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GESTAPO USA
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july 29, 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
*NYPD admits it’s used unmarked vehicles to apprehend suspects for “decades” after “disturbing” video(ARTICLE BELOW)
*NYPD DISAPPEARED BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTERS INTO DETENTION FOR DAYS AT A TIME. LAWMAKERS WANT TO END THE PRACTICE.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The psychology of police violence: What makes so many cops have racial biases?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Cop fired after racist remarks caught on tape “forgot” to disclose criminal record to department(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How Starbucks, Target, Google and Microsoft quietly fund police through private donations(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A Buffalo police officer says she stopped a fellow cop's chokehold on a black suspect. She was fired.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records.(excerpt below)
*Police Are Building Surveillance Networks of Private Security Cameras in Cities
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*If you’re surprised by how the police are acting, you don’t understand US history
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US POLICE HAVE A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST BLACK PEOPLE. WILL IT EVER STOP?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Suspected Looter Was Kneeling and Had a Hammer, Not a Gun, When Fatally Shot By Vallejo Police(ARTICLE BELOW)
*LOUISVILLE POLICE LEFT THE BODY OF DAVID MCATEE ON THE STREET FOR 12 HOURS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Policing in the US is not about enforcing law. It’s about enforcing white supremacy
(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 racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*GESTAPO USA FUNNIES(below)
NYPD admits it’s used unmarked vehicles to apprehend suspects for “decades” after “disturbing” video
Though the video drew comparisons to Portland, the NYPD said no federal authorities were involved in the arrest
IGOR DERYSH - salon
JULY 29, 2020 3:10PM (UTC)
As the New York Police Department defended a viral video showing plainclothes officers forcefully detaining a trans protester in an unmarked van, the agency admitted that it has used similar vehicles to apprehend suspects for "decades."
A video posted Tuesday to Twitter by the independent journalist Michelle Lhooq shows men in shorts and T-shirts grab the trans protester and wrestle her into an unmarked van. About 15 seconds into the video, marked officers on bikes arrive to set up a perimeter around the van as the plainclothes officers rush to drive away. The incident took place in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan.
The protester was identified by her friends as an 18-year-old homeless trans woman named Nicki Stone. Stone was charged with multiple counts of vandalism and criminal mischief for allegedly spraying graffiti on police cameras and other locations around the city, Gothamist reported.
"Suddenly, there was an unmarked grey van that moved out in front of us that had been waiting for us," a protester named Derrick told the outlet. "Four guys jumped out and a line of police bicycles came out from down the block — we hadn't seen them. They pushed us back. They grabbed Nicki like she was a rag doll . . . They had her arms on her neck, and then they drove off. They're targeting our leaders – that's what's going to happen now."
The video drew widespread criticism. The Human Rights Campaign called it "deeply troubling." The American Civil Liberties Union said the video showed the protester was "abducted off the streets by unmarked 'officers.'"
"These dangerous, abusive, and indefensible actions must stop," the ACLU on Twitter. "Law enforcement must be held accountable."
Though the video drew comparisons to the federal officials deployed to Portland who have snatched protesters into unmarked vans ostensibly as part of President Donald Trump's executive order to protect monuments and federal property, the NYPD said no federal authorities were involved in the arrest.
The NYPD issued a statement on Twitter saying that Stone was wanted for damaging police cameras, and she was detained by the Warrant Squad, which uses unmarked vehicles to carry out arrests. NYPD Lt. John Grimpel told NBC News that the Warrant Squad has used unmarked vehicles to detain people for "decades."
"A woman taken into custody in an unmarked van was wanted for damaging police cameras during 5 separate criminal incidents in & around City Hall Park. The arresting officers were assaulted with rocks & bottles," the NYPD said, though the video does not appear to show officers being assaulted with neither rocks nor bottles.
"The Warrant Squad uses unmarked vehicles to effectively locate wanted suspects," the statement added. "When she was placed into the Warrant Squad's unmarked gray minivan, it was behind a cordon of NYPD bicycle cops in bright yellow and blue uniform shirts there to help effect the arrest."
Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the author of "The End of Policing," refuted the NYPD's explanation.
"Those officers arrived after a violent arrest by non-uniformed officers in the middle of an active [protest]," he wrote. "This was a reckless and dangerous provocation."
Three witnesses who spoke to Gothamist also disputed the claim.
"None of that happened whatsoever," protester Clara Kraebber told the outlet. "We literally turned the corner and were met with a line of police who attacked us without warning."
Ali Bauman, a reporter at CBS New York, also questioned the explanation, asking why the NYPD would "not tell reporters where the woman was taken or where she is being processed."
New York City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera later tweeted early Wednesday morning that the protester had been released. Rivera called for an independent review of the arrest and "an immediate explanation for why an unmarked van full of officers was anywhere near a peaceful protest."
"It's clear that using an unmarked van and plainclothes officers to make an arrest for vandalism (in the middle of a peaceful protest) is a massive overstep," she added. "I'm exploring legislation."
Similar incidents have been seen in other cities. The San Diego Police Department launched an internal investigation after a viral video showed armed men, who did not identify themselves, detaining a young woman in an unmarked van outside of a high school last month. The SDPD said the men were plainclothes officers but refused to release any details of its investigation.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has not commented on the video, and a spokeswoman referred questions to the NYPD statement. But other city leaders publicly questioned the arrest.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson called the video "incredibly disturbing," according to The New York Times. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said he was "deeply concerned" by the arrest.
Organizers told The Times that the woman was arrested in connection with the clearing of an encampment outside City Hall, where demonstrators called for the city to defund the police. De Blasio touted that the City Council had voted to cut nearly $1 billion from the NYPD budget in response to demonstrations last month, though activists have called that claim a "lie."
New York criminal defense attorneys on Wednesday decried the arrest but noted that the tactic used in the video was not uncommon.
"This is not a new policing strategy - I mean, maybe for protests, but this is how NYPD polices Black and Brown neighborhoods," said civil rights attorney Rebecca Kavanagh. The reaction to the video, she said, was "white people waking up to a reality Black and Brown people have lived for decades."
"The thing about all the outrageous acts of police violence, nonsensical arrests and holding people indefinitely that have been shocking everyone in the news is that... it's always been happening," agreed Olayemi Olurin, a New York City public defender. "This is how they always conduct themselves. You just don't hear about it."
A video posted Tuesday to Twitter by the independent journalist Michelle Lhooq shows men in shorts and T-shirts grab the trans protester and wrestle her into an unmarked van. About 15 seconds into the video, marked officers on bikes arrive to set up a perimeter around the van as the plainclothes officers rush to drive away. The incident took place in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan.
The protester was identified by her friends as an 18-year-old homeless trans woman named Nicki Stone. Stone was charged with multiple counts of vandalism and criminal mischief for allegedly spraying graffiti on police cameras and other locations around the city, Gothamist reported.
"Suddenly, there was an unmarked grey van that moved out in front of us that had been waiting for us," a protester named Derrick told the outlet. "Four guys jumped out and a line of police bicycles came out from down the block — we hadn't seen them. They pushed us back. They grabbed Nicki like she was a rag doll . . . They had her arms on her neck, and then they drove off. They're targeting our leaders – that's what's going to happen now."
The video drew widespread criticism. The Human Rights Campaign called it "deeply troubling." The American Civil Liberties Union said the video showed the protester was "abducted off the streets by unmarked 'officers.'"
"These dangerous, abusive, and indefensible actions must stop," the ACLU on Twitter. "Law enforcement must be held accountable."
Though the video drew comparisons to the federal officials deployed to Portland who have snatched protesters into unmarked vans ostensibly as part of President Donald Trump's executive order to protect monuments and federal property, the NYPD said no federal authorities were involved in the arrest.
The NYPD issued a statement on Twitter saying that Stone was wanted for damaging police cameras, and she was detained by the Warrant Squad, which uses unmarked vehicles to carry out arrests. NYPD Lt. John Grimpel told NBC News that the Warrant Squad has used unmarked vehicles to detain people for "decades."
"A woman taken into custody in an unmarked van was wanted for damaging police cameras during 5 separate criminal incidents in & around City Hall Park. The arresting officers were assaulted with rocks & bottles," the NYPD said, though the video does not appear to show officers being assaulted with neither rocks nor bottles.
"The Warrant Squad uses unmarked vehicles to effectively locate wanted suspects," the statement added. "When she was placed into the Warrant Squad's unmarked gray minivan, it was behind a cordon of NYPD bicycle cops in bright yellow and blue uniform shirts there to help effect the arrest."
Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the author of "The End of Policing," refuted the NYPD's explanation.
"Those officers arrived after a violent arrest by non-uniformed officers in the middle of an active [protest]," he wrote. "This was a reckless and dangerous provocation."
Three witnesses who spoke to Gothamist also disputed the claim.
"None of that happened whatsoever," protester Clara Kraebber told the outlet. "We literally turned the corner and were met with a line of police who attacked us without warning."
Ali Bauman, a reporter at CBS New York, also questioned the explanation, asking why the NYPD would "not tell reporters where the woman was taken or where she is being processed."
New York City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera later tweeted early Wednesday morning that the protester had been released. Rivera called for an independent review of the arrest and "an immediate explanation for why an unmarked van full of officers was anywhere near a peaceful protest."
"It's clear that using an unmarked van and plainclothes officers to make an arrest for vandalism (in the middle of a peaceful protest) is a massive overstep," she added. "I'm exploring legislation."
Similar incidents have been seen in other cities. The San Diego Police Department launched an internal investigation after a viral video showed armed men, who did not identify themselves, detaining a young woman in an unmarked van outside of a high school last month. The SDPD said the men were plainclothes officers but refused to release any details of its investigation.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has not commented on the video, and a spokeswoman referred questions to the NYPD statement. But other city leaders publicly questioned the arrest.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson called the video "incredibly disturbing," according to The New York Times. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said he was "deeply concerned" by the arrest.
Organizers told The Times that the woman was arrested in connection with the clearing of an encampment outside City Hall, where demonstrators called for the city to defund the police. De Blasio touted that the City Council had voted to cut nearly $1 billion from the NYPD budget in response to demonstrations last month, though activists have called that claim a "lie."
New York criminal defense attorneys on Wednesday decried the arrest but noted that the tactic used in the video was not uncommon.
"This is not a new policing strategy - I mean, maybe for protests, but this is how NYPD polices Black and Brown neighborhoods," said civil rights attorney Rebecca Kavanagh. The reaction to the video, she said, was "white people waking up to a reality Black and Brown people have lived for decades."
"The thing about all the outrageous acts of police violence, nonsensical arrests and holding people indefinitely that have been shocking everyone in the news is that... it's always been happening," agreed Olayemi Olurin, a New York City public defender. "This is how they always conduct themselves. You just don't hear about it."
NYPD DISAPPEARED BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTERS INTO DETENTION FOR DAYS AT A TIME. LAWMAKERS WANT TO END THE PRACTICE.
Daniel A. Medina - the intercept
July 22 2020, 9:41 a.m.
IN EARLY JUNE, hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters languished for days in cramped New York City jail cells. Stuck in holding pens without masks and exposed to soiled conditions amid the coronavirus pandemic, they were unable to reach loved ones or lawyers. The protesters were effectively disappeared into New York City’s detention system.
Attorneys from the Legal Aid Society went to court to demand the protesters’ immediate release. In a lawsuit filed against the New York Police Department, attorneys from Legal Aid, a public defense organization, alleged that over 400 individuals in city detention facilities had been held for more than 24 hours without seeing a judge, in breach of state law and detainees’ constitutional rights.
The public defenders accused the police department of deliberately slow-rolling standard procedures to keep protesters in jail as payback for demonstrations against police brutality. Lawyers for the police asserted that the NYPD faced unprecedented challenges with both a pandemic and widespread protests raging.
In a one-line decision, Judge James M. Burke of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan sided with the police. “All writs are denied,” he ruled. In doing so, Burke accepted the NYPD’s rationale that the conditions on the ground should overrule preexisting state law: The 1991 Roundtree v. Brown decision established the 24-hour standard from arrest to arraignment.
Burke’s decision set off a firestorm. Protesters flocked to Manhattan’s Foley Square, near the state and federal courthouses, demanding the release of the protesters.
“The law doesn’t have a looter exception, it doesn’t have a Covid-19 exception,” said Russell Novack, one of the Legal Aid staff attorneys who brought the suit. “This was deliberate, intentional punishment for protesting.”
In the state capital of Albany, a progressive Democrat from Queens said his new bill would ensure that New Yorkers are never again disappeared into detention. State Sen. Michael Gianaris introduced a bill to codify the Roundtree decision and better track detentions. Already having pushed the legislation through two committees, Gianaris will bring his bill before the legislature’s full upper chamber on Wednesday.
The bill would oblige all police departments in New York State to either bring an arrested individual before a judge within 24 hours or immediately release them upon request.
It would also add a new section to the laws governing habeas corpus in New York, clarifying that anyone held for more than 24 hours before their arraignment is entitled to release unless the police produce “clear and convincing evidence that such a delay” is warranted. Under the new statute, police departments would have to give an individualized explanation for each person’s delay — something the NYPD did not have to do last month.
“In the United States, we like to fancy ourselves as having a justice system that protects civil liberties,” Gianaris told The Intercept. “An important tenet of that is that one shouldn’t be imprisoned without being found guilty of a crime and certainly not without being charged with a crime.”
A KEY COMPONENT of the bill, Gianaris said, is that it would force all municipalities in New York state with over a million residents — only New York City would qualify — to create a detained persons registry. The registry would serve as a database of all arrested individuals and be accessible only to authorized users from public defender organizations — such as the Legal Aid Society and others like the defenders network that operates around the city — contracted with the city to represent criminal defendants.
The registry would eliminate the arbitrary power of the police to disappear people in the system, he added. “That’s a very scary proposition,” Gianaris said of allowing police to hold individuals over 24 hours without seeing a judge.
The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment on the bill.
The bill is widely expected to sail through the Democratic-controlled Senate before heading to the Assembly as soon as this week. It is unclear whether Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who in June called on city district attorneys to keep looters in jail for longer than 24 hours, would seek to veto the measure.
The Intercept reached out to several protesters swept up in the mass arrests last month. All declined to speak on the record, citing ongoing cases against them, including breaking Mayor Bill de Blasio’s weeklong curfew, which could carry a Class-B misdemeanor charge.
The district attorneys for Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx have publicly stated that they will not prosecute protesters arrested for low-level offenses. Still, the court cases remain scheduled, in September and October.
Steve Zeidman was a supervisor at the Legal Aid Society on the Roundtree case. Nearly three decades later, he said the decision has never been properly enforced. The Gianaris bill, he said, will only be successful if judges choose to enforce it.
“The court’s unwillingness to hold the prosecutors and the police department’s feet to the fire rendered the Roundtree decision toothless in many cases,” said Zeidman, a CUNY Law School professor. “The crisis is that this bill is even necessary.”
Attorneys from the Legal Aid Society went to court to demand the protesters’ immediate release. In a lawsuit filed against the New York Police Department, attorneys from Legal Aid, a public defense organization, alleged that over 400 individuals in city detention facilities had been held for more than 24 hours without seeing a judge, in breach of state law and detainees’ constitutional rights.
The public defenders accused the police department of deliberately slow-rolling standard procedures to keep protesters in jail as payback for demonstrations against police brutality. Lawyers for the police asserted that the NYPD faced unprecedented challenges with both a pandemic and widespread protests raging.
In a one-line decision, Judge James M. Burke of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan sided with the police. “All writs are denied,” he ruled. In doing so, Burke accepted the NYPD’s rationale that the conditions on the ground should overrule preexisting state law: The 1991 Roundtree v. Brown decision established the 24-hour standard from arrest to arraignment.
Burke’s decision set off a firestorm. Protesters flocked to Manhattan’s Foley Square, near the state and federal courthouses, demanding the release of the protesters.
“The law doesn’t have a looter exception, it doesn’t have a Covid-19 exception,” said Russell Novack, one of the Legal Aid staff attorneys who brought the suit. “This was deliberate, intentional punishment for protesting.”
In the state capital of Albany, a progressive Democrat from Queens said his new bill would ensure that New Yorkers are never again disappeared into detention. State Sen. Michael Gianaris introduced a bill to codify the Roundtree decision and better track detentions. Already having pushed the legislation through two committees, Gianaris will bring his bill before the legislature’s full upper chamber on Wednesday.
The bill would oblige all police departments in New York State to either bring an arrested individual before a judge within 24 hours or immediately release them upon request.
It would also add a new section to the laws governing habeas corpus in New York, clarifying that anyone held for more than 24 hours before their arraignment is entitled to release unless the police produce “clear and convincing evidence that such a delay” is warranted. Under the new statute, police departments would have to give an individualized explanation for each person’s delay — something the NYPD did not have to do last month.
“In the United States, we like to fancy ourselves as having a justice system that protects civil liberties,” Gianaris told The Intercept. “An important tenet of that is that one shouldn’t be imprisoned without being found guilty of a crime and certainly not without being charged with a crime.”
A KEY COMPONENT of the bill, Gianaris said, is that it would force all municipalities in New York state with over a million residents — only New York City would qualify — to create a detained persons registry. The registry would serve as a database of all arrested individuals and be accessible only to authorized users from public defender organizations — such as the Legal Aid Society and others like the defenders network that operates around the city — contracted with the city to represent criminal defendants.
The registry would eliminate the arbitrary power of the police to disappear people in the system, he added. “That’s a very scary proposition,” Gianaris said of allowing police to hold individuals over 24 hours without seeing a judge.
The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment on the bill.
The bill is widely expected to sail through the Democratic-controlled Senate before heading to the Assembly as soon as this week. It is unclear whether Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who in June called on city district attorneys to keep looters in jail for longer than 24 hours, would seek to veto the measure.
The Intercept reached out to several protesters swept up in the mass arrests last month. All declined to speak on the record, citing ongoing cases against them, including breaking Mayor Bill de Blasio’s weeklong curfew, which could carry a Class-B misdemeanor charge.
The district attorneys for Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx have publicly stated that they will not prosecute protesters arrested for low-level offenses. Still, the court cases remain scheduled, in September and October.
Steve Zeidman was a supervisor at the Legal Aid Society on the Roundtree case. Nearly three decades later, he said the decision has never been properly enforced. The Gianaris bill, he said, will only be successful if judges choose to enforce it.
“The court’s unwillingness to hold the prosecutors and the police department’s feet to the fire rendered the Roundtree decision toothless in many cases,” said Zeidman, a CUNY Law School professor. “The crisis is that this bill is even necessary.”
The psychology of police violence: What makes so many cops have racial biases?
Are racist cops corrupted by power, or a self-selecting bunch? Psychologists share their insights
MATTHEW ROZSA - salon
JULY 5, 2020 11:30PM (UTC
Any way you slice it, the statistics about American policing are damning. One study estimated that African American men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police during their lifetime, while another discovered that African Americans are twice as likely to be unarmed when shot by police than white people. Multiple studies have found that police officers disproportionately stop African American and Hispanic drivers and are disproportionately more likely to search them, even though they discover less contraband. Although African Americans comprise only 13 percent of the total population, they make up a quarter of the police shooting victims and more than one-third of the unarmed victims whose police shootings were fatal.
That raises a psychological question: is there something about those who are drawn to policing that makes them more likely to target people of color? Or is something happening on the job that predisposes them to bias? Answering that means turning to psychology for answers.
"I think what causes it is a lot of different reasons," Dr. Jameca Woody-Cooper, a psychologist in St. Louis, told Salon. "The most obvious of them all is just pure hatred and discrimination. Not having exposure and close relationships with certain populations of people, they've been able to set up these biases and stereotypes over the years." She added that the individual backgrounds of specific officers probably contribute to this, including where they grow up, their parents and the beliefs with which they are raised.
"I think it culminates in them getting positions like police officers, where they have this unrestrained power, unchecked," Woody-Cooper told Salon. "It's kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing. I think certain types of personalities are attracted to being police officers, maybe those who want power and feel like they haven't been able to take advantage of people."
Dennis Parker, director of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, pointed to history as well as psychology as a guide.
"I think a lot of it comes from the fact that for really a large part of the history of the police department, part of their job was to treat people of color, particularly black people, differently," Parker explained. "Law enforcement was in some cases based in doing slave patrols to look for people who had escaped, and also to enforce laws that included segregation and things like that. There is a long history of it."
He also argued that police culture "permits and in some ways encourages violence," particularly through laws that actively militarize them. This can be a recipe for disaster: Citing the story of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland who was shot by police while playing with a toy gun in a park, Parker explained that "you're giving power to people, who even if they are not explicitly racist, are affected by the same kind of implicit biases that everyone else is." In Rice's case, he noted that "there is a lot of research that shows that police and people in general tend to overestimate the age of black children and also black women, and so therefore feel a greater amount of threat and are more likely to respond as if they feel they are under threat, even if the circumstances don't warrant that."
Parker also ticked off a tendency among law enforcement to view areas with large African American populations as "battlegrounds," the fact that politicians like President Donald Trump use war-like language to describe the job facing police officers, and the trend of using police officers for jobs for which they're ill-equipped, like treating people with mental health problems.
"There is the old saying that, if you give someone a hammer, every problem looks like a nail," Parker told Salon. "I think that there is a tendency to treat everything as a situation where violence is appropriate or use of force is the appropriate response."
L. Song Richardson, Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, believes that the racist cops can be split into two categories.
"We have the outright bigots, and because bigotry exists in our broader society, it's unsurprising that it also exists within police departments just as it would exist in any organization, in any institution," Richardson told Salon. "And then we have individuals who consciously think of themselves as egalitarian and fair, who would not associate themselves with outright bigotry, but who still engage in actions that a bigot would engage in. And that's because of their unconscious racial biases that they learned from living in a country that has been under white supremacy for centuries."
Like Parker, Richardson located much of the problem in the history behind police forces themselves.
"Policing practices that have not changed," Richardson explained. "If we think about the history of policing from the South, where it came out of the slave patrols and then police officers, as instruments of the state, also helped to enforce Jim Crow laws."
She added, "We can trace back from today, all the way back to the South and the way that police departments were created."
The next question is what policies can effectively address the problem of police racism and violence. On that, the experts diverged.
"The changes that occur have to be really broad, systematic ones," Parker said. "It's not enough to say we have to have some training or we have to hire more police offices of color. We really have to look at a question of how we truly assure safety, how we assure that whatever system is in place protects everyone and not just some people, whatever it would be." He added that the Defund the Police movement "comes from the recognition that the amount of money that's spent on law enforcement means that there's less money that's available for social services, for education, for job training, for the things that might themselves make communities far more safe."
He also emphasized, "At least one of the absolutely mandatory things is that the police can not be viewed as being above the law."
Richardson identified specific problems that law enforcement agencies need to address, telling Salon that the problems of police racism and violence won't be fixed "unless we have the stomach to [confront] problematic policing practices, such as stops and frisks and the war on drugs, unless we have the stomach to change the way that police departments train their officers, and unless we are willing to change the problematic Fourth Amendment doctrines that facilitate the type of practices that lead to racialized violence," including "qualified immunity cases that allow police officers to engage in shows of force with people of color and chase them without any reasonable suspicion or probable cause."
She concluded, "It's a whole system. It's the police departments, it's the training, it's the laws that apply to them, and the judges who allow these practices to continue based on the doctrine that they embrace."
Dr. Woody-Cooper concluded that "abolishing police could be a good thing, if I can see details about what that looks like" because the problem has gotten so bad.
"You have to start from scratch to rebuild because I think there's so much corruption and so much education and behavior that has been allowed to continue for generations," Dr. Woody-Cooper explained. "I don't know if it's possible to clean that up. I don't know if it's possible to make the type of change that's necessary because police don't really like to hold other police accountable."
That raises a psychological question: is there something about those who are drawn to policing that makes them more likely to target people of color? Or is something happening on the job that predisposes them to bias? Answering that means turning to psychology for answers.
"I think what causes it is a lot of different reasons," Dr. Jameca Woody-Cooper, a psychologist in St. Louis, told Salon. "The most obvious of them all is just pure hatred and discrimination. Not having exposure and close relationships with certain populations of people, they've been able to set up these biases and stereotypes over the years." She added that the individual backgrounds of specific officers probably contribute to this, including where they grow up, their parents and the beliefs with which they are raised.
"I think it culminates in them getting positions like police officers, where they have this unrestrained power, unchecked," Woody-Cooper told Salon. "It's kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing. I think certain types of personalities are attracted to being police officers, maybe those who want power and feel like they haven't been able to take advantage of people."
Dennis Parker, director of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, pointed to history as well as psychology as a guide.
"I think a lot of it comes from the fact that for really a large part of the history of the police department, part of their job was to treat people of color, particularly black people, differently," Parker explained. "Law enforcement was in some cases based in doing slave patrols to look for people who had escaped, and also to enforce laws that included segregation and things like that. There is a long history of it."
He also argued that police culture "permits and in some ways encourages violence," particularly through laws that actively militarize them. This can be a recipe for disaster: Citing the story of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland who was shot by police while playing with a toy gun in a park, Parker explained that "you're giving power to people, who even if they are not explicitly racist, are affected by the same kind of implicit biases that everyone else is." In Rice's case, he noted that "there is a lot of research that shows that police and people in general tend to overestimate the age of black children and also black women, and so therefore feel a greater amount of threat and are more likely to respond as if they feel they are under threat, even if the circumstances don't warrant that."
Parker also ticked off a tendency among law enforcement to view areas with large African American populations as "battlegrounds," the fact that politicians like President Donald Trump use war-like language to describe the job facing police officers, and the trend of using police officers for jobs for which they're ill-equipped, like treating people with mental health problems.
"There is the old saying that, if you give someone a hammer, every problem looks like a nail," Parker told Salon. "I think that there is a tendency to treat everything as a situation where violence is appropriate or use of force is the appropriate response."
L. Song Richardson, Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, believes that the racist cops can be split into two categories.
"We have the outright bigots, and because bigotry exists in our broader society, it's unsurprising that it also exists within police departments just as it would exist in any organization, in any institution," Richardson told Salon. "And then we have individuals who consciously think of themselves as egalitarian and fair, who would not associate themselves with outright bigotry, but who still engage in actions that a bigot would engage in. And that's because of their unconscious racial biases that they learned from living in a country that has been under white supremacy for centuries."
Like Parker, Richardson located much of the problem in the history behind police forces themselves.
"Policing practices that have not changed," Richardson explained. "If we think about the history of policing from the South, where it came out of the slave patrols and then police officers, as instruments of the state, also helped to enforce Jim Crow laws."
She added, "We can trace back from today, all the way back to the South and the way that police departments were created."
The next question is what policies can effectively address the problem of police racism and violence. On that, the experts diverged.
"The changes that occur have to be really broad, systematic ones," Parker said. "It's not enough to say we have to have some training or we have to hire more police offices of color. We really have to look at a question of how we truly assure safety, how we assure that whatever system is in place protects everyone and not just some people, whatever it would be." He added that the Defund the Police movement "comes from the recognition that the amount of money that's spent on law enforcement means that there's less money that's available for social services, for education, for job training, for the things that might themselves make communities far more safe."
He also emphasized, "At least one of the absolutely mandatory things is that the police can not be viewed as being above the law."
Richardson identified specific problems that law enforcement agencies need to address, telling Salon that the problems of police racism and violence won't be fixed "unless we have the stomach to [confront] problematic policing practices, such as stops and frisks and the war on drugs, unless we have the stomach to change the way that police departments train their officers, and unless we are willing to change the problematic Fourth Amendment doctrines that facilitate the type of practices that lead to racialized violence," including "qualified immunity cases that allow police officers to engage in shows of force with people of color and chase them without any reasonable suspicion or probable cause."
She concluded, "It's a whole system. It's the police departments, it's the training, it's the laws that apply to them, and the judges who allow these practices to continue based on the doctrine that they embrace."
Dr. Woody-Cooper concluded that "abolishing police could be a good thing, if I can see details about what that looks like" because the problem has gotten so bad.
"You have to start from scratch to rebuild because I think there's so much corruption and so much education and behavior that has been allowed to continue for generations," Dr. Woody-Cooper explained. "I don't know if it's possible to clean that up. I don't know if it's possible to make the type of change that's necessary because police don't really like to hold other police accountable."
Cop fired after racist remarks caught on tape “forgot” to disclose criminal record to department
Three cops were fired after patrol footage revealed racist remarks and threats of violence against Black residents
ROGER SOLLENBERGER - salon
JUNE 26, 2020 4:56PM (UTC)
Three officers were fired by the Wilmington Police Department on Thursday after they accidentally recorded themselves making openly racist comments and threats of violence against Black residents, according to investigators.
One of those men was accused in administrative court by the state of North Carolina of failure to disclose an extensive criminal record to the department, a 2014 filing shows.
James "Brian" Gilmore pleaded guilty in 2011 to driving while intoxicated, and he was subsequently suspended from the department for 30 days without pay, demoted from corporal officer to patrol officer and reassigned to another unit.
The follow-up internal investigation dragged up old infractions, which Gilmore had failed to disclose upon his hiring in 1997. According to the 2014 filing, those included another DWI, as well as citations for purchasing alcohol for a minor, possession of alcohol as a minor, a hit-and-run on an unattended vehicle and illegally fishing.
In the 2014 hearing, which Gilmore had requested an appeal to argue that he should not lose his shield, the officer explained to a North Carolina administrative court judge that his father had retained an attorney to represent him in connection with those charges, and "his father handled the matter for him." He also told the court that he "did not recall that there had been a DWI charge."
This Wednesday, investigators revealed that Gilmore was caught on tape earlier this month criticizing the Black Lives Matter protests in Wilmington with fellow officer Michael "Kevin" Piner, who told Gilmore the department's only concern seemed to be "kneeling down with the Black folks."
Gilmore replied that he had seen a video on social media of white individuals kneeling in solidarity, which he characterized as "white people bowing down on their knees and worshipping Blacks," according to a report released by the department this week.
The show of solidarity also featured a "fine looking white girl and this little punk pretty boy bowing down and kissing their toes," Gilmore was quoted as saying.
Their conversation was captured when Piner accidentally turned on his patrol video recorder, and was later discovered in a routine audit of patrol footage.
According to the police report, Gilmore attempted to explain the remarks to department investigators by claiming that the social media video had disturbed him because the Bible instructs "thou shall not bow to any idol."
In the 2014 hearing, one of Gilmore's department colleagues who testified to his character said, "He treats the public well . . . He's an excellent police officer . . . If you could have a picture of a community policing officer, it would be Brian Gilmore."
Though the administrative judge in the proceeding found that the evidence against Gilmore had constituted "material misrepresentations," he ruled that it did not prove the officer had intentionally deceived the department by failing to reveal his record.
The judge wrote that the testimony of fellow officers demonstrated that Gilmore had "very favorable character traits including that of honesty, truthfulness, integrity, professionalism and dedication to law enforcement service."
The judge also noted that the department chief at the time, Ralph M. Evangelous, who resigned this January, considered Gilmore a "good police officer" despite the missing paperwork and recent DWI. Testimony from fellow men and women in blue, the judge wrote, indicated that Gilmore had "redeemed himself for that error in judgment."
In the end, the administrative court recommended the state not strip Gilmore's state certification. Two months later, an attorney for the state and the state's law enforcement commission agreed.
Current Wilmington Chief of Police Donny Williams said this Wednesday that all three officers had been fired for misconduct, and the department was working with the state to determine whether to revoke their certifications.
"There are certain behaviors that one must have in order to be a police officer, and these three officers have demonstrated that they do not possess it," he said in a statement.
While the department found that Gilmore's racist remarks met the bar for misconduct, investigators labeled Piner's conversations with Cpl. Jesse Moore as "hate speech."
The investigative report detailed recorded conversations in which those two officers criticized the department's response to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted nationwide after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, calling one of their Black colleagues a "piece of sh*t" and claiming another had been "sitting on his ass" during the demonstrations.
"Let's see how his boys take care of him when sh*t gets rough," Piner said in the recording. "See if they don't put a bullet in his head."
Moore, who like Gilmore joined the force in 1997, later described to Piner the recent arrest of a Black woman, whom he repeatedly called the N-word, adding: "She needed a bullet in the head right then and move on."
"Let's move the body out of the way and keep going," Moore added.
"That's what I've been trying to tell you," Piner replied.
Moore also called a Black judge a "fucking negro magistrate."
Piner, upon predicting that the protests would lead to a second Civil War, volunteered that he was preparing to buy an assault rifle.
"We are just going to go out and start slaughtering them," Piner said, adding the N-word.
"God, I can't wait," he continued.
Moore said he would not do that.
Piner said he welcomed a second Civil War, because it would "wipe 'em off the f***ing map. That'll put 'em back about four or five generations."
"You're crazy," Moore replied.
The officers have maintained they are not racist but had only been "venting," arguing, per the report, that the "stress of today's climate in law enforcement" was too much to bear.
Piner acknowledged that the tape was "embarrassing," but said he had recently been afraid for his family's safety and reached a "breaking point."
Chief Williams, a Black man who formally took office only days ago following months serving in an acting capacity, called the conversations "brutally offensive" and released a summary of the department's internal investigation in a show of transparency.
"This is the most exceptional and difficult case I have encountered in my career," he said. "We must establish new reforms for policing here at home and throughout this country."
The department's public information officer told Salon in a phone call that two of the three officers had filed for restraining orders against the department. The court tossed the requests, but ordered the department not to comment on the case beyond the materials made public.
District Attorney Ben David announced Thursday that his office was in the process of dismissing or reviewing the 89 pending cases involving Piner, Moore or Gilmore.
"Since learning about the terminations, my office has undertaken a review of all cases where these officers were the primary charging officers. [Some] cases were dismissed [Wednesday], and the individuals charged will be notified by mail of these dismissals in the coming days," David said.
Of the cases under review, 24 are Piner's, 32 are Moore's, and 33 are Gilmore's. Some carry serious charges, including an assault on a woman, felony larceny and at least one case of felony assault with a deadly weapon resulting in serious injury.
Neither Gilmore, Moore nor Piner responded to Salon's request for comment.
One of those men was accused in administrative court by the state of North Carolina of failure to disclose an extensive criminal record to the department, a 2014 filing shows.
James "Brian" Gilmore pleaded guilty in 2011 to driving while intoxicated, and he was subsequently suspended from the department for 30 days without pay, demoted from corporal officer to patrol officer and reassigned to another unit.
The follow-up internal investigation dragged up old infractions, which Gilmore had failed to disclose upon his hiring in 1997. According to the 2014 filing, those included another DWI, as well as citations for purchasing alcohol for a minor, possession of alcohol as a minor, a hit-and-run on an unattended vehicle and illegally fishing.
In the 2014 hearing, which Gilmore had requested an appeal to argue that he should not lose his shield, the officer explained to a North Carolina administrative court judge that his father had retained an attorney to represent him in connection with those charges, and "his father handled the matter for him." He also told the court that he "did not recall that there had been a DWI charge."
This Wednesday, investigators revealed that Gilmore was caught on tape earlier this month criticizing the Black Lives Matter protests in Wilmington with fellow officer Michael "Kevin" Piner, who told Gilmore the department's only concern seemed to be "kneeling down with the Black folks."
Gilmore replied that he had seen a video on social media of white individuals kneeling in solidarity, which he characterized as "white people bowing down on their knees and worshipping Blacks," according to a report released by the department this week.
The show of solidarity also featured a "fine looking white girl and this little punk pretty boy bowing down and kissing their toes," Gilmore was quoted as saying.
Their conversation was captured when Piner accidentally turned on his patrol video recorder, and was later discovered in a routine audit of patrol footage.
According to the police report, Gilmore attempted to explain the remarks to department investigators by claiming that the social media video had disturbed him because the Bible instructs "thou shall not bow to any idol."
In the 2014 hearing, one of Gilmore's department colleagues who testified to his character said, "He treats the public well . . . He's an excellent police officer . . . If you could have a picture of a community policing officer, it would be Brian Gilmore."
Though the administrative judge in the proceeding found that the evidence against Gilmore had constituted "material misrepresentations," he ruled that it did not prove the officer had intentionally deceived the department by failing to reveal his record.
The judge wrote that the testimony of fellow officers demonstrated that Gilmore had "very favorable character traits including that of honesty, truthfulness, integrity, professionalism and dedication to law enforcement service."
The judge also noted that the department chief at the time, Ralph M. Evangelous, who resigned this January, considered Gilmore a "good police officer" despite the missing paperwork and recent DWI. Testimony from fellow men and women in blue, the judge wrote, indicated that Gilmore had "redeemed himself for that error in judgment."
In the end, the administrative court recommended the state not strip Gilmore's state certification. Two months later, an attorney for the state and the state's law enforcement commission agreed.
Current Wilmington Chief of Police Donny Williams said this Wednesday that all three officers had been fired for misconduct, and the department was working with the state to determine whether to revoke their certifications.
"There are certain behaviors that one must have in order to be a police officer, and these three officers have demonstrated that they do not possess it," he said in a statement.
While the department found that Gilmore's racist remarks met the bar for misconduct, investigators labeled Piner's conversations with Cpl. Jesse Moore as "hate speech."
The investigative report detailed recorded conversations in which those two officers criticized the department's response to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted nationwide after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, calling one of their Black colleagues a "piece of sh*t" and claiming another had been "sitting on his ass" during the demonstrations.
"Let's see how his boys take care of him when sh*t gets rough," Piner said in the recording. "See if they don't put a bullet in his head."
Moore, who like Gilmore joined the force in 1997, later described to Piner the recent arrest of a Black woman, whom he repeatedly called the N-word, adding: "She needed a bullet in the head right then and move on."
"Let's move the body out of the way and keep going," Moore added.
"That's what I've been trying to tell you," Piner replied.
Moore also called a Black judge a "fucking negro magistrate."
Piner, upon predicting that the protests would lead to a second Civil War, volunteered that he was preparing to buy an assault rifle.
"We are just going to go out and start slaughtering them," Piner said, adding the N-word.
"God, I can't wait," he continued.
Moore said he would not do that.
Piner said he welcomed a second Civil War, because it would "wipe 'em off the f***ing map. That'll put 'em back about four or five generations."
"You're crazy," Moore replied.
The officers have maintained they are not racist but had only been "venting," arguing, per the report, that the "stress of today's climate in law enforcement" was too much to bear.
Piner acknowledged that the tape was "embarrassing," but said he had recently been afraid for his family's safety and reached a "breaking point."
Chief Williams, a Black man who formally took office only days ago following months serving in an acting capacity, called the conversations "brutally offensive" and released a summary of the department's internal investigation in a show of transparency.
"This is the most exceptional and difficult case I have encountered in my career," he said. "We must establish new reforms for policing here at home and throughout this country."
The department's public information officer told Salon in a phone call that two of the three officers had filed for restraining orders against the department. The court tossed the requests, but ordered the department not to comment on the case beyond the materials made public.
District Attorney Ben David announced Thursday that his office was in the process of dismissing or reviewing the 89 pending cases involving Piner, Moore or Gilmore.
"Since learning about the terminations, my office has undertaken a review of all cases where these officers were the primary charging officers. [Some] cases were dismissed [Wednesday], and the individuals charged will be notified by mail of these dismissals in the coming days," David said.
Of the cases under review, 24 are Piner's, 32 are Moore's, and 33 are Gilmore's. Some carry serious charges, including an assault on a woman, felony larceny and at least one case of felony assault with a deadly weapon resulting in serious injury.
Neither Gilmore, Moore nor Piner responded to Salon's request for comment.
US policing
similar to how the kkk was funded!!!
How Starbucks, Target, Google and Microsoft quietly fund police through private donations
More than 25 large corporations in the past three years have contributed funding to private police foundations, new report says
Kari Paul
the guardian
Thu 18 Jun 2020 19.37 EDT
Protests over police violence and racism have amplified calls to re-examine police budgets in the United States, with several large companies announcing they are re-evaluating their commercial ties with police departments.
But a new report sheds light on the myriad other ways corporations engage with police forces, including by donating to police foundations that don’t face the same scrutiny as police departments.
The report was released on Thursday by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit corporate and government accountability research institute, and its research database project LittleSis. It details how more than 25 large corporations in the past three years have contributed funding to private police foundations – industry groups designated as nonprofits that provide additional funds to police forces.
Police proponents say the foundations have emerged as police departments face budget cuts and are a means to supplement the force with top-of-the-line technology and weaponry. But critics argue police departments are already overfunded – they receive 20% to 45% of discretionary funds in cities across the US – and that funding through foundations allows police to operate with little oversight. Foundations, according to a 2014 report from ProPublica, “can be a way for wealthy donors and corporations to influence law enforcement agencies’ priorities”.
Legally, police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials. But designated as private charities, police foundations are not subject to the same public information laws that apply to law enforcement agencies.
These foundations receive millions of dollars a year from private and corporate donors, according to the report, and are able to use the funds to purchase equipment and weapons with little public input. The analysis notes, for example, how the Los Angeles police department in 2007 used foundation funding to purchase surveillance software from controversial technology firm Palantir. Buying the technology with private foundation funding rather than its public budget allowed the department to bypass requirements to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council.
The Houston police foundation has purchased for the local police department a variety of equipment, including Swat equipment, sound equipment and dogs for the K-9 unit, according to the report. The Philadelphia police foundation purchased for its police force long guns, drones and ballistic helmets, and the Atlanta police foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras.
In addition to weaponry, foundation funding can also go toward specialized training and support programs that complement the department’s policing strategies, according to one police foundation.
“Not a lot of people are aware of this public-private partnership where corporations and wealthy donors are able to siphon money into police forces with little to no oversight,” said Gin Armstrong, a senior research analyst at LittleSis.
A variety of companies – including financial institutions, technology companies, retailers, local universities and sports teams, provide funding to police foundations. Donations may be, in part, to curry favor with a force that exists primarily to protect property and capital, the report said.
“Police foundations are a key space for orchestrating, normalizing and celebrating the collaboration between corporate power and the police,” the LittleSis report said.
Among the companies with ties to police is Amazon. The online giant last week implemented a one-year moratorium on the use of its artificial intelligence software Rekognition by police departments after extended criticism from human rights groups.
But the company still has a number of less-direct connections to the police, according to the LittleSis report. A representative of the company currently sits on the executive committee of the Seattle police foundation’s board and Amazon has been an official partner to the police foundation, donating at least $5,000 according to the foundation website.
It also donates to police foundations across the US through its charitable program, AmazonSmile and still partners with more than 1,000 police forces through its smart doorbell product Ring.
Amazon declined to comment on its continued ties with police and police foundations.
Bank of America has seats on both the Chicago and New York City police foundation boards. According to tax filings examined by LittleSis, it has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to police foundations, including $200,000 to the NYC police foundation, $51,250 to the Atlanta police foundation, $25,000 to the Boston police foundation, $10,000 to the Los Angeles police foundation, as well as smaller donations to police foundations in Yarmouth, Massachusetts; Sarasota, Florida; Abilene, Texas; Duluth, Minnesota; Bellevue, Washington; and Sacramento and Glendale, California.
Bank of America announced on 2 June a four-year commitment to support economic opportunity initiatives to combat racial inequality accelerated by the global pandemic.
Seattle-based Starbucks is an active donor to the Seattle police foundation and has a representative on its board, according to the report. The coffee retailer also recently donated $25,000 to the NYC police foundation.
Bank of America and Starbucks did not respond to requests for comment.
Target has made major contributions to police foundations across the country, according to the report, including the NYC, Atlanta and Seattle police foundations. A $200,000 donation from Target in 2007 helped the LA police foundation purchase sophisticated surveillance equipment for the LAPD, the report found.
Currently, Target is a sponsor of the Washington DC police foundation and has a representative on the board, the report notes. In addition to funding police foundations, Target offers additional funding to local agencies through its “public safety grant” program.
A spokesman for Target said the donation to police foundations is a “very small portion of the 5% of annual profits Target gives back to the community”.
Facebook, Google and Microsoft are also all partners and donors to the Seattle police foundation, and Microsoft sits on the foundation’s board, the report found. Microsoft and Facebook declined to comment on their donations to police foundations. Google did not respond to request for comment.
Microsoft has publicly stated it will ban police from using its facial recognition technology.
Evan Greer, the deputy director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, said the report highlights companies can’t claim to stand for human rights while funding government agencies accused of violating them. “Corporations who cozy up to police, build surveillance software to them, or funnel them money through shady donations are actively propping up systemic racist violence and oppression.”
But a new report sheds light on the myriad other ways corporations engage with police forces, including by donating to police foundations that don’t face the same scrutiny as police departments.
The report was released on Thursday by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit corporate and government accountability research institute, and its research database project LittleSis. It details how more than 25 large corporations in the past three years have contributed funding to private police foundations – industry groups designated as nonprofits that provide additional funds to police forces.
Police proponents say the foundations have emerged as police departments face budget cuts and are a means to supplement the force with top-of-the-line technology and weaponry. But critics argue police departments are already overfunded – they receive 20% to 45% of discretionary funds in cities across the US – and that funding through foundations allows police to operate with little oversight. Foundations, according to a 2014 report from ProPublica, “can be a way for wealthy donors and corporations to influence law enforcement agencies’ priorities”.
Legally, police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials. But designated as private charities, police foundations are not subject to the same public information laws that apply to law enforcement agencies.
These foundations receive millions of dollars a year from private and corporate donors, according to the report, and are able to use the funds to purchase equipment and weapons with little public input. The analysis notes, for example, how the Los Angeles police department in 2007 used foundation funding to purchase surveillance software from controversial technology firm Palantir. Buying the technology with private foundation funding rather than its public budget allowed the department to bypass requirements to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council.
The Houston police foundation has purchased for the local police department a variety of equipment, including Swat equipment, sound equipment and dogs for the K-9 unit, according to the report. The Philadelphia police foundation purchased for its police force long guns, drones and ballistic helmets, and the Atlanta police foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras.
In addition to weaponry, foundation funding can also go toward specialized training and support programs that complement the department’s policing strategies, according to one police foundation.
“Not a lot of people are aware of this public-private partnership where corporations and wealthy donors are able to siphon money into police forces with little to no oversight,” said Gin Armstrong, a senior research analyst at LittleSis.
A variety of companies – including financial institutions, technology companies, retailers, local universities and sports teams, provide funding to police foundations. Donations may be, in part, to curry favor with a force that exists primarily to protect property and capital, the report said.
“Police foundations are a key space for orchestrating, normalizing and celebrating the collaboration between corporate power and the police,” the LittleSis report said.
Among the companies with ties to police is Amazon. The online giant last week implemented a one-year moratorium on the use of its artificial intelligence software Rekognition by police departments after extended criticism from human rights groups.
But the company still has a number of less-direct connections to the police, according to the LittleSis report. A representative of the company currently sits on the executive committee of the Seattle police foundation’s board and Amazon has been an official partner to the police foundation, donating at least $5,000 according to the foundation website.
It also donates to police foundations across the US through its charitable program, AmazonSmile and still partners with more than 1,000 police forces through its smart doorbell product Ring.
Amazon declined to comment on its continued ties with police and police foundations.
Bank of America has seats on both the Chicago and New York City police foundation boards. According to tax filings examined by LittleSis, it has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to police foundations, including $200,000 to the NYC police foundation, $51,250 to the Atlanta police foundation, $25,000 to the Boston police foundation, $10,000 to the Los Angeles police foundation, as well as smaller donations to police foundations in Yarmouth, Massachusetts; Sarasota, Florida; Abilene, Texas; Duluth, Minnesota; Bellevue, Washington; and Sacramento and Glendale, California.
Bank of America announced on 2 June a four-year commitment to support economic opportunity initiatives to combat racial inequality accelerated by the global pandemic.
Seattle-based Starbucks is an active donor to the Seattle police foundation and has a representative on its board, according to the report. The coffee retailer also recently donated $25,000 to the NYC police foundation.
Bank of America and Starbucks did not respond to requests for comment.
Target has made major contributions to police foundations across the country, according to the report, including the NYC, Atlanta and Seattle police foundations. A $200,000 donation from Target in 2007 helped the LA police foundation purchase sophisticated surveillance equipment for the LAPD, the report found.
Currently, Target is a sponsor of the Washington DC police foundation and has a representative on the board, the report notes. In addition to funding police foundations, Target offers additional funding to local agencies through its “public safety grant” program.
A spokesman for Target said the donation to police foundations is a “very small portion of the 5% of annual profits Target gives back to the community”.
Facebook, Google and Microsoft are also all partners and donors to the Seattle police foundation, and Microsoft sits on the foundation’s board, the report found. Microsoft and Facebook declined to comment on their donations to police foundations. Google did not respond to request for comment.
Microsoft has publicly stated it will ban police from using its facial recognition technology.
Evan Greer, the deputy director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, said the report highlights companies can’t claim to stand for human rights while funding government agencies accused of violating them. “Corporations who cozy up to police, build surveillance software to them, or funnel them money through shady donations are actively propping up systemic racist violence and oppression.”
A Buffalo police officer says she stopped a fellow cop's chokehold on a black suspect. She was fired.
cbs news
6/19/2020
Former Buffalo police officer Cariol Horne was fired in 2008 after she says she stopped a white officer's chokehold on a black suspect in handcuffs. Now, the Buffalo city council is asking the New York attorney general to investigate Horne's firing.
Horne, a nearly 20-year veteran of the Buffalo Police Department, told CBS News correspondent Jericka Duncan the image of George Floyd dying at the hands of police in Minneapolis is triggering.
"Looking at the video, it was very upsetting, and I felt that if one of those officers has stepped in that he would be alive today," she said.
Derek Chauvin, the officer who pressed his knee into Floyd's neck while he was on the ground and handcuffed, was fired and later charged with second-degree murder. Three other officers at the scene were charged with aiding and abetting a murder.
In 2006, then-officer Horne made headlines after intervening when she says fellow officer Greg Kwiatkowski was choking a black suspect, Neal Mack.
"Neal Mack looked like he was about to die," Horne said. "So had I not stepped in, he possibly could have. He was handcuffed and being choked."
The Buffalo Police Department brought disciplinary charges against Horne and fired her in 2008, a few months before she was eligible to receive a full pension. Kwiatkowski sued Horne and her lawyer for defamation.
In 2011, a judge found that eight statements Horne's lawyer made were defamatory and false, including the claim that Horne "saved the life of a suspect who was already in handcuffs and was being choked out by officer Greg Kwiatkowski."
Mack, the suspect at the center of the nearly 14-year-old case, maintains to this day that Horne saved his life.
"He was choking me. I was handcuffed. Cariol Horne said, 'You killing him, Greg,' and she reached over and tried to grab his hand around my neck," Mack said.
In 2012, in a lawsuit brought by Mack, a jury found no wrongdoing by the Buffalo police officers involved in his arrest.
As for Kwiatkowski, he was sentenced to four months in federal prison in 2018 for using "unlawful and unreasonable force" against four black teenagers.
"Unlawful, unnecessary force, the same thing that I said he did," Horne said.
Horne said she has turned her pain into activism. When she saw the video of Buffalo police pushing a 75-year-old protestor to the ground, she said she was disgusted.
"So now if they can push the 75-year-old white man when it's still daylight out, just think of what they do to our young black kids at nighttime," she said.
Horne said she's at peace because she stands by what she did. Still, she broke down when asked how this has impacted her children.
"It's important for me to be truthful because this has been a lot of years, so when you talk about where did the raw emotion come from, it's because ... I have fought all of these years and tried to keep it together for my children," she said.
Horne is now fighting for her full pension and pushing to pass Cariole's Law, which she said would protect police who intervene from being retaliated against.
The Buffalo Police Department told CBS News that in 2006, Horne requested that her case be reviewed by an independent arbitrator. The arbitrator recommended termination after lengthy hearings and the police commissioner at the time followed that recommendation.
Former Buffalo police lieutenant Kwiatkowski could not be reached, and his former lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.
Horne, a nearly 20-year veteran of the Buffalo Police Department, told CBS News correspondent Jericka Duncan the image of George Floyd dying at the hands of police in Minneapolis is triggering.
"Looking at the video, it was very upsetting, and I felt that if one of those officers has stepped in that he would be alive today," she said.
Derek Chauvin, the officer who pressed his knee into Floyd's neck while he was on the ground and handcuffed, was fired and later charged with second-degree murder. Three other officers at the scene were charged with aiding and abetting a murder.
In 2006, then-officer Horne made headlines after intervening when she says fellow officer Greg Kwiatkowski was choking a black suspect, Neal Mack.
"Neal Mack looked like he was about to die," Horne said. "So had I not stepped in, he possibly could have. He was handcuffed and being choked."
The Buffalo Police Department brought disciplinary charges against Horne and fired her in 2008, a few months before she was eligible to receive a full pension. Kwiatkowski sued Horne and her lawyer for defamation.
In 2011, a judge found that eight statements Horne's lawyer made were defamatory and false, including the claim that Horne "saved the life of a suspect who was already in handcuffs and was being choked out by officer Greg Kwiatkowski."
Mack, the suspect at the center of the nearly 14-year-old case, maintains to this day that Horne saved his life.
"He was choking me. I was handcuffed. Cariol Horne said, 'You killing him, Greg,' and she reached over and tried to grab his hand around my neck," Mack said.
In 2012, in a lawsuit brought by Mack, a jury found no wrongdoing by the Buffalo police officers involved in his arrest.
As for Kwiatkowski, he was sentenced to four months in federal prison in 2018 for using "unlawful and unreasonable force" against four black teenagers.
"Unlawful, unnecessary force, the same thing that I said he did," Horne said.
Horne said she has turned her pain into activism. When she saw the video of Buffalo police pushing a 75-year-old protestor to the ground, she said she was disgusted.
"So now if they can push the 75-year-old white man when it's still daylight out, just think of what they do to our young black kids at nighttime," she said.
Horne said she's at peace because she stands by what she did. Still, she broke down when asked how this has impacted her children.
"It's important for me to be truthful because this has been a lot of years, so when you talk about where did the raw emotion come from, it's because ... I have fought all of these years and tried to keep it together for my children," she said.
Horne is now fighting for her full pension and pushing to pass Cariole's Law, which she said would protect police who intervene from being retaliated against.
The Buffalo Police Department told CBS News that in 2006, Horne requested that her case be reviewed by an independent arbitrator. The arbitrator recommended termination after lengthy hearings and the police commissioner at the time followed that recommendation.
Former Buffalo police lieutenant Kwiatkowski could not be reached, and his former lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.
We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records.
In 2019, USA TODAY led a national effort to publish disciplinary records for police officers. George Floyd's death has renewed calls for transparency
John Kelly, and Mark Nichols, USA TODAY
Updated 6:48 a.m. PDT June 11, 2020
At least 85,000 law enforcement officers across the USA have been investigated or disciplined for misconduct over the past decade, an investigation by USA TODAY Network found.
Officers have beaten members of the public, planted evidence and used their badges to harass women. They have lied, stolen, dealt drugs, driven drunk and abused their spouses.
Despite their role as public servants, the men and women who swear an oath to keep communities safe can generally avoid public scrutiny for their misdeeds.
The records of their misconduct are filed away, rarely seen by anyone outside their departments. Police unions and their political allies have worked to put special protections in place ensuring some records are shielded from public view, or even destroyed.
Reporters from USA TODAY, its affiliated newsrooms across the country and the nonprofit Invisible Institute in Chicago spent more than a year creating the biggest collection of police misconduct records.
Obtained from thousands of state agencies, prosecutors, police departments and sheriffs, the records detail at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, much of it previously unreported. The records obtained include more than 110,000 internal affairs investigations by hundreds of individual departments and more than 30,000 officers who were decertified by 44 state oversight agencies.
Among the findings:
The level of oversight varies widely from state to state. Georgia and Florida decertified thousands of police officers for everything from crimes to questions about their fitness to serve; other states banned almost none.
That includes Maryland, home to the Baltimore Police Department, which regularly has been in the news for criminal behavior by police. Over nearly a decade, Maryland revoked the certifications of just four officers. In Minneapolis, where officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd until he died, at least seven police officers have been decertified since 2009, according to state records.
Floyd's death sparked mass protests across the U.S. and around the world with millions of people calling for accountability for violent officers and the departments that allow them to retain their badge. It "was not just a tragedy, it was a crime," said The Rev. Al Sharpton, delivering the eulogy at Floyd's funeral on June 9.
"Until the law is upheld and people know they will go to jail," Sharpton said, "they're going to keep doing it, because they're protected by wickedness in high places."[...]
Search the database: Exclusive USA TODAY list of decertified officers and their records
Officers have beaten members of the public, planted evidence and used their badges to harass women. They have lied, stolen, dealt drugs, driven drunk and abused their spouses.
Despite their role as public servants, the men and women who swear an oath to keep communities safe can generally avoid public scrutiny for their misdeeds.
The records of their misconduct are filed away, rarely seen by anyone outside their departments. Police unions and their political allies have worked to put special protections in place ensuring some records are shielded from public view, or even destroyed.
Reporters from USA TODAY, its affiliated newsrooms across the country and the nonprofit Invisible Institute in Chicago spent more than a year creating the biggest collection of police misconduct records.
Obtained from thousands of state agencies, prosecutors, police departments and sheriffs, the records detail at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, much of it previously unreported. The records obtained include more than 110,000 internal affairs investigations by hundreds of individual departments and more than 30,000 officers who were decertified by 44 state oversight agencies.
Among the findings:
- Most misconduct involves routine infractions, but the records reveal tens of thousands of cases of serious misconduct and abuse. They include 22,924 investigations of officers using excessive force, 3,145 allegations of rape, child molestation and other sexual misconduct and 2,307 cases of domestic violence by officers.
- Dishonesty is a frequent problem. The records document at least 2,227 instances of perjury, tampering with evidence or witnesses or falsifying reports. There were 418 reports of officers obstructing investigations, most often when they or someone they knew were targets.
- Less than 10% of officers in most police forces get investigated for misconduct. Yet some officers are consistently under investigation. Nearly 2,500 have been investigated on 10 or more charges. Twenty faced 100 or more allegations yet kept their badge for years.
The level of oversight varies widely from state to state. Georgia and Florida decertified thousands of police officers for everything from crimes to questions about their fitness to serve; other states banned almost none.
That includes Maryland, home to the Baltimore Police Department, which regularly has been in the news for criminal behavior by police. Over nearly a decade, Maryland revoked the certifications of just four officers. In Minneapolis, where officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd until he died, at least seven police officers have been decertified since 2009, according to state records.
Floyd's death sparked mass protests across the U.S. and around the world with millions of people calling for accountability for violent officers and the departments that allow them to retain their badge. It "was not just a tragedy, it was a crime," said The Rev. Al Sharpton, delivering the eulogy at Floyd's funeral on June 9.
"Until the law is upheld and people know they will go to jail," Sharpton said, "they're going to keep doing it, because they're protected by wickedness in high places."[...]
Search the database: Exclusive USA TODAY list of decertified officers and their records
Police Are Building Surveillance Networks of Private Security Cameras in Cities
BY Katya Schwenk, Truthout
PUBLISHED June 11, 2020
Log onto Nextdoor.com, the message board of choice for Washington, D.C.’s most affluent neighborhoods, and, alongside photos of lost keys and microwaves for sale, there are clips from security cameras.
“Man attempting to enter parked cars (possibly armed with visible gun)” reads one post by “Simon J.” from July 10, 2018, featuring a grainy image of a Black man walking beside a van. Further posts by Simon J., published in the Nextdoor forum for D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood reveal that the “visible gun” refers only to a shape in the man’s pocket.
A string of comments from neighbors follows, each claiming they, too, have seen this man in their neighborhood. “I saw him too at 29th and N St… Scoping out cars!” one wrote. Another woman responded to say she saw him “checking out cars,” and attached an image of an unidentifiable Black man riding a bicycle down the sidewalk in broad daylight, his face turned from the camera.
Several commenters lamented that, when they had called the police, the cops did not judge the situation worthy of response. “If you tell the police he is armed, they should come,” one person suggested.
For cities across the country, encouraging security camera ownership and this kind of online sharing, often in partnership with police, is becoming a new pillar of what its advocates deem “crime prevention.” These initiatives have changed the way communities are policed — and police themselves. Now, as protests over police brutality surge in cities across the country, law enforcement is relying on these networks to identify demonstrators.
“We are not done making arrests,” Peter Newsham, D.C.’s police chief, said at a June 1 press conference after a night of unrest in Washington, in which police used tear gas on protesters. “Our city, thankfully, has a very expansive CCTV system. We have government-owned cameras. We have privately-owned cameras.” He added that police were “urging” residents and businesses to share their footage.
D.C. residents have taken up the call. “Check your cameras,” reads one June 2 Nextdoor post from a woman in northwest D.C. She wrote that she was forwarding police a video of “several young men” talking about robbing a bank during the protests, unaware they were being recorded by her home’s security camera.
Police Incentivize Private Surveillance Cameras
Washington, D.C., is a striking example of how cities can finance private surveillance. Over the past four years, D.C. has funded more than 18,000 security cameras for its residents, an investment of more than $2 million. The city’s private security camera “incentive program” passes out $500 rebates and vouchers to city residents who purchase their own camera systems — provided they register them with the city’s police department. A new abundance of security cameras now blink out from porches and back alleys. Their footage is plastered across forums like Nextdoor.
Such initiatives are proliferating across the country. Spokane, Washington, and Baltimore, Maryland, as well as several neighborhoods in Minneapolis, have launched similar rebate programs in the last two years, while San Francisco, California, Des Moines, Iowa, and Berkeley, California, all keep private security camera registries.
These registry programs typically share only the location and camera system information with police, and do not give law enforcement direct access to camera feeds. Chicago’s security camera network goes a step further, however, as once the owner registers their camera, the police and various city agencies can access it at any time without permission. The Chicago police say they command a network of 45,000 cameras around the city, though they do not disclose how many of those cameras are privately owned.
The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) already operates hundreds of public CCTV cameras around Washington, D.C. Through the security camera registry, police now have the precise coordinates of thousands more. And unlike the CCTV system, the locations of registered private cameras are not made public.
“I can say without a doubt we’re seeing more and more cameras,” said Robert Contee, MPD assistant chief. “The rebate program has certainly helped with that.”
Contee said MPD has tracked people deemed “suspects” walking to or from crime scenes using the cameras. Checking the private camera registry to contact camera owners for footage, he said, is now commonplace in his investigations. Program reports show that footage from the cameras has been used to make arrests on charges ranging from murder to petty theft.
Demonstrators in D.C. and in cities across the country, already enduring police violence, must also contend with cameras at every turn — on businesses, on public buildings, within communities. Whitney Shepard, an organizer with the D.C.-based Stop Police Terror Project, which organizes around police violence, says that for protesters, that “is really scary.” Historically, police and the FBI have put significant resources toward tracking Black activists, from the COINTELPRO projects during the civil rights movement to the uprising in Ferguson.
“[Community surveillance] is one of the more insidious ways we witness that,” Shepard said. “In this moment, we as organizers want to push the narrative that we need to be watching out for our neighbors, not watching them. It’s unfortunate to see the leaders in D.C. not take that to heart.”
---
A Lucrative Spider Web of Surveillance
This distribution of cameras in Washington, D.C., aligns with national trends of private security camera use. Companies like Amazon Ring have targeted the country’s more affluent, suburban neighborhoods as a consumer base. Amazon markets its Ring Doorbell product not just as a video feed but as a platform — the shiny doorbell camera comes packaged with a community crime-mapping app.
Amazon Ring has forged data-sharing relationships with more than 400 police departments nationally, and has come under fire for its close relationship with law enforcement. The company has pushed police departments to promote its cameras, in some cases offering free cameras as a reward for promoting the Ring app, according to reporting by Motherboard.
Notably, companies like Ring have loose restrictions on when they can share private camera footage directly with police. According to Ring’s public information sharing policy, the company may disclose information “in connection with an investigation of suspected or actual illegal activity,” though Ring says it does not do so in the absence of a subpoena or warrant.
Amazon Ring says it has played an active role in promoting security camera subsidies across the country. Though the company does not have a public partnership with MPD, in 2016, at the camera program’s launch, Ring posted a blog post announcing it was working with the government of the District of Columbia to “get the word out.”
“Ring has already worked with cities across the US to launch similar programs,” the post reads. The company then said it was lowering the price of some of its cameras specifically for D.C. residents taking advantage of the rebate program.
Garcia said that regardless of Ring’s support, the D.C. incentive program does not recommend any particular camera for purchase. But for Amazon, the program has undoubtedly been good business.
“Ring is committed to protecting user privacy,” a company spokesperson told Truthout, adding that the company does not support programs that mandate sharing of footage “contrary to [users’] personal preference.”
Many companies have found investing in surveillance to be lucrative. In Minneapolis, where police in at least five city suburbs have partnerships with Ring, Target has been a major investor in police surveillance, spending $300,000 on CCTV cameras around the city.
On May 28, in the days following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, footage of a Minneapolis Target being looted went viral. For many, the incident has come to represent popular backlash against surveillance and corporate greed.
Private security cameras are often just one piece of the ever-expanding surveillance infrastructure in cities. In Chicago, police use Stingray tracking devices to surveil cell phone locations. In New York City, police use license plate readers to monitor a car’s location in real time. And in January, MPD announced it was partnering with Nextdoor, allowing forum users like those that shared the “suspicious” photos in Georgetown to quickly forward their posts to police.
“You’ve seen that cities, by partnering with private businesses and individuals, by getting federal grants from the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, have been able to build out these very massive camera networks that essentially allow police departments to have a huge portion of cities under watch all the time,” said Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight. “That is pretty troubling.”
For Shepard, this ever-expanding digital surveillance infrastructure is most harmful for Black communities and other communities of color.
“When we have … surveillance cameras everywhere, you have to wear an ankle bracelet, you have a drone policing your neighborhood — it’s a way to make communities that have already been displaced through ghettoization and redlining easy to police,” she said.
Of course, the growing abundance of camera footage has also proved a double-edged sword for police. The camera video of George Floyd’s death has spurred a national reckoning. It was captured, too, on nearby security cameras.
“Man attempting to enter parked cars (possibly armed with visible gun)” reads one post by “Simon J.” from July 10, 2018, featuring a grainy image of a Black man walking beside a van. Further posts by Simon J., published in the Nextdoor forum for D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood reveal that the “visible gun” refers only to a shape in the man’s pocket.
A string of comments from neighbors follows, each claiming they, too, have seen this man in their neighborhood. “I saw him too at 29th and N St… Scoping out cars!” one wrote. Another woman responded to say she saw him “checking out cars,” and attached an image of an unidentifiable Black man riding a bicycle down the sidewalk in broad daylight, his face turned from the camera.
Several commenters lamented that, when they had called the police, the cops did not judge the situation worthy of response. “If you tell the police he is armed, they should come,” one person suggested.
For cities across the country, encouraging security camera ownership and this kind of online sharing, often in partnership with police, is becoming a new pillar of what its advocates deem “crime prevention.” These initiatives have changed the way communities are policed — and police themselves. Now, as protests over police brutality surge in cities across the country, law enforcement is relying on these networks to identify demonstrators.
“We are not done making arrests,” Peter Newsham, D.C.’s police chief, said at a June 1 press conference after a night of unrest in Washington, in which police used tear gas on protesters. “Our city, thankfully, has a very expansive CCTV system. We have government-owned cameras. We have privately-owned cameras.” He added that police were “urging” residents and businesses to share their footage.
D.C. residents have taken up the call. “Check your cameras,” reads one June 2 Nextdoor post from a woman in northwest D.C. She wrote that she was forwarding police a video of “several young men” talking about robbing a bank during the protests, unaware they were being recorded by her home’s security camera.
Police Incentivize Private Surveillance Cameras
Washington, D.C., is a striking example of how cities can finance private surveillance. Over the past four years, D.C. has funded more than 18,000 security cameras for its residents, an investment of more than $2 million. The city’s private security camera “incentive program” passes out $500 rebates and vouchers to city residents who purchase their own camera systems — provided they register them with the city’s police department. A new abundance of security cameras now blink out from porches and back alleys. Their footage is plastered across forums like Nextdoor.
Such initiatives are proliferating across the country. Spokane, Washington, and Baltimore, Maryland, as well as several neighborhoods in Minneapolis, have launched similar rebate programs in the last two years, while San Francisco, California, Des Moines, Iowa, and Berkeley, California, all keep private security camera registries.
These registry programs typically share only the location and camera system information with police, and do not give law enforcement direct access to camera feeds. Chicago’s security camera network goes a step further, however, as once the owner registers their camera, the police and various city agencies can access it at any time without permission. The Chicago police say they command a network of 45,000 cameras around the city, though they do not disclose how many of those cameras are privately owned.
The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) already operates hundreds of public CCTV cameras around Washington, D.C. Through the security camera registry, police now have the precise coordinates of thousands more. And unlike the CCTV system, the locations of registered private cameras are not made public.
“I can say without a doubt we’re seeing more and more cameras,” said Robert Contee, MPD assistant chief. “The rebate program has certainly helped with that.”
Contee said MPD has tracked people deemed “suspects” walking to or from crime scenes using the cameras. Checking the private camera registry to contact camera owners for footage, he said, is now commonplace in his investigations. Program reports show that footage from the cameras has been used to make arrests on charges ranging from murder to petty theft.
Demonstrators in D.C. and in cities across the country, already enduring police violence, must also contend with cameras at every turn — on businesses, on public buildings, within communities. Whitney Shepard, an organizer with the D.C.-based Stop Police Terror Project, which organizes around police violence, says that for protesters, that “is really scary.” Historically, police and the FBI have put significant resources toward tracking Black activists, from the COINTELPRO projects during the civil rights movement to the uprising in Ferguson.
“[Community surveillance] is one of the more insidious ways we witness that,” Shepard said. “In this moment, we as organizers want to push the narrative that we need to be watching out for our neighbors, not watching them. It’s unfortunate to see the leaders in D.C. not take that to heart.”
---
A Lucrative Spider Web of Surveillance
This distribution of cameras in Washington, D.C., aligns with national trends of private security camera use. Companies like Amazon Ring have targeted the country’s more affluent, suburban neighborhoods as a consumer base. Amazon markets its Ring Doorbell product not just as a video feed but as a platform — the shiny doorbell camera comes packaged with a community crime-mapping app.
Amazon Ring has forged data-sharing relationships with more than 400 police departments nationally, and has come under fire for its close relationship with law enforcement. The company has pushed police departments to promote its cameras, in some cases offering free cameras as a reward for promoting the Ring app, according to reporting by Motherboard.
Notably, companies like Ring have loose restrictions on when they can share private camera footage directly with police. According to Ring’s public information sharing policy, the company may disclose information “in connection with an investigation of suspected or actual illegal activity,” though Ring says it does not do so in the absence of a subpoena or warrant.
Amazon Ring says it has played an active role in promoting security camera subsidies across the country. Though the company does not have a public partnership with MPD, in 2016, at the camera program’s launch, Ring posted a blog post announcing it was working with the government of the District of Columbia to “get the word out.”
“Ring has already worked with cities across the US to launch similar programs,” the post reads. The company then said it was lowering the price of some of its cameras specifically for D.C. residents taking advantage of the rebate program.
Garcia said that regardless of Ring’s support, the D.C. incentive program does not recommend any particular camera for purchase. But for Amazon, the program has undoubtedly been good business.
“Ring is committed to protecting user privacy,” a company spokesperson told Truthout, adding that the company does not support programs that mandate sharing of footage “contrary to [users’] personal preference.”
Many companies have found investing in surveillance to be lucrative. In Minneapolis, where police in at least five city suburbs have partnerships with Ring, Target has been a major investor in police surveillance, spending $300,000 on CCTV cameras around the city.
On May 28, in the days following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, footage of a Minneapolis Target being looted went viral. For many, the incident has come to represent popular backlash against surveillance and corporate greed.
Private security cameras are often just one piece of the ever-expanding surveillance infrastructure in cities. In Chicago, police use Stingray tracking devices to surveil cell phone locations. In New York City, police use license plate readers to monitor a car’s location in real time. And in January, MPD announced it was partnering with Nextdoor, allowing forum users like those that shared the “suspicious” photos in Georgetown to quickly forward their posts to police.
“You’ve seen that cities, by partnering with private businesses and individuals, by getting federal grants from the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, have been able to build out these very massive camera networks that essentially allow police departments to have a huge portion of cities under watch all the time,” said Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight. “That is pretty troubling.”
For Shepard, this ever-expanding digital surveillance infrastructure is most harmful for Black communities and other communities of color.
“When we have … surveillance cameras everywhere, you have to wear an ankle bracelet, you have a drone policing your neighborhood — it’s a way to make communities that have already been displaced through ghettoization and redlining easy to police,” she said.
Of course, the growing abundance of camera footage has also proved a double-edged sword for police. The camera video of George Floyd’s death has spurred a national reckoning. It was captured, too, on nearby security cameras.
Opinion - US policing
If you’re surprised by how the police are acting, you don’t understand US history
Policing in America was never created to protect and serve the masses. It can’t be reformed because it is designed for violence
Malaika Jabali - the guardian
Fri 5 Jun 2020 05.30 EDT
Amid worldwide protests against the police killing of George Floyd, activists around the US have raised demands for specific policy measures, such as defunding the police. Justifying these demands are the images emerging from the protests, with police officers ramming protesters in vehicles, indiscriminately attacking protesters with pepper spray and exerting excessive force. Local and state policing budgets have nearly tripled since 1977, despite declining crime rates. Even people unfamiliar with the police and prison abolitionist movement are starting, rightly, to envision that public spending could be used in more socially responsible ways.
But beyond the fiscal argument is an ethical one: policing in America cannot be reformed because it is designed for violence. The oppression is a feature, not a bug.
That seems like a radical sentiment only because policing is so normalized in American culture, with depictions in popular media ranging from hapless, donut-chugging dopes to tough, crime-fighting heroes. We even have a baseball team named after a police organization – the Texas Rangers.
But it’s time to look beyond the romanticization of American police and get real. Just as America glorifies the military and Wall Street, and some Americans whitewash the confederate flag and plantation homes, the history of policing is steeped in blood. In fact, the Texas Rangers are named after a group of white men of the same name who slaughtered Comanche Indians in 1841 to steal indigenous territory and expand the frontier westward. The Rangers are considered the first state police organization.
Likewise, as black people fought for their freedom from slavery by escaping north, slave patrols were established to bring us back to captivity. Many researchers consider slave patrols a direct “forerunner of modern American law enforcement”.
In northern “free” states, police precincts developed in emerging industrial cities to control what economic elites referred to as “rioting”, which was “the only effective political strategy available to exploited workers”. But, as described in the text Community Policing, this “rioting” was:
actually a primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers, [and] [t]he modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.
In other words, police were never created to protect and serve the masses, and our legislative and judicial systems – from Congress to the courts to prosecutors – have made this clear. Congress’s 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, for instance, incentivized law enforcement officials to capture Africans suspected of running away from slavery, paying officials more money to return them to slave owners than to free them.
Instead of expanding the American political project to embrace black people as free citizens, our institutions made caveats to exclude them from the country’s founding principles. Historically, most black people were not considered human, let alone citizens worthy of police or constitution protections. We were property. Even free blacks were, at best, second-class citizens whose status could be demoted at any white person’s whims and who fundamentally had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”, as the supreme court affirmed in 1856.
Modern court rulings have steadily eroded civil liberties to give police more power and permit racially discriminatory policing, convictions and sentencing. This entrenched history of violent white supremacy is a lot to attempt to reform. So just as 19th-century abolitionists set the terms of their fight beyond incremental improvements to slavery, abolitionists today assert that policing and incarceration must move past modest proposals that fundamentally maintain the system.
The billions of dollars that governments spend on increasingly militarized police can be better used to address the underlying socioeconomic conditions that contribute to police encounters. We should divert resources towards investments in mental health, public education, drug prevention programs, homelessness prevention, community-centered crime prevention and jobs development.
The immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing felt like another police encounter that would lead to yet another viral hashtag with little police reform. But the work of abolitionists has set the bar even higher. We should move past calls for criminal justice reform and instead make demands for freedom.
But beyond the fiscal argument is an ethical one: policing in America cannot be reformed because it is designed for violence. The oppression is a feature, not a bug.
That seems like a radical sentiment only because policing is so normalized in American culture, with depictions in popular media ranging from hapless, donut-chugging dopes to tough, crime-fighting heroes. We even have a baseball team named after a police organization – the Texas Rangers.
But it’s time to look beyond the romanticization of American police and get real. Just as America glorifies the military and Wall Street, and some Americans whitewash the confederate flag and plantation homes, the history of policing is steeped in blood. In fact, the Texas Rangers are named after a group of white men of the same name who slaughtered Comanche Indians in 1841 to steal indigenous territory and expand the frontier westward. The Rangers are considered the first state police organization.
Likewise, as black people fought for their freedom from slavery by escaping north, slave patrols were established to bring us back to captivity. Many researchers consider slave patrols a direct “forerunner of modern American law enforcement”.
In northern “free” states, police precincts developed in emerging industrial cities to control what economic elites referred to as “rioting”, which was “the only effective political strategy available to exploited workers”. But, as described in the text Community Policing, this “rioting” was:
actually a primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers, [and] [t]he modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.
In other words, police were never created to protect and serve the masses, and our legislative and judicial systems – from Congress to the courts to prosecutors – have made this clear. Congress’s 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, for instance, incentivized law enforcement officials to capture Africans suspected of running away from slavery, paying officials more money to return them to slave owners than to free them.
Instead of expanding the American political project to embrace black people as free citizens, our institutions made caveats to exclude them from the country’s founding principles. Historically, most black people were not considered human, let alone citizens worthy of police or constitution protections. We were property. Even free blacks were, at best, second-class citizens whose status could be demoted at any white person’s whims and who fundamentally had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”, as the supreme court affirmed in 1856.
Modern court rulings have steadily eroded civil liberties to give police more power and permit racially discriminatory policing, convictions and sentencing. This entrenched history of violent white supremacy is a lot to attempt to reform. So just as 19th-century abolitionists set the terms of their fight beyond incremental improvements to slavery, abolitionists today assert that policing and incarceration must move past modest proposals that fundamentally maintain the system.
The billions of dollars that governments spend on increasingly militarized police can be better used to address the underlying socioeconomic conditions that contribute to police encounters. We should divert resources towards investments in mental health, public education, drug prevention programs, homelessness prevention, community-centered crime prevention and jobs development.
The immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing felt like another police encounter that would lead to yet another viral hashtag with little police reform. But the work of abolitionists has set the bar even higher. We should move past calls for criminal justice reform and instead make demands for freedom.
- Malaika Jabali is a writer, attorney and activist whose first short film, Left Out, examines the economic crisis facing black midwesterners
US police have a history of violence against black people. Will it ever stop?
The bereaved and brutalized have been calling for justice for years but the Trump administration reversed Obama’s tentative steps towards reform
Oliver Laughland US southern bureau chief
the guardian
Thu 4 Jun 2020 09.28 EDT
In Ferguson, Missouri, Mike Brown’s body lay lifeless on the street for four hours after he was shot dead by a white officer. Witnesses described him holding his hands up in surrender before he was killed.
In New York City, Eric Garner told a white officer who placed him in a banned chokehold that he could not breathe before he died. He repeated the phrase 11 times.
In Cleveland, Ohio, 12-year-old Tamir Rice played on a snowy winter morning with a toy gun before he was shot dead by a white officer.
That these horrific deaths of unarmed black men and boys all occurred within four months of each other back in 2014 is no aberration. It is a cycle of American state brutality that has repeated itself year upon year, generation upon generation.
In 2015 it would be Tony Robinson, then Eric Harris, then Walter Scott, then Freddie Gray, then William Chapman, then Samuel DuBose. That some of those names have perhaps already faded from national memory is indicative of the crisis.
In 2016, I sat with Samaria Rice, mother of young Tamir, at a park bench near the site of her son’s death as she lamented: “When I see any of these murders it’s like the government is throwing more salt on an open wound and I’m not having a chance to heal.”
Then, she was referring to Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, both shot dead by police within a day of each other earlier that month.
Now, in 2020, it is George Floyd, the 46-year-old loving father and staunch community advocate, placed in a knee-to-neck restraint for almost nine minutes by a white officer in Minneapolis. He died in the same metro area as Philando Castile. He uttered the same final pleas as Eric Garner.
The nationwide unrest that follows Floyd’s death is undoubtedly more intense than in 2014; the leadership from the White House immeasurably more reckless, insensitive and life threatening.
And yet, here the country is again.
Violence against black men and women at the hands of white authority is foundational to the United States, and continues to influence its policing culture to this day.
Precursors to modern-day American police departments include violent slave patrols utilized in southern states before the civil war, then the legal enforcement of racist Black Codes, followed by Jim Crow laws. Early municipal departments in growing US cities were overwhelmingly white, and brutalized vulnerable communities routinely. Thousands of lynchings of black Americans by white vigilantes went unpunished by the judicial system. And during the civil rights era and well beyond, peaceful protest has been harshly suppressed by officers sworn to protect and serve.
Just days after I sat with Samaria Rice on that bench in Cleveland, Donald Trump accepted the Republican party’s nomination for president a few miles down the road.
Trump presented himself as the “law and order” candidate during a dark acceptance speech. The former Milwaukee sheriff, David Clarke, led the arena in a chilling round of applause for the Baltimore police officer Brian Rice, who that day had been acquitted on charges related to the death of Freddie Gray, whose spine was almost severed during his 2014 arrest. Trump thrust the issue of race and policing firmly into the culture wars he was fomenting.
Trump’s response to police violence was a marked departure from the Obama administration’s. Since Michael Brown’s death, which began a nationwide reckoning and rejuvenated the Black Lives Matter movement, Obama had used his authority to target problematic police departments, including those in Ferguson, Chicago and Baltimore, with justice department investigations.
He issued an executive order to curtail local departments’ procurement of certain military-grade equipment. He commissioned a taskforce on 21st-century policing, which memorably urged American law enforcement to move from a “warrior” to a “guardian” culture.
Although America has a sprawling, decentralized system of policing – the country has roughly 18,000 police departments each with their own use of force policy, hiring practices and oversight mechanisms making universal reform near impossible – there were at least signs of tentative progress.
And then Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States.
Not only did he fight a PR war against those who knelt during the national anthem to pay tribute to black lives lost and stand against the structural racism underpinning it all. Now a man who called for the death penalty against five black and brown teenagers wrongfully convicted of a rape in Central Park in 1989, had the ability, with a stroke of a pen or a nod to his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to undo any of the progress made.
The administration acted quickly. Within two months of assuming office, Sessions forced a sweeping review of court-enforceable reform packages – known as consent decrees – imposed on numerous problematic police departments. He revoked a directive, issued by the Obama administration, to end the US government’s use of private prisons – a marker of the first black president’s attempt to end the disproportionate incarceration of black and brown men. [...]
In New York City, Eric Garner told a white officer who placed him in a banned chokehold that he could not breathe before he died. He repeated the phrase 11 times.
In Cleveland, Ohio, 12-year-old Tamir Rice played on a snowy winter morning with a toy gun before he was shot dead by a white officer.
That these horrific deaths of unarmed black men and boys all occurred within four months of each other back in 2014 is no aberration. It is a cycle of American state brutality that has repeated itself year upon year, generation upon generation.
In 2015 it would be Tony Robinson, then Eric Harris, then Walter Scott, then Freddie Gray, then William Chapman, then Samuel DuBose. That some of those names have perhaps already faded from national memory is indicative of the crisis.
In 2016, I sat with Samaria Rice, mother of young Tamir, at a park bench near the site of her son’s death as she lamented: “When I see any of these murders it’s like the government is throwing more salt on an open wound and I’m not having a chance to heal.”
Then, she was referring to Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, both shot dead by police within a day of each other earlier that month.
Now, in 2020, it is George Floyd, the 46-year-old loving father and staunch community advocate, placed in a knee-to-neck restraint for almost nine minutes by a white officer in Minneapolis. He died in the same metro area as Philando Castile. He uttered the same final pleas as Eric Garner.
The nationwide unrest that follows Floyd’s death is undoubtedly more intense than in 2014; the leadership from the White House immeasurably more reckless, insensitive and life threatening.
And yet, here the country is again.
Violence against black men and women at the hands of white authority is foundational to the United States, and continues to influence its policing culture to this day.
Precursors to modern-day American police departments include violent slave patrols utilized in southern states before the civil war, then the legal enforcement of racist Black Codes, followed by Jim Crow laws. Early municipal departments in growing US cities were overwhelmingly white, and brutalized vulnerable communities routinely. Thousands of lynchings of black Americans by white vigilantes went unpunished by the judicial system. And during the civil rights era and well beyond, peaceful protest has been harshly suppressed by officers sworn to protect and serve.
Just days after I sat with Samaria Rice on that bench in Cleveland, Donald Trump accepted the Republican party’s nomination for president a few miles down the road.
Trump presented himself as the “law and order” candidate during a dark acceptance speech. The former Milwaukee sheriff, David Clarke, led the arena in a chilling round of applause for the Baltimore police officer Brian Rice, who that day had been acquitted on charges related to the death of Freddie Gray, whose spine was almost severed during his 2014 arrest. Trump thrust the issue of race and policing firmly into the culture wars he was fomenting.
Trump’s response to police violence was a marked departure from the Obama administration’s. Since Michael Brown’s death, which began a nationwide reckoning and rejuvenated the Black Lives Matter movement, Obama had used his authority to target problematic police departments, including those in Ferguson, Chicago and Baltimore, with justice department investigations.
He issued an executive order to curtail local departments’ procurement of certain military-grade equipment. He commissioned a taskforce on 21st-century policing, which memorably urged American law enforcement to move from a “warrior” to a “guardian” culture.
Although America has a sprawling, decentralized system of policing – the country has roughly 18,000 police departments each with their own use of force policy, hiring practices and oversight mechanisms making universal reform near impossible – there were at least signs of tentative progress.
And then Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States.
Not only did he fight a PR war against those who knelt during the national anthem to pay tribute to black lives lost and stand against the structural racism underpinning it all. Now a man who called for the death penalty against five black and brown teenagers wrongfully convicted of a rape in Central Park in 1989, had the ability, with a stroke of a pen or a nod to his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to undo any of the progress made.
The administration acted quickly. Within two months of assuming office, Sessions forced a sweeping review of court-enforceable reform packages – known as consent decrees – imposed on numerous problematic police departments. He revoked a directive, issued by the Obama administration, to end the US government’s use of private prisons – a marker of the first black president’s attempt to end the disproportionate incarceration of black and brown men. [...]
Suspected Looter Was Kneeling and Had a Hammer, Not a Gun, When Fatally Shot By Vallejo Police
By Laura Sambol • nbc bay area
Published June 3, 2020
A police shooting may provide a dangerous new spark to a community already on edge.
It was revealed in a Wednesday press conference that a Hispanic man was kneeling when a Vallejo police officer shot and killed him. The shooting early Tuesday morning happened as police tried to stop looters at a Walgreens after an hours-long crime spree.
Wednesday's updates comes after two nights of violence and destruction in the city. Some people fear this could cause even more violence in the Solano County city, while others are begging the community to protest, but do so peacefully.
The Vallejo police news conference was abruptly cut short due to an angry crowd.
Sean Monterrosa from San Francisco has been identified as the 22-year-old Hispanic man fatally shot by police. Vallejo police said he started running toward a car that just rammed into a police unit and appeared to be armed.
"This individual appeared to be running toward the black sedan, but suddenly stopped, taking a kneeling position, and placing his hands above his waist, revealing what appeared to be the butt of a handgun," Vallejo Police Chief Shawny Williams said.
Turns out it was not a gun.
Monterrosa had a 15-inch hammer tucked into his pocket of his sweatshirt.
"Due to the perceived threat, one officer fired his weapon five times from within the police vehicle through the windshield, striking the suspect once," Williams said.
Vallejo was already a community divided after the shooting death of a young black man just last year.
Willie McCoy, a 20-year-old rap artist, was asleep in his car at a Taco Bell drive-thru when six Vallejo police officer shot him to death.
For Kalicia Seymour, with the Vallejo Towards Peace group, police shootings are personal. She said police shot her uncle several years ago and nearly killed him.
"It's really traumatic. It's really sad to see people of our race and community being killed by that," Seymour said.
Meanwhile, concrete barricades surround the Vallejo Police Department. City buildings and businesses remain boarded up and closed while the city braces for another night of violence.
"To people that are protesting, to people that are looting, we all need to take a second to recoup and take a step back to think about why we are doing this, who we are fighting for," said Michaela Evuen Vallejo Towards Peace.
Police are not releasing the name of the officer involved in the shooting, but said he is an 18-year veteran.
It was revealed in a Wednesday press conference that a Hispanic man was kneeling when a Vallejo police officer shot and killed him. The shooting early Tuesday morning happened as police tried to stop looters at a Walgreens after an hours-long crime spree.
Wednesday's updates comes after two nights of violence and destruction in the city. Some people fear this could cause even more violence in the Solano County city, while others are begging the community to protest, but do so peacefully.
The Vallejo police news conference was abruptly cut short due to an angry crowd.
Sean Monterrosa from San Francisco has been identified as the 22-year-old Hispanic man fatally shot by police. Vallejo police said he started running toward a car that just rammed into a police unit and appeared to be armed.
"This individual appeared to be running toward the black sedan, but suddenly stopped, taking a kneeling position, and placing his hands above his waist, revealing what appeared to be the butt of a handgun," Vallejo Police Chief Shawny Williams said.
Turns out it was not a gun.
Monterrosa had a 15-inch hammer tucked into his pocket of his sweatshirt.
"Due to the perceived threat, one officer fired his weapon five times from within the police vehicle through the windshield, striking the suspect once," Williams said.
Vallejo was already a community divided after the shooting death of a young black man just last year.
Willie McCoy, a 20-year-old rap artist, was asleep in his car at a Taco Bell drive-thru when six Vallejo police officer shot him to death.
For Kalicia Seymour, with the Vallejo Towards Peace group, police shootings are personal. She said police shot her uncle several years ago and nearly killed him.
"It's really traumatic. It's really sad to see people of our race and community being killed by that," Seymour said.
Meanwhile, concrete barricades surround the Vallejo Police Department. City buildings and businesses remain boarded up and closed while the city braces for another night of violence.
"To people that are protesting, to people that are looting, we all need to take a second to recoup and take a step back to think about why we are doing this, who we are fighting for," said Michaela Evuen Vallejo Towards Peace.
Police are not releasing the name of the officer involved in the shooting, but said he is an 18-year veteran.
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LOUISVILLE POLICE LEFT THE BODY OF DAVID MCATEE ON THE STREET FOR 12 HOURS
Aída Chávez - the intercept
June 1, 2020, 3:05 p.m.
THE BODY OF David McAtee laid in the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, for over 12 hours on Monday. McAtee had been killed by law enforcement just after midnight on Sunday, May 31, amid days of protests over police violence nationwide. Noon the next day, protesters were gathered at the site. McAtee’s body was still there.
McAtee, the owner of a local barbecue business and a beloved community figure, was shot and killed after Louisville police and the National Guard opened fire on a crowd that had gathered at a parking lot on 26th and Broadway. As the owner of YaYa’s BBQ, McAtee was known to give police officers free meals. Bystanders and witnesses have said that the crowd was not protesting when the police arrived. Police claim that they were returning fire after the crowd began shooting.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear attributed the killing to the Louisville Metro Police Department and the National Guard. Police officers, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said, had not activated their body cameras in violation of policy. Police Chief Steve Conrad was fired as a result, but retains his pension. Acting Chief Robert Schroeder, at the press conference, seemed to walk back Beshear’s statement pending investigation. “We do not know who shot him,” he said, “we do not know if it was related to a separate incident, if it was due to the shots fired by our officers and the National Guardsmen soldiers who accompanied them.” The press conference did not address why McAtee’s body was left outside, and Louisville police did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert LeVertis Bell, a community activist who’s running for the Louisville Metro Council in the 4th District, was among the hundreds of protesters who had gathered at the scene early Monday afternoon. He said the crowd was made up mostly of members of the community, not experienced activists, who were angry and hurt. “We were already dealing with the death of Breonna Taylor,” he said, referring to the police shooting of a young black woman two months ago.
“Even if they had some sort of legitimate, procedural reason for [keeping the body at the scene] you’d think they would have in mind the trauma that they’re inflicting when they do that, especially having experienced that with the Mike Brown case in Ferguson,” Bell said. “That’s the first thing I thought, that this was terrorism… because it’s terrorizing, even if they don’t intentionally try to do it.”
Protests of police brutality around the country saw escalating violence over the weekend, with police driving vehicles into crowds and firing rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash grenades, in clashes that have gone viral on social media. Police have arrested more than 4,100 people over days of demonstrations, according to a tally from the Associated Press, and several protesters have been killed. On Saturday night in Omaha, Nebraska, Jake Gardner, a white bar owner, shot and killed James Scurlock, a 22-year-old black man, outside his establishment. On Monday, prosecutors said the man acted in self defense and would not be charged. Calvin L. Horton Jr. was shot and killed outside a pawnshop in Minneapolis. Chris Beaty, a former football player, and Dorian Murrell were also shot and killed in separate incidents in Indianapolis over the weekend, though it was not immediately clear who was responsible for either killing. A protester died in St. Louis after reportedly being dragged on the highway by a FedEx truck.
At the mayor’s press conference, Kentucky State Rep. Charles Booker, a Louisville native who is challenging Mitch McConnell for Senate in 2020, spoke for the community. “My voice is strained because I’ve been doing a lot of yelling and crying as well,” he said, and called for police officers involved in Taylor’s death to be relieved of their duties and for the investigations in Taylor’s death to be expedited. “To lose your job when someone has died at your hands is a small price to pay.”
RELATED: Louisville police chief fired after no body camera footage of shooting
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer fired police chief Steve Conrad on Monday after learning that police officers did not record body-camera footage of the fatal shooting of David McAtee, a black man, in west Louisville in the early morning hours.
McAtee, the owner of a local barbecue business and a beloved community figure, was shot and killed after Louisville police and the National Guard opened fire on a crowd that had gathered at a parking lot on 26th and Broadway. As the owner of YaYa’s BBQ, McAtee was known to give police officers free meals. Bystanders and witnesses have said that the crowd was not protesting when the police arrived. Police claim that they were returning fire after the crowd began shooting.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear attributed the killing to the Louisville Metro Police Department and the National Guard. Police officers, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said, had not activated their body cameras in violation of policy. Police Chief Steve Conrad was fired as a result, but retains his pension. Acting Chief Robert Schroeder, at the press conference, seemed to walk back Beshear’s statement pending investigation. “We do not know who shot him,” he said, “we do not know if it was related to a separate incident, if it was due to the shots fired by our officers and the National Guardsmen soldiers who accompanied them.” The press conference did not address why McAtee’s body was left outside, and Louisville police did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert LeVertis Bell, a community activist who’s running for the Louisville Metro Council in the 4th District, was among the hundreds of protesters who had gathered at the scene early Monday afternoon. He said the crowd was made up mostly of members of the community, not experienced activists, who were angry and hurt. “We were already dealing with the death of Breonna Taylor,” he said, referring to the police shooting of a young black woman two months ago.
“Even if they had some sort of legitimate, procedural reason for [keeping the body at the scene] you’d think they would have in mind the trauma that they’re inflicting when they do that, especially having experienced that with the Mike Brown case in Ferguson,” Bell said. “That’s the first thing I thought, that this was terrorism… because it’s terrorizing, even if they don’t intentionally try to do it.”
Protests of police brutality around the country saw escalating violence over the weekend, with police driving vehicles into crowds and firing rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash grenades, in clashes that have gone viral on social media. Police have arrested more than 4,100 people over days of demonstrations, according to a tally from the Associated Press, and several protesters have been killed. On Saturday night in Omaha, Nebraska, Jake Gardner, a white bar owner, shot and killed James Scurlock, a 22-year-old black man, outside his establishment. On Monday, prosecutors said the man acted in self defense and would not be charged. Calvin L. Horton Jr. was shot and killed outside a pawnshop in Minneapolis. Chris Beaty, a former football player, and Dorian Murrell were also shot and killed in separate incidents in Indianapolis over the weekend, though it was not immediately clear who was responsible for either killing. A protester died in St. Louis after reportedly being dragged on the highway by a FedEx truck.
At the mayor’s press conference, Kentucky State Rep. Charles Booker, a Louisville native who is challenging Mitch McConnell for Senate in 2020, spoke for the community. “My voice is strained because I’ve been doing a lot of yelling and crying as well,” he said, and called for police officers involved in Taylor’s death to be relieved of their duties and for the investigations in Taylor’s death to be expedited. “To lose your job when someone has died at your hands is a small price to pay.”
RELATED: Louisville police chief fired after no body camera footage of shooting
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer fired police chief Steve Conrad on Monday after learning that police officers did not record body-camera footage of the fatal shooting of David McAtee, a black man, in west Louisville in the early morning hours.
DemocratSinceBirth@Demo. Underground
Opinion - George Floyd
Policing in the US is not about enforcing law. It’s about enforcing white supremacy
Police treatment of two CNN reporters at a George Floyd protest shows the US has opposite systems of justice – one for white people, one for people of color
paul butler - the guardian
Sun 31 May 2020 00.16 EDT
On Friday the CNN journalist Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television as he covered protests of police brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jimenez identifies as African American and Hispanic, and when the cops confronted him, he did just what minority parents tell their kids to do. Jimenez cooperated; he was respectful, deferential even. He said: “We can move back to where you like … We are getting out of your way … Wherever you want us, we will go.”
It didn’t matter; the police officers put handcuffs on him and led him away, and then came back to arrest his crew. Jimenez narrated his arrest as they led him away. His voice is steady. His eyes, though. Jimenez is masked so his eyes are the only clue to what he’s feeling. His eyes are perplexed and terrified. I get it. When a black or brown person goes into police custody, you never know what is going to happen. You just know that when you leave police custody, if you are lucky enough to leave, you will be diminished. That is the point.
What’s most interesting is not that Jimenez and his colleagues were released shortly thereafter without any charges filed (or even being told why they had been taken into custody). That’s what class will buy a black man in America. You don’t get it quite as bad as your lower-income brethren. Jeff Zucker, the CNN president, talked to Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and the crew was quickly released. With an apology from the governor, not the cops. Cops rarely apologize, especially to black men.
But what’s most interesting is what happened to Josh Campbell, a white CNN journalist who was in the same area as Jimenez and not arrested. Campbell said his experience was the “opposite” of Jimenez’s. The cops asked him “politely to move here and there”. “A couple times I’ve moved closer than they would, like, they asked politely to move back. They didn’t pull out the handcuffs.”
It’s a cliche that the US has two systems of justice, separate and unequal, but I prefer the word Campbell used. The US has “opposite” systems of justice – one for white people and another for racial minorities, especially African Americans, Latinx and Native American people.
White progressives love to focus on class subordination (I see you, Bernie Sanders!) but there is something sticky about race. Jimenez’s professional status and calm demeanor did not stop the police from treating him like a regular black dude – the subject of their vast authority to detain and humiliate. They didn’t have an actual reason and they didn’t need one. Jimenez’s dark skin was the offense.
This is how powerful a drug white privilege is. Here we have the cops policing a rally protesting police brutality against a black man. Even in that context, when the whole world is watching figuratively, and CNN’s audience is watching literally, the cops can’t help themselves. They go all brutal lite. They play “who’s the man” even when the black man, like Jimenez, goes out of his way to show he already knows who the man is. “You are, officer, Sir.” What the cops round up are the usual suspects and the usual suspects are always black and brown.
The whole world has seen the sordid violent recording where George Floyd narrates, over 10 minutes, his own demise. Actually, there is not 10 minutes of narration because Floyd goes limp and silent after several minutes, but that does not cause former officer Chauvin to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck. The officers had received a radio run to go to a local store, where Floyd had allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill. Floyd is across the street from the store, chilling in his car with a couple of friends, when the officers approach like they are apprehending violent offenders. They order Floyd and his friends out of the car, put Floyd in handcuffs, order him to lie face down on the ground, and pin him down with their knees and hands. Floyd complains he can’t breathe. A cop responds: “Well, get up and get in the car.”
I guess that is what you call police humor.
People ask why would the police treat another human being like this, and the answer must be because they can. There are rarely consequences. US police officers kill about 1,000 people a year (compared with the UK, where in 10 years, law enforcement took a total of 23 lives) and there are rarely consequences. Since 2005, when roughly 15,000 people have been killed by US law enforcement officers, fewer than 150 have been charged with murder.
True, the officers in George Floyd’s case lost their jobs, and now face or will face criminal prosecution. This is only because of the video evidence and the high-profile protests. The reality is that, statistically, even these officers are likely to escape conviction. Of the 150 officers charged with homicide in the line of duty, the majority have been found not guilty or had charges dropped.
For the moment, we who believe in justice are supposed to be satisfied that one cop, four days after the fact, has been taken into custody, when there are multiple videos of that officer with his knee on the victim’s back as the man complains he can’t breathe.
As a black man, and as a former prosecutor, I had no idea it was so difficult to get arrested. US cops arrest about 12,000,000 people a year, but not usually each other. For the rest of us – I mean the rest of us black and brown people – we usually get arrested and charged the same day the cops decide we are guilty. The talk our parents give us about how to act around armed agents of the state is designed not so much to prevent arrests as to preserve life. It worked for Omar Jimenez.
But not for George Floyd. On the ground, dying, George Floyd pleads for his life, respectful as a person can be when he is asking for mercy from the people who are literally crushing the life out of him. He says “please”, “officer”, and calls out to his dead mother.
But the police do not remove their knees and feet and hands from Mr Floyd’s body. They don’t even stop restraining him when his body is limp and silent.
What’s to be done? Tinkering with the system makes a difference here and there but it is not enough. If a white woman was thought to have tried to use a fake $20 bill, it’s impossible to imagine the police storming her vehicle, ordering her and her friends out, placing her in handcuffs and ultimately her winding up dead. But as long as cops have that kind of power, people of color will bear the brunt. So one simple reform would be to not allow the cops to make arrests for any non-violent crime. It’s a power they can’t be trusted with, because they will abuse it.
In the end, this is not about law enforcement. It’s about enforcing white supremacy. There’s no tinkering with that, what with white supremacy being the foundation on which the country was built. The consistent big question in the quest for racial justice has been how much white supremacy is central to the identity of the US. This is what Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates argued about. If we had something approaching equal justice, would we still even be the United States? In order to accomplish that we’d have to change the constitution, which authorizes much of the police violence that communities of color complain about, and the politics which exploits white anxiety about black and brown men.
What does it mean for people of color to live in a country where, for them to have a fair shot, law and government have to be transformed? It means that we should expect more cases like Omar Jimenez and George Floyd, regardless of whether Trump or Biden wins in November.
The real problem, ultimately, is not bad apple cops, even though these four officers are rotten to the core. The real problem is demonstrated in what a bystander told the officers as they restrained him to death. “He’s human, bro.” But Floyd was not human to these officers. Enforcing the dehumanization of people of color has become, in the United States, what you call police work.
It didn’t matter; the police officers put handcuffs on him and led him away, and then came back to arrest his crew. Jimenez narrated his arrest as they led him away. His voice is steady. His eyes, though. Jimenez is masked so his eyes are the only clue to what he’s feeling. His eyes are perplexed and terrified. I get it. When a black or brown person goes into police custody, you never know what is going to happen. You just know that when you leave police custody, if you are lucky enough to leave, you will be diminished. That is the point.
What’s most interesting is not that Jimenez and his colleagues were released shortly thereafter without any charges filed (or even being told why they had been taken into custody). That’s what class will buy a black man in America. You don’t get it quite as bad as your lower-income brethren. Jeff Zucker, the CNN president, talked to Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and the crew was quickly released. With an apology from the governor, not the cops. Cops rarely apologize, especially to black men.
But what’s most interesting is what happened to Josh Campbell, a white CNN journalist who was in the same area as Jimenez and not arrested. Campbell said his experience was the “opposite” of Jimenez’s. The cops asked him “politely to move here and there”. “A couple times I’ve moved closer than they would, like, they asked politely to move back. They didn’t pull out the handcuffs.”
It’s a cliche that the US has two systems of justice, separate and unequal, but I prefer the word Campbell used. The US has “opposite” systems of justice – one for white people and another for racial minorities, especially African Americans, Latinx and Native American people.
White progressives love to focus on class subordination (I see you, Bernie Sanders!) but there is something sticky about race. Jimenez’s professional status and calm demeanor did not stop the police from treating him like a regular black dude – the subject of their vast authority to detain and humiliate. They didn’t have an actual reason and they didn’t need one. Jimenez’s dark skin was the offense.
This is how powerful a drug white privilege is. Here we have the cops policing a rally protesting police brutality against a black man. Even in that context, when the whole world is watching figuratively, and CNN’s audience is watching literally, the cops can’t help themselves. They go all brutal lite. They play “who’s the man” even when the black man, like Jimenez, goes out of his way to show he already knows who the man is. “You are, officer, Sir.” What the cops round up are the usual suspects and the usual suspects are always black and brown.
The whole world has seen the sordid violent recording where George Floyd narrates, over 10 minutes, his own demise. Actually, there is not 10 minutes of narration because Floyd goes limp and silent after several minutes, but that does not cause former officer Chauvin to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck. The officers had received a radio run to go to a local store, where Floyd had allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill. Floyd is across the street from the store, chilling in his car with a couple of friends, when the officers approach like they are apprehending violent offenders. They order Floyd and his friends out of the car, put Floyd in handcuffs, order him to lie face down on the ground, and pin him down with their knees and hands. Floyd complains he can’t breathe. A cop responds: “Well, get up and get in the car.”
I guess that is what you call police humor.
People ask why would the police treat another human being like this, and the answer must be because they can. There are rarely consequences. US police officers kill about 1,000 people a year (compared with the UK, where in 10 years, law enforcement took a total of 23 lives) and there are rarely consequences. Since 2005, when roughly 15,000 people have been killed by US law enforcement officers, fewer than 150 have been charged with murder.
True, the officers in George Floyd’s case lost their jobs, and now face or will face criminal prosecution. This is only because of the video evidence and the high-profile protests. The reality is that, statistically, even these officers are likely to escape conviction. Of the 150 officers charged with homicide in the line of duty, the majority have been found not guilty or had charges dropped.
For the moment, we who believe in justice are supposed to be satisfied that one cop, four days after the fact, has been taken into custody, when there are multiple videos of that officer with his knee on the victim’s back as the man complains he can’t breathe.
As a black man, and as a former prosecutor, I had no idea it was so difficult to get arrested. US cops arrest about 12,000,000 people a year, but not usually each other. For the rest of us – I mean the rest of us black and brown people – we usually get arrested and charged the same day the cops decide we are guilty. The talk our parents give us about how to act around armed agents of the state is designed not so much to prevent arrests as to preserve life. It worked for Omar Jimenez.
But not for George Floyd. On the ground, dying, George Floyd pleads for his life, respectful as a person can be when he is asking for mercy from the people who are literally crushing the life out of him. He says “please”, “officer”, and calls out to his dead mother.
But the police do not remove their knees and feet and hands from Mr Floyd’s body. They don’t even stop restraining him when his body is limp and silent.
What’s to be done? Tinkering with the system makes a difference here and there but it is not enough. If a white woman was thought to have tried to use a fake $20 bill, it’s impossible to imagine the police storming her vehicle, ordering her and her friends out, placing her in handcuffs and ultimately her winding up dead. But as long as cops have that kind of power, people of color will bear the brunt. So one simple reform would be to not allow the cops to make arrests for any non-violent crime. It’s a power they can’t be trusted with, because they will abuse it.
In the end, this is not about law enforcement. It’s about enforcing white supremacy. There’s no tinkering with that, what with white supremacy being the foundation on which the country was built. The consistent big question in the quest for racial justice has been how much white supremacy is central to the identity of the US. This is what Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates argued about. If we had something approaching equal justice, would we still even be the United States? In order to accomplish that we’d have to change the constitution, which authorizes much of the police violence that communities of color complain about, and the politics which exploits white anxiety about black and brown men.
What does it mean for people of color to live in a country where, for them to have a fair shot, law and government have to be transformed? It means that we should expect more cases like Omar Jimenez and George Floyd, regardless of whether Trump or Biden wins in November.
The real problem, ultimately, is not bad apple cops, even though these four officers are rotten to the core. The real problem is demonstrated in what a bystander told the officers as they restrained him to death. “He’s human, bro.” But Floyd was not human to these officers. Enforcing the dehumanization of people of color has become, in the United States, what you call police work.
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.
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
