Police, prison and abolition

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 11, 2022 2:23 pm

US Police Have So Much Extra Gear They’re Sending It to Ukraine

Police departments around the U.S. are donating tactical gear to Ukraine, whose annual defense budget is smaller than the NYPD’s.
PB
By Paul Blest
March 10, 2022, 8:49am


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A MEMBER OF UKRAINIAN TERRITORIAL DEFENSE UNITS TALKS ON A PHONE DURING OBSERVATION OF RUSSIAN TROOPS MOVEMENTS AROUND THE VILLAGE OF VELYKA DYMERKA, 40KM EAST OF KYIV ON MARCH 9, 2022. (DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Police departments around the U.S. are donating tactical gear to Ukraine, whose annual defense budget is smaller than the NYPD’s.

Law enforcement agencies in several states have all announced in recent days that they’re donating dozens of pieces of body armor, such as ballistic helmets and vests. Some of the departments and their respective local partners—one of which is a top defense contractor with U.S. and Ukrainian government contracts—say the donations will be distributed to Ukrainian citizens under siege by the Russian military.

State law enforcement agencies in Colorado and Vermont both announced Wednesday that they were donating defensive equipment to Ukraine. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said the state’s policing agencies were “coordinating an effort to donate used and expired body-armor vests to military units in Ukraine,” and the Vermont State Police also encouraged members of the public to donate their own body armor as long as it’s rated Level III or higher by the Department of Justice’s research arm—capable of protecting against some rifle rounds, in other words.

The Colorado Department of Public Safety said it was donating more than 80 sets of body armor and 750 helmets, and that it was accepting donations from other law enforcement agencies in the state. “This is equipment that we are no longer able to use because it is beyond life cycle, or in some cases it may have been replaced or upgraded by some equipment that maybe better fits our needs or is safer,” Colorado DPS spokesperson Patricia Billinger told local station KARE9.

In Pennsylvania, the Falls Township Police Department, which has 53 sworn officers and is situated about 40 minutes north of Philadelphia, is sending 52 ballistic vests, including 15 “military-grade” vests capable of stopping rifle bullets, although they’re no longer under warranty, according to Falls Township police chief Nelson E. Whitney II.

“We took 45 vests from the back [of the department’s evidence facility],” Whitney said. “I looked through my basement, and I found a couple I had from over the years, and other officers did the same.”

The department is also providing “battle dress uniforms” (BDUs), or non-traditional police uniforms marked for SWAT teams or hazardous weather events. Whitney said they’re “more typically used in a tactical or military situation than everyday law enforcement.”

Whitney added the department is also sending boots, medical supplies, personal hygiene supplies, and animal food.

The department decided to coordinate donations after a request from one of their officers whose wife is Ukrainian and still had family there. The Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center in nearby Jenkintown, is coordinating the donations and flying supplies from the U.S. to Poland every day, according to Whitney.

The city of Yonkers, New York, also announced last week that its police department would donate 40 ballistic vests and 50 tactical helmets, largely to help the Ukrainian population in Yonkers and Westchester County, according to Christina Gilmartin, communications director for Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano.

The ballistic vests, the city said, were all out of commission and are rated a minimum of Level II—meaning they’re designed to protect against all handgun rounds, according to online tactical gear retailer Bulletproof Zone. The helmets Yonkers is donating were made specifically for riot control.

“The war in Ukraine is bearing down unbelievable tragedy upon the Ukrainian people, and the Yonkers Police stands united with them,” Yonkers police commissioner John J. Mueller said in a statement accompanying a press release announcing the donation. “It is our hope that this donation helps in the defense of their homeland.”

The donations are being handled by the Westchester County chapter of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which didn’t respond to a request for comment. Asked if the city was planning to send firearms and ammunition to Ukraine as well, Gilmartin responded: “Not at this time.”

That U.S. police departments have gear capable of protecting people during a war is not surprising. Since 1997, the Pentagon has transferred billions of dollars worth of equipment—including small arms, aircraft, and tactical vehicles—to more than 8,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies through the 1033 program and the Defense Department’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) and its Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO).

But while it’s not completely unheard of for police departments to donate tactical gear—in 2004, North Carolina police departments donated 1,500 bulletproof vests to a North Carolina National Guard unit that was deploying to Iraq—it does appear to be unusual, particularly to donate the gear overseas.

“Honest to God I have no idea how often this is done or who does it,” Chuck Wexler, a leading policing researcher who serves as the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told VICE News in an email.

One sheriff claimed in an announcement that the federal government, including the Department of Defense and State Department, were soliciting donations for Ukraine from state and local law enforcement.Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman announced last week that his department would send more than 340 expired ballistics helmets that would otherwise be destroyed to a Pentagon contractor, which would then send them to Ukraine.

“Many of our Department of Defense (DOD) and State Department contacts have asked the law enforcement community for equipment to help the Ukrainian people push back against this violence and protect their citizens,” Hoffman said on Twitter.

He added that the Pentagon is attempting to “supply more than 50,000 helmets and law enforcement supplies in the coming weeks.”


The State Department and Pentagon, however, both flatly denied asking U.S. law enforcement to contribute equipment to Ukraine.

A State Department spokesperson told VICE News in an email Friday the department “has made no such request.” A Pentagon spokesperson told VICE News in an email Thursday: “We are aware of no such requests from the Department of Defense.”

A Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson later told VICE News that Hoffman hasn’t actually spoken with the Pentagon, but rather that “all communication has been verbal through a third-party vendor that has been vetted by DOD.”

That vendor is a Sarasota-based Global Ordnance, a defense contractor and commercial arms and equipment distributor, whose sales reached nearly $200 million in 2020. Along with its subsidiary Global Military Products (GMP), the company has won at least a half-billion dollars in Defense Department contracts over the past decade, according to USAspending.gov, the Treasury Department’s government spending tracker. The company also signed a “cooperation agreement” with Ukrainian state-owned defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom last September worth up to $500 million.

Global Ordnance vice president for human resources Carrie Morales told VICE News that the equipment wasn’t requested by the Pentagon, but that the company has “a lot of people in Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe” and that the donation is part of the company’s “humanitarian efforts.”

The company’s president is Marc Morales, a veteran military supplier. Before he started Global Ordnance in 2013, however, Morales and 21 other executives and employees of military and law enforcement contracting firms were indicted on federal charges of attempting to bribe an undercover FBI agent posing as the defense minister of Gabon. The Justice Department ultimately dropped the charges in 2012, for a variety of reasons, including excluded evidence and the resources necessary to prosecute.

The company said in a blog post last week that it’s working with the Pinellas Community Fund, a local charity, to send aid to Ukraine, and that the company has “facilitated delivery of ammunition, arms, humanitarian aid, and are continuing to work day and night to help the Ukrainians fight for their freedom.”

Aside from the involvement of a defense contractor, the donations raise questions about the outsized resources afforded to U.S. police agencies. State and local governments in the U.S. spent $123 billion on policing in 2019, or nearly 4% of their general expenditures, according to the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

The Ukrainian military budget was nearly $6 billion in 2020, according to the World Bank; the New York Police Department’s FY2020 budget in 2020 was nearly $11 billion, including a $5.6 billion operating budget and $5.3 billion “centrally allocated” budget including pensions and fringe benefits, according to the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission.

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world,” former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once joked.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypkjx/ ... ar-ukraine

Fascist solidarity, how touching................Not to mention there's money to be made.

You might ask why the cops got all this heavy gear. They've got it for you, to use on you at their master's bidding, and perhaps even without it. Is abolition not screamingly obvious?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 15, 2022 2:20 pm

US Private Prisons Are Big Business at Expense of Human Rights

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People demanding the U.S. government to stop funding private prisons. | Photo: Twitter/ @PresenteOrg

Published 14 March 2022 (22 hours 1 minutes ago)

The United States has the largest prison population of more than 2 million and the highest prison population rate of 629 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.

Driven by a motive to seek profits, a system originally designed for rehabilitation has become "big business" that thrives on violations of the human rights of migrants and minorities, said a Mexican expert in strategic studies, referring to private prisons in the United States.

Private prisons were founded in the 1980s to make up for bed shortages in federal and state ones. The U.S. government pays private prison management companies for each inmate, so the more prisoners, the higher the earnings, said Raul Benitez Manaut, a professor at the Center for Research on North America at Mexico's National Autonomous University.

This money-making endeavor has been supported by what he calls the U.S. "iron fist" policy on street crime, which for the past 30 years has "given the police incentives to send more people to prison for minor crimes, in collusion with prosecutors and judges." Prison privatization in the U.S., on the rise in the last three decades, has adulterated the essence of the prison system by turning it into business whose profitability relies on the number of inmates.

The U.S. has the largest prison population of more than 2 million and the highest prison population rate of 629 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the latest data from the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research at the School of Law of Birkbeck of University of London. Low-income groups and ethnic minorities are the main victims of the police and judicial practices feeding private prisons.

Black and Latino Americans were incarcerated at about 5 times and 1.3 times respectively the rate of white Americans, according to the U.S. News and World Report in October 2021. "The Black population is larger than the white one in U.S. prisons because many Afro-descendants do not have the money to pay for a lawyer and avoid jail," said Benitez, adding that "judges normally favor the white population, and often punish the Black and Latino population, so those are human rights violations."


The rise in undocumented migrants heading to the U.S. has benefited owners of private detention centers, as they receive money for each migrant held, and employ detainees as extremely cheap labor. The criminalization of immigration has contributed to the high number of people behind bars, and many migrants are held in detention centers operated by private companies, where their human rights are violated or limited.

As of September 2021, 79 percent of people detained each day in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody were held in private detention facilities, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The GEO Group and CoreCivic are the two largest owners, managers and operators of private prisons in the United States, with combined revenue in 2020 of more than US$4 billion.

The companies are also large donors to political campaigns, such as that of former U.S. President Donald Trump, and hire firms to lobby for their interests among lawmakers and in the upper echelons of U.S. power.

Benitez said that government officials, from the local and regional levels and up, and operators of private prisons benefit from the current system, with which in mind the federal government "cannot and does not want to" eradicate prison privatization. "It's a vicious circle."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0007.html

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Owner of MEnD Correctional Care Loses License Over In-Custody Death of Hardel Sherrell
By Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot March 10, 2022

St. Paul, MN – In an unprecedented move, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice ruled to suspend the medical license of Dr. Todd Leonard and fine him $30,000 for his role in the 2018 in-custody death of Hardel Sherrell. Dubbed “Dr. Death” by activists, Leonard founded MEnD Correctional Care, which provides medical care to at least 48 correctional facilities across five states in the Midwest, overseeing the health care of up to 9,600 inmates.

Content Advisory: Death

The ruling came over three years after Sherrell, a 27-year-old father of three, died a torturous death in Beltrami County Jail due to complications from Guillain-Barré syndrome, which was undiagnosed at the time. He was the fourth death in the jail in as many years.

Sherrell’s mother’s legal team got video footage from the jail and filed a lawsuit. Her push for accountability along with a whistleblowing nurse helped to spark a slew of investigations into his death by a variety of agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A federal grand jury is also investigating Sherrell’s death for criminal charges.

Unicorn Riot was first to release videos from Beltrami County Jail revealing the tortuous neglect by corrections officers in the Beltrami County Jail and medical staff from MEnD that led to the in-custody death of Hardel Sherrell – see here for more. https://unicornriot.ninja/tag/hardel-sherrell/

A Kare11 investigation into MEnD, prompted by Sherrell’s death found that at least 25 inmates died while under Leonard’s care. Leonard’s license was previously restricted in 2011 when the Board reprimanded him and fined him.

It was Stephanie Lundblad, the whistleblowing nurse who filed complaints with several agencies, including the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice in September 2018, that led to the Board’s ruling. She blew the whistle on the neglect she saw from the jail and from Leonard himself, saying she felt like she witnessed a “murder” after caring for Sherrell a few days before his death.

Lundblad’s complaint eventually led to evidentiary hearings in July 2021 at the request of the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice Complaint Review Committee. Recommendations were made by the Board and the final ruling to suspend Leonard’s license was made by Administrative Judge Ann O’Reilly on January 8, 2022. Leonard can apply for reinstatement in September.

Todd Leonard was represented by David Bunde of Fredrickson & Byron. Keriann Riehle and Nicholas Lienesch, both Assistant Attorneys General, represented the Committee.

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Hardel Sherrell was 27 when he died in Beltrami County Jail

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Conclusion in Board’s final report

The Orders

Four orders were handed down by Judge O’Reilly. The medical license of Todd Leonard (MEnD Correctional Care) was ordered to be suspended for an “indefinite period of time” starting on March 1, 2022. Leonard must pay a $30,000 civil penalty to the Board before July 21, 2022. Lastly, the Board noted Minnesota Statutes 147.081 and 147.082, reiterating that Leonard “must not imply” that he’s an authorized doctor.

However, in just six months, Leonard “may petition the Board to have the suspended status removed from his license.” The petition process consists of submitting a paper report detailing the implementation of policies and procedures.

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The Report

The Board’s 164-page report (PDF) released in January 2022 gives the findings of fact, conclusions, and the final order on Leonard’s license along with the September 2021 recommendation report. See the Table of Contents and read the full report below.

The report states that Leonard created MEnD in 2008. Leonard’s the president of the company and served as the chief medical director until 2021 when a new corporate medical director was appointed.

MEnD started contracting with Beltrami County Jail, located in Bemidji, Minnesota, in 2012. The compensation for the original contract was $204,900 annually, yet there were amendments made to the contract after increased hours in 2013. The amended contract amount was redacted from the report but “According to [Leonard], MEnD’s net profits in 2020 were ‘a few’ hundred thousand dollars.”

The report states that Leonard had a “romantic relationship” with ‘Nurse #1’, Michelle Skroch, and that he lives with her. A “love contract” was crafted by a lawyer working for MEnD to “openly declare” their work romance. In 2018, when Sherrell died, Skroch was serving as MEnD’s director of nursing and was MEnD’s lead trainer and training developer.

The report stated five examples of memes which were found in MEnD’s training materials that “made light of the inmate population that MEnD served.” Included in the trainings were cartoons with captions joking about inmates’ mental health, substance abuse, cleanliness in the institution and the inability for inmates to leave. Leonard and Skroch stated those memes were to inject “levity” into the trainings and “to have a chuckle.”

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Examples of memes used in MEnD’s training documents making “light of the inmate population” – pages 11 and 12 of the Board’s final report

Later in the memorandum, a footnote was added to the word “faking” in a sentence speaking on MEnD’s conclusion that Sherrell was faking his illness. The footnote reads:

“This is not surprising considering MEnD’s training materials and overall culture mock and belittle the individuals entrusted to their care.”
Footnote 65 on page 76 of the Board’s final report on Todd Leonard

A section in the ruling report titled Care of Inmate/Patient is 44 pages long and covers in detail the neglect that occurred in Sherrell’s death. Hardel was incarcerated on August 1, 2018, and was moved to Beltrami County Jail on August 24. He died on September 2.

Sherrell’s health deteriorated within days of his arrival at the jail and the neglect he faced revolved around a consistent claim by certain MEnD employees and jail staff that he was “faking” his illness and was “plotting” to escape if he went to the hospital.

Incompetence by MEnD staff exacerbated the claims that Sherrell was faking. In one instance, after reviewing jail video from the wrong day and time, ‘Nurse #3’ wrote a report on August 29 to Leonard expressing “healthy skepticism” over “the Patient’s complaints.” This led to Leonard removing Sherrell’s access to a wheelchair during a time when Sherrell was losing the ability to control his legs.

The next day, ‘Nurse #2’ ordered Sherrell be taken to the hospital after evaluating him in the morning. The order was overridden by Jail Administrator Calandra Allen who claimed Sherrell was a “flight risk.”


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A failure by MEnD’s Nurse #3 by reviewing the wrong day’s footage and thereby expressing “skepticism” in Hardel Sherrell’s illness led to an increased amount of neglect – sections of pages 18, 19, 21, and 22 in the final report ruling against Todd Leonard

On August 31, three days before Sherrell died in a jail cell, his ability to move any of his extremities had deteriorated. He had become incontinent and was having trouble swallowing and breathing. He was cold to the touch and yet sweating profusely. He was unable to eat or drink and was left lying in his own urine several different times for several hours while in a medical cell with a camera in the upper corner of the cell.

That day, Stephanie Lundblad, the whistleblowing nurse whose complaints sparked the Committee’s review, was working her first day at MEnD. Labeled as ‘Medical Provider #1’, she was supposed to meet Leonard at the jail, but he called and said he would not be coming. She ended up working her first day independently and was not alerted to Sherrell’s condition.

She stated from the moment she walked in, she heard several correction officers “making fun of the Patient.” The officers were saying he was faking his paralysis and “laughing about how he would not wear an adult diaper.”

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Whistleblowing nurse Stephanie Lundblad’s first day at MEnD featured her boss informing her she would be working alone and jail staff making fun of Hardel Sherrell – page 26 of the Board’s report on Todd Leonard

For further details of the conditions of neglect that Lundblad saw, the complaint that she submitted can be found here. She sent complaints to the Department of Corrections Inspection Unit, the Ramsey County Medical Examiner, and the Medical Board of Medical Practice in early September 2018.

Lundblad’s life has been negatively altered since Sherrell’s death, which she calls a “murder.” She stated to the Committee in 2021 that she resigned from MEnD after learning Sherrell died and was “horrified” by the “incompetency.”

She reported that Leonard told her Sherrell killed himself likely by stuffing a sock down his throat.

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MEnD employee for one day before resigning, Stephanie Lundblad recalled being emotionally damaged by the “neglect” that Hardel Sherrell faced in Beltrami County Jail – pages 54 and 55 of the Board’s ruling on Todd Leonard

During her medical assessments on patients incarcerated at Beltrami County Jail on August 31, Lundblad’s persistence that Sherrell needed to be taken to the hospital was finally allowed by the jail after prior repeated denials over claims he was “faking” and seeking to “escape.”

However, Sherrell was discharged that same night after tests and given a final diagnosis of “malingering” and “weakness.” Corrections officers from Beltrami County Jail had accompanied Sherrell on his trip and were noted as telling the medical personnel in Sanford Hospital that Sherrell was faking.

The next day, September 1, the day before Sherrell died, Skroch is noted in the report as seeing Sherrell two-and-a-half hours after arriving at the jail and then falsifying her medical notes with an earlier and incorrect time. Skroch spent less than three minutes examining him at a distance of 10 feet away, never checking his vital signs.

That day, a sergeant in the jail noted in a written report and voiced in a message to Administrator Allen that Skroch had advised him “that there was nothing medically wrong with the Patient.” Skroch had given instruction to the jail staff that they didn’t need to assist Sherrell with anything as he was “capable of doing it himself.”

Skroch spoke to Leonard at 5:30 p.m. that evening about the diagnosis from the hospital visit the night before. According to the Board, Leonard listened and gave no further instructions for medical care for Sherrell, concluding that the ER’s “diagnosis of “malingering” were “puzzling” and “bizarre.”


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The day before Hardel Sherrell died in a Beltrami County Jail cell, MEnD’s director of nursing, Michelle Skroch, instructed jail staff that there was “nothing medically wrong” with Sherrell – pages 43 and 44 of the Board’s final report on Todd Leonard

On the day of Sherrell’s death, Skroch is said in the report to have, for the second day in a row, just “peeked onto his cell” and did not check his vitals. Her written notes are in “stark contrast” to what appears in the jail videos, says the report.

Also noted is Skroch’s final observations of Sherrell before she left the jail at 2:27 p.m. She stated Sherrell was “sleeping comfortably.” Yet, video appears to show Hardel laying unconscious while “excreting a white substance from his mouth.” He was pronounced dead two hours later.


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The day that Hardel Sherrell died in Beltrami County Jail, Michelle Skroch, failed to check his vitals and said Sherrell was “sleeping comfortably” despite video showing he appeared unconscious with foam coming from his mouth – pages 50 and 51 of the Board’s final report

Experts brought in by the Board to testify at the hearing are noted in the report as stating Sherrell “most likely died of respiratory failure caused by Gauillain-Barre Syndrome” and that Leonard failed Sherrell on a multitude of levels, including “failing to conform to the minimum standard of care.”

An expert brought in by Leonard and his legal team at Fredrikson & Byron opined that MEnD treated Sherrell appropriately and that they “met the standard of care in his treatment.”

In the Administrative Law Judge’s Memorandum, three occasions were noted in the report as times when Leonard’s “conduct fell below the minimal standard of acceptable” and demonstrated “a careless disregard” for Sherrell. They were as follows:

*Respondent [Todd Leonard] failed to ensure the Patient’s timely transfer to the emergency room on August 30, 2018, after the Administrator overrode Respondent’s medical directive for a patient over whom Respondent had an ethical and professional duty to protect.
*Second, on both September 1 and 2, 2018, Respondent failed to obtain basic medical information about the Patient from his on-site medical staff that would have enabled him to make informed and proper medical decisions for the Patient’s care.
*Finally, as a result of his failure to obtain necessary information from his on-site medical staff, Respondent neglected to return the Patient to the hospital for emergency care, when such care was clearly needed.

Judge O’Reilly’s report notes that “it cannot be ignored that” Leonard “had a significant financial interest in maintaining a good business relationship with the jail and its administration.”

The report details the many steps and decisions Leonard made that the Medical Board and Judge O’Reilly deemed failures during the treatment of Sherrell. The conclusion reads as such:
“The Patient entered the county jail on August 24, 2018, a vibrant, seemingly healthy 27-year-old man. He was carried from that same jail nine days later to be laid to rest, after having endured days of suffering, begging those responsible for his care – medical providers and correction officers alike – for help that never came. His condition had already been dismissed by his custodians and ‘caregivers’- he was a criminal defendant feigning an illness, not a man presumed innocent and in desperate need of care. And given their preconceived notions of inmates, no evidence could convince them otherwise. Even in his final hours, as he sat in a wheelchair, in filthy scrubs, with urine streaming down his legs, his caregivers would not believe him. As he laid unconscious, half-naked on the floor of his jail cell, white foam coming from his mouth, they still did not believe him. It took his death to convince medical professionals and jail staff that the Patient was not ‘malingering.‘

Given the egregious facts of this case, the Administrative Law Judge recommends that the Board impose significant and appropriate discipline against Respondent. The Judge further urges that the State of Minnesota investigate all who callously disregarded their duty to this man. Foremost among them are Nurse #1, the county jail, and jail staff. Scrutiny should also be applied to the contracts MEnD maintains with Minnesota counties and municipalities, and all the other medical providers who were involved in the Patient’s ‘care’ between August 25 and September 2, 2018.

A tragedy like this should never have occurred. And it must never be allowed to happen again.”
Findings of Fact, Conclusions, and Final Order In the Matter of the Medical License of Todd A. Leonard, M.D. – Table of Contents
I Background: Respondent (2) and MEnD 2-12
II Care of Inmate/Patient 12-55
III Cause of Death 55-59
IV Complaint Made to the Board of Medicine 59-60
V Expert Medical Testimony 60-70
Conclusions 70-73
The Administrative Law Judge’s Memorandum 73-90
Order 88-90
Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Recommendation [redacted] 91-164
Read the full 164-page report detailing the findings of fact, conclusions, and final order from the MN Board of Medical Practice:

(see link)

In response to the ruling, Leonard stated:

“I am profoundly saddened and disappointed by the Minnesota Board’s decision. This death was a tragedy, but to my core I believe our care was appropriate, especially given the incredibly rare nature of this patient’s condition. This incident has been investigated extensively by the Board, through the legal process and other means; each of those investigations documented the steps we took to properly evaluate the patient’s condition, to recommend a course of treatment and to follow up as appropriate. For reasons I still struggle to understand, these facts were not persuasive to the Board.

It’s important to make it clear that today’s decision is a judgment for me personally and not against MEnD, its 250 employees or the important work they do. Over the last decade, our team has served many thousands of individuals with quality medical care. I am proud of our track record in living up to the standards of our profession and of the quality healthcare that we have delivered over this time. We have received multiple national accreditations based on the high standard of work that the MEnD team delivers each day, and they will continue that work with that spirit in mind.”


(more...)

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/owner-of ... -sherrell/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 31, 2022 2:57 pm

‘No progress’ since George Floyd: US police killing three people a day

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A woman walks past a boarded up Apple store that has been painted with a mural of George Floyd's likeness and the names of others killed by police.
In the two years since George Floyd’s murder, the US has made little progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement. Photograph: Gillian Flaccus/AP

As Joe Biden pushes to ‘fund the police’, data from Mapping Police Violence shows high rates of deaths at the hands of law enforcement persist

@SamTLevin
Wed 30 Mar 2022 06.00 EDT

Police officers in America continue to kill people at an alarming rate, according to a data analysis that has raised concerns about the Biden administration’s push to expand police investments amid growing concerns about crime.

Law enforcement in the US have killed 249 people this year as of 24 March, averaging about three deaths a day and mirroring the deadly force trends of recent years, according to Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group. The data, experts say, suggests in the nearly two years since George Floyd’s murder, the US has made little progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and that the 2020 promises of systemic reforms have fallen short.

Police have killed roughly 1,100 people each year since 2013. In 2021, officers killed 1,136 people – one of the deadliest years on record, Mapping Police Violence reported. The organization tracks deaths recorded by police, governments and the media, including cases where people were fatally shot, beaten, restrained, and Tasered. The Washington Post has reported similar trends, and found that 2021 broke the record for fatal shootings by officers since the newspaper started its database tracking in 2015.

“The shocking regularity of killings suggests that nothing substantive has really changed to disrupt the nationwide dynamic of police violence,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard, which evaluates departments. “It demonstrates that we’re not doing enough, and if anything, it appears to be getting slightly worse year over year.”

Advocates argue that the persistent rate of killings was a critical reason the US should not be expanding its police forces.


Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said to “fund the police”, released a budget proposal earlier this week for $30bn in law enforcement and crime prevention efforts, including funding to put “more police officers on the beat”. The proposal, which called for the expansion of “accountable, community policing”, sparked immediate criticisms from racial justice groups. The Movement for Black Lives noted that the White House was proposing only $367m to support police reform and said Biden’s budget “shows a blatant disregard for his promises to Black people, masked as an effort to decrease crime”.

Michael Gwin, a White House spokesperson, said in an email that Biden had been “consistent in his opposition to defunding the police and in his support for additional funding for community policing”, and “remains committed to advancing long-overdue police reforms”.

“The president, along with the overwhelming majority of Americans, knows that we can and must have a criminal justice system that both protects public safety and upholds our founding ideals of equal treatment under the law. In fact, those two goals go hand-in-hand. That approach is at the core of the president’s comprehensive plan to combat crime by getting guns off the streets, and by investing in community-oriented policing and proven community anti-violence programs,” he added.


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During the national uprisings after George Floyd’s murder, advocates argued that cities could save lives by reducing police budgets. Photograph: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images

During the national uprisings after Floyd’s murder, “defund the police” became a central rallying cry, with advocates arguing reform efforts had failed to prevent killings and misconduct. Cities could save lives by reducing police budgets, limiting potentially deadly encounters with civilians, and reinvesting funds into community programs that address root causes of crime, activists have said.

Some cities initially responded with modest cuts to police budgets, in some cases removing officers from schools, traffic enforcement and other divisions, and investing in alternatives. But over the last year, an uptick in gun violence and homicides has prompted a backlash to the idea of defunding (even as the current crime rate remains significantly lower than decades prior). With intense media coverage of crime, officials have been pressured to abandon reforms, prioritize harsh punishments and invest more in police. Cities that made small cuts have largely restored and expanded law enforcement budgets.

“To invest more into a system that we all know is broken is really a slap in the face to everyone who marched in summer 2020,” said Chris Harris, director of policy at the Austin Justice Coalition in Texas. “It reflects just a real lack of solutions to the problems that we face. It’s just more of the same – even if it’s exactly the thing that we know continues to hurt and kill people.”

Killings by police in the US
Mapping Police Violence data on fatal shootings by officers and other deaths at the hands of police

249 People killed in 2022, as of 24 March

1,136 People killed in 2021

1,133 People killed in 2020

1,096 People killed in 2019

1,145 People killed in 2018

Harris said it was disappointing to see calls for police expansion at the federal level, given the George Floyd Act, the national reform measure proposed after the protests, did not succeed. He said he was not surprised that the killings by police continue apace: “We fail to deal with the underlying issues that often drive police interactions in our communities, partly because we’re funding this law enforcement response rather than the upfront supports and services that could help people.”

Gwin noted that the White House was exploring possible executive action to pass reforms after Republicans blocked negotiations over legislation.

Sinyangwe pointed to a data analysis in Los Angeles, which showed that in recent years, one-third of incidents in which Los Angeles police department (LAPD) officers used force involved an unhoused person: “Instead of using force against homeless people, we should be investing in services and creating unarmed civilian responses to these issues.”

But in LA, where housing and outreach efforts have fallen short, there has been an escalating law enforcement crackdown on street encampments. And LAPD is on track to get a large budget boost, despite a sharp increase in killings by officers in 2021.

Proponents of police budget increases argue that law enforcement is the solution to violence, but Sinyangwe noted that fewer than 5% of arrests nationally are for serious violent crimes. And research has shown that when police forces expand, there are more arrests for low-level offenses, he said. And many high-profile killings by police have involved stops for alleged low-level crimes.

Image
The Los Angeles police department is on track to get a large budget boost, despite an increase in killings by officers in 2021. Photograph: Myung J Chun/Los Angeles Times/REX/Shutterstock

Kaitlyn Dey, an organizer in Portland, Oregon, said it was frustrating to see officials push a narrative that cities need to “re-fund the police” when municipalities have largely failed to defund law enforcement in the first place.

“We have to start chipping away at how many officers there are, what kind of equipment they have – that is going to reduce [police] violence, because they’re not going to be able to enact it if you take away their resources,” she said.

There are documented solutions that could reduce killings, said Alex S Vitale, sociology professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on policing. He noted estimates suggesting that 25% to 50% of people killed by police were having a mental health crisis.

“If we would develop non-police mental health crisis teams, and improve community-based mental health services, we could save hundreds of lives a year,” he said.

Vitale, author of The End of Policing, pointed to a program in Denver that sends mental health clinicians and paramedics to respond to certain 911 calls, which is now dramatically expanding after a successful pilot. Health experts have responded to thousands of emergency calls since 2020, and have never had to call police for backup, the Denver Post reported.

“While the media has mobilized crime panics to try and shut down talk of reducing our reliance on policing, organizations across the country are doing grassroots work in communities to demand these alternatives,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... high-rates

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 23, 2022 2:29 pm

Policing causes violence, not the other way around
April 23, 2022 Sonali Kolhatkar

Image
Police Everywhere Justice Nowhere, rally at the State Capitol in St Paul, Minnesota, after the not guilty verdict in the Yanez trial, 2017. Photo: Lorie Shaull

The New York City subway shooting in Brooklyn on April 12 miraculously resulted in no deaths, although about 30 people suffered injuries, including 10 from gunshot wounds. Within hours, a massive manhunt for the shooter was underway, but in the end it was the suspect who tipped police off and turned himself in. Still, that has not stopped politicians and corporate media outlets like the Washington Post and others from using the shooting to shore up police talking points and implicitly make the case for more police funding.

Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, has followed the politics of law enforcement for years. The author of The End of Policing—a book that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) inadvertently helped turn into a bestseller during the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson—explained to me in an interview that “we’ve seen a big increase in the number of police on the subway with the new mayor, Eric Adams, and that did not play a role in preventing this [shooting] from happening.”

Indeed, New York police, with all the resources of modern technology, surveillance and weaponry at its disposal, had to embarrassingly turn to the public for help. “We routinely overestimate the effectiveness of policing as a solution to our problems,” said Vitale.

Across the country, Democratic Party leaders like Mayor Adams are taking “tough-on-crime” stances, forgetting the horrors of racist police brutality that had seemed so apparent to the entire nation only two years ago when millions of Americans protested, angered by the videotaped police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who in 2020 suggested cutting $120 million from her city’s police budget, ultimately decided to increase police funding. Earlier this year she again requested millions more in supplemental police funding but then quietly withdrew her request after gleeful coverage by right-wing news outlets about her “stunning” reversal on the issue.

In Los Angeles, mayoral hopeful Karen Bass, known as a staunch progressive, has also decided to change her tune on police funding. Bass is running neck and neck with billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and may be feeling pressure from Caruso’s overt pro-police position.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot last fall also proposed increased police funding after having earlier taken a position to cut funds.

And, President Joe Biden, who has stated more vociferously than most of his fellow Democrats that he does not agree with the idea of defunding police departments, has unsurprisingly proposed a massive increase in police funding in his federal budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

Biden, Adams, Breed, Bass, and Lightfoot, all Democrats, are citing rising crime levels as reasons for increasing police funding, perplexing left-leaning voters. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy says that this pivot is the result of Democrats’ failure to make progress on gun control.

But there is no evidence that increased policing actually reduces violence. Indeed, it is quite the contrary. Most researchers and journalists attempt to correlate increased policing with a reduction in crime. But few ask whether increased policing reduces violence. If police are the perpetrators of violence, then increased policing results in increased violence, as a 2021 study by Community Resource Hub and Interrupting Criminalization found.

Crime is related to many factors, and policing is not one of them. Vitale draws a connection between wealth disparities and the criminalization of poverty, saying that Democratic mayors “continue to insist that all local government can do is subsidize the already wealthy in hopes that they’ll be competitive on the global stage.” In turn, he says, “this has just produced tremendous inequality and budget cuts for essential social services.” The issues that “have resulted from that have been turned into ‘policeable’ problems, and this has just created a vicious cycle.”

Studies have shown that when there are ample resources for community services such as mental health care, crime goes down. Indeed, in the case of the New York subway shooting, the suspect has a history of mental health struggles. If cities responded to mental health episodes with counselors instead of police, we might well see a reduction in overall violence.

In fact, the city of Denver, Colorado, did just that. Over a period of six months, Denver city authorities dispatched mental health teams instead of police in situations that warranted such intervention. The experiment was judged a success given that 750 such calls resulted in zero arrests. In one incident, a man who was hallucinating had no shoes on in extremely cold weather. The team that was dispatched gave him a pair of shoes as a simple first step toward helping him.

Sadly, the corporate media has relentlessly fed the notion that rising crime is an indication that more police are necessary. The fact that recent robberies of high-end luxury stores have gotten so much publicity—from disproportionate media coverage—has fueled the myth that crime is out of control and that more police are needed, even though overall crime levels are not as high as they are being made out to be. Critics have dubbed this sort of media coverage as “copaganda,” or pro-cop propaganda.

“There are a lot of factors that drive this conflation of policing and public safety” and the idea that “policing is the only tool that’s available to keep us safe,” said Vitale. One factor is that covering crime and policing offers “sensationalism” in headlines that drives up corporate media ratings. Additionally, according to Vitale, “The news media have always cozied up to police to be a source of information.”

But, the most important driver of copaganda is what Vitale calls “a shared worldview” between corporate media, liberal elites, and police. This view is that “the problems of American society… [are] problems of individual and group moral failure that are best addressed through punitive interventions.”

A stark example of this can be found in Politico, once a digital upstart and pioneer of “new media,” today squarely part of the corporate media landscape. A story about the Los Angeles mayor’s race, headlined “Crime upstages progressive priorities in Los Angeles mayor’s race,” featured a large photograph of a homeless encampment by the beach. The photo made it clear that unhoused people, in the outlet’s view, are a source of crime.

Instead of seeing the large spike in homelessness as a symptom of an unequal economy, the phenomenon is being used by politicians and the media alike to justify increased policing. In fact, as Politico points out at the very bottom of its story, “crime rates are far below historic lows and actually dipped in 2020 before the current uptick.” Shouldn’t that have been the story’s leading point?

This sort of coverage is a far cry from the nearly unanimous mainstream media support for the Black Lives Matter movement two years ago. That movement called for, and continues to support, a redirection of police funding toward community services for the unhoused, those struggling with mental health, unemployment, hunger and other social problems caused by the current capitalist system.

“The mainstream media, once they had an understanding of what it was we were really talking about in the summer of 2020,” said Vitale, “quickly realized that they were diametrically opposed to it and have sort of systematically excluded these ideas from mainstream media conversations.”

To admit that social problems are caused by the failures of capitalism would undermine the credibility of the very system that political and media elites rely on. A police-centric worldview preserves a system that is designed to produce unequal outcomes.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... ay-around/
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat May 07, 2022 2:30 pm

‘The Core of Copaganda Is the Symbiotic Relationship Between Press and Police’
CounterSpin interview with Josmar Trujillo on hyper-policing
JANINE JACKSON

Janine Jackson interviewed Copwatch Media‘s Josmar Trujillo about hyper-policing for the April 29, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Witnesses describe the suspect’s arrest: ‘He went without a struggle.’
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New York Times (4/13/22)
Janine Jackson: When the news got out that someone had shot people in New York City’s subway system, many of us knew just what would come next, and we were not surprised. Immediate, urgent calls for more police and more policing, for tougher treatment of homeless and/or mentally ill people. Forget tolerance or empathy or social services, because look where that gets us.

It’s an argument that we’ve heard for decades, but it’s not an abstract debate. Just because patterns and practices are old doesn’t mean their harms are not fresh. So, yes, it matters very much whether the news convinces people that they’ve just been saved from lethal threat by, as the New York Times explained, “hundreds of officers from a multitude of agencies,” using methods “as modern as scrutinizing video from surveillance cameras and parsing electronic records, and as old-fashioned as a wanted poster.”

And it matters how that tees up your reaction to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ declaration of the suspect that, “if all goes well, he will never see the outside of a prison cell again,” as unmitigated celebration and a renewed sense of security.

Josmar Trujillo is an activist and writer. He works with Copwatch Media, a community-based project that does print and video reporting about law enforcement’s effects on hyper-policed communities. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Josmar Trujillo.

Josmar Trujillo: Great to be back. Hi, Janine.

JJ: It seems worth talking about the Frank James coverage, the suspect in this subway shooting, in part because it was so boilerplate, and it shows the bare bones of a conversation, or what pretends to be a conversation, that we have seen countless times. What would you say were the key markers here? What made this sort of classic copaganda?

JT: So the subway shooting incident was a little bit of a mix of copaganda, and also a little bit of a throwback to big crisis moments, not quite at the level of 9/11, but moments of panic, sheer panic. For the last couple of years, local media, not just in New York City but around the country, have been spreading copaganda, inciting fear and pushing the conversation away from the issue of Black lives mattering or social justice, and towards this idea that we’re all not safe.

A subway shooting, because it’s in a public space where millions of people jump on a transit system to go to work, to go around the city, was treated like it was an attack on the entire city. So it had that extra element of fear, of panic, that this could happen to anyone, anywhere. And that escalated the level at which the copaganda operated.

Now, some of the things that were clear were, one, the NYPD was thrust into the leading role, to be some agency that’s there in the forefront, looking to bring the bad guy into custody and to keep us all safe. And the NYPD not only didn’t stop the subway shooting from happening—even though thousands of police officers have been added into the subway system, and there’s cameras in every subway station in New York City—but were also unable to capture him. Part of the copaganda was, one, putting them in the forefront to say they’re going to stop this guy, they’re going to catch this guy, which they did neither.
How the manhunt for Frank James, the N.Y.C. subway shooting suspect, unfolded
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NBC News (4/14/22)
But then the media also just ignored and politely overlooked the fact of what the NYPD was unable to do, and that the suspect—and we should note that he’s a suspect; because the cameras in the subway weren’t working, we don’t even have clear footage that he did what he did—but the fact that he was suspected of doing it, he called the authorities on himself, after 30 hours of walking around some of the most densely populated parts of the city in broad daylight, using the subway system for hours after the incident, where you would think the police would be looking for him.

I mean, this spectacular failure of public safety was on full display. And the media not only ignored it, but afterwards still managed to somehow credit the NYPD, and the brave men and women of the NYPD, for capturing the suspect, while begrudgingly noting that he actually did call—he was seen by regular people on the street, who had to point out to police officers that he was on the street, but that he also had to, at some point, just call Crimestoppers on himself.

And that was, to me, one of the most amazing things, is this idea that not only will the media always lionize the cops, but when the cops are clearly inept, and clearly not doing what they’re theoretically supposed to do, that the media will cover for them, and politely omit that failure.
Crime Is Rising on Subways Across the Country, Experts Say
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Washington Post (4/16/22)
JJ: And it’s so important, because this isn’t a moment where we’re just talking about an event that happened and made people scared. It’s linked to solutions, and the solution is more police. So it’s meaningful. It’s not just like, oh, we should call out cops because their crackerjack work didn’t actually wind up apprehending this suspect.

It’s because we know—and we saw, it’s already happened, the solution has already been called for, and it’s more police and more policing. So it’s extra meaningful that that actually doesn’t work. Forget the ideology for a moment. It just doesn’t seem to work in terms of what people are claiming it works for.

JT: Yeah. Police enjoy a really convenient arrangement in terms of perception of crime, and the responsibility for keeping the public safe. On the one hand, when crime goes down, when a crime stat goes down one percentage point, they’ll hold a press conference and pat themselves on the back, and say, “Look at us, you should praise us. We’re the men and women of the NYPD, and we keep you safe. Look at the crime stats going down,” which they did for many years, as crime continued to decline in New York City.

But when crime goes up—and some crime categories have gone up, because of the pandemic. That’s another conversation, that the media has failed to factor in the pandemic effect into some crime categories going up, and also across the city, which was predictable.

But you would say, well, if police deserve credit when crime goes down, whose responsibility is it when crime goes up? The police are nowhere to be found. Then they’ll point the fingers at anyone else. And in the case of the NYPD, there’s a big conversation about bail reform, a really disingenuous conversation about some of the moderate reforms that were passed in New York state about incarceration, [claims] that are completely fabricated, have no basis in any evidence at all, but have been used to blame reforms for causing crime.

And so they push blame for crime increases on everyone else: Black Lives Matter protest, social justice movements, anything except themselves. So it’s like a “heads we win, tails you lose.” They only get credit for when things go right in terms of crime stats. And when things go wrong, it’s the fault of social justice movements.

JJ: Let’s lateral into media, because it’s such a co-operative relationship. There’s kind of a sideways acknowledgement from reporters that more police don’t actually make people more safe, but they make people feel more safe, and that perception is what we’re going to address. It’s very shadows on the cave wall. Like, we’re not going to actually deal with safety, we’re going to deal with perceptions of safety.

And that’s why I feel like media are so core to this conversation. The stories that reporters tell people have a lot to do with what people believe about what law enforcement does, what it doesn’t do, who’s harmful, who’s not harmful, and all of that.

JT: And people should understand the term “copaganda,” which I know is being used now more readily. It’s not just an example of when police are overly quoted in a story, or used as the only source in the story, or when there is favorable coverage or bias given to them. The stories are the symptoms. The core of copaganda is that symbiotic relationship between the press and police. Police rely on press and press rely on police.

For example, local reporters here rely on access to police officers to get access to crime scenes, to get information that is not yet publicly available, because the police hold so much public information before it goes out.

That access, to be able to say, “Hey, can we interview you for this new policy that’s going into effect? Can we go for a ride-along for this operation that you’re planning?” This symbiotic relationship, that’s at the core of copaganda, so the stories that you see are the products of that relationship, and that relationship, I think, is what we need to talk about more and more, and why the media is relying—not all of the media, but much of the mainstream and corporate media, and especially the local media, they’re very dependent on access to police officers or police officials.
Mayor Eric Adams Proposes Boost to Police and Jail Spending in Nearly $100B Budget
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The City (4/26/22)
And then how police also utilize the press, to, one, stoke fear when they need to, because fear is a really crucial element to validate police authority, and how that goes both ways. And it’s an unspoken relationship, and it goes on and on, and it creates an element of fear that makes the public much more malleable in terms of what they’ll allow to happen without being skeptical, whether you want to bring back stop and frisk, or you want to bring drones to New York City for the police—any return to a horrible form of policing or an escalation of a new form of policing depends on people being properly scared enough.

And police benefit from it, because they’ll have their budgets expanded, which just happened yesterday; the mayor is proposing more funding for the NYPD. But also it sells newspapers, it gets clicks. It gets people to buy into this narrative that the media has been cultivating for the better part of two years, and you can even say longer than that—many, many years. So there’s a benefit for both sides of that arrangement.

JJ: Absolutely. So much I could say… I do think that honest, observant people would acknowledge that the game-changing media on police brutality, on police racism, has not come from salaried journalists, who are charged with and constitutionally protected for speaking truth to power.

It’s not come from there. It’s come from—we’re calling them “citizen journalists.” What they are are regular people on the street with a phone who, I was going to say “are not afraid to use it,” but I think often they are afraid to use it, but they just know that if they don’t record this… they recognize that they’re now the historical record, and if they don’t record this and show it, then people are going to deny that it happened.

And so if we could just talk about the redefining of journalism, the fact that if we’re talking about police brutality and aberrations by police, it matters so much that just regular folks are creating media and reporting about it.

JT: Absolutely. And this goes back, in a very recent history, to Ferguson. This goes back to the highs of the Black Lives Matter movement, the recording of the interaction that killed Eric Garner in Staten Island, the Ferguson protesters who were using social media to shoot images out to the world of what the police department was doing in response to protests.

So you can call it “citizens”—we use “copwatch,” because copwatch is a form of people using cameras to be vigilant of police and tracking what they’re saying, because, unfortunately, we live in a society where police’s word is always taken at a higher value than a regular person’s word.

So you need that camera. You need that evidence, but you also need to show the world what’s happening. We use “copwatch,” we use “citizen,” you can just say “the public.” Some people will say “activist.” I never got a card in the mail that said I was an activist. I was a person who just started to give a crap about what was going on, and I started to do things about it, you know?

It’s regular people being able to document what’s going on. And in particular with the police, because policing is most harmful in communities of color, it’s those people in low-income communities of color that have the most experience, the most perspective, the most context to be able to speak about this.

And not just write about it for a one-time story because, you know, the story is hot, or an editor told you to go over to Harlem and check out what’s going on, but because maybe you live there and maybe you know what’s going on. Maybe you have connections in the community that enlighten your understanding of what’s happening from just a one-time incident to a continuation of a historical oppressive system.

So I think it’s really important that that conversation of us not relying on salaried, constitutionally protected reporters, or card-carrying members of the press, to understand that storytelling is about people. And that’s the most important element that we can start from, and in terms of policing, there are certain people that are policed more than others. And if we acknowledge that, then we also have to acknowledge that they might be the better suited ones to have an honest conversation about it.

JJ: Absolutely. You know, if video evidence were enough, we wouldn’t be in conversation right now. We’ve seen videos. We have video—Rodney King—we have video, video exists.

JT: No, I’ll, I’ll never forget what you told me once. I think it was some event that we saw you at, where you said evidence is not the problem. It’s never been about a lack of evidence, like we just need to compile more evidence, more proof.

It’s important to document things, but it’s also important to understand that this is not just about winning over people with the rationality of our argument, but really understanding this is a war of information, and a literal war as well.

I mean, there’s physical violence, death. There are things that are happening in communities at the hands of the police. There is a literal and figurative war that’s happening, and in those cases, it’s not about you sitting down and having an honest intellectual debate with someone who will concede when you have a point.

They will not concede. The people who are against this are not willing to acknowledge that bail reform has not contributed to crime. It’s beside the point, the facts don’t matter to them. It’s just about pushing an agenda forward, and being the loudest and the most aggressive in that way. I think if we understand that, I think we’ll also have a better understanding of how to counteract that.

JJ: Well, precisely, and thank you very much, Josmar, for that. And I just want to ask you, finally, if you do think about—you know, we’re not anti-reporter, we’re not anti-journalism—if you think about what useful journalism around this set of issues would look like, or what it would include, what are we talking about? How do we get off the dime on this conversation?

Image
Josmar Trujillo: “We have to understand that journalism is something that anybody should be able to do. We should all be able to document our stories.” (image: Joseph Hayden)

JT: Well, this is a long conversation. We could have a big conversation, a couple of days’ worth of conversations, about that. But there’s been kind of a reckoning, from what I’ve seen, in media about, at the very basic level, diversity in the newsroom, right? Like just acknowledging that, right? Not to mention, people aren’t moving enough in that direction, but acknowledging that white supremacy is not just an issue of people in power in police departments or in government, but also in the people who shape and tell the stories of our society.

But there’s this idea also that it’s not just about diversity. It’s also about tearing down the walls of saying, like, this person is a reliable person because this person has a press pass, and this person is a crazy or a fringe person because they put their stuff on social media.

There has to be, I think, room for us to understand that citizen journalism and journalism can be made stronger by not thinking of ourselves in these silos, and not thinking of ourselves as “real reporters and people who are really objective,” and “people who are not credible,” and start to open up that conversation.

Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of stuff since the Capitol riots where there’s this whole battle for information about who’s right and who’s wrong. And there’s a deeper conversation about censorship and all of this stuff. But I think we have to understand that journalism is something that anybody should be able to do. We should all be able to document our stories, and there needs to be, I think, a push for traditional newsrooms to understand that, possibly create programs and put resources into helping bridge that gap, right? So we’re not just hiring from the journalism schools, and we’re creating apprenticeships or creating programs, ways for people to be able to enter the profession, but also for us to not think that the profession is the end all and be all of storytelling, because it’s not.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with activist and writer Josmar Trujillo. You can find Copwatch Media online at Copwatch.Media, and his work many places around the internet, including FAIR.org. Thank you so much, Josmar Trujillo, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JT: Thanks, Janine. Thanks so much for having me.

https://fair.org/home/the-core-of-copag ... nd-police/

************************************

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Police officers pepper spray a woman next to the Colorado State Capitol as protests against the killing of George Floyd continue on May 30, 2020 in Denver, Colorado. (Photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)

Investigation Shows Hundreds of US Cops Being Trained by Far-Right Extremists
"Bad training is instilling bad behavior," said one criminal justice reform advocate.

KENNY STANCIL

May 6, 2022
Hundreds of cops across the United States have been taught by individuals who espouse far-right extremist views, according to a new investigation that was published Friday to sound the alarm on a burgeoning and unregulated private training industry.

Reuters identified five law enforcement trainers who have been hired by police and sheriffs' departments nationwide despite their support for right-wing militia groups, including the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters; the QAnon conspiracy, which baselessly claims that Democrats and Hollywood stars belong to a cabal of Satanist pedophiles and cannibals; and former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen.

Some use bigoted instructional materials that promote racism, misogyny, and transphobia, and many endorse the constitutional sheriff philosophy, which maintains that county sheriffs should refuse to uphold any law they find unconstitutional.

"Adherents to the constitutional sheriff movement consider the federal government a grave threat to U.S. citizens," Reuters reported. "They argue that local law enforcement is a higher authority, with the power to countermand the decisions of legislatures, courts, and presidents."

Richard Whitehead, one of dozens of active and retired police officers or trainers who were listed in a database of members of the Oath Keepers, "has called for public executions of government officials he sees as disloyal" to Trump, Reuters reported. In a 2020 social media post, he urged cops "to disobey Covid-19 public-health orders from 'tyrannical governors,' adding: 'We are on the brink of civil war.'"

During his day job, "the Idaho-based law enforcement consultant has taught at least 560 police officers and other public safety workers in 85 sessions in 12 states over the past four years," noted the news outlet, which analyzed public records from the departments that hired him.

"He is one of five police trainers identified by Reuters whose political commentary on social media has echoed extremist opinions or who have public ties to far-right figures," the news outlet added. "They work for one or more of 35 training firms that advertised at least 10 police or public-safety training sessions in 2021."

Whitehead, Darrel Schenck, Adam Davis, Tim Kennedy, and Ryan Morris are tapping into a lucrative business opportunity that likely wouldn't exist if U.S. police officers were adequately prepared during their initial job training, Reuters reported. The lessons promoted in their private courses, meanwhile, might be less dangerous for civilians if states had more funding to set standards and provide oversight.

As the news outlet explained:

Private trainers work in an unregulated industry that largely has evaded the heightened scrutiny of U.S. policing in recent years in the wake of high-profile police killings of civilians. Trainers like those identified by Reuters, a half dozen police-training specialists say, highlight a lack of standards and oversight that allows instruction that can often exaggerate the threats that officers face, making them more likely to respond with excessive force in stressful situations.

U.S. law enforcement officers receive far less initial training at police academies than their counterparts in comparable countries, said Arjun Sethi, a Georgetown University adjunct law professor and policing specialist. That opens "immense commercial opportunities" for private trainers to fill the void with ongoing training of active-duty officers, often "in a politicized manner" that normalizes biased policing against Black people and other communities, he said.

Private trainers typically advertise their courses to police and sheriffs' departments, who often pay for their officers to take them. But individuals can also seek out and pay for courses on their own to satisfy government or department requirements for ongoing training. The courses vary widely in content and in price, from hundreds to thousands of dollars per attendee.

State-based oversight institutions, often called Peace Officer Standards and Training agencies, set requirements for police training, such as the types of classes and minimum teaching hours that officers must complete. But the institutions have little power in most states to influence course content or set standards for private police trainers, in part due to budget constraints, said Randy Shrewsberry, a former police officer. He saw unregulated police training as such a problem that in 2017 he founded the California-based Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform.

Cops who perceive a far-right trainer as authoritative and credible may end up adopting their ideology, said Shrewsberry. "Bad training is instilling bad behavior," he added.

According to a 2019 analysis of historical FBI data published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy, "The number of line-of-duty deaths has declined dramatically over the last five decades." Police deaths per 100,000 officers fell by 75% over the past half-century—from 81 in 1970 to 20 in 2016. Deaths from felonies decreased even more than accidental deaths during that time.

"In light of such data showing declining dangers to officers, many training agencies long ago abandoned training that emphasized putting officers through simulations of threatening situations," Reuters reported.

"That's the worst kind of training to give officers today, to make them feel more vulnerable," said Gil Kerlikowske, who led the police departments of Buffalo and Seattle between 1994 and 2009. "You want people to have an awareness" of violent threats, "but you don't want them to be so hypersensitive that it impacts everything they do."

Although "the 'war on cops' thesis is not supported by any evidence," as the 2019 study concluded, individual trainers have "wide latitude to teach America's police officers whatever they see fit" due to the lack of regulation, Reuters noted.

The news outlet added:

The mindset that trainers impart, such as a feeling of constant vulnerability, can be more influential than the technical knowledge they share, said Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and former police officer with expertise in law enforcement training. Stoughton said studies show that training which overemphasizes life-threatening situations can impart a "warrior mentality," convincing the officers that they face constant deadly threats.

In a promotional video that Kennedy released in 2020, Chris Jackson, an officer who works for a California police agency operated by a Native American tribe, said Kennedy's course had "opened his eyes to the world" and changed the way he would respond to threats. "You never want to be a victim of anything," he said in the video.

Jackson told Reuters in an interview that the training, which his agency paid for, made him more aware of potential threats and prepared to respond with less hesitation. "Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to eliminate the threat," he said.

More than 5,000 people in the U.S. have been shot and killed by cops since 2015, including 1,050 in the past year alone. Police kill civilians in the U.S. at a far higher rate than their counterparts in comparable countries.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/ ... extremists

That's a two-way street...but mebbe they're talking about the Israelis...does it matter? And do you really think that those in authority consider such training bad? I don't...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Mon May 16, 2022 2:07 pm

Violent White Folks Who Were Taken Into Custody With Loving Care By Police
Bruce C.T. WrightWritten By Bruce C.T. Wright
Posted 17 hours ago

Image

UPDATED: 4:15 p.m. ET, May 15, 2022

Originally published: June 18, 2019

Only in America can police respond to separate calls for similar incidents and have two drastically different results depending on the race of the suspect.

That truth was impossible to ignore on Saturday when 18-year-old Payton Gendron drove four hours to a supermarket in a Black community in Buffalo, New York, where he opened fire with an assault rifle and killed at least 10 people and injured at least three others. He was safely taken into custody following the carnage.

MORE: ‘White Replacement Theory’: Buffalo Suspect Pushed Racist GOP Conspiracy In Manifesto, Reports Claim

Of those 10 people slain, Gendron is alleged to have killed at least four elderly Black women who were being remembered as pillars in the community. A 30-year-veteran of the Buffalo Police Department who was working as a security guard at Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue was also killed. Eleven of the 13 total victims are reportedly Black.


While the motivation behind his attack was later revealed to be of a racist, anti-Black nature, responding police officers managed to talk Gendron into surrendering without having to fire a single shot at the suspected white supremacist. It was not immediately clear if cops knew a former police officer had been killed.

Again, police did not resort to any lethal force for someone believed to be a mass murderer — quite the contrast from the routine deadly police response when Black people are suspected of doing far less than initiating a racist massacre.

It has been reported that Gendron was holding a gun to his own neck while apparently threatening to kill himself by suicide when officers successfully negotiated (read: de-escalated) his surrender.

While Gendron lived to see his day in court (he pleaded not guilty hours after the shooting on Saturday), for perspective’s sake, convicted murderer and former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd over nonviolent allegations surrounding a counterfeit $20 bill. Since the time when Chauvin murdered Floyd, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was shot and killed after a traffic stop stemming from too many air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror and 22-year-old Amir Locke was shot and killed seconds after cops roused him from his sleep during the type of botched no-knock raid that killed Breonna Taylor in her own home.

The examples of the difference along racial lines in law enforcement reactions to similar reports of crime keep pouring in.

One glaring instance of law enforcement not being nearly as trigger-happy with white people as they are with Black suspects came courtesy of a viral video on social media. While it was unclear when, where and why a violent encounter happened between a store patron and a police officer, it was very clear that the cop never once felt threatened enough to use lethal force.

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Source: Twitter

Precious context was missing from the video, which began recording as the cop and suspect were already grappling in an aisle of what appeared to be a liquor store. The cop, who employed a leg-sweep takedown of the suspect likely learned from departmental training, exercised the kind of restraint rarely if ever seen with nonviolent Black suspects, like Jacob Blake, who was unarmed when he was shot in the back multiple times at close range as he tried to enter his car in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The video ended with the cop handcuffing the suspect, who had clearly assaulted the officer. Scroll down to see the full video.

In Florida, a self-described Trump-supporting white supremacist with a huge swastika tattooed on his chest caused a racist disruption at a restaurant, threatened to sexually assault one woman and then physically attacked another. When the police finally arrived, there was no brutality to be seen; no reckless shoving of the suspect’s head into a squad car. Instead, there was some jovial joking taking place as the suspect, identified as Nicholas Arnold Schock, was carefully eased into the back of a police cruiser.

In fact, the restaurant’s employees and patrons used more force than the police did.


It was a far cry from, say, how Baltimore cops treated Freddie Gray before he sustained his deadly injury in the back of a police van over suspicions about a pen knife.

In another stunningly similar example, an armed white man who allegedly shot and injured a police officer after barricading himself in a home during a contentious standoff with law enforcement managed to be peacefully arrested in North Hollywood, California, in June. Police responded to a reported active shooting and somehow took the armed man into custody without resorting to the lethal force we see officers use so many times with unarmed Black people.




The incident in West Hollywood came nearly two weeks after a suspected double murderer who was also accused of a range of other violent crimes was safely taken into custody without the police resorting to any violence, let alone lethal force. Peter Manfredonia was arrested in Maryland six days after he allegedly killed a 62-year-old man with a machete, held anther man hostage, stole the hostage’s guns and vehicle, killed a former classmate, kidnapped the former classmate’s girlfriend in her car in Connecticut.


The Hartford Courant reported reported that police said “no one was injured when he was arrested.” He’s also a white man, which likely explains his life being spared by members of a profession that have typically responded with deadly intentions to Black people suspected of lesser crimes, if any at all. It was a stark contrast to the reports of police shooting unarmed Black people who were not suspected of multiple murders and leading police on an inter-state chase for nearly a week.

Oh, and who can forget how Ahmaud Arbery‘s accused killers — father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael — who are on video shooting the jogger were gently handled during their arrest? More on that below.



That treatment stood in stark contrast to the videos circulating on social media showing how police were responding to nonviolent Black people accused of violating social distancing guidelines during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Roger Hedgpeth was arrested a block away from the White House after threatening to kill the president of the United States. The Florida man was armed with a sheathed knife on his left hip, according to a report from The Washington Post.

A D.C. police report revealed that Hedgpeth told a Secret Service officer, “I am here to assassinate President Donald Trump. I have a knife to do it with.”

The report described the 25-year-old as a “critically missing/endangered person as well as a mental health consumer.” He was taken into custody by the Secret Service for threatening “to do bodily harm and possession of a prohibited weapon.” The knife on Hedgpeth’s person had a 3 ½ inch blade. He was also wearing an empty pistol holder, according to the report.




Benjamin Murdy of Harford County, Maryland fired nearly 200 rounds from a rifle and a handgun, while “police never fired a single shot,” according to WMAR Baltimore. After an hour-and-a-half standoff with Harford County police, the Maryland man eventually called 911 and turned himself in. Despite the evident threat Murdy posed to the arresting officers – a threat that has resulted in the killing of many Black suspects – Murdy who was taken into custody peacefully and later charged.


Murdy opened fire on Harford Sheriff’s deputies after they arrived at his home following a report made by Murdy’s girlfriend who claims that he shot and killed her dog during a dispute.

“We’re familiar with him,” said Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler, “He’s been the subject of a couple of protective orders from a previous relationship and then I think from the current one. I’m not up to spec on all of those, but he had made statements in there that he would take out police if they ever came to the house.”

Murdy’s neighbor was heading to take out his trash at the time and had to quickly seek cover to avoid being hit with the rapidly fired bullets. Bobby Schell said that although he hid on the other side of his truck, which ended up being riddled with bullet holes, he was grazed on his right knee and hit in the scrotum.

Murdy was charged with attempted first-and-second degree murder, first-and-second degree assault, reckless endangerment, aggravated animal cruelty and other related charges.

Florida woman Serina Probus was accused of two separate violent felonies, one of which the 20-year-old admitted to being “too high on cocaine to remember,” the Tampa Bay Times reported. Despite the clear threat to the safety of the arresting officers — a threat that police have quickly killed Black suspects over — Probus was somehow able to be peacefully taken into custody and as a result smiled proudly in her mugshot. Her treatment stood in stark contrast to how cops typically react to Black suspects accused of the same or less.

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Pictured: Serina Probus | Source: Pasco Sheriff’s Office

Police said Probus was drunk when she bit her sister on the hand for trying to prevent her from leaving a home with her 6-month-old daughter early in the morning of New Year Day. When police responded, “Probus cursed at them and tried to kick out a window in the patrol vehicle as she was being arrested and was placed in a hobble restraint to bind her legs,” the Tampa Bay Times wrote. “As she was being restrained, deputies said she tried to pee on them, then spit on them once she was in the car.”

After Probus was booked on “the misdemeanor charge of domestic violence and felony charge of battery on a law enforcement officer,” she was hit with another felony charge of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon stemming from an accusation in October when she allegedly intentionally hit a man with her SUV.

History has shown that Black people accused of much less have suffered much worse fates at the hands of police, especially in Florida. But the rules change when white folks are involved, as shown by the Pasco Sheriff’s Office, which happily snapped Probus’ gleeful mugshot.

It was unclear if deputies stopped to get her some Burger King on the way to being booked, which is exactly what happened after Dylann Roof — the admitted racist murderer of nine parishioners in a historic Black church in South Carolina in 2015 — was peacefully arrested even though he was considered armed and very dangerous.



Jerri Kelly decided the best reaction to four Black teenagers who knocked on her door while fund-raising for their high school was to pull a gun on them and keep her firearm aimed at them until police arrived. While the obviously racist episode that unfolded in Arkansas resulted in Kelly being arrested, it took the Wynne Police Department — which arrived on the scene to see Kelly holding the boys at gunpoint while they were forced to lie on the ground — five days to actually take her into custody.


Kelly, the wife of the local jail administrator, was arrested with tender loving care for something — if the roles were reversed — that arguably would have gotten one or all of the boys shot and/or killed by police. She had the audacity to plead not guilty to four counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a minor.

The list of similar examples literally goes on and on and serves as further proof that when you are white, no matter if you gun down people at a church or even assault police officers, you can expect to be peacefully arrested. Must be nice. See below for more.

1. Bryan Riley

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Source:Polk County Sheriff's Office

Bryan Riley, high on methamphetamines, killed four people he didn’t know on Sept. 2, 2021, including a baby, a mother and a grandmother before shooting at police and later separately attacking a different officer in Florida. And yet, in spite of those truths, police never felt a threat to their lives enough to do anything more than take Riley safely into custody without resorting to lethal force.

Riley’s survival following his police encounter is the polar opposite of results typically seen if the suspect is Black regardless of the severity of any alleged crime. The 33-year-old former Marine sharpshooter also shot an 11-year-old girl who was left fighting for her life in critical condition.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said during a press conference that Riley was “a cold, calculated murderer” who “was ready for battle” when he went on his shooting rampage in Lakeland, which is about 36 miles northeast of Tampa.

2. Miami airport violence

A man at Miami International Airport on Aug. 27, 2021, was recorded on video throwing a violent temper tantrum complete with threatening to fistfight people and spewing the N-word.

The unidentified man is identified in a tweet as an “anti-masker” and is shown in the video skulking around an airline’s check-in area, getting in the face of airport employees and ultimately grabbing a security post and threatening to hit someone with it before he violently flung it across the floor. In doing so, he managed to call someone the N-word before kicking “wet floor” signs like an NFL punter.

The video promptly went viral for all the wrong reasons.

Local 10 News in South Florida reported that a witness claimed the suspect “entered the women’s restroom near gate D23 and got into a physical altercation with his girlfriend. The viewer said the man was then denied boarding on the flight due to his aggressive and possibly intoxicated behavior.”

The man was later identified the man as a military veteran who the police were kind enough “to a treatment center for evaluation” instead of greeting his violence with their own — something that typically happens when Black people are suspected of doing far less.

3. Floyd Ray Roseberry

Floyd Ray Roseberry, of North Carolina, parked his pickup truck in front of the Library of Congress and threatened to blow up two city blocks in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 20. Roseberry had propane tanks in his vehicle and he posted a live video on Facebook demanding to speak with President Joe Biden or else he would set off bombs he said he had placed in the truck.

Capitol Police took the threat seriously enough to evacuate local homes during the hours-long standoff before authorities were able to apprehend Roseberry without resorting to using lethal force against a suspect who threatened violence during an hours-long standoff that put the public at risk.

Instead, Roseberry will be able to have his day in court to defend himself whatever charges — since none were immediately announced — he faces for his threat of committing a violent act, on federal property, no less. There were no reports that Roseberry sustained any injuries during his apparently otherwise peaceful arrest.

4. Jeffrey Nicholas

Jeffrey Nicholas faces capital murder charges for killing two deputies from the Concho County Sheriff’s Office in Texas. They engaged in a shootout with Nicholas after the 28-year-old fled as the deputies responded to a complaint about a dog, according to local news outlet KTXS.

Nicholas reportedly resisted arrest by fleeing in his car and “barricading” himself in his home in the town of Eden before the deadly shootout broke out. Eden’s mayor ultimately convinced Nicholas to surrender after about 30 minutes.

5. Robert Aaron Long, suspect in Asian massage parlor killing spree in GA

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Source:Crisp County Sheriff's Office

A suspected white supremacist named Robert Aaron Long was arrested for allegedly going on a deadly shooting spree at multiple Asian massage parlors in the metro Atlanta area, leaving at least eight people dead. Six of them were Asian women. There was no motive for the shooting immediately announced, but the killings came as reports of anti-Asian violence were sweeping across the country.

Despite being a suspected mass murderer who led police on a car chase before his arrest, Long still managed to be “taken into custody without incident.”

6. Duke Webb, bowling alley gunman in Rockford, Illinois

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Source:Winnebago County Sheriff's Office

Duke Webb killed three people and injured three others in a shooting at a bowling alley on Dec. 26 in Rockford, Illinois. Webb, an active-duty member of the U.S. Army who is 37-year-old, was not subjected to lethal force and was instead able to be taken safely into custody.

Subsequent reports about Webb were expressed in sympathetic terms and absent of any of the kind of demonization in death we see directed toward Black and brown suspects accused of doing far less before law enforcement killed them.

The Army described him as honorable and lamented the shooting that it said was “completely out of character” for Webb.

7. Car Drives Into Group Of Protesters In New York

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Source:Getty

Kathleen Casillo enjoyed the privilege of being arrested and charged with reckless endangerment for speeding her car through a group of Black Lives Matter protesters and hospitalizing six people. However, despite the severity of her actions that, considering the circumstances, carry heavy political and racial implications, the 52-year-old white woman was still able to be released on her own recognizance without having to pay any bail.

8. Brad Parscale, demoted former Trump campaign manager

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Source:Getty

According to the Miami Herald, Parscale’s wife told police her husband had recently become violent and even showed them bruises on her body. A Fort Lauderdale police detective wrote in his incident report, “noticed several large sized contusions on both of her arms, her cheek and forehead.” The report also stated that she told the detective “Brad Parscale hits her.”

That allegation coupled with the 10 guns police confiscated from the home would probably result in some kind of violence if the suspect was Black. But Parscale, who stands at an intimidating 6’8, wasn’t even charged with a crime, let alone arrested.

9. Brett Hankison

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Source:Shelby County Sheriff's Department

Brett Hankison, the only person held responsible for Breonna Taylor‘s killing because some of the shots he fired hit a neighboring apartment, was able to surrender to his former colleague for the accusation of wanton endangerment even though he blindly shot his service weapon at least 10 times when he and his partners botched a suspiciously obtained no-knock warrant in Louisville.

10. Thomas Kinworthy accused of killing Black cop, shooting another

Thomas Kinworthy was arrested Aug. 30, one day after he allegedly shot two police officers in St. Louis, killing one. Both officers are Black. According to local news outlet KMOV, police had identified Kinworthy as the suspect before arresting him and knew that he had a lengthy violent criminal record, including offenses for a shooting during a road rage incident. Still, law enforcement managed to capture him alive without firing a single shot, the latter of which seems to be protocol for police when searching for Black suspects accused of murdering civilians, let alone a police officer.

11. Dalton Potter allegedly shot a cop and another man

Dalton Potter was not only wanted for larceny and theft of more than $2,500 in Texas but he also allegedly shot a cop during a traffic stop in Georgia and then shot another man days later. Still, somehow, police were able to arrest him without firing off a single shot or employing a deadly restraint while attempting to detain him. Local news outlet WDEF reported that “No one was injured in the arrest.”

Police apparently arrested him without incident when “authorities stumbled upon the fugitive and took him into custody,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

“Officers basically just walked up on him,” Whitfield County Sheriff Scott Chitwood. “They were coming out to refresh their batteries and literally just jumped him right there on the spot.”

It was literally the polar opposite type of response we’ve seen when there is a Black suspect, as evidenced by Jacob Blake, who was shot in the back at least seven times last month in Wisconsin while the unarmed Black man was trying to get into his own car.

12. White suspect physically attacking officer

This unidentified white man assaulted a police officer in public and was still somehow able to avoid being Tasered, let alone shot to death by the cop. At one point the cop gestures like he’s going to use his Taser, but he ultimately decides against it. The cop never once used his actual gun.

Now, think about what would have happened had the suspect in this video been Black.

13. Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha Jacob Blake shooter

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Source:Twitter

This photo shows 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse the night that he shot at least three people and killed two of them during a protest against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Prior to Rittenhouse’s shooting spree, video footage showed local law enforcement seemingly consulting with the teenager, who is too young to legally own the AR-15 assault rifle he was brandishing while speaking with cops.

That could be why it took more than 12 hours to peacefully arrest the suspect who should have been considered armed and dangerous.

14. White supremacist who beat a woman on video

15. West Hollywood shooter
An unidentified white man suspected of being an active shooter who allegedly injured a police officer was still able to walk out of the West Hollywood, California, home that he had barricaded himself in during an intense standoff with cops. Reports said the man was armed. However, even if he wasn’t, it is still noteworthy he was not killed, which is the typical response to similar situations involving Black suspects.

16. Gregory and Travis McMichaels

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Source:Glynn County Sheriff's Office

This suspected white supremacist father-son duo was arrested and charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was jogging when he was killed after he was racially profiled. The arrests of Gregory and Travis McMichaels came more than two months after they killed him, a cold-blooded act that was recorded on a video that leaked on social media.

17. Anthony J. Trifiletti, shot an unarmed Black man

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Source:Saint Paul Police Department

Anthony J. Trifiletti reportedly told the Saint Paul Police Department that he saw Douglas Lewis “reaching toward his waistband as he advanced,” the supposed reason for shooting the unarmed Black drive four times at close range in an apparent fit of road rage. To make matters worse, Trifiletti tried to imply that Lewis identified himself as a gang member. However, two witnesses said they never heard Lewis say that he was “GD,” a reference to the Gangster Disciples street gang.

Trifiletti, armed and dangerous, was peacefully taken into custody and charged with second-degree murder.

18. Matthew Bernard, Killed Three People

19-year-old Matthew Bernard shot and killed two women and a child in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. Bernard, who was naked and armed with a rifle, also choked a church caretaker and chased a police officer. He posed such a threat to the public that seven local schools were locked down, according to WDBJ-TV.

Yet, somehow, police found a way to de-escalate the situation without resorting to the type of lethal force cops often rely on when confronting Black suspects accused of far less.

USA Today reported that Bernard was arrested on three counts of first-degree murder. The sheriff’s office released the following statement, “The names of the deceased are being held until family members are notified. Investigators are still on-scene collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses. A first court appearance has not been scheduled.”

However, there were reports that two of the victims were the wife and child of Blake Bivens, a Double-A pitcher in the Tampa Bay Rays organization and that Bernard is the brother of Bivens’ wife.

19. (???)

20. Mark Boisey

Mark Boisey, 31, of New Cumberland County, Pennsylvania strangled and pistol-whipped a woman, and fired nearly 50 shots at police. Nonetheless, he was still peacefully arrested and seen in handcuffs with a confident smile on his face. Watch the clip above.

21. Lorne Brown

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Source:NBC Miami

Lorne Brown, 39, of the Margate-Coconut Creek Fire Rescue Department in Florida shot unarmed Simeon Brown, 22, after the 22-year-old drove onto a Cooper City street where a Super Bowl block party was being held. He faces charges of attempted first-degree murder, shooting into a vehicle and aggravated assault with a firearm. He was ordered to remain behind bars, without bond, and has been suspended with pay.

22. Patrick Crusius, El Paso Mall Mass Shooting Suspect

Patrick Crusius, the El Paso mass shooter who is accused of killing at least 20 people, was booked without a scratch on him after his surrender for launching a racially motivated mass killing that reportedly targeted Hispanics in the Texas border city.

The mass shooting suspect, who was reportedly pro-Trump and against “race mixing,” was said to have used an AK-47 assault rifle, which should automatically consider him armed and dangerous. However, responding law enforcement was somehow able to apprehend the heavily armed Crusius, 21, and arrest him safely.

23. Aaron Dean

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Source:Tarrant County Jail

Former Fort Worth Police Officer Aaron Dean shot through Atatiana Jefferson‘s window and killed her on Oct. 12, 2019 while she was playing video games with her nephew. He resigned, reportedly was not cooperating with police and finally arrested late in the day on Oct. 14, 2019.

24. Amber Guyger

It took three days Amber Guyger, who gunned down 26-year-old Botham Jean in his own home on Sept. 6, 2018, to be arrested and charged. She was released on bond in less than an hour.

25. James Holmes

On July 20, Holmes killed 12 and injured 49 others at a movie theater in Colorado. He was seriously armed and dangerous but, according to USA Today, he was calmly arrested. Aurora police officer Jason Oviatt reportedly found “him outside, standing with his hands on top of his car. Oviatt said Holmes was ‘completely compliant’ when told to surrender.” Oviatt said, “He was just standing there not doing anything, not urgent about anything.” Yet, police seized a semiautomatic handgun with a laser sight, a semiautomatic shotgun and an AR-15 military assault rifle equipped with a 100-round magazine drum from the scene.

26. Michael Mattioli

The officer with the Milwaukee Police Department who was accused — but not immediately charged — of assaulting a 25-year-old man who was beaten unconscious, was peacefully arrested at his home, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

27. Dylann Roof

Image
Source:Getty

In June of 2015, nine churchgoers were gunned down at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The killer, Dylann Roof, was treated so kindly by police that they reportedly bought him Burger King. (Photo by Grace Beahm-Pool/Getty Images)

28. Matthew Sloan Punched And Spit On Police…


newsone.com
Naked White Man Punched, Spit At Police And Was Peacefully Arrested
Matthew Sloan is in custody but wasn't shot or killed.

29. Assaulted Police And Even Chased Them…

Baytown Police Officer shot & killed a pregnant woman last night. She was shot at point blank range 3 or 4 times after being tased and on ground, she was not armed. Her name is Pamela Turner, family of Blazers Guard Evan Turner.
@KingJames @CP3 @DwyaneWade

This man never complied
This man actually hit police multiple times
This man chased police and made them fear for safety
This man was not killed!

Pamela Turner was murdered and pregnant, she was never given the same opportunity. WHY?

30. Shot At Police At Trump Tower… (???)

31. Shot At Police At Walmart — And Was Let Go…



32. Man Holds Black Man At Gunpoint And He Is Calmly Arrested…

Downtown CHARLOTTESVILLE right now. F*ing white trash has a black man submitted first with a knife around his neck, then makes him kneel still threatening to stab him.
Please, Twitter do your thing in the name of justice #resist

[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1078790073662038017[/youtube]

33. Grady Wayne Wilkes

Grady Wayne Wilkes in Alabama shot and killed a police officer and wounded two others. He was calmly arrested… imagine if he was Black.

https://newsone.com/playlist/white-arre ... by-police/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat May 21, 2022 2:41 pm

Image

‘This is America’: cops, Democrats, and the MOVE bombing of 1985
Originally published: Red Flag on May 16, 2022 by Zak Borzovoy (more by Red Flag) (Posted May 21, 2022)

“Attention, MOVE. This is America. You have to abide by the laws of the United States.” This was the ultimatum given through a Philadelphia police megaphone to a group of Black activists trapped in their home in the early morning of 13 May 1985. The house on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia was surrounded by hundreds of police. Thirteen MOVE members, including five children, were inside.

MOVE was an activist organisation influenced by both the Black Panther Party and the hippy movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. It combined the struggle for Black liberation with a focus on eco-friendly ways of living. Ed Pilkington, writing in the Guardian, described the politics as “a strange fusion of black power and flower power”. Members of the group wore their hair in dreadlocks, changed their last names to “Africa” and advocated veganism.

The Philadelphia police were notorious for their racist violence against working-class Black people. While the civil rights movement had won important democratic rights, for most Black people there was little respite from the poverty and police violence plaguing their lives. Most remained confined to inner-city ghettos. Cops used the crime that resulted from this poverty as justification to crack down on Black communities at will.

MOVE fought back against abuse at the hands of the police. For this they were deemed a terrorist organisation by the City of Philadelphia, which began to look for any excuse to wipe them out.

Police closed in on the MOVE house on the morning of 13 May, carrying arrest warrants obtained using alleged neighbourhood complaints. Officers had previously shown little concern about such complaints in Black neighbourhoods. It was clear that they were using them as an excuse to finish what they had started in 1978, when police provoked a firefight with MOVE activists that resulted in nine MOVE members being jailed for 100 years each for the murder of a single police officer.

More than 500 police surrounded the house. Over the next 12 hours, they fired 10,000 rounds of ammunition from sub-machine guns into the dwelling, as well as teargas and water from water cannons. Any attempt by the MOVE members to leave the house was met with bullets, so they took cover in the basement.

To finish the job, police were given the green light by the city’s mayor, Wilson Goode, to drop two military-grade bombs on the roof while the thirteen MOVE members were still inside.

Thirteen-year-old Birdie Africa ran from the house screaming. Ramona Africa also ran. Both were shot at and arrested. The remaining eleven activists were burned alive, including five children. “They’ve dropped a bomb on babies!” a horrified man who was standing behind police barricades watching the terror unfolding before him reportedly shouted.

After the explosion, police refused to let firefighters put out the blaze for more than four hours. They watched as three blocks of houses in the mostly Black working-class neighbourhood burned to the ground. Three hundred people were made homeless in a matter of hours.

The response of the mayor was unapologetic. “I’d do it again”, Goode said. The streets of cities throughout the U.S. should have been inundated with protests on the night of 13 May, but they weren’t. The main reason is that Wilson Goode was Philadelphia’s first Black Democrat mayor.

Instead of immediate retaliation, there was widespread confusion. Many people, including local activists, were shocked by Goode’s role in the bombing. The Black liberation movement in Philadelphia had done a great deal of political work to get him elected. They did so with the expectation that Goode would bring about a change in the conditions for Black Philadelphians. Not only was there no significant improvement in conditions under Goode, but he signed off on one of the worst atrocities committed against Black activists the country had ever seen.

This is a pattern that has been repeated again and again. Twenty-three years later, Barack Obama was elected president with similar expectations. One of his first acts was to bail out the banks after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Over the course of his two presidencies, the average wealth of the poorest 99 percent in the U.S. dropped by U.S.$4,500, while the average wealth of the top 1 percent increased by U.S.$4.9 million. Obama doggedly defended the country’s racist police, “Our entire way of life in America depends on the rule of law,” he said in Dallas in 2016.

More recently, when NBA players threatened to go on strike after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, Obama used his influence to encourage the players to abandon their stand. The basketballers’ strike would have been a significant step forward in the fight against racism and police violence, but Obama shut it down, instead arguing that a vote for the Democrats was the best way to fight back.

Joe Biden presented himself as the liberal alternative to Trump’s bigotry. He chose Kamala Harris, a Black woman and ex-cop, as his running mate. This earned him the applause of liberal commentators who fawned over this progressive pair.

But since Biden and Harris’ election, very little has changed. According to non-profit research group Mapping Police Violence, in 2021 cops killed 1,136 people—one of the deadliest years on record. As of 24 March 2022, police in the U.S. have killed 249 people, averaging about three killings a day. Biden opposes a key demand of the Black Lives Matter movement—to defund the police—and has instead announced a substantial funding increase for policing-related programs in his 2022 budget proposal, arguing that “the answer is not to defund our police departments”.

The MOVE bombing showed nearly 40 years ago that the Democrats will ultimately defend, with violence if necessary, the institutions that produce and maintain racial oppression. As important as violence though, is the party’s capacity to channel rebellion into safe waters, and co-opt its leaders. After George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement produced the largest urban rebellion in U.S. history. But without a leadership with a clear vision of how to win liberation, and one able to challenge the Democrats’ suffocating influence in NGO and liberal circles, it petered out.

When Black people took to the streets with rage in the 1960s over police violence, numerous Black mayors like Wilson Goode were installed to put out the fires. The year after the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, Eric Adams, a Black Democrat, and ex-cop, was elected Mayor of New York City. While lauded by the liberal press, he plans to bring back the controversial anti-crime units which were formally disbanded in 2020 as a concession to Black Lives Matter protesters. He recently pushed for legislation to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to be tried as adults.

The MOVE bombing sounded the death knell of the Black power movement of the late 1960s and ‘70s, of which MOVE was one of the final remnants. Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and now MOVE, had all been violently subdued by state repression. What followed was a period of defeat and demoralisation in the struggle against racial oppression in the U.S..

Not a single cop or official at any level has been held accountable for the bombing. The only punishment resulting from the attack was against its survivors. Ramona Africa spent seven years in prison, charged for the murder of her fellow activists who police had burned alive. Despite this, Ramona Africa continues her activism today and keeps the memory of the attack and its lessons alive, against efforts by the Democrats to sweep it under the carpet.

Ramona gave a warning to young radicals in a 2017 interview with Truthout, “Don’t allow yourselves to be compromised or co-opted–because trust me–they will try… This system will come at you with all kinds of things. All kinds! But if you fall for it, you’re done… Long live the revolution! Ona move!” To effectively fight and end racist police violence, we need to follow Ramona’s advice.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/21/this-is-america/

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Biden can stop White supremacist violence. Or he can support the police unconditionally.
He can’t do both.[/b]
By Nia T. EvansUpdated May 18, 2022, 9:16 p.m.

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People participate in a vigil to honor the 10 people killed in Saturday's shooting at Tops market on May 17, 2022 in Buffalo, New York. A gunman opened fire at the store killing ten people and wounding another three. The attack was believed to be motivated by racial hatred.SCOTT OLSON/GETTY

Now that 10 families must memorialize and bury loved ones gunned down Saturday by a White supremacist 18-year-old who drove hours to open fire on unsuspecting grocery shoppers, it is easy to read this as a moment of shared humanity transcending boundaries of race and identity.

It is not.

But you wouldn’t know it from listening to President Joe Biden’s comments, designed to elicit feelings of unity. Biden, like Barack Obama before him, is good at reminding us of what we have in common, of experiences we all share, which is usually a good thing. But in his rush to tell universal stories, the president risks obscuring the truth.

The truth is 13 people were shot, and 11 of those people were Black. Ten people died. The attack was allegedly carried out by Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, New York, and was premeditated and motivated by White supremacist ideology. Gendron has been charged with first-degree murder.

The next day, Biden addressed the massacre at the 41st annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service, an event honoring fallen law enforcement officers. He cited the U.S. Justice Department’s commitment to investigating the matter as “a hate crime and racially motivated act of White supremacy and violent extremism,” then pivoted, as he usually does, to decrying “hate” in the abstract.

Funding police to eradicate White nationalism is like pouring gasoline on a raging fire while sniffing the air wondering why it’s so smoky.

It’s on us to “address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America,” he said. “No one understands this more than the people sitting in front of me.”

No one, he insisted, but law enforcement and their families could relate to how the family members of the Buffalo victims felt when they received that call, the one announcing the death of their loved ones. That fact is police officers do not usually face or prevent White nationalist violence. One of the strongest vectors of White supremacist violence is the people tasked with addressing the crisis: law enforcement.

Police often facilitate such violence. Even the FBI, with its history of violence, racism, and brutality, was forced to admit as much. In 2006, an internal FBI memo expressed concerns about “White supremacist infiltration of law enforcement” and “self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to White supremacist causes.” By 2015, FBI domestic terrorism investigations turned up several “active links” between “militia extremists, White supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists” and law enforcement. Police officials were connected to the very individuals or alleged domestic terrorists they were charged with investigating.

Yet, despite the obvious severity of this trend, no national strategy has emerged to identify White supremacist police officers. As a result, these connections grow in the shadows, free from any rigorous national oversight effort or investigative body. The election of Donald J. Trump strengthened those bonds. When the Republican Party adopted a platform focused almost exclusively on violently defending White political, economic, and electoral power, police unions cheered them on. And as White supremacist violence expanded throughout the Trump administration, so did police powers and budgets.

The sheer scale of ties between law enforcement and White nationalist groups became even more apparent during the summer of 2020. As protests rippled across the country and police responded with spectacular displays of violence, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law released an explosive report detailing more than two decades of connections between U.S. law enforcement and racist militant groups. The report found police links to White supremacist groups in more than a dozen states, including Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, and Washington.

The report confirmed what many of us already knew and witnessed throughout the 2020 uprisings: Many police officers identified and sympathized with White nationalists. From Kenosha to Philadelphia, police posed with White nationalist leaders, let armed vigilantes terrorize Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and stood by as far-right militias attacked protesters. White nationalist ideology and violence continued to grow, unfettered and unchallenged, often with the tacit support of the very people charged with restraining them.

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President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visit the memorial across the street from the scene of Saturday's deadly shooting at a Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo, N.Y., on Tuesday, May 17, 2022.HEATHER AINSWORTH/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Stopping this type of violence is supposed to be the reason Biden ran for president. He spent much of his campaign condemning Donald Trump’s reaction to the Unite the Right rally in 2017, expressing disgust at “Klansmen and White supremacists and neo-Nazis out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and baring the fangs of racism.” The first two words of his campaign launch video are “Charlottesville, Virginia.” Biden marketed his moral leadership through the lens of racial violence. And the realities of that violence have remained a through line of his presidency.

Biden’s horror at growing White supremacist power tipped him into the race, a race he won because of the strength of Black social movements organizing against a form of racial violence he has ignored: police terror. Months later, on Jan. 6, 2021, a violent mob of White supremacists descended upon the Capitol — convinced of the inherent illegitimacy of Black voters — and sought to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.

The Jan. 6 mob, which included active and retired police officers, received so much help from Capitol police that rioters are evading federal charges by pointing to explicit support from on-duty officers. This is the reality of White nationalism in America; it may have a clear political home in the Republican party, but it also enjoys support from large swaths of law enforcement.

Throughout this crisis, Biden insists our “resolve must never, ever waver” but offers no legislative solutions and promotes hollow notions of unity. Much like his political opponents on the right who seek to legislate away an honest account of American history, Biden clings to ahistorical, nationalistic myths about police, ideas that fail to consider the real and growing dangers we face and that ultimately sustain the very racial violence he claims to despise.

What he, and Democratic Party leaders, refuse to accept is White nationalist ideology is not sustained by “lone gunmen” with “hate-filled souls”; it is nurtured by American institutions. It’s cultivated in our political systems and within police ranks. And it cannot be eradicated by the same people who are captivated by it.

House Democrats are now considering a new domestic terror law that would empower local law enforcement to identify and monitor “homegrown terrorism.” But funding police to eradicate White nationalism is like pouring gasoline on a raging fire while sniffing the air wondering why it’s so smoky.

Black political thinkers, most especially Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and Derecka Purnell, have long said police manage inequality. Police exist to respond to the unequal distribution of resources, a setup that overwhelmingly benefits White Americans, they say. It follows that policing is, in and of itself, a defense of Whiteness. Law enforcement protects the benefits, resources, and investments, such as psychic safety and property, that millions of White Americans hold dear. These benefits come at the direct expense of Black and Brown communities.

The Buffalo gunman claims to have acted in defense of such Whiteness. His manifesto indicated he believes in the “great replacement” theory, the false idea that White Americans are being “replaced” by other races. Sadly, defending Whiteness is not as radical or fringe as we’d like to believe. It is time we take stock of our institutions and the political leaders who are committed to doing the same.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/05/18/ ... itionally/
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Mon May 23, 2022 2:29 pm

John Grisham: ‘There are tens of thousands of innocent people in prison and you don’t believe it because you’re white’

The author and lawyer said during a speech at the Santa Fe Literary Festival that ‘white people love the death penalty’ but ‘Black people know the truth’ about criminal justice in the US

Holly Baxter

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John Grisham spoke unequivocally about criminal justice and America’s racial divide during the first full day of the Santa Fe Literary Festival, saying that “white people love the death penalty”.

“There are tens of thousands of innocent people in prison and you don’t believe it because you’re white,” the prolific author and lawyer said to the audience while in conversation with friend and bestselling writer Hampton Sides.

“Black people know the truth,” he added, to applause. “It’s pretty easy to send an innocent person to prison. It’s almost impossible to get them out.”

Grisham described visiting death row for book research, where he found there was a room set aside for condemned inmates to sit with a chaplain during the hour before their execution.

“I’m sitting with this chaplain, it’s quiet, spooky, there’s no execution looming,” Grisham said, “...and he said, ‘Can I ask you a question? Are you a Christian?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Do you think Jesus would approve of what we do here?’ And I couldn’t say yes.”

Grisham added that he hadn’t been vehemently against the death penalty before that moment. The chaplain “said, ‘We all agree that killing’s wrong, so why should the state be able to kill?’ That moment I switched [my opinion] and never looked back.”

The author met families of victims who had been killed by inmates on death row. “I don’t know how they do it, but they find a way to forgive,” he said. “And when they do that, they can start to put it behind them. And the ones who are bitter or vengeful or want blood, they never do.”

Grisham also spoke about his involvement with the criminal justice nonprofit for the wrongfully accused, The Innocence Project, adding that 275 people had been exonerated because of the charity’s work.

Asked whether he had begun writing his next book, Grisham described growing up in the shadow of the Vietnam War and said that “there’s one book I want to write about Vietnam”. During his childhood, he had “conflicts with [his] father” about the war, and “as I grew older, I met people who went, and met families whose sons didn’t come home, and I just wonder: How could this happen to this country?”

The multi-genre writer said that although he isn’t yet working on a Vietnam-oriented manuscript, he is “thinking about that”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 84503.html

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New Afrikans Must Not Lose to Nazis
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 21, 2022

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Last Saturday’s neo-nazi white supremacist mass shooting serves as a reminder of the war waged against the Black colony aka the oppressed New Afrikans (the New Afrikan Nation) and our need for organizations that are working to free the land from euro-amerikkkan control. Originally published on Medium.

On Saturday, May 14th, 2022 in Buffalo, New York, an 18-year-old white nationalist neo-nazi walked into a store and opened fire on a crowd with his assault rifle. In addition to writing a racist manifesto, he live-streamed this attack as a means to get his message of white supremacist violence across to all those who would see it. This neo-nazi attack left 10 New Afrikans dead, as well as another New Afrikan and two white folks wounded. While this type of violence continues to shock the world, this is simply a reminder to the Afrikan in Amerikkka that we are at war, and at any minute this type of armed white supremacist violence can wreak havoc on any of us. It may find us while we grocery shop, drive our children to school, while we sleep in bed with our partner, or ride the train home following a New Year’s celebration like Oscar Grant in 2009. And while white supremacists have made it their mission to remind us of this gut-wrenching truth, our revolutionary cadre organization understands our duty to remind the New Afrikan masses that we must organize a united front that can defend against this violence. As El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) said, “Preserve your life. It’s the best thing you got!”

For clarity: this is not a reactionary call for New Afrikans to engage in senseless violence like the neonazis. This is a call for self-defense! To preserve our lives and the future of our people!

The first step of developing this united front — The Front for the Liberation of the New Afrikan Nation (FROLINAN) is to build Revolutionary Cadre Organizations, i.e., People’s Programs. These organizations serve as the nucleus of the united socioeconomic, political, and military front. For example, if there was a unified response from Black organizations across the country (providing security for the victim’s families/patrolling the neighborhoods of other Black communities in preparation for another attack, childcare for the community, cooked meals, groceries, money so the families could take off from work and grieve/cover memorial expenses) to the types of heinous attack that took place in Buffalo, the people would want to know what these revolutionary black groups standing up for its people were all about— thus they turn to these organizations and find that these organizations aren’t just responding to circumstance, they in-fact have a complete understanding of the systems that allow for white supremacist violence to run rampant, and they also have an objective: the freeing of the people and the land through the total liberation and unification of all Afrikans under scientific socialism.

The revolutionary cadre organization shows their grasp of the terrain through their opportunities for political education (classes, community learnings, writings, speeches) and their programs for decolonization (free health clinic, free hot meal distro, free clothes, free grocery programs). When the people see these programs established, and in conjunction with a revolutionary armed force, they see that there’s a material place to put their revolutionary energy, and the cadre and movement make a positive qualitative leap. This shows the dialectical connection between armed struggle and the development of decolonization programs in the community. Armed and unified responses follow dialectical (scientific) steps and processes. Armed struggle cannot happen without the development of decolonization programs, as the question arises, what are we fighting for? Are we fighting for the sake of fighting, or are we fighting for complete control and independence of the New Afrikan nation?

“Repression Raises Consciousness and Contradictions”

Naturally, the repressed will have emotions and physical responses to said repression, but it is the job of the leadership (the revolutionary cadre organization) to direct the revolutionary fervor of oppressed New Afrikans, so that they can respond to their genocide and the war waged against them in the most scientific and effective manner. We did not make this world, but it is our duty to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors and fight back and create the world we wish to see… using any means necessary! The call of the day continues to be “FROLINAN FORWARD”; to build the revolutionary cadre organization via political education and programs for decolonization that meet the material needs of the people, and to unite them under the cause of liberation. This is the only way that we will save our people from genocide and ultimately free ourselves from white supremacist capitalist slavery!

Free the people!

Free the land!

People’s Programs is an Oakland-based, Black-socialist organization dedicated to the liberation of ALL Afrikan people through scientific socialism. We are guided by the practices and theories of Revolutionary Nationalists and Pan-Africanists, and we are aiming to do our part in the unification and liberation of Afrikans across the diaspora.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... -to-nazis/
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat May 28, 2022 2:26 pm

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Coward cops, government do nothing while children are massacred
Originally published: Liberation News on May 26, 2022 by Kenya Elliott (more by Liberation News) | (Posted May 28, 2022)

The Party for Socialism and Liberation expresses our deepest condolences to those impacted by the horrific massacre that was committed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. We condemn in the strongest possible way this atrocious attack, and express our solidarity to the families, children, teachers, and community members who experienced and witnessed the tragedy and its aftermath.

Had it not been for the total cowardice of the police, the horrendous scene at Robb Elementary School could have been significantly altered, and lives could have been saved. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the shooting, while 17 other people were injured. However, virtually the entire time the shooter was in the school–between 40 and 60 minutes–he was “barricaded” in one classroom, which is where all of the fatalities happened. According to a member of the Department of Public Safety, the “barricade” actually meant that the shooter simply locked the door of the classroom he entered.

While the shooter spent up to an hour stationary in one classroom, the police stayed outside of the school instead of entering the building and stopping the shooter, allowing more people to be killed than in any school shooting besides Sandy Hook. Onlookers, community members, and families of students at the school urged the police to enter and stop the shooting during the time that the cops stood idle and waited outside, but their pleas were ignored. Police inaction was so significant that unarmed bystanders discussed the idea of entering the school themselves as they watched those who claim to “protect and serve” stand by as schoolchildren were slaughtered.

In addition to breathtaking cowardice, this inaction also reflects police officers’ disregard for the lives of Latino children. The population of Uvalde, Texas is 73% Latino, and the population of Robb Elementary School is 90% Latino. On top of that, 87% of students come from families considered by the school to be low income. When poor and working class people, especially people of color, are being killed, saving their lives is simply not a priority for the police.

It is also an absolute disgrace that the loved ones of the victims cannot even hope for solace in knowing that the industry that profits while the school shooting epidemic rages will be held accountable. Thanks to the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act” passed under the Bush administration in 2005, gun manufacturers and dealers are afforded broad immunity against civil lawsuits stemming from shootings that happen with their products. With only a handful of very narrow exceptions to this immunity, the PLCAA has protected the gun industry from consequences of their negligence and irresponsibility for almost two decades.

In virtually every other industry, most of which produce items that are much less potentially deadly, manufacturers are subject to civil liability should their products cause harm. However, the gun industry not only enjoys federal and state protection with the PLCAA, there are also 35 states that have enacted legislation that grants additional blanket immunity to gun manufacturers, or that prevents municipal governments from pursuing legal action against the gun industry.

The tragedy at Robb Elementary School is heartbreaking. When one considers all the ways that this massacre was amplified by the inaction of the police and that gun manufacturers have legal immunity, it is also enraging. To bring about an end to gun violence–to bring about an end to school and all mass shootings–we cannot rely on the good will of those who currently hold power in government. We must fight together, protect each other, and struggle for a society free from violence.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/28/coward- ... massacred/

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From Buffalo to Uvalde: Racism, violence come from the top
May 27, 2022 John Parker

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People in Buffalo, N.Y., march on May 15 after racist murder of 10 Black people.

From Buffalo, New York, to Uvalde, Texas, it all comes from the top.

It comes from the top and trickles down to us in bullets and death. That’s the reality in a capitalist country that glorifies murder by drone of people we’ve never heard of, diminishing life into a decision of U.S. corporate interests.

War is a game that all of the Democrats and Republicans are playing – all who voted for more high-tech weapons of death sent to Ukraine, where many will land in the hands of those whose ideology promotes killing in the name of white supremacy.

And the games continue in Somalia, where more African lives will be sacrificed to the weapons carried by U.S. troops being sent there now – more racism at work and, as U.N. research shows, more extremists created, a byproduct of Pentagon terrorism.

The almost $100 billion sent to Ukraine since 2004, first for regime change, now for war with Russia, has made it a manufacturing plant for Nazi propaganda by the likes of the Azov Regiment and Right Sector.

According to an in-depth article by Die Zeit in Germany, neo-Nazi and white supremacist international networks are growing and becoming more dangerous, and Ukraine has become their center. Their Black Sun symbol was not only on the white supremacist shooter in Buffalo, but can be seen tattooed on cops here as well.

2021 was a record year for deadly police shootings since the Washington Post started keeping track in 2015. The disproportionate number of Black and Brown victims tells another story of white supremacy spread through state bodies of repression.

Those who fall victim at an impressionable age to an ideology that makes them feel powerful and provides an outlet to blame others for the problems of capitalist alienation and economic despair are watching and listening. And some will act.

As tragic as those actions are, the racist institutions of the capitalist state will use them to continue their proliferation of violence and white supremacy.

Why are there no common-sense safety mechanisms in place that would make it harder to acquire assault weapons without some type of background check, evaluation, etc.? Because it gets in the way of profits and support from certain right-wing and racist forces. And it’s the ruling class that supplies the racist police forces nationally with the most dangerous assault weapons. Police and military weapons often find their way into the hands of white supremacists.

The indoctrination of youth into hate, violence and white supremacy is not an accident. It is a consequence of putting profits over society’s responsibility to protect our youth from fascist propaganda that should not be allowed to build and recruit amongst those whom society has failed. There needs to be a financial and structural commitment to fighting racism, white supremacy and the glorification of state-sponsored violence, including the numerous recruiting ads by the military. A federal requirement to teach history that includes the contributions of African and other non-European peoples is also a necessary step.

The resources and funding now going to imperialist war should instead be used for teachers, social workers and healthcare providers to be unencumbered in their most vital work — protecting our youth from those who would destroy their lives and end their potential to become loving, productive human beings.

What is needed is an end to the culture of militarism, war and violence, and the acceptance and encouragement of state-sanctioned killings of Black and Brown peoples by the Border Patrol and police. What is needed now is for working people to decide what type of procedures are necessary to keep their children safe, not only from mass shooting incidents but from law enforcement as well. This needs to be done while we build a movement to get at the root cause of this violence.

It’s curious that mass shooters like Dylan Roof in Charleston, South Carolina, and Payton Gendron in Buffalo — both white — were taken into custody alive, but not Salvador Ramos in Uvalde. Whatever the reason, that resonates with history.

It’s also curious that the fascist Alex Jones is allowed to continue to spread racism and anti-trans lies – this time falsely blaming a transgender woman for the shooting in Texas. Jones’ right to “free speech” is vigorously enforced, just as the Azov Regiment’s is on Facebook, while anti-fascist voices are silenced.

But it all comes from and is encouraged from … the top. And it will only stop when capitalism, the generator of white supremacy and violence, is toppled.

John Parker is the Socialist Unity Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.


https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... m-the-top/

Even as capitalism is in it's terminal(one way or the other) phase so the alienation engendered peaks.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 02, 2022 2:14 pm

Mass Shootings, Empire, and Racist, Copaganda Dog Whistles
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 01 Jun 2022

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Senators Chris Murphy and John McCain in Kiev, Ukraine on December 15, 2013 with Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (Photo: AP)

Two mass shootings in quick succession brought out the worst in Americans. The anger and grief were followed by the usual lies and pretense that violence here is somehow mysterious. Political leaders advocate state violence all the time, calling for new victims to be created here and around the world.

A settler colonial state founded on indigenous genocide and African enslavement that is still addicted to the doctrine of racial domination will be violent. How could it be otherwise? This nation has the world’s highest rate of incarceration, 1,000 police killings every year, a defense budget bigger than any other, and the imperialist wars that inevitably follow. No one should be shocked when individuals here carry out violent acts. Yet that is exactly what we get when mass shootings take place, pretend shock and confused outrage.

On May 15, 2022 a racist white man killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The response was fairly typical and frankly not very helpful. Black people pondered whether they should be armed, politicians pretended to be serious about limiting access to guns, and platitudes were in abundance. Joe Biden tweeted nonsense , “In America, evil will not win. Hate will not prevail. White supremacy will not have the last word.” Of course, evil, hate, and white supremacy are foundational and dictate many facets of American life. As president, Biden’s job is to make sure none of that changes. After making the obligatory visit to a crime scene with the First Lady, and promising some sort of action that he wasn’t serious about, the country returned to its usual state of barely concealed apprehension which ended up being a short lived reprieve from ugly truth.

On May 24, 2022 a gunman entered a school in Uvalde, Texas and killed 19 children and 2 teachers. The cycle of thoughts, prayers and pretend action continued but was even worse because of the short span of time between the two events and revelations about police action, or rather inaction, in Uvalde.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut won kudos for his particular act of pretense on the senate floor. Murphy’s performance was a bit over the top but that is probably why it garnered so much attention. The senator seemed to be on the verge of tears as he made an impassioned plea to his colleagues. “What are we doing? … Why are we here? …This only happens in this country and nowhere else. … Nowhere else do kids go to school thinking they might be shot that day. … I’m here on this floor to beg - to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues. Find a path forward here.”

Those are fine words from Murphy until one considers that on a regular basis he advocates U.S. violence all over the world. In December 2013 he joined his colleague John McCain in Ukraine. They attended a rally hosted by the neo-Nazi Svoboda party which was dedicated to overthrowing the elected president. The ensuing violence after the coup killed 14,000 people in the region that opposed the U.S. backed government.

Murphy has been particularly vicious in his efforts to undermine the elected government of Venezuela . “Maduro is evil, and the U.S. should pursue a strategy to undermine him and prompt new elections. No one can defend what he has done to Venezuela. But it’s quite a different thing for the U.S. to incite a civil war with no real plan for how it ends.” Sound(Ssound familiar?).” Murphy supports the sanctions that have killed thousands of Venezuelans and very publicly defended overthrowing that government too, just as he did in Ukraine. The overly dramatic senator should be asked hard questions about the violence he espouses.

But the Uvalde story has yet another layer of complication. The same police department which claimed to have a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team that practiced protecting localprotectinglocal schools, allowed the gunman to continue his killing spree instead of confronting him.
Parents begged the officers to intercede but were tasered and handcuffed. One woman entered the school and rescued her own children without any help from the police. The gunman was shot only when Border Patrol officers arrived and went into the school against police protest.

Biden and the Democratic Party have made police funding the centerpiece of their latest dog whistle to white voters. He proposes giving police departments $30 billion in funding to do what Uvalde did, have a useless SWAT team and a bloated budget.

So dedicated are democrats to what they hope is a winning formula that they couldn’t even read the room as it were, and stop their copaganda routine. David Axelrod , a Barack Obama campaign strategist, staffer, and leading democratic party propagandist felt he should still sing police praises long after the public expressed outrage about the incompetence and uncaring displayed in Uvalde. “The inexplicable, heart-wrenching delay in Uvalde underscores the indispensable role of police.” Of course Uvalde showed what abolitionists have long maintained, that police don’t deter crime, exist to lock up marginalized groups, and show up only after crimes are committed. In this case they didn’t do much even after they showed up.

The party which Black people cling to is once again engaged in talking over their heads straight to white people and makes clear that locking up and throwing away the key is always a winning political strategy. The empire goes on, politicians talk out of both sides of their mouths, and the public are left stunned or numb when the body count climbs. No one will tell them the truth, that the violence that underlies the U.S. is in fact a feature and not a bug. People who want it to end need to go beyond thoughts, prayers and hoping that presidents and other politicians will ever do anything to stop it.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/mass- ... g-whistles

The creeping mass insanity which manifest in these murders is the result of the ever increasing alienation generated by late stage capitalism.

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Free speech battle: LAPD refuses permit for People’s Summit for Democracy

Liberation StaffJune 1, 2022 138 2 minutes read
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Liberation News is reposting this urgent appeal circulated by the ANSWER Coalition regarding the People’s Summit for Democracy taking place June 8-10 in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Police Department has refused to grant a permit to the People’s Summit for Democracy for a legal mass march scheduled to coincide with Biden’s Summit of the Americas on Friday, June 10. This is an outrageous denial of the First Amendment rights to free speech and to peacefully assemble. A press conference has just concluded Los Angeles calling on all progressive people to demand that city authorities reverse this decision immediately. We encourage all supporters to make phone calls, send letters and post online to spread this news far and wide.

The Summit of Americas is shaping up badly for the White House, as Biden’s exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua has led to nearly 20 heads of state saying they will not attend. Meanwhile, the People’s Summit has been gaining momentum over the last few weeks with endorsements from major unions and immigrant rights organizations, and prominent speakers coming from across the country and the world. Los Angeles authorities are trying to cover up this political embarrassment by preventing a march altogether. The ANSWER Coalition, and the other convening organizations of the People’s Summit, are committed to exercising our free speech rights and marching regardless.

Register to attend the People’s Summit here.

Official People’s Summit press release:

The Los Angeles Police Department has refused to grant a permit for a legal mass march scheduled to coincide with the Summit of the Americas on Friday, June 10, 2022. Organizers for the People’s Summit for Democracy say that, “the LAPD conduct constitutes an illegal denial of constitutional rights for those engaged in first amendment protected activity.” They vow to demonstrate regardless on June 10.

Organizers of the People’s Summit filed a permit request on February 25 for a free speech protected activity. 95 days have passed, and the LAPD has dragged its feet and not responded with any concrete steps to move forward in the application process. The LAPD has attempted to shift the blame about the delay in issuing the permit to the Secret Service and the Federal Government, but we know this is a stalling tactic.

This egregious violation of free speech and the infringement on our democratic right to protest goes against the very values that Joe Biden and the US government claim to uphold in the Summit of the Americas. Further, the maneuver threatens to undermine a principal avenue for progressive people in this country to advocate for social justice.

Angelica Salas, Executive Director of CHIRLA expressed, “The People’s Summit will lift up all those issues important to our people but left out of that other presidential summit across town: the rights of immigrants, women and workers, the rebuilding and protection of democratic norms, the security of families. We will present a different vision of the Western Hemisphere as a place of peace, freedom and prosperity for all that excludes no country, no faith, no race, and no gender.”

Regardless of the outcome regarding the permit request, the people of the Americas will march on the streets of Los Angeles on June 10 to Biden’s Summit of Exclusion and make our voices heard. We will see you at Los Angeles Technical Trade College from June 8-10 and in the streets on June 10!

https://www.liberationnews.org/free-spe ... rationnews
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