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may 26, 2020
MICHAEL WOOD: We have a culture that from the beginning has been disproportionate and been oppressive to persons of color, and women, and other minorities. We have a system in which criminal justice is an oxymoron. We have a society that trumps up the second amendment as this big right that we have and that right is to have this weaponry so cops can be killed. That’s literally the purpose of the second amendment. And we have state sanctioned murder all over the country with a blue wall of silence and justice not being done. So I’m completely baffled by why anyone is surprised by all of this.
Why Cops Kill Black People: Research Suggests a Troubling Pattern of 'Retaliatory Violence'
Chauncey DeVega / Salon
The story of race in America is a story of change, and a story of things remaining the same. To measure our progress, or lack thereof, all we need to do is to look at how America's police treat the public, and look in turn at who fills the prison cells -- and all too often the cemeteries.
in the headlines
*Video shows Minneapolis cop with knee on neck of motionless, moaning man who later died(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Police officer: It’s ‘unfortunate’ not all Black people were killed by coronavirus
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Early Data Shows Black People Are Being Disproportionally Arrested for Social Distancing Violations(ARTICLE BELOW)
*California City Was Accused of Police Brutality Weeks Before Cop Beat Black Teen
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Chief Placed on Leave as Fallout Continues for Oregon Police Department That Wrongfully Arrested Black Man Who’d Complained of Workplace Racial Harassment
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Lawsuit: Black Twin Brothers Beaten, Arrested by Cops After Being Accused of Burglarizing Their Own Home(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Miami Beach Police Accused of Racism After Numerous Videos of Violence Against Black Spring Breakers Go Viral(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Maryland man fatally shot by police while asleep in his bedroom
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ICE’S NEW YORK OFFICE USES A RIGGED ALGORITHM TO KEEP VIRTUALLY ALL ARRESTEES IN DETENTION. THE ACLU SAYS IT’S UNCONSTITUTIONAL.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'I didn't do nothing to you': Man accused of hopping train cars cries before Chicago cop shoots him(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE FBI IS INVESTIGATING MASSIVE EMBEZZLEMENT OF BORDER PATROL UNION FUNDS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘Don’t put handcuffs on’: Body camera footage shows Orlando police arresting 6-year-old for ‘tantrum’(ARTICLE BELOW)
*California Cops Are Collecting Info on Millions of Drivers Who Have Done Nothing Wrong(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Lawsuit: Long Island Teens Beaten, Wrongfully Arrested and Charged In Assault They Didn’t Commit(ARTICLE BELOW)
*PG County Police Officer Kills Black Man — Handcuffed, Buckled in Seatbelt of Police Cruiser(ARTICLE BELOW)
*In Anti-Communist Fervor, FBI Built a 500-Page File on Coretta Scott King
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, remember: America’s justice system still enforces racial oppression(ARTICLE BELOW)
*LAPD scandal over alleged gang framing swells to 20 officers; chief sees a ‘criminal aspect’(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Inside the US prison where inmates 'begged for their lives' amid days of violence
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*MIT warns students, staff about visits from ICE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Schaston Hodge, black man killed by white Texas troopers, was shot 16 times
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Wisconsin deputy burglarized grieving families' homes during funerals, officials say
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*NYPD Cop Who Burst Into Black Nashville Family’s Home in a Drunken Rage, Threatening Them, Gets Two-Week Sentence(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Retired Cop Claims NYPD Rewarded Officers for Arresting More Black Men While Avoiding ‘Soft Targets’(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HOW A ‘CABAL’ OF FBI AGENTS HELPED TRUMP WAGE HIS CONSPIRACY WAR ON CLINTON
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump Thinks He Can Get Away With Murder Because Police Do All the Time
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*GESTAPO USA FUNNIES(below)
Video shows Minneapolis cop with knee on neck of motionless, moaning man who later died
BY BRIAN DAKSS
MAY 26, 2020 / 10:09 AM / CBS NEWS
Screen grab from video captured on evening of May 25, 2020 by onlooker Darnella Frazier shows Minneapolis police officer with knee on neck of "forgery" suspect.
DARNELLA FRAZIER / FACEBOOK
A video taken by an onlooker Monday evening shows a Minneapolis police officer keeping his knee on the neck of a motionless, moaning man at the foot of a squad car. The man later died.
A police statement said officers were responding to a "forgery in progress."
"Officers were advised that the suspect was sitting on top of a blue car and appeared to be under the influence," the statement said. "Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car.
"After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance," according to the statement.
The man died soon after, the statement said, adding: "At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident. … Body worn cameras were on and activated during this incident."
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said at a press conference Tuesday that the FBI will lead the investigation into the incident due to the possible civil rights violation.
Two of the officers involved have been "relieved of duty status," Arradondo said. The officers are still receiving pay, but have no law enforcement duties.
The video, captured by Darnella Frazier, begins with the man, who is black, groaning and repeatedly saying "I can't breathe" to the officer who has his knee on the man's neck. The officer is white.
"Please," the man pleads. "I can't breathe," and continues to moan. An officer keeps insisting he get in the car, while the man repeatedly says he can't.
"My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. … (I need) water or something. Please. Please. I can't breathe, officer. … I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe." That was followed by more groaning.
A female bystander points out the subject's nose is bleeding.
In an ongoing commentary permeated by cursing, a male onlooker says: "That's bulls—t, Bro. You're stopping his breathing right there, Bro. Get him off the ground, Bro. You're being a bum right now."
The man says the officer is "enjoying that. He's a bum, Bro. You could have put him in the car by now. He's not resisting arrest or nothing. You're enjoying it. Look at you. Your body language — you bum. You know that's bogus right now."
The female onlooker repeatedly urges the officers to check the subject's pulse. "He's not responsive right now," a bystander says. "He's not moving." An ambulance then arrives and takes the man away.
"You just really killed that man, Bro," the male onlooker says to the officer.
Frazier, who took the video, wrote on Facebook: "They killed him right in front of cup foods over south on 38th and Chicago!! No type of sympathy 💔💔#POLICEBRUTALITY."
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the man's death "simply awful," and "wrong at every level" at the press conference Tuesday.
"For the better part of the night I've been trying to find the words to describe what happened and all I keep coming back to is that he should not have died," Frey said.
"What we saw was horrible, completely and utterly messed up," he said. "This man's life matters, he matters. He was someone's son, someone's family member, someone's friend. He was a human being and his life mattered."
A police statement said officers were responding to a "forgery in progress."
"Officers were advised that the suspect was sitting on top of a blue car and appeared to be under the influence," the statement said. "Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car.
"After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance," according to the statement.
The man died soon after, the statement said, adding: "At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident. … Body worn cameras were on and activated during this incident."
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said at a press conference Tuesday that the FBI will lead the investigation into the incident due to the possible civil rights violation.
Two of the officers involved have been "relieved of duty status," Arradondo said. The officers are still receiving pay, but have no law enforcement duties.
The video, captured by Darnella Frazier, begins with the man, who is black, groaning and repeatedly saying "I can't breathe" to the officer who has his knee on the man's neck. The officer is white.
"Please," the man pleads. "I can't breathe," and continues to moan. An officer keeps insisting he get in the car, while the man repeatedly says he can't.
"My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. … (I need) water or something. Please. Please. I can't breathe, officer. … I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe." That was followed by more groaning.
A female bystander points out the subject's nose is bleeding.
In an ongoing commentary permeated by cursing, a male onlooker says: "That's bulls—t, Bro. You're stopping his breathing right there, Bro. Get him off the ground, Bro. You're being a bum right now."
The man says the officer is "enjoying that. He's a bum, Bro. You could have put him in the car by now. He's not resisting arrest or nothing. You're enjoying it. Look at you. Your body language — you bum. You know that's bogus right now."
The female onlooker repeatedly urges the officers to check the subject's pulse. "He's not responsive right now," a bystander says. "He's not moving." An ambulance then arrives and takes the man away.
"You just really killed that man, Bro," the male onlooker says to the officer.
Frazier, who took the video, wrote on Facebook: "They killed him right in front of cup foods over south on 38th and Chicago!! No type of sympathy 💔💔#POLICEBRUTALITY."
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the man's death "simply awful," and "wrong at every level" at the press conference Tuesday.
"For the better part of the night I've been trying to find the words to describe what happened and all I keep coming back to is that he should not have died," Frey said.
"What we saw was horrible, completely and utterly messed up," he said. "This man's life matters, he matters. He was someone's son, someone's family member, someone's friend. He was a human being and his life mattered."
Police officer: It’s ‘unfortunate’ not all Black people were killed by coronavirus
May 20, 2020
By Matthew Chapman - raw story
On Wednesday, The Olympian reported that a police officer in Kaplan, Louisiana was terminated after a racist social media comment.
During a live stream of a COVID-19 press conference by Gov. John Bel Edwards, another commenter wrote, “virus that was created to kill all the BLACKS is death.” In response, Ofc. Steven Aucoin wrote “Well it didn’t work … how unfortunate.”
“The Kaplan Police Department confirmed officer Steven Aucoin’s firing in a Facebook post on May 15, saying it was ‘aware of the situation’ and dismissed Aucoin after an investigation into comments the officer made online just hours earlier,” reported Tanasia Kenney. The department issued a statement saying, “Chief [Joshua] Hardy and the Kaplan Police Department would like to apologize for this matter.”
Some residents of Kaplan defended Aucoin, with firefighter Joshua Brothers telling a local news station, “The newest update that Facebook does, it doesn’t put the comments in consecutive order like it used to. It’s not a timeline thing. Relevant newer comments might be above. Some comments aren’t listed at all.”
However, according to The Olympian, Aucoin has a history of racist posts, at one point writing, “I can’t wait until the next part of the plan is implemented and they see what’s in store for their kind.”
During a live stream of a COVID-19 press conference by Gov. John Bel Edwards, another commenter wrote, “virus that was created to kill all the BLACKS is death.” In response, Ofc. Steven Aucoin wrote “Well it didn’t work … how unfortunate.”
“The Kaplan Police Department confirmed officer Steven Aucoin’s firing in a Facebook post on May 15, saying it was ‘aware of the situation’ and dismissed Aucoin after an investigation into comments the officer made online just hours earlier,” reported Tanasia Kenney. The department issued a statement saying, “Chief [Joshua] Hardy and the Kaplan Police Department would like to apologize for this matter.”
Some residents of Kaplan defended Aucoin, with firefighter Joshua Brothers telling a local news station, “The newest update that Facebook does, it doesn’t put the comments in consecutive order like it used to. It’s not a timeline thing. Relevant newer comments might be above. Some comments aren’t listed at all.”
However, according to The Olympian, Aucoin has a history of racist posts, at one point writing, “I can’t wait until the next part of the plan is implemented and they see what’s in store for their kind.”
Early Data Shows Black People Are Being Disproportionally Arrested for Social Distancing Violations
Crowds of mostly white protesters have defied Ohio’s stay-at-home order without arrest, while in several of the state’s biggest jurisdictions, police departments have primarily arrested black people for violating the order.
by Joshua Kaplan and Benjamin Hardy - propublica
May 8, 6:22 p.m. EDT
On April 17 in Toledo, Ohio, a 19-year-old black man was arrested for violating the state stay-at-home order. In court filings, police say he took a bus from Detroit to Toledo “without a valid reason.” Six young black men were arrested in Toledo last Saturday while hanging out on a front lawn; police allege they were “seen standing within 6 feet of each other.” In Cincinnati, a black man was charged with violating stay-at-home orders after he was shot in the ankle on April 7; according to a police affidavit, he was talking to a friend in the street when he was shot and was “clearly not engaged in essential activities.”
Ohio’s health director, Dr. Amy Acton, issued the state’s stay-at-home order on March 22, prohibiting people from leaving their home except for essential activities and requiring them to maintain social distancing “at all times.” A violation of the order is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $750 fine. Since the order, hundreds of people have been charged with violations across Ohio.
The state has also seen some of the most prominent protests against state stay-at-home orders, as large crowds gather on the statehouse steps to flout the directives. But the protesters, most of them white, have not faced arrest. Rather, in three large Ohio jurisdictions ProPublica examined, charges of violating the order appear to have fallen disproportionately on black people.
ProPublica analyzed court records for the city of Toledo and for the counties that include Columbus and Cincinnati, three of the most populous jurisdictions in Ohio. In all of them, ProPublica found, black people were at least four times as likely to be charged with violating the stay-at-home order as white people.
As states across the country attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19, stay-at-home orders have proven instrumental in the fight against the novel coronavirus; experts credit aggressive restrictions with flattening the curve in the nation’s hotbeds. Many states’ orders carry criminal penalties for violations of the stay-at-home mandates. But as the weather warms up and people spend more time outside, defense lawyers and criminal justice reform advocates fear that black communities long subjected to overly aggressive policing will face similarly aggressive enforcement of stay-at-home mandates.
In Ohio, ProPublica found, the disparities are already pronounced.
As of Thursday night in Hamilton County, which is 27% black and home to Cincinnati, there were 107 charges for violating the order; 61% of defendants are black. The majority of arrests came from towns surrounding Cincinnati, which is 43% black. Of the 29 people charged by the city’s Police Department, 79% were black, according to data provided to ProPublica by the Hamilton County Public Defender.
In Toledo, where black people make up 27% of the population, 18 of the 23 people charged thus far were black.
Lt. Kellie Lenhardt, a spokeswoman for the Toledo Police Department, said that in enforcing the stay-at-home order, the department’s goal is not to arrest people and that officers are primarily responding to calls from people complaining about violations of the order. She told ProPublica that if the police arrested someone, the officers believed they had probable cause, and that while biased policing would be “wrong,” it would also be wrong to arrest more white people simply “to balance the numbers.”
In Franklin County, which is 23.5% black, 129 people were arrested between the beginning of the stay-at-home order and May 4; 57% of the people arrested were black.
In Cleveland, which is 50% black and is the state’s second-largest city, the Municipal Court’s public records do not include race data. The court and the Cleveland Police Department were unable to readily provide demographic information about arrests to ProPublica, though on Friday, the police said they have issued eight charges so far.
In the three jurisdictions, about half of those charged with violating the order were also charged with other offenses, such as drug possession and disorderly conduct. The rest were charged only with violating the order; among that group, the percentage of defendants who were black was even higher.
Franklin Country is home to Columbus, where enforcement of the stay-at-home order has made national headlines for a very different reason. Columbus is the state capital and Ohio’s largest city with a population of almost 900,000. In recent weeks, groups of mostly white protesters have campaigned against the stay-at-home order on the Statehouse steps and outside the health director’s home. Some protesters have come armed, and images have circulated of crowds of demonstrators huddled close, chanting, many without masks.
No protesters have been arrested for violating the stay-at-home order, a spokesperson for the Columbus mayor’s office told ProPublica. Thomas Hach, an organizer of a group called Free Ohio Now, said in an email that he was not aware of any arrests associated with protests in the entire state. The Columbus Division of Police did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.
Ohio legislators are contemplating reducing the criminal penalties for violating the order. On Wednesday, the state House passed legislation that would eliminate the possibility of jail time for stay-at-home violators. A first offense would result in a warning, and further violations would result in a small fine. The bill is pending in the state Senate.
Penalties for violating stay-at-home orders vary across the country. In many states, including California, Florida, Michigan and Washington, violations can land someone behind bars. In New York state, violations can only result in fines. In Baltimore, police told local media they had only charged two people with violations; police have reportedly relied on a recording played over the loudspeakers of squad cars: “Even if you aren’t showing symptoms, you could still have coronavirus and accidentally spread it to a relative or neighbor. Being home is being safe. We are all in this together.”
Enforcement has often resulted in controversy. In New York City, a viral video showed police pull out a Taser and punch a black man after they approached a group of people who weren’t wearing masks. Police say the man who was punched took a “fighting stance” when ordered to disperse. In Orlando, police arrested a homeless man walking a bicycle because he was not obeying curfew. In Hawaii, charges against a man accused of stealing a car battery, normally a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail, were enhanced to a felony, which can result in 10 years in prison, because police and prosecutors said he was in violation of the state order.
The orders are generally broad, and decisions about which violations to treat as acceptable and which ones to penalize have largely been left to local police departments’ discretion.
Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal organization focused on racial justice, said such discretion has opened the door to police abuse, and she said the U.S. Department of Justice or state governments should issue detailed guidelines about when to make arrests. That discretion “is what’s given rise to these rogue practices,” she told ProPublica, “that are putting black communities and communities of color with a target on their backs.”
In jails and prisons around the country, inmates have fallen ill or died from COVID-19 as the virus spreads rapidly through the facilities. Many local governments have released some inmates from jail and ordered police to reduce arrests for minor crimes. But in Hamilton County, some people charged with failing to maintain social distancing have been kept in jail for at least one night, even without any other charges. Recently, two sheriff’s deputies who work in the jail tested positive for COVID-19. “The cops put their hands on them, they cram them in the car, they take them to the [jail], which has 800 to 1400 people, depending on the night,” said Sean Vicente, director of the Hamilton County Public Defender’s misdemeanor division. “It’s often so crowded everyone’s just sitting on the floor.”[...]
Ohio’s health director, Dr. Amy Acton, issued the state’s stay-at-home order on March 22, prohibiting people from leaving their home except for essential activities and requiring them to maintain social distancing “at all times.” A violation of the order is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $750 fine. Since the order, hundreds of people have been charged with violations across Ohio.
The state has also seen some of the most prominent protests against state stay-at-home orders, as large crowds gather on the statehouse steps to flout the directives. But the protesters, most of them white, have not faced arrest. Rather, in three large Ohio jurisdictions ProPublica examined, charges of violating the order appear to have fallen disproportionately on black people.
ProPublica analyzed court records for the city of Toledo and for the counties that include Columbus and Cincinnati, three of the most populous jurisdictions in Ohio. In all of them, ProPublica found, black people were at least four times as likely to be charged with violating the stay-at-home order as white people.
As states across the country attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19, stay-at-home orders have proven instrumental in the fight against the novel coronavirus; experts credit aggressive restrictions with flattening the curve in the nation’s hotbeds. Many states’ orders carry criminal penalties for violations of the stay-at-home mandates. But as the weather warms up and people spend more time outside, defense lawyers and criminal justice reform advocates fear that black communities long subjected to overly aggressive policing will face similarly aggressive enforcement of stay-at-home mandates.
In Ohio, ProPublica found, the disparities are already pronounced.
As of Thursday night in Hamilton County, which is 27% black and home to Cincinnati, there were 107 charges for violating the order; 61% of defendants are black. The majority of arrests came from towns surrounding Cincinnati, which is 43% black. Of the 29 people charged by the city’s Police Department, 79% were black, according to data provided to ProPublica by the Hamilton County Public Defender.
In Toledo, where black people make up 27% of the population, 18 of the 23 people charged thus far were black.
Lt. Kellie Lenhardt, a spokeswoman for the Toledo Police Department, said that in enforcing the stay-at-home order, the department’s goal is not to arrest people and that officers are primarily responding to calls from people complaining about violations of the order. She told ProPublica that if the police arrested someone, the officers believed they had probable cause, and that while biased policing would be “wrong,” it would also be wrong to arrest more white people simply “to balance the numbers.”
In Franklin County, which is 23.5% black, 129 people were arrested between the beginning of the stay-at-home order and May 4; 57% of the people arrested were black.
In Cleveland, which is 50% black and is the state’s second-largest city, the Municipal Court’s public records do not include race data. The court and the Cleveland Police Department were unable to readily provide demographic information about arrests to ProPublica, though on Friday, the police said they have issued eight charges so far.
In the three jurisdictions, about half of those charged with violating the order were also charged with other offenses, such as drug possession and disorderly conduct. The rest were charged only with violating the order; among that group, the percentage of defendants who were black was even higher.
Franklin Country is home to Columbus, where enforcement of the stay-at-home order has made national headlines for a very different reason. Columbus is the state capital and Ohio’s largest city with a population of almost 900,000. In recent weeks, groups of mostly white protesters have campaigned against the stay-at-home order on the Statehouse steps and outside the health director’s home. Some protesters have come armed, and images have circulated of crowds of demonstrators huddled close, chanting, many without masks.
No protesters have been arrested for violating the stay-at-home order, a spokesperson for the Columbus mayor’s office told ProPublica. Thomas Hach, an organizer of a group called Free Ohio Now, said in an email that he was not aware of any arrests associated with protests in the entire state. The Columbus Division of Police did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.
Ohio legislators are contemplating reducing the criminal penalties for violating the order. On Wednesday, the state House passed legislation that would eliminate the possibility of jail time for stay-at-home violators. A first offense would result in a warning, and further violations would result in a small fine. The bill is pending in the state Senate.
Penalties for violating stay-at-home orders vary across the country. In many states, including California, Florida, Michigan and Washington, violations can land someone behind bars. In New York state, violations can only result in fines. In Baltimore, police told local media they had only charged two people with violations; police have reportedly relied on a recording played over the loudspeakers of squad cars: “Even if you aren’t showing symptoms, you could still have coronavirus and accidentally spread it to a relative or neighbor. Being home is being safe. We are all in this together.”
Enforcement has often resulted in controversy. In New York City, a viral video showed police pull out a Taser and punch a black man after they approached a group of people who weren’t wearing masks. Police say the man who was punched took a “fighting stance” when ordered to disperse. In Orlando, police arrested a homeless man walking a bicycle because he was not obeying curfew. In Hawaii, charges against a man accused of stealing a car battery, normally a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail, were enhanced to a felony, which can result in 10 years in prison, because police and prosecutors said he was in violation of the state order.
The orders are generally broad, and decisions about which violations to treat as acceptable and which ones to penalize have largely been left to local police departments’ discretion.
Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal organization focused on racial justice, said such discretion has opened the door to police abuse, and she said the U.S. Department of Justice or state governments should issue detailed guidelines about when to make arrests. That discretion “is what’s given rise to these rogue practices,” she told ProPublica, “that are putting black communities and communities of color with a target on their backs.”
In jails and prisons around the country, inmates have fallen ill or died from COVID-19 as the virus spreads rapidly through the facilities. Many local governments have released some inmates from jail and ordered police to reduce arrests for minor crimes. But in Hamilton County, some people charged with failing to maintain social distancing have been kept in jail for at least one night, even without any other charges. Recently, two sheriff’s deputies who work in the jail tested positive for COVID-19. “The cops put their hands on them, they cram them in the car, they take them to the [jail], which has 800 to 1400 people, depending on the night,” said Sean Vicente, director of the Hamilton County Public Defender’s misdemeanor division. “It’s often so crowded everyone’s just sitting on the floor.”[...]
Chief Placed on Leave as Fallout Continues for Oregon Police Department That Wrongfully Arrested Black Man Who’d Complained of Workplace Racial Harassment
By Ashleigh Atwell - ATLANTA BLACK STAR
April 10, 2020
An Oregon police chief is on administrative leave while an investigator looks into a lawsuit from a wrongfully arrested Black man.
West Linn Police Chief Terry Kruger was placed on paid administrative leave on April 8.
“Administrative leave ensures that all parties have the opportunity to clearly and completely answer questions and explain their actions,” the city said in a statement. “It is not a determination of wrongdoing on the part of Chief Kruger or anyone else. Any such determination can only be made after the investigation is complete.”
West Linn Police Chief Terry Kruger was placed on administrative leave while the city investigates the case of
Michael Fesser, a Black man who sued the city over a wrongful 2017 arrest. (Photo: City Of West Linn)
Michael Fesser sued the Portland suburb’s police department after he was arrested in 2017 and accused of stealing from A&B Towing Co., his employer. The arrest turned out to be staged by then-West Linn Police Chief Terry Timeus, who was friends with Eric Benson, the company’s owner, according to The Oregonian.
Prior to the arrest, Fesser complained about racial discrimination he experienced in the workplace, and Benson was worried about a potential lawsuit. Court documents state co-workers used racial slurs toward him and brandished a confederate flag.
Michael Fesser was arrested in 2017 after his boss falsely accused him of theft. (Photo: KGW / video screenshot)The West Linn officers also operated outside of their jurisdiction when they began investigating Fesser. Fesser lives in Portland, and A&B Towing is located in Portland. Kruger was installed as chief after Fesser’s arrest, but some citizens have called for his firing. He reportedly defended Fesser’s arrest behind closed doors, according to documentation from meetings between the chief and city officials.
“It’s not an illegal investigation. There wasn’t illegal surveillance. It wasn’t an unlawful arrest. There wasn’t a violation of his civil rights. These are the allegations. But it was a legitimate investigation,’’ Kruger said during a September 2018 meeting.
“There was probable cause. They did arrest him lawfully. He was indicted for crimes.’’
Fesser was awarded a $600,000 settlement from the city in February. He also received $415,000 from his former employer.
“The pattern of police misconduct and racism by West Linn Police officers, facilitated by the Portland Police, is truly shocking and disheartening,” Paul Buchanan, Fesser’s lawyer, told CBS News in February. “We hope that our local police will take the very strong local and national reaction we are seeing to this case as a strong message that reform is required. It is scary that the police can so readily make up claims that are not true.”
Fesser wants to protect other Black men, including his sons, from a similar experience.
“What’s really going to help is if we come together as a community and their community also and we just move through this process so it doesn’t happen again,” he said last month. “This cannot happen. It has to stop.”
West Linn Police Chief Terry Kruger was placed on paid administrative leave on April 8.
“Administrative leave ensures that all parties have the opportunity to clearly and completely answer questions and explain their actions,” the city said in a statement. “It is not a determination of wrongdoing on the part of Chief Kruger or anyone else. Any such determination can only be made after the investigation is complete.”
West Linn Police Chief Terry Kruger was placed on administrative leave while the city investigates the case of
Michael Fesser, a Black man who sued the city over a wrongful 2017 arrest. (Photo: City Of West Linn)
Michael Fesser sued the Portland suburb’s police department after he was arrested in 2017 and accused of stealing from A&B Towing Co., his employer. The arrest turned out to be staged by then-West Linn Police Chief Terry Timeus, who was friends with Eric Benson, the company’s owner, according to The Oregonian.
Prior to the arrest, Fesser complained about racial discrimination he experienced in the workplace, and Benson was worried about a potential lawsuit. Court documents state co-workers used racial slurs toward him and brandished a confederate flag.
Michael Fesser was arrested in 2017 after his boss falsely accused him of theft. (Photo: KGW / video screenshot)The West Linn officers also operated outside of their jurisdiction when they began investigating Fesser. Fesser lives in Portland, and A&B Towing is located in Portland. Kruger was installed as chief after Fesser’s arrest, but some citizens have called for his firing. He reportedly defended Fesser’s arrest behind closed doors, according to documentation from meetings between the chief and city officials.
“It’s not an illegal investigation. There wasn’t illegal surveillance. It wasn’t an unlawful arrest. There wasn’t a violation of his civil rights. These are the allegations. But it was a legitimate investigation,’’ Kruger said during a September 2018 meeting.
“There was probable cause. They did arrest him lawfully. He was indicted for crimes.’’
Fesser was awarded a $600,000 settlement from the city in February. He also received $415,000 from his former employer.
“The pattern of police misconduct and racism by West Linn Police officers, facilitated by the Portland Police, is truly shocking and disheartening,” Paul Buchanan, Fesser’s lawyer, told CBS News in February. “We hope that our local police will take the very strong local and national reaction we are seeing to this case as a strong message that reform is required. It is scary that the police can so readily make up claims that are not true.”
Fesser wants to protect other Black men, including his sons, from a similar experience.
“What’s really going to help is if we come together as a community and their community also and we just move through this process so it doesn’t happen again,” he said last month. “This cannot happen. It has to stop.”
Lawsuit: Black Twin Brothers Beaten, Arrested by Cops After Being Accused of Burglarizing Their Own Home
By Tanasia Kenney - atlanta black star
March 21, 2020
A pair of federal lawsuits filed in Sacramento, California, this week accuses Rancho Cordova Police of excessive force, false arrest and other offenses in the violent take down of two brothers in front of their home last year.
The complaints, which also name Sacramento County and the officers as defendants, alleges the brothers were beaten, choked, arrested and carted off to jail after a neighbor mistook them for burglars, the Sacramento Bee reports.
Twins Carlos and Thomas Williams contend they’re the victims of police brutality and believe the incident, at least in part, stems from the fact that they’re African-American.
The pair were arrested the night of March 23, 2019, as Carlos was showing his brother a water drain he installed on his new home. That’s when they were confronted by a couple who demanded to know “what the fuck” they were doing on the property, then accused them of trying to burglarize the place.
“Basically, because I didn’t fit the description of maybe what should be in this neighborhood,” Carlos told local station CBS 13.
The couple dialed 911, and within moments the Williams brothers were surrounded by police.
“The police officers arrived at the scene and immediately drew their guns, screamed profanities at the brothers, placed one brother in a chokehold, and beat them both into unconsciousness,” Thomas Williams’ complaint alleges. “The brothers attempted to convince officers they were residents, but the officers did not care.”
The cops searched both brothers and seized Carlos’ wallet, which contained a driver’s license listing his current address “and made it plainly obvious to the arresting officers that Carlos wasn’t burglarizing his own home.”
“Carlos confirmed yet again to arresting officers he lived at the dispatched address,” the lawsuit adds, noting that a neighbor named Oraciso Galvan also confirmed to police that Carlos lived at the home.
Still, the siblings were arrested and jailed on charges of felony assault and resisting arrest, according to the complaint. Prosecutors ultimately declined to file charges.
Their troubles didn’t end there, however. Since the incident, the Williams brothers claim they’ve been the target of a “coordinated intimidation campaign” by the police and Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, which operates Rancho Cordova PD under contract with the city, according to the Sacramento Bee.
The sheriff’s department said officers followed standard protocol in the incident.
“This can be a very violent thing having a residential burglary,” Deputy Rod Grassmann told CBS 13 at the time, adding, “People who commit residential burglaries have weapons, so it would be reasonable that deputies would respond that way.”
Grassmann also claimed the men were combative and ignored deputies’ commands, saying they had to ask multiple times for one brother to “take your hand out of pocket.”
Thomas Williams, whose lawsuit notes that he’s both an educator and an entrepreneur, denies this, however, and further accuses police of violating his and his brother’s civil and constitutional rights in the arrest.
Atlanta Black Star reached out to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department for comment and is awaiting response.
The complaints, which also name Sacramento County and the officers as defendants, alleges the brothers were beaten, choked, arrested and carted off to jail after a neighbor mistook them for burglars, the Sacramento Bee reports.
Twins Carlos and Thomas Williams contend they’re the victims of police brutality and believe the incident, at least in part, stems from the fact that they’re African-American.
The pair were arrested the night of March 23, 2019, as Carlos was showing his brother a water drain he installed on his new home. That’s when they were confronted by a couple who demanded to know “what the fuck” they were doing on the property, then accused them of trying to burglarize the place.
“Basically, because I didn’t fit the description of maybe what should be in this neighborhood,” Carlos told local station CBS 13.
The couple dialed 911, and within moments the Williams brothers were surrounded by police.
“The police officers arrived at the scene and immediately drew their guns, screamed profanities at the brothers, placed one brother in a chokehold, and beat them both into unconsciousness,” Thomas Williams’ complaint alleges. “The brothers attempted to convince officers they were residents, but the officers did not care.”
The cops searched both brothers and seized Carlos’ wallet, which contained a driver’s license listing his current address “and made it plainly obvious to the arresting officers that Carlos wasn’t burglarizing his own home.”
“Carlos confirmed yet again to arresting officers he lived at the dispatched address,” the lawsuit adds, noting that a neighbor named Oraciso Galvan also confirmed to police that Carlos lived at the home.
Still, the siblings were arrested and jailed on charges of felony assault and resisting arrest, according to the complaint. Prosecutors ultimately declined to file charges.
Their troubles didn’t end there, however. Since the incident, the Williams brothers claim they’ve been the target of a “coordinated intimidation campaign” by the police and Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, which operates Rancho Cordova PD under contract with the city, according to the Sacramento Bee.
The sheriff’s department said officers followed standard protocol in the incident.
“This can be a very violent thing having a residential burglary,” Deputy Rod Grassmann told CBS 13 at the time, adding, “People who commit residential burglaries have weapons, so it would be reasonable that deputies would respond that way.”
Grassmann also claimed the men were combative and ignored deputies’ commands, saying they had to ask multiple times for one brother to “take your hand out of pocket.”
Thomas Williams, whose lawsuit notes that he’s both an educator and an entrepreneur, denies this, however, and further accuses police of violating his and his brother’s civil and constitutional rights in the arrest.
Atlanta Black Star reached out to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department for comment and is awaiting response.
Miami Beach Police Accused of Racism After Numerous Videos of Violence Against Black Spring Breakers Go Viral
By Ashleigh Atwell - atlanta black star
March 18, 2020
The Miami Beach Police Department is being accused of racially profiling and overpolicing Black spring breakers.
Videos of violent confrontations between Black spring breakers and police officers circulated around Twitter over the weekend. In one video, officers were trying to disperse a crowd after a fight broke out.
As two men began to walk away, an officer grabbed one by the arm. When the spring breaker snatched his arm away, both of the men were tackled by several MBPD officers. While the men were being arrested, other officers shot pellets to disperse the crowd. The two men were later charged with resisting arrest without violence.
After the officer and the woman tumble to the ground from the impact, the cop quickly gets to his feet and shoves the woman, who appeared to kick at him in response. The officer then grabbed her by the neck and pinned her to the asphalt. She was arrested and charged with resisting arrest without violence and battery against a police officer. The MBPD claims the woman purposefully interfered with the chase.
In yet another video, a young Black man is lying on the ground while a MBPD officer holds him in a headlock.
The treatment of Black spring breakers drew the fire of the Miami-Dade chapter of the NAACP, the Miami New Times reported. The advocacy organization wants MBPD police Chief Richard Clements and Miami Beach City Manager Jimmy Morales removed from their posts.
According to chapter president Ruban Roberts, the organization had a positive relationship with Clements’ predecessor, Dan Oates, and warned the city that Clements would increase violent police interactions. His worries were validated when he saw MBPD officers outfitted in riot gear.
“There’s no justification other than intimidation for them to wear that gear and for them to have those guns,” Roberts said.
Roberts is upset with Morales because he says any decision made by the police department must be approved by the city of Miami Beach.
“Any action the officers take or the chief takes, whether it’s using riot gear or assault rifles and bullets, has to have approval from the mayor and city manager,” Roberts said.
Jeanne Baker, chair of ACLU Florida’s police practice committee, told the Miami Herald the MBPD “has a long and troubled history of racial discrimination.” According to the outlet, in the 1930s, Black workers couldn’t travel to Miami Beach unless they had a work permit and submitted headshots and fingerprints to the police. In 2011, the Miami Beach police were criticized for the death of Raymond Herisse, who was killed when officers fired more than 100 bullets into his car. Four bystanders were hit by the gunfire but survived.
Sources told the Miami Herald there would be an internal conversation, but Clements is defending the department’s behavior in public.
“If you come to Miami Beach to cause problems, we will intervene and take enforcement action,” Clements said in a statement.
Kevin Millan, president of the Miami Beach Fraternal Order of Police, also defended the officers’ actions.
“The videos, along with the police officer’s body camera footage, captured the hostile crowd, fights, and disorderly actions of numerous spring breakers,” Millan said.
Roberts didn’t go as far as calling city officials racist, but he believes race is a factor in the treatment of Black visitors.
“I’m not calling Jimmy or the mayor racist, but it has racial overtones when you only do that with one population,” he said. “You can’t tell me that on the other spring break weeks when you have white college kids come down, the kids don’t also act unruly. Why is that different? There’s only one common denominator.” (VIDEO)
Videos of violent confrontations between Black spring breakers and police officers circulated around Twitter over the weekend. In one video, officers were trying to disperse a crowd after a fight broke out.
As two men began to walk away, an officer grabbed one by the arm. When the spring breaker snatched his arm away, both of the men were tackled by several MBPD officers. While the men were being arrested, other officers shot pellets to disperse the crowd. The two men were later charged with resisting arrest without violence.
After the officer and the woman tumble to the ground from the impact, the cop quickly gets to his feet and shoves the woman, who appeared to kick at him in response. The officer then grabbed her by the neck and pinned her to the asphalt. She was arrested and charged with resisting arrest without violence and battery against a police officer. The MBPD claims the woman purposefully interfered with the chase.
In yet another video, a young Black man is lying on the ground while a MBPD officer holds him in a headlock.
The treatment of Black spring breakers drew the fire of the Miami-Dade chapter of the NAACP, the Miami New Times reported. The advocacy organization wants MBPD police Chief Richard Clements and Miami Beach City Manager Jimmy Morales removed from their posts.
According to chapter president Ruban Roberts, the organization had a positive relationship with Clements’ predecessor, Dan Oates, and warned the city that Clements would increase violent police interactions. His worries were validated when he saw MBPD officers outfitted in riot gear.
“There’s no justification other than intimidation for them to wear that gear and for them to have those guns,” Roberts said.
Roberts is upset with Morales because he says any decision made by the police department must be approved by the city of Miami Beach.
“Any action the officers take or the chief takes, whether it’s using riot gear or assault rifles and bullets, has to have approval from the mayor and city manager,” Roberts said.
Jeanne Baker, chair of ACLU Florida’s police practice committee, told the Miami Herald the MBPD “has a long and troubled history of racial discrimination.” According to the outlet, in the 1930s, Black workers couldn’t travel to Miami Beach unless they had a work permit and submitted headshots and fingerprints to the police. In 2011, the Miami Beach police were criticized for the death of Raymond Herisse, who was killed when officers fired more than 100 bullets into his car. Four bystanders were hit by the gunfire but survived.
Sources told the Miami Herald there would be an internal conversation, but Clements is defending the department’s behavior in public.
“If you come to Miami Beach to cause problems, we will intervene and take enforcement action,” Clements said in a statement.
Kevin Millan, president of the Miami Beach Fraternal Order of Police, also defended the officers’ actions.
“The videos, along with the police officer’s body camera footage, captured the hostile crowd, fights, and disorderly actions of numerous spring breakers,” Millan said.
Roberts didn’t go as far as calling city officials racist, but he believes race is a factor in the treatment of Black visitors.
“I’m not calling Jimmy or the mayor racist, but it has racial overtones when you only do that with one population,” he said. “You can’t tell me that on the other spring break weeks when you have white college kids come down, the kids don’t also act unruly. Why is that different? There’s only one common denominator.” (VIDEO)
maryland
sleeping while white!!!
Maryland man fatally shot by police while asleep in his bedroom
Montgomery county police said Duncan Socrates Lemp ‘confronted’ officers as eyewitness gave ‘contrary’ account
Associated Press in Silver Spring - the guardian
Sat 14 Mar 2020 08.55 EDT
A Maryland man who was shot and killed by a police officer was asleep in his bedroom when police opened fire from outside his house, an attorney for the 21-year-old man’s family said on Friday. The man’s girlfriend was also wounded.
The Montgomery county police department said in a news release Duncan Socrates Lemp “confronted” police and was shot by one of the officers early on Thursday.
But Rene Sandler, an attorney for Lemp’s relatives, said an eyewitness gave a “completely contrary” account of the shooting. She said police could have “absolutely no justification” for shooting Lemp based on what she has heard about the circumstances.
“The facts as I understand them from eyewitnesses are incredibly concerning,” she said.
The warrant police obtained to search the Potomac home Lemp shared with his parents and 19-year-old brother does not mention any “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, Lemp’s relatives said in a statement released by their lawyers. Nobody in the house that morning had a criminal record, the statement added.
“Any attempt by the police to shift responsibility on to Duncan or his family, who were sleeping when the police fired shots into their home, is not supported by the facts,” the statement says.
A police department spokesman did not immediately respond to the statements by the family or their lawyer.
The department’s news release said tactical unit members were serving a “high-risk” search warrant around 4.30am when one officer fatally shot Lemp. Police detectives recovered three rifles and two handguns from the home. Lemp was prohibited from possessing firearms, police said.
“Detectives were following up on a complaint from the public that Lemp, though prohibited, was in possession of firearms,” the release said, without elaborating.
Sandler said the family believes police fired gunshots, not a flashbang or other projectile, from outside the home, including through Lemp’s bedroom window, while he and his girlfriend were sleeping. Nobody in the home heard any warnings or commands before police opened fire, she said.
“There is no warrant or other justification that would ever allow for that unless there is an imminent threat, which there was not,” Sandler said.
The police release said the “facts and circumstances of the encounter” were still under investigation. Prosecutors from neighboring Howard county will review the evidence at the conclusion of the investigation.
Lemp was Caucasian, according to Sandler. She did not know the race of the unidentified officer involved because she said the officers were wearing masks. The officer was placed on administrative leave, a standard procedure after police shootings.
Lemp worked as a software developer and was trying to raise money for a startup company, according to friends and co-workers.
“He was a talented, smart guy. Super nice. Didn’t deserve to get shot,” said Samuel Reid, whose Canadian software company employed Lemp as an independent contractor.
Tsolmondorj Natsagdorj, 24, of Fairfax, Virginia, said he met Lemp in 2016 and bonded with him over their shared interest in cryptocurrency. They also talked about politics. He described Lemp as a libertarian who frequented the 4chan and Reddit message boards, sites popular with internet trolls.
“Duncan was a young guy with a bright future as an entrepreneur,” Natsagdorj said. “He was working on things to change the world.”
On social media accounts that friends said belonged to him, Lemp’s username was “YungQuant”. On an internet forum called “My Militia”, someone who identified himself as Duncan Lemp, of Potomac, and posted under the username “yungquant” said he was “an active III%’r and looking for local members & recruits”.
That was an apparent reference to the Three Percenters, a wing of the militia movement. The group’s logo, the Roman numeral III, has become popular with anti-government extremists, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
On his Instagram account, Lemp recently posted a photograph that depicted two people holding up rifles and included the term “boogaloo”, slang used by militia members and other extremists to describe a future civil war in the US.
Friends said they never heard Lemp espouse any anti-government rhetoric. Sandler said Lemp was not a part of any anti-government or militia-type group.
“He was pro-America and supported wholeheartedly all the protections of the constitution,” she said.
Sandler said Lemp’s family was traumatized. Their statement said they intended to “hold each and every person responsible for his death”.
“We believe that the body camera footage and other forensic evidence from this event will support what Duncan’s family already knows, that he was murdered,” the statement said.
The Montgomery county police department said in a news release Duncan Socrates Lemp “confronted” police and was shot by one of the officers early on Thursday.
But Rene Sandler, an attorney for Lemp’s relatives, said an eyewitness gave a “completely contrary” account of the shooting. She said police could have “absolutely no justification” for shooting Lemp based on what she has heard about the circumstances.
“The facts as I understand them from eyewitnesses are incredibly concerning,” she said.
The warrant police obtained to search the Potomac home Lemp shared with his parents and 19-year-old brother does not mention any “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, Lemp’s relatives said in a statement released by their lawyers. Nobody in the house that morning had a criminal record, the statement added.
“Any attempt by the police to shift responsibility on to Duncan or his family, who were sleeping when the police fired shots into their home, is not supported by the facts,” the statement says.
A police department spokesman did not immediately respond to the statements by the family or their lawyer.
The department’s news release said tactical unit members were serving a “high-risk” search warrant around 4.30am when one officer fatally shot Lemp. Police detectives recovered three rifles and two handguns from the home. Lemp was prohibited from possessing firearms, police said.
“Detectives were following up on a complaint from the public that Lemp, though prohibited, was in possession of firearms,” the release said, without elaborating.
Sandler said the family believes police fired gunshots, not a flashbang or other projectile, from outside the home, including through Lemp’s bedroom window, while he and his girlfriend were sleeping. Nobody in the home heard any warnings or commands before police opened fire, she said.
“There is no warrant or other justification that would ever allow for that unless there is an imminent threat, which there was not,” Sandler said.
The police release said the “facts and circumstances of the encounter” were still under investigation. Prosecutors from neighboring Howard county will review the evidence at the conclusion of the investigation.
Lemp was Caucasian, according to Sandler. She did not know the race of the unidentified officer involved because she said the officers were wearing masks. The officer was placed on administrative leave, a standard procedure after police shootings.
Lemp worked as a software developer and was trying to raise money for a startup company, according to friends and co-workers.
“He was a talented, smart guy. Super nice. Didn’t deserve to get shot,” said Samuel Reid, whose Canadian software company employed Lemp as an independent contractor.
Tsolmondorj Natsagdorj, 24, of Fairfax, Virginia, said he met Lemp in 2016 and bonded with him over their shared interest in cryptocurrency. They also talked about politics. He described Lemp as a libertarian who frequented the 4chan and Reddit message boards, sites popular with internet trolls.
“Duncan was a young guy with a bright future as an entrepreneur,” Natsagdorj said. “He was working on things to change the world.”
On social media accounts that friends said belonged to him, Lemp’s username was “YungQuant”. On an internet forum called “My Militia”, someone who identified himself as Duncan Lemp, of Potomac, and posted under the username “yungquant” said he was “an active III%’r and looking for local members & recruits”.
That was an apparent reference to the Three Percenters, a wing of the militia movement. The group’s logo, the Roman numeral III, has become popular with anti-government extremists, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
On his Instagram account, Lemp recently posted a photograph that depicted two people holding up rifles and included the term “boogaloo”, slang used by militia members and other extremists to describe a future civil war in the US.
Friends said they never heard Lemp espouse any anti-government rhetoric. Sandler said Lemp was not a part of any anti-government or militia-type group.
“He was pro-America and supported wholeheartedly all the protections of the constitution,” she said.
Sandler said Lemp’s family was traumatized. Their statement said they intended to “hold each and every person responsible for his death”.
“We believe that the body camera footage and other forensic evidence from this event will support what Duncan’s family already knows, that he was murdered,” the statement said.
oppression by algorithm!!!
ICE’S NEW YORK OFFICE USES A RIGGED ALGORITHM TO KEEP VIRTUALLY ALL ARRESTEES IN DETENTION. THE ACLU SAYS IT’S UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
Sam Biddle - the intercept
March 2 2020, 7:30 a.m.
IN 2013, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly began using a software tool to recommend whether people arrested over immigration violations should be let go after 48 hours or detained. The software’s algorithm supposedly pored over a variety of risk factors before outputting a decision.
A new lawsuit, however, filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders, alleges that the algorithm doesn’t really make a decision, at least not one that can result in a detainee being released. Instead, the groups said, it’s an unconstitutional cudgel that’s been rigged to detain virtually everyone ICE’s New York Field Office brings in, even when the government itself believes they present a minimal threat to public safety.
The suit, which asks that ICE’s “Risk Classification Assessment” tool be ruled illegal and the affected detainees reassessed by humans, includes damning new data obtained by the NYCLU through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The data illuminates the extent to which the so-called algorithm has been perverted. Between 2013 and 2017, the FOIA data shows, the algorithm recommended detention without bond for “low risk” individuals 53 percent of the time, according an analysis by the NYCLU and Bronx Defenders. But from June 2017 — shortly after President Donald Trump took office — to September 2019, that number exploded to 97 percent.
“This dramatic drop in the release rate comes at a time when exponentially more people are being arrested in the New York City area and immigration officials have expanded arrests of those not convicted of criminal offenses,” says the groups’ lawsuit. “The federal government’s sweeping detention dragnet means that people who pose no flight or safety risk are being jailed as a matter of course—in an unlawful trend that is getting worse.”
Individuals detained under what the lawsuit calls a “no-release policy” will remain jailed until they can be seen by an immigration judge. People arrested by ICE had no access to information about how they were classified by the algorithm — that’s why the FOIAs were necessary — and most don’t have access to lawyers at the time of their detention, Thomas Scott-Railton, a fellow at the Bronx Defenders told The Intercept. “The result,” he said, “is that people are detained for weeks, even months, without having been given the actual justification for their detention and without a real chance to challenge it.”
THE LAWSUIT ALLEGES that this algorithmic rubber stamp violates both the constitutional guarantee to due process and federal immigration law that calls for “individualized determinations” about release, rather than blanket denials with a computerized imprimatur. Reached by email, ICE New York spokesperson Rachael Yong Yow told The Intercept, “I am not familiar with the lawsuit you reference, but I am not inclined to comment on pending litigation.”
The risk assessment algorithm is supposed to provide a recommendation to ICE officers who are then meant to make the final decision, but the agency’s New York Field Office diverged from the algorithm’s ruling less than 1 percent of the time since 2017. When detainees are finally seen by a human, non-algorithmic immigration judge, the lawsuit says, “approximately 40% of people detained by ICE are granted release on bond.”
The Trump administration’s stepped-up immigration arrests of people without criminal convictions lay bare the perversity of the rigged no-release policy. “If the New York Field Office were actually conducting individualized determinations pursuant to its stated criteria,” the lawsuit says, “the percentage of people released should have actually increased since 2017 because more people arrested qualified for release.”
The technical reasons for this drastic change are clear. Algorithms are essentially problem-solving formulas that can operate at superhuman speed. ICE’s risk assessment algorithm originally functioned by automatically reviewing an immigration detainee’s personal history, weighing factors like their flight risk and threat to public safety, then spitting out one of four options: detention without bond, detention with the possibility of a release on bond, outright release, or a referral to a human ICE supervisor.
In 2018, Reuters reported that Trump’s inauguration brought a critical change to the risk assessment tool where the software was edited to simply remove the possibility of a “release” output. The NYCLU’s FOIA data also shows that the option for bond was removed in 2015. In other words, this ostensible problem-solving software was rigged to provide only one solution: detention.
BASED ON THE government’s own data, the decision-making tool functionally makes decisions about as well as a stopped clock would tell time. Rather than functioning as a tool that even attempts to aid human decision-making, FOIA data shows the opposite. The “Risk Classification Assessment” tool serves as a funnel to fast-track action in line with the Trump administration’s brutal immigration agenda.
For years, exactly how the ICE algorithm reached its ultimate decisions has been kept secret. “ICE has been anything but transparent about both the RCA’s algorithm and how the tool is used by officials in the field,” explained NYCLU attorney Amy Belsher. “And yet, these determinations have profound and severe impacts on the lives of the thousands of people ICE arrests every year.”
Unlike much of the secret code used in government or business, however, this secret algorithm was exposed because ICE rigged it: We now know exactly how it doesn’t work. The risk-assessment tool has almost ceased to be an algorithm altogether, rather serving only to give the impression of algorithmic justice. “Given what we now know about the manipulations to the tool,” added Belsher, “it appears the main function of the RCA is to provide a veneer of objectivity and fairness to a process that lacks it entirely.” In this computer-enabled vacuum of accountability, ICE’s New York personnel can point to the oracular algorithm to justify increased detentions, which in turn points to nothing but itself.
For New Yorkers handed an algorithm-sanctioned detention, the lawsuit says, the consequences can be immediate and crushing:
Once denied release under the new policy, people remain unnecessarily incarcerated in local jails for weeks or even months before they have a meaningful opportunity to seek release in a hearing before an Immigration Judge. While waiting for those hearings, those detained suffer under harsh conditions of confinement akin to criminal incarceration. While incarcerated, they are separated from families, friends, and communities, and they risk losing their children, their jobs, and their homes. Because of inadequate medical care and conditions in the jails, unmet medical and mental-health needs often lead to serious and at times irreversible consequences.
At no point have detainees ensnared by the ICE algorithm had any chance at recourse, explained Belsher, describing a legal process as opaque as the risk-assessment tool. “People are not able to meaningfully participate in ICE’s initial custody determination process, they are not given access to counsel and cannot submit evidence,” Belsher said. “ICE’s decision is administratively final; there is no process within the agency for people to challenge either the RCA’s recommendation or ICE’s custody determination. In fact, ICE does not even provide the person with the RCA’s determination of their flight or danger risk level or any other recommendation generated by the tool. People are given a basic form stating only that ICE has decided to detain them.”
The no-release policy is particularly tough on people with disabilities or health problems. “This practice of widespread detention is both cruel and needless,” Scott-Railton, of the Bronx Defenders, said in a press release, “and has particularly devastating consequences for people with physical or psychological disabilities who must fight their immigration cases while being held in inhumane conditions and without access to the health services they need.”
A new lawsuit, however, filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders, alleges that the algorithm doesn’t really make a decision, at least not one that can result in a detainee being released. Instead, the groups said, it’s an unconstitutional cudgel that’s been rigged to detain virtually everyone ICE’s New York Field Office brings in, even when the government itself believes they present a minimal threat to public safety.
The suit, which asks that ICE’s “Risk Classification Assessment” tool be ruled illegal and the affected detainees reassessed by humans, includes damning new data obtained by the NYCLU through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The data illuminates the extent to which the so-called algorithm has been perverted. Between 2013 and 2017, the FOIA data shows, the algorithm recommended detention without bond for “low risk” individuals 53 percent of the time, according an analysis by the NYCLU and Bronx Defenders. But from June 2017 — shortly after President Donald Trump took office — to September 2019, that number exploded to 97 percent.
“This dramatic drop in the release rate comes at a time when exponentially more people are being arrested in the New York City area and immigration officials have expanded arrests of those not convicted of criminal offenses,” says the groups’ lawsuit. “The federal government’s sweeping detention dragnet means that people who pose no flight or safety risk are being jailed as a matter of course—in an unlawful trend that is getting worse.”
Individuals detained under what the lawsuit calls a “no-release policy” will remain jailed until they can be seen by an immigration judge. People arrested by ICE had no access to information about how they were classified by the algorithm — that’s why the FOIAs were necessary — and most don’t have access to lawyers at the time of their detention, Thomas Scott-Railton, a fellow at the Bronx Defenders told The Intercept. “The result,” he said, “is that people are detained for weeks, even months, without having been given the actual justification for their detention and without a real chance to challenge it.”
THE LAWSUIT ALLEGES that this algorithmic rubber stamp violates both the constitutional guarantee to due process and federal immigration law that calls for “individualized determinations” about release, rather than blanket denials with a computerized imprimatur. Reached by email, ICE New York spokesperson Rachael Yong Yow told The Intercept, “I am not familiar with the lawsuit you reference, but I am not inclined to comment on pending litigation.”
The risk assessment algorithm is supposed to provide a recommendation to ICE officers who are then meant to make the final decision, but the agency’s New York Field Office diverged from the algorithm’s ruling less than 1 percent of the time since 2017. When detainees are finally seen by a human, non-algorithmic immigration judge, the lawsuit says, “approximately 40% of people detained by ICE are granted release on bond.”
The Trump administration’s stepped-up immigration arrests of people without criminal convictions lay bare the perversity of the rigged no-release policy. “If the New York Field Office were actually conducting individualized determinations pursuant to its stated criteria,” the lawsuit says, “the percentage of people released should have actually increased since 2017 because more people arrested qualified for release.”
The technical reasons for this drastic change are clear. Algorithms are essentially problem-solving formulas that can operate at superhuman speed. ICE’s risk assessment algorithm originally functioned by automatically reviewing an immigration detainee’s personal history, weighing factors like their flight risk and threat to public safety, then spitting out one of four options: detention without bond, detention with the possibility of a release on bond, outright release, or a referral to a human ICE supervisor.
In 2018, Reuters reported that Trump’s inauguration brought a critical change to the risk assessment tool where the software was edited to simply remove the possibility of a “release” output. The NYCLU’s FOIA data also shows that the option for bond was removed in 2015. In other words, this ostensible problem-solving software was rigged to provide only one solution: detention.
BASED ON THE government’s own data, the decision-making tool functionally makes decisions about as well as a stopped clock would tell time. Rather than functioning as a tool that even attempts to aid human decision-making, FOIA data shows the opposite. The “Risk Classification Assessment” tool serves as a funnel to fast-track action in line with the Trump administration’s brutal immigration agenda.
For years, exactly how the ICE algorithm reached its ultimate decisions has been kept secret. “ICE has been anything but transparent about both the RCA’s algorithm and how the tool is used by officials in the field,” explained NYCLU attorney Amy Belsher. “And yet, these determinations have profound and severe impacts on the lives of the thousands of people ICE arrests every year.”
Unlike much of the secret code used in government or business, however, this secret algorithm was exposed because ICE rigged it: We now know exactly how it doesn’t work. The risk-assessment tool has almost ceased to be an algorithm altogether, rather serving only to give the impression of algorithmic justice. “Given what we now know about the manipulations to the tool,” added Belsher, “it appears the main function of the RCA is to provide a veneer of objectivity and fairness to a process that lacks it entirely.” In this computer-enabled vacuum of accountability, ICE’s New York personnel can point to the oracular algorithm to justify increased detentions, which in turn points to nothing but itself.
For New Yorkers handed an algorithm-sanctioned detention, the lawsuit says, the consequences can be immediate and crushing:
Once denied release under the new policy, people remain unnecessarily incarcerated in local jails for weeks or even months before they have a meaningful opportunity to seek release in a hearing before an Immigration Judge. While waiting for those hearings, those detained suffer under harsh conditions of confinement akin to criminal incarceration. While incarcerated, they are separated from families, friends, and communities, and they risk losing their children, their jobs, and their homes. Because of inadequate medical care and conditions in the jails, unmet medical and mental-health needs often lead to serious and at times irreversible consequences.
At no point have detainees ensnared by the ICE algorithm had any chance at recourse, explained Belsher, describing a legal process as opaque as the risk-assessment tool. “People are not able to meaningfully participate in ICE’s initial custody determination process, they are not given access to counsel and cannot submit evidence,” Belsher said. “ICE’s decision is administratively final; there is no process within the agency for people to challenge either the RCA’s recommendation or ICE’s custody determination. In fact, ICE does not even provide the person with the RCA’s determination of their flight or danger risk level or any other recommendation generated by the tool. People are given a basic form stating only that ICE has decided to detain them.”
The no-release policy is particularly tough on people with disabilities or health problems. “This practice of widespread detention is both cruel and needless,” Scott-Railton, of the Bronx Defenders, said in a press release, “and has particularly devastating consequences for people with physical or psychological disabilities who must fight their immigration cases while being held in inhumane conditions and without access to the health services they need.”
man's life is worth less than the cost of a subway ride!!!
'I didn't do nothing to you': Man accused of hopping train cars cries before Chicago cop shoots him
Lauren Floyd
Daily Kos Staff
Sunday March 01, 2020 · 7:35 AM PST
Witness video shows a Chicago police officer shooting and injuring a man accused only of hopping from train car to train car Friday at a downtown train station in Chicago. Two officers were put on desk duty in the incident and are being investigated in the encounter, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. The incident happened just after city officials announced a plan intended to reduce shootings and other incidents of violence in the city's transit system, the newspaper reported. The police shooting, however, begs the question: Will more police on city train platforms really affect a drop in shootings or will it simply change the type of shootings residents have to deal with? Instead of civilians holding the guns, will it be police officers?
The footage shows one Chicago police officer lying on top of the man in question near the bottom of an escalator while another officer tried to restrain the man. “I didn’t do nothing to you,” the man said. He also managed to break free enough to stand up, when one of the officers can be heard telling the man to “stop resisting” at least eight times. A female officer seemed to spray the man with pepper spray, after which he is seen on the video holding covering eyes with one hand. “Give him your hands,” the female officer shouted. The man took two steps toward the other officer, but his female colleague shot the suspect before he could make it to the officer. The man police shot at then ran up the nearby escalator, and a second shot could be heard. It was fired outside of the camera’s view.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a statement released on Twitter Friday the Civilian Office of Public Accountability is independently investigating the incident and interim Chicago Police Supt. Charlie Beck has contacted the State's Attorney "due to the potential criminal nature of this incident." “With the strong caveat that one perspective does not depict the entirety of the incident, the video is extremely disturbing and the actions by these officers are deeply concerning,” Lightfoot said.
Chicago resident Kyle Lucas said in response to the mayor’s tweet: "I was supposed to be on that escalator when those police recklessly shot blindly up them. Thankfully something else came up and I wasn’t there. This is what we expected to happen when you increased @Chicago_Police presence on the @cta. Take them off and find an alternative.”
Rachel Murphy, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said in a statement released online Saturday: “Once again, we see evidence of the lack of meaningful de-escalation by Chicago police officers.” Murphy went on to say Chicago Police “has not adequately included the public” in developing processes that are supposed to require officers to use de-escalation techniques “to prevent or reduce the need for force.” “ It is critical that the community be part of the dialogue around when and how officers may use force,” Murphy said.
The footage shows one Chicago police officer lying on top of the man in question near the bottom of an escalator while another officer tried to restrain the man. “I didn’t do nothing to you,” the man said. He also managed to break free enough to stand up, when one of the officers can be heard telling the man to “stop resisting” at least eight times. A female officer seemed to spray the man with pepper spray, after which he is seen on the video holding covering eyes with one hand. “Give him your hands,” the female officer shouted. The man took two steps toward the other officer, but his female colleague shot the suspect before he could make it to the officer. The man police shot at then ran up the nearby escalator, and a second shot could be heard. It was fired outside of the camera’s view.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a statement released on Twitter Friday the Civilian Office of Public Accountability is independently investigating the incident and interim Chicago Police Supt. Charlie Beck has contacted the State's Attorney "due to the potential criminal nature of this incident." “With the strong caveat that one perspective does not depict the entirety of the incident, the video is extremely disturbing and the actions by these officers are deeply concerning,” Lightfoot said.
Chicago resident Kyle Lucas said in response to the mayor’s tweet: "I was supposed to be on that escalator when those police recklessly shot blindly up them. Thankfully something else came up and I wasn’t there. This is what we expected to happen when you increased @Chicago_Police presence on the @cta. Take them off and find an alternative.”
Rachel Murphy, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said in a statement released online Saturday: “Once again, we see evidence of the lack of meaningful de-escalation by Chicago police officers.” Murphy went on to say Chicago Police “has not adequately included the public” in developing processes that are supposed to require officers to use de-escalation techniques “to prevent or reduce the need for force.” “ It is critical that the community be part of the dialogue around when and how officers may use force,” Murphy said.
INSIDE THE BORDER PATROL
The FBI Is Investigating Massive Embezzlement of Border Patrol Union Funds
The head of the powerful union representing border patrol agents nationwide said the FBI is working to identify who stole some $500,000 out of the coffers of the El Paso local. The theft raises more questions about lawlessness in the union’s ranks.
by A.C. Thompson and Jeff Ernsthausen - pro publica
Feb. 24, 3:15 p.m. EST
The FBI is investigating the disappearance of some $500,000 from the coffers of the powerful union representing the country’s roughly 20,000 Border Patrol agents, said the organization’s national president, Brandon Judd.
Judd said the probe is focused on identifying the individuals responsible for siphoning the money from the bank accounts of the union’s El Paso branch in recent years.
“We know the FBI is looking at it,” said Judd, head of the National Border Patrol Council, which has forged a close alliance with President Donald Trump.
Under the Trump administration, the Border Patrol, a once obscure federal agency, has been thrust into the center of a rancorous debate over immigration policy, facing intense criticism over the squalid conditions in the agency’s overcrowded detention facilities, a string of migrant deaths and revelations that some 9,500 current and former agents were part of a private Facebook group that included vulgar and misogynistic content.
Equally troubling has been evidence of ongoing lawlessness in the agency’s ranks. Over the past five years, hundreds of Border Patrol agents have been arrested on charges ranging from drunken driving to murder, causing alarm among congressional leaders, law enforcement experts and the Border Patrol’s own advisory board, which in 2016 warned that criminal misconduct by agents could undermine the agency’s ability to secure the borders.
The unfolding financial scandal in the El Paso sector, one of the busiest and most important in the country, is likely to raise fresh questions about the integrity of the agents tasked with policing the southern border. Staffed and run largely by active-duty agents, the El Paso local represents the interests of more than 1,400 Border Patrol employees stationed across west Texas and New Mexico.
Rumors that the local’s coffers had been looted through a long-running embezzlement scheme had been circulating through the ranks of the Border Patrol since 2018, after a change in the leadership of the local. But it wasn’t until last November that Judd told a gathering of concerned agents in El Paso exactly how much money was missing.
According to an audio recording obtained by ProPublica, Judd told the agents that forensic auditors hired by the union had discovered “$352,389.31 that was misappropriated. They also found that there was another $150,035.65 that was not properly paid to the IRS in tax money. Somebody pocketed it, just up and walked away.”
Judd assured the agents, “We expect there will be indictments.” The theft, he said, had also been brought to the attention of the U.S. Department of Labor, which has the authority to investigate allegations of corruption in labor organizations and often works in conjunction with the FBI.
“It’s a slap in the face,” said one agent and union member who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to discuss union affairs. “This place is notorious for having people in leadership positions who don’t have any leadership skills — and that’s both in management and the union.”
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman with the Department of Labor would neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.
Judd, who was recently elected to a third term as president of the national union, said the auditors, who examined the local’s financial records over a nearly 10-year span, found “many, many discrepancies.”
He didn’t specify when the thefts started and wouldn’t identify the potential targets of the federal probe. But four agents who spoke to ProPublica expressed concerns about the activities of the former head of the local, Robert Russell, and his sister, Dawn Munoz, who handled the local’s finances and prepared its taxes for a decade.
Russell served as the local’s president from 2014 to 2017 and was one of a handful of people with access to its funds, according to interviews and documents filed with the Department of Labor. He was first voted onto the local’s executive board in 2004.
In the spring of 2018, after Russell had stepped down as president, the local fired Munoz. Union officials said it was only then that they learned that the finances were in disarray and hired a forensic auditor to scour the books.
In an interview, Russell, a veteran agent who continues to work for the Border Patrol, insisted that no money had disappeared on his watch. “I don’t think there’s any money missing,” he said.
Instead, Russell questioned the motives of Judd, suggesting that Judd and his colleagues had invented the whole embezzlement scandal “to take the heat off of themselves” and to distract rank-and-file agents from the flaws in a new labor contract that Judd negotiated with the federal government last fall. “It’s purely politically motivated, nothing more,” Russell said.
Judd dismissed Russell’s comments: “The FBI is way too busy to investigate hoaxes.”
The union collects roughly $65 per month from each of its members; the money is split between the local and the national office. In 2018, the local operated on a budget of approximately $303,000, federal documents indicate. Membership dues provide the union’s only significant source of revenue, and much of that money goes to pay lawyers and union stewards to assist agents in disciplinary disputes.
Russell said he hadn’t been questioned by anyone from the FBI or the Labor Department. He also said his sister wasn’t involved in any wrongdoing.
In a lengthy interview, Munoz offered a series of contradictory statements about the scandal and her troubled personal history. Court documents obtained by ProPublica show that prosecutors in Texas and New Mexico have charged her with a string of low-level financial crimes dating back to 1991, including theft, forgery, and writing bad checks.
She initially said that she hadn’t heard about the embezzlement controversy. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. About 30 minutes later in the conversation, Munoz admitted that she knew about the allegations.
Munoz, who also said she hadn’t been interviewed by the FBI or Labor Department, was adamant that she couldn’t have taken funds from the union bank accounts because she didn’t have access to them.
It’s not clear whether the union vetted Munoz, who is not a certified public accountant, before hiring her.
During the interview, Munoz initially said she’d never been arrested. But when confronted with her jail booking records, she acknowledged that’d she’d been briefly incarcerated on forgery charges in 1991 before posting $3,000 bail.
Munoz, who is married to a retired Border Patrol agent, gave several conflicting accounts of the forgery incident, before admitting that she had forged her cousin’s name on a bank withdrawal slip and had taken $175 out of the woman’s credit union account. “That was my fault,” Munoz said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Court records show the case was eventually dismissed, and Munoz characterized the episode as a misunderstanding between family members.
Since 1997, Munoz has been charged with writing bad checks at least four times, including an ongoing case in New Mexico. A clerk for the magistrate court in the small town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, said a judge has issued a warrant for Munoz’s arrest for failing to pay fines and court costs there.
Munoz claimed she’d never had any legal troubles in New Mexico and said most of the other cases, which occurred in El Paso, were the result of a stolen checkbook. El Paso county court records indicate that two bad check cases were dismissed without Munoz being forced to repay the money.
In a fourth case, in 2009, she was prosecuted for writing a bad check for $1,014 to a small business that sold her kitchen countertops, according to police and court documents. Prosecutors dropped the case after Munoz paid restitution to the countertop company.
Cesar Lujan, who served as the union’s treasurer for eight years, declined to comment. He resigned in 2018 after the union notified the FBI about the missing money.
At a union meeting last summer, Joe Frescas, the current local president, ran through the steps the local had taken to recoup the missing funds. Frescas said union leaders were seeking reimbursement for the stolen funds from the local’s insurer – federal law requires unions to retain insurance to cover any “losses caused by acts of fraud or dishonesty by officers” – and said the local was preparing a civil lawsuit against Munoz’s company, Tax Solutions & Accounting.
Judd stressed that he’s seen no evidence of misconduct by the local’s current leadership, but some frontline agents working in the El Paso sector are skeptical and suspect the financial misconduct might go beyond the missing $500,000.
“In the last two years the financial controls have been a little better, but not a lot,” said an agent who is familiar with the operations of the union. “Money is still being mismanaged.”
Judd said the probe is focused on identifying the individuals responsible for siphoning the money from the bank accounts of the union’s El Paso branch in recent years.
“We know the FBI is looking at it,” said Judd, head of the National Border Patrol Council, which has forged a close alliance with President Donald Trump.
Under the Trump administration, the Border Patrol, a once obscure federal agency, has been thrust into the center of a rancorous debate over immigration policy, facing intense criticism over the squalid conditions in the agency’s overcrowded detention facilities, a string of migrant deaths and revelations that some 9,500 current and former agents were part of a private Facebook group that included vulgar and misogynistic content.
Equally troubling has been evidence of ongoing lawlessness in the agency’s ranks. Over the past five years, hundreds of Border Patrol agents have been arrested on charges ranging from drunken driving to murder, causing alarm among congressional leaders, law enforcement experts and the Border Patrol’s own advisory board, which in 2016 warned that criminal misconduct by agents could undermine the agency’s ability to secure the borders.
The unfolding financial scandal in the El Paso sector, one of the busiest and most important in the country, is likely to raise fresh questions about the integrity of the agents tasked with policing the southern border. Staffed and run largely by active-duty agents, the El Paso local represents the interests of more than 1,400 Border Patrol employees stationed across west Texas and New Mexico.
Rumors that the local’s coffers had been looted through a long-running embezzlement scheme had been circulating through the ranks of the Border Patrol since 2018, after a change in the leadership of the local. But it wasn’t until last November that Judd told a gathering of concerned agents in El Paso exactly how much money was missing.
According to an audio recording obtained by ProPublica, Judd told the agents that forensic auditors hired by the union had discovered “$352,389.31 that was misappropriated. They also found that there was another $150,035.65 that was not properly paid to the IRS in tax money. Somebody pocketed it, just up and walked away.”
Judd assured the agents, “We expect there will be indictments.” The theft, he said, had also been brought to the attention of the U.S. Department of Labor, which has the authority to investigate allegations of corruption in labor organizations and often works in conjunction with the FBI.
“It’s a slap in the face,” said one agent and union member who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to discuss union affairs. “This place is notorious for having people in leadership positions who don’t have any leadership skills — and that’s both in management and the union.”
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman with the Department of Labor would neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.
Judd, who was recently elected to a third term as president of the national union, said the auditors, who examined the local’s financial records over a nearly 10-year span, found “many, many discrepancies.”
He didn’t specify when the thefts started and wouldn’t identify the potential targets of the federal probe. But four agents who spoke to ProPublica expressed concerns about the activities of the former head of the local, Robert Russell, and his sister, Dawn Munoz, who handled the local’s finances and prepared its taxes for a decade.
Russell served as the local’s president from 2014 to 2017 and was one of a handful of people with access to its funds, according to interviews and documents filed with the Department of Labor. He was first voted onto the local’s executive board in 2004.
In the spring of 2018, after Russell had stepped down as president, the local fired Munoz. Union officials said it was only then that they learned that the finances were in disarray and hired a forensic auditor to scour the books.
In an interview, Russell, a veteran agent who continues to work for the Border Patrol, insisted that no money had disappeared on his watch. “I don’t think there’s any money missing,” he said.
Instead, Russell questioned the motives of Judd, suggesting that Judd and his colleagues had invented the whole embezzlement scandal “to take the heat off of themselves” and to distract rank-and-file agents from the flaws in a new labor contract that Judd negotiated with the federal government last fall. “It’s purely politically motivated, nothing more,” Russell said.
Judd dismissed Russell’s comments: “The FBI is way too busy to investigate hoaxes.”
The union collects roughly $65 per month from each of its members; the money is split between the local and the national office. In 2018, the local operated on a budget of approximately $303,000, federal documents indicate. Membership dues provide the union’s only significant source of revenue, and much of that money goes to pay lawyers and union stewards to assist agents in disciplinary disputes.
Russell said he hadn’t been questioned by anyone from the FBI or the Labor Department. He also said his sister wasn’t involved in any wrongdoing.
In a lengthy interview, Munoz offered a series of contradictory statements about the scandal and her troubled personal history. Court documents obtained by ProPublica show that prosecutors in Texas and New Mexico have charged her with a string of low-level financial crimes dating back to 1991, including theft, forgery, and writing bad checks.
She initially said that she hadn’t heard about the embezzlement controversy. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. About 30 minutes later in the conversation, Munoz admitted that she knew about the allegations.
Munoz, who also said she hadn’t been interviewed by the FBI or Labor Department, was adamant that she couldn’t have taken funds from the union bank accounts because she didn’t have access to them.
It’s not clear whether the union vetted Munoz, who is not a certified public accountant, before hiring her.
During the interview, Munoz initially said she’d never been arrested. But when confronted with her jail booking records, she acknowledged that’d she’d been briefly incarcerated on forgery charges in 1991 before posting $3,000 bail.
Munoz, who is married to a retired Border Patrol agent, gave several conflicting accounts of the forgery incident, before admitting that she had forged her cousin’s name on a bank withdrawal slip and had taken $175 out of the woman’s credit union account. “That was my fault,” Munoz said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Court records show the case was eventually dismissed, and Munoz characterized the episode as a misunderstanding between family members.
Since 1997, Munoz has been charged with writing bad checks at least four times, including an ongoing case in New Mexico. A clerk for the magistrate court in the small town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, said a judge has issued a warrant for Munoz’s arrest for failing to pay fines and court costs there.
Munoz claimed she’d never had any legal troubles in New Mexico and said most of the other cases, which occurred in El Paso, were the result of a stolen checkbook. El Paso county court records indicate that two bad check cases were dismissed without Munoz being forced to repay the money.
In a fourth case, in 2009, she was prosecuted for writing a bad check for $1,014 to a small business that sold her kitchen countertops, according to police and court documents. Prosecutors dropped the case after Munoz paid restitution to the countertop company.
Cesar Lujan, who served as the union’s treasurer for eight years, declined to comment. He resigned in 2018 after the union notified the FBI about the missing money.
At a union meeting last summer, Joe Frescas, the current local president, ran through the steps the local had taken to recoup the missing funds. Frescas said union leaders were seeking reimbursement for the stolen funds from the local’s insurer – federal law requires unions to retain insurance to cover any “losses caused by acts of fraud or dishonesty by officers” – and said the local was preparing a civil lawsuit against Munoz’s company, Tax Solutions & Accounting.
Judd stressed that he’s seen no evidence of misconduct by the local’s current leadership, but some frontline agents working in the El Paso sector are skeptical and suspect the financial misconduct might go beyond the missing $500,000.
“In the last two years the financial controls have been a little better, but not a lot,” said an agent who is familiar with the operations of the union. “Money is still being mismanaged.”
of course the 6 year old was black!!!
‘Don’t put handcuffs on’: Body camera footage shows Orlando police arresting 6-year-old for ‘tantrum’
February 25, 2020
By David Edwards
The Orlando Police Department has released footage of a 6-year-old girl being arrested.
According to The Tampa Bay Times, Kaia Rolle was being read a story when officers showed up to arrest her after she had a “tantrum” earlier in the day.
The arrest occurred at Lucious and Emma Nixon Academy on Sept. 19, 2019. Rolle’s family shared body camera footage with the Orlando Sentinel this week.
“What are those for?” Rolle asks the officer, referring to zip ties used to handcuff suspects.
“They’re for you,” Officer Dennis Turner replies.
“No … no, don’t put handcuffs on!” Rolle begs. “Help me, help me, please!”
Turner was eventually fired after the arrest sparked national outrage.
According to The Tampa Bay Times, Kaia Rolle was being read a story when officers showed up to arrest her after she had a “tantrum” earlier in the day.
The arrest occurred at Lucious and Emma Nixon Academy on Sept. 19, 2019. Rolle’s family shared body camera footage with the Orlando Sentinel this week.
“What are those for?” Rolle asks the officer, referring to zip ties used to handcuff suspects.
“They’re for you,” Officer Dennis Turner replies.
“No … no, don’t put handcuffs on!” Rolle begs. “Help me, help me, please!”
Turner was eventually fired after the arrest sparked national outrage.
California Cops Are Collecting Info on Millions of Drivers Who Have Done Nothing Wrong
With few rules and no oversight, California’s biggest law enforcement agencies are sharing millions of driver records.
DANIEL MOATTAR - mother jones
2/21/2020
Law enforcement in four of California’s most populous counties is storing, searching, and sharing detailed records on millions of random drivers, according to a new report from the California State Auditor, a nonpartisan government agency. The audit, released last week, found major deficiencies—and possible lawbreaking—in police use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the California counties of Los Angeles, Fresno, Marin, and Sacramento.
The technology is frighteningly simple: cameras on police cars or roadsides can scan up to 2,000 license plates per minute, storing the plate number, the location, and the time the car was spotted. From there, an officer can easily pull other identifying information, like the driver’s name, address, and criminal history, all without a warrant—or even a supervisor’s sign-off. The result is that drivers are being tracked and recorded by the police, whether or not they’ve done anything wrong. In San Diego, the state audit found that 0.04 percent of scanned plates were actually under suspicion when scanned. A 2016 CityLab report pegged that at 0.02 percent in Marin County. In Los Angeles, the figure was 0.01 percent of 320 million images, all including timestamps and the driver’s exact location. In 2013, Mother Jones reported that, per the American Civil Liberties Union, just 47 of the million license plates scanned in Maryland “were even tentatively associated with actual serious crimes.”
A Santa Monica, California police officer points a radar gun.Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Law enforcement in four of California’s most populous counties is storing, searching, and sharing detailed records on millions of random drivers, according to a new report from the California State Auditor, a nonpartisan government agency. The audit, released last week, found major deficiencies—and possible lawbreaking—in police use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the California counties of Los Angeles, Fresno, Marin, and Sacramento.
The technology is frighteningly simple: cameras on police cars or roadsides can scan up to 2,000 license plates per minute, storing the plate number, the location, and the time the car was spotted. From there, an officer can easily pull other identifying information, like the driver’s name, address, and criminal history, all without a warrant—or even a supervisor’s sign-off. The result is that drivers are being tracked and recorded by the police, whether or not they’ve done anything wrong. In San Diego, the state audit found that 0.04 percent of scanned plates were actually under suspicion when scanned. A 2016 CityLab report pegged that at 0.02 percent in Marin County. In Los Angeles, the figure was 0.01 percent of 320 million images, all including timestamps and the driver’s exact location. In 2013, Mother Jones reported that, per the American Civil Liberties Union, just 47 of the million license plates scanned in Maryland “were even tentatively associated with actual serious crimes.”
Once a marginal technology, license plate scanners are now widespread, minimally regulated, and employed by everyone from mall cops to landlords, with reams of plate data floating around the web—thanks in part to cop-tech hawkers convincing police that license-plate monitoring has gone “from a nice-to-have luxury to a can’t-operate-without system.” And big corporations have gotten into the game: Vigilant Solutions, a private, for-profit law enforcement contractor that sells both license plate readers and the data they collect, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola Solutions.
Less than a third of states have laws regulating ALPRs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2019, California lawmakers set a few restrictions on license plate scanners—but they only apply to the state highway patrol. Well over half of California’s law enforcement agencies use the technology, and auditors found that in Fresno, Marin, and Sacramento, police shared their records with thousands of other public agencies in 44 of 50 states. (All three were sending driver data to cops in Honolulu, one of the toughest cities for a California fugitive to drive to.)
California does require that ALPR users set “a usage and privacy policy” that’s “consistent with respect for individuals’ privacy and civil liberties,” meaning that police who freely share driver data may be violating the law.
Privacy advocates have long raised issues with license plate readers, especially given the long, sketchy history of law enforcement data abuse. A 2016 investigation by the Associated Press found that officers “stalked, harassed, and tampered with criminal cases using details obtained” through motor vehicle databases. It can look innocuous at first: the spread of home DNA tests like 23andMe led to “a law enforcement free-for-all, with police and allies digging into consumer DNA databases with little law or policy to guide them,” according to a 2019 investigation by Mother Jones‘s Madison Pauly. That year, a Slate article on ALPRs found more malfeasance:
A few years ago, the Associated Press reported that NYPD used ALPRs to scan the plates of worshippers at a mosque. Police in Edmonton, Alberta, admitted to using a confidential police database in 2004 to get the plate number of a local columnist who was sharply critical of police conduct and ordering officers to look out for his car, hoping to catch him at a bar and then arrest him for drunk driving.
California law enforcement agencies have said they don’t share data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a longstanding concern of organizations like ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). But ICE appears to have access to Vigilant’s database of over 2 billion photos, part of what the Verge calls “a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month.” Vigilant is the industry-standard ALPR provider, and the most popular in California. A 2019 EFF investigation, written up in Techdirt, found discrepancies between Vigilant’s public statements and internal communications on sharing plate data.
None of the audited law enforcement agencies required police to get any kind of approval before searching license plate records. The Los Angeles Police Department had no policy regulating ALPRs at all. (It now says it’s working on one.)
State Senator Scott Weiner, who commissioned the audit, called the lack of regulation “totally unacceptable,” saying in a public statement that his office was drafting legislation “to put an end to these privacy violations.”
Per the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has long opposed ALPRs, legislation like Weiner’s could ban license plate data collection by private companies, which would keep firms like Vigilant from gathering and selling massive driver data files. Lawmakers could limit data retention, like they’ve already done for the California Highway Patrol, demand more training, oversight, or audits for departments that use plate scanners, or even place a state-wide moratorium on their use.
California has long been a bellwether for rules on everything from auto emissions to police face recognition. With the nationwide spread of cheap, unregulated license plate scanners, any California restrictions on what cops do with your information could become a model for the rest of the country.
The technology is frighteningly simple: cameras on police cars or roadsides can scan up to 2,000 license plates per minute, storing the plate number, the location, and the time the car was spotted. From there, an officer can easily pull other identifying information, like the driver’s name, address, and criminal history, all without a warrant—or even a supervisor’s sign-off. The result is that drivers are being tracked and recorded by the police, whether or not they’ve done anything wrong. In San Diego, the state audit found that 0.04 percent of scanned plates were actually under suspicion when scanned. A 2016 CityLab report pegged that at 0.02 percent in Marin County. In Los Angeles, the figure was 0.01 percent of 320 million images, all including timestamps and the driver’s exact location. In 2013, Mother Jones reported that, per the American Civil Liberties Union, just 47 of the million license plates scanned in Maryland “were even tentatively associated with actual serious crimes.”
A Santa Monica, California police officer points a radar gun.Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Law enforcement in four of California’s most populous counties is storing, searching, and sharing detailed records on millions of random drivers, according to a new report from the California State Auditor, a nonpartisan government agency. The audit, released last week, found major deficiencies—and possible lawbreaking—in police use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the California counties of Los Angeles, Fresno, Marin, and Sacramento.
The technology is frighteningly simple: cameras on police cars or roadsides can scan up to 2,000 license plates per minute, storing the plate number, the location, and the time the car was spotted. From there, an officer can easily pull other identifying information, like the driver’s name, address, and criminal history, all without a warrant—or even a supervisor’s sign-off. The result is that drivers are being tracked and recorded by the police, whether or not they’ve done anything wrong. In San Diego, the state audit found that 0.04 percent of scanned plates were actually under suspicion when scanned. A 2016 CityLab report pegged that at 0.02 percent in Marin County. In Los Angeles, the figure was 0.01 percent of 320 million images, all including timestamps and the driver’s exact location. In 2013, Mother Jones reported that, per the American Civil Liberties Union, just 47 of the million license plates scanned in Maryland “were even tentatively associated with actual serious crimes.”
Once a marginal technology, license plate scanners are now widespread, minimally regulated, and employed by everyone from mall cops to landlords, with reams of plate data floating around the web—thanks in part to cop-tech hawkers convincing police that license-plate monitoring has gone “from a nice-to-have luxury to a can’t-operate-without system.” And big corporations have gotten into the game: Vigilant Solutions, a private, for-profit law enforcement contractor that sells both license plate readers and the data they collect, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola Solutions.
Less than a third of states have laws regulating ALPRs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2019, California lawmakers set a few restrictions on license plate scanners—but they only apply to the state highway patrol. Well over half of California’s law enforcement agencies use the technology, and auditors found that in Fresno, Marin, and Sacramento, police shared their records with thousands of other public agencies in 44 of 50 states. (All three were sending driver data to cops in Honolulu, one of the toughest cities for a California fugitive to drive to.)
California does require that ALPR users set “a usage and privacy policy” that’s “consistent with respect for individuals’ privacy and civil liberties,” meaning that police who freely share driver data may be violating the law.
Privacy advocates have long raised issues with license plate readers, especially given the long, sketchy history of law enforcement data abuse. A 2016 investigation by the Associated Press found that officers “stalked, harassed, and tampered with criminal cases using details obtained” through motor vehicle databases. It can look innocuous at first: the spread of home DNA tests like 23andMe led to “a law enforcement free-for-all, with police and allies digging into consumer DNA databases with little law or policy to guide them,” according to a 2019 investigation by Mother Jones‘s Madison Pauly. That year, a Slate article on ALPRs found more malfeasance:
A few years ago, the Associated Press reported that NYPD used ALPRs to scan the plates of worshippers at a mosque. Police in Edmonton, Alberta, admitted to using a confidential police database in 2004 to get the plate number of a local columnist who was sharply critical of police conduct and ordering officers to look out for his car, hoping to catch him at a bar and then arrest him for drunk driving.
California law enforcement agencies have said they don’t share data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a longstanding concern of organizations like ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). But ICE appears to have access to Vigilant’s database of over 2 billion photos, part of what the Verge calls “a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month.” Vigilant is the industry-standard ALPR provider, and the most popular in California. A 2019 EFF investigation, written up in Techdirt, found discrepancies between Vigilant’s public statements and internal communications on sharing plate data.
None of the audited law enforcement agencies required police to get any kind of approval before searching license plate records. The Los Angeles Police Department had no policy regulating ALPRs at all. (It now says it’s working on one.)
State Senator Scott Weiner, who commissioned the audit, called the lack of regulation “totally unacceptable,” saying in a public statement that his office was drafting legislation “to put an end to these privacy violations.”
Per the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has long opposed ALPRs, legislation like Weiner’s could ban license plate data collection by private companies, which would keep firms like Vigilant from gathering and selling massive driver data files. Lawmakers could limit data retention, like they’ve already done for the California Highway Patrol, demand more training, oversight, or audits for departments that use plate scanners, or even place a state-wide moratorium on their use.
California has long been a bellwether for rules on everything from auto emissions to police face recognition. With the nationwide spread of cheap, unregulated license plate scanners, any California restrictions on what cops do with your information could become a model for the rest of the country.
Lawsuit: Long Island Teens Beaten, Wrongfully Arrested and Charged In Assault They Didn’t Commit
By Tanasia Kenney - atlanta black star
January 31, 2020
The parents of two Long Island teens say cellphone tracking proves their sons were at a friend‘s house at the time that police claim they assaulted a 32-year-old man. (Photo: CBS New York)
The family of two Long Island teens are taking the Nassau County Police Department to court after they claim their sons were profiled, brutalized and wrongfully charged with assault.
Authorities arrested Ahmad Tillery, 15, and his brother, 14, and a third teen last week in connection to an assault on a 32-year-old Latino man. The teens were charged with the crime, but their parents insist they had nothing to do with it.
David and Mondy Tillery told CBS New York their sons are good students and active members of the Boy Scouts. The parents are now suing the police department, accusing officers of targeting their sons.
“They kidnapped them,” David Tillery also said of police, recalling how officers kept him and his wife in the dark while his boys were in custody.
The family’s attorney, Fred Brewington, also alleges the teens were “beaten, slammed on a car, slammed on the ground, abused, cursed at, mocked and then psychologically tortured for four or five hours,” during questioning by police.
The incident unfolded on Jan. 21 as the brothers and a third teen were out riding bikes at a nearby park. That’s when they say officers stopped and arrested them in the assault.
“You do not have the right to come into our community and just abuse our children,” Mondy Tillery said.
She said she feared her boys had been kidnapped, later realizing they were at the police precinct after a tracker on the teens’ cellphones led her and her husband there. Upon arrival, David Tillery said one of the officers asked him, “Did you know that your sons are part of a gang?”
“You mean, the Boy Scouts?” he replied.
Nassau County Police Department has denied any wrongdoing on their part and said the teens were picked up 10 minutes after the reported assault. In fact, authorities said they fit the description and that the victim had positively identified them as his attackers.
“The investigation has revealed that police officers acted within the scope of the law and exercised restraint and professionalism at the time of arrest,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said in a statement.
All three teens were taken into custody, one of them charged with resisting arrest after trying to flee the scene, police said. Authorities also deny using excessive force, adding that the Tillery sons signed a document stating they sustained no injuries.
“This document was signed by both the juvenile and his mother at the time he was released from police custody,” the department added.
Still, the Tillerys maintain their children’s innocence and argue that cellphone tracing proves their sons were at a friends house at the time of the attack.
“Not all black, African-American children are gang members,” David Tillery said. “You do have quality citizens like my boys. They’re Boy Scouts. They’re in a church choir.”
The incident remains under investigation.
Authorities arrested Ahmad Tillery, 15, and his brother, 14, and a third teen last week in connection to an assault on a 32-year-old Latino man. The teens were charged with the crime, but their parents insist they had nothing to do with it.
David and Mondy Tillery told CBS New York their sons are good students and active members of the Boy Scouts. The parents are now suing the police department, accusing officers of targeting their sons.
“They kidnapped them,” David Tillery also said of police, recalling how officers kept him and his wife in the dark while his boys were in custody.
The family’s attorney, Fred Brewington, also alleges the teens were “beaten, slammed on a car, slammed on the ground, abused, cursed at, mocked and then psychologically tortured for four or five hours,” during questioning by police.
The incident unfolded on Jan. 21 as the brothers and a third teen were out riding bikes at a nearby park. That’s when they say officers stopped and arrested them in the assault.
“You do not have the right to come into our community and just abuse our children,” Mondy Tillery said.
She said she feared her boys had been kidnapped, later realizing they were at the police precinct after a tracker on the teens’ cellphones led her and her husband there. Upon arrival, David Tillery said one of the officers asked him, “Did you know that your sons are part of a gang?”
“You mean, the Boy Scouts?” he replied.
Nassau County Police Department has denied any wrongdoing on their part and said the teens were picked up 10 minutes after the reported assault. In fact, authorities said they fit the description and that the victim had positively identified them as his attackers.
“The investigation has revealed that police officers acted within the scope of the law and exercised restraint and professionalism at the time of arrest,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said in a statement.
All three teens were taken into custody, one of them charged with resisting arrest after trying to flee the scene, police said. Authorities also deny using excessive force, adding that the Tillery sons signed a document stating they sustained no injuries.
“This document was signed by both the juvenile and his mother at the time he was released from police custody,” the department added.
Still, the Tillerys maintain their children’s innocence and argue that cellphone tracing proves their sons were at a friends house at the time of the attack.
“Not all black, African-American children are gang members,” David Tillery said. “You do have quality citizens like my boys. They’re Boy Scouts. They’re in a church choir.”
The incident remains under investigation.
PG County Police Officer Kills Black Man — Handcuffed, Buckled in Seatbelt of Police Cruiser
By Ashleigh Atwell - atlanta black star
January 28, 2020
A handcuffed man was shot and killed while sitting in a police cruiser in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
Prince George’s County police claim officers pulled William Green over around 8 p.m. on Monday night after they received calls about an erratic driver who struck several other vehicles, as reported by FOX 5 DC. Green was taken into custody after officers allegedly smelled PCP and suspected he was under the influence.
He was cuffed, placed in the front passenger seat of the police cruiser, where he sat handcuffed and buckled in the seatbelt while officers waited for the drug recognition team to show up. Placing people in the front seat is standard practice for the department. When an officer got into the driver’s seat a struggle ensued, according to The Associated Press.
William Green was shot and killed by a Prince George’s County police officer on January 27, while restrained by handcuffs and a seatbelt. (Photo: Screen grab/FOX 5 DC)
Moments later, several shots were heard from the cruiser. Green was shot by the officer’s weapon multiple times, according to local reports. Officers rendered emergency aid and Green was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Green’s family doesn’t understand how a traffic stop ended with the death of their loved one.
“I can’t understand why you had him in the car seat, seatbelt down, handcuffed and then gone shoot him,” said Brenda Green, his mother. “For what reason? What could he possibly do?”
The police said the officer who shot Green was not wearing a body camera so they are going to survey surveillance cameras in the area.
“We are at the very beginning of what is going to be a very complex investigation to exactly what happened inside of that cruiser,” said police spokeswoman Christina Cotterman. “That is the crux of what we’re going to be looking at.”
The officer has not been publicly identified and is currently on administrative leave. PG County Police said they will probably release the officer’s name on Tuesday.
This is a developing story.
Prince George’s County police claim officers pulled William Green over around 8 p.m. on Monday night after they received calls about an erratic driver who struck several other vehicles, as reported by FOX 5 DC. Green was taken into custody after officers allegedly smelled PCP and suspected he was under the influence.
He was cuffed, placed in the front passenger seat of the police cruiser, where he sat handcuffed and buckled in the seatbelt while officers waited for the drug recognition team to show up. Placing people in the front seat is standard practice for the department. When an officer got into the driver’s seat a struggle ensued, according to The Associated Press.
William Green was shot and killed by a Prince George’s County police officer on January 27, while restrained by handcuffs and a seatbelt. (Photo: Screen grab/FOX 5 DC)
Moments later, several shots were heard from the cruiser. Green was shot by the officer’s weapon multiple times, according to local reports. Officers rendered emergency aid and Green was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Green’s family doesn’t understand how a traffic stop ended with the death of their loved one.
“I can’t understand why you had him in the car seat, seatbelt down, handcuffed and then gone shoot him,” said Brenda Green, his mother. “For what reason? What could he possibly do?”
The police said the officer who shot Green was not wearing a body camera so they are going to survey surveillance cameras in the area.
“We are at the very beginning of what is going to be a very complex investigation to exactly what happened inside of that cruiser,” said police spokeswoman Christina Cotterman. “That is the crux of what we’re going to be looking at.”
The officer has not been publicly identified and is currently on administrative leave. PG County Police said they will probably release the officer’s name on Tuesday.
This is a developing story.
In Anti-Communist Fervor, FBI Built a 500-Page File on Coretta Scott King
BY Aaron J. Leonard, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 20, 2020
The file on Coretta Scott King, who appears in this photo taken on May 1, 1968, a testament to the larger racist ugliness festering in the U.S., then as now.
BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES
This is a rough, tough, dirty business. --former FBI Assistant Director, William C. Sullivan, on the nature of counterintelligence.
Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation. --Coretta Scott King
The FBI’s aggressive efforts against Martin Luther King Jr. remain a huge stain on the Bureau, and exemplary of the dirty work it carried out during the long 1960s. Less known, but of no less consequence, was the unwanted attention it directed at Coretta Scott King, the wife of the late civil rights leader. Scott King was meticulously monitored by the Bureau, which compiled over 500 pages of records on her. Her file offers not only a clear view of the FBI and government’s preoccupation with Communist infiltration during the Cold War — and the depths the FBI would sink to in attempting to undermine anyone associated with it — but the larger racist ugliness festering in U.S. society, one still very much present.
The Bureau’s Priorities
The FBI’s key motivation in building a file on Coretta Scott King was grounded in the Cold War dynamic of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The bureau was fixated on determining whether the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and its leader, Martin Luther King Jr., were consorting with or being influenced by Communists.
Through an effort known as Operation SOLO — a highly secret scheme pried loose by scholar David Garrow in 1981 — the Bureau had intelligence that a concealed Communist was serving as a key adviser of King. That adviser, Stanley Levison, had been identified by Communist Party member Jack Childs. Jack, along with his brother Morris, were FBI informants serving in high ranks of the Communist Party (CP).
There remains controversy as to whether or not Childs’s information was wholly accurate, but what is not contested is that the FBI used the alleged ties to target King — including wiretapping him — resulting in the FBI garnering a good deal of salacious and other information on him. That was the backdrop to the public sparring with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that culminated in a verbal attack by Hoover, who called King “the most notorious liar in the country.” This all happened around the time King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
All of this controversy was impacting those around MLK, especially his wife, as this February 15, 1965, informant report to the FBI director from the special agent in charge of the Atlanta office makes clear:
CORETTA said that this attack really hurt because HOOVER has a large following in this country and many of these people will believe anything he says.
Scott King’s assessment is at once on-target for its moment, but also evocative of our current one.
After MLK
Martin Luther King Jr. would be viciously gunned down on April 4, 1968. In the wake of his assassination, the Bureau would shift its attention of Levison and the SCLC onto Scott King. Two weeks after King’s murder, the Bureau wrote a memo, based on information “From a confidential source who has furnished reliable information in the past.” Who that was is unclear, though by then the Bureau had more than one informant in King’s organization, including King’s accountant James. A. Harrison and the photographer Ernest Withers. It was through such sources they ascertained that Stanley Levison had been in contact with Coretta Scott King and reported the following:
Levison referred to Coretta King’s possible appearance at the major mass anti-Vietnam war demonstration scheduled for New York City on April 27, 1968. He said he had checked with Dave Dellinger’s (National Director, National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam) office and that he, Levison, feels that it is alright for her to appear on this program and also to participate in the Mothers’ March (in Washington, D.C. in connection with the Poor Peoples Campaign) as long as she does not do anything else.
The memo closes noting once more that Levison had been a “secret member of the Communist Party,” adding the caveat that in 1963-64 he had “criticized the CP for not being sufficiently militant.” Regardless, according to the Bureau, “His differences with the CP, however, are merely tactical and he continues his ideological adherence to Communism.” Following this report, the Bureau clearly expanded its focus to also encompass Scott King.
Unique Position
In the course of reading the Coretta Scott King file, what becomes apparent is the paradoxical social position of her and her late husband. On the one hand, the Kings were not unique in being high-profile public figures in the Black freedom movement who faced the hostile attention of the FBI. What is unique was their proximity and access to the standing political institutions. In that respect, they were at once outsiders, demanding a seat at the table, and insiders actually invited in to sit down. King met with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. At the same time, the FBI was secretly recording King’s conversations, per the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. This simultaneous targeting and inclusion resulted in FBI notes like this one:
On June two-zero, six-nine, Coretta King told Stanley Levison that Ethel Kennedy had contacted her that date to say she was sorry about what had been in the paper (apparently referring to the article concerning the authorization from Robert F. Kennedy, when Attorney General, to tap Martin Luther King’s telephones). Coretta added that Ethel implied that she hoped this would not interfere with their friendship.
The entry goes on, “Coretta stated that this was ‘sort of passing the buck, and they’re trying to put it all off on him [Robert F. Kennedy]’.” Coretta then added, “that he [Kennedy] may have agreed and gone along with it,” suggesting the greater blame for the wiretapping lay with the FBI. It is notable that now, the FBI is generally blamed entirely for the wiretaps, while Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general who approved them, largely gets a pass.
More striking though, is the fact that the conversation happened at all. Who could conceive of anything similar with leaders such as Malcolm X, Robert and Mabel Williams, Max Stanford, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Ella Baker or Huey P. Newton? The Kings had “one foot on the platform, one foot on the train” in relation to the ruling political apparatus, allowing them to have a close relationship with the Kennedys, including the attorney general, who had contributed in no small way to making their lives a living hell.
A Different Fear
By the late 1960s, Coretta Scott King’s FBI file shows that the ruling authorities were no longer quite as preoccupied by the threat of Communist infiltration (COMINFIL in Bureau typology) in the SCLC, but rather by a larger sense of social upheaval. At that point in history, the days of Gandhian nonviolence were well in the past, replaced by a much greater challenge. This can be seen in the following 1971 FBI report on a Deputy Attorney General’s Conference, discussing Scott King’s appearance at an upcoming peace demonstration:
Mr. [Richard] Kleindienst [who would soon become President Nixon’s attorney general] stated he was quite impressed with the intelligence the FBI was developing in the black extremist field and certainly recognized the threat these political terrorists represented…. Mr. Kleindienst further took note of the fact that Mrs. Coretta King likely would appear as a speaker before the forthcoming massive peace demonstration here in Washington, D.C. on April 24, 1971, and if she is not given adequate security, extremist elements could be provided with a target which could kick things off.
Leaving aside the report’s ambiguous definition of “extremists” — who did they have in mind? — the proliferation of “long hot summers” of urban insurrections or rioting (depending on how one views such things), which reached a crescendo after MLK was assassinated, had changed how the political authorities saw matters relating to Coretta Scott King. Instead of targeting her directly, the authorities were more focused on the implications of bad things happening to her.
Investigating Threats
While there is much in the file that is quite appalling, in certain ways, it is the later releases that bring home something essential about the historic nature of Coretta Scott King and the movement she was part of. In these later files, it is not the FBI attempting to threaten and undermine Scott King, but rather violent white supremacists.
In the file is a vitriolic racist letter sent to her and forwarded to the FBI by her secretary. After invoking numerous racial epithets, the writer — identifying himself as “Alexander” — says he is going to “Slit your womb out before I kill you.” That threat was ultimately referred to the U.S. attorney in Atlanta:
US Attorney RAY TAYLOR JR, advised after careful review of [REDACTED] report concerning [REDACTED] he would decline prosecution of [REDACTED] in the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta due to [REDACTED] and due to the fact that prosecution had also been declined in Raleigh, North Carolina….
Another threat, coming in the spring of 1976, came in the form of cutout letters: “Stay off of the University of Maryland Campus or you will die! The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Reading these passages today, aside from the timelessness of how sickening it all is, one is reminded of Dylann Roof, the racist mass murderer, who slaughtered nine Black people as they undertook Bible study four-and-a-half years ago. Roof was recently thrust into the news again when Trump apologist Nikki Haley whined that Roof had given the Confederate battle flag — the symbol of the violent defense of slavery — a bad name, by being associated with it.
And here we are. Much in the way Scott King bemoaned how “many of these people will believe anything he [J. Edgar Hoover] says” to the most vile and violent racist threats leveled against a woman who had lost so much, what jumps out in reading Coretta Scott King’s FBI file today is not how long ago it all was, but how white supremacy — whether in law enforcement or otherwise — is still very much with us.
Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation. --Coretta Scott King
The FBI’s aggressive efforts against Martin Luther King Jr. remain a huge stain on the Bureau, and exemplary of the dirty work it carried out during the long 1960s. Less known, but of no less consequence, was the unwanted attention it directed at Coretta Scott King, the wife of the late civil rights leader. Scott King was meticulously monitored by the Bureau, which compiled over 500 pages of records on her. Her file offers not only a clear view of the FBI and government’s preoccupation with Communist infiltration during the Cold War — and the depths the FBI would sink to in attempting to undermine anyone associated with it — but the larger racist ugliness festering in U.S. society, one still very much present.
The Bureau’s Priorities
The FBI’s key motivation in building a file on Coretta Scott King was grounded in the Cold War dynamic of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The bureau was fixated on determining whether the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and its leader, Martin Luther King Jr., were consorting with or being influenced by Communists.
Through an effort known as Operation SOLO — a highly secret scheme pried loose by scholar David Garrow in 1981 — the Bureau had intelligence that a concealed Communist was serving as a key adviser of King. That adviser, Stanley Levison, had been identified by Communist Party member Jack Childs. Jack, along with his brother Morris, were FBI informants serving in high ranks of the Communist Party (CP).
There remains controversy as to whether or not Childs’s information was wholly accurate, but what is not contested is that the FBI used the alleged ties to target King — including wiretapping him — resulting in the FBI garnering a good deal of salacious and other information on him. That was the backdrop to the public sparring with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that culminated in a verbal attack by Hoover, who called King “the most notorious liar in the country.” This all happened around the time King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
All of this controversy was impacting those around MLK, especially his wife, as this February 15, 1965, informant report to the FBI director from the special agent in charge of the Atlanta office makes clear:
CORETTA said that this attack really hurt because HOOVER has a large following in this country and many of these people will believe anything he says.
Scott King’s assessment is at once on-target for its moment, but also evocative of our current one.
After MLK
Martin Luther King Jr. would be viciously gunned down on April 4, 1968. In the wake of his assassination, the Bureau would shift its attention of Levison and the SCLC onto Scott King. Two weeks after King’s murder, the Bureau wrote a memo, based on information “From a confidential source who has furnished reliable information in the past.” Who that was is unclear, though by then the Bureau had more than one informant in King’s organization, including King’s accountant James. A. Harrison and the photographer Ernest Withers. It was through such sources they ascertained that Stanley Levison had been in contact with Coretta Scott King and reported the following:
Levison referred to Coretta King’s possible appearance at the major mass anti-Vietnam war demonstration scheduled for New York City on April 27, 1968. He said he had checked with Dave Dellinger’s (National Director, National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam) office and that he, Levison, feels that it is alright for her to appear on this program and also to participate in the Mothers’ March (in Washington, D.C. in connection with the Poor Peoples Campaign) as long as she does not do anything else.
The memo closes noting once more that Levison had been a “secret member of the Communist Party,” adding the caveat that in 1963-64 he had “criticized the CP for not being sufficiently militant.” Regardless, according to the Bureau, “His differences with the CP, however, are merely tactical and he continues his ideological adherence to Communism.” Following this report, the Bureau clearly expanded its focus to also encompass Scott King.
Unique Position
In the course of reading the Coretta Scott King file, what becomes apparent is the paradoxical social position of her and her late husband. On the one hand, the Kings were not unique in being high-profile public figures in the Black freedom movement who faced the hostile attention of the FBI. What is unique was their proximity and access to the standing political institutions. In that respect, they were at once outsiders, demanding a seat at the table, and insiders actually invited in to sit down. King met with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. At the same time, the FBI was secretly recording King’s conversations, per the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. This simultaneous targeting and inclusion resulted in FBI notes like this one:
On June two-zero, six-nine, Coretta King told Stanley Levison that Ethel Kennedy had contacted her that date to say she was sorry about what had been in the paper (apparently referring to the article concerning the authorization from Robert F. Kennedy, when Attorney General, to tap Martin Luther King’s telephones). Coretta added that Ethel implied that she hoped this would not interfere with their friendship.
The entry goes on, “Coretta stated that this was ‘sort of passing the buck, and they’re trying to put it all off on him [Robert F. Kennedy]’.” Coretta then added, “that he [Kennedy] may have agreed and gone along with it,” suggesting the greater blame for the wiretapping lay with the FBI. It is notable that now, the FBI is generally blamed entirely for the wiretaps, while Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general who approved them, largely gets a pass.
More striking though, is the fact that the conversation happened at all. Who could conceive of anything similar with leaders such as Malcolm X, Robert and Mabel Williams, Max Stanford, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Ella Baker or Huey P. Newton? The Kings had “one foot on the platform, one foot on the train” in relation to the ruling political apparatus, allowing them to have a close relationship with the Kennedys, including the attorney general, who had contributed in no small way to making their lives a living hell.
A Different Fear
By the late 1960s, Coretta Scott King’s FBI file shows that the ruling authorities were no longer quite as preoccupied by the threat of Communist infiltration (COMINFIL in Bureau typology) in the SCLC, but rather by a larger sense of social upheaval. At that point in history, the days of Gandhian nonviolence were well in the past, replaced by a much greater challenge. This can be seen in the following 1971 FBI report on a Deputy Attorney General’s Conference, discussing Scott King’s appearance at an upcoming peace demonstration:
Mr. [Richard] Kleindienst [who would soon become President Nixon’s attorney general] stated he was quite impressed with the intelligence the FBI was developing in the black extremist field and certainly recognized the threat these political terrorists represented…. Mr. Kleindienst further took note of the fact that Mrs. Coretta King likely would appear as a speaker before the forthcoming massive peace demonstration here in Washington, D.C. on April 24, 1971, and if she is not given adequate security, extremist elements could be provided with a target which could kick things off.
Leaving aside the report’s ambiguous definition of “extremists” — who did they have in mind? — the proliferation of “long hot summers” of urban insurrections or rioting (depending on how one views such things), which reached a crescendo after MLK was assassinated, had changed how the political authorities saw matters relating to Coretta Scott King. Instead of targeting her directly, the authorities were more focused on the implications of bad things happening to her.
Investigating Threats
While there is much in the file that is quite appalling, in certain ways, it is the later releases that bring home something essential about the historic nature of Coretta Scott King and the movement she was part of. In these later files, it is not the FBI attempting to threaten and undermine Scott King, but rather violent white supremacists.
In the file is a vitriolic racist letter sent to her and forwarded to the FBI by her secretary. After invoking numerous racial epithets, the writer — identifying himself as “Alexander” — says he is going to “Slit your womb out before I kill you.” That threat was ultimately referred to the U.S. attorney in Atlanta:
US Attorney RAY TAYLOR JR, advised after careful review of [REDACTED] report concerning [REDACTED] he would decline prosecution of [REDACTED] in the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta due to [REDACTED] and due to the fact that prosecution had also been declined in Raleigh, North Carolina….
Another threat, coming in the spring of 1976, came in the form of cutout letters: “Stay off of the University of Maryland Campus or you will die! The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Reading these passages today, aside from the timelessness of how sickening it all is, one is reminded of Dylann Roof, the racist mass murderer, who slaughtered nine Black people as they undertook Bible study four-and-a-half years ago. Roof was recently thrust into the news again when Trump apologist Nikki Haley whined that Roof had given the Confederate battle flag — the symbol of the violent defense of slavery — a bad name, by being associated with it.
And here we are. Much in the way Scott King bemoaned how “many of these people will believe anything he [J. Edgar Hoover] says” to the most vile and violent racist threats leveled against a woman who had lost so much, what jumps out in reading Coretta Scott King’s FBI file today is not how long ago it all was, but how white supremacy — whether in law enforcement or otherwise — is still very much with us.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, remember: America’s justice system still enforces racial oppression
Racist perceptions play out in prosecutors' offices and throughout the criminal justice system today
MIRIAM ARONI KRINSKY - MARSHAN ALLEN - salon
JANUARY 19, 2020 3:00PM (UTC)
Over 50 years ago the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated for daring to fight for an America that placed justice at the center and saw the humanity in every man, woman and child. Five decades later, America has time and again failed to live up to these ideals and Dr. King's vision remains incomplete, especially when it comes to our justice system. That's why Fair and Just Prosecution and the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth brought two dozen elected reform-minded prosecutors and 20 leaders from the Incarcerated Children's Advocacy Network (ICAN) together last year to walk in Dr. King's footsteps. ICAN's network includes individuals sentenced to lengthy prison terms as children but now back in our communities leading productive lives. Together, we explored the history of racial oppression in America and saw the need to reckon with our nation's painful legacy of white supremacy and racial violence if we are to forge a new pathway forward.
America leads the world in incarceration, locks adults and children in often inhumane and dangerous conditions, and is the only country that sentences children to life without the possibility of parole. Much of the weight of this system continues to fall upon black men, women and children.
At the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice we learned about the reality of slavery and racial terrorism in America. We walked across the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where on "Bloody Sunday" law enforcement officers brutally attacked unarmed civil rights protesters. As our group arrived at the exact spot where brave advocates had once looked down at officers waiting to attack them, our group locked arms and spontaneously broke out into a verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" – reclaiming this historic site where the justice system fundamentally failed as one now marked by a new era of leaders vowing to do better. It was a powerful reminder that racial oppression in America has not ended, but also a moment of hope that we can create real change when joined together.
While it has been 156 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and decades since lynchings took place in town squares, the terrorization of black people continues. It has morphed into over-policing, unequal justice too often based on race and wealth, and a never-ending pipeline that pushes far too many, starting far too young, and for far too long, into our prisons and jails. Many ICAN members were tried in the adult system and at 14, 15, or 16 years of age were sentenced to life terms before they'd learned to drive, had a job, or we were old enough to vote. This epitomizes our broken system – and an approach to young people that renders us an international outlier.
Fortunately, communities understand this is not what justice looks like and are coming together with a growing number of elected prosecutors redefining their role in the 21st century.
Too often those who commit criminal offenses are cast as malicious villains, creating an environment that locks away children for life without a second thought. This narrative – centuries in the making – is built upon a telling of history that neglects how policies like Black Codes restricted the movement of freed black Americans. It also reinforces the debunked and racist super-predator theory of the 1990s that landed too many black youth in prison and perpetuates the idea that the economic and social conditions of black people (and cycles of incarceration that far too many have been subjected to) are due to their own lack of will rather than systems intentionally designed to control or marginalize them.
A deep and honest look at who we have been, and still are, as a country is required before we can emerge as the country we want to be. That begins with reform led by those most deeply impacted and prosecutors willing to acknowledge the shameful role of their predecessors in perpetuating past atrocities. Looking back at these actions is part of interrogating how insidious and powerful perceptions of black criminality play out in prosecutors' offices and throughout the criminal justice system today.
Today, we have an opportunity to make progress in fulfilling Dr. King's promise of America. Prosecutors can rally against criminalizing children, partner with ICAN members to understand the consequences of youth incarceration, and advocate for practices that keep young people out of the adult criminal justice system. They can choose to treat, rather than criminalize, manifestations of trauma and substance use disorder, and embrace second chances rather than forever define individuals by their worst mistakes. And, they can revisit decades-long sentences and adopt practices to address racially disparate outcomes.
We can – and we must – learn from the mistakes of our past and move in a new direction, one with justice and humanity at its center. We owe that much to Dr. King's legacy and to our nation's future.
America leads the world in incarceration, locks adults and children in often inhumane and dangerous conditions, and is the only country that sentences children to life without the possibility of parole. Much of the weight of this system continues to fall upon black men, women and children.
At the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice we learned about the reality of slavery and racial terrorism in America. We walked across the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where on "Bloody Sunday" law enforcement officers brutally attacked unarmed civil rights protesters. As our group arrived at the exact spot where brave advocates had once looked down at officers waiting to attack them, our group locked arms and spontaneously broke out into a verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" – reclaiming this historic site where the justice system fundamentally failed as one now marked by a new era of leaders vowing to do better. It was a powerful reminder that racial oppression in America has not ended, but also a moment of hope that we can create real change when joined together.
While it has been 156 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and decades since lynchings took place in town squares, the terrorization of black people continues. It has morphed into over-policing, unequal justice too often based on race and wealth, and a never-ending pipeline that pushes far too many, starting far too young, and for far too long, into our prisons and jails. Many ICAN members were tried in the adult system and at 14, 15, or 16 years of age were sentenced to life terms before they'd learned to drive, had a job, or we were old enough to vote. This epitomizes our broken system – and an approach to young people that renders us an international outlier.
Fortunately, communities understand this is not what justice looks like and are coming together with a growing number of elected prosecutors redefining their role in the 21st century.
Too often those who commit criminal offenses are cast as malicious villains, creating an environment that locks away children for life without a second thought. This narrative – centuries in the making – is built upon a telling of history that neglects how policies like Black Codes restricted the movement of freed black Americans. It also reinforces the debunked and racist super-predator theory of the 1990s that landed too many black youth in prison and perpetuates the idea that the economic and social conditions of black people (and cycles of incarceration that far too many have been subjected to) are due to their own lack of will rather than systems intentionally designed to control or marginalize them.
A deep and honest look at who we have been, and still are, as a country is required before we can emerge as the country we want to be. That begins with reform led by those most deeply impacted and prosecutors willing to acknowledge the shameful role of their predecessors in perpetuating past atrocities. Looking back at these actions is part of interrogating how insidious and powerful perceptions of black criminality play out in prosecutors' offices and throughout the criminal justice system today.
Today, we have an opportunity to make progress in fulfilling Dr. King's promise of America. Prosecutors can rally against criminalizing children, partner with ICAN members to understand the consequences of youth incarceration, and advocate for practices that keep young people out of the adult criminal justice system. They can choose to treat, rather than criminalize, manifestations of trauma and substance use disorder, and embrace second chances rather than forever define individuals by their worst mistakes. And, they can revisit decades-long sentences and adopt practices to address racially disparate outcomes.
We can – and we must – learn from the mistakes of our past and move in a new direction, one with justice and humanity at its center. We owe that much to Dr. King's legacy and to our nation's future.
LAPD scandal over alleged gang framing swells to 20 officers; chief sees a ‘criminal aspect’
By MARK PUENTE, RICHARD WINTON
la times
JAN. 14, 2020
The investigation into allegations that members of the elite Los Angeles Police Department Metro Division falsified information they gathered during stops and wrongly portrayed people as gang members or associates has expanded to include 20 officers, with prosecutors already reviewing one case.
The widening probe is becoming a major scandal at the LAPD, raising questions about the criminal cases brought by the officers now under scrutiny. The officers, assigned to special patrols in South Los Angeles, are suspected of falsifying field interview cards during stops and entering incorrect information about those questioned in an effort to boost stop statistics.
“This definitely has a criminal aspect. Falsifying information on a department report is a crime,” Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday. “I must look straight at these allegations. It does give me concern.”
Los Angeles Police Commission members expressed alarm.
“These allegations are extremely troubling,” said commission President Eileen Decker.
Decker asked the commission’s inspector general, Mark Smith, to monitor the LAPD investigation and to conduct a separate inquiry.
Moore said the investigation initially focused on three officers and moved to others who worked with them. It then expanded to more who worked with the second group, the police chief said.
Moore said 10 officers had been assigned to home and had their police powers suspended. “I believe there is sufficient cause to assign them to home,” he said.
Another 10 have been removed from the street because investigators have reviewed some of their work and “don’t know if it’s inaccuracies or falsehoods,” Moore said.
“We have found inconsistencies that are in direct contrast with the physical evidence,” he said.
To add a protective measure, the department now requires a gang lieutenant to review body-worn video to make sure it matches the field interview cards when adding someone to the database, Moore added.
In at least one case, body camera and car recordings did not match the accounts in the field interview cards, law enforcement sources told the Los Angeles Times last week.
A Times investigation published last January showed that Metro officers stopped African American drivers at a rate more than five times their share of the city’s population. To combat a surge in violent crime, the LAPD doubled the size of its Metropolitan Division in 2015, creating special units to swarm crime hot spots.
In response, the LAPD announced last fall it would drastically cut back on pulling over random vehicles. At the time, Moore said Metro’s vehicle stops had not proved effective, netting about one arrest for every 100 cars stopped, while coming at a tremendous cost to innocent drivers who felt they were being racially profiled. Officials said Metro crime suppression officers, who number about 200, would instead track down suspects wanted in violent offenses and use strategies other than vehicle stops to address flare-ups in crimes such as burglaries and shootings.
The widening probe is becoming a major scandal at the LAPD, raising questions about the criminal cases brought by the officers now under scrutiny. The officers, assigned to special patrols in South Los Angeles, are suspected of falsifying field interview cards during stops and entering incorrect information about those questioned in an effort to boost stop statistics.
“This definitely has a criminal aspect. Falsifying information on a department report is a crime,” Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday. “I must look straight at these allegations. It does give me concern.”
Los Angeles Police Commission members expressed alarm.
“These allegations are extremely troubling,” said commission President Eileen Decker.
Decker asked the commission’s inspector general, Mark Smith, to monitor the LAPD investigation and to conduct a separate inquiry.
Moore said the investigation initially focused on three officers and moved to others who worked with them. It then expanded to more who worked with the second group, the police chief said.
Moore said 10 officers had been assigned to home and had their police powers suspended. “I believe there is sufficient cause to assign them to home,” he said.
Another 10 have been removed from the street because investigators have reviewed some of their work and “don’t know if it’s inaccuracies or falsehoods,” Moore said.
“We have found inconsistencies that are in direct contrast with the physical evidence,” he said.
To add a protective measure, the department now requires a gang lieutenant to review body-worn video to make sure it matches the field interview cards when adding someone to the database, Moore added.
In at least one case, body camera and car recordings did not match the accounts in the field interview cards, law enforcement sources told the Los Angeles Times last week.
A Times investigation published last January showed that Metro officers stopped African American drivers at a rate more than five times their share of the city’s population. To combat a surge in violent crime, the LAPD doubled the size of its Metropolitan Division in 2015, creating special units to swarm crime hot spots.
In response, the LAPD announced last fall it would drastically cut back on pulling over random vehicles. At the time, Moore said Metro’s vehicle stops had not proved effective, netting about one arrest for every 100 cars stopped, while coming at a tremendous cost to innocent drivers who felt they were being racially profiled. Officials said Metro crime suppression officers, who number about 200, would instead track down suspects wanted in violent offenses and use strategies other than vehicle stops to address flare-ups in crimes such as burglaries and shootings.
Inside the US prison where inmates 'begged for their lives' amid days of violence
Oliver Laughland in Jackson, Mississippi
the guardian
Mon 13 Jan 2020 02.00 EST
Five inmates died this month in notorious Mississippi prison marked by racism and neglect – prisoners and families demand urgent reform
“People were begging for their lives as they were stabbed,” said Kelly Mallett, as his gaze drifted. “There were fires being set. Trash everywhere. Rats. Roaches. It was just total chaos.”
The 44-year-old is a former inmate at Mississippi’s crumbling state penitentiary at Parchman, part of a sprawling, century-old prison farm complex in the north of the state. He had only been free for two days and was the first eyewitness to speak freely in public about the days of bloody rioting inside Parchman over the new year, a facility that remains shrouded in the legacy of Jim Crow, marked by decaying conditions and its culture of brutality.
In a single week, five inmates in the Mississippi correctional system were killed, three in Parchman, during violence state officials tied to a bitter gang rivalry that dominates prisons in the state. But the bloodshed has also drawn attention to what lawmakers say are routine constitutional violations, as well as the chronic underfunding of a system that incarcerates people at a rate almost twice the American average.
“For 48 hours it was just violence,” said Mallett, who served an eight-year sentence for a non-violent drug crime. “Nothing but violence, before any help.”
Still wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, the former inmate said highway patrol officers eventually stormed his unit and retook it, an event he believed occurred on 3 January. Mallett said he was locked in his cell throughout the rioting and was not involved in the violence, but also openly declared his gang affiliation.
He claimed to have been escorted by armed state officers when he was released on 8 January, due to ongoing safety concerns.
“It is pure hell there,” he said. “Inside you have no rights.”
The Mississippi Department of Corrections [MDC] declined to respond to multiple requests for comment and has not provided a public total for the number injured during the unrest. A prison source, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to protect themselves from reprisals, claimed that as of Friday there were still many injured inmates at Parchman who had not received treatment.
On Friday, MDC lifted a statewide prison lockdown but excluded Parchman, where more than 3,000 inmates are held. A heavy police presence remained outside the sprawling complex, which was built in 1901 and modelled after a slave plantation to extract free labor from inmates. Mississippi continues to incarcerate African Americans at a disproportionate rate.
In interviews with six people who had family or partners inside the facility, three said they had not heard from them since the violence began. Those who had contacted their loved ones had done so via contraband cellphones, which are widely used in Parchman. None had any formal confirmation from MDOC, despite making calls.
“It’s just extremely rough not knowing what’s going on,” said 38 year-old Romania Harry, whose partner Richard O’Kelley is in the eighth year of a 10-year sentence for aggravated assault and burglary. “We get no information and no sympathy from Corrections.”
Harry said she was particularly concerned as her partner is in a wheelchair following back surgery. Her account was supported by photographic evidence. She claimed O’Kelley was not receiving medicine before the rioting started.
According to MDOC records, O’Kelley is held in the notorious “Unit 32”. The building was shuttered in 2010 as part of a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), after the group documented inhumane conditions including the use of permanent solitary confinement.
Following rioting earlier this month, it was reopened. It housed hundreds of men.
Paloma Wu, a senior staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), said a client she visited at Parchman on Thursday had been held in “Unit 32” for around five days.
The client, who did not wish to be named, told his attorney there had been no running water for four days, meaning inmates had to defecate into empty toilets that soon overflowed. The client had not showered and had slept on a concrete floor. Food had been as little as a slice of bread.
The Guardian reviewed photographic evidence as well as video which supported this description of conditions.
“We have been treating these people like animals for decades,” Wu said. “Worse than animals, in fact.”
On Tuesday, Mississippi’s lone Democratic congressman, Bennie Thompson, joined with the SPLC and ACLU to write to the US justice department, requesting a federal investigation into all Mississippi’s correctional facilities, which include three state-run and three private prisons.
The letter alleged violation of constitutional rights under the eighth amendment, which safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment.
“It is no exaggeration to say more lives will be lost absent immediate intervention,” it said.
Thompson cited severe staff shortages: 670 staff positions across the three state prisons are unfilled, causing some prisons to be held in lockdown throughout 2019. Although Mississippi has the third-highest rate of incarceration in the US, last month its budget committee recommended reducing spending on state facilities by up to 6.6%. Mississippi pays the lowest salaries for prison staff anywhere in the US.
The crisis is expected to dominate the next legislative session, which begins this month. The outgoing governor, Phil Bryant, has acknowledged the fiscal problems but blamed inmates for the January violence.
“The inmates are the ones that take each other’s lives,” he told reporters. “The inmates are the ones that fashion weapons out of metal. So, I would say look to the inmates.”
On Friday, protesters organized by the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign entered the state capitol in Jackson. They marched up two flights of stairs and stood outside Bryant’s office but were told by security officers he was not available to meet.
Among them was Eva Scott, a 47-year-old retail worker. In early December her nephew Antonio Taylor, 33, was found dead in his cell at Parchman. It was ruled a suicide by hanging but the family, who found out about the death through inmates, not authorities, distrusted the coroner’s ruling.
“Nobody should live like [the inmates] do,” Scott said. “That’s a human being. Somebody’s child. If you have to live in a place like that, you just have to fight for your life.”
“People were begging for their lives as they were stabbed,” said Kelly Mallett, as his gaze drifted. “There were fires being set. Trash everywhere. Rats. Roaches. It was just total chaos.”
The 44-year-old is a former inmate at Mississippi’s crumbling state penitentiary at Parchman, part of a sprawling, century-old prison farm complex in the north of the state. He had only been free for two days and was the first eyewitness to speak freely in public about the days of bloody rioting inside Parchman over the new year, a facility that remains shrouded in the legacy of Jim Crow, marked by decaying conditions and its culture of brutality.
In a single week, five inmates in the Mississippi correctional system were killed, three in Parchman, during violence state officials tied to a bitter gang rivalry that dominates prisons in the state. But the bloodshed has also drawn attention to what lawmakers say are routine constitutional violations, as well as the chronic underfunding of a system that incarcerates people at a rate almost twice the American average.
“For 48 hours it was just violence,” said Mallett, who served an eight-year sentence for a non-violent drug crime. “Nothing but violence, before any help.”
Still wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, the former inmate said highway patrol officers eventually stormed his unit and retook it, an event he believed occurred on 3 January. Mallett said he was locked in his cell throughout the rioting and was not involved in the violence, but also openly declared his gang affiliation.
He claimed to have been escorted by armed state officers when he was released on 8 January, due to ongoing safety concerns.
“It is pure hell there,” he said. “Inside you have no rights.”
The Mississippi Department of Corrections [MDC] declined to respond to multiple requests for comment and has not provided a public total for the number injured during the unrest. A prison source, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to protect themselves from reprisals, claimed that as of Friday there were still many injured inmates at Parchman who had not received treatment.
On Friday, MDC lifted a statewide prison lockdown but excluded Parchman, where more than 3,000 inmates are held. A heavy police presence remained outside the sprawling complex, which was built in 1901 and modelled after a slave plantation to extract free labor from inmates. Mississippi continues to incarcerate African Americans at a disproportionate rate.
In interviews with six people who had family or partners inside the facility, three said they had not heard from them since the violence began. Those who had contacted their loved ones had done so via contraband cellphones, which are widely used in Parchman. None had any formal confirmation from MDOC, despite making calls.
“It’s just extremely rough not knowing what’s going on,” said 38 year-old Romania Harry, whose partner Richard O’Kelley is in the eighth year of a 10-year sentence for aggravated assault and burglary. “We get no information and no sympathy from Corrections.”
Harry said she was particularly concerned as her partner is in a wheelchair following back surgery. Her account was supported by photographic evidence. She claimed O’Kelley was not receiving medicine before the rioting started.
According to MDOC records, O’Kelley is held in the notorious “Unit 32”. The building was shuttered in 2010 as part of a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), after the group documented inhumane conditions including the use of permanent solitary confinement.
Following rioting earlier this month, it was reopened. It housed hundreds of men.
Paloma Wu, a senior staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), said a client she visited at Parchman on Thursday had been held in “Unit 32” for around five days.
The client, who did not wish to be named, told his attorney there had been no running water for four days, meaning inmates had to defecate into empty toilets that soon overflowed. The client had not showered and had slept on a concrete floor. Food had been as little as a slice of bread.
The Guardian reviewed photographic evidence as well as video which supported this description of conditions.
“We have been treating these people like animals for decades,” Wu said. “Worse than animals, in fact.”
On Tuesday, Mississippi’s lone Democratic congressman, Bennie Thompson, joined with the SPLC and ACLU to write to the US justice department, requesting a federal investigation into all Mississippi’s correctional facilities, which include three state-run and three private prisons.
The letter alleged violation of constitutional rights under the eighth amendment, which safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment.
“It is no exaggeration to say more lives will be lost absent immediate intervention,” it said.
Thompson cited severe staff shortages: 670 staff positions across the three state prisons are unfilled, causing some prisons to be held in lockdown throughout 2019. Although Mississippi has the third-highest rate of incarceration in the US, last month its budget committee recommended reducing spending on state facilities by up to 6.6%. Mississippi pays the lowest salaries for prison staff anywhere in the US.
The crisis is expected to dominate the next legislative session, which begins this month. The outgoing governor, Phil Bryant, has acknowledged the fiscal problems but blamed inmates for the January violence.
“The inmates are the ones that take each other’s lives,” he told reporters. “The inmates are the ones that fashion weapons out of metal. So, I would say look to the inmates.”
On Friday, protesters organized by the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign entered the state capitol in Jackson. They marched up two flights of stairs and stood outside Bryant’s office but were told by security officers he was not available to meet.
Among them was Eva Scott, a 47-year-old retail worker. In early December her nephew Antonio Taylor, 33, was found dead in his cell at Parchman. It was ruled a suicide by hanging but the family, who found out about the death through inmates, not authorities, distrusted the coroner’s ruling.
“Nobody should live like [the inmates] do,” Scott said. “That’s a human being. Somebody’s child. If you have to live in a place like that, you just have to fight for your life.”
MIT warns students, staff about visits from ICE
Matt Reed - Reporter - wcvb
1/10/20
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MIT sent a memo to faculty and staff notifying them that they should expect a visit from ICE and urged cooperation with immigration officials.
That memo, which was obtained by the Boston Globe, said the purpose of ICE's visit is to check the status of foreign postdoctoral students, researchers and visiting scholars.
The checks could also include immigration officials stopping by work sites and laboratories, and they may ask the university how they decided on a foreign student's salary.
The two-page memo was sent faculty-wide Thursday, the Globe reported, and it said federal officials are likely to give them 48 hours' notice,
An MIT spokesperson told the Globe that they would be sharing similar information with the foreign scholars.
"MIT has been clear about the value of our global community and of the free flow of scientific ideas," the school said. "We are grateful for the dedication, imagination, and perseverance of every scholar here at MIT."
An ICE spokesperson told the Globe immigration officials have been making inspection visits to small businesses and large corporations that hire such students since 2016, but they are increasing in frequency.
That memo, which was obtained by the Boston Globe, said the purpose of ICE's visit is to check the status of foreign postdoctoral students, researchers and visiting scholars.
The checks could also include immigration officials stopping by work sites and laboratories, and they may ask the university how they decided on a foreign student's salary.
The two-page memo was sent faculty-wide Thursday, the Globe reported, and it said federal officials are likely to give them 48 hours' notice,
An MIT spokesperson told the Globe that they would be sharing similar information with the foreign scholars.
"MIT has been clear about the value of our global community and of the free flow of scientific ideas," the school said. "We are grateful for the dedication, imagination, and perseverance of every scholar here at MIT."
An ICE spokesperson told the Globe immigration officials have been making inspection visits to small businesses and large corporations that hire such students since 2016, but they are increasing in frequency.
US policing
Schaston Hodge, black man killed by white Texas troopers, was shot 16 times
Dallas paper obtains autopsy on August shooting
‘They killed my son like he was an animal,’ says mother
Associated Press in Dallas
the guardian
Sat 4 Jan 2020 13.32 EST
The autopsy report of a man who was shot dead by two state troopers after a traffic stop in Dallas shows he had 16 gunshot wounds, including shots to the head, front and back torso and both legs.
Schaston Hodge, 27, was shot dead by the troopers Joshua Engleman and Robert Litvin on 17 August, following what police described as a short pursuit after the troopers attempted to stop Hodge for failing to use a turn signal.
The Dallas Morning News obtained the autopsy report by the Dallas county medical examiner.
“They killed my son like he was an animal,” Hodge’s mother, Shandra Brackens-Hodge, said in a statement to the newspaper. “They shot my son 16 times, they almost blew his head off.”
Engleman and Litvin were working in Dallas as part of Texas governor Greg Abbot’s decision to send troopers to help city police during an increase in violent crime.
Both troopers involved in the shooting are white. Hodge was black.
Lt Lonny Haschel, a spokesman for the Texas department of public safety (DPS), said Texas Rangers investigated the shooting and turned a report over to the Dallas county district attorney’s office. A grand jury declined to indict the troopers.
“The entire incident, captured on video, was presented to a Dallas county grand jury and returned a no bill,” Haschel said in an email, the newspaper reported.
The Texas DPS has declined to release videos of the shooting.
Schaston Hodge, 27, was shot dead by the troopers Joshua Engleman and Robert Litvin on 17 August, following what police described as a short pursuit after the troopers attempted to stop Hodge for failing to use a turn signal.
The Dallas Morning News obtained the autopsy report by the Dallas county medical examiner.
“They killed my son like he was an animal,” Hodge’s mother, Shandra Brackens-Hodge, said in a statement to the newspaper. “They shot my son 16 times, they almost blew his head off.”
Engleman and Litvin were working in Dallas as part of Texas governor Greg Abbot’s decision to send troopers to help city police during an increase in violent crime.
Both troopers involved in the shooting are white. Hodge was black.
Lt Lonny Haschel, a spokesman for the Texas department of public safety (DPS), said Texas Rangers investigated the shooting and turned a report over to the Dallas county district attorney’s office. A grand jury declined to indict the troopers.
“The entire incident, captured on video, was presented to a Dallas county grand jury and returned a no bill,” Haschel said in an email, the newspaper reported.
The Texas DPS has declined to release videos of the shooting.
Wisconsin deputy burglarized grieving families' homes during funerals, officials say
By Antonia Noori Farzan / The Washington Post
omaha world herald
12/19/19
Janelle Gericke.
WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
After his longtime girlfriend passed away in February 2018, an 82-year-old man in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, came home from the funeral to find a perplexing note stuck inside his front door.
"I was here to pick up the stuff through Facebook," it said. "I came in to the house and the items weren't by the door. So I didn't leave my money. I tried Facebook messaging you but you haven't responded."
The message didn't make much sense, the man's son later told police, because the 82-year-old didn't even have a cellphone or a computer. And it soon came to seem even more suspicious when the man looked inside his bedroom and found a cabinet open and his checkbook gone.
More than a year later, detectives with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office would link the crime to one of their own deputies. Authorities say that Janelle Gericke, who worked as a corrections officer at the Jefferson County Jail until July, scoured obituaries for funeral times and targeted the homes of grieving family members while they were attending memorial services.
But her colleagues began spotting her as she staked out potential victims, and, on Tuesday, the 29-year-old was charged with felony burglary.
A criminal complaint from the Wisconsin Department of Justice lists seven instances between February 2018 and June 2019 where the former deputy either successfully broke into a stranger's home, or was spotted lurking outside houses that she had reason to believe would be empty. If her calculations turned out to be wrong, state investigators say, Gericke would quickly make up a story.
When one family returned home from a funeral and found her standing in their kitchen, she claimed that she had been hired to clean the house. On multiple occasions, she explained that she was trying to pick up furniture or baby goods she arranged to buy on Facebook Marketplace, and then said she must have written down the wrong address.
But even in a sprawling county that is home to more than 80,000 people, there were times when Gericke showed up to the wrong house and ran into people who knew her. On Halloween last year, prosecutors say, a couple getting ready to go trick-or-treating noticed a woman standing on their patio and peering into their house through the door. When the wife approached, she realized that the stranger was actually Gericke, who worked with her father at the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and also belonged to his bowling team.
"I didn't know this was your house," Gericke allegedly told the woman. She explained that she was trying to buy a shelf that she had seen on Facebook Marketplace, giving a name and an address that the couple didn't recognize.
Then, in January, authorities say, one of Gericke's co-workers spotted her while out on patrol. Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy David Drayna had been driving past the home of a beloved local firefighter who was fatally hit by a car while trying to rescue a stranded motorist on New Year's Eve, and was surprised to see someone standing on the man's front porch at the precise moment that his memorial service was taking place.
When he stopped, he realized that it was Gericke, who was pregnant at the time. She claimed that she was trying to buy used baby gear off Facebook Marketplace, and had no idea that she was actually at the deceased firefighter's house. Afterward, she texted the deputy a photo of a Graco baby swing, saying, "I got my bouncer. Im the idiot. She gave me the right address, it was 1020. I accidentally typed 1030 . . ."
Later, state investigators interviewed the woman who lived at the "right address." She hadn't sold anyone a Graco baby swing, she said.
Suspicions began to mount last April, when Gericke allegedly targeted one of her own co-workers in a particularly brazen burglary attempt. An officer with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office who was leaving town for two days had sent out a departmentwide email, giving her colleagues a heads-up about her travel plans. As soon as her plane landed, authorities say, her phone started pinging with alerts from her home security system.
The surveillance video showed a pregnant woman in tennis shoes trying to tug open the front and back doors to the officer's house, then poking around a gas grill on the patio to look for a spare key. Two other deputies who watched the footage identified the woman as Gericke.
Gericke denied that she was the woman in the video, admitting only that she owned an identical pair of white tennis shoes, the affidavit says. But in May, detectives connected her to the stolen checks that had vanished from the 82-year-old man's home more than a year before. The note that had been left on his front door had a fingerprint on it, and the state's crime laboratory matched it to Gericke.
Officials from the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that as soon as they realized one of their own deputies was a burglary suspect, they handed the investigation over to the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation. Detectives with the state agency staked out Gericke's home, noting that she drove a silver Chevrolet Cobalt identical to the one that had appeared on surveillance footage, and had a black Labrador retriever matching a dog that some victims had described seeing in the back of her car as she left the scene.
The final test came a month later, when state investigators began studying online obituaries and watching the homes of bereaved relatives. On June 14, investigators say they saw Gericke try to enter the home of a couple who were at a memorial service for their son, then drive to the home of the deceased man's brother and try his doors, too.
Gericke, who was first hired by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office in February 2016, was fired in July, the Journal Sentinel reported. It's unclear why it took five more months for charges to be filed. A Tuesday statement from the department apologized "for the embarrassment and mistrust that this individual may have caused."
Gericke's attorney could not immediately be reached for comment late Wednesday night. Her first court appearance is scheduled for Dec. 30.
"I was here to pick up the stuff through Facebook," it said. "I came in to the house and the items weren't by the door. So I didn't leave my money. I tried Facebook messaging you but you haven't responded."
The message didn't make much sense, the man's son later told police, because the 82-year-old didn't even have a cellphone or a computer. And it soon came to seem even more suspicious when the man looked inside his bedroom and found a cabinet open and his checkbook gone.
More than a year later, detectives with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office would link the crime to one of their own deputies. Authorities say that Janelle Gericke, who worked as a corrections officer at the Jefferson County Jail until July, scoured obituaries for funeral times and targeted the homes of grieving family members while they were attending memorial services.
But her colleagues began spotting her as she staked out potential victims, and, on Tuesday, the 29-year-old was charged with felony burglary.
A criminal complaint from the Wisconsin Department of Justice lists seven instances between February 2018 and June 2019 where the former deputy either successfully broke into a stranger's home, or was spotted lurking outside houses that she had reason to believe would be empty. If her calculations turned out to be wrong, state investigators say, Gericke would quickly make up a story.
When one family returned home from a funeral and found her standing in their kitchen, she claimed that she had been hired to clean the house. On multiple occasions, she explained that she was trying to pick up furniture or baby goods she arranged to buy on Facebook Marketplace, and then said she must have written down the wrong address.
But even in a sprawling county that is home to more than 80,000 people, there were times when Gericke showed up to the wrong house and ran into people who knew her. On Halloween last year, prosecutors say, a couple getting ready to go trick-or-treating noticed a woman standing on their patio and peering into their house through the door. When the wife approached, she realized that the stranger was actually Gericke, who worked with her father at the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and also belonged to his bowling team.
"I didn't know this was your house," Gericke allegedly told the woman. She explained that she was trying to buy a shelf that she had seen on Facebook Marketplace, giving a name and an address that the couple didn't recognize.
Then, in January, authorities say, one of Gericke's co-workers spotted her while out on patrol. Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy David Drayna had been driving past the home of a beloved local firefighter who was fatally hit by a car while trying to rescue a stranded motorist on New Year's Eve, and was surprised to see someone standing on the man's front porch at the precise moment that his memorial service was taking place.
When he stopped, he realized that it was Gericke, who was pregnant at the time. She claimed that she was trying to buy used baby gear off Facebook Marketplace, and had no idea that she was actually at the deceased firefighter's house. Afterward, she texted the deputy a photo of a Graco baby swing, saying, "I got my bouncer. Im the idiot. She gave me the right address, it was 1020. I accidentally typed 1030 . . ."
Later, state investigators interviewed the woman who lived at the "right address." She hadn't sold anyone a Graco baby swing, she said.
Suspicions began to mount last April, when Gericke allegedly targeted one of her own co-workers in a particularly brazen burglary attempt. An officer with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office who was leaving town for two days had sent out a departmentwide email, giving her colleagues a heads-up about her travel plans. As soon as her plane landed, authorities say, her phone started pinging with alerts from her home security system.
The surveillance video showed a pregnant woman in tennis shoes trying to tug open the front and back doors to the officer's house, then poking around a gas grill on the patio to look for a spare key. Two other deputies who watched the footage identified the woman as Gericke.
Gericke denied that she was the woman in the video, admitting only that she owned an identical pair of white tennis shoes, the affidavit says. But in May, detectives connected her to the stolen checks that had vanished from the 82-year-old man's home more than a year before. The note that had been left on his front door had a fingerprint on it, and the state's crime laboratory matched it to Gericke.
Officials from the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that as soon as they realized one of their own deputies was a burglary suspect, they handed the investigation over to the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation. Detectives with the state agency staked out Gericke's home, noting that she drove a silver Chevrolet Cobalt identical to the one that had appeared on surveillance footage, and had a black Labrador retriever matching a dog that some victims had described seeing in the back of her car as she left the scene.
The final test came a month later, when state investigators began studying online obituaries and watching the homes of bereaved relatives. On June 14, investigators say they saw Gericke try to enter the home of a couple who were at a memorial service for their son, then drive to the home of the deceased man's brother and try his doors, too.
Gericke, who was first hired by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office in February 2016, was fired in July, the Journal Sentinel reported. It's unclear why it took five more months for charges to be filed. A Tuesday statement from the department apologized "for the embarrassment and mistrust that this individual may have caused."
Gericke's attorney could not immediately be reached for comment late Wednesday night. Her first court appearance is scheduled for Dec. 30.
NYPD Cop Who Burst Into Black Nashville Family’s Home in a Drunken Rage, Threatening Them, Gets Two-Week Sentence
By Tanasia Kenney - atlanta black star
December 16, 2019
NYPD officer Michael Reynolds, 25, faces criminal trespass charges as well as three counts of assault after breaking into a Black family’s Nashville home. (Photo: Metro Nashville Police Department)
A New York City policeman charged after breaking into the Tennessee home next door to his Airbnb and threatening the family inside is headed to jail.
Michael J. Reynolds was sentenced to just two weeks in jail and three years’ probation for the July 2018 break-in, according to court transcripts obtained by Atlanta Black Star. Reynolds, a patrol officer in Manhattan, faced charges of assault and aggravated criminal trespass after terrorizing victim Conese Halliburton and her sons in their Nashville home.
He pleaded no contest to the charges earlier this year.
Halliburton, along with two witnesses, took the stand at the Dec. 6, hearing and recalled the events of that night. The mom of four said she was at home with her sons when Reynolds, 26, who was in town for a bachelor party and staying with friends at an Airbnb, kicked down her door in a drunken rage.
The incident unfolded in the early hours of July 9, 2018, when Halliburton, in bed with her youngest child at the time, heard shouting outside her home. She asked one of her older sons to peek out of the window and check it out.
“I could hear, like, someone yelling, and it was like really loud, and it was close,” she told the court. “I was like, something doesn’t sound right.”
By that time, Halliburton was dialing police after her son spotted Reynolds in their front yard and his shouts continued to grow louder.
“It was just like, loud yelling, just like really loud,” she added, saying she couldn’t make out what the suspect was saying. “And while I was on the phone with the [911 operator], you know how it sounds like a knock — when someone is knocking at your door. It was like vibrations, like really loud. It was like boom, boom, boom.”
Reynolds would eventually burst through the front door. Halliburton said even as her dogs tried biting the intruder, he fought them off and continued making his way into her home and down the hall.
“He’s like this is my motherf—–g house, this is my motherf—–g house,” she recalled Reynold’s yelling.
Part of the attack was captured by a neighbor’s Nest security system, on which a male voice is heard threatening the family: “Try to shoot me, I’ll break every bone in your fucking neck. You fucking nigger.”
Halliburton said, at one point, her 20- and 17-year-old two elder sons placed themselves in between herself and Reynolds, who refused to leave until the family warned that police were on their way.
Authorities would interview the officer later that night but did not arrest him. It wasn’t until days later that Metro Nashville police got involved and began investigating. By then, Halliburton had already confronted Reynolds and his friends over the incident.
Neighbor Joetta Alderson was there when Hallibuton approached the cop and the six or seven others he was sharing the Airbnb with. She said Reynolds expressed remorse over the incident, but his other buddies didn’t think it was a big deal.
“The one that did a whole lot of talking, it’s like he kept trying to incite some type of altercation between us and them,” Alderson testified, referring to Reynolds best friend and mouthpiece of the group Thomas Geberth. He suggested, “that if the police [were] called, it’s not going to be a big issue because they were policemen from New York.”
“It made it seem like there was no justice to me,” she added. “What had happened to [Halliburton] could happen to anybody. But as long as they were policemen, then it was OK.”
Justin Roddick, another neighbor who testified, recalled Reynold’s apology but said it was insincere.
“He was laughing,” Roddick said, describing how the group brushed off a visibly upset Hallibuton. “That’s not an ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.”
Reynolds later took the stand and continued to express remorse over the incident. He said he was decommissioned and suspended from his job for 30 days, though he remains employed by the NPYD.
His lax sentencing drew outrage online and sparked calls for the department to fire him outright.
“This guy should be thrown off the force and put in damned prison for what he did. His ‘jail time’ is a joke,” one Twitter user wrote.
Reynolds has 30 days to report to the Metro jail to begin his sentence.
Michael J. Reynolds was sentenced to just two weeks in jail and three years’ probation for the July 2018 break-in, according to court transcripts obtained by Atlanta Black Star. Reynolds, a patrol officer in Manhattan, faced charges of assault and aggravated criminal trespass after terrorizing victim Conese Halliburton and her sons in their Nashville home.
He pleaded no contest to the charges earlier this year.
Halliburton, along with two witnesses, took the stand at the Dec. 6, hearing and recalled the events of that night. The mom of four said she was at home with her sons when Reynolds, 26, who was in town for a bachelor party and staying with friends at an Airbnb, kicked down her door in a drunken rage.
The incident unfolded in the early hours of July 9, 2018, when Halliburton, in bed with her youngest child at the time, heard shouting outside her home. She asked one of her older sons to peek out of the window and check it out.
“I could hear, like, someone yelling, and it was like really loud, and it was close,” she told the court. “I was like, something doesn’t sound right.”
By that time, Halliburton was dialing police after her son spotted Reynolds in their front yard and his shouts continued to grow louder.
“It was just like, loud yelling, just like really loud,” she added, saying she couldn’t make out what the suspect was saying. “And while I was on the phone with the [911 operator], you know how it sounds like a knock — when someone is knocking at your door. It was like vibrations, like really loud. It was like boom, boom, boom.”
Reynolds would eventually burst through the front door. Halliburton said even as her dogs tried biting the intruder, he fought them off and continued making his way into her home and down the hall.
“He’s like this is my motherf—–g house, this is my motherf—–g house,” she recalled Reynold’s yelling.
Part of the attack was captured by a neighbor’s Nest security system, on which a male voice is heard threatening the family: “Try to shoot me, I’ll break every bone in your fucking neck. You fucking nigger.”
Halliburton said, at one point, her 20- and 17-year-old two elder sons placed themselves in between herself and Reynolds, who refused to leave until the family warned that police were on their way.
Authorities would interview the officer later that night but did not arrest him. It wasn’t until days later that Metro Nashville police got involved and began investigating. By then, Halliburton had already confronted Reynolds and his friends over the incident.
Neighbor Joetta Alderson was there when Hallibuton approached the cop and the six or seven others he was sharing the Airbnb with. She said Reynolds expressed remorse over the incident, but his other buddies didn’t think it was a big deal.
“The one that did a whole lot of talking, it’s like he kept trying to incite some type of altercation between us and them,” Alderson testified, referring to Reynolds best friend and mouthpiece of the group Thomas Geberth. He suggested, “that if the police [were] called, it’s not going to be a big issue because they were policemen from New York.”
“It made it seem like there was no justice to me,” she added. “What had happened to [Halliburton] could happen to anybody. But as long as they were policemen, then it was OK.”
Justin Roddick, another neighbor who testified, recalled Reynold’s apology but said it was insincere.
“He was laughing,” Roddick said, describing how the group brushed off a visibly upset Hallibuton. “That’s not an ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.”
Reynolds later took the stand and continued to express remorse over the incident. He said he was decommissioned and suspended from his job for 30 days, though he remains employed by the NPYD.
His lax sentencing drew outrage online and sparked calls for the department to fire him outright.
“This guy should be thrown off the force and put in damned prison for what he did. His ‘jail time’ is a joke,” one Twitter user wrote.
Reynolds has 30 days to report to the Metro jail to begin his sentence.
Retired Cop Claims NYPD Rewarded Officers for Arresting More Black Men While Avoiding ‘Soft Targets’
By Tanasia Kenney - atlanta black star
December 9, 2019
New York City officers were rewarded more overtime if they arrested African-American men, a bombshell declaration submitted by a former NYPD cop alleges.
Retired policeman Pierre Maximilien claims officers in Coney Island’s Transit District 34 were ordered to avoid “soft targets,” meaning whites, Asians and Jews, and instead focus their efforts on Blacks and Hispanics, according to court documents obtained by the New York Post.
The accusations are a part of a larger discrimination suit brought by Sgt. Edwin Raymond and three officers who say the agency’s top brass forced them to arrest Blacks and Hispanics over other groups. Those who did not comply would face the wrath of then-commanding officer Constantin Tsachas. Tsachas remains on the force and was promoted to deputy inspector in 2016, the New York Daily News reports.
“We were taught by Tsachas’ closest lieutenants we couldn’t give summons to what they called … ‘soft targets,’” Maximilien wrote in a sworn affidavit, adding that Black and Hispanic officers were disciplined more harshly than whites for refusing to follow the racist directive.
“Instead, it was emphasized that we needed to stop male blacks. Those were the ones Tsachas wanted to go to jail,” he added.
Maximiliens’s declaration further claims that supervisors retaliated against those who took issue with the racist quota system, placing minority officers on command by themselves and denying them vacation and leave, among other punishments. Meanwhile, white officers were given “a pass.”
“They would write it off as a bad month and place them in areas with partners who were extremely aggressive so they could make the arrest quota,” said Maximilien, who retired from the department in 2015.
The NYPD declined comment on the pending litigation, but has long denied the existence of quotas. However, Maximilien says the department refers to quotas by a series of code names, including performance goals, activity and expectations.
The City Law Department has responded to the lawsuit, calling the former officer’s claims wholly unsubstantiated.
“The NYPD investigated the allegations in Officer Maximilien’s declaration and found them to be meritless,” it said in a statement. “We will continue to defend against these baseless claims.”
Retired policeman Pierre Maximilien claims officers in Coney Island’s Transit District 34 were ordered to avoid “soft targets,” meaning whites, Asians and Jews, and instead focus their efforts on Blacks and Hispanics, according to court documents obtained by the New York Post.
The accusations are a part of a larger discrimination suit brought by Sgt. Edwin Raymond and three officers who say the agency’s top brass forced them to arrest Blacks and Hispanics over other groups. Those who did not comply would face the wrath of then-commanding officer Constantin Tsachas. Tsachas remains on the force and was promoted to deputy inspector in 2016, the New York Daily News reports.
“We were taught by Tsachas’ closest lieutenants we couldn’t give summons to what they called … ‘soft targets,’” Maximilien wrote in a sworn affidavit, adding that Black and Hispanic officers were disciplined more harshly than whites for refusing to follow the racist directive.
“Instead, it was emphasized that we needed to stop male blacks. Those were the ones Tsachas wanted to go to jail,” he added.
Maximiliens’s declaration further claims that supervisors retaliated against those who took issue with the racist quota system, placing minority officers on command by themselves and denying them vacation and leave, among other punishments. Meanwhile, white officers were given “a pass.”
“They would write it off as a bad month and place them in areas with partners who were extremely aggressive so they could make the arrest quota,” said Maximilien, who retired from the department in 2015.
The NYPD declined comment on the pending litigation, but has long denied the existence of quotas. However, Maximilien says the department refers to quotas by a series of code names, including performance goals, activity and expectations.
The City Law Department has responded to the lawsuit, calling the former officer’s claims wholly unsubstantiated.
“The NYPD investigated the allegations in Officer Maximilien’s declaration and found them to be meritless,” it said in a statement. “We will continue to defend against these baseless claims.”
According to a report from the Daily Beast, a “cabal” of FBI agents and former agents — led by a famous FBI investigator — waged an investigatory war on Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton that ultimately gave Donald Trump a helping hand in defeating the former Secretary of State in the 2016 presidential election.
In a deep dive into the history of former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom — who rose to fame as the lead investigator looking into the explosion and crash of TWA flight 800 on July 17, 1996 — the Beast’s Patricia Ravalgi reveals that Kallstrom went from conspiracy-debunker to conspiracy-monger when it came to the Clintons.
According to Ravalgi, Kallstrom has a long relationship with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, going back to the former New York City mayor’s U.S. Attorney days.
“By the late 1980s, Kallstrom was a well-known surveillance expert who designed the complex bugging operations during the famous New York Pizza Connection investigation and the John Gotti investigation. These were cases worked on by both Giuliani and Louis Freeh, both at the Southern District of New York at the time. Kallstrom was their leading wiretap guy, and the three of them bonded,” the reports states. “By the mid-1990s the distrust and dislike of Bill and Hillary Clinton that flowed from the FBI leadership down to the rank-and-file was well established. It had been in existence from the minute Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination to run against the incumbent, President George H.W. Bush. Rumors had begun circulating among federal agents that Hillary was rude and nasty to her Secret Service detail, and that she and her husband hated cops. There were women coming forward accusing Bill Clinton of harassment and rape. Hillary was accused of corruption at her old law firm in Arkansas.”
With Hillary Clinton plotting a presidential run, “Giuliani and Kallstrom were well-positioned to exploit” agency resentment against the Clintons , with the report stating: “Each man had tentacles still deep inside the Bureau, and as they looked for ways to stop Hillary a sort of cabal developed that included current as well as former FBI agents.”
According to the report, those FBI agents felt they had discovered the “kryptonite” that would bring Clinton down — her private email server.
“Hillary Clinton’s bad judgment and the question of what happened to some of the emails from the private server led to interminable Republican allegations and investigations in Congress trying to establish some criminal intent. ‘The emails!’ became a common refrain at Trump campaign rallies, often culminating in the chant, ‘Lock her up!'” Ravalgi writes.
Coupled with former FBI Director James Comey’s controversial decision to announce an investigation into some newly discovered emails right before the election — and the New York Times front-page coverage of what would turn out to be a big nothing — the FBI handed Trump another assist.
As for Kallstrom, the report notes that he has long left the FBI and now shows up on Fox News where he provides fodder for the network’s Clinton obsession.
“Kallstrom used to be, like the fictional detective Joe Friday on the old TV series Dragnet, looking for ‘just the facts.’ But the hero of the TWA 800 investigation now spends his days spinning conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, appearing on Fox News programs calling her ‘corrupt and crazy’ and also referring to the former deputy director of his own FBI, Andy McCabe, as ‘corrupt.’ He has even called former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan ‘communists.’ Kallstrom repeatedly disparaged former FBI Director Robert Mueller,” Ravalgi explains. “Kallstrom also took to the airwaves to defend Trump cronies Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, bemoaning how badly treated they were by Mueller and the FBI, but that was before they were convicted of felonies.”
“Apparently Kallstrom has a high regard for his former law enforcement and intelligence community colleagues, but only those who are die-hard Trump supporters and Hillary-haters. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem to matter to him what you’ve done at the FBI or for your country, if you have anything bad to say about Trump—you’re scum,” she added.
More at: Once-Heroic Agents Help Trump Divide and Conquer the FBI
THE DEEPER STATE
In a deep dive into the history of former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom — who rose to fame as the lead investigator looking into the explosion and crash of TWA flight 800 on July 17, 1996 — the Beast’s Patricia Ravalgi reveals that Kallstrom went from conspiracy-debunker to conspiracy-monger when it came to the Clintons.
According to Ravalgi, Kallstrom has a long relationship with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, going back to the former New York City mayor’s U.S. Attorney days.
“By the late 1980s, Kallstrom was a well-known surveillance expert who designed the complex bugging operations during the famous New York Pizza Connection investigation and the John Gotti investigation. These were cases worked on by both Giuliani and Louis Freeh, both at the Southern District of New York at the time. Kallstrom was their leading wiretap guy, and the three of them bonded,” the reports states. “By the mid-1990s the distrust and dislike of Bill and Hillary Clinton that flowed from the FBI leadership down to the rank-and-file was well established. It had been in existence from the minute Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination to run against the incumbent, President George H.W. Bush. Rumors had begun circulating among federal agents that Hillary was rude and nasty to her Secret Service detail, and that she and her husband hated cops. There were women coming forward accusing Bill Clinton of harassment and rape. Hillary was accused of corruption at her old law firm in Arkansas.”
With Hillary Clinton plotting a presidential run, “Giuliani and Kallstrom were well-positioned to exploit” agency resentment against the Clintons , with the report stating: “Each man had tentacles still deep inside the Bureau, and as they looked for ways to stop Hillary a sort of cabal developed that included current as well as former FBI agents.”
According to the report, those FBI agents felt they had discovered the “kryptonite” that would bring Clinton down — her private email server.
“Hillary Clinton’s bad judgment and the question of what happened to some of the emails from the private server led to interminable Republican allegations and investigations in Congress trying to establish some criminal intent. ‘The emails!’ became a common refrain at Trump campaign rallies, often culminating in the chant, ‘Lock her up!'” Ravalgi writes.
Coupled with former FBI Director James Comey’s controversial decision to announce an investigation into some newly discovered emails right before the election — and the New York Times front-page coverage of what would turn out to be a big nothing — the FBI handed Trump another assist.
As for Kallstrom, the report notes that he has long left the FBI and now shows up on Fox News where he provides fodder for the network’s Clinton obsession.
“Kallstrom used to be, like the fictional detective Joe Friday on the old TV series Dragnet, looking for ‘just the facts.’ But the hero of the TWA 800 investigation now spends his days spinning conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, appearing on Fox News programs calling her ‘corrupt and crazy’ and also referring to the former deputy director of his own FBI, Andy McCabe, as ‘corrupt.’ He has even called former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan ‘communists.’ Kallstrom repeatedly disparaged former FBI Director Robert Mueller,” Ravalgi explains. “Kallstrom also took to the airwaves to defend Trump cronies Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, bemoaning how badly treated they were by Mueller and the FBI, but that was before they were convicted of felonies.”
“Apparently Kallstrom has a high regard for his former law enforcement and intelligence community colleagues, but only those who are die-hard Trump supporters and Hillary-haters. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem to matter to him what you’ve done at the FBI or for your country, if you have anything bad to say about Trump—you’re scum,” she added.
More at: Once-Heroic Agents Help Trump Divide and Conquer the FBI
THE DEEPER STATE
How a ‘cabal’ of FBI agents helped Trump wage his conspiracy war on Clinton
December 2, 2019
By Tom Boggioni- raw story
Trump Thinks He Can Get Away With Murder Because Police Do All the Time
BY Danny Katch, Truthout
PUBLISHED November 26, 2019
When Donald Trump declared that he wanted not only Ukraine but also China to investigate Joe Biden on October 4, all hell broke loose. A political class jaded by daily White House provocations was roused by this brazenly authoritarian call for international assistance in bringing down the president’s top-polling opponent, and the impeachment drive suddenly kicked into high gear.
That same night, Joshua Brown, an African American man who had recently helped win a rare murder conviction against a police officer, was murdered in the parking lot of his Dallas apartment building. Dallas police officials claimed that Brown’s death was unrelated to his witness testimony against their officer Amber Guyger, and that what actually happened was that Brown was selling marijuana in his parking lot — days after his name and face had been all over the news — and was killed by three other Black men in a drug deal gone wrong.
For many observers, the official police account rang about as true as Trump’s claims about the size of his inauguration crowd. But even if Brown’s death really had nothing to do with his testimony against Guyger, the understandable and widespread perception that it did will likely dissuade others from testifying against police. Like presidential threats to the integrity of the next election, Joshua Brown’s murder, therefore, should be considered a crisis of democracy and the rule of law — different in kind but not severity. In fact, in mainstream conversations, it’s barely been considered at all, drowned out by impeachment news.
The point here is not that we should focus on Joshua Brown instead of Donald Trump but to see how deeply they are connected. Many of us find ourselves continually and involuntarily shocked that Trump has been able to stay in office despite his many well-documented crimes and irrationalities. But why are we shocked? Since the advent of the camera phone we’ve been witness to dozens of police officers with far less power than the president getting away with all manner of criminal and immeasurably harmful behavior.
Of the roughly 1,000 documented police killings that take place every year in the U.S., fewer than 1 percent result even in an arrest — and convictions are even more rare. Even those few exceptions prove the larger rule. Guyger’s conviction — for the absurd and indefensible killing of an unarmed neighbor in his own apartment — surprised many people, because an ordinary cop can usually do the very thing it was so jarring to hear a presidential candidate boast about: Shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it (provided it’s 5th Avenue in Harlem and not the Upper East Side).
Trump has no doubt brought something new and dangerous to the modern American presidency, and it’s useful to look at comparable corrupt strongmen around the world like India’s Narendra Modi and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as we try to comprehend his role. But while Trumpism is part of an international trend, its roots are squarely domestic– and in many ways rooted in American policing.
For all the media coverage of blue-collar workers in a handful of midwestern counties, you would never know that Trump’s first and primary union backing came from the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Border Patrol Council. This is Trump’s real non-wealthy base, and while he’s failing to keep promises of bringing back good factory jobs, he’s absolutely delivering on his pledges to “unshackle” abusive police departments from federal oversight and immigration agents from just about any standards of basic morality.
Perhaps one reason why so few in the political class draw these connections is that, as privileged people not normally subject to the imperious impunity of local law enforcement, politicians and pundits experience Trump’s authoritarianism as something entirely new. But families and community members of police victims have long known the bullying and gaslighting that has now grown so familiar to all under Trumpism. When Trump says that Black people love his racist comments about Baltimore, when police claim that the man with a knife was an immediate threat to multiple officers surrounding him with guns, the point is not to convince the skeptics but to make them understand that there’s nothing they can do about it.
Victims of police misconduct are also well acquainted with the Trumpian technique of smearing the reputations of accusers. “He was no angel,” The New York Times infamously wrote about Michael Brown after he was killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. “No angel” is a phrase one can easily picture Trump saying to describe a woman accusing him of sexual assault, or a member of Congress looking to investigate his corruption. Trump’s partner in crime, Rudy Giuliani, in fact used similar words in 2000 when as New York City mayor he unsealed the entirely irrelevant juvenile records of Patrick Dorismond to show that the police murder victim “isn’t an altar boy.”
Dorismond’s murder was one of many that fueled protests against police violence in New York City under Giuliani. Michael Brown’s 2014 murder led to an uprising in Ferguson that inspired a much larger nationwide movement under the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” The minimalist slogan conveyed that the country’s entire legal system needed wholesale change just to make those three simple words a reality. Rather than take up this challenge, the Democrats in power at the time simply repeated the slogan and moved on, a ridiculous posture that looked progressive only in contrast with that of many Republicans, who actually opposed the three words.
Now Trump is president and he’s brought the “Blue Lives Matter” crowd’s sneering contempt for legal niceties into the White House. Police and ICE agents are even more empowered to commit abuses. The Ferguson community is alarmed and suspicious over the deaths of six protesters in the past three years. And now Joshua Brown has been killed just days after the verdict of the police officer he helped convict. As we worry whether Trump will stay in power and create an authoritarian nightmare, we should ask ourselves whether the dystopia is already here — and Trump is not the creator but the creation.
That same night, Joshua Brown, an African American man who had recently helped win a rare murder conviction against a police officer, was murdered in the parking lot of his Dallas apartment building. Dallas police officials claimed that Brown’s death was unrelated to his witness testimony against their officer Amber Guyger, and that what actually happened was that Brown was selling marijuana in his parking lot — days after his name and face had been all over the news — and was killed by three other Black men in a drug deal gone wrong.
For many observers, the official police account rang about as true as Trump’s claims about the size of his inauguration crowd. But even if Brown’s death really had nothing to do with his testimony against Guyger, the understandable and widespread perception that it did will likely dissuade others from testifying against police. Like presidential threats to the integrity of the next election, Joshua Brown’s murder, therefore, should be considered a crisis of democracy and the rule of law — different in kind but not severity. In fact, in mainstream conversations, it’s barely been considered at all, drowned out by impeachment news.
The point here is not that we should focus on Joshua Brown instead of Donald Trump but to see how deeply they are connected. Many of us find ourselves continually and involuntarily shocked that Trump has been able to stay in office despite his many well-documented crimes and irrationalities. But why are we shocked? Since the advent of the camera phone we’ve been witness to dozens of police officers with far less power than the president getting away with all manner of criminal and immeasurably harmful behavior.
Of the roughly 1,000 documented police killings that take place every year in the U.S., fewer than 1 percent result even in an arrest — and convictions are even more rare. Even those few exceptions prove the larger rule. Guyger’s conviction — for the absurd and indefensible killing of an unarmed neighbor in his own apartment — surprised many people, because an ordinary cop can usually do the very thing it was so jarring to hear a presidential candidate boast about: Shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it (provided it’s 5th Avenue in Harlem and not the Upper East Side).
Trump has no doubt brought something new and dangerous to the modern American presidency, and it’s useful to look at comparable corrupt strongmen around the world like India’s Narendra Modi and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as we try to comprehend his role. But while Trumpism is part of an international trend, its roots are squarely domestic– and in many ways rooted in American policing.
For all the media coverage of blue-collar workers in a handful of midwestern counties, you would never know that Trump’s first and primary union backing came from the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Border Patrol Council. This is Trump’s real non-wealthy base, and while he’s failing to keep promises of bringing back good factory jobs, he’s absolutely delivering on his pledges to “unshackle” abusive police departments from federal oversight and immigration agents from just about any standards of basic morality.
Perhaps one reason why so few in the political class draw these connections is that, as privileged people not normally subject to the imperious impunity of local law enforcement, politicians and pundits experience Trump’s authoritarianism as something entirely new. But families and community members of police victims have long known the bullying and gaslighting that has now grown so familiar to all under Trumpism. When Trump says that Black people love his racist comments about Baltimore, when police claim that the man with a knife was an immediate threat to multiple officers surrounding him with guns, the point is not to convince the skeptics but to make them understand that there’s nothing they can do about it.
Victims of police misconduct are also well acquainted with the Trumpian technique of smearing the reputations of accusers. “He was no angel,” The New York Times infamously wrote about Michael Brown after he was killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. “No angel” is a phrase one can easily picture Trump saying to describe a woman accusing him of sexual assault, or a member of Congress looking to investigate his corruption. Trump’s partner in crime, Rudy Giuliani, in fact used similar words in 2000 when as New York City mayor he unsealed the entirely irrelevant juvenile records of Patrick Dorismond to show that the police murder victim “isn’t an altar boy.”
Dorismond’s murder was one of many that fueled protests against police violence in New York City under Giuliani. Michael Brown’s 2014 murder led to an uprising in Ferguson that inspired a much larger nationwide movement under the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” The minimalist slogan conveyed that the country’s entire legal system needed wholesale change just to make those three simple words a reality. Rather than take up this challenge, the Democrats in power at the time simply repeated the slogan and moved on, a ridiculous posture that looked progressive only in contrast with that of many Republicans, who actually opposed the three words.
Now Trump is president and he’s brought the “Blue Lives Matter” crowd’s sneering contempt for legal niceties into the White House. Police and ICE agents are even more empowered to commit abuses. The Ferguson community is alarmed and suspicious over the deaths of six protesters in the past three years. And now Joshua Brown has been killed just days after the verdict of the police officer he helped convict. As we worry whether Trump will stay in power and create an authoritarian nightmare, we should ask ourselves whether the dystopia is already here — and Trump is not the creator but the creation.
The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops
June 4, 2019
By The Conversation - Raw Story
Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.
But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new.
There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.
The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.
I’m a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing – first planted centuries ago – have not yet been fully purged.
Slave patrols
There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.
Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. They located and returned enslaved people who had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people and punished enslaved workers found or believed to have violated plantation rules.
The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s. As University of Georgia social work professor Michael A. Robinson has written, by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.
Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone’s home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.
The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere.
The first police forces were overwhelmingly white, male and more focused on responding to disorder than crime.
As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Gary Potter explains, officers were expected to control a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor. Through the early 20th century, there were few standards for hiring or training officers.
Police corruption and violence – particularly against vulnerable people – were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors – controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.
Jim Crow laws
Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.
For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.
The ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 quickly made the Black Codes illegal by giving formerly enslaved blacks equal protection of laws through the Constitution. But within two decades, Jim Crow laws aimed at subjugating African Americans and denying their civil rights were enacted across southern and some northern states, replacing the Black Codes.
For about 80 years, Jim Crow laws mandated separate public spacesfor blacks and whites, such as schools, libraries, water fountains and restaurants – and enforcing them was part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke laws or violated social norms often endured police brutality.
Meanwhile, the authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when African Americans were lynched. Nor did the judicial system hold the police accountable for failing to intervene when black people were being murdered by mobs.
Reverberating today
For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.
The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper’s database indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American.
Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement – even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.
In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.
When a Stanford University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver’s complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.
This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.
There is greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are becoming more diverse.
What’s more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take “diversity in criminal justice” courses. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.
In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to recognize and minimize their own biases in New York City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.
But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.
But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new.
There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.
The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.
I’m a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing – first planted centuries ago – have not yet been fully purged.
Slave patrols
There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.
Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. They located and returned enslaved people who had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people and punished enslaved workers found or believed to have violated plantation rules.
The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s. As University of Georgia social work professor Michael A. Robinson has written, by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.
Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone’s home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.
The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere.
The first police forces were overwhelmingly white, male and more focused on responding to disorder than crime.
As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Gary Potter explains, officers were expected to control a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor. Through the early 20th century, there were few standards for hiring or training officers.
Police corruption and violence – particularly against vulnerable people – were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors – controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.
Jim Crow laws
Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.
For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.
The ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 quickly made the Black Codes illegal by giving formerly enslaved blacks equal protection of laws through the Constitution. But within two decades, Jim Crow laws aimed at subjugating African Americans and denying their civil rights were enacted across southern and some northern states, replacing the Black Codes.
For about 80 years, Jim Crow laws mandated separate public spacesfor blacks and whites, such as schools, libraries, water fountains and restaurants – and enforcing them was part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke laws or violated social norms often endured police brutality.
Meanwhile, the authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when African Americans were lynched. Nor did the judicial system hold the police accountable for failing to intervene when black people were being murdered by mobs.
Reverberating today
For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.
The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper’s database indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American.
Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement – even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.
In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.
When a Stanford University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver’s complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.
This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.
There is greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are becoming more diverse.
What’s more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take “diversity in criminal justice” courses. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.
In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to recognize and minimize their own biases in New York City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.
But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.
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Reasonable Force
The everyday assault on Blue Lives.
By Khalil Bendib ~ Other Words.com
