Police, prison and abolition

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 06, 2021 2:52 pm

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Ruby Montoya Case Raises Questions about Cooperation and Movement Lawyering
By Ryan Fatica, Contributor December 2, 2021

Ruby Montoya is doing whatever she can to lighten her punishment after publicly admitting to a string of arson and sabotage attacks against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2017.

According to a recent article in The Economist, “Montoya agreed to cooperate with the FBI” in fall 2020. During such FBI debriefs, agents typically attempt to solicit information on other activists and pressure co-defendants to testify against each other. (The Economist declined to reveal its source for this information, and in an email to Unicorn Riot, Montoya denied cooperating with the FBI).

Since summer 2021, Montoya’s lawyer has repeatedly filed motions on her behalf asking the court to allow her to file documents under seal—a practice typically avoided by those facing political charges in an effort to be transparent about engagement with law enforcement and the courts. In a motion in federal court in August, Montoya claimed she was coerced into taking action by her co-defendant Jessica Reznicek, members of the Des Moines Catholic Worker Community and others, and that she felt forced into pleading guilty to the charges against her by her former attorney.

On June 30, Reznicek was sentenced to 8 years in prison after accepting a non-cooperating plea deal.

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Jessica Reznicek (L) and Ruby Montoya (R), as they participate in a vision quest led by Indigenous elders (Photo Source: Ruby Montoya, Document 205, Supplement to Motion to Withdraw Guilty Plea, Exhibit 17, Filed November 24, 2021).

As Montoya scrambles to cast blame on others, the climate movement around her faces fundamental questions about cooperation with law enforcement and movement lawyering. Movement lawyering is a term for legal defense strategies that consider the needs of and take direction from broader political movements in its defense of individual activists.

Although there is no solid proof publicly available yet that Montoya is selling out her former comrades to the FBI, some in the movement think that the evidence is pretty clear.

“It’s quacking and it has a beak so I’m thinking it’s a duck,” said Daniel McGowan, a former political prisoner who served 7 years in prison for eco-sabotage after refusing to cooperate with the government against his co-defendants during the Green Scare. McGowan now works as a paralegal and pays close attention to cases in which activists are charged with crimes similar to those he pleaded guilty to.

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Daniel McGowan in Portland, Maine in November 2021 (Photo Source: Daniel McGowan).

McGowan believes the sealed documents in Montoya’s case demonstrate a lack of transparency.
“It’s problematic because with other evidence that we’ve seen like The Economist article that was just published and things said in court and things said to the media, I think it’s pretty apparent that Ruby Montoya is cooperating against Jessica and others and that her lawyer is facilitating that at this point.”
Daniel McGowan, paralegal and former political prisoner
Montoya’s current attorney, Daphne Silverman, refused to comment on whether Montoya is or has been cooperating with law enforcement. “As a lawyer representing Ruby Montoya,” Silverman said, “I owe Ms. Montoya a duty to represent her interests alone, which requires me to place those interests paramount and not be held back by any conflicts of interest, including the interests of a movement or another individual.”

In McGowan’s case, several of his former friends chose to provide information on him and others in hopes of receiving lighter sentences. “I remember reviewing a plea bargain of my co-defendant and I had to review it in the presence of my lawyer because there was concern about leaks,” McGowan said. “So I remember asking ‘what part is sealed?’ And my lawyer showed me the three sections and it was, of course, the sections about cooperation.”

In addition to filing sealed motions with the court, Silverman struck a blow against movement lawyering in August when she filed a motion seeking to withdraw Montoya’s guilty plea and accusing Montoya’s former attorney, Lauren Regan, of a conflict of interest stemming from her commitment to concepts like “solidarity.”

Now, a group within the National Lawyers Guild is pushing back. In an internal statement (PDF) obtained by Unicorn Riot, the National Lawyers Guild Federal Repression Taskforce condemned Silverman, who is a Guild member, for her attacks on movement lawyering and called for her expulsion from the Guild. According to the statement, the Taskforce “was formed by experienced lawyers and legal workers in the summer of 2020 to track and help respond to instances of federal law enforcement questioning, harassment, grand jury subpoenas, and other repression against social movements.”

“We wrote this statement to respond to Daphne’s attacks on movement lawyering,” the group wrote, “and to assert that Daphne should resign from Guild membership because her professed values do not align with the Guild in crucial respects. If Daphne does not resign, we believe the Guild has a responsibility to expel her from Guild membership.”

In the motion, Silverman claimed that rather than approach the case with her client’s best interest in mind, Regan had coerced Montoya into accepting the plea for political reasons. “Ms. Montoya was coerced by attorney Lauren Regan,” the motion read, “to accept a packaged plea deal in ‘solidarity’ with her ‘comrade’ in the ‘movement’, co-defendant Jessica Rae Reznicek.”

Lauren Regan and the Civil Liberties Defense Center declined to comment for this article.

The Federal Repression Taskforce statement criticized Silverman for treating concepts like “solidarity” as suspect.
“Regardless of her intent, the motion implies that solidarity with co-defendants and concern for the impact to social movements are not legitimate client concerns. To the contrary, many activist-clients choose to center goals that extend beyond the direct legal outcome of their cases.”
National Lawyers Guild Federal Repression Taskforce statement

The National Office of the National Lawyers Guild declined to comment on the Taskforce statement and on Silverman’s criticisms, citing the sensitivity of the case due to its “wide-reaching impact and potential repercussions for protest law and Indigenous peoples’ rights.”

“It is outrageous that the concept of solidarity is being touted as bullying or manipulation when one is fighting for their life in the courts of the most powerful carceral system in the world. A system which is standing up for one of the wealthiest and most exploitative corporations in the world,” said Garrett Fitzgerald, an activist legal worker in Minneapolis with over a decade of experience helping activists defend themselves against repression.
“Ruby has broken her solidarity with the movements for change she claimed to support. More painfully, she has broken solidarity with and betrayed Jessica. I can’t imagine the hurt and heartbreak Jessica must be feeling.”

Garrett Fitzgerald, activist legal worker
The Taskforce statement raises concerns about the potential broad impact of Silverman’s attacks on movement lawyering. “Daphne’s argument suggests that anyone holding a leadership position in—and possibly anyone who is a member of, employed by, or affiliated with—any of these or similar organizations has a conflict of interest any time they represent an individual activist,” the statement reads. “This, quite plainly, has potential to bolster prosecution arguments to deny activists their chosen counsel. If the argument were to gain traction, it would undermine competent movement legal defense.”
“The vision Daphne articulates is one in which activist legal representation is wholly separate from the movement, a cadre of potentially sympathetic but ultimately outside experts to call upon in times of need. Ultimately this serves the mystification and inaccessibility of the law and legal assistance, upholding a status quo in which legal technicians hold power over the communities and movements they profess to support.”

National Lawyers Guild Federal Repression Taskforce statement
For McGowan, the Taskforce statement doesn’t go far enough. The statement, McGowan said, “wants to defend a concept, the practice, of movement lawyering, but not defend a person that has been thrown under the bus, an actual NLG member, Lauren Regan.”
“The idea that Lauren Regan is some bully that pushes people to take plea bargains, and did this with Ruby is laughable. What’s worse is the silence regarding all of this. I don’t understand how the NLG [Taskforce] can write this theoretical statement, defending movement lawyering, but not defending the actual people that engage in movement lawyering.”

Daniel McGowan, paralegal and former political prisoner
The NLG’s Federal Repression Taskforce declined to comment for this article, but did confirm that the statement was produced by their group.

In response to the Taskforce statement, Silverman filed another motion in federal court last week claiming that Regan is behind the efforts to expel her from the Guild. “Tellingly, since the filing of the motion to withdraw, Ms. Regan has sought to have undersigned counsel expelled from the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) for prioritizing Ms. Montoya’s interests above the movement,” the motion reads. “A faction of the Guild at the behest of Ms. Regan has taken the position that a lawyer can prioritize a movement and require a client to act in the best interest of the movement including pleading guilty and going to prison instead of investigating defenses and proceeding to trial.”

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Ruby Montoya participates in a vision quest led by Indigenous elders (Photo Source: Ruby Montoya, Document 205, Supplement to Motion to Withdraw Guilty Plea, Exhibit 17, Filed November 24, 2021).

McGowan takes particular umbrage with Montoya’s efforts to blame Reznicek for the pipeline sabotage they both admittedly took part in. “It just comes across as blaming everyone but Ruby for things she did,” said McGowan. “And I don’t want to see anyone go to prison. I certainly don’t want to see Jessica in prison, but I wonder why is Ruby special? Why is Ruby special when Jessica is sitting in a bunk bed in a room of a hundred women at Waseca, basically on lockdown status, because the prison is on a COVID restriction?”

In a recent conversation with The Economist, Reznicek spoke from FCI-Waseca, a Federal women’s prison in Minnesota, saying that Montoya’s recent claims made her “so angry.”
“I did not do what she’s saying, not anything like that. Our journeys were so intertwined. Despite what she wants to claim, she was very much a part of it.”

Jessica Reznicek, co-defendant of Ruby Montoya
“If Ruby Montoya and Jessica did these actions together,” said McGowan, “and went on a tour doing public events talking about what they did and were fully responsible, accountable adults, then why now, when the shit hit the fan, is one of the people seeking to just get out of it? To be honest, that’s how I see all these pleadings.”

The recent allegations of Montoya’s lack of transparency and the allegations of cooperation with the FBI has caused some within the movement to question whether they should continue to support her. In September, Chase Iron Eyes with the Lakota People’s Law Project released a video in collaboration with Montoya seeking to build support for her case.

“This is a critical moment for the Indigenous and environmental justice movements,” said Iron Eyes in an email to Unicorn Riot. “Our communities live on the frontlines of the climate battle, and we strongly believe that no water protector should ever be prosecuted for standing up for Mother Earth — much less convicted as a terrorist. We absolutely cannot allow that to become the status quo. It breaks my heart to see that this happened to Jessica, and it’s why we initially supported Ruby when she asked for our help.”

[quot]“At this stage, we have no direct knowledge of cooperation by Ruby with law enforcement. If those rumors are true, that’s indefensible and precludes us from offering any further assistance. It’s important that we, as justice advocates, show solidarity with one another at all times — especially when those with access to the levers of power seek to divide us.”

Chase Iron Eyes, Lakota People’s Law Project[/quote]

Montoya also maintains a GoFundMe page to raise money for Silverman’s legal representation. The campaign lists a target fundraising goal of $176,000. According to documents recently filed by Silverman in federal court, Regan and her organization, the Civil Liberties Defense Center, had previously been representing Montoya pro-bono.

McGowan says he thinks this continued support sends a confusing message to activists about how one should behave when confronted with state repression.
“There’s a GoFundMe that is out there trying to raise money for the lawyer. And apparently there’s water protector organizations that give money to this cause. And I don’t understand it at all. I think it gives a very bad message to the movement, that at the end of the day we’re going to support people who betray their co-defendants. It’s not principled and it’s not clear, and it’s very confusing.”

Daniel McGowan, paralegal and former political prisoner
Silverman’s recent filings draw on the government’s evidence against Montoya in the DAPL sabotage case, which reportedly contain 265 reports from the private security firm TigerSwan, including numerous reports from law enforcement.

Silverman continues to allege that Montoya and Reznicek were taught to weld by undercover operatives who sought to entrap them. “TigerSwan documented Ms. Montoya’s heartfelt commitment to protecting the climate for our children,” Silverman wrote in the pleading, “documented their connection to law enforcement and documented their immediate knowledge of who caused the damage to the pipes. The only way this knowledge is possible is through a provocateur informant who was present for the training.”

“Montoya is a young female who appears to have been brainwashed,” a TigerSwan operative wrote during the investigation, according to the pleading.

TigerSwan’s involvement in the Standing Rock protests, and their investigation into Montoya and Reznicek, has been widely reported. In response to the historic protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, TigerSwan was contracted by Energy Transfer Partners to provide additional private security to the pipeline company in the face of mounting and increasingly militant public pressure. In 2017, The Intercept obtained about 1,100 TigerSwan reports from public records requests and a leak from a private contractor, documenting the company’s surveillance of anti-pipeline activists.

(Unicorn Riot interviewed Alleen Brown, one of the authors of The Intercept article, to discuss the TigerSwan documents.)
https://vimeo.com/219897248

TigerSwan was the first to identify Montoya and Reznicek as the likely perpetrators of a series of arson and sabotage attacks on the pipeline. In a May 2017 report obtained by the Intercept, TigerSwan agents wrote, “The best assessment based on the known facts is that the attack was most likely conducted by Iowa activists; Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya.”

Over four years later, as Montoya continues to deny responsibility for the actions she took, a fragmented climate justice movement seeks to define its values. In the crucible of state repression, where concepts like “movement lawyering” and “solidarity” can define futures, the Montoya case may now be laying the groundwork for what’s to come.

“Obviously, the scramble to get the shortest sentence results in the government winning and individual defendants and the movement losing,” said McGowan. “I think that when people stay together and are strong and work with each other by sharing information and sharing legal resources, we come out a lot better.”

Cover image composed by Alex Binder of Unicorn Riot.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/ruby-mon ... lawyering/


Although this story is about an environmental/native rights activist this situation is applicable to BLM and any movement against capitalism, racism, the status quo. "

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"
Yes indeed, Mr S, these people are always constrained by class interest. They all seek to 'keep it in the box', have no intention of upsetting the apple cart. Yes, they do achieve some small good, but at the expense of preventing greater good. Consider the NRDC...Ain't nothing but lesser evilism, which we know in truth is the greater evil.

And if I gotta tell ya how repugnant snitches are I don't know why I even bother...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 07, 2021 3:47 pm

Who gets to claim self-defense?
December 6, 2021 Stephen Millies

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The people’s movement fought to save Joann Little, a Black woman prisoner who killed a white prison guard rapist in self-defense.

How did Kyle Rittenhouse justify killing anti-racist activists Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, as well as wounding Gaige Grosskreutz in Kenosha, Wisconsin? This white racist vigilante who worships Trump and the police claims that he was merely defending himself.

The right of self-defense was also claimed by Kenosha cop Rusten Sheskey for shooting Jacob Blake seven times on Aug. 23, 2020, leaving him paralyzed. The shooting of Blake, a Black father of seven children, led to the anti-racist protests in Kenosha.

Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley refused to press charges against Shesky. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland declined to prosecute.

Four New York City police officers claimed self-defense when they fired 41 bullets at Amadou Diallo. The unarmed African immigrant was killed in the Bronx on Feb. 4, 1999. New York Gov. George Pataki moved the trial out of the Bronx to assure the cops’ acquittal.

Sean Bell was killed by police on what was supposed to be his wedding day on Nov. 25, 2006, in the New York borough of Queens. After firing 50 shots at the unarmed Black man, the police claimed self-defense.

They were acquitted in a non-jury trial by Judge Cooperman.

Judge Schroeder in Rittenhouse’s trial might as well have been his defense attorney.

Self-defense was the excuse for Cleveland cop Timothy Loehmann for killing 12-year-old Tamir Rice. The Black child was carrying a toy gun.

So was 13-year-old Nicholas Naquan Heyward Jr., who was playing cops and robbers in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Houses on Sept. 27, 1994. Officer Brian George saw the toy gun and killed the honor student. The cop wasn’t even indicted since this too was allegedly “self-defense.”

Even the vigilantes who killed the Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia claimed to be acting in self-defense. It was only because the Black community mobilized that these lynchers were convicted.

No right of self-defense for oppressed

Every legal system admits that people have the right to defend themselves. This right was never meant to apply to the oppressed.

Those who were enslaved didn’t have the right to defend themselves against their slave masters. Serfs didn’t have the right to self-defense against serf owners.

Celia was a 19-year old enslaved African who was continually raped by the Missouri slave master Robert Newsom since she was 14. Her two daughters were born because of these rapes.

Newsom crawled into Celia’s cabin one last time on June 23, 1855. Celia defended herself with a stick, killing Newsom. Celia was indicted for murder for defending herself while she was pregnant.

Circuit Court Judge William Hall instructed the all-white jury that “if Newsom was in the habit of having intercourse with the defendant who was his slave and went to her cabin on the night he was killed to have intercourse with her or for any other purpose and while he was standing in the floor talking to her she struck him with a stick which was a dangerous weapon and knocked him down, and struck him again after he fell, and killed him by either blow, it is murder in the first degree.”

The jury found Celia guilty and the judge sentenced her to be hanged. Celia escaped but was recaptured. After her child was born stillborn, she was hanged in Fulton, Missouri, on Dec. 21, 1855.

One hundred twenty years later, Joann Little was acquitted of killing the white prison guard who attempted to rape her in North Carolina. The imprisoned Black woman took Clarence Alligood’s ice pick and defended herself with it.

Even though Alligood’s body was found naked from the waist down, Little, who had escaped, was declared an “outlaw.” This allowed police to kill her on sight. The prosecutor claimed Little had lured Alligood to her cell.

Like the mobilization to secure justice for Ahmaud Arbery, it was only because people organized that Joann Little was declared not guilty. This was the first time that a woman was found not guilty on grounds of self-defense for defending herself against rape.

Never forget Sammie Osborne!

No Indigenous person was ever given the right to defend themself against the U.S. government that was committing genocide against them. President Abraham Lincoln had 38 members of the Dakota Sioux Nation hanged on Dec. 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota.

Killer cops always claim that they had to make split-second decisions to save their lives. On the Sunday morning of Aug. 17, 1941, the Black sharecropper Sammie Osborne had to make a split-second decision in Barnwell County, South Carolina.

The day before his white landlord, William Walker, had forced him to work at gunpoint despite Osborne having an injured foot. Now, the drunken Walker barged into the shack where Osborne had been sleeping.

He beat the 18-year-old sharecropper with a stick that he held in one hand while holding a .32 caliber pistol in the other. Seeing that his life was in mortal danger, Osborne grabbed a shotgun and killed Walker.

There was no right to self-defense for Sammie Osborne. According to the 1940 census, Barnwell County had a 64% Black majority population. But a jury of 12 white men found Osborne guilty.

Sammie Osborne was sentenced to death by Strom Thurmond, who later became South Carolina’s governor and ran as the presidential candidate of the States’ Rights Party in 1948.

Thurmond spent 48 years in the U.S. Senate as its most notorious racist. His friend, Joe Biden, spoke at his memorial service.

After being resentenced to death by another judge, the now 20-year-old Sammie Osborne was strapped in South Carolina’s electric chair on Nov. 19, 1943. As the electrodes were placed on his head, Osborn’s last words were, “I’m ready to go because I know that I am not guilty.”

The next year, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. was burned to death in the same electric chair.

The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse gives a license to kill for every other white racist vigilante. All those who defend Rittenhouse, like Jimmy Dore or The Militant “socialist newsweekly,” put themselves on the side of white supremacy.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2021/ ... f-defense/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 21, 2021 2:04 pm

Everything’s wrong with it: the U.S. death penalty
December 20, 2021

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By Camille Landry for Alliance for Global Justice – December 2021

Volumes have been written about it. Hundreds of thousands of people have protested it, written to their legislators and congress members, prayed about it, sung about it, and hoped that it would end. It has been condemned as inhumane, ineffective, racist, cruel, antiquated, vengeful and just plain wrong by individuals and groups ranging from several popes and other religious leaders to criminal justice scholars, police chiefs and prison wardens. Yet the death penalty in the United States persists.

The death penalty remains one of the most egregious offenses against human rights in the world. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights clearly states that the right to life is paramount among human rights.

The United States is alone among so-called democratic nations in its utilization of the death penalty. More than 70% of the world’s countries have abolished capital punishment in law or practice. The U.S. is an outlier among its close allies in its continued use of the death penalty. No other nation that calls itself a democracy regularly kills its residents. We will leave the question as to whether the United States is truly a democracy for another time and place.

Snuffing out life in this manner is the ultimate violation of human rights. Even worse, the death penalty is an ineffective means of preventing crime and keeping communities safe. State-sponsored murder is nothing but vengeance, a relic of the kind of violent, inhumane practices that represent our darkest and most shameful past.

Despite ample evidence that the death penalty is ineffective, racist, costly and immoral, we persist in wreaking it upon the people of this nation. In light of evidence that it is unnecessary and wrong, this infringement of decency and justice is despicable.

Innocent people are sentenced to death and executed. Legal scholar William Blackstone said, “It is better that ten guilty men go free than to execute a single innocent man.” Yet many innocent people in the United States have been executed.

For every 8.3 people on death row in the United States in the modern era, one person has been exonerated in a court of law. The death penalty carries the inherent risk of executing an innocent person. Since 1973, at least 186 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated. There are many more who maintain their innocence and have strong evidence to back up their claims yet remain on death row – or have already been killed.

Of 350 persons who were mistakenly convicted of potentially capital crimes, whose cases were reviewed in courtrooms across the country, 139 were sentenced to death, and 23 were actually executed. Researchers say that there are probably many more cases not yet identified (Stanford Law Review study of 1900 to 1985).

The case of Troy Davis is one of the best-known recent examples of an innocent man who was murdered. Mr. Davis was accused of shooting an off-duty police officer. There was no ballistic evidence to support this accusation. Other people were implicated in the shooting. Counsel for Mr. Davis was inadequate and inept. There was an international outcry against the planned execution of a man who had a credible case for his innocence; yet Troy Davis was killed by the state of Georgia on September 21, 2011.

Misconduct by police and prosecutors is common. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, in death penalty cases, perjury/false accusations and official misconduct are the leading causes of wrongful convictions. A record 111 exonerations in 2018 involved witnesses who lied on the stand or falsely accused the defendant. In 50 of these cases, the defendant was falsely accused of a crime that never happened.

Misconduct by police or prosecutors (or both) was involved in 79% of homicide exonerations in 2018. Concealing evidence that casts doubt on the defendant’s guilt is the most common type of misconduct, which includes police officers threatening witnesses, forensic analysts faking test results, and prosecutors presenting false testimony.

Official misconduct is more common in death penalty cases, especially if the defendant is Black. Data shows that 87% of Black exonerees who were sentenced to death were victims of official misconduct, compared to 67% of white death row exonerees.

“The National Registry of Exonerations report on Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States reveals that 87% of Black death-row exonerees had been victims of official misconduct, as compared to 67% of white death-row exonerees. Official misconduct is among the most difficult and time-consuming of evidence to unearth, and so it is not surprising that the most recent exonerations — many of which have taken two decades or more — provide ever starker evidence of race effects. The NRE data shows that 20 of the last 21 wrongly condemned African Americans (95%) to have been exonerated were victims of official misconduct, as compared to 8 of the last 12 white death-row exonerees (67%).

The National Registry reports that these racial disparities are “for the most part” the product of police misconduct. The Registry reports ‘a modest difference’ in prosecutorial misconduct rates by prosecutors in death-row exonerations, with prosecutorial misconduct present in 59% of death-row exonerations of African Americans, as compared to 53% of death-row exonerations of whites. However, it reported ‘a large difference in the rate of misconduct by police’: 59% for Black death-sentenced exonerees compared to 44% for whites. The Registry reports that “the high rate of misconduct by police in murder cases with Black defendants is reflected in the nature of the misconduct that occurs. Concealing exculpatory evidence, the most common type, is primarily a form of prosecutorial misconduct; there is relatively little difference in its frequency by race…. On the other hand, witness tampering is committed almost exclusively by police officers” and occurs nearly twice as frequently with Black murder defendants.”


Racism is rampant in the way the death penalty is applied. Black people are four times more likely to be sentenced to death than white people charged with the same crime. People who kill whites are far more likely to receive the death penalty than people who kill Black people, even though Black people are more likely to be murdered than whites.

Figure 1: Impact of Race on Executions
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Mentally ill people are often executed despite laws forbidding this practice.

The execution of those with mental illness or “the insane” is clearly prohibited by international law. Virtually every country in the world prohibits the execution of people with mental illness. Often the person who makes the determination of sanity in a murder trial is an employee of the prosecution; few defendants can afford to hire their own psychiatrists for determination of sanity. The Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to shield mentally ill people from the death penalty, saying only that people who are insane cannot be executed. But “insane” is narrowly defined as “those who are unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it” — a definition that excludes most people with severe mental illness. This includes people with diagnoses of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury – illnesses that make it difficult or impossible to distinguish between reality and fantasy, or to make reasoned choices, or exhibit ordinary levels of self-control. Execution of mentally ill people is cruel, vicious and unnecessary – a clear violation of human rights that is recognized by virtually every nation – except the USA.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “there are significant gaps in the legal protection accorded severely mentally ill defendants charged with or convicted of a capital crime. Most notably, this country still permits the execution of the severely mentally ill. The problem is not a small one. A leading mental health group, Mental Health America, estimates that five to ten percent of all death row inmates suffer from a severe mental illness.”

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Cecil Clayton was executed by the State of Missouri on March 17, 2015. He was 74 years old, suffered from dementia, had an IQ of 71, was missing a significant part of his brain due to a sawmill accident in 1972 which prompted the removal of about 20% of his frontal lobe (the part of the brain that governs impulse control and problem-solving). He had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia, extreme paranoia, and more. He checked himself into a mental hospital stating that he could not control his temper. His psychiatrist concluded “there is presently no way that this man could be expected to function in the world of work. Were he pushed to do so, he would become a danger both to himself and to others.” He had suicidal and homicidal impulses. Six separate psychiatric evaluations found that Clayton should be exempt from execution because he could not understand that he would be executed, or the reasons for his execution. Mr. Clayton was denied a formal competency hearing that could have spared him from execution. MRI evidence of Mr. Clayton’s missing brain tissue was presented at the trial, to no avail.

The death penalty does not deter crime. States that have the most executions have the highest rates of violent crime. The 2010 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate and accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast and West have the lowest murder rates and hold less than 1% of all executions. The death penalty is not a deterrent to violent crime. Consistent with previous years, the 2010 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate and accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast and West have the lowest murder rates and hold less than 1% of all executions.

The death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment. It costs 2-5 times as much to sentence someone to death as it does to sentence them to life in prison. A death penalty trial typically costs 95 percent more than a non-capital trial. It costs taxpayers from $2 to $5 million per death sentence for the trials and appeals. Life in prison averages $1 million (40 years at $25,000/year). Louisiana State Attorney General and former District Attorney Jeff Landry says that he can try a second-degree murder case for $15,000-20,000 instead of $250,000 for a death penalty trial. Money spent on killing people could be used to remedy the root causes of violence or to keep communities safe in other ways.

The death penalty is applied unequally in other ways, too. Most people are shocked to find that whether the death penalty is imposed is determined more by where the crime was committed, and where the capital trial took place than the actual facts of the case. Smaller counties have lower budgets for prosecutors and are thus less likely to charge defendants with capital murder. Larger, more populous and prosperous counties are more likely to bring death penalty cases to trial. Suburban counties, although they have lower murder rates than urban counties, send more murderers to death row than their urban neighbors do.

And sometimes people are put to death because of clerical errors. Cory Maples, who was convicted of murder in Alabama, had the appeal of his death sentence denied because of a missed deadline. This failure was not, however, his fault. The state had sent a letter to the national law firm representing him telling him his first appeal had been denied (which meant that the clock on the next deadline was started), but since his lawyers had left the firm, the notice was returned to the state of Alabama unopened. The state made no effort to resend the document. Despite the fact that neither he nor his lawyers were aware of the initial denial (in large part because of the state’s actions), the state denied his subsequent appeal because he missed the deadline. Even conservative Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts found this unacceptable.

Equal justice under the law is a fundamental principle of human rights. The death penalty clearly violates that principle.

The death penalty perpetuates violent crime. As a symbol of “being tough on crime,” the death penalty helps politicians get elected. Since it does not reduce violent crime, it wastes resources. States that have abolished the death penalty can redirect the money saved into programs that actually reduce violent crime.

Poor people are executed much more often than wealthy murderers. The U.S. justice system treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Over 99% of the people on death row are indigent, according to one U.S. Appeals Court judge. Persons of all income levels commit murder, but poor people are the primary recipients of the death penalty. Mentally ill people are executed. Even though the law forbids the execution of those who are mentally ill, experience shows that the determination of sanity is generally made after very limited contact with the accused, often by psychiatrists employed by the prosecution. Inevitably, some who are ill are declared “sane,” and fit for execution.

Many people accused of capital crimes are destitute. They rely upon public defenders for their defense; these attorneys have sparse budgets that cannot pay for expert witnesses who could prove their client’s innocence. Some of the attorneys who represent defendants in capital cases have come to the courtroom drunk, fallen asleep during the trial, and failed to call witnesses who could prove their client’s innocence. Some merely have little to no experience in defending capital cases. They’re fresh out of law school or inadequately trained or prepared to defend their clients’ lives.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.”

Many victims’ families oppose the death penalty.
It only prolongs pain for families as it inevitably drags out the legal process and leaves families in limbo waiting for an execution that may never come. Proponents of capital punishment have long argued for the death penalty as a necessary way to bring closure to family members of homicide victims. But science suggests that achieving closure through executions is a myth, and in growing numbers of family members of homicide victims do not want the death penalty to be pursued in the deaths of their loved ones. “I know how it feels to lose a son,” stated a mother whose 12-year-old was gunned down in the streets. “Why would I want another mother to go through that?”

Bud Welch, who lost his daughter Julie in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, said “of convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh, “At first I’d have killed him myself if I’d had the chance.” As the trial wound on, Mr. Welch realized that the execution of McVeigh would serve little purpose other than vengeance. Bud Welch met and befriended the father of the man who had murdered his daughter and 167 other people, including little children in a daycare center. Bud said of Bill McVeigh, “I recognized it because I was feeling that pain, too.” Bud Welch is now an international advocate for the abolition of the death penalty. “About a year before the execution I found it in my heart to forgive Tim McVeigh. It was a release for me rather than for him.”

Bud Welch is not alone in the realization that the execution of a murderer does little to assuage the grief of a survivor. Six months after the bombing a poll taken in Oklahoma City of victims’ families and survivors showed that 85 percent wanted the death penalty for Tim McVeigh. Six years later that figure had dropped to nearly half, and now most of those who supported his execution have come to believe it was a mistake. In other words, they didn’t feel any better after Tim McVeigh was taken from his cell and killed.

The jury is in: the death penalty is racist, classist, ineffective, cruel, unusual, expensive, unjust, incurably flawed, and representative of our most basic and ignorant habits. It is an egregious violation of human rights. In other words, everything is wrong with it. It must end, and soon.

https://afgj.org/everythings-wrong-with ... th-penalty
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 03, 2022 3:50 pm

[ib]After the largest anti-racist uprising in the US, historic trials provide important lessons[/b]

In the year 2021, it was the turn of the US government, particularly its judicial system, to respond to the protests of 2020

December 31, 2021 by Natalia Marques

Image
Protestors in Midtown Manhattan call for an end to police brutality after Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict. Photo: Vincent Tsai

In the summer of 2020, the people of the United States witnessed the largest anti-racist struggle in the country’s history after a video of the brutal murder of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin went viral. While Floyd’s murder was the catalyst, the first year of the pandemic was marked by increased police and vigilante violence. Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot in a botched “citizen’s arrest” by vigilantes and Breonna Taylor, who was shot dead while asleep by police, were among the most egregious cases.

In the year 2021, it was the turn of the US government, particularly its judicial system, to respond to the protests of 2020. Historic trials of the killers of unarmed Black people and protestors were set to answer an important question: how would the system respond to the outcry of millions against racist violence?

Derek Chauvin: guilty on all charges

In April 2021, killer cop Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all charges against him: unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. In June, Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.

The verdict was hailed by many as an important victory as police officers who murder civilians rarely face consequences in the United States. In 2020, out of 1,126 people killed by police, officers were charged with a crime in only 16 cases. Even in high profile cases such as those of the officers who killed Mike Brown or Eric Garner, the police involved went punishment-free for the murder of unarmed Black men.

Many also considered it an important step in ending indiscriminate police murder of Black people. Anti-racist activist Jacqui Lewis said of the verdict: “It’s not justice… but this is accountability. Now we demand a new standard: You will be held accountable.”

Even as the trial was underway, two notable police killings occurred, which, though unrelated to the proceedings, drew attention to the systemic issue of police violence beyond Chauvin as an individual. On April 11, young father Daunte Wright was shot by a police officer during a traffic stop 10 miles from the trial, and the same day that Derek Chauvin was found guilty, 16-year-old Ma’khia Bryant was shot by Ohio police.

The process of the trial itself also revealed the depths of the epidemic of racist violence in the United States. This was clear in how Derek Chauvin’s defense built their arguments around a character assassination of George Floyd as a large, threatening drug addict, who died of underlying health problems such as drug use, rather than Chauvin’s knee on his neck. The defense even brought out David Fowler as an expert witness, despite his clear ties to the cottage industry of “experts”, such as medical examiners, who work to keep killer police officers free of accountability.

During his time as Maryland’s chief medical examiner, Fowler was key in helping police avoid accountability for the murder of Black people, such as in the case of victim Anton Black. As stated by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, “Fowler claimed that Anton died of natural causes, saying that his bipolar disorder was a contributing factor, rather than the weight pressed on Anton while he was held facedown by three white officers and a white civilian.” Fowler adopted a similar attitude for the George Floyd case, attempting to distract from Chauvin’s murder by citing cardiac arrhythmia, heart disease, and drug use as factors in his death.

However, the Chauvin trial broke with the norm in that the Minneapolis police decided against standing with Chauvin. Breaking with what is known as the “blue wall of silence”, in which US police will refuse to report a colleague’s brutality, the police chief of Chauvin’s own department testified against him. It seemed as if the chief of police was attempting to distance his police force from Chauvin’s actions when he said that his murder of Floyd “is not part of our training, and it is certainly not part of our ethics or our values.” These words ring hollow in light of the fact that Chauvin has been involved in two shootings, one fatal, and had at least 17 complaints made against him before George Floyd. These actions went unpunished by the Minneapolis Police Department.

If Chauvin’s actions did not break with the norm of the ultra-violent US police, why did George Floyd’s murder result in a guilty verdict? Many point to the massive movement against racist brutality as the pivotal reason.

Activist Kerbie Joseph, an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition and the Audre Lorde Project, who herself lead anti-police brutality fightbacks such as the campaign for justice for Akai Gurley, told Peoples Dispatch, “Because the struggle was that big and lasted for so long, we were in the streets for 28 days…It shifted the narrative of the jurors, it shifted the narrative of the media, it shifted the narrative of the music that was made…All of that shifted because of people being on the ground.”

Killer Kyle Rittenhouse walks free

In sharp contrast to Chauvin, the next key trial witnessed by the people of the United States was that of Kyle Rittenhouse, accused of homicide and related charges. The 17-year-old had crossed state lines with an AR-15 rifle to protect businesses from looting, as he claimed, by protesters after mass demonstrations against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. At the protest, Rittenhouse linked up with a group of armed men, brought to Kenosha by a Facebook post on the right-wing militia page “Kenosha Guard,” asking, “Any Patriots willing to take up arms and defend our City tonight from the evil thugs?” As the night went on, police were caught on video chatting with Rittenhouse and other armed men, giving them water and saying, “We appreciate you guys, we really do.”

That night, Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz. After a national spectacle of a trial, Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges relating to his shooting of those three people.

To those following the proceedings, it soon became clear that the judge in Rittenhouse’s trial, Bruce Schroeder, had a clear bias towards the defense. Before the trial even began, the judge barred the prosecution from using the word “victim” to describe those shot by Rittenhouse, as he claimed it was a “loaded” word. On the other hand, he permitted the defense to use the words “looter”, “arsonist”, and “rioter” to describe the three men. The judge also threw out key video evidence taken of Rittenhouse watching alleged looters exiting a CVS, in which he says, “Bro, I wish I had my f—ing AR. I’d start shooting rounds at them.”

Judge Schroeder also shot down what was viewed by some as the easiest charge to prove against Rittenhouse, one count of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18. There were multiple other examples of Schroeder cozying up to Rittenhouse, such as telling the courtroom to applaud for a defense witness, calling a recess after Rittenhouse cried on the witness stand, and allowing Rittenhouse himself to draw the names of jurors from a raffle-style tumbler.

Meanwhile, after 15-year-old Guyanese-American Prakash Churaman was accused of killing his best friend in 2014, he was arrested, handcuffed to a pipe on the wall, and interrogated until he finally said, “I’ll say whatever you want to hear.” On the other hand, Rittenhouse walked directly towards police with his hands up after murdering two people, and was only arrested the next day.

Kyle Rittenhouse is now being courted by the right-wing, and was the keynote speaker at an event organized by the conservative organization Turning Point USA. Following his forced confession, Prakash Churaman spent six years in the infamous Rikers Island Prison and is still fighting to clear himself of charges, 7 years later.

Lynchers found guilty against all odds

Soon after the Rittenhouse trial ended, the killers of unarmed Black man Ahmaud Arbery were found guilty of murder. The guilty verdict came after a trial which put on display the reality of racist lynching, an unsolved problem in the United States that dates back to the slavery era.

In February 2020, three men, Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan, pursued jogger Ahmaud Arbery in two separate vehicles. These men believed, without evidence, that Arbery was behind recent burglaries in the area. In the shocking video of his murder, Ahmaud Arbery struggles to defend himself, and is in turn shot by Travis. According to William Bryan, Travis McMichael called Arbery a “f – – – ing n – – – er” as he lay on the ground, dying.

Despite the seemingly clear facts in the case, reports showed that the judicial system in Georgia was prepared to let the perpetrators off scot-free. Jackie Johnson, the then District Attorney of Brunswick, Georgia, where Arbery was murdered, had a personal connection to Gregory McMichael, who had worked as an investigator in her office until 2019. According to reports McMichael contacted her shortly after the murder, pleading for advice.

Johnson then recused herself from the initial investigation, transferring the case to another district attorney, George Barnhill. It was later found that Barnhill’s son had also worked alongside McMichael. It was also later discovered that Johnson had told officers not to arrest the McMichaels. On September 8, 2021, Johnson was indicted for obstruction of justice.

Still, it was only after the video was made public at the request of Gregory McMichael himself, that arrests were made of the trio. McMichael believed that the video would defend his public image, but the video evidence of the brutal murder ignited nationwide protests.

Here too, the trial of the defendants revealed how racism permeates policies and institutions in the US. During the trial, the defense did everything they could to keep Black people out of the courtroom, despite claiming that the case wasn’t about race. 11 out of 12 Black jurors were struck from the case, leaving a jury of 11 white jurors and one Black juror. When Black pastors attended the trial alongside Ahmaud Arbery’s family, providing moral support, defense lawyer Kevin Gough brazenly requested that there be “no more Black pastors in here,” citing concerns of “intimidation”.

The defense mounted a case based on Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law, a law enacted in the era of slavery that emboldened white Georgia citizens to arrest escaping Black people, and the claim that the murder was motivated by “self-defense”. This exchange between Travis McMichael and the prosecution exposed the self-defense claim as a lie:

Prosecutor: He [Arbery] never yelled at you guys?

Travis McMichael: No ma’am.

Prosecutor: Never threatened you at all?

Travis McMichael: No ma’am.

Prosecutor: Didn’t brandish any weapons?

Travis McMichael: No ma’am.

Prosecutor: Didn’t pull out any guns?

Travis McMichael: No ma’am.

Prosecutor: Didn’t pull out any knife?

Travis McMichael: No ma’am.

Prosecutor: Never reached for anything did he?

Travis McMichael: No.

Prosecutor: He just ran?

Travis McMichael: Yes, he was just running.


Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law was repealed by an otherwise conservative governor, Brian Kemp, earlier this year.

Kim Potter, Valentina Orellana-Peralta, and the ongoing struggle
Kim Potter, the police officer who fatally shot Daunte Wright in Minneapolis during the Chauvin trial, was found guilty of first and second degree manslaughter on December 23. Her defense was fashioned around Potter’s ongoing claim that she had mistook her taser for a gun. Much of the news coverage has focused on the same claim, along with a sympathetic spin exemplified by headlines such as Kim Potter on Daunte Wright death: ‘I’m sorry it happened’, or Kim Potter gives emotional testimony; defense rests its case. However, as a juror remarked, “The Taser kind of feels like a mouse click whereas the trigger has some trigger draw weight,” a difference one would expect to be obvious to a 26-year veteran of the police force.

The recently released footage of police opening fire in a clothing store in Los Angeles and killing 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta in a dressing room has once again sparked anger over the disproportionately violent responses of police. The LAPD officers claim they were trying to apprehend a suspect, Daniel Elena Lopez, who was also fatally shot.

The epidemic of racist violence in the United States is far from over. Movement leaders, such as those involved in the 2020 uprisings against racism, believe that a stronger movement is needed to truly end this violence.

“We have to keep the struggle at a high. If people aren’t in the streets, we have to keep building, that’s our role,” declared Kerbie Joseph. “Even though it hurts us…But it’s through that pain that we’re able to put seeds to make some type of victory. And that’s what we got. This wasn’t possible 10 years ago. It wasn’t possible five years ago. It’s because of movements before 2020 that made it possible for these verdicts to happen. It’s because of years, decades, centuries of struggle, but not just struggle, but organizing. So every step is a victory.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/12/31/ ... t-lessons/

Credit where credit is due, a whole lot of the protest and especially the support it gets is due to the ever greater presence of video recording devices of whatever nature in the hands of significant numbers of working people. All of these atrocities have been going on all along. It has only been these videos which put the lie to the cops, prosecutors and politicians, which have made the truth undeniable to even many who wallowed in denial.Seeing is believing. Ask any primate.

Nonetheless, we can use all the help we can get and if the capitalists wish to sell us a particularly useful piece of rope then we should make the most of it.
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 07, 2022 2:54 pm

Image
AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File
Copaganda

I.

You can call it Reverse Miranda—
Or—you can call it Copaganda:
highly effective $campaign, permanent budget drain
Preying on poor Peoples’ pain—Protecting 1% reign...

We are the world’s finest fiction writers
Supremely skilled with Dr. Goebbels gift for gas-
lighting—for disseminating disinformation, mis-
information, 1/2 truths—for fashioning big lies...

We deploy 70 scribes—70 Fox-box foot soldiers
as flame-throwers of fear. We bleed out budgets—
whether crime is up or crime is down—with most
Sophisticated Psy-Ops some call: “Shakedown...”

“If you come to The City of Angels ruled by
devils we will treat you like a King—Rodney King—
maybe kill your daughter, the eve of her Quinceañera?
We can’t Protect you from Capitalist deviltry we Serve...
You remain medical emergencies, unmasked coughs,
shoulder to shoulder sneezes; ripoffs and layoffs away
from sidewalk slumber in 1% tent colonies we patrol...”

II.

You can call it Reverse Miranda—
Or—you can call it Copaganda
highly effective $campaign, permanent budget drain
Preying on poor Peoples’ pain—Protecting 1% reign...

A wounded man’s ‘bleeding out’ on Oakland’s
Adams Point near the lake. The police prance
and putz around—backing his neighbors away.
A Highland Hospital emergency room nurse rushes
to aid the man. Her humanity earns threats of arrest.
For gunmen, yellow tape emblazoned: POLICE LINE
DO NOT CROSS is the preferred, time-tested treatment...

III.

You can call it Reverse Miranda—
Or—you can call it Copaganda:
highly effective $campaign, permanent budget drain
Preying on poor Peoples’ pain—Protecting 1% reign...

A B train is heading home to Harlem. A Black man
exiting collapses. A young lunch bucket brother bolts
into action. And soon a rainbow of Columbia medical
students surround them; comforting and stabilizing the
fallen one.
We riders are once again awed by humanity, solidarity
and skills!

Navy blue clouds swarm the platform and signal bad,
Bad weather. Not the drunken brutes with badges that
Descended on City Hall; urinating their beer on its steps—
Extorting the Big Apple’s first Black mayor...

Still, the first thing they do is shoo the students and lunch
bucket brother away, barking:
“This is a police matter—get back—get back!” Up goes in-
dispensable yellow tape!
Fishing in the fallen man’s pockets, they find the thimble-full
of thin blu line their racket runs on...

© 2022. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/copaganda
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 28, 2022 2:50 pm

NYT Twists Stats to Insist We Need More Policing
JULIE HOLLAR

The New York Times handed over its popular The Morning daily newsletter on January 18 to new hire German Lopez, formerly of Vox. His debut edition of the data-driven newsletter (usually helmed by David Leonhardt) was headlined “Examining the Spike in Murders.”

As criminal justice activist and expert Alec Karakatsanis (Twitter, 1/18/22) pointed out, the analysis presented as indisputable the notion that a rise in homicides demands a police-based solution—a position that is, in fact, highly disputed, and worth debunking in detail, since it’s a popular one these days, both in the Times and in other prominent outlets (FAIR.org, 6/24/21, 7/20/21).

More police as racial justice?
NYT: Examining the Spike in Murders
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German Lopez (New York Times, 1/18/22) argues that the “short-term fixes” for a rise in murder involve “more focused policing, targeting the people and places most likely to be violent.”
Lopez describes an increase in the murder rate over 2020 and 2021 (which, it’s worth pointing out, is still lower than it was from 1970 through 1996) and explains that victims are disproportionately Black, framing his analysis in terms of racial justice:

The violence remains a grave example of racial inequality in the US. We have real solutions, with strong evidence, to deal with the problem, experts said. But those solutions need support from the public and lawmakers to go anywhere.

Lopez appears to see himself as working to right a wrong here, helping to inform the public about concrete solutions that will address racial inequality. And yet one of his central theories—that a policing “pullback” helped drive rising homicides, so police are a necessary part of the solution—not only rests on very shaky ground, its prescription entails heavy costs in terms of racial justice that Lopez refuses to consider.

Lopez cites zero Black sources about the causes or the solutions. Aside from a woman from Chicago who simply describes her experience of hearing gunshots in her neighborhood, his other three named sources are white professors of criminology and public safety.

Lopez says “experts” point to “three broad explanations” for the increased murder rate: “the pandemic,” “changes in policing” and “more guns.” Two of these are fairly straightforward: Gun sales and carrying greatly increased, which one would expect to increase the number of murders, since numbers of guns correlate with numbers of homicides. And the pandemic disrupted social services and safety nets that help prevent violence.

As for “changes in policing,” Lopez explains:

The fallout from the 2020 racial justice protests and riots could have contributed to the murder spike. Police officers, scared of being caught in the next viral video, may have pulled back on proactive anti-violence practices. More of the public lost confidence in the police, possibly reducing the kind of cooperation needed to prevent murders. In extreme circumstances, the lack of confidence in the police could have led some people to take the law into their own hands—in acts of street or vigilante violence.

It’s a theory (sometimes called “the Ferguson Effect”) that hinges on an awful lot of “could have”s, “may have”s and “possibly”s. It’s extremely popular among police chiefs and their boosters who, seeking to defend against movements challenging police violence, deflect blame back onto protesters.

Questioning the timing

After introducing the possibilities, Lopez turns to sorting out the likelihood of each. He argues that “timing” undermines the pandemic hypothesis, since “the murder spike took off in May and June 2020, months after Covid began to spread in the US,” and “other countries didn’t experience similar spikes during the pandemic.” Meanwhile, the same timing “supports” the policing explanation, because, he says, the murder rate rose “unusually quickly shortly after George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests,” and killings increased in 2015 and 2016 “after protests over policing during those years.”

The comparison to other countries is not terribly useful without much more fine-grained analysis, as it ignores their wide range of differences in terms of their governmental response to the pandemic and other factors that impact violent crime: inequality, lack of social safety nets and availability of guns.

As for timing, as Karakatsanis (Twitter, 1/20/22) points out, experts are very hesitant to speculate about short-term effects on crime because of the complex interacting factors. In fact, there’s even a great deal of uncertainty about the factors impacting historical, long-term crime rates. But there’s plenty to cast doubt on the protest/policing explanation. Murder rates are seasonal, lower when it’s cold (as when lockdowns started) and peaking every summer—the same time police protests have historically happened. Previous research hasn’t found an impact of “de-policing” on homicide. And there’s a great deal of diversity across cities when you take apart the data: NYC and LA, for instance, which both had major BLM protests, didn’t experience unusual homicide surges immediately afterwards.

Image
Source: Citycrimestats.com, 12/31/20

Lopez inserts one of his experts, criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, to close out the brief discussion of the possible causes: “All three played a role. What’s difficult is to assign priority to one compared to the others.”

In other words, readers are to understand that it’s anyone’s guess whether “fallout” from racial justice protests was a bigger factor in the rising murder rate than the pandemic or a flood of new guns—and Lopez pretty clearly nudges readers toward guessing the answer is that it was.

‘No getting around’ more punishment

Correctly identifying causes is crucial, since the causes point to different solutions. “In the short term,” Lopez writes,

there’s solid evidence for policing—specifically, more focused policing, targeting the people and places most likely to be violent. With some of these strategies, the police work with other social services to lift violent perpetrators out of that life.

He then quotes another of his experts to leave no room for argument: “I’m as much a reformer as anybody, but the short-term solutions around high violence are mainly punitive. There’s no getting around that.” (In case you were wondering whether “proactive anti-violence practices” really meant anything but more punishment.)
Murders are spiking. Police should be part of the solution.
Image
“Here’s proof that cops are good” seems like a good way to get a gig at the New York Times (Vox, 9/27/21).
The link Lopez uses to back up his claims of “solid evidence” behind policing directs readers to a piece he wrote for Vox in September (9/27/21) with a headline that made clear his position on this issue before the Times hired him: “Murders Are Spiking. Police Should Be Part of the Solution.”

One problem with Lopez’s argument in the piece—which is much longer and includes more nuance and caveats than his Times version—is that he used evidence about overall reductions in crime to make arguments about homicide, when in fact the two don’t move in tandem. (Indeed, overall crime rates have gone down during the pandemic, as Lopez has elsewhere acknowledged—Vox, 7/21/21.)

Two key studies he relied on, for instance, noted that they found no or minimal reductions in violent crime with increased policing. A third (NEBR, 12/20) emphasized that while it did find a small reduction in homicides,

reducing funding for police could allow increased funding for other alternatives. Indeed an array of high-quality research suggests that crime can, in certain contexts, be reduced through methods other than policing or its by-product, incarceration.

That’s particularly noteworthy, given that the study found that increased policing also resulted in more arrests for low-level crimes like loitering and drug possession, which in turn places more burdens on the most affected communities: crippling court fees and fines, plus the effects of even brief incarceration like loss of income, jobs or housing, breaking up of families and disruption of mental health and health services. And for all that, increased incarceration doesn’t even increase public safety or reduce recidivism.

In other words, if policing in some form can modestly bring down murder rates, it also incurs very real costs, above and beyond budgetary ones—which are rarely if ever measured in these studies.

In the Vox piece, Lopez did acknowledge many caveats to the bold argument made in the headline. He noted that the research suggests that not just any policing works, for instance. This is where the “proactive policing” idea comes in, a favorite of policing proponents, and a big part of the argument that a police “pullback” causes the rise in crime. It’s true that many studies have found that specific, focused policing practices have produced some (mostly small, short-term) decreases in crime. But a) that’s not what most police departments do, except in a few ad hoc short-term programs (Police Quarterly, 1/20), so it could be expected to have had next to no impact on the nationwide homicide rate, and b) the studies once again don’t take into account the costs of these programs, including the negative impacts on heavily policed communities, mentioned above.

Lopez admitted the latter issue in his Vox piece. And he raised the possibility of alternatives to policing, though he gave them less credence than the authors of the NEBR study, because they fail to clear an impossibly high bar: “These other approaches were all evaluated in a world where police exist, so even the positive research can’t demonstrate that these are necessarily true alternatives to police.” So even if it won’t hurt to try these other approaches, Lopez concluded, the data say we’ve got to push forward with increased policing.

This is the same conclusion he brings to his Times debut. Lopez wrote that long-term solutions include those that “enrich both individuals’ and communities’ socioeconomic standing over time,” as well as “gun control and higher alcohol taxes.” Both these and policing solutions are “likely necessary to reverse the murder spike and prevent future increases.” That’s just the expert consensus, Lopez suggests.

Alternatives to more police
‘Re-Fund the Police’? Why It Might Not Reduce Crime.
Image
Shaila Dewan (New York Times, 11/8/21) reports on the “downsides of adding more police officers, including negative interactions with the public, police violence and further erosion of public trust.”
In fact, many experts disagree.

As one should always remember, the New York Times is not a monolith. Another reporter at the outlet, Shaila Dewan (11/8/21), looking specifically at the impact on crime of increasing funding for police departments, drew very different conclusions based on her sources—four academics and two community activists. All but one offered some pushback or alternative to the “more policing = less crime” mantra, demonstrating that Lopez’s experts do not come close to representing a consensus.

And Dewan’s remarkable piece raised certain critiques that rarely appear in corporate media accounts of crime, such as the fact—pointed out by Tamara Nopper, an abolitionist academic—that crime statistics come from the police and do not include civil rights violations or police violence (nor do they highlight white collar crime, or corporate crimes like wage theft and illegal air pollution). Take, for instance, the fact that while there were some 25,000 homicides in 2020, more than one million people per year in this country are “threatened or subjected to police use of force” during encounters with police (Annual Review of Criminology, 1/22).

Perhaps one of the most striking pieces of evidence against Lopez is one he cited himself in his Vox piece. A “majority” of a panel of over 60 criminal justice experts agreed that increasing police budgets would improve public safety, Lopez told readers. “Most” also say the same of increasing social service budgets, he then noted, but “there’s no reason, if the goal is to fight crime, that communities shouldn’t expand both policing and social services,” he wrote.

Of course, the reasons to not expand policing are myriad, as I’ve already spelled out. And while his portrayal of the survey is technically true, it’s a twisted interpretation of the panel’s results, which strongly tilted toward increasing social service budgets, which 84% agreed with, versus 61% for increasing police budgets. And strong agreement found even greater disparities, at 41% for social service increases versus only 10% for police increases.

Image
Source: Criminal Justice Expert Panel: Policing and Public Safety

Policing also isn’t the only viable short-term solution, as Lopez would have readers believe. There are non-policing short-term approaches with evidence supporting their impact on gun assaults and other index crimes, as Dewan pointed out in her piece, such as increased street lighting and cleaning up vacant lots—which don’t come with the drawbacks of policing.

And given the clear links between violent crime and gun prevalence, surely “gun control” merits more than a name check in any discussion of solutions, however brief.

As Karakatsanis (Twitter, 12/29/21) observes, a central aim of “copaganda” is to distract the public from inequality:

The goal is to extract wealth from [the] working class, make them less safe, and then offer them only those “solutions” that increase the power and control over them by people who own things.

Corporate news outlets and their corporate sponsors obviously aren’t terribly interested in people being constantly bombarded with news about threats to their well-being that derive from the actions of major corporations. Air pollution was recently estimated to cause over 100,000 US deaths in a year, nearly five times higher than the homicide rate. But the Times has yet to hire a journalist for The Morning with a passion for investigating the causes of and solutions to the air pollution death rate.

https://fair.org/home/nyt-twists-stats- ... -policing/
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 31, 2022 3:08 pm

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MPD Political Extremism Powerpoint Spotlights Antifa and Boogaloo
By Sam Richards, Contributor January 28, 2022

Minneapolis, MN – Unicorn Riot has obtained documents used to train Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) staff on political extremism. The training presentation is entitled “Political Extremists / Anarchists, a brief summary of groups that border the line between protest and domestic terrorism.” The MPD documents discuss the so-called Boogaloo movement as well as the anti-fascist movement known commonly as Antifa. The training materials prepared by an MPD intelligence analyst reveal their targeting of individuals for expressing political speech. Additionally, the MPD demonstrates a misunderstanding of Antifa as well as the threat posed by Boogaloo members.

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Slide from MPD’s PowerPoint.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “Boogaloo adherents increasingly attended protests and riots, and they often sought to capitalize on high tensions to incite violence and chaos.” This accelerationist strategy aims to propagate a new civil war that would destroy the Federal government. Boogaloo members often exploit civil unrest and racial justice protests as a means to appear more moderate while concealing widespread white supremacist and other bigoted views.

Members of the Boogaloo movement often dismiss attempts to be labeled as left or right-wing From the CSIS: “While Facebook and other social media platforms allow Boogaloo adherents to communicate and organize themselves into local groups resembling cells or chapters, there is no overarching organization that coordinates Boogaloo activity nationally. Boogaloo adherents are anchored by such ideologies as accelerationism and anti-government action rather than membership in any organization.”

A review of over 240,000 messages from Boogaloo Discord chats in 2020 shows that the ‘boogaloo’ is not a single coherent group but represents a decentralized informal online movement of devoted adherents “consistently reproducing hierarchical right-wing social values despite their superficial opposition to government authority.”

Many participants in the Boogaloo chats were also very active on 4chan’s /k/ board focused on weapons, which has long been a hub for armed white supremacists to plan meetups, shooting practice, and camping trips. 4chan /k/ enthusaist and neo-Nazi Allen Scarsella was sentenced to to 15 years in prison for a mass shooting at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis in 2015.

Yet at a handful of protests across the nation since George Floyd was killed, young armed white men claiming to be Boogaloo Bois have been seen along with racial justice protesters.

Political Bias and the Antifa Boogeymen

Through misunderstanding or political bias, the MPD analyst made wildly inaccurate claims about the organization and structure of Antifa. Antifa is famously decentralized and it has no official headquarters nor leadership, contrary to the near conspiracy theorizing present in the MPD documents. In contrast, the Boogaloo’s apolitical dynamic was noted by the MPD intelligence analyst who assembled the training materials.

As with many paranoia-soaked reports about antifascists, MPD conflates different types of protests and activity under a sprawling label of Antifa. Local mutual aid projects and ‘black bloc’ style direct actions, as usual, are implied to be part of the dreaded Antifa octopus rather than disparate, sometimes overlapping elements of the contemporary political scene.

MPD’s slant attempts to roll a giant Antifa snowman out of the deep drifts of discontent wafting through Minneapolis. This kind of fabrication could entice prosecutors to file conspiracy charges on the basis of political orientation. As far back as 2017 some authorities in that state sought to label antifascists as ‘street gangs.’ Last year, at least five attendees at a violent pro-Trump ‘Patriot March’ in San Diego also attended the January 6 insurrection attempt just three days earlier. “Participants in the Patriot March, conversely, engaged in violent acts, seemingly without consequence,” the Appeal added. In the aftermath of this event, conspiracy charges were selectively levied by San Diego prosecutors against alleged antifascists last December. Defendants allegedly joined the conspiracy “by liking and sharing” social media posts, authorities claimed in their legal reasoning.

Kieran Knutson, President of Communications Workers of America (CWA) local 7250, offered his perspective on MPD’s analysis: “My initial reaction is that this is a very superficial understanding of political forces – like someone who doesn’t know much probably got paid a lot of money to play on Google for a few hours…There is no Antifa HQ, there’s not even a Torch HQ.”

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Slide from MPD’s PowerPoint.

The MPD presentation wrongly claims that Antifa entered the modern scene at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The presentation failed to mention the white supremacist terror attack on anti-racist counter-demonstrators that killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 others. This is of import as the neo-Nazi who attacked the counter demonstration was driving a car when he plowed into the crowd, a tactic that would become increasingly prominent both locally in Minneapolis but also nationally.

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Slide from MPD’s PowerPoint.

Antifa, a shortened moniker for the anti-fascist movement, began as a leftwing movement composed of various political ideologies including socialists, anarchists, and communists but also less ideological people concerned with racism, totalitarianism and fascism. The objective of Antifa has always been simple: to counter the rise of fascism, specifically Nazism in Europe.

With the election of Donald Trump and subsequent rise in white supremacist violence, Antifa has grown across the country and includes many who do not closely identify with radical politics outside of opposing a resurgent rightwing.

There is no electoral strategy nor much of an agenda beyond mass mobilization to challenge and halt any such totalitarianism from taking root. Among organized antifascist groups, the leading focus is researching white supremacists in their region, reducing the degree of secrecy they enjoy and hopefully deterring racially motivated harassment and violent attacks.

The Twin Cities have a lengthy history of anti-fascist protest which includes some of the first modern organized anti-racist groups in the country, The Baldies, who are featured in the PowerPoint. Not featured is the fact that The Baldies led directly to Anti-Racist Action, also mentioned in the report.

The MPD’s PowerPoint mythologizes Antifa and falsely claims it has a national headquarters as well as internal processes and accreditations that simply do not exist. There are no bylaws, nor master plans, nor officialdom of any kind with Antifa – its organizing typically occurs in response to planned rightwing demonstrations and members spontaneously come and go. Leftwing organizing in the U.S. takes this approach specifically due to historical repression and surveillance of leftist movements.

The MPD documents claim that “Minneapolis is unconfirmed as being Torch verified but social media posts indicate the process has begun.” MPD also falsely claims Portland, OR is the “national AF headquarters,” and Torch “is responsible for accreditation of national Antifa Chapters.”

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Slide from MPD’s PowerPoint.

“While there is no one ANTIFA Inc. there are collectives and networks of anti-fascists, including the Torch Network – which has its origins in the old Anti-Racist Action Network. While Torch has some serious activists and projects, including Rose City Antifa – Torch represents a small percent of militant antifascists around the country,” explained Knutson.

The accreditation claim was not followed by any of the alleged posts but specific Twitter users were targeted due to their supposed “high probability of either being Antifa leaders, members, affiliates or ground supporters.” Labeling Twitter users who expressed political viewpoints the MPD decided (based upon no defined metric) as high level operators in Antifa is a dangerous portent of things to come, especially when resolutions have been introduced to label Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

While labeling Antifa dangerous, the presentation slants dismissive toward the dangers posed by Boogaloo members who fetishize guns and violence and openly express a desire for a second civil war.

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MPD claims a collection of personal and organization Twitter accounts have a “high probability” of being “antifa Leaders, members, affiliates or ground supporters”. Slide from MPD’s PowerPoint with notes written by MPD. Redactions made by Unicorn Riot to protect the public.

Knutson explains, “this is not the first time that local law enforcement has attempted to criminalize anti-fascists in the Twin Cities.”

This is political posturing by a police department that previously tweeted debunked Project Veritas content disparaging of a Congresswoman immediately before her reelection. A department perennially under investigation for civil rights abuses. A department whose officer federation was led by Bob Kroll, who was sued by the outgoing Police Chief Medaria Arradondo years ago for racist misdeeds including wearing a white supremacist patch on his jacket. Therefore, it may not be surprising that the MPD’s intelligence analysts would have such a wildly inaccurate portrayal of anti-fascists / anti-racists.

The presentation explained previously that Boogaloo members organized online and eventually became active in the streets. Yet despite the MPD’s supposition that the internet is key toward their organizing abilities, no list of Boogaloo social media accounts are listed as was done for antifa.

Further evidence of this political posturing and bias comes from a slide covering the Boogaloo movement titled ‘Tactics.’ The slide states, “The Boogaloo movement is not clearly defined by a set of rules, actions, or social media guidelines like ANTIFA.” The alleged antifa guidelines and rules are not included, likely because they do not exist.

Conspiracy theorists routinely spread fake documents such as Antifa membership cards or checks from George Soros to hype and further mythologize Antifa, as a menacing organization with far reaching tentacles, which is simply not the case. The ‘Tactics’ slide also explains that Boogaloo members are “brash” online and “proudly portray affiliation,” however no dossier of potential leaders, members, affiliates, etc is included.

Two Boogaloo members, both since incarcerated, were mentioned in a slide titled Notable MPD Interactions. One of the members, Benjamin Teeter, who sold weapon stocks to an undercover FBI agent, is featured for his participation in unrest in downtown Minneapolis in late August 2020 – full story on this upcoming.

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An Alleged “Antifa Leader” Speaks

Unicorn Riot spoke with one of the people whose Twitter account was named in this presentation on the condition of anonymity. “It’s pretty frightening to be labeled as an extremist because when you appear on a list like this, you never know if it’s sloppy research, or if you are in danger. It feels really unsettling to know that they are training police officers to monitor me, specifically.”

This is an individual who explained that they have never been arrested and that their activism is centered around mutual aid. When asked whether they feel targeted simply due to their online speech they explained, “It sure seems like it.”

Being named in this way by a police department with a recurring history of abuses toward activists has caused the anonymous individual to change their behavior.

“I’ve gotten more serious about information security… I called a few key people in my life to let them know I’m on this list, in case anything happens. Honestly, I could see some sort of Kyle Rittenhouse situation happening. I could see some white supremacist with a gun deciding that they are going to take me out because I am too loud, and because they are miseducated. The line between laughably bad police work and endangering me by targeting me in this way is very blurry, and they know it.”

-Individual targeted as one to take ‘note’ of in the MPD Extremism PowerPoint
As previously mentioned, the metric for someone finding their way onto this list is not known. The individual we spoke with thinks, “it really does feel like folks who have been vocal about pushing back against the city, especially as it pertains to the Near North encampment [for the unhoused], are being specifically targeted.”

Another blatantly political slide speculates on two possible future paths for the anti-fascist movement. The first being a “lull in activity with the absence of Donald Trump.” The second, “Embrace a more aggressive/confident presence within the social sphere as democratic socialism becomes more widely accepted and discussed in American politics.” Again, this is pure speculation and evidence for a secret Antifa agenda is not included in the presentation.

Reality Check and Statistics

The national discourse surrounding political violence, protest, and civil unrest has been mired in anecdotes and clueless punditry. Corporate media are well known to offer false equivalencies when it comes to political discussions which often paint an overly simplistic picture of two equal and opposite sides on any number of issues. Unfortunately, this is clearly the case with the ever increasingly important issue of domestic terrorism. The MPD decided to further the paradigms of false-balance oversimplification despite its own first-hand encounters with domestic extremists.

Nationally, since the mid 1990s, incidents of rightwing violence far exceed leftwing attacks. It’s not even close. From the Guardian, “A new database of nearly 900 politically motivated attacks and plots in the United States since 1994 includes just one attack staged by an anti-fascist that led to fatalities. In that case, the single person killed was the perpetrator. Over the same time period, American white supremacists and other rightwing extremists have carried out attacks that left at least 329 victims dead, according to the database.”


In perhaps the most notorious episode of its type, Boogaloo adherents used the cover of a George Floyd protest in 2020 to target federal security agents in Oakland, killing one. The shooter Steven Carrillo, a professed Boogaloo Boi and a staff sergeant at the Travis Air Force Base said in a Facebook post he was going to “go to the riots and support our own cause.”

Alarming many civil liberties activists are new Federal changes to definitions of terrorism and extremism. With the obvious rise in rightwing violence in the United States, the Biden administration has taken “unprecedented” measures to tackle domestic terrorism.

White supremacists are now in focus but included in these efforts are those professing anticapitalist views, environmentalists and others. (In 2018 we reported on long-running Midwestern FBI probes and grand juries aimed at the left, based on documents that expose little known ‘statistical accomplishment’ incentives and internal ‘domestic terrorism’ designations which are rarely, if ever, presented to the public.)

Chip Gibbons, the policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent told Politico, “Given the lax guidelines and overall history, I think it’s very likely that these domestic terrorism resources are going to be deployed against people who are engaged not in terrorism but in speech activities,” he added. “And the targets selected for these investigations are going to reflect the same bias the FBI has always had.”

Through this political extremism training the Minneapolis Police Department has shown a lack of basic understanding of the issue at hand, spelling trouble particularly for leftwing activists who are oftentimes demonized by mainstream media outlets. This occurs during a time of increasing political violence, the majority of which is perpetrated by the far-right and the state, and a breakdown of democratic institutions while the MPD is grappling with its own legitimacy crisis.

These factors combine to make it a dangerous time to be an activist, a fact of life which also motivates many to continue their activism, against the odds. Knutson summarized the situation, “the clear motive for presentations like this is to prepare the ground for political repression.”

Niko Georgiades of Unicorn Riot contributed to this report. Cover image composition by Dan Feidt.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/mpd-poli ... -boogaloo/
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 07, 2022 2:33 pm

Minnesota police kill man in Minneapolis apartment, making three victims in 66 days
February 3, 2022 Niko Georgiades

Minneapolis – A SWAT officer from the Minneapolis Police Department killed a man after busting into a downtown Minneapolis apartment at 7 a.m. on February 2. The victim has been identified by the community as Amir Locke. He’s become the third Black man killed by Minnesota police in 66 days. In each case, the victim is demonized by the police and the press.

Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is in charge of all the investigations into each of the three deaths: Amir Locke, Kokou Christopher Fianfonou in Austin, and Noah Kelley in Mounds View. Protests have called for transparency and accountability in each of the cases.

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Amir Locke – Minneapolis – February 2, 2022 – Killed by Minneapolis PD Mark Hanneman

Amir Locke, who is said to be around 24 years old, was killed by Mark Hanneman, a SWAT officer with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) while they were executing an early morning search warrant on February 2. The killing occurred at the Bolero Flats Apartment Homes on the 7th floor.

The police narrative, which contradicts what Locke’s family says, is that Minneapolis Police were assisting St. Paul Police in executing a search warrant on a homicide suspect when the suspect brandished a weapon, and in fear of their lives, they shot and killed him.

Locke hasn’t officially been named but according to activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, Locke’s family has identified him as the one killed. Armstrong also posted on Facebook that MPD’s Interim Chief Amelia Huffman called her in the morning after the shooting to tell her that it happened.

The family says that Amir was sleeping on the couch of a family member’s apartment when the police busted in the door executing a search warrant seeking three people, none of whom were Locke.

His family said that he was a licensed gun owner with a conceal and carry permit. He was startled from the pre-dawn police actions and sought to protect himself when he was shot and killed by the police, his family says.


According to reporting by Georgia Fort, at least three apartments were raided during the operation that killed Locke. Two on the 14th floor and the one on the seventh, where Amir was killed.

During a press conference hours after the killing, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Interim Chief Huffman expressed condolences from the tragedy of the loss of life and provided their explanation for yet another violent police killing in the City of Minneapolis.

Interim Police Chief Huffman stated that SWAT officers were “serving search warrants to assist the St. Paul Police Department’s homicide unit … related to an ongoing murder investigation.” She said officers gained entry using a key fob and “loudly and repeatedly announced police search warrant” before entering. Then, nine seconds into the 7th floor apartment “the officers encountered a male who was armed with a handgun. He was holding that gun in his hand. At the time that shots were fired.”

The City of Minneapolis swiftly revealed Locke was killed by Minneapolis Police Department Officer Mark Hanneman (002654) and released documents related to the shooting, with some redactions: Incident Detail Report, Fire Incident Detail Report, and Fire Incident Report, along with a news release, and two photos of the gun (1, 2).

The documents reveal that Hanneman was part of Unit 1280 that initially entered the apartment and that Locke was killed by two gunshot wounds to the chest and one to the wrist.

Hanneman was previously a police officer in Hutchinson and was involved in a statewide intra-agency scheme to offer illicit drugs to protesters in the Occupy movement and the unhoused as part of Minnesota State Patrol’s Drug Recognition Evaluator (DRE) program. The program was briefly halted during the controversy and a lawsuit but continues to operate. Hanneman had since become an officer with MPD after serving a minor reprimand for his participation in DRE and recently graduating with a masters degree in criminal justice.

Other officers assigned to Unit 1280 according to MPD’s Incident Detail Report were John K Biederman (000548); Ryan J Carrero (001003); Conan D Hickey (002997); Dominic Manelli (123219); Aaron Pearson (005504); Nathan J Sundberg (007011); John Sysaath (007026).

Providing cover to Unit 1280 was 1281 and involved in that unit was MPD offficer Kyle Mader, who was filmed violently slamming an advocate for the houseless to the ground at George Floyd Square in late 2020.

In a controversial pattern, Locke was named a homicide suspect in the initial reports by the police that were widely published by the press. In her short press conference, Interim Chief Huffman referred to the “homicide” investigation from which the warrant was based, three times. Similar inaccurate homicide allegations were spread about Winston Smith after he was killed by a federal task force last year in Uptown Minneapolis. Corporate news reports were later retracted that initially called Smith a murder suspect.

If what the family says is true and that Locke was not named on the warrant, he was then not a suspect in the investigation – yet he was still killed.

The pattern of criminalizing victims is clearly seen in each of the last three police killings in Minnesota.

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Amir Locke – Image via Facebook

Kokou “Christopher” Fianfonou – Austin, MN – December 23, 2021 – Killed by Austin PD Zachary Gast

38-year-old Kokou “Christopher” Fianfonou was killed by Austin Police Department Officer Zachary Gast in
the parking lot of a gas station in Austin, Minnesota around 9:30 p.m. on December 23. Police say Fianfonou was threatening officers with a knife.

Fianfonou, originally from Togo, was reportedly stuck in an extended standoff with Austin PD starting on December 22 from a report of a man walking in traffic with a knife.

During the standoff that lasted over 24 hours, Austin Police shot tear gas, foam marker rounds, and deployed Tasers into Fianfonou’s cousin’s house (where he was staying) in an attempt to clear him out. On the evening of December 23, officers left the sight of the house and a few hours later, they say Fianfonou then confronted them, armed, and they shot and killed him.

Fianfonou’s family disputes official narratives that Fianfonou was threatening anyone. They say he was unarmed when he was killed and that he had bags of groceries in his hands. Friends and family say he was going through a mental crisis the day before being killed.


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Christopher Fianfonou – Images via GoFundMe

A GoFundMe has been created by his family to help support his wife and children. Activists have called for all video footage to be released, cops fired and prosecuted and Christopher’s family to be compensated.

Noah Kelley – Mounds View, MN – November 28, 2021 – Killed by Mounds View PD Sgt. Michael Hanson and New Brighton PD John Thomas

21-year-old Noah Kelley was killed by Mounds View Police Department Sergeant Michael Hanson and New Brighton Police Officer John Thomas inside a Mounds View liquor store around 7 p.m. on November 28. Police say Kelley was armed with a handgun and alone in the liquor store when officers arrived and killed Kelley. According to the Department of Public Safety, body cameras captured “portions of the incident.”

On January 10 protesters rallied at the Mounds View City Hall before a City Council meeting and spoke during (video).

Brian Kelley, Noah’s father, addressed City Council members during the meeting and insisted the videos be released, and requested a meeting with the mayor and police chief. Kelley said that he had been left in the dark as to what happened to his son with no information besides the police report.

“I’ve spent the last month and a half in extra grief because I’m completely unaware of what took place – and that’s the reason why the taxpayers provide things like the body cameras. In addition, Gov. Walz, in June of 2021 insisted that those types of footage be available to family members within five days of an incident that resulted in death.”

Brian Kelley addressing the Mounds View City Council on January 10, 2022

Kelley’s requests seem to have been granted and a meeting with the family and authorities is scheduled for the first Friday in February.

Brian Kelley has spent nearly two decades building families through a ministry called All About Family and teaching youth about designing and building with the Young Builders and Designers Program. Noah worked alongside him and Brian said “he was going to become a carpenter or in a similar labor trade.”

Kelley leaves behind a young daughter and a wife. His family has created a GoFundMe to help support his family.

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Noah Kelley was 21 when police killed him in November 2021
Source: Unicorn Riot

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... n-66-days/

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Amir Locke’s Killer Gave Illicit Drugs to Protesters in 2012 Scandal
By Dan Feidt and Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot February 5, 2022

Minneapolis, MN – Mark Hanneman, the Minneapolis Police officer who killed Amir Locke while executing a pre-dawn no-knock warrant, was heavily involved in giving illicit drugs to unhoused people and Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2012. At the time, Hanneman was an officer in the small town of Hutchinson in McLeod County west of Minneapolis.

According to Hanneman’s personnel file released by the City of Minneapolis on February 3, Hanneman had his first stints working with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) in late 2015. The city also released Hanneman’s MPD Employee Complaint Summary, revealing three complaints. However according to non-profit Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB), Hanneman’s had four complaints filed against him. Three of the complaints were closed with no discipline and one is still open.

Amir Locke, a 22-year-old registered gun owner with no criminal record, was killed before 7 a.m. on February 2 when SWAT officers with MPD executed a search warrant for the St. Paul Police who were doing a homicide investigation. Locke was labeled as the suspect following the incident by the Interim Police Chief and in news reports, but his family believes Locke wasn’t their target and that he wasn’t named in their warrants.

Body camera footage showing the killing was released the next day. It showed a SWAT unit of police enter a downtown Minneapolis apartment with a key, announce their presence, kick a couch that Locke was sleeping in a blanket on, and kill him within two seconds.

Officer Hanneman (Badge #2654) was part of MPD’s SWAT Unit 1280 that initially entered the apartment. Hanneman shot and killed Locke with two gunshot wounds to the chest and one to the wrist.

Hanneman was the only officer to fire his weapon during the early morning intrusion. According to his personnel file, Hanneman has gone through dozens of Use of Force trainings, SWAT trainings, and weapons training courses.

Before he became a police officer, Hanneman was a 911 dispatcher in Hutchinson for two years. Hanneman then joined the Hutchinson Police Department for five years, and was also on their SWAT team.

During his time as an officer in Hutchinson, Hanneman took part in the statewide Drug Recognition Evaluator training program (DRE, also known as “Drug Recognition Expert”) run by the Minnesota State Patrol. Within the program, officers gave illicit drugs to people to evaluate their reactions. This training program took place periodically in downtown Minneapolis, but in 2012 it was exposed and became a scandal, which led state authorities to relocate the training to California.


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Minnesota State Patrol officers involved in the 2012 DRE program picking people up and dropping them off at Peavey Plaza.

The DRE theory is that trainees can be taught to identify physiological effects similar to alcohol intoxication, but it is based on hazy science which implies the unproven ability to detect impairment. DRE programs are heavily promoted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a key industry group.

Hanneman routinely drove his squad car into downtown Minneapolis and sought subjects from the streets who would be willing to get in the car, be brought to a building used by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MNDoT) and the State Patrol near the airport, and be given drugs. In many cases, officers skipped the step of driving to the building and gave drugs to people in their squad car.


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A garage in this complex on the west side of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport was where Officer Hanneman and others gave drugs to people, aiming to learn physiological responses in the DRE program in the spring of 2012.

A quickly produced 35-minute documentary, “MK Occupy Minnesota: Drugs & the DRE Program at Peavey Plaza,” created by community members, independent media, and CUAPB spotlighted the training program and interviewed many participants. The late copwatcher Darryl M. Robinson also provided footage and assistance via CUAPB to this project. (Several members and co-founders of Unicorn Riot worked on the documentary—one of the largest projects we collaborated on before launching the organization less than three years later.)



The film was released the same day that the city council was considering adding a curfew and barring anyone from the downtown plaza overnight—drug intoxication was cited as one reason for the policy, including the very intoxication that the State Patrol and local officers like Hanneman were directly creating.

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One of the DRE program participants gets in an outstate sheriff’s vehicle after he was offered free drugs. He later spoke about the experience.

Some of the people they sought were unhoused, people with chemical dependency, and Occupy Wall Street protesters. According to participants, the drugs given to people ranged from cannabis to cocaine and heroin. The officers would approach them and ask if they wanted to get high without being arrested. If the person obliged, the officers would provide the drugs, and sometimes also provide a fast food meal.

After getting people high and ‘evaluating’ them, Hanneman would drive them back downtown and frequently drop them off at the Occupy Wall Street protest encampment at Peavey Plaza in 2012.

In a later lawsuit that was filed on behalf of the program participants, the Minnesota State Patrol could not be sued due to statutory immunity. As the Minnesota House of Representatives research points out (PDF), “The doctrine of sovereign immunity dates back to the English common law concept rex non potest peccare (‘the king can do no wrong’).”

Hanneman, who was also a school resource officer in Minneapolis, is currently still employed by the MPD as of February 5.

For more regional reporting on Mark Hanneman, see “MPD officer who killed Amir Locke disciplined for controversial 2012 Occupy MN DRE training” at Bluestem Prairie. See the personnel file for Mark Hanneman below (redactions made by City of Minneapolis).(at link)

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/amir-loc ... 2-scandal/

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SWAT Officers Involved in Locke Killing Have Violent, Checkered Past
By Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot February 5, 2022
Minneapolis, MN – Several of the Minneapolis Police SWAT officers involved in the February 2 early morning killing of Amir Locke have violent and checkered pasts.

Officer Mark Hanneman, the shooter who killed Locke, had previously given illicit drugs to protesters in 2012; two officers were involved in beating Jaleel Stallings nearly to death while ‘hunting’ the Minneapolis populace during the George Floyd Uprising; another violently assaulted an advocate for the unhoused at the city’s George Floyd Square in late 2020.

Amir Locke was a 22-year-old registered gun owner with no criminal record. He was killed before 7 a.m. on February 2, 2022, when SWAT officers with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) executed a no-knock search warrant for the St. Paul Police who were doing a homicide investigation.

Body camera footage showing the killing was released the next day. It showed a SWAT unit of police enter a downtown Minneapolis apartment with a key, shout “police search warrant,” kick a couch that Locke was sleeping in a blanket on, and kill him within two seconds. Locke had a handgun next to him as he was sleeping and rolled over to grab it after being startled awake. Locke never fully raised the gun and his finger never reached the trigger.

Officers besides Mark Hanneman (#2654) assigned to the SWAT team Unit 1280, that entered the apartment, were John K. Biederman (#548); Ryan J. Carrero (#1003); Conan D. Hickey (#2997); Dominic Manelli (#123219); Aaron Pearson (#5504); Nathan J. Sundberg (#7011); and John Sysaath (#7026).

The backup team, Unit 1281, was comprised of Jason T. Andersen (#107); Carl R. Blad (#580); Thomas J. Campbell (#97371); Kristopher Dauble (#1441); Kyle Mader (#4397); William J. Martin (#4433); Travis M. Ricci (#5997); Zachary Seraphine (#6454); and Nicholas Wasche (#7576).


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First two pages of MPD’s Incident Detail Report – full ten pages at bottom of the article.

MPD Officer Mark Hanneman Gave Illicit Drugs to Protesters

MPD Officer Mark Hanneman was the only officer to fire his weapon during the early morning intrusion. He shot three shots into Amir Locke, killing him.

Hanneman was heavily involved in the statewide Drug Recognition Evaluator training program (DRE, also known as “Drug Recognition Expert”) run by the Minnesota State Patrol while he was a police officer in Hutchinson.

Hanneman would drive his squad car into downtown Minneapolis from Hutchinson, a small town about an hour west of the city, to give drugs to unhoused people and Occupy Wall Street protesters in order to evaluate their reactions. See our special Amir Locke’s Killer Gave Illicit Drugs to Protesters in 2012 Scandal. Hanneman was given some from of disciplinary action from his participation in the statewide scheme.

Officer Mark Hanneman had his first stints working with the MPD in late 2015. According to the city, who released Hanneman’s personnel file and his MPD Employee Complaint Summary, he’s had three complaints filed on him. However, non-profit Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB), lists four complaints filed against him. Three of the complaints were closed with no discipline and one is still open.

Hanneman worked as a school resource officer for a couple years before he graduated with a masters degree in criminal justice. Hanneman has taken dozens of SWAT, Use of Force, and Weapons trainings. Hanneman’s personnel file can be read below.

(See chart at link)

MPD Officers Nathan Sundberg and Kristopher Dauble

Minneapolis Police Officer Nathan Sundberg (#7011) participated in Locke’s killing as part of Unit 1280, the initial squad that entered Locke’s cousin’s apartment. Officer Kristopher Dauble (#1441) participated from Unit 1281, the back up team.

Both MPD Officers Sundberg and Dauble took part in the gang-style beating of Jaleel Stallings during a night of police hunting the Minneapolis populace on May 30, 2020, in the last days of the George Floyd Uprising.

In 2021, non-profit news organization Minnesota Reformer uncovered body camera footage from units of MPD a couple nights after the community overtook the Third Precinct, who were prowling Southside Minneapolis streets in police vans expressly hunting for people.

The main unit was led by Sgt. Andrew Bittell. Six months after ‘hunting’ people, Unicorn Riot unraveled a story of how Sgt. Bittell led the denigration of a central command community engagement officer in late November 2020 – see our special Shame Games.

Officers Sundberg and Dauble were both in the SWAT team led by Bittell ‘hunting’ people, as they described it. On the night of May 30, they were in an unmarked white van with their headlights out and driving down East Lake St. near Bloomington Ave. Tensions were extremely high in Minneapolis for the citizens, after days of unrest with fears of attacks from armed white supremacists as well as police.

In this environment, Stallings was with some friends in a parking lot providing safety for their neighborhood when the unmarked van rolled up with its lights off. MPD officers started shooting 40-mm marker rounds at Stallings and his friends. Thinking the worst and not seeing it was MPD, Stallings fired a few shots in the direction of the van with his gun.

After realizing it was police, Stallings put his gun on the ground and laid flat. Police jumped out from the van in the middle of the street and when they reached Stallings in the parking lot, they almost beat him to death. MPD officers also violently beat all people that were in the parking lot. See body camera footage from this incident (content advisory).

Stallings was arrested for attempted murder but later beat the case and all charges were dropped. He has since filed a lawsuit.

Taking part in the shooting ‘less-lethals’ at the crowd protecting their community and beating Stallings and the other community members were Nathan Sundberg and Kristopher Dauble.

Along with all MPD who took part in massively violent interactions with the community during the uprising, Sundberg and Dauble never faced any consequences.

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Jaleel Stallings mugshot after being beaten by MPD and charged with attempted murder. Source: Minnesota Reformer.

Dauble has at least 10 complaints filed against him according to CUAPB, with four still open and the rest closed with no discipline. In 2019, Dauble was named in a settlement that cost taxpayers $67,500.

Sundberg has four complaints, all closed with no discipline. He also took part in firing his service weapon and injuring a man in 2021.

MPD Officer Kyle Mader
In Unit 1281, who provided cover to 1280, was MPD officer Kyle Mader. Officer Mader was filmed violently slamming an advocate for the houseless to the ground at George Floyd Square (GFS) in late 2020.

The incident happened in December 2020 and started when MPD chased an unknown suspect into GFS and apprehended him a short distance from where ex-officer Derek Chauvin and his co-defendants killed George Floyd. The crowd in GFS were unaware why the police came into the space and they grew agitated.

While another officer was arresting the unknown suspect, officer Kyle Mader pushed several people yelling for them to back up before making his way to JoJo, a houseless advocate, and assaulting him.

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Minneapolis Police officer Kyle Mader (R) moments after slamming and arresting an advocate for the unhoused on December 4. Screenshot of video by On Site Public Media.

In video first released by On Site Public Media and included in our interview below in which JoJo recounts the experience, Mader can be seen abruptly approaching JoJo before slamming him to the ground, kneeing on his back and arresting him.


Officer Kyle Mader has been with MPD since 2016. He has ten complaints filed against him with one of the complaints still open and all others closed with no discipline, according to data compiled by CUAPB.

Officer Mader has faced zero discipline for his violent actions directed at the community he’s taken an oath to be a “peacekeeper” in.

All officers involved in the killing of Amir Locke are still getting paid by taxpayers and as of February 5, none face discipline. While we only focus on four of the 17 officers in Units 1280 and 1281, more research is being done on the remaining officers and their conduct with the community.

Activists have disrupted press conferences, held a car protest downtown and also a large protest on Saturday, February 5, calling for charges against Hanneman and the resignation of Mayor Jacob Frey and Interim Police Chief Amelia Huffman.

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Amir Locke – Facebook

Read the ten-page Incident Detail Report released by the City of Minneapolis on the day of the killing of Amir Locke.(See report at link)

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Over and over and over again, it ain't no anomaly.

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 11, 2022 3:07 pm

Fatal police shootings in 2021 set record since The Post began tracking, despite public outcry

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Officers investigate the scene of a police shooting on Dec. 29 in Silver Spring, Md. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

By Marisa Iati, Steven Rich and Jennifer Jenkins
February 9, 2022 at 5:22 p.m. EST

Police shot and killed at least 1,055 people nationwide last year, the highest total since The Washington Post began tracking fatal shootings by officers in 2015 — underscoring the difficulty of reducing such incidents despite sustained public attention to the issue.

The new count is up from 1,021 shootings the previous year and 999 in 2019. The total comes amid a nationwide spike in violent crime — although nowhere near historic highs — and as people increasingly are venturing into public spaces now that coronavirus vaccines are widely available.

Despite setting a record, experts said the 2021 total was within expected bounds. Police have fatally shot roughly 1,000 people in each of the past seven years, ranging from 958 in 2016 to last year’s high. Mathematicians say this stability may be explained by Poisson’s random variable, a principle of probability theory that holds that the number of independent, uncommon events in a large population will remain fairly stagnant absent major societal changes.


That the number of fatal police shootings last year is within 60 of the average suggests officers’ behavior has not shifted significantly since The Post began collecting data, said Andrew Wheeler, a private-sector criminologist and data scientist.

“I think the data is pretty consistent that there’ve been no major changes in policing, at least in terms of these officer-involved shooting deaths,” he said.

(more...)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... cord-2021/

While there might be something to the statistical explanation(lies, damn lies, statistics...) if I were an advocate of metaphysics I might suspect there to be some sort of cop-zeitgeist which impels them to double down on their impunity.

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Judge Cahill’s No-Knock Warrant Led to MPD Execution of Amir Locke
By Marjaan Sirdar, Contributor February 8, 2022

Minneapolis, MN – Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill, who presided over Derek Chauvin’s George Floyd murder trial, signed an evidentiary search warrant to aid an investigation which amounted to a death sentence for Amir Locke; Minneapolis city leadership previously promised to cease this dangerous practice. After reviewing Cahill’s record, activists say it reveals “a disturbing pattern.”

Last week the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) requested a no-knock warrant in a case where Amir Locke’s family claims it was unnecessary; it led to SWAT officer Mark Hanneman killing their beloved 22-year-old family member, who was not even named on the warrant. (The first press release from MPD falsely claimed Locke was a “suspect” several times.)

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February 5, 2022 Justice for Amir Locke protest in Downtown Minneapolis (Full 1hr43min Unicorn Riot Stream)

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February 5, 2022 Justice for Amir Locke protest in Downtown Minneapolis. Photos by Chris Juhn.

The original investigation started in Saint Paul, but the Saint Paul police (SPPD) reported to KARE 11 News that it requested a standard warrant into the homicide investigation it was conducting, not a no-knock warrant. They said they requested Minneapolis’ help, but it was MPD that insisted on the dangerous no-knock warrant. Since Locke’s killing, MPD has refused to provide answers as to why it changed protocol in this case.

Investigative reporter A.J. Lagoe broke the news Friday that Judge Cahill was the signing judge on duty last week and signed off on what ended up a death warrant for Amir Locke. Locke’s mother Karen Wells said her son was “executed.”

Dangerous No-Knock Warrants

Twin Cities based activist Adnan Ahmed, a contributing writer/editor for the socialist publication Left Voice, recently compared Locke’s killing to the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, which sparked international outrage and outcries to ban such deadly practices. “​​The similarity between the murders of Locke and Taylor is not a mere coincidence… No-knock warrants have… been a big part of the racist war on drugs that began back in the 1970s, which has disproportionately targeted Black and Brown people.”

Because of this dangerous practice, Locke was murdered, just as “the federal trial is wrapping up for the three Minneapolis ex-cops charged with with violating George Floyd’s constitutional rights as they stood and watched Derek Chauvin murder him,” Ahmed noted. Pointing out how “Governor Tim Walz, fearing another rebellion from community members, has asked the National Guard to be on standby,” putting the whole city on edge.

False Election Promises to Ban Fatal Practice

The Minnesota Legislature restricted the execution of no-knock warrants between the hours of 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. due to their dangerous nature reflected in the data. The raid that led to Locke’s killing was executed at 6:48 a.m., 12 minutes before state law permitted. That’s because the law allows room for exceptions which critics complain have become loopholes that nullify the policy entirely.

Journalists, activists, and the loved ones of Locke want clarity as to why SPPD have not used a no-knock warrant in five years but MPD applied for no fewer than 90 dangerous no-knock warrants since they said they stopped using them, according to University of Iowa Professor and Guardian contributor Simon Balto.

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U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA43) speaks at Brooklyn Center Police Department on April 17, 2021 after the killing of Daunte Wright (Full video)
Judge Cahill’s Record ‘Demonstrates Pattern’
Judge Peter Cahill gained notoriety when he presided over the Derek Chauvin murder trial. He came under criticism for lashing out at U.S. congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA43), saying she was “disrespectful to the rule of law” for encouraging protestors to “stay in the streets” and “get more confrontational” after officer Kim Potter shot and killed Daunte Wright while the Chauvin trial was taking place. Similar to today, Gov. Walz had troops on standby when Potter killed Wright.

It was recently revealed that on December 31, 2020, Cahill signed a dangerous nighttime no-knock warrant to raid Dolal Idd’s family’s home, which failed to collect any illegal guns, after he was slain in an undercover gun purchase sting operation by MPD. Idd was just 23 years old. This “demonstrates a disturbing pattern,” activists say, and the judge “must resign.”

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It’s a bust: “None of the items set forth in the search warrant” were found in the raid authorized by Judge Peter Cahill on December 31, 2020.

Calls For Resignations of the “Hidden Hand”

Protestors are demanding accountability from the top down this time. Keith McCarron, former Minneapolis 911 dispatcher turned activist, told Unicorn Riot he’s disturbed with Cahill being the “hidden hand” in these ongoing tragedies. McCarron is friends with Bayle Gelle, the father of Dolal Idd, communicating with him regularly. McCarron said, “Cahill is especially culpable for immense pain and suffering,” and wants him to step down.


February 5, 2022 Justice for Amir Locke protest outside MPD Downtown precinct (Full 1hr43min Unicorn Riot Stream)
Former Minneapolis mayoral candidate Jerrell Perry and Minneapolis’ newly elected president of the Board of Estimate & Taxation Samantha Pree-Stinson both recently took to social media calling for Cahill’s resignation. Community leaders Brandyn Lee Tulloch, Toshira Garraway, and Toussaint Morrison have all joined the calls for resignations.

On Monday, at a rally by Black mothers at Minneapolis City Hall, activist and entrepreneur Raeisha Williams joined the calls for resignations. Williams said Cahill signing the warrant that led to Locke’s execution was reminiscent of a slave master signing a bounty on his runaway slave.

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Minneapolis Board of Estimate & Taxation President Samantha Pree-Stinson calls for Judge Cahill’s resignation, along with part of the Do. She posted an op-ed asking “Who is actually running our city?” after Amir Locke’s killing.

Protestors who rallied three days in a row, including McCarron, want murder charges brought against MPD officer Hanneman. He has a “checkered past” with three complaints filed against him. He was a major provider of illicit drugs to unhoused people and Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2012 and is featured in a recent Unicorn Riot story revisiting the illegal Drug Recognition Evaluator training program (or DRE) in downtown Minneapolis, which was exposed and shuttered. Taking part in the raid that killed Locke along with Hanneman were officers also involved in the brutal MPD assault against an innocent Black man, Jaleel Stallings, during the George Floyd Uprising.

Protestors are demanding Mayor Frey’s resignation and MPD Interim Police Chief Amelia Huffman’s immediate firing. However, that’s not enough for McCarron, he wants to see pressure on Governor Walz too. “We’re not just going after the man who pulled the trigger. This trigger was pulled all the way down the chain of command.”

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Judge Peter Cahill’s Background

Judge Cahill was appointed by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) in 2007, after he served as a prosecutor in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office under Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar, an office heavily dependent on funding from Target Corporation.

Klobuchar, now a U.S. Senator, ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2020, but faltered in the national spotlight as her record caught up with her; she incarcerated 16-year-old Myon Burrell for a murder he did not commit. Burrell has since been released from prison.

Before the murder of George Floyd, Judge Cahill’s highest profile case was the conviction of a juvenile for a triple homicide that he has maintained he did not commit. (He was just 15 at the time of the gruesome crimes.) Activists believe the then-kid, who is now 27-year-old Mahdi Hassan Ali, is innocent and are calling for justice, saying Cahill presided over a trial that was unfair at every level.

Case of Mahdi Hassan Ali

As reported in 2011 by Minnesota Public Radio, a Target forensics specialist testified in court against Ali. He asserted that clothing worn by the killer shown in the surveillance video from the Seward Market murders was evidence belonging to Ali found when MPD raided his grandmother’s home. This was a major link in the investigation connecting Ali to the crime scene.

However, people believe the juvenile’s trial was unfair, considering that Target Corp. was paying the prosecutor’s office, the Minneapolis police, and an expert witness. Ali’s supporters point out that Judge Cahill and prosecuting attorney Mike Freeman never disclosed Target’s relationship to the case, an apparent conflict of interest. Activists decry that such a ‘justice system’ controlled by corporations is corrupt to its core.

Burhan Israfael, a member of Minneapolis’ Somali community, believes Ali’s case is eerily similar to Burrell’s. Ali and Burrell both claimed to be at different locations than where each respective murder occurred and both claimed there were surveillance videos that could prove their innocence. Both teens were convicted and received life sentences.

Israfael told Unicorn Riot, “I don’t think it’s a coincidence. It’s a reflection of this surveillance society that targets Black kids by design.” In both cases video evidence that could have exonerated the juveniles was suppressed during trial. “It just goes to show a lack of humanity,” Israfael said, “especially when considering Mahdi’s guilt was in doubt and almost entirely predicated on the testimony of kids who were under duress and themselves involved in the murders.”

After Ali was found guilty, Cahill was criticized for “stacking” his sentence instead of sentencing him concurrently, essentially going around the law that restricts juveniles from receiving life in prison. Israfael said, “Cahill intentionally stacked the sentence giving this kid 99 years. Here was an opportunity for Cahill to look at this and say ‘maybe we have it wrong.’ But instead Cahill said ‘fuck that,’ and went around the restrictions that said giving a child a life sentence is inhumane.”

Israfael said when he thinks about judges like Cahill “who have all that power to do good but instead commit harm,” like when he signed off on the no-knock warrant that led to Amir Locke’s demise, “It’s just politics as usual.”

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/judge-ca ... mir-locke/

More images at link.

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Amir Locke Killing Draws Thousands Downtown, Presser Disruptions, and Protest Outside Police Chief’s Home
By Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot February 8, 2022

Minneapolis, MN – Despite below freezing temperatures, community disdain over the killing of Amir Locke on February 2 has been widely shown to the authorities in a variety of ways in the days following.

Graffiti referencing Locke has been sprayed across the city landscape, including on the Minneapolis Police’s First Precinct building. City press conferences were disrupted, thousands marched downtown, and two caravan protests have occurred in Minneapolis, with one stopping outside the house of Interim Police Chief Amelia Huffman on February 6.

Protests are expected to continue as a student-led walkout of high schools occurred on Tuesday, February 8 starting at St. Paul Central and ending at the Governor’s Residence. A national solidarity rally is planned for 6 p.m. at the Hennepin County Government Center on Tuesday as well. Watch it live on Unicorn Riot:


22-year-old Amir Locke was killed by Minneapolis Police Officer (MPD) Mark Hanneman as he carried out a pre-dawn no-knock warrant with an MPD SWAT unit. Body camera footage was quickly released from the incident showing Locke was awake for about two seconds before being shot to death. Along with several of the other SWAT members, Hanneman has past deeds of wrongdoing towards the community, including giving illicit drugs to protesters in 2012 while he was an officer with Hutchinson Police Department.

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Thousands marched downtown on February 5 demanding justice for Amir Locke – photo contributed by Chris Juhn

Thousands Protest Downtown on February 5

Several thousand people braved below-freezing temperatures and marched through downtown Minneapolis to demand justice for Amir Locke three days after he was killed by Minneapolis Police. The march began with a rally outside the Hennepin County Government Center where family members of Amir Locke spoke along with local activists.

Unicorn Riot live streamed the ending of the speeches and the march that transpired after.




The crowd stopped at MPD’s 1st Precinct, blocks from where Locke was killed at. Speeches were made about accountability and change. Graffiti was seen sprayed onto walls as the march made its way back to the Government Center.

“Amir Locke,” “Amir,” and “1312” (numbers in the alphabet for ACAB) was spray painted on the metal doors that were shuttered in front of the 1st Precinct. According to jail support organizers two people were arrested from the protest for ‘property damage.’

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Graffiti reading “Amir Locke,” “1312,” and “Amir” was spray painted on MPD’s 1st precinct during Saturday’s march – Image via @GraffitiRadical

City Press Conference Disrupted, Community Safety Workgroup Mentioned

Body camera footage was released on February 3, the night after the killing, and Mayor Jacob Frey and Interim Police Chief Amelia Huffman held a press conference in City Hall.

In the small crowd, activists and journalists who were filming asked questions. The presser was later interrupted by activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who’s the co-chair of the newly constructed Community Safety Workgroup. She said during her interruption that she joined the group because they promised transparency and she felt Huffman and Frey were taking part in a “coverup.”

The Community Safety Workgroup has had its own issues over its transparency and former Mayoral candidate Sheila Nezhad quit the group after just two meetings because of their private nature. Nezhad wrote about the reasonings behind her resigning from the working group in an editorial published at MinnPost. Nezhad said the main two reasons she quit were the closed door meetings and it not being “a good use of city resources.”

In City Hall, Mayor Frey and the Interim Chief walked out of the tense press conference after answering that Amir was wrongly referred to as a suspect in the first MPD press release because they were still gathering information. Activists Jaylani Hussein (CAIR-MN) and Michelle Gross (CUAPB) then took to the podium to call for accountability.


A protest car caravan calling for justice for Amir Locke was held downtown on Friday night February 4 and another one on Sunday. The Sunday night action featured upwards of 75 cars that drove from the site of the abandoned 3rd Precinct to the Interim Police Chief’s house around Lake of the Isles.

Activists stopped around the house and held a rally outside calling on the Interim Chief to resign. Toussaint Morrison said they pulled up to her house because she is “complicit in the predation of Black men and our community members, gunning them down with impunity and then leaving press conferences early saying nothing.”

A vigil was held the night Amir was killed and numerous press conferences featuring the family of Amir Locke have occurred since. On Friday, February 4, over a dozen members of Locke’s family spoke along with their legal representative, Jeff Storms and local activists.


After the presser, several activists went to the office of Mayor Jacob Frey in attempts to speak with him about firing Mark Hanneman, the officer who killed Locke and demanding the resignation of Interim Chief Huffman.

As documented by independent journalist KingDemetrius Pendleton (starting around 2:15:30 of this video), Mayor Frey never came out of his office. Instead, Frey called Nekima Levy Armstrong on the phone about 14 minutes after the crowd had gathered in the hallway to tell her he was busy.

During the afternoon of Monday, February 7, another press conference was held in City Hall featuring a coalition of Black women and mothers demanding accountability for the killing of Amir Locke.


Graffiti

Since the killing of Amir Locke, messages in remembrance of him and against police have been spray painted across a variety of city backdrops, including metal shutters on MPD’s 1st Precinct. A large mural reading “Justice for Amir!” was painted on an I-94 retaining wall south of downtown Minneapolis.

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“Justice for Amir!” mural on I-94 retaining wall in Minneapolis – Image via @GraffitiRadical

Discontent is often expressed via street art. A new era of anti-police graffiti in Minneapolis was spawned during the George Floyd Uprising. The art initially permeated the boarded up buildings and store fronts and has since continued on walls after recent police killings of Dolal Idd, Winston Smith, and now Amir Locke.

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(more images...)

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 20, 2022 3:13 pm

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1 in 3 Big Defense Contractors Profit from US Prisoner Suffering
February 19, 2022
By Alan MacLeod – Feb 14, 2022

There exists a situation whereby prisoners earning pennies per hour are making multimillion-dollar weapons fired by individuals being paid barely $20,000 per year at civilians who might not make that much in their lifetimes.

America’s largest arms companies are increasingly finding lucrative new ways of profiting from the prison industrial complex; in many cases, weapons of war are directly manufactured using coerced prison labor. A new MintPress News study of the 100 largest private Defense Department contractors found that 37% of them were also profiting from incarcerated Americans, either in prisons and jails, or in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) camps. This proportion rose to 16 of the top 25 largest arms manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. The complete list of top corporations profiting from mass incarceration, displayed in order of value of Department of Defense contracts received, is as follows:
Lockheed Martin
Raytheon
General Dynamics
Northrop Grumman
BAE Systems
L3Harris Technologies
General Electric
Health Net Federal Services
Atlantic Diving Supply
Leidos Holdings, Inc.
McKesson Corp.
Booz Allen Hamilton Holding
AmerisourceBergen Corp.
Leonardo S.p.A.
Textron Inc.
AECOM
CACI International
Jacobs Engineering Group
Honeywell International
The Walsh Group Ltd.
Hensel Phelps Construction Co
Express Scripts Inc.
FedEx
Verizon
Carahsoft Technology
Cardinal Health Inc.
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)
Harris Global Communications Inc.
AT&T
Microsoft
Serco Group
Cisco Systems
Gilbane Inc.
CDW Corp.
GlaxoSmithKline plc
Centene
Deloitte
The list (which can be viewed and downloaded here) was created by compiling data from government website USASpending.Gov. The list of the 100 largest private military contractors over the last completed fiscal year was then compared to a database of prison industry private-sector players curated by prison abolition group Worth Rises.

When asked to comment on the fact that almost two-thirds of the biggest players in the defense industry were also waist-deep in the prison profiteering racket, journalist and prison teacher Chris Hedges was far from shocked. “The fabric of the defense industry, the carceral state, the intelligence industry, it is all interwoven. And I think these findings prove it,” he said. Hedges’s most recent book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” was released in October.

MintPress also spoke with Worth Rises’s founder and executive director, Bianca Tylek, who was similarly unsurprised, stating, “There’s considerable overlap between the two industries, which isn’t shocking; these are controversial industries. Corporations that operate in one controversial industry aren’t afraid to take part in another. Where we see a particular overlap is in security and surveillance technology. In fact, historically, the federal government has awarded grants to test technology being developed for anti-terrorism in prisons and jails.”

Not exactly a cottage industry

One of those “controversial” corporations is Raytheon. In 2011, the Massachusetts-based giant was awarded a contract worth up to $40 million to develop a case-management and communications system for ICE, combining more than a hundred Department of Homeland Security databases into one.

The company, which announced $64.4 billion worth of sales last year, also makes use of America’s vast prison population as a source of almost infinite cheap labor to make some of its most expensive products. Prisoners are coerced into working for as little as 23 cents per hour (minus taxes and other fees) for subcontractors who manufacture parts for Patriot missiles that cost up to $5.9 million apiece, meaning it would take nearly three thousand years of round-the-clock working for a prisoner to be able to afford what they are making.

The US government allows Raytheon and others to sell their products to some of the worst human rights-abusing governments in the world, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Raytheon weapons have been crucial in the Saudi-led Coalition’s bombardment of Yemen, creating what the United Nations calls “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Since the beginning of the war, Raytheon has sold at least $3.3 billion worth of equipment to Riyadh alone. In 2018, the Saudi military used a Raytheon-made laser-guided missile to blow up a school bus full of Yemeni children, killing 51 people. While this story made the news, there are doubtless countless other similar cases like this that never reach Western audiences.

Thus, there exists a situation whereby prisoners earning pennies per hour are making multimillion-dollar weapons fired by individuals being paid barely $20,000 per year at civilians who might not make that much in their lifetimes.

Meanwhile, incarcerated individuals across the U.S. make electronics, harnesses and optical equipment for BAE Systems, including for its Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a mainstay of the U.S. Army. For this work, prisoners reportedly receive around $100 per month.

A number of BAE System subsidiaries—including military and police equipment manufacturer Armor Holdings (which makes the majority of the US Army’s backpacks) and camera, security and spy technology firm Fairchild Imaging—also appear on Worth Rises’ list of corporations that sell to the prison industry. Worth Rises considers BAE Systems, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin to be among the most egregious corporate profiteers from prison labor, all of them scoring “full marks” on their harm index.

Other big defense contractors moonlight in the prison industry as well. General Electric and its subsidiaries are involved in the construction and equipping of prisons, supplying food and overseeing prison healthcare. Not to be outdone, Booz Allen Hamilton supplies IT and administrative solutions to ICE. And in Louisiana, prisoners on work-release built warships for Northrop Grumman before it closed its Avondale shipyard in 2014.

Perhaps the most important player connecting the prison industry to the military is government-owned corporation Unicor (also known as Federal Prison Industries). Employing more than 16,000 inmates nationwide in 2021, Unicor is a massive enterprise, boasting revenues of over $528 million last year. Making everything from textiles to office equipment and electronics, the company provides a vital service to the military industrial complex, supplying it with a near endless stream of captive and virtually free labor to exploit.

Unicor often acts as a subcontractor for the big arms conglomerates, but is also directly employed by the U.S. government. In the past 12 months, it has secured a number of contracts worth around $100 million with the Army and Air Force to produce all manner of clothing, from trousers to coats to workout outfits, with work being done in its network of factories in more than a dozen states across the country.

While the likes of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin keep their associations with this controversial source of labor quiet, Unicor is proud of its connections, boasting on its website:

Our electro-optical cable assemblies are used in avionic and missile controls, submarine navigation, and tactical observation and targeting systems in fighter jets, helicopters, tanks and other armored vehicles. Our expertise in manufacturing electro-optical assemblies is proven in numerous programs, such as the Bradley eye-safe laser rangefinder and the Patriot missile guidance system.

Other vehicles Unicor notes its products are part of include the F-15 Eagle (Boeing) and F-16 Fighting Falcon (Lockheed Martin) jets and the Cobra (Bell/Textron) helicopter. Unicor also manufactures bulletproof body armor and used to supply the military with combat helmets until a quality-control issue caused a huge recall. Boeing, which is not included on the current list presented above, appears to no longer use prison labor in the construction of its products.

Woke imperialism?

While many of the 37 corporations listed are well known as weapons manufacturers, readers might not associate some of the other names with the arms industry—a fact that highlights the diverse range of services the Department of Defense pays for. CACI International, for instance, is far from a household name, despite the fact that it employs more than 22,000 people worldwide. CACI’s primary client is the US government, for whom it provides a wide array of IT and professional services. Situated in the part of northern Virginia colloquially known as “Raytheon Acres,” it is one of the many companies collectively feasting from the trough of Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts.

CACI markets itself as a progressive employer. Its website is rife with talk of diversity and inclusiveness, claiming:

CACI values everyone’s unique contributions that they bring to our company, and to our customers — every day. A diverse workforce fosters innovative thinking. It improves our potential for recruiting and retaining highly qualified employees, and it makes us a more attractive business partner.

It also boasts that it is on the Forbes list of top female-friendly companies. However, this progressiveness stops cold when money is on the line. In 2016, CACI bid for and won a $93 million contract with ICE to maintain its detention centers—buildings that have been widely described as concentration camps. According to its then-CEO, Ken Asbury, “CACI is committed to supporting our federal law enforcement officers and first responders protecting the nation.”

Last year, Asbury’s successor John Mengucci bemoaned President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal as bad for business. He was right: in 2019, CACI secured a $907 million contract over 5 years to “provid[e] intelligence operations and analytic support” to US forces in Afghanistan, although with the withdrawal, that particular gravy train appears to have run dry.

In 2004, a group of 256 Iraqis sued CACI for its alleged involvement in their torture and sexual assault at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected CACI’s appeal, bringing them a step closer to facing consequences for their actions.

Chips away!

Some readers might be surprised to see tech companies such as Verizon, IBM, AT&T and Microsoft among the largest defense contractors. However, in a high-tech, 21st century environment, the military requires a wide range of technology and, considering the high premiums it usually pays, it is fast becoming a highly lucrative market to tap. As the former supreme allied commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis, said in 2019, in the next 10 years, the military would be vastly more focused on cyberwarfare, with a priority on offensive cyber capability and unmanned land vehicles and drones, all of which require the services of Silicon Valley.

In November, the Pentagon solicited bids from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle for its multibillion dollar Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program. Last April, Microsoft also secured a gigantic $22 billion contract to supply the Army with more than 120,000 bespoke augmented-reality headsets, meant for use in both training and battlefield scenarios.

For many years, Silicon Valley has closely collaborated with the national security state. In 2020, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services signed a partnership with the CIA to provide the agency with cloud computing services. The deal was reportedly worth tens of billions of dollars. Likewise, big tech has found collaborating with the prison industry to be highly profitable. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all provided their services and experience to ICE, helping the agency streamline its operations to find and deport as many people as possible. In all three cases, this has caused a major backlash, including from their own staff.

The gulag and the gig economy

Prison conditions in the United States are among the worst in the developed world. Although most states require prisoners to be financially compensated for their labor, wages can be garnished to pay for child support, victim restitution and even room and board. And in five states—Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and Florida – prisoners are required to work without any pay whatsoever. “This is bonded labor; it can’t organize; it can’t strike; it can’t protest its working conditions. Pay is far below the minimum wage,” Hedges told MintPress. Thus the massive prison population serves the needs of corporate America in two ways: first, it provides a gigantic pool of cheap, disciplined labor to exploit, helping them compete with sweatshops in Asia; and second, it acts as a disciplining tool against free labor, helping to bust unions and drive down wages and working conditions across the country. As Hedges said: “Figures like Dostoyevsky understood that if you want to understand the beating heart of any country, you have to look at its prison population because those who are trapped in the prison system are, in essence, the model workers for the corporate state. That is what they want all of us to become. And in the gig economy, we are moving in that direction.”

Worth Rises is among a number of groups that consider some prison labor to be akin to slavery, and it has campaigned to change the Thirteenth Amendment, which allows slavery to be used as a form of punishment for a crime.

As the economy has been hollowed out and jobs shipped overseas, much of the country’s working-class population has become, in corporate America’s eyes, surplus to economic requirements. They are no longer needed to work in factories and are effectively useless in generating profits for others. Hedges sees the rise of the prison industrial complex as a response to this. As he noted: “Bodies on the streets of Detroit or Newark or East New York are not worth anything in the eyes of the corporate state. But if you lock them in a cage, they have the capacity to generate fifty or sixty thousand dollars per year for these corporations. So in that sense, it is a complete continuum [since slavery].”

With almost 2.3 million people behind bars across a network of more than 7,000 facilities, the United States has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, locking its citizens up at over 10 times the rate of European countries like Denmark or Sweden, and over 17 times that of Japan. Nearly $4.6 billion is spent every year on the construction of new facilities. The US spends far more on its carceral state than any other country, with its prison population accounting for almost a quarter of the incarcerated people worldwide. A vast array of products, from baseball caps to Ikea furniture to McDonald’s uniforms to Victoria’s Secret lingerie has been made by incarcerated individuals. This profit-driven relationship between the U.S. government and corporate America when it comes to incarcerating millions is what sociologists mean when they refer to the “prison industrial complex.”

The US prison population explosion closely mirrors the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant ideology. Before the Reagan administration, American prison figures were comparable to those in Europe. However, between 1984 and 2005, a new prison or jail was built, on average, every 8.5 days, to the point where it peaked in 2009. Worth Rises’s Tylek strongly criticized the cost and waste of the endeavor. “In many places, prison and jail populations have fallen over the past few years. And yet the budgets of those agencies continue to increase. Nothing justifies that,” she said.

The off-the-charts prison industry has become so normalized that it is the subject of light entertainment. In 2020, a new game called “Prison Empire Tycoon” went viral, becoming the number one strategy game in Apple’s App Store. The point of the game was to oversee and run a for-profit prison. During the tutorial at the start of the game, a baton-wielding guard instructs players, telling them that “the state pays us good money” to manage the “lowlifes” they send your way. “It’s a perfect business,” he says, as he shows you how to send people to solitary confinement, something that is near-universally described as torture. Few people apparently took any issue with it, with the game garnering positive reviews.

Paying their debt?

One way of generating more profit in both the game and in reality is to shift costs onto the prisoners themselves. Incarcerated people now regularly have to pay for essentials like soap, toothpaste and shampoo as well as phone calls with loved ones. Others require medical co-pays to see a doctor or for room and boarding costs, to be garnished from earned wages.

Often just being sent to a correctional facility incurs a $100 “processing fee” prisoners must pay, while visitors are regularly charged for background checks. Prisoners’ friends and families transfer $1.8 billion into correctional facilities every year. Faced with no other choices, they are forced to accept money transfer fees up to 45%. Financial corporations like JPay and JP Morgan Chase partner with correctional facilities in order to ensure the best deal for them – and the worst deal for the prisoners. As Tylek told MintPress, “Being incarcerated is very expensive. It is so expensive that it drives many families that are supporting people who are incarcerated into debt.”

Hedges, who has spent a great deal of time teaching in the New Jersey penitentiary system, also noted the similarities between prisons and the military, commenting that guards are often recruited from the military or National Guard. Increasingly, guards resemble swat teams, and are equipped with high-tech lethal weaponry. “Everything is militarized,” he said, adding: “You are referred to by your number, not your name. You are forced to walk in a single file down the halls. Any infraction or [slight perceived] by a corrections officer can see you end up being beaten or thrown into solitary confinement and stripped of what few privileges you have. It is the perfect microcosm of the totalitarian state.”

Bringing the wars home

To an even greater extent than prisons, policing has become increasingly militarized. Since 1997, the Department of Defense has transferred more than $7.2 billion worth of military equipment to law enforcement agencies. Today, it is not uncommon for police departments to possess high-powered assault rifles, tanks and helicopters. In the wake of the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, President Barack Obama restricted the flow of surplus military equipment. However, once in office, Donald Trump quickly reversed the decision.

A 2017 study found that the receipt of military equipment by law enforcement agencies led to an increase in fatal shootings by police. Even when controlling for other variables, counties with the most equipment received were found to record more than double the police killings of counties that received nothing. When all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything begins to resemble a nail.

“In many cases, the government is reacting to domestic crime in the way it responds to international war. And this is driven by the fact that many of the same vendors are providing the equipment and technology for both these environments,” Tylek said.

As empires decline, Hedges has argued, they often bring the repression they mete out abroad back with them, using on the domestic population tactics honed through quelling foreign dissent. Today, poor communities across the U.S. are beginning to be governed in an increasingly militarized way, while those oppressed by a prison industrial complex at home are coerced into providing their labor to bolster the military industrial complex abroad. And at every step, corporate America continues to profit.

Featured image: Inmates return from farm work detail at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana. Gerald Herbert/AP

(MintPress News)


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