tried to walk through the lobby, but “[g]uards subdued her before she made it out the front door.”
“Back then I didn’t know any other way,” she told them. “I just wanted to be free.”
The year after Williams was released from solitary confinement, Kathy Randels founded the LCIW Drama Club. The only secular enrichment program available in the prison, the club meets weekly every Saturday and, barring lockdowns at the prison, did so continuously since 1996, until COVID forced a hiatus.
James Robertson, Mama Glo’s eldest son, and Mary Smith-Moore, her younger sister, reacting to the news that Mama Glo would be released after 51 years. Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022, by Frances Madeson.
Mama Glo joined the group a couple of years later. Randels remembers that, from the beginning, she went deep in the work and pulled no punches. But the first piece where she “really connected to the power of performance” was when her mother died.
“She was not able to be present at the death or the funeral, and she put all of that in her piece,” Randels recalls. Williams’ mother had raised three of her five children, taking them in when her last three teenagers were still at home. Baby Darrel was just one year old. Her debt to her mother was infinite, and to not be allowed to be there by her dying mother’s side to comfort or honor her brought infinite sorrow. “She went through it in front of us.”
Afterwards a young woman told the club, “Y’all sacrifice your lives and stories for the rest of us to learn something.”
“There’s no place you can go where love can’t find you.”
Ausuetta AmorAmenkum, Randel’s partner in the LCIW Drama Club since 2000, says she’s never felt it to be a sacrifice.
“They give me that sense of knowing that there’s no place you can go where love can’t find you.”
They’re not supposed to touch the women, but “we always hug them”; they’re not supposed to talk about any outside stuff, but “we always talk about our lives,” AmorAmenkum said.
Mama Glo told her one day, “When y’all tell us about the outside, we go with you.”
Bonds unbroken
“Sister, my sister,” Williams called out to Mary Smith-Moore as she stepped shakily past the prison gate.
Since the sisters were last physically together, Williams’ youngest daughter, oldest grandson, their brother, a sister, two nieces, and a nephew had all died, and Smith-Moore buried her husband just days prior.
The women embraced for the first time in two and a half years and held on tight. Even as Williams took her first steps of freedom, there was a palpable sense of disbelief among those gathered at the gate. Given the carceral system’s caprice and the relative powerlessness of those held captive within it, nothing was guaranteed. (75-year-old Bobby Sneed, for instance, was held nine months past his release date on flimsy grounds after being locked up in Angola Prison for 47 years. He finally got out in January.)
Looking into each other’s eyes, they were counting blessings and losses, especially of kin: since the sisters were last physically together, Williams’ youngest daughter, oldest grandson, their brother, a sister, two nieces, and a nephew had all died, and Smith-Moore buried her husband just days prior.
“That’s who we are,” Smith-Moore said about their family’s ability to meet this moment together, to carry her elder sister out of Louisiana to safety despite so much fresh grief. “We came from a very strong foundation.”
That day’s parole hearing, billed in advance by some familiar with the process as a near formality, was nothing of the sort. The hearing was painful and draining, especially for the shock it delivered to the victim’s family.
Budge Cutrera, the 64-year-old Italian-American grocer killed by shots fired with his own gun, which he had raised in defense during the 1971 stickup, was supposed to retire a few weeks after the robbery took place. How could he have known that the pistol Williams was holding was her son’s toy, or that the rifle wrapped in a coat and held by Harris wasn’t loaded? Hollingsworth struggled with him over the gun and three shots did their worst.
Though Williams’ finger wasn’t on the trigger, Mr. Cutrera’s son and two grandchildren opposed Williams’ release. What tore them up the most was that in all this time she had never expressed any remorse to them. What they didn’t know was that she has always been strictly prohibited upon punishment by law from contacting them—for any reason. They learned that for the first time in the hearing.
“No one ever told them ‘that’s never going to happen,’” Katie Hunter-Lowrey, crime-survivor organizer at The Promise of Justice Initiative in New Orleans, said after the hearing. “Both the unforgiven and the unforgiving suffer,” she explained. “They’ve been waiting all these years for something that could have been healing, but that the criminal legal system prevents from happening.”
In Louisiana there are mechanisms that could’ve brought the Cutreras the kind of healing they were deprived of. For instance, they could have had a mediated sit-down. “But,” Hunter-Lowrey says, “the system doesn’t inform people. We don’t have a state budget that reflects a society that cares about healing or what happens to survivors of violence. Which is why the cycles are repeated.”
Kathy Randels, Julia Menhati, and Ausuetta AmorAmenkum of the LCIW Drama Club wait for Mama Glo, who’d participated in the club for over 20 years. Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022, by Frances Madeson.
In a criminal legal system where the state prosecutes crimes against itself, neither the needs of the people who have been hurt or those who have perpetuated the harm are centered.
“Incarcerated people have also experienced violence and lost family members to violence, and that’s not really taken into consideration,” she explained. “But it should be.”
Smith-Moore said she felt for the Cutrera family. Though she hadn’t shopped there, she knew of their grocery store in Opelousas and who they were, and had grieved for the senseless loss of Budge Cutrera when it happened.
“We all did,” she said.
Gubenatorial clemency is not going to cut it
Kerry Myers, deputy director of Louisiana Parole Project, which provided legal and wraparound service to Mama Glo, says they’re working to bring the remaining 55 10/6 lifers home alive.
That’s the first tranche; then they want all lifers who’ve served 20 years or more to be given another look—and there are thousands of them.
The data shows that there’s no public policy imperative to keep them incarcerated, but the only way out by law is the commutation process. But that’s exclusively under the office of the governor’s control. In the simplest and most practical terms, the process has been outstripped by the enormous need, and it does not and probably cannot work fast enough to stave off a humanitarian crisis.
“By virtue of executive function, he is not bound by any timeframe,” Myers explained.
Participatory Defense Movement NOLA hosts Mama Glo’s family and supporters at the Wildmark Hotel in Baton Rouge to watch via Zoom the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Paroles’ final confirmation of Mama Glo’s release. Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022, by Frances Madeson.
Governor John Bel Edwards could’ve prioritized signing all commutations as they came over one by one from the Pardons & Parole Board, especially during the pandemic. Or he could have taken action on May 8, 2020, when 150 signatories including Myer’s own organization, respectfully begged him to let Mama Glo (and 144 others) go with a stroke of his pen. This was near the beginning of the coronavirus (which rages still throughout Louisiana’s prisons). Or, because it’s totally within his office’s discretion, he need never act.
LPP is advocating for legislation to be introduced in the upcoming March 2022 legislative session.
With over 2,500 lifers over 60 years old, a full 5% of the state’s prison population, the state needs to start moving a lot of people through the system a lot more quickly.
“We’re so glad Mama Glo got to go home,” Myers said. “But we were way past the point in her sentence that her continued incarceration did anything to serve public safety. Keeping her locked up was a waste.”
With 2.1 million incarcerated people, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. But America’s prison system is part of a larger social apparatus that predominantly targets, criminalizes, and polices poor people and people of color. As the monstrous reach of our carceral system extends further into our daily lives, so too have forms of resistance grown in communities around the country and beyond. At this moment in history, what creative possibilities exist for revolting against these institutionalized forms of capture, policing, and criminalization?
In 2021, TRNN Executive Producer and host of Rattling the Bars Eddie Conway joined a blockbuster panel of scholars and activists for the American Studies Association (ASA) to discuss these very questions. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, with permission from the ASA and the panel participants, we are publishing the video recording of this panel, which is entitled “Revolt Against the Carceral World” and is hosted by Professor Dylan Rodríguez.
Jennifer Marley is Tewa, from the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, and has been a member of The Red Nation since 2015. In 2019 she completed her BA with a double major in Native American Studies and American studies from the University of New Mexico, where she served as Kiva Club president from 2018-2019. Marley is currently a PhD student in the American Studies department at the University of New Mexico.
Rachel Herzing lives and works in Oakland, CA, where she fights the violence of policing and imprisonment. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex, and the co-director of the StoryTelling & Organizing Project, a community resource sharing stories of interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.
Sandy Grande is Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She is the author of Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought and a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.
David Hernández is Faculty Director of Community Engagement and Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His research focuses on immigration enforcement with a particular focus on the US detention regime. He is the co-editor of the anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader and is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Alien Incarcerations: Immigrant Detention and Lesser Citizenship.
This week, during a hearing that was abbreviated so that city employees could attend the funerals for three Baltimore firefighters, the Board of Estimates quickly approved a little over $31,000 for a durable and lightweight kind of surveillance technology called “a throwbot.” The $31,290 in city funds will go to ReconRobotics Inc. There was no need to look for another vendor because, as the BOE agenda notes, ReconRobotics Inc. “is the sole manufacturer and distributor of these devices.”
Indeed, throwbots seem to be one of a kind. The small rolling device—it looks like two wheels on an axel—is able to capture video and audio and broadcast it back to a small hand-held device in real-time; the device can also be thrown and withstand the force of impact, including 30-foot falls. This makes the technology, which is battery operated and weighs a little over a pound, useful for police who can send it into someone’s home, for example, and surveill the location, or to inspect a “suspect” close-up without putting the police in as much risk. Additionally, the throwbot uses infrared technology, letting law enforcement see in the dark. Primarily, throwbots have been used by police for situations involving SWAT.
Like so many of the toys American police departments get to play with, throwbots were developed as military technology and have slowly trickled down into police departments nationwide. After it was used in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, this technology spread to police departments starting in 2011 after ReconRobotics applied to the FCC for a spectrum use waiver, allowing the technology to transmit its live video feed. The technology, like so much military-to-police tech, was introduced along with plenty of advocacy by police and fawning news coverage in many of the towns that purchased throwbots.
Like so many of the toys American police departments get to play with, throwbots were developed as military technology and have slowly trickled down into police departments nationwide.
Last year, Baltimore Police killed one man and shot another during the kind of potential barricade or hostage situation ReconRobotics says their technology can help to end more swiftly—and, they say, “peacefully”—than kicking in a door or throwing flashbang grenades into a home. It is not clear how a citizen enduring a behavioral crisis would know that a “throwbot” tossed through a window or down a hallway is different from a flashbang or any other police weapon.
On Aug. 9, 2021, Marcus Martin, 40 years old, was shot and killed by Baltimore Police Officer Jeffery Archambault of SWAT. Police had been called to the scene because of an assault reported by someone in the home. When police arrived, others in the home were able to leave, and Martin was left alone with a shotgun, surrounded by police officers.
The use of a large, roving police robot escalated the situation between cops and Martin, who, family members said, had lost his job days earlier. Body-worn camera footage of the shooting shows cops discussing bringing the “robot” out and worrying that Martin, who had a shotgun, might shoot at the robot. And that’s exactly what happened: Martin fired at the robot, which was at the front door of his home. That meant Martin was essentially firing at police. No officers were shot by Martin, but soon after Martin shot the robot, Archambault sniped and killed him.
Because the situation began as a call over an assault, it was not diverted to mental health professionals who work for the city. BPD’s Crisis Response Team, trained to better handle behavioral crises like the one Martin was experiencing, were not available because they operate between 11:00AM and 7:00PM.
(In another incident that occurred on Christmas Day last year, 50-year-old Barron Coe was shot and injured by police. Police were called to Coe’s house because of a disturbance. As police on the scene spoke to him, Coe suggested he may have had explosives in the home, said he was armed, and warned of “a major situation.” He told them to get back-up. Then, police said, not long after, Coe had a gun in his waistband and raised it, at which point he was shot by police. For a week after the shooting, police maintained the story that Coe had fired at them, but on Jan. 3 they finally admitted that Coe did not fire his weapon at all. In fact, Coe’s gun had no firing pin and could not fire. BDP’s Crisis Response Team was also not present during Coe’s shooting.)
As Battleground Baltimore has reported, police spending as of late has included $18 million for new police helicopters; $100,000 in additional funding to Metro Crime Stoppers; $759,500 to continue a contract with AI-based audio surveillance tech ShotSpotter; and $6.5 million in red light camera revenue to help BPD balance its budget.
Credit to @ScanthePolice, the local Twitter account dedicated to police transparency, for calling attention to throwbots and for running down the rest of this week’s proposed police spending.
Partial credit for making it easier to get a sense of city spending must also be given to Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry. Since he was elected to the comptroller position last year, Henry has been active in calling attention to each week’s agenda and sometimes live-tweeting the BOE meeting. In emails sent out by his communication team, Henry often highlights some of the notable (and egregious) expenditures.
During this week’s BOE meeting where the throwbots were approved, Henry also announced that there is a bid opening up later this month for SWAT tactical vests.
A small-town police department in Milton, West Virginia, is facing more scrutiny after another troubling video surfaced of a questionable arrest. The newly obtained video contradicts the sworn statement of a Milton police officer who said the man who was arrested resisted arrest and tried to escape. PAR investigates the case and delves deeper into the finances of the town, which has nearly doubled its collections of court fines and fees over the past decade.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal lawsuit against the Washington County Detention Center in Arkansas on behalf of inmates who say the jail’s medical staff, led by Dr. Robert Karas, prescribed and gave them ivermectin to treat COVID-19 without telling them what the drug actually was. (Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug that the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Pharmacists Association, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, and others have repeatedly stated should not be used as a treatment for COVID-19.) As Edrick Floreal-Wooten, one of the inmates at Washington County Detention Center and a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, recently told CBS News, “They said they were vitamins, steroids and antibiotics. We were running fevers, throwing up, diarrhea … and so we figured that they were here to help us. … We never knew that they were running experiments on us, giving us ivermectin. We never knew that.”
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speaks about these revelations and the impending federal lawsuit with Gary Sullivan, legal director for the ACLU of Arkansas, and Zachary Crow, director of decARcerate, a grassroots coalition working to end mass incarceration in Arkansas with and on behalf of prisoners and their families.
Charles Hopkins: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. It’s been recently reported that men detained in Washington County Detention Center in Arkansas were given an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin without their consent.
Eva Madison: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I learned today that Dr. Karas is giving ivermectin, cow dewormer, to inmates at the jail. He is disregarding FDA guidance and giving dewormer to our inmates at the jail. And so, I don’t care how much Dr. Karas wants for his contract. We need someone new who is following FDA guidance to be treating our inmates. And so I just wanted to say that, because it’s very disturbing to me that that’s the level of medical care that we’re providing to the folks down at the jail.
Charles Hopkins: Here to talk about this is Guy Sullivan, director of the ACLU Arkansas, and Zachary Crow, executive director of DecARcerate. Welcome.
Zachary Crow: Thank you.
Gary Sullivan: Thank you.
Charles Hopkins: Gary, when did you become aware that the men at the Washington County Detention Center Arkansas were being given this anti-parasite medicine?
Gary Sullivan: Late last summer it came to light in a budget committee meeting at the Washington County Quorum Court that ivermectin had been administered to detainees at the Washington County Detention Center, so we started some Freedom of Information Act requests to get as much information as we could about that at that time.
Charles Hopkins:Were the men that were given this, did they give their consent to receive this medication, and why were they given this medication?
Gary Sullivan: We learned at that time that the detainees at the jail were told they were being given vitamins and steroids to make them feel better. They were not told they were being given ivermectin at all, so they weren’t giving any consent. Later, after we complained about this, they were informed that they were getting ivermectin, but they still weren’t informed of the side effects and the potential dangers of this drug, and they weren’t told that it’s not approved by the FDA for use to treat COVID.
Charles Hopkins: Okay, and in terms of them not being told by the medical staff, do you believe that the medical staff at the detention center were intentionally using this medication as a form of experimentation?
Gary Sullivan: It appears that that might be the case. After the media picked up on this story, several of the detainees refused to take the ivermectin anymore. And about the same time, Dr. Karas, who is the medical provider for the jail, put up signs in front of his clinics – He also has a private clinic business – Soliciting private citizens to join his research group to determine if ivermectin was effective as a COVID treatment.
Charles Hopkins: Who authorized them to use ivermectin in this particular facility?
Gary Sullivan: Dr. Karas and Karas Correctional Medicine started using the ivermectin and the sheriff gave him his blessing and allowed it.
Charles Hopkins: Can criminal charges be brought against the medical staff and anyone else involved in this?
Gary Sullivan: I cannot comment on that. We are only handling the civil case here.
Charles Hopkins: Okay, and Mr. Crow, in terms of you representing DecARcerate, what are y’all’s position on this problem? Keeping in mind that we’re talking about people that are detained and they have not yet been convicted of any crime. What are y’all’s position on this particular abuse that’s taking place?
Zachary Crow: Yeah, so our position would be the same as COVID at large. What this pandemic has shown us over and over again is that mass incarceration is a public health crisis, and so it’s not surprising that this happened in a jail where people have always received subpar, improper medical treatment for, really, since the history of penitentiaries started in Arkansas. This has always been the case here, where people are receiving improper, insufficient medical care.
And so it’s no wonder that in a pandemic like this Washington County has such high COVID numbers. One of the ways that we’re calling for this to be addressed is fewer people in jail. We think one of the only real ways to address the harm that’s been done is to mitigate that harm by holding fewer and fewer people in confinement. Particularly, as you say, jail, where no one in jail has been convicted of a crime.
Charles Hopkins: Can you give us some of the specific actions you are taking to minimize that problem? Because as you said, we both recognize we’re dealing with detainees and they’re under a different standard. What are some of the actions, direct actions, y’all are taking to try to reduce the population or get them to release prisoners or detainees?
Zachary Crow: Yeah. Well, in Washington County specifically, when we learned about this in August of last year we began putting pressure by lots and lots of phone calls both to Dr. Karas and also to Sheriff Helder to end the contract with Dr. Karas’s office and also to continue releasing people from the jail. And so we started calling and trying to put as much pressure on these institutions as possible.
We also continued to contact the governor. The governor during this COVID pandemic has released some people early from prisons, but that’s happened in fewer and fewer places as far as jails go. And so we’re trying to put pressure both on the state to release people from prisons but also individual counties to change their practices of who they hold, how long they hold people, who’s allowed access to bail, those kinds of things.
Charles Hopkins: Okay, so in terms of that, are y’all advocating bail reform?
Zachary Crow: Yeah, absolutely. DecARcerate, one of our primary campaigns is around court debt, so that would of course be bail, but also fines and fees.
Charles Hopkins: Hey Gary, what’s the status of the lawsuit? Because I’m aware that y’all filed a lawsuit. Can you give us the status of it, and does it involve punitive and monetary damages as well?
Gary Sullivan: This case was filed Jan. 13 and the defendants, once they’re served, have 21 days to file a response to the complaint. That time period has not yet run, so the court will not set a scheduling order until the defendants have responded. In this case the defendants are the sheriff, Sheriff Helder of Washington County, the Washington County Detention Center, and also Dr. Karas and Karas Correctional Medicine.
Once there is a scheduling order in place then discovery will proceed and we’ll look forward to having a trial date. We are asking that the court enter an injunction preventing the county and Dr. Karas from prescribing and administering ivermectin in the jail and a declaration that that practice was unconstitutional. We do not seek money damages in this case.
Charles Hopkins: And why is that?
Gary Sullivan: At the ACLU of Arkansas, we try to right wrongs. We do not look for money damages.
Charles Hopkins: And in terms of the plaintiffs, the detainees, are any of them still being detained in Washington County Detention Center to your knowledge?
Gary Sullivan: The four plaintiffs are still detainees as far as I know, the last time I looked, and they have not contacted me to say they’ve been released. And that was as of last week so I believe that they are still in jail.
Charles Hopkins:And what are some of the conditions they’re undergoing because of filing this lawsuit? Have they been retaliated against because they are plaintiffs in this lawsuit, to your knowledge?
Gary Sullivan: At least one plaintiff believes that he may have been retaliated against, but I don’t have specific facts on that. Some of the plaintiffs continue to experience gastrointestinal problems such as diarrhea or stomach pain.
Charles Hopkins: And this is directly related to the ivermectin?
Gary Sullivan: I can’t say that it is or is not. That’s why we’re asking the judge to order that these detainees be allowed to have a private doctor examine them and evaluate them because they no longer trust Dr. Karas to do that.
Charles Hopkins: And have any of them said that they believe this is the result of that, the anti-parasite medicine?
Gary Sullivan: The plaintiffs believe that that is possible because they didn’t have these symptoms and side effects before they took the ivermectin.
Charles Hopkins: Can you talk about the side effects of ivermectin, to your knowledge?
Gary Sullivan: Yes. As I mentioned earlier, the plaintiffs in our case have experienced stomach issues. They’ve had stomach pain, diarrhea, which isn’t surprising since they’re taking a medicine that’s used for deworming. If it’s given in incorrect dosages it can cause seizures, coma, and death. And as we have calculated based on the medical records we obtained of the plaintiffs, they have been given dosages way higher than humans should be given for the uses of ivermectin which are for certain parasites such as worms, head lice, and a skin condition called rosacea, which none of these inmates had.
Charles Hopkins: And Zach, do you have any knowledge on this particular medicine?
Zachary Crow: Not beyond what Mr. Sullivan has shared. I would just add that we learned about this experimentation really randomly at a quorum court meeting. It came up as a vague reference in a committee meeting. And so, this is what we know, but I think it raises lots of other concerns about what is being done in this jail that maybe has not come up. And so I think it raises concerns even beyond this about the treatment or the lack of treatment that people in Washington County Jail, but jails all over the state of Arkansas, are receiving.
Charles Hopkins: And Gary, one last question. Do you know of any other jails or institutions that are experimenting with prisoners, any that utilize experimentation such as this?
Gary Sullivan: We have received one report from another county jail in Arkansas. We have not verified that report yet and I don’t know who the medical provider is for that county jail. But what the taxpayers of Washington County need to know is that Dr. Karas has a contract. He gets $1.5 million a year to provide this medical care to the inmates and he has basically been doing experimentation with drugs that aren’t approved for the uses that he is utilizing for them.
Charles Hopkins: And to your knowledge does he have a history of doing this?
Gary Sullivan: As far as we know this started in November of 2020 so I don’t know if any other drugs were used incorrectly at the jail before that.
Charles Hopkins: And Zach, when we look at this situation that these men are still confined and still detained, does DecARcerate have any position on getting people moved out of these types of environments or have organized or mobilized the community to have some kind of influence on impacting legislators to do these things?
Zachary Crow: Sure. We’re looking at whether there are any legislative possibilities. The next legislative session in Arkansas will not be until January of next year, so another full year, and so hands are somewhat tied with what could be done legislatively, but we are partnering with folks in Washington County to address this on a local level.
Something else that’s happening in Washington County where this happened is that Washington County is trying really hard to use COVID relief money to expand this jail where this happened and so there are lots of folks mobilized on the ground there in Washington County who are resisting that attempted expansion with COVID relief money. So money from the government that was meant for COVID relief, Washington County is attempting to use to expand this jail. And so that’s one of the ongoing fights of not only let’s get people out, but let’s not make this behemoth any bigger. Let’s not grow the beast.
Charles Hopkins: What are some of the things that y’all are doing in the community to get these men that’s being detained, get their families and other supporters to join y’all in the fight to bring justice to these people’s plight?
Zachary Crow: Well, I’m not personally connected to any of the plaintiffs in this suit but we are working with some of our partners in that part of the state. I’m not personally in Washington County but we’re working with folks in that area, as I said, to continue fighting this attempted expansion and to get folks out of jail. And so folks are showing up to quorum court meetings and trying to put as much pressure to stop this jail expansion as possible.
Charles Hopkins: And Gary, what do you think the community can do to support the lawsuit or the actions that’s being taken on behalf of the ACLU at Arkansas? What do you think the community should be doing or can be doing to help raise the awareness of the plight that the men at Washington County Detention Center are undergoing in Arkansas?
Gary Sullivan: Members of the public could make sure they talk about this issue and let anyone else know that doesn’t already know about what’s going on there. They could also appear at quorum court meetings when the public’s allowed to speak and express their opinions. They can also write letters.
Charles Hopkins: Okay. And Zach?
Zachary Crow: Yeah. I would echo all of those. The quorum court meetings are where our partners in that part of the state have really put their focus because it’s where this was first learned about. It’s the body that has direct control over this jail expansion and these contracts and so it’s a place where the power in the room to make these changes exists and is open for public comments. It’s really easy to show up to a meeting at the quorum court and make yourself heard.
Charles Hopkins: There you have it. Rattling the Bars. Gary Sullivan and Zachary Crow. Gary, the ACLU, and Zachary Crow of DecARcerate Arkansas. Both are rattling the bars, making the noise, bringing to the attention the abuses that are taking place in Arkansas County Detention Center. Thank both of you for joining us today.
Gary Sullivan: Thank you.
Zachary Crow: Thanks.
Charles Hopkins: And on behalf of myself and Eddie, continue to rattle the bars. Thank you very much.
Crime and arrest data for 2021 provided to Battleground Baltimore by the Baltimore Police Department shows that last year was similar to 2020 and 2019, with homicides surpassing 300, the number of non-fatal shootings more than doubling that homicide number, and comparable numbers year-in and year-out on gun seizures, weapon possession arrests, and other categories.
The city has endured high homicide numbers even when arrests were also high, and increases and decreases in gun seizures—a major focus of police and Mayor Brandon Scott—do not align with decreases in murders and non-fatal shootings (or “failed murders” as cops sometimes call them).
A major difference between 2020 and 2021 was the conversation about crime. In response to the largest public demonstration against racist police violence in US history, last year was marred by fearmongering and specious claims of a nationwide “crime spike” pushed by police departments, pundits, and politicians—claims that were repeated by credulous reporters whose articles often acknowledged that, although the number of murders did increase, the larger “crime spike” did not exist.
Along with these “crime spike” claims was a common and easily disproved talking point that police departments had been “defunded,” allegedly leading to the “crime spike.” In reality, most police departments had their budgets increased, and budget reductions were fairly negligible. For example, Baltimore Police had their budget reduced by $22 million in 2020. In 2021, the police budget was increased by $28 million. With an annual budget of $555 million, which makes up nearly 30% of the city’s budget, that’s nearly $900 in police spending for each Baltimorean.
Meanwhile, the number of homicides and non-fatal shootings in Baltimore have remained incredibly high since 2015, as they were throughout the ‘90s and much of the 2000s.
In other words, Baltimore City has been experiencing a so-called “crime spike” for most of the past 30 years—and, occasionally, that spike has been even more pronounced.
Still, the 2021 data is illuminating, especially when compared to numbers over the past three decades. There is little correlation between homicides and non-fatal shootings and some of the most talked-about metrics for crime reduction. Higher numbers of arrests (including drug and weapon possession arrests) and gun seizures are not leading to less crime. The city has endured high homicide numbers even when arrests were also high, and increases and decreases in gun seizures—a major focus of police and Mayor Brandon Scott—do not align with decreases in murders and non-fatal shootings (or “failed murders” as cops sometimes call them).
Battleground Baltimore requested this data on Jan. 3. The categories we requested are among the most frequently cited categories by police for determining the success of its crime fight; and yet, this data was not provided to Battleground Baltimore for more than three weeks. Here’s a closer look at what the data say…
In 2021, there were 337 homicides in Baltimore. 2021’s homicide clearance rate was 42%.
In 2020, there were 335 homicides, and 348 in 2019. Baltimore has surpassed 300 homicides each year since 2015. Before 2015, the last time Baltimore City surpassed 300 homicides was 1999, when there were 305 homicides. Throughout the ’90s, the city endured more than 300 homicides a year, although it also had significantly more people. Currently, Baltimore City’s population is around 585,000 people. In the late ’90s, it was near 650,000 people.
The 2021 homicide clearance rate of 42% is an increase from 40.3% in 2020 and 31% in 2019. It is still well below the national average for homicide clearance in comparable cities, which is around 54%.
In 2021, there were 726 non-fatal shootings. The non-fatal shooting clearance rate in 2021 was 25.1%.
The national average clearance rate for non-fatal shootings is about 26.1%. In Baltimore, there were 724 non-fatal shootings in 2020, and the clearance rate was 20.2%. A look at the past three decades of non-fatal shootings and homicides in Baltimore shows that, even as the number of homicides fluctuated (as low as 196 in 2011; in the 300s for most of the ’90s), non-fatal shootings still doubled homicides.
In 2021, Baltimore Police made 13,592 arrests.
All available data show that increased arrests in Baltimore do not lead to reduced homicides.
That number is down from 16,204 in 2020, and 24,826 in 2019. Arrests have been steadily decreasing since 2006 when the police department, in part due to an ACLU lawsuit against the police over illegal arrests, began reducing its number of arrests. In the early 2000s, under Mayor Martin O’Malley and his “zero tolerance” policy—a strategy I once called one of the “most audacious experiments in mass incarceration in American history”—arrests skyrocketed. In 2003, for example, Baltimore Police made a staggering 110,164 arrests in a city of around 642,000 people.
All available data show that increased arrests in Baltimore do not lead to reduced homicides. For example, in 1991, police made 65,033 arrests and there were 305 homicides. In 2001, there were 93,778 arrests and 256 homicides. In 2011, 60,009 arrests and 196 homicides.
In 2021, there were 1,046 drug offense arrests. 1,001 of those arrests were felonies and 45 of them were misdemeanors.
Last year, a study showed that reducing drug arrests and other low-level arrests did not increase crime in Baltimore, and the 2021 data also bears this out.
In 2020, there were 1,348 drug offense arrests, and in 2019, 3,770. This steady reduction in drug arrests is a reason for the drop in arrests overall. Back in 2015, when cannabis possession was decriminalized, drug arrests dropped to 32,939 from 46,231 in 2014 (those lower arrests, however, remained racially disproportionate).
Not long into the pandemic, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced a COVID-19 policy that her office would no longer prosecute a number of low-level crimes, including drug possession, which further reduced the arrest numbers. Last year, a study showed that reducing drug arrests and other low-level arrests did not increase crime in Baltimore, and the 2021 data also bears this out.
In 2021, there were 1,438 weapon possession arrests and a total of 2,355 gun seizures.
In 2020, there were 1,233 weapons possession arrests and 2,244 gun seizures. In 2019, there were 1,161 weapon possession arrests and 2,203 gun seizures. Gun seizing is considered a major part of the crime reduction in Baltimore, with a focus on the hard number of seizures each year. However, gun seizures have, over the past decades, stayed around the 2,000-2,500 range, except for an increase in 2018 to 3,911 gun seizures, a year that ended with 309 homicides. In 2019, there were 348 homicides and 2,203 gun seizures, a little more than half the number in 2018.
Battleground Baltimore also requested the clearance rate for rape cases in 2021, a number that was contested throughout last year. In March 2021, police said the clearance rate was 0%. By October, police said that there had been 246 reported rapes, but did not have a clearance rate number and promised to provide it. They did not.
The Baltimore Police Department told Battleground Baltimore they would provide the year-end clearance rate for rape cases soon.
Coty Cecil was awaiting repairs on his RV in a West Virginia campground when Milton police started breaking into his home, refusing to show a warrant. Cecil was eventually charged with possession with intent to distribute and transporting drugs over state lines, even though the half-dozen pot plants found in his RV were grown in his home state of Michigan—where they are legal. While looking into the dubious circumstances of Cecil’s arrest, PAR investigated the finances of the small rural community and uncovered some intriguing details about the role policing plays as a revenue engine for the town.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis 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 do so by showing you this video of how police in a small West Virginia town tried to lie to get into someone’s private property. And we will explore the reasons why this raid may have not only violated the law, but also the consequences for both him and his family.
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 do have some extras for our PAR family. Okay, now we’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, as we’ve reported on our show before, there is no policy more destructive in recent American history than the war on drugs. It has led to millions of useless arrests and millions of years of, in our opinion, illegal incarceration. But even though public opinion is turning against the idea of making any substance illegal, police still use it like a sledgehammer against those who cannot protect themselves.
Case in point is this video I’m showing you now of Milton, West Virginia, police trying to get inside the trailer of a man whose RV had broken down. His name is Coty Cecil, and he was traveling across the country when the brake lines of his RV failed, forcing him to stop in a trailer park in West Virginia. Coty, who is from Michigan, also happens to work for a legal marijuana growing equipment company and had a total of eight small Delta-8 hemp plants growing inside his RV. That’s right. Eight immature hemp plants, which is why police in West Virginia decided that Coty was such a threat to the community that they had to break into his home without a warrant. As you can see in the video we are showing now, police insisted that he let them inside. When Coty, fully aware of his constitutional rights, asked to see the warrant, police kept telling him they would get it soon. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer 1:Open the door.
Coty: So you’re going to break my stuff violently anyway?
Police Officer 1: You’re going to get a copy of the warrant. Yeah. Open the door.
Coty: Look it, my hands are right here. All I’m doing is recording this. That’s it.
Police Officer 1: Open the door.
Coty: I just don’t understand why and what’s going on. I need to have a lawyer present.
Police Officer 1: You don’t have a lawyer present for a search warrant.
Coty: For a warrant, why not? This can be done completely peacefully. I just need to see a warrant first. Why are you guys breaking my stuff? I don’t – I haven’t seen a warrant yet. Right now, I look like I’m surrounded by a bunch of wolves trying to attack me.
Police Officer 1: You’ll get a copy of it.
Coty: Okay. So as soon as I get a warrant, I’ll open the door. What’s the issue?
Well, here we go. This is what they’re after. Just so people know the real truth. [window smashes] Whoa, whoa.
Police Officer 1: Open the door.
Coty: I don’t understand why you guys are being so violent towards me. That’s all.
Police Officer 1: We’re not being violent.
Coty: Yes, you are. You just smashed my whole window in.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But in fact, no warrant existed, at least not during the raid. But that didn’t stop police from smashing his door and continuing to tell him to let them inside. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Coty: And you’re not being violent? I haven’t even seen a warrant yet.
Police Officer 1: We are affecting a search.
Coty: What kind of a search? Can I get any response at all?
Police Officer 1: What the hell do you got in here?
Coty: It’s a deadbolt. I’ll unlock it.
Police Officer 1: Unlock it!
Coty: I want to see a warrant!
Police Officer 1: Unlock it!
Coty: I want a warrant first. This is my constitutional right to see that I am being searched with a warrant.
Police Officer 1: You are being searched with a warrant as soon as he gets here.
Coty: Then I will be sitting right here, not doing anything. Trying to comply with the police that are breaking into my home for no apparent reason.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, I think it’s interesting that Coty was not willing to concede his rights in this situation. As you can see, throughout the ordeal he continues to insist to see the warrant. Still, no matter how many times he asked the police, they said it was forthcoming but failed to produce it, which might have prompted Coty to eat a few medicinal edibles. Given that his arrest was imminent.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Coty: Eat some edibles. [rustling]
I just want to see a warrant. That’s it. And I will come out. I don’t have nothing in here. I don’t have nothing to hide, but you just beat my door down. And you’re trying to make me look like a straight criminal. I don’t know what I did wrong. I’ve been sleeping in my RV since last night. What did I do wrong, officer? Can you explain it?
Police Officer 1: We’ll explain everything as soon as you open this door.
Coty: I need a warrant.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Still, despite not being able to produce a warrant either that day or since, police forced their way inside, breaking his window and taking it upon themselves to break down his door. They also searched his car. Let’s watch as they arrest Coty for his eight hemp plants.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Coty: You’ve got me scared for my life! Here, I’m coming out. I’m coming out, guys.
Police Officer 2: Put your cigarette down.
Coty: Okay. It’s the other way, guys. The other way.
Police Officer 2: Come this way.
Coty: Please. I’ll help you. Don’t break my house. This is all I own.
Police Officer 2: Okay. Y’all [inaudible] it up. Clear the rest of it. There’s supposed to be another guy in here. There’s anybody else in here, make yourself known.
Coty: It’s just me. I’m by myself.
Police Officer 1: [Where’s] your partner?
Coty: My partner? What are you talking about?
Police Officer 1: That’s what he’s doing in here. Eating all that shit up.
Coty: What are you talking about? Are you talking about my family members that come to visit me because I’ve got people here in West Virginia? Like what is the big issue, dude?
Police Officer 2: Anybody in here, make yourself known.
Coty: What? Because you guys didn’t even show probable cause or a warrant? Wait.
Police Officer 2: Anybody?
Coty: I don’t even know what I did wrong. You see what I’m saying?
Police Officer 2: Marijuana grow.
Coty: Yeah. What, my plants?
Police Officer 2: Yeah.
Coty: You feel good for busting some plants? I’m out here trying to stop [inaudible] coke and meth.
Police Officer 2: Welcome to the search warrant.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Because of the arrest you just watched, Coty has been given a $100,000 bail, has been charged with the manufacture and cultivation of a controlled substance, transporting a controlled substance, obstruction, intent to distribute, and resisting arrest are some of the pending charges he is facing.
Now, setting aside the debate over whether or not marijuana should be legal, there are several disturbing facts surrounding this case. I mean, just an aside, marijuana has proven to be one of the most beneficial medicinal plants mother nature has ever created. The fact that it is used to lock people in cages and confiscate their property is a philosophical debate that we have had on this show, but is still worth mentioning in the context of the case we’re examining now.
But there is more going on behind the scenes that we have unearthed since Coty’s family contacted us about this case. Not only did they violate his constitutional rights as we can see here, but the facts that we have discovered for this questionable arrest paint this entire ordeal in a light much more disturbing than the simple arrest we’re watching now.
Which is why we decided to do some work and find out exactly what happened to the warrant and to dig into the finances and the police department of the small town in West Virginia. So to delve deeper into what’s going on, 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: Now, Stephen, you have reached out, not just to police, but also prosecutors. What are they saying?
Stephen Janis: Well, they haven’t gotten back to me, but I had some questions. Number one, is there a warrant? Was there a warrant? Where is the warrant? And other questions about the case itself: Is it okay for people who have legal marijuana to bring it into the state if they get it from another state? Why is this case being prosecuted? And how, exactly, are plants and what quantity of plants do you have to have with intent to distribute? I mean, that is a huge crime, And what is the threshold? Because none of this case makes sense.
Taya Graham: You’ve been delving deeper into both the police department and the City of Milton in general. What have you uncovered? And what did you ask the mayor of Milton about what you found?
Stephen Janis: Well, they have been issuing a tremendous amount of fines, almost 25%, 30% of their operation budget comes from fines. Half a million dollars, $600,000. And you’re talking about a city with a population of 2,500 people. I did the calculations. It means every person in the city has to get $250 in fines a year, every man, woman, and child. And so I asked the mayor. I said, Mayor, what exactly is going on in this town? Why are people being charged so many fines? Why is your police department such a profit center? And then on top of that, the police department takes up half of the operations budget, $1 million a year. So the fines don’t even support it, but pays for a lot of it so they can have 10 police officers. So the finances of this city are very suspect, and I think questionable, and probably have a lot to do with this case.
Taya Graham: You also did something interesting and you reached out to the West Virginia tourism agency. Why did you do this? And what did they say?
Stephen Janis: Well, I asked them very specifically if people coming into West Virginia traveling who had bought marijuana legally in a state or had a medical card or had a prescription, if they should come to West Virginia at all, because if you’re going to arrest people who have medical marijuana, people need to know about it. And I said, look, we get between 100,000 and a million people who watch our show and we want to warn these people, don’t go to West Virginia if you have a medical marijuana card because they’re going to arrest you, which is what they just did in this case. Believe it or not, they have not gotten back to me. But I’m going to stay on them.
Taya Graham: Now, about 24 hours after you sent these emails, we got some breaking news on the case.
Stephen Janis: Yeah, 24 hours after I sent the emails, there was an emergency bail hearing that wasn’t scheduled, that was called for Coty that reduced his bail by $80,000, with the stipulation that he leave West Virginia. So pretty interesting that –
Taya Graham: Now wait a second. Do you think this is just a coincidence that Coty is given a hearing for a bail reduction after you sent emails to all these city officials? Or is there something else going on?
Stephen Janis: No, Taya, I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think this is actually something because we asked some very pointed questions about the case and pointed out some flaws in the case. Now, I just got word that they won’t accept the bail that was set by the magistrate and the case has been forwarded to circuit court. So he’s in kind of a limbo right now, but we’re going to keep on it. Certainly, I think they’re responding to our pressure at this point.
Taya Graham: And now for more details on what’s going on with Coty and why he’s still in jail and what this means for him and his family, I’m joined by his mother, Joni. Joni, thank you so much for joining us.
Joni Frye: Thank you, Danielle. I was so shocked when you messaged me back. Thank you so much for hearing our story and trying to help.
Taya Graham: Now first, how did Coty end up in West Virginia?
Joni Frye: He had broken a brake line on the highway, stopped at a campground where, luckily, we had family about an hour away – My brother’s there – That could help him fix the brake line. So he had paid for a short stay at the campground so that he could work on his brake line.
Taya Graham: Now, the video shows a prolonged standoff with police during which Coty continues to ask for a copy of the warrant. Can you talk a little bit about what we’re seeing?
Joni Frye: He’s like, give me a warrant and I will open the door peacefully and come out. He tells them that repeatedly. They threaten him. They make sly comments like, we know what you need. Talking about when he asked for the warrant and one of the officers literally says, I know what you need. Talking about beating him up or he needs a beating. And he’s like, look, I’m not trying to give you a hard time. Just show me the warrant and I will open the door. He’s like, you don’t have to break my stuff. So they crowbar the door. They bust in the window. And then he, the officer literally says to him, we’ll give you the warrant when it gets here.
Taya Graham: So they charged him with intent to distribute. How does that make sense?
Joni Frye: He had eight very small Delta flower plants, no buds on them. No nothing. Just like I said, you can imagine how small the closet of an RV is. And he literally, thank God, he goes to the closet, opens the curtain and says, I want everybody to see what this is all about.
Taya Graham: So how have authorities in West Virginia behaved since he was arrested?
Joni Frye: [Didn’t] get any cooperation from the police station down there where he’s at. They didn’t even want to help me figure out how to put commissary money on his… They didn’t even want to give me his inmate number. It took three phone calls for me to get his inmate number because they kept hanging up on me or being rude or transferring me to a line that wouldn’t pick up or, just to get an inmate number so that I could make sure that he had money to eat.
Taya Graham: Now, they also charged him with possession of a firearm. Why was there a gun in his RV?
Joni Frye: I have no clue, but my son has never been into guns or violence. The most trouble he has ever been in in his life was maybe theft, because when he was on drugs he got in some trouble for robbery. He went to prison for a year in Florida for robbery. He was strung out on drugs, but he’s completely turned his life around. He’s got a four year old who has slight autism. He’s not potty trained and he doesn’t speak yet, which they don’t like me to call it autism. They’re, I guess, hoping he’ll outgrow it. They’re young. They don’t want to believe that. But he also has a two year old little boy that he had custody of. Luckily they were with their mom at the time that this all happened. That’s why he was traveling, because they were with their mom. But 90% of the time they live with my son.
Taya Graham: And how has this ordeal affected him? How is Coty doing?
Joni Frye: Yeah, he’s a wreck. His four year old just had his fourth birthday. They’re being raised by a single mom who is very young and now they have no dad. He’s a wreck. He’s a wreck.
Taya Graham: Now, usually at this point in the show, I highlight some other aspect of policing which warrants attention because it’s related to the topic at hand. Meaning I pick an example of some egregious action or abuse by cops that I think would relate to the story we have just told. But today, I’m going to take a different tack. I’m going to take a deep dive into the City of Milton and examine the many ways it exemplifies all the problems with American policing and the overreach of the war on drugs that we talk about consistently on the show.
So, what do I mean? Well, as Stephen pointed out, the numbers in the city are stunning. In a community of only 2,500 people the Milton police have issued millions of dollars in fines over the past couple years, and in a city nestled in one of the poorest counties in the country where the median income is just $22,000. The amount of money spent on things like recreation and housing is a mere penny on the dollar compared to the cash invested in law enforcement. And an area that has been saturated with opioid pills and overdose deaths spends literally nothing on public health according to the budget documents we reviewed.
I mean, is there anything in the budget for addiction treatment or drug treatment centers or needle exchange or anything that might save lives? Not hardly. In fact, in addition to spending $1 million funding police operations, the town allocated an additional $400,000 of its capital budget to the cops, meaning for more police equipment or weapons, maybe tactical vests, while other social needs were simply ignored.
The point is that in this small little West Virginia town, you can see all the misplaced priorities that American policing projects in all its stark and irrefutable glory. This small rural community spends a million dollars on cops while allocating nothing for the type of infrastructure and social programs that could actually heal the people who are hurting. This tiny hamlet smack in the middle of rural America puts as much, if not more, into cops than my own crime-suffused City of Baltimore. How’s that for great public policy?
This is why, in general, Americans have lost faith in government. Because these questionable priorities reveal that the people who run this country care more about preserving their own power than they do about building stronger cities and communities. They’d rather invest in a badge and a gun than a school or a park. They’d rather assess fines and court fees to pay cops than build parks and recreation to beautify the city for the people who live there.
But that’s not all, not hardly, because just take a look at the Facebook page of the Milton Police Department. If you scroll down, you’ll see pictures of people at the worst moment of their lives disseminated to the public via an audience of potentially millions. Each one includes a little caption that paints a picture of the person as a downright despicable criminal, a person with no agency, no intrinsic value other than the fact that they are fodder for a police department Facebook page. And that’s the point.
And I would like to add that this police department’s Facebook page is doing actual harm. It’s not just ruining the reputation of the people they arrested, potentially keeping them from getting a job or housing, but is doing literal harm. One of the recent Facebook posts showed that the police arrested three people who called for help when a friend overdosed from opioids. They let the public know that if you call for help to save someone’s life, you can be arrested. Does that sound like a policy to protect and serve or preserve public safety? Does that sound like good policy for a country in the midst of an opioid epidemic?
What we see here is the classic intersection of propaganda and police overreach working in tandem to distort and deflect the humanity of a community. We see how police are now empowered to create their own propaganda that can be used against us. How they’ve become the narrator of our lives, and in doing so control the contours of our political agency.
Because now police can simply post pictures of the people they arrest and frame them in the worst possible light imaginable. People who are somebody’s daughter or son or father or brother are depicted as worthless criminals. Human beings who more than likely suffer from addiction or are trapped in poverty or have made bad choices are now permanently memorialized on a Facebook page standing in front of a freaking tape measure.
I mean, forgive me for crashing your Facebook take-down party, but I thought this country was built upon the notion that we are all innocent until proven guilty. Are we entitled to a speedy trial by the jury of our peers before the scarlet letter of criminality is eternally imprinted on our digital lives? Don’t all of us deserve the benefit of the doubt? Well, not in Milton.
That’s because in this town of 2,500 people we are witnessing the political economy of policing writ small. Meaning, the Facebook page and the aforementioned spending imbalance on cops are two sides of the same coin. Just think about it. Doesn’t it make sense that if you’re dedicating more resources to cops than any other line item, you need to prove that that money is well spent. Doesn’t it take a little taste of fear, so to speak, to coerce people to accept spending millions on law enforcement and almost nothing on parks and public health? I mean, if you’re putting almost all the money that you extract from the public through fines and fees into paying police salaries, don’t you need to conjure villains who can only be stopped by the brave heroes driving around the town? Isn’t it imperative that you create a narrative where cops are out there nightly protecting residents from the evil hoards that would take away their sense of peace and prosperity?
It is astonishing to me that this small town in West Virginia literally embodies all of the inequalities that arise from the raw political power of policing that we are constantly uncovering through our reporting on this show. We see here in Milton how the unjust imbalance between resources dedicated to cops and the money allotted for community improvement is maintained and even bolstered.
That’s why the story of the arrest of Coty is so illustrative of the problem of chronic over policing. We have a man who is minding his own business with some hemp plants who is now facing five charges, thousands of dollars in fines, and perhaps lengthy incarceration. And, of course, add on to that a $100,000 bond and attorney’s fees and what we have here is nothing more than monetizing misery.
So not only are the police in this town sucking up resources that might otherwise be spent on vital communal services, but they are literally using questionable arrests of people like Coty to keep the fear and the cash flowing. That’s why when we look at the finances of a city like Milton, we see the same fiscal malfeasance that makes policing such a destructive force across the country. We see a nation that collectively spends $200 billion on policing but can’t afford to guarantee healthcare for all its citizens.
We see a country that has 18,000 separate police departments, funding lavishly and without restraint, while the country can’t find housing for millions of homeless people or build affordable homes for the working class. We see a law enforcement industrial complex that routinely overrides the rights guaranteed in our Constitution while politicians and political elites do little to stop it.
That’s why the story of Coty matters. And that’s why what we have learned about the city is worth reporting. I think that what the City of Milton reveals about the overwhelming power of law enforcement to tax us and then spend on themselves is critically important to acknowledge because the imbalance of power exemplified in Milton affects every single one of us. And until we address it, or better, redress it, we will never have the community that we deserve.
And just as a side note, to counter the image of Coty the police have posted for all to see, let’s take a moment to show the loving father and caring son and human being that Coty actually is.
I’d like to thank my guest, Joni, Coty’s mother for taking the time to speak with us. Thank you, Joni.
And, of course, I have to thank Stephen Janis, the intrepid reporter, for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee.
And 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 with us. You can, of course, message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter, or you can message The Police Accountability Report on Facebook or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. It really helps us. And of course, I do read your comments and appreciate them, and I try to answer your questions whenever I can.
My name is Taya Graham and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
Inmates at the Danbury Federal Correctional Camp in Connecticut, also known as “Camp Cupcake,” have been overwhelmed by COVID-19. According to formal allegations from US Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, and Representative Jahana Hayes, over half of the women currently incarcerated at Danbury FCI tested positive for COVID-19 this month, often receiving little to no assistance from staff, which has only exacerbated the ongoing crisis. Advocates are demanding immediate action, including calling for the Bureau of Federal Prisons to release all incarcerated individuals who are medically vulnerable to finish their sentences through home confinement.
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, co-host-in-training Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speaks about the ongoing COVID crisis at Danbury with Dianthe Dawn Brooks and Wendy Kraus-Heitmann. Dianthe Dawn Brooks is a community organizer who was formerly incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Correctional Camp. Wendy Kraus-Heitmann is an advocate who has a passion for criminal justice reform, ending mass incarceration, and assisting justice impacted individuals reclaiming their lives. She lives in Connecticut, where she works on securing housing for returning citizens.
Charles Hopkins: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. A recent report states that 50% of the women at Danbury Correctional Facility have COVID. Here to talk about this is Wendy and Dawn. Thank you all for coming.
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: Thank you for having us. Thank you.
Charles Hopkins: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Give us a little background on the Danbury Prison. Is it a federal prison or is it a state prison? Either one of y’all can take it.
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: It’s a federal facility that houses men and women. They have both a camp, a medium for women and a medium for men. Low end medium for men.
Charles Hopkins: How many women are housed there?
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: Currently in the camp there are 84 people. When we were there it was a little over a hundred people.
Charles Hopkins: 84 people? Okay.
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: Yes.
Charles Hopkins: What are the conditions that the women are living under, Wendy?
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Well, it’s been very difficult right now because at the best of times the facilities at Danbury are rather run down and in serious need of repair. Honestly, the whole place needs to be bulldozed. It would never pass any sort of structural health inspection, construction, anything like that. So right now they’re in conditions where not only are they isolated and put into quarantine rooms, but they often do not have adequate heat. They don’t have hot water a lot of the time. And I don’t mean the hot water goes off now and then. I mean the majority of the time it’s off. And it’s not because somebody’s flipping a switch for punishment or anything. It’s just that the facility is that old, decrepit, and run down. So they are quarantined, segregated from one another in different units. And then on top of it they’ve got these decrepit facilities that they have to deal with.
And then when the food comes, it’s brought from an… Because there are three prisons on the same grounds. And so when the food is coming now they’re not cooking for themselves anymore, it’s coming from one of the other facilities. And they’re in styrofoam boxes. And a lot of times by the time you get it from one building to another, it’s cold and it’s been moved around a lot so it’s all mixed up. And I mean, that may sound small, but it actually… You mix like meat with some applesauce. It’s not a good thing. It’s difficult for them to have any kind of just adequate care. And you’re talking about people that are sick with COVID here. So…
Charles Hopkins: Right.
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Yeah. It’s difficult for them. And then on top of it, because of the way they’re quarantined, they haven’t had very much access, especially definitely not consistent access, to email, telephones, video visits. That’s all been cut off. And obviously the families are very worried about them. Because you don’t get any news of that. In other prisons… Like, I know someone right now who’s at Federal Medical Center in Rochester, in the men’s facility there, and in their unit they have telephones and computers. So they’re able to be locked down and still communicate with the outside world. But at Danbury you have to leave your unit to go to the telephones and the computers. So nobody’s able to go to them because they can’t keep them separate from one another.
Charles Hopkins: Right.
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Yeah. So it’s been really difficult, really difficult on their families.
Charles Hopkins: Right. Right. Why do you think there are so many cases of COVID in Danbury?
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: Because there’s no ability to have six feet distancing. You are in a cubicle for the camp, you’re in a cubicle with one bunkmate. There’s not even six feet between you and the person that you share that bunk with. And each bunk is literally like office cubicles, one next to the other. And the men’s facilities and the other women’s facilities, the women down the hill in the medium, they live in one big room. Literally. Their cubicle walls are half walls. So you could see from one place to the other and everybody’s breathing all over each other And so, there’s just no way for them to properly distance. That was the whole point in pushing to get people out of Danbury when we had the court order under Judge Shea that they could release as many people as possible in the CARES Act because it’s impossible for them to do what’s right, to ensure that people are safe.
Charles Hopkins: And as you speak of the CARES Act, what is the administration doing to remedy this?
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: The administration has done very little. The first group of people that got released didn’t get released because they properly used the CARES Act. They got released because we literally sued in the Connecticut court and it was an order issue that made them have to let people go without the parameters of how much time they had and all the other minor things that they were trying to take into consideration. That settlement agreement expired in October. And we only know of one person that has left the facility under CARES Act since the expiration of that order.
For the camp, there’s really no reason for people to be there. If you made it to the camp you’re already low or minimum in most cases. To be in a camp you have to be considered secure because there are no locked doors and all of those various things. You could really walk off the premises. So the idea that those folks can’t be transferred to home confinement is really silly. There’s no barriers that prevent them from doing it outside of BOP. It’s a prison. It’s meant to confine people. And so, they look at every possible way to keep somebody inside versus every possible way to release them.
Charles Hopkins: Right. What’s going on on the outside? Who’s occupying that space to try to highlight this and bring this to them other than yourselves?
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Okay. So in the community, we’re actually pretty lucky. There have been several different groups. One of them is the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. They’ve been helping a lot. At different times the ACLU has been involved as well. And there’s no way that I could say enough about how much work and effort the people at FAMM, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, have done. Like, they’ve all been advocating and trying to talk to politicians, legislators, even the president, to try to get something done here and in the administrations.
But it’s not just them either. There’s groups of legal advocacy clinics in the Quinnipiac Law School and in Yale also. And there’s even like a couple of places that… And I hesitate to name them because I don’t know how much they want it known that they want it done, but they know who they are and they’ll appreciate the shout out. But there’ve been a couple law firms that have stuck their neck out and tried to file some actions to try to get some more information out of there so that we can have statistics and numbers so that when we go in public and say, hey, they could be releasing a lot more. Well, how do you know that? How many people? Well, because their statistics say so. And we’re waiting on those statistics right now, but we know that they’re there because we’ve talked to the people inside who are absolutely eligible for CARES. They should be out.
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: In addition, we’ve had Color of Change that has been working with us for almost a year now on various priorities. They have a petition out right now relevant to Danbury. You could find it on their Color of Change website. And we’ve also had some involvement from the Ladies of Hope Ministry. So not to try to leave anybody out.
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Yeah. I don’t even know all of the groups. So thank you, Dawn, for chipping in on them.
Charles Hopkins: Okay. But we have a vast and a broad network of people supporting the women at Danbury. How are the women? Well, how are their spirits in regard to what’s going on with them?
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: I think everybody’s frustrated right now. We know more could be done by the administration and BOP and they’re just not doing it. We’ve had several actions over the last year and a half. When we first came out last year we organized a protest to highlight the conditions that were still going on and the fact that even with the Judge’s order they were slow to release people. And it’s continued. So I think right now if you were to talk to any advocate or entity we would all say the same thing. They could do a lot more and they’re just not. And so we’re going to continue to put the pressure on them, hoping that at some point, somebody will make a decision that is right, and that is to release as many people as possible so that they could lessen the spread of COVID and keep people safe.
Charles Hopkins: Right. And what can the general public do? We know that we got this vast network as you outlined. But what can the general public do to heighten the attention about the conditions that the women at Danbury are undergoing at this time?
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: I’m going to start. Wendy, you could chime in. But you could start with signing that petition, you can call your local US Congress and senators who have legislative authority over BOP and the Department of Justice. You can call BOP and complain. There are many Facebook pages with actions and there are even some protests being planned. If they just plug into the network, they would get information as we move forward. On Facebook, we have a page, Don’t Send Them Back, and I’ll let Wendy take it from there because she could explain.
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Okay. So in addition to all those things, one of the things that I think is really difficult when you’re somebody who’s still inside is you feel completely cut off from the rest of the world. Even though you do have some email or phone privileges, although the women of Danbury don’t really have them very consistently right now, it’s still not the unimpeded communication that people have the liberty to enjoy when they’re outside, obviously. So it feels very lonely. It feels like people are just going on with their lives and don’t care about you. So if you have people who are inside, send them letters for goodness sake. And there are several groups that you can get involved with that will match you with people.
There’s this wonderful journalist. She’s on Twitter a lot, but she’s very, very prominent and had stuff published nationwide. Keri Blakinger. And she will hook you up with people who need books because that’s the best way to pass time ever. She’s got a whole list of people and books that they would love to have sent to them. And you can do things like that. If you want to help somebody directly, just to lift their spirits up.
We do have a group, when Dawn and I got out, one of the things that we noticed right away was that people were in danger of being sent back. Now that we did all this work to get out, we certainly didn’t want to be sent back. So we formed a group called Don’t Send Us Back. There’s a website, dontsendusback.org, and it connects to all our various social media. We’re on Twitter, we’re on Facebook. We have the website itself. And we just coordinate with one another and tell each other things like, be careful to make sure you answer all your calls when they call. Be careful that you don’t use mouthwash that has alcohol in it. Make sure you check your mouthwash because that can be problematic if you just brushed your teeth and then you go do a breathalyzer. You know? Things like that.
And also just helping people navigate the bureaucracy, sometimes, of making sure that they stay out. And in addition, because we know how blessed we are, literally, to be out, how extremely lucky we are, privileged, straight up, to be out, we also spend time keeping track of the people who are still inside and finding out what we can do. A lot of us, because we got out the way we did, we have a lot of legal contacts. So we help them. We try to point lawyers to situations where they need help and where they might need even more help. Like, the people at Alderson right now are going through it in a horrible way. Absolutely like human rights violation level stuff. And we’ve tried to reach out to help them in any way that we can in the same way.
So these are the things that you can do. But one of the best things that you can do that impacts the most, honestly, is call your congressional reps and your senators because they’re the ones who have the influence over the BOP. And they’re the ones who do things like have the judiciary committee meetings where they drag them in there and they ask them questions, and they have to answer to them. And so if you are writing your representative to sing like, hey, this is important to me, that helps. It really does.
Charles Hopkins: Okay, good. Why do you think that the women’s prison’s prisoners are being subjected to such harsh treatment unlike the men?
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: I think the men organized better. Up until us in Danbury there had not been a contingent of women that really stuck together around the issue. We organized while we were inside. So things that we didn’t like we came together to not go to the cafeteria or various things like that that the men are excellent at. But the women are not normally as good at it. And so that leaves some room because when the men start acting up they immediately cave and give them what they want but they’re not accustomed to the women coming together. So I know it had been done years ago and we brought it back while we were there. And we continue to try to tell the people who are inside now, through their families and loved ones, how they can come together so that they can continue to fight, what information to send out so that we can try to be helpful to them.
But I think it’s just a lack of people really understanding what prisons represent. These camps get nicknamed as Camp Cupcake and all of these different things when in all reality they are horrible situations and places. They lack medical care, they lack cleaning supplies. You have bathrooms with mold and mildew. You have conditions that are just deplorable. No human person should live there. And so, the idea that you are, because you’re at a camp, some luxury… I know my image of what a camp was, having never gone to prison, was totally different than my experience. And I would imagine that many people think the same thing. And so, just getting people to really understand what it represents and how bad the conditions are because it’s unfathomable when you really think about it.
Charles Hopkins: Thank you, all. Any final thoughts that y’all want to share with the public? And y’all would split it up and give us your insights on what you want to share with the public.
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: I would love to see as many people as possible write letters, call their congressional and their senate candidates, join FAMM, Color of Change, some of those organizations that are helping us so that you can continue to stay on the list and get information as we move forward with whatever we’re doing. Petitions, sometimes we have Facebook chats, et cetera. And if you have a loved one there or know somebody there, please not only stay in touch with them, but if you get information that could be helpful as we organize, you can find both Wendy and I on Facebook or on Twitter. And we welcome you sharing whatever information that will help us continue to stay in contact with the women and men inside and to move forward with the issues that they’re having.
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Yeah.
Charles Hopkins: And Wendy?
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: In addition to all of that, which I absolutely agree with too, one thing that I really want people to understand though is that this is not just a Danbury issue. We’re, what, not even three weeks into the year yet and already three women from Alderson have died from COVID. Camp Cupcake. Are you kidding me? This is serious. And what’s really tragic is there’s at least two of them that I think might have been CARES eligible and definitely would’ve been very much closer to their out dates had their first step credits been applied in a timely manner. And yet, they were stuck in that prison to get that. And here’s the thing. People say like, well, you can get COVID outside too. Absolutely you can. And you can also choose your treatment. You can choose when you want to seek out medical assistance. You can choose what kind of medication you do or don’t want to take. You are in charge of things.
When you are incarcerated, you are at the mercy of whoever thinks that you are sick enough to go to the hospital or not, sick enough to merit care or not. And it must be stated, there is a presumption underlying everything involving incarceration that the inmate is lying. That is the first thing that they start with assuming. So if you go to them and you say, I’m sick. I’m hurt. Somebody beat me up. Somebody treated me wrong. My rights are being violated, the first thing that any staff member or administrative person, whether it be the BOP or the government, thinks is the inmate is lying. So when you’re sick and miserable and you need healthcare and you say, I’m dying. Send me the hospital, they think you’re saying it for attention. They think you’re saying it just because you want to go somewhere on a field trip.
So they ignore you until they’re really sure. That’s where you get the stories of women giving birth in jail cells. It’s like that. And I really want people to understand that. Also, that these people that we’re talking about in the federal prison camps, Dawn mentioned it earlier, that there are no locks. There are no fences. And they are still staying there in these deplorable conditions because they don’t want to get in trouble. They don’t want to get more charges. They don’t want to get brought back by the marshals. They’re afraid to get in trouble. They’re trying to follow the rules and they’re staying there for that. So you’re going to tell me that they’re a danger in the community? Are you serious right now? Come on. So we’ve got to get these people out. There’s no reason they shouldn’t be in the communities.
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: When you take a place like Danbury, the camp specifically, there is no nurse or doctor assigned there every day from some time period. They have a person that comes in in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening to give out medicine and take sick calls. But there’s no person physically there. So if something happens to you, you have to wait for them to even call medical to come up to the building, depending on who determines what the priority is, depends on how long it takes.
We’ve had scenarios where women have been… I had an allergic reaction to peanuts while I was inside and it took them literally about two hours to get a person up. Thankfully, I was not dying, but I had already turned beet red, I was starting to break out. And the idea that you have to wait on medical without somebody really even assessing how serious it is. And if you look at today’s COVID statistics on BOP, they reached their highest numbers since the pandemic started of COVID positive staff and inmates. So that means they didn’t learn anything from a year plus ago when we started this. And so they have to be willing to do something different. And unless we demand it, it’s not going to happen.
Charles Hopkins: One last question. Why do you think the BOP is so reluctant to let these women go? As you outlined, the lesser security and the lesser security, they can literally walk away. Why do you think the BOP is so harsh on not wanting to let these women go?
Dianthe Dawn Brooks:I remind people every day that BOP is responsible for keeping a person incarcerated. Their job, their correction officers, their staff is paid as a function of the number of inmates. A lot of them have that same attitude of, you should just shut up and do your time. They don’t care about conditions, et cetera. Much like we talk about that Code Blue within police departments, they have some of those same codes within correctional facilities. And so, you don’t have any rights. You’re not perceived as a person. You’re literally perceived as a number. Your registration number is what you are known by in most cases. And so, it really dehumanizes the person that is sitting there incarcerated and what should be done for them versus what is.
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Well, I think one of the first things that should be done is that the BOP needs to be ordered to release anybody who is CARES eligible. I don’t understand why it’s even a question. Like, most of the prisons looked at the CARES Act, and from what we can see, just thought of it as optional. Considering how many people we’ve run into, family members who have contacted us say, why isn’t my person out? They’ve got this much time in, they like they’ve never had a shot, they’re a low risk is called their recidivism score. Like, why aren’t they out? Well, I don’t know. They just don’t want to.
And people have filed the forms requesting to be evaluated for CARES home confinement and gotten a note back from the warden saying like, well, we don’t have COVID here right now. So we’re not going to do that. In another facility, the warden replied that even though there was COVID there at the moment, they were perfectly fine handling it there themselves. So they didn’t need to use CARES. It’s like, this wasn’t a choice. You’re supposed to be doing this. Congress gave you a direct order.
Charles Hopkins: Right. And Dawn, what’s your final thought?
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: I believe we need to take it one step further and we need to look at how we decarcerate these prison systems as a whole. Prisons were never designed for women, and so they shouldn’t be there. In most cases, there are alternatives. We need to look at mental health counseling. We need to look at drug treatment programs. We need to look at the reasons why our women are ending up being incarcerated and let’s change the system. And in the cases where people make mistakes, let’s find alternatives. There are community outlets that could be utilized to keep people on the outside. They’ve used home confinement effectively for 18 months for many of us who were released. We had the lowest recidivism rate in history. And so, that shows that it can be done. It’s proven that you could release people and your community would still be safe and they would not end up being violated, et cetera. And so let’s use that more to look at alternatives to jail cells for women.
Charles Hopkins: Now you have it. Dawn and Wendy are rattling the bars. Thank you for joining us in this edition of Rattling the Bars. We appreciate your support for these women of Danbury, for these two women that are doing remarkable work on behalf of incarcerated people throughout the country. Thank you very much.
Dianthe Dawn Brooks: Thank you very much for having us on the show, for caring about the issue, and for your entire team. We look forward to coming back again, hopefully on another subject that won’t be, because we’re going to fight to free our women and our men from this process.
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann: Yes. Thank you.
Charles Hopkins: On behalf of Eddie and myself, we appreciate you for participating in this episode of Rattling the Bars. Thank you very much.
A recent HBO documentary entitled The Slow Hustle has brought renewed attention to the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter in 2017. Police initially claimed Suiter was the victim of a lone assailant after his body was found in a West Baltimore alley with a gunshot wound to the head. But as details began to emerge regarding Suiter’s involvement with some of Baltimore’s most corrupt cops, the case took a turn that raised serious questions about what actually happened and if his death was part of a broader cover-up.
Shortly after Suiter died, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis produced a podcast series that looked behind the scenes and examined how Suiter’s death told a more complex story about police corruption in Baltimore. In Part III of this podcast series, Graham and Janis explore the bombshell revelation that Suiter’s mysterious death occurred one day before he was supposed to testify in a major corruption investigation regarding the Baltimore Police Department’s infamous Gun Trace Task Force.
Transcript
The transcript of this podcast is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.
The efforts of cop watchers and First Amendment auditors to record police continues to be a controversial subject. Some use aggressive tactics that critics say go too far, others argue the country’s law-enforcement-industrial complex needs to be aggressively challenged to yield results. PAR examines the contours of this debate through the case of Denver cop watcher DJ Kdot the party. Dj Kdot was arrested by police in Aurora, Colorado, for allegedly interfering with an investigation while filming a traffic stop. What happened when the case went to trial reveals much about the state of cop watching today, the extent of our First Amendment protections, and the expansive reach of the US criminal justice system.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
The transcript for this video is being processed and will be posted as soon as possible.
When a former Baltimore Police Commissioner suggested to a subordinate that he put child pornography on a problem cop’s computer, at least one person in the room wasn’t sure if it was a joke or not. That’s just one of the many anecdotes of misconduct detailed in a shocking report on the Baltimore Police Department released last week.
According to the report, Sean Malone, the police department Chief of Legal Affairs at the time, overheard former Baltimore Commissioner Ed Norris openly discussing Robert Richards, a cop who was “among the most vocal of the Black BPD members on the issue of racial discrimination,” and who was also “accused by five female police officers under his command of sexual harassment—actions that included exposing himself.”
This massive 515-page report is teeming with stories of misconduct, abuses of power, and straight-up illegal activity.
“Richards will probably have child pornography on his computer in a few weeks,” Malone recalled Norris saying to others in the room.
That anecdote, by the way, is hidden in a footnote, which is to say: This massive 515-page report is teeming with stories of misconduct, abuses of power, and straight-up illegal activity.
Another one: In September 2000, a cop named Brian Sewell planted drugs on a teenager he identified as a local dealer who had frequently evaded drug charges. The problem was: The drugs Sewell planted on the teenager were swiped from a nearby park bench—and those drugs had, in turn, been planted there by other Baltimore cops as an “integrity sting” to see what Sewell would do if he stumbled upon drugs.
Sewell did not pass the test.
The report, titled “Anatomy of The Gun Trace Task Force Scandal: Its Origins, Causes, and Consequences,” is ostensibly a look at how the 2017 Gun Trace Task Force scandal involving stealing and drug-dealing cops came to be, but anecdotes such as the two above reach all the way back to the early 2000s. The result is a damning presentation of how, on both a micro and macro level, the Baltimore Police Department has been awash in corruption and rights-violating behavior for decades.
The report illustrates how the “Gun Trace Task Force,” created to trace guns and connect them to shootings and gun dealers—similar to tactics used when building a drug case—quickly became another police squad running around Baltimore and chasing anybody (and, mostly, young Black men) who might be in possession of a weapon. Many of the squad’s members, including those who were later indicted, were well-known problem officers racking up internal affairs complaints with little consequence.
Many of the squad’s members, including those who were later indicted, were well-known problem officers racking up internal affairs complaints with little consequence.
Kevin A. Jones, the commander who transitioned the unit to this even more chaotic, even less effective approach to policing, and who seemingly overlooked internal affairs complaints, is still with the department.
“The GTTF under Jones did not express any special interest in—nor had they shown any aptitude for—the investigations and analysis needed to make cases,” the report says. “The abandonment of the GTTF’s original mission was reflected in various ways, including in the personnel selections made by Jones, which included Momodu Gondo and Jemell Rayam. Jones had previously supervised both men in an operations squad and felt comfortable with them, even though neither had shown any particular investigative or analytic talent.”
The report also notes how, after Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (who would later oversee GTTF) was shown to have lied about the nature of a 2014 car stop where he apparently helped plant cocaine in a man’s car, internal affairs was encouraged to back off and reduce Jenkins’ punishment. Darryl DeSousa, who was a deputy commissioner at the time (and, later, police commissioner), supposedly intervened on Jenkins’ behalf. The report notes that DeSousa was “known throughout BPD as someone with little interest in or commitment to accountability.” It later adds that when the report’s investigators spoke to DeSousa, he “somewhat lamely said he had ‘no clue’ that any of the GTTF members were ‘involved in any of this,’ and that he would have increased the punishment if he had known.”
DeSousa himself served time in federal prison due to the fallout from the scandal when it was revealed he had been lying about his income on his taxes.
By all accounts, even while racking up arrest numbers and gun seizure numbers, GTTF was unsuccessful at reducing crime—and often created crime.
Data obtained by Battleground Baltimore shows that in 2007, the year GTTF was founded, Baltimore Police seized 3,495 guns. That year, there were 282 murders and 651 nonfatal shootings.
In 2016, the last full year GTTF was operational, there were 318 murders and 666 nonfatal shootings. The police seized 2,124 guns that year.
In 2018, the year after GTTF was federally indicted, Baltimore Police actually seized more guns than it had in years, with 3,911 guns seized. That year there were 309 murders and 677 nonfatal shootings.
The independent investigation was overseen by law firm Steptoe & Johnson and was paid for by the City.
“Our investigation demonstrated that the corruption within the GTTF began long before the officers joined forces on that squad, and was by no means limited to that squad,” lead investigator Michael R. Bromwich said in a press statement. “Our investigation also revealed that several of the officers involved were known to engage in misconduct on a continuing basis, but that the internal mechanisms within BPD were inadequate to the task of disciplining them appropriately and terminating them when the facts justified it.”
Also, a disclosure: The report cites I Got a Monster, the book about police corruption that I co-authored. My co-author, Baynard Woods, was interviewed for the report.
In terms of the sheer magnitude of corruption, the GTTF report recalls the 2016 Department of Justice investigative report into the Baltimore Police Department—the result of a civil rights investigation into the department following the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody. That report, which made national headlines, detailed the department’s routine violation of civil rights and flagrant disregard for accountability.
“It’s sad that we need an official report to verify things Black citizens have been saying for decades,” Organizing Black’s Ralikh Hayes told The Intercept back in 2016. “The culture of policing in this city is extremely corrupt and little things like policy reforms won’t fix it.”
That report, apparently, only touched the surface of the rot within BPD. For instance, the DOJ’s report did not uncover the Gun Trace Task Force, the vast, drug-dealing, money-stealing, evidence-planting, criminal conspiracy operating within the Baltimore Police Department. For nearly a decade, a number of police officers and commanders had been either directly involved in this theft-and-drug-dealing ring or had conveniently looked the other way.
In March 2017, months after the DOJ report was released, seven Baltimore police officers were federally indicted as part of the Gun Trace Task Force scandal, which led to the release of last week’s report—much the same way the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray led to the 2016 DOJ report.
Hearings about enacting recommendations introduced in the DOJ report have often focused on ways to provide the police with more resources, including money. Indeed, Baltimore City Council members said that part of the reason why citywide calls to defund the police did not happen is because the Consent Decree compels the city to maintain the police budget.
Once again, Baltimore City’s defense attorneys delivered a much-deserved “We told you so” when the GTTF scandal report was released last week. Lawyers who represent Baltimoreans who have had encounters with dirty cops are often the only ones who hear about the extent of police corruption and actually sound the alarm.
Deborah Katz Levi, director of special litigation for Baltimore City’s Office of the Public Defender, had many cases involving GTTF officers and was in charge of going through thousands of their previous cases, locating people who needed to be released from prison.
“The report documents what we, as public defenders, already knew to be true: corruption, violence, and illegality run deep within the Baltimore Police Department—going back decades and ingrained in its culture,” Levi said in a statement. “This is exacerbated by prosecutors who withhold information about corrupt officers and judges who let them act without checks, resulting in the continued abuse, harassment, and wrongful imprisonment of Baltimore residents.”
Defense attorney Ivan Bates had more than 30 cases involving GTTF cops, and his experiences helped lead to the federal indictments against them. In 2018, he ran against Marilyn Mosby for Baltimore City State’s Attorney and lost (and is running again this year). In a statement, he pointed fingers at Mosby’s office in particular.
“The Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office blatantly ignor[ed] the activities of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) and allow[ed] members of the force to testify in court to assist their pursuit of increasing their number of convictions,” Bates said in a statement. “The culture of overlooking corruption in order to elevate the number of convictions must end.”
Bates saw firsthand the city’s prosecutors overlooking this corruption. During a hearing for one of his clients, who was illegally stopped, arrested, and charged with gun and cocaine possession and later had his house broken into by the cops, Bates realized how none of that seemed to matter to prosecutors and judges. Body camera footage of the questionable arrest and subsequent scheming to break into the man’s house was ignored.
“This [case] is a pullover at a gas station,” the assistant state’s attorney told Bates. “So [the body camera footage] has nothing to do with this case.”
Bates’ client in that case only had his charges dropped after the federal indictments.
Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has not commented on the new report. Then again, Mosby has been quite busy. On Jan. 14, the same day the report was released, Mosby was federally indicted, effectively overshadowing the report—particularly among the national press, where liberal pundits have come to Mosby’s defense with a severe lack of proper context.
The report also includes a number of recommendations on how to change Baltimore Police. Commissioner Michael Harrison, in a letter to Bromwich and company, said many of its recommendations were already implemented.
“Your recommendations provide a clear roadmap; and by implementing them, along with our Consent Decree, BPD can write the next chapter in our history, one that the residents of Baltimore can be proud to call their own,” Harrison wrote.
As Battleground Baltimore has reported, hearings about enacting recommendations introduced in the DOJ report have often focused on ways to provide the police with more resources, including money. Indeed, Baltimore City Council members said that part of the reason why citywide calls to defund the police did not happen is because the Consent Decree compels the city to maintain the police budget.
Residents calling for the City Council to reduce the Baltimore Police Department’s budget have often cited the GTTF scandal as precisely why less money needs to be spent on police.
Following last year’s budget increase, which puts the annual police budget at $555 million, police spending continued to increase throughout the rest of 2021 and into 2022, as Battleground Baltimore reported last week.
At this week’s Board of Estimates hearing, two settlements were approved for victims of the GTTF: one for $120,000, the other for $75,000.
The “Anatomy of The Gun Trace Task Force Scandal: Its Origins, Causes, and Consequences” report itself also cost Baltimore City $4.47 million.
On Jan. 26, there will be a hearing about the report, organized by City Councilperson Mark Conway, chair of the council’s Public Safety and Government Operations Committee.
“The report lays out a number of issues, and failures, that enabled the GTTF’s shocking actions to occur without accountability for years. Its findings are difficult and at times disturbing to read, but necessary for the forward progress of the department,” Conway said in a statement.
Malcolm X was assassinated over 50 years ago, but organizations like the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) are carrying on the fight for Black liberation today, winning important victories and developing crucial organizing strategies that social justice movements everywhere can learn from. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway and cohost-in-training Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speak with Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele about the crucial lessons MXGM organizers have learned over the years through their efforts to liberate political prisoners, organize and empower Black communities, and combat the apparatuses of state violence. Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele is a community organizer, educator, and member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. He is also the National Strategies and Partnerships Director at Movement for Black Lives and cofounder of the world-renowned Black August Hip Hop Project.
A recent HBO documentary entitled The Slow Hustle has brought renewed attention to the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter in 2017. Police initially claimed Suiter was the victim of a lone assailant after his body was found in a West Baltimore alley with a gunshot wound to the head. But as details began to emerge regarding Suiter’s involvement with some of Baltimore’s most corrupt cops, the case took a turn that raised serious questions about what actually happened and if his death was part of a broader cover-up.
Shortly after Suiter died, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis produced a podcast series that looked behind the scenes and examined how Suiter’s death told a more complex story about police corruption in Baltimore. In Part 2 of this podcast series, Graham and Janis take a closer look at the Baltimore Police Department’s own investigation into Suiter’s death and explain why the facts don’t add up.
Transcript
Stephen Janis: Anyone who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered, barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances, the case is solved. That is, through high tech forensics, moral resolve, or simply the near-mythic competence of American law enforcement, killers are ultimately sent to jail. But as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.
Taya Graham: And that is the point of this podcast, because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics. It’s a psychic toll of stories untold that infects an entire community. The final, violent moments of a victim’s life that remain shrouded in mystery.
Stephen Janis: I’m Stephen Janis.
Taya Graham: I’m Taya Graham.
Stephen Janis: And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore city.
Taya Graham: Welcome to The Land of the Unsolved.
Speaker 1: This callous coward with a gun in his hand shot a cop in the head tonight.
Speaker 2: My heart grieves for Detective Sean Suiter.
Speaker 3: There’s no way that I would think, if you are a good partner, that you are going to lose sight of me.
Speaker 4: Now, if they thought, at the smallest level, that it involved police officers tied to their case, there’s no way they would’ve given that case back.
Steven Tabeling: Listen, after a case gets 72 hours old, it gets cold. If you don’t do something in 72 hours, you really have a problem.
Kevin Davis: There’s a radio transmission, a very brief radio transmission, made by Detective Suiter. It was about two or three seconds. It’s unintelligible right now. We don’t know exactly what he said, but he was clearly in distress.
Taya Graham: Welcome back to The Land of the Unsolved, the podcast that explores the legions of unsolved cases and mysterious deaths that haunt one of the most violent cities in America: Baltimore. In our first series, we are talking about the case of Detective Sean Suiter, a case that has come to embody all the ills that affect Baltimore. Police corruption, community mistrust, and a general sense that things are not what they appear to be.
Stephen Janis: Suiter was found on Nov. 15, shot in the head in a West Baltimore alley. The bullet that entered the back of his head came from his own gun.
Taya Graham: Police initially insisted Suiter was shot by an unknown assailant. But as we’ve learned, that theory was in doubt from the beginning.
Stephen Janis: Just a week after Suiter was shot there was still no evidence of an assailant, reporter Jayne Miller also reporting that Suiter was shot with his own gun.
Taya Graham: And the police commissioner admits there is no evidence of struggle or a lone gunman.
Stephen Janis: But after a massive funeral and a week with few, if any, leads, a bombshell announcement at police headquarters.
Kevin Davis: I am now aware of Detective Suiter’s pending federal grand jury testimony surrounding an incident that occurred several years ago with BPD police officers who were federally indicted in March of this year. The acting United States Attorney and the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office have told me in no uncertain terms that Detective Suiter was not the target of any ongoing criminal investigation.
Taya Graham: Police commissioner Kevin Davis revealed that Suiter was set to testify before a federal grand jury in the case of the now infamous Gun Trace Task Force. Investigative reporter Jayne Miller was there.
Jayne Miller: So on Nov. 22, exactly a week after the shooting, Kevin Davis held a news conference and said he was supposed to testify before the federal grand jury about the Gun Trace Task Force case on Nov. 16. We also reported with an interview with the US Attorney Steve Schenning that the Feds didn’t know what he was going to say. So that remains one of the great mysteries of this case, is what was he going to say? The Gun Trace Task Force is the, at the time, elite unit of officers, detectives, whose mission was to get guns off the street. In March of 2017, 7 members of the unit, a Sergeant and six detectives, were indicted on federal corruption charges, essentially robbing people, stealing from them, skimming money and drugs from them.
Stephen Janis: The implications that Suiter was somehow involved with ties to a case dating back to 2010.
Jayne Miller: So I was also hearing a narrative in the kind of rumbling around surrounding the case that he was very concerned that he was going to get outed in the case and that he had shown some concern about that.
Taya Graham: It was a case that involved a car chase, an accident, and the death of the father of a Baltimore police officer.
Jayne Miller: So there was a car stop in April of 2010 that involved Jenkins and Suiter and another officer. And they stopped these two guys because Jenkins thought – This is what Jenkins wrote in his charging document – That they were about to have transact drugs, that they had too much money, whatever. He saw a guy with cash. So they stopped them. Suiter was in one car and Jenkins and the other officer were in another car. So they kind of boxed him in. The guys, the two guys who were in the car, they indicate that they were, I don’t want to say… They didn’t say they were wearing full masks, but they indicated that they had on plain clothes and they weren’t quite sure, they thought they were going to get robbed. They weren’t quite sure what was going to go on. So the two guys in the car take off. They somehow get their car out of that little box and they take off and they drive a short distance. And Jenkins and Suiter are both in pursuit in some fashion.
And the car runs through an intersection and hits another car and causes a pretty bad crash. And as a result of that an 86-year-old man died, as a result of the accident. At the time, the two men – The names are Brent Matthews and Umar Burley – Were charged with drug possession. I mean, because allegedly there were drugs found in the car after the accident. So they were charged with drug charges. The case went to the federal government. They get convicted federally. That’s kind of the end of it. And Mr. Burley gets convicted of, he pleads guilty to manslaughter in the state court. And that’s kind of the end of that. Well, in fact, what happened was the drugs were planted and that comes to light because of the testimony of the other officer. And Suiter was the one who found the planted drugs.
I think it was Mr. Burley who described Suiter as kind of the good cop, bad cop. That he was like, look, you’ll be okay, whatever, at the initial stop. And then Suiter’s role allegedly, after the crash, was to discover the planted drugs. And there’s no allegation that Suiter put the drugs in the car. There’s no allegation that he knew the drugs were planted. The other officer who testified against Jenkins said that Suiter was clueless. But obviously the question remains whether Suiter knew that that was all dirty.
Stephen Janis: And now, for Sean Yoes, editor of the AFRO-American newspaper, all the simmering doubts that had been roiling the community about the case came to the surface.
Sean Yoes: And then, again, once we found out that he was due to testify against his own colleagues, then I think it just seemed like almost a watershed moment for most people. They had a good thing. They were making money. I mean, they were getting paid between the overtime and robbing of drug dealers. I mean, you bust a guy for $25,000, split it among your men, and you’re already getting 80 G’s in extra overtime money a year. And then you can get $5,000, $10,000 a month on top of that.
Taya Graham: And for retired homicide detective Stephen Tabeling it was another piece of a bizarre puzzle that was not coming together.
Steven Tabeling: The thing is, I’ve had cases where somebody would be near a window and shoot themself in the head. And just remember, the gun goes off and your hand goes and the gun might go outside. You might find a gun feet away. Would it be logical to find a gun underneath him? Yeah, it could happen. That could happen. But again, where were the shell casings? Where were the shell casings? You can tell what side. You can tell maybe if the guy was left-handed or right-handed or what side. But again, these are things that you have to see.
Stephen Janis:For Miller, who spent a great deal of time in Harlem Park, the belief was also building among community members that Suitor was a victim of foul play.
Jayne Miller: Well, there was already strong belief in the West Baltimore community that this was a hit on Suiter. And then it really exacerbated that.
Taya Graham: And she notes the testimony was high stakes for Suiter.
Jayne Miller: He likely would have been immunized before the grand jury. I don’t know that that was his concern as much as he was going to be exposed. And in fact, he was exposed. If you remember, there was testimony from one of the detectives who testified in trial that Suiter was among those who took money.
Steven Tabeling: I didn’t see the man. I didn’t see his body. Only thing I know is what was said. But it’s very difficult for me to believe that somebody just walked up and put a gun in his head. It’s tough to believe.
Stephen Janis: Both Taya and I attended the trial of two other members of the Gun Trace Task Force, Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor. They were the only cops of the now nine officers who had pleaded not guilty.
Taya Graham: Both were convicted at trial. I think it’s important to understand just how brazen and destructive this group was and how that culture has played into the suspicions about the Suiter case. During the trial, prosecutors called a long list of witnesses: drug dealers who they robbed, a bail bondsman who helped them deal pills stolen from pharmacies during the uprising after the death of Freddie Gray.
Stephen Janis: But one story stood out for its brazenness. Not satisfied with dealing drugs and cash from narcotics work, the officers began to branch out and look for more opportunities to steal.
Taya Graham: So one of the GTTF members obtained an auto tracking device from the police department and placed it on the car of a person they had been told kept large amounts of cash in his home. They tracked his location. And when he was gone, they attempted to rob his house.
Stephen Janis: But when they arrived and broke into the house, the victim’s girlfriend was lying on the bed. And I remember in the courtroom, the defense lawyer asking, what did you do? And the officer said something like, I may have threatened her life.
Taya Graham: The point of the story is that the GTTF was so out of control, so literally unsupervised that they operated with the impunity of a criminal organization deep within the Baltimore Police Department.
Stephen Janis: And that is why, as the investigation into the death of Detective Sean Suiter unfolded, the community’s suspicions that what the top brass was telling them was hiding something deeper and more sinister beneath the surface only became more intense.
Taya Graham: And as details of the case were revealed that Suiter was set to testify about, a different picture emerged that didn’t jibe with the image of a hero cop.
Stephen Janis: Instead, the story of the 2010 accident included details of planting drugs, and more importantly, a longer relationship between Suiter and the mastermind of the Gun Trace Task Force scandal, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins.
Taya Graham: Jenkins was the supervisor of the task force, but he was also the ringleader of the criminal activity, guiding the squad of seven officers through an array of horrific crimes: robbing residents, shaking down drug dealers, and dealing large quantities himself.
Jayne Miller: I can tell you how he’s been described by other members of the squad when they’ve testified and the bail bondsman who knows him very well, that was the guy who was selling his drugs, selling drugs for him, is that he felt very empowered by his position in the Gun Trace Task Force and that he felt like he could go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and do whatever he wanted. And I mean, Gondo, I think it was Gondo that described him as crazy. He definitely bent the rules. Even before committing crimes, he was bending rules all over the place.
Stephen Janis: And as reporters like Miller started digging, they learned that Jenkins and Suiter had ties that went back years.
Jayne Miller: Well, I mean, from the moment that Suiter was shot and that happened, you looked at his cases and it was like, whoa, he’s working with these guys in 2009, ’10, ’11, ’12. And so immediately it raised that question of whether his death may have some nexus to that case because of his connection to them. I also had heard that he had been concerned about what he had witnessed when he was working with Jenkins, et cetera, and had wanted to be moved out of the unit. And so all of that was in the background of his death.
Sean Yoes: The narrative that just kept coming forward was the police did it.
Taya Graham: Which is when a new theory of the case starts to emerge.
Stephen Janis: And the Baltimore Police Department makes a startling request, an announcement that changes the course of the investigation, raises doubts about what really happened to Suiter, and only reinforces the notion that when it comes to the Baltimore Police Department, nothing is what it seems.
Kevin Davis: This morning I sent the following letter that I will read to you and a copy will be provided to you at the end of this press conference, to Christopher Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I sent it to him today. Dear Director Wray, I appreciate and commend the leadership of Special Agent in Charge Gordon Johnson, of your Baltimore field office as it pertains specifically to the Nov. 15 murder of detective Sean Suiter. Special Agent in Charge Gordon has been responsive, collaborative, and has dedicated FBI resources to our investigation. In fact, the FBI, ATF, and DEA have all been embedded into the investigation from the very beginning.
Taya Graham: A twist in the case that will push an already fraught city to the edge.
Sean Yoes: You could not, if you had a thousand tongues, you couldn’t say bullshit enough.
Stephen Janis: All that coming up on the next episode of The Land of the Unsolved as we continue to explore the mysterious death of Detective Sean Suiter. Thank you for joining us for the second episode of The Land of the Unsolved, the mysterious death of Detective Sean Suiter.
Taya Graham: We want to thank our guests, award-winning investigative reporter for WBAL TV, Jayne Miller.
Stephen Janis: Sean Yoes, Baltimore editor of the AFRO newspaper, the nation’s oldest Black newspaper, and former homicide detective, Steven Tabeling. The Land of the Unsolved was written and produced by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham for Ace Spectrum Productions.
Taya Graham: If you want to read more about unsolved murder in Baltimore and beyond, Stephen and I have written three books about the subject, all available through amazon.com. Why Do We Kill?: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore, You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths About Policing in Baltimore and Beyond, and The Book of Cop: A Testament to Policing That Works.
Stephen Janis: Be sure to join us for the next episode of The Land of the Unsolved where we will delve deeper into the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter.
Taya Graham: And you can visit us on our website landoftheunsolved.com to download new episodes or leave suggestions for a case you want us to investigate. My name is Taya Graham.
Stephen Janis: And I’m Stephen Janis.
Taya Graham: And thank you for joining us for The Land of the Unsolved.
Aaron Reinas was just blocks from his home when a San Bernardino, California, sheriff accosted and accused him of burglarizing cars. What happened next reveals the dangers of unchecked police power and the dire consequences individual citizens can face for standing up for their rights. PAR investigates Reinas’s questionable arrest and why police often ignore the law in pursuit of phantom crimes.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
The transcript for this video is in production and will be made available as soon as possible.
As the omicron variant surged into the new year, pushing statewide infection rates in Maryland past 30% and sending Baltimore City residents scrambling for COVID-19 tests and N95 masks, Baltimore City spent more money on the Baltimore Police Department.
On Dec. 23, Baltimore City’s Board Of Estimates approved $18 million for three new police helicopters. The three new helicopters will replace the four old helicopters purchased in 2011 for $9.5 million, Baltimore Brewreported.
It was the latest burst of additional funding since the Baltimore City Council voted to give the Baltimore Police a $28 million budget increase back in June 2021. In September, $6.5 million in revenue from red light cameras, supposedly allotted to make streets safer for motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians, was instead given to the police.In November, the city approved $759,500 to continue a contract with ShotSpotter, the AI-based sound detecting software that alerts 911 when it believes it has registered gunshots. The technology’s efficacy has been much-debated, and despite vocal opposition to the funding—including from activist DeRay Mckesson—it was approved.
While all of that additional police funding was approved, Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan announced his “refund the police” initiative.
“I am the biggest skeptic of ShotSpotter,” Mayor Brandon Scott said. “But saying that and also knowing that this is the final renewal for this contract and, as I have already directed CitiStat to do an in-depth analysis of this tool… This really, for me, is about getting to people who are the victims of gun violence who no one is calling for.”
Since 2018, the total amount of money spent by Baltimore on ShotSpotter is a little over $3 million.
While all of that additional police funding was approved, Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan announced his “refund the police” initiative. It is a cynical political strategy; Hogan has persistently claimed that the police in his state have been “defunded” even though their budgets have increased.
“The reality is that our police are underfunded and under attack,” Hogan said back in October. “To reverse the tide of rising crime, we need to stop demonizing and sabotaging the dedicated men and women who risk their lives every single day to keep the rest of us safe. We cannot defund the police, we need to refund the police.”
Hogan’s initiative, he said, would provide $150 million more to Maryland law enforcement as well as neighborhood safety grants, victims services, and money for Marylanders who provide tips that lead to arrests (this week, Hogan announced that the additional police funding will reach $500 million over the next three years).
In December, $96,000 was approved to be awarded to four Harlem Park residents whose constitutional rights were violated during an illegal lockdown of their West Baltimore neighborhood in 2017 after Baltimore City Police Officer Sean Suiter was found shot there.
There is also the devastating story of Malcolm Bryant, whose family last week was approved to be awarded $8 million dollars for his wrongful conviction. Bryant served 17 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He was released in 2016, with assistance from the Maryland Innocence Project. He died the next year.
The $8 million approved by the city is the result of a Bryant family lawsuit against the Baltimore Police Department, homicide detective William F. Ritz, and Barry Verger, a forensic analyst. The Bryant family’s lawyers alleged that evidence that could have shown Bryant was innocent was withheld, including physical evidence that pointed to another suspect and an eyewitness whose testimony contradicted that of the only eyewitness who was called to testify in court.
Earlier this week, Baltimore City Council also voted in favor of the Supplementary Criminal Apprehension and Conviction Fund, which would increase the amount of money that can be rewarded to a resident whose information leads to the arrest or conviction of someone suspected of committing a crime.
The Baltimore Police clearance rate for homicides is around 40%, lower than the average national homicide clearance rate.
The $100,000 in additional funding to Metro Crimestoppers, Baltimore City Councilperson Isaac “Yitzy” Schliefer has argued, is needed because the Baltimore City Police Department’s clearance rate on homicides is so low.
The Baltimore Police clearance rate for homicides is around 40%, lower than the average national homicide clearance rate. In 2019, NPR described the effectiveness of rewards-for-tips as “not wildly productive.”
A bill from State Senator Jill Carter could address some of the city’s exorbitant spending on police. The Law Enforcement Pension Reform bill (Senate Bill 141) sponsored by Carter would make it so “that law enforcement officers are subject to forfeiture of benefits from the State Retirement and Pension System or a local system when a law enforcement officer is found guilty of, pleads guilty to, or enters a plea of nolo contendere to a qualifying crime; providing for the processes and procedures to implement a forfeiture of benefits; and generally relating to the forfeiture of pension benefits.”
Last year’s bundled police reform bill that slowly moved through the statehouse had a provision that would have done what Carter’s bill intends to do, but it was removed before the bill passed.
Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry has come out in support of the bill, putting it on his legislative priority list for 2022, he announced in a press release.
“The Board of Estimates has approved over $14.1 million in law enforcement related settlements over the actions of police officers who were found guilty of crimes and fired,” Henry said. “We are paying out claims for these officers’ wrongdoings—yet the same officers are allowed to keep their pensions. If the City is paying for your crimes, we should have the ability to go after you for damages—specifically, your pension.”
As for those three helicopters worth $18 million, Baltimore Brew reported earlier this week that, according to police, buying three helicopters was a sound, affordable decision, actually.
“We are financing three helicopters. You might ask, well, you now have four helicopters, why are we only considering three?” Shallah Graham, chief financial officer for the Baltimore Police, told the Brew. “We want to be financially responsible. We know it’s tough times right now in the economy.”
Walter Lomax was wrongfully imprisoned in the state of Maryland for 39 years until he eventually had his conviction vacated by a judge in 2006. While he was incarcerated and fighting for his freedom, Lomax worked with other inmates on the long process of lobbying for a bill in the state legislature that would end Maryland’s designation as one of only three states—along with California and Oklahoma—that granted the governor the power to veto parole recommendations made by the parole commission. In December of 2021, that fight finally ended and the Maryland legislature stripped the governor’s power to overturn parole decisions for inmates serving life sentences.
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway and cohost-in-training Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speak with Walter Lomax about his incarceration and the long fight to change Maryland’s parole system. After being fully exonerated in 2014, Walter Lomax became the face of the effort to fix the state’s compensation system for wrongfully convicted and imprisoned Marylanders, culminating in the passage of “The Walter Lomax Act” in 2021. He is also the founder and executive director of the Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization that advocates for humane and sensible criminal justice and sentencing policies for those incarcerated long term in Maryland prisons.
Eddie Conway:Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. For the past 27 years a fight has been waged by a noble comrade to get the governor out of the parole process in the state of Maryland. Walter Lomax started fighting the governor about the lifer parole situation while he was in prison, in jail. He continued once he got out and after 27 years, he has finally won the victory that he was seeking. So Walter Lomax, thanks for joining me.
Walter Lomax:Well, thanks for the invitation, Eddie.
Eddie Conway: Joining me also is my guest co-host Mansa Musa, who’s going to conduct most of this interview. You could say he’s co-host in training. So, Mansa Musa, thank you also for joining me.
Charles Hopkins: Thank you for having me, Eddie.
Eddie Conway: Lomax, can you give us just a small capsule of what the issue really is? Like three governors in the United States of America that still won’t allow – Well now two, thanks to you – That still won’t allow prisoners to be released without their signature. And so Maryland was the third governor, but how did this come about? Can you talk a little bit about Willie Horton and the politics of what happened to you and us?
Walter Lomax: Well nationally, Willie Horton really set the stage for it, that’s to be sure, but people that was… The programs that were still in existence even after Willie Horton continued to exist. Once they got shut down they weren’t reinstituted. I guess the nail in the coffin he had [inaudible] was Rodney Stokes when he committed the murder-suicide that brought us back in that day in ’93. But it had become so political that no – With the exception of Jerry Brown out in California. He allowed individuals to be released, Oklahoma and California. And this is why when we got the legislation passed in 2011, the 180-day rule, they were basing it on California’s system, thinking that since Jerry Brown was letting people be released that maybe that would happen here in Maryland.
In fact, I have a little something I can tell you all now since everything is over with. They had offered us 90 days when the 180-day statute was passed, but we had brought the heat so fierce that we actually thought that we were going to get that legislation passed. Senator McFadden had assured us that he could bring the votes, and what O’Malley did, well, they offered us 90 days. They said we will give you all 90 days, and they called me in, and since I couldn’t call you all on the phone I couldn’t contact any of you all to get a consensus.
I just made an executive call and said, no, we’re not taking it. Because we actually thought we could get it passed, and he went back and said, well, I will accept 180 days. And so that’s how we got the 180 days. So I’m telling you all this now so, y’all can’t come at me because it’s all been done with, right?
Eddie Conway: Yeah.
Walter Lomax: But it was so political and as you know that as soon as the [180-day] rule came effective, O’Malley denied all the 57 cases that were there beforehand, he denied each and every one of them, right?
Charles Hopkins: Well, I want you to… Eddie started at 27 years, but I want you to take us back, as briefly as you can, to when they removed everybody from the camp system and brought you all into the main prison system and ultimately gave birth to your perspective of trying to get a political resolution for our plight. Can you briefly go back to that?
Walter Lomax: As best I can. It took us a moment because when we were first removed in 1993 we actually thought that it was just going to be a momentary process. They were going to reevaluate, take a look at the system and then put us back into the pre-release system. And so it took a period before we actually realized that that was not going to happen. And then when there was a change in administrations, when the Governor Schaefer went out of office and Governor Glenn Dennis came into office, and we didn’t really, I guess, clearly understand what was happening until Glenn Dennis actually made that statement down in front of Maryland House Correction, that he was ordering the parole commission not to send any recommendations to his desk and that to him life meant life. And so from that point, I think – And this was in 1995 – I think we fully understood that we were going to be in a fight, that this was going to be a battle.
And so we first looked at legal and as the cases were being moved through the court. Well, let me digress for just a second. When I was coming home on my [family leave], a delegate, Clarence “Tiger” Davis lived down the street from my dad where I spent my weekends at, and he and I used to talk about this issue, or at least some forms of it, and why the politics should be removed from the process that if an individual see the recommendation, they should be allowed to be released. And we didn’t actually talk then about introducing legislation but it was a part of a general conversation that something needs to be done. And so, because he and I had had those conversations while I was on my weekends, when we were removed back and then realized that there was not going to be a change, we started to seriously think about having legislation introduced. And so he introduced the first piece of legislation for us.
I think it was maybe the General Assembly session for 1996. And he was the only person that sponsored, he didn’t have any co-sponsors, and it really didn’t go anywhere. And so we decided that we were going to use the, I guess, Malcolm, Dr. King approach. They didn’t like Malcolm at all, and the only reason why they accepted King because, not that he was an alternative, but because they felt a little more comfortable with him. And so we launched the legal and the legislative initiative. And once we organized the prisoners, that was the most major thing that we needed to do. In fact, Eddie was in the cut and I was up in Hagerstown and they were somewhat talking about this lifers coalition. And at the time I had an opportunity to be released, to be quite honest, [Fran Cassidy] was representing us, and she said that she could get some of us out. I was one of those people because we had established a liberty interest.
We were in the work release family leave program. We were paying taxes. We were doing everything that a regular citizen should do with the exception of actually being free. But when I looked at that, I encouraged the guys not to try to go that route because there were only 14 of us that were in the work release and family leave program and everybody behind us wouldn’t be able to meet those standards. They wouldn’t be able to reach that bar, in other words. And if they had allowed us to be released for established liberty interest, everybody behind us would’ve been essentially locked in.
So since we could make the best case, legally that is, I encourage them not to go that route. And that’s when the brothers in the Maryland House of Correction began to start to organize and I mean, really, really organize. And we was able to put together lifer coordinators in each institution all around the system, that was back during that time, we were still able to correspond with each other so –
Charles Hopkins: Right.
Walter Lomax: …We had those channels available to us. You were going to say something?
Charles Hopkins: Yeah, no, I want you to, that’s a nice opportunity to segue into what gave you the confidence, though, because I’m in your space with you, we’re doing some organizing up the new jail and we are meeting on the regular about this, but what gave you the confidence to continue along the political process in a state that we know is like, was ultra-conservative, the legislature was ultra-conservative around this issue. What gave you the confidence to pursue it? And even though we know, like you said earlier it’s a collective effort, but everybody put your face on it because you were the most persistent in terms of advocacy. So what gave you the confidence? This is about what gave you the confidence to pursue it?
Walter Lomax:You mean early on or just [inaudible] years?
Charles Hopkins: Overall, because you know, you got out and you took up the mantra before you left. You were instrumental in organizing, but once you got out you took up the mantra and really became like an ipso facto lobbyist for us in Annapolis. So what gave you the confidence to stay focused on this process?
Walter Lomax: I think part of my driving force is that I was one of the seven people that he stood out in front of the Maryland House of Correction. When he made that statement, I was one of the seven people that he denied parole. And I think I realized that we had pretty much done everything humanly possible to be released. And this policy was effectively saying that our sentence has become life without parole. Yeah, that really gave me a lot of incentive to continue with that.
But see now be mindful that I’m still battling two fronts. One is I’m innocent and I can’t get out, and the people that are guilty that have earned the right to get out can’t get out either. And I think along the way it was such a learning process, part of it, you say, what gave me the confidence. When we started to launch our legislative initiative and we realized how many people we could actually mobilize.
And we started talking in terms of proxy voting, things of that nature, where we would have our family members and friends vote for the individual, vote for the candidate that would most support our issue. When we realized how many votes we could actually put together and then exercise our proxy vote initiative, because we started reaching outside of people that were just having the letter. We started also bringing the people that had these suspended life sentences in, and then those people that had what was called virtual life sentences, 50 years or more, whatever the case might be. And we realized, specifically when we looked at the numbers that was involved when Glenn Dennis won the first election, actually, most of us felt that he stole that election from [Ellen Salisbury] during that period, and we realized that we could probably put together, mobilize 10, 15, 20,000 votes.
And if we were to vote as a collective, that’s why the proxy vote initiative became so important. We just realized that in a general election such as that, we could actually determine the outcome. It was a little difficult at that point to really organize our family members and friends because we didn’t really have, we had people on the outside that were doing things, but they didn’t have the wherewithal to actually bring all of our family members and friends together. Salima Marriott was pretty good in bringing them, getting other folk to recognize that they weren’t alone, because she used to host a meeting. But that was still limited.
Eddie Conway: Talk about what this means to those people that are still held behind the bars right now with life sentences that’ve been turned down for parole numerous times. The exception is obviously the [Unger] cases, but the cases that are not Unger cases, what does this victory mean for them and future people that’s going in there with parole or life.
Walter Lomax: Well, and this was a sticking point for me personally, because as you and I know that in 1972, when they instituted the diminution credits toward the first parole here, a person was eligible after 11 and a half years. When we first came in it was 15 years, and then with the diminution credits to 11 and a half years. And so even though nobody was basically being released within that period, they were basically serving well over 15, close to 20 years. So what this means for me is that it added five years to that. Now that wouldn’t affect any of the people that’s already in the system right now, they will still be governed under the previous statute, but everybody that’s coming into the system after that fact, they would have to do 20 years. Where they’ll still be able to earn diminution credits toward the first parole hearing. So that would mean 17 or something like that.
But I had reservations about adding something to that. But the only way we were able to convince legislators to vote for this legislation is by them feeling that, well, we increased the time before they actually become eligible for parole so they had spent a little more time in prison. But what it would mean for people that’s in the system is that all of those people, man, that have been able to get a recommendation that weren’t under Unger have a meaningful opportunity to be released. It’s not a get out of jail free card that’s for sure. You basically would have to do the things that we did while we were in there because the courts obviously wouldn’t have let us go had we not done what we’ve done.
When they looked at the totality of our record they realized that we had actually earned the right to be released. Well, at least a meaningful opportunity to be so, and if the Parole Commission gives that recommendation for somebody who does that it really means a hell of a lot. Now we still have a little bit of work to do. For one the risk assessment is still a problematic and then two, people that will be released on parole will be on a lifetime parole so we are looking at trying to get that maybe to maybe five years or something more reasonable, because we still got people that was released back during the Mandel, Hughes, and Schaefer administration. They’re still on parole. I talked to a guy, Aggy Long’s brother, Porter, this guy had been on parole for over 30 some years, so that’s really unconscionable.
So we have little basic work. And then also see if we can work around getting those folk back in work release and family programs and things of that nature. I personally know the benefits of having that because I was in the program and I had a chance to reacclimate back out before I was actually physically just cast back out into society. In fact, we had a lot of issues, a lot of problems that we had to deal with when the people that were being released under Unger because they were in maximum security institutions one day and we found out that they’re going to be released in a week or two weeks. And then they just throw right out into society. It’s like a culture shock to be quite honest. Now a lot of them would admit that they had issues or problems, but it’s a lot of trauma, man.
I’m just looking at the two of y’all, as I’ve said we… Well, Jack Adam said it was the belly of the beast, but we were in the intestines of the beast, right? So, we know what we went through. And so even though, we’re functioning and but the fact of it is we experienced a lot of trauma in there, man, a hell of a lot of trauma –
Charles Hopkins: Yeah. I agree with that.
Walter Lomax: …But some stuff we may never be able to get rid of, but we may be able to manage it, such as we have.
Charles Hopkins: I just want to say that, we call this Rattling The Bars, and this is a perfect example of rattling the bars. We know when we were in south wing, we were just buying to get the post’s attention about conditions and here, you rattle the bars. You shook the bars, you got people’s attention and then rattle the bars. You got all the people to come aboard and rattle the bars.
So in rattling these bars, we have managed to have an earthquake-type result and the result is that more people are going to get out and more people have hope. And this was the one thing that was lacking when I left out of prison, what was lacking when I left out was it was becoming a hopeless environment. So, when we look back on this here, we can say that hope has been restored, and this is something that’s going to go a long way in terms of the paradigm shift in prison. So rattle the bars.
Eddie Conway: So Lomax, thanks for joining us.
Walter Lomax: It was really, really, really my pleasure. As we were talking, I was thinking to myself, I was saying, this is like we’re standing down on the flat. So we’re down on two yard, having a conversation about, okay, what do we strategize today? What’s going on today? What is it that we need to do? Who do we need to pull?
Eddie Conway: Yeah.
Walter Lomax: This is great, man. It was really great.
Charles Hopkins: A flash, a flash west way.
Walter Lomax: Yeah, yeah.
Eddie Conway: Okay. So thank both of you all. Thanks for joining me for this. Okay.
Walter Lomax: No doubt. No doubt, Eddie.
Charles Hopkins: Thank you.
Eddie Conway: All right. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.
A recent HBO documentary entitled The Slow Hustle has brought renewed attention to the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter in 2017. Police initially claimed Suiter was the victim of a lone assailant after his body was found in a West Baltimore alley with a gunshot wound to the head. But as details began to emerge regarding Suiter’s involvement with some of Baltimore’s most corrupt cops, the case took a turn that raised serious questions about what actually happened and if his death was part of a broader cover-up.
Shortly after Suiter died, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis produced a podcast series that looked behind the scenes and examined how Suiter’s death told a more complex story about police corruption in Baltimore. In Part 1 of this podcast series, Graham and Janis examine the initial discovery of Suiter’s body, the police-led manhunt that ensued, and the moment when the official explanation of Suiter’s death began to unravel.
Transcript
The transcript of this podcast is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 6, 2022. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
With Canadian oil giant Enbridge pouring more than $4 million into a fund that was used by the law enforcement agencies which have arrested hundreds of people for protesting the company’s thousand-mile-long tar sands pipeline, the prosecutor who is bringing charges against the environmental defenders believed he was also entitled to benefit from the fund, according to an independent investigation.
The Center for Protest Law and Litigation (CPLL) revealed Thursday that Jonathan Frieden, the lead prosecutor seeking to jail hundreds of opponents to the Line 3 pipeline, sought more than $12,000 last July from the so-called Line 3 Public Safety Escrow Trust, which the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) ordered Enbridge to pay into as a condition of the pipeline’s construction.
According to documents obtained by the center, Frieden wrote to Rick Hart, manager for the escrow account at the Minnesota PUC, with a bill for the hours he and his support staff worked preparing the case against Indigenous groups and other climate campaigners.
Hart later informed Frieden that “prosecution expenses are not an allowable reimbursable expense for the Line 3 Public Safety Escrow Account.”
Enbridge—whose Line 3 pipeline transports tar sands across Indigenous lands and violates Anishinaabe treaty rights as well as threatening water safety in Minnesota—has acknowledged that it funneled $2.9 million into the fund which benefited sheriffs’ departments and other law enforcement agencies as they cracked down on anti-pipeline protests.
Enbridge—whose Line 3 pipeline transports tar sands across Indigenous lands and violates Anishinaabe treaty rights as well as threatening water safety in Minnesota—has acknowledged that it funneled $2.9 million into the fund which benefited sheriffs’ departments and other law enforcement agencies as they cracked down on anti-pipeline protests.
The money has been used to conduct patrols along the pipeline and to reimburse law enforcement agencies for protective gear, transportation, lodging, and meals while they’ve made hundreds of arrests.
As Frieden pursued charges for trespassing, theft, “unlawful assembly,” and other misdemeanors and felonies—which are “meant to intimidate and dissuade free speech and to dissuade further protests” rather than protect public safety, according to campaigners—he sought funding from the oil giant.
The prosecutor pushed back when he was informed the escrow account couldn’t be used by him and his staff, saying their work “to charge the individuals endangering the public” should “qualify under public safety.”
Frieden’s “expectation of funding incentivized the wrongful charging of hundreds,” said CPLL.
“Who’s next to violate [the] constitutional rights of water protectors and ask Big Oil to pay for it?” asked Katie Redford, co-founder of Earth Rights International.
First the police, now the prosecutors–who's next to violate constitutional rights of water protectors and ask #bigoil to pay for it? https://t.co/ONHDjMRjuy
The state-run account to which Enbridge has contributed millions of dollars “essentially privatizes public police forces to act in service to the private pecuniary interests of this foreign corporation against its political opponents and the Indigenous community and to stop and disrupt peaceful organizing and expression that would educate the larger community and national audience about the environmental devastation and danger posed by the Line 3 pipeline,” said CPLL.
Frieden’s request suggests he believed that the company was also using “county attorneys as their personal security,” said Jane Fleming Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party.
Big Oil should not be allowed to use police officers and county attorneys as their personal security. This is disgusting abuse of power and I hope all MN selected officials and Congress steps in. This should never be happening. @billmckibben@WinonaLadukehttps://t.co/1zhBJ5WM6s
