Dick Bennett's Anthologies focused on Stopping US Wars & Nuclear Holocaust and Stopping Warming & Climate Calamity, including examinations of their causes, consequences, and cures
Dick’s summaries of the
Introduction and chapters one and two.
Publisher’s summary.
An Excerpt.
Reviews.
About the author.
Google Search
The Third Industrial
Revolution
His other books.
THE GREEN NEW
DEAL
DICK’S General
Introduction.
Although this book is about the familiar subject of resilience in adapting to the climate
emergency, it is far from familiar in scope
in most other ways, which is a major reason why it kept my attention page after
page.
In any textbook on
rhetoric and argumentation, establishment of the speaker’s authority is usually
near the front of persuasive techniques. Pull a climate book off your shelf and
glance at the endorsers.And then look
at Rifkin’s:the Director of the largest
energy consulting team in the industry; the co-chair of the Global Covenant of
Mayors for Climate; the former President of Doctors Without Borders; the
Principal of the number one architecture firm in the US as ranked by
Architecture magazine; Vandana Shiva, recipient of the Right Livelihood Award.
They like the
scope and boldness-and persuasiveness--of his plan.
The scope and
boldness: the collapse of the FF civilization, the rebuilding of the planet’s
infrastructure, zero carbon living, free sun and wind.
The persuasiveness:
well, that depends upon our judgment during a close reading,
but I found his exposition of the European Climate Vision to
be what has been missing in the USA, ironically in a book declared to be about
the USA’s new New Deal.He has used our
pre-World War II Dust Bowl and Depression and the transformative but truncated
national project of the Democrats’ New Deal as the foundation for the new ND’s
realization in post-WWII European national experiences.It’s a complex story of course; he offers no
simple magical solutions, only clear thinking and hard work.
For example,
chapter 1, p. 29, “in the European Union [of the 21st century], EU
citizens recognize the importance of maintaining a balanced partnership between
government and commerce, and there is a deep appreciation for the role that the
government plays in providing public infrastructure and services. . . .By contrast, everywhere we look across
America today, the public infrastructure is in dire straits and disrepair,” to
which the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a report card of D+.(Here’s an example from Arkansas: Emily
Walkenhorst, “High-risk dams in rough shape….” (NADG, 11-18-19).Or this
nation-wide: Ellen Knickmeyer, “Report: 60% of Superfund sites at higher risk
in climate change.”(11-19).Who do you think is readier for the climate
emergency, Europe or the US?)
And how will we
pay to catch up our infrastructure in order to be resilient when the
hyper-storms and -floods and -fires and -droughts strike?That’s all laid out too by Rifkin in
“Finding the Money” (182- and passim).
This is a
brilliant, comprehensive, necessary book for the emergency, and I urge all CBF
members to read it.
Dick
Jeremy Rifkin.The
Green New Deal:Why
the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan
to Save Life on Earth.St.
Martin's Press, 2019.
Dick’s
summary and comments on the Intro. and chapters 1 and 2.
ORGANIZATION
Part
I.“The Great Disruption: The Decoupling
Stampede and Stranded Fossil Fuel Assets”
In
four chapters: the ferocious effort of corporate investors to extract every
drop of FF before that trillions of dollars of profit is shut off and the new
economy of free sun and wind arrives and empowers the people.
Part
II.“A Green New Deal Rising from the
Ashes.”
In
three chapters: the new “social capitalism,” a cooperative society of the
people creating a new democratic civilization.
INTRODUCTION
(Notes on pp.247-).
This
thoroughly political book opens with 2018’s wakeup calls:1) The IPCC’s October “dire warning of
“accelerating emissions” and “escalating climatic events, imperiling life on
the planet.”To avoid that chaos, we
must “cut the emission of global warming gases 45 percent from 2010 levels” in
only 12 years.2) The Nov. 2018 election
of a younger generation of Democrats who understood the warning and were
“committed to a radical redirection of the American economy” to a more
equitable distribution of its fruits.By
Feb. 2019 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with Senator Ed Markey had introduced a
Green New Deal Resolution.Quickly over
100 members of Congress cosponsored it, including several presidential
contenders, and hundreds of state and local officials.
This “turnaround in the national mood”
followed a decade of disastrous water events indicating a “disruption of the
Earth’s hydrosphere.”Climate change and
the GND were moving to the center of the 2020 electoral campaign.91% of Democrats supported the Resolution,
88% of Independents, and 64% of Republicans (pp. 5-6).Elite representatives were also joining the
movement, especially in support of a carbon tax.And a similar GND “swept across the European
Union.”(6-7).
Meanwhile, “solar, wind, and other
renewable energies are coming online.”The cost for solar and wind installation has “plummeted” until they are
now “’cheaper than the most efficient gas plants, coal plants, and nuclear
reactors.” (7).Here Rifkin introduces
what becomes a major topic of the book: the move from FF to cheaper renewables
will create trillions of dollars worth of FF “stranded assets,” creating a “seismic struggle” as the “principal
sectors responsible for global warming” begin “to decouple from the fossil fuel
industry.” (8).
Rifkin calls this energy change the “Great
Disruption,” and it is part of the “Third Industrial Revolution” (TIR) of
divestment from FF and embrace of renewables.Of great concern to millions of US workersis the safe transition of over $40 trillion
invested in pension funds.This will be
“the biggest divest/invest campaign in capitalist history” (9).
Unfortunately, the US has no plan for the
transition to a zero-carbon future.Europe and China, however, are preparing, which Rifkin has
assisted.This book on the GND is
intended to help the US catch up (10).He is confident that the global companies and the governments of the EU
and China ”that I work with” can do it, and that the US will join them.
CHAPTER
ONE: IT’S THE INFRASTRUCTURE, STUPID! (Notes pp. 249-251) [From the First
Industrial Revolution to the Third]
[We think in trinities or triads?Rifkin does.]
We need a new economic vision and fast,
for we need to transform simultaneously all three parts of our interactive infrastructure:
1) communication, 2) transportation, 3) energy, and we have only 20 years to accomplish
it [to others, 10 years].
This total paradigm revolution can be
understood historically as three economic revolutions, which Rifkin compares not
in chronological order, but the First and Second are woven into his narrative
of the Third.
The new economic system, the Third
Industrial Revolution, will change everything [remember Klein’s book]
“comparable to the shift from agriculture to an industrial society,” creating
“new business models. . .new kinds of mass employment,” training “millions of
people.”
The digitized Communication Internet is
converging with digitized Mobility/ Logistics Internet powered by a Renewable
Energy Internet “atop an Internet of things (IoT) platform embedded in the
total infrastructure (pp. 15-16).[Rifkin thinks BIG and the FUTURE.See pp. 24]
The rest of the chapter takes up topic
after topic of the shiftfrom the Second
Industrial Revolution into the “smart” zero-carbon, Third Industrial Revolution
economy and infrastructure that are “the very center-piece of a Green New Deal” (23).
This new economy’s infrastructure must be
enormous to accomplish such scope of planetary changes.“Big Data,” available to all free, will
increase efficiency and productivity, reduce carbon footprint, and lower
marginal cost, “forcing a fundamental change in the capitalist system” (17). “This is what the green digital Third Industrial Revolution does.”
(18).And since it is universally
embedded, it will be a “sharing economy” composed of “sharing networks” using
dramatically less natural resources and causing significantly less carbon emissions.“The Sharing Economy is a core feature of the
Green New Deal era” (19).
The GND’s roots in the 2nd IR
of the Roosevelts and the Democratic Party is announced by its name, and such
roots go far back into the 1st IR via the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of
1862 and 1890 (32-33).
But
those infrastructures were flawed by their economic and social inequities
(34).The GND envisions a democratic
future, governments in partnership with the public.Power including economic power must be “glocalized,”
or decentralized to regions, states, counties, and cities, and to “peer-assemblies” (35-6, 42-45).“Deep public participation” should be the
rule in this laterally scaled 3rd IR in which the infrastructure is
perceived as public open-source commons.
Why has the national infrastructure been
so neglected in recent decades?Why have
we delayed?Why are we so far behind
Europe?Despite the countless ways government (i.e.
public) money has built the infrastructure of this country, the evidence that
increasing infrastructure spending increases jobs and GDP, and the popularity
of infrastructures, well-funded Republican anti-government, pro-private and
corporate ideology has been gaining power ever since Ronald Reagan (28-31, 36-7).
[In the preceding summary, I
mainly assumed the voice of the author.In the following, I speak as clearly another person telling about the
chapter.–D]
CHAPTER 2: POWER TO THE PEOPLE: THE SUN AND WIND ARE FREE
Jeremy Rifkin has extraordinary knowledge
of the history of the “Green New Deal.”He is the first historian of the movement that I know of to identify its
roots in 2007 Europe.By then Europe had
become the leader in decarbonizing societies.In 2007 the European Union
(EU) established the 20-20-20 protocols requiring all EU member states to
increase their energy efficiency by 20%, reduce their global warming emissions
by 20%, and increase their generation of renewable energies by 20% by the year 2020.Thus it was “the first major political power
to establish a…legally binding commitment to….transform the continent into a
zero-carbon society” (47).[Did they
meet their deadline?]
Almost simultaneously the Green New Deal
movement began.The eclectic Green New
Deal Group met in the UK “to rethink the economic paradigm.”And in 2008
they published a 48-page declaration titled A
Green New Deal: Joined-Up Policies to Solve the Triple Crunch of the Credit
Crisis, Climate Change, and High Oil Prices.”Central to the document was the 20-20-20- formula.It inaugurated the zero-carbon Third Industrial Revolution paradigm shift (the
First in the nineteenth century: coal, steam, telegraph; the Second in the twentieth:
oil, electricity, telephone):renewables,
digital infrastructure (see chapter 1).
The document’s title was no
accident.The group chose President
Roosevelt’s New Deal as the inspiration for transforming the European economy
into green (48).
One year later the German Green Party
issued a manifesto titled Toward a
Transatlantic Green New Deal: Tackling the Climate and Economic Crises.They hoped to unite the US and EU to
advance a postcarbon transition.
Later the same year the European Greens
published a detailed plan called A Green
New Deal for Europe: Towards Green Modernisation in the Face of Crisis.And the United Nation’s Environment
Programme (UNEP) issued its report, Rethinking
the Economic Recovery: Global Green New Deal.2008 was a great leap forward for GND.
Next year S. Korea signed a $36 billion
initiative for low-carbon projects and 900,000 new jobs.
And in 2011, Rifkin co-authored a book
titled A Green New Deal: From
Geo-politics to Biosphere Politics, focusing on architecture and infrastructure
(49).
The Green New Deal “continued to gain
momentum” and became “a theme in the 2019 European elections.”
Meanwhile, in the US, GND “became the
moniker for the US Green Party and the presidential run of Jill Stein in
2016.”And in 2018 the new sunrise Movement and US Representative Ocasio-Cortez
[with Senator Markey] made their own declaration. (Discussed earlier p. 3, e.g.
103 members of Congress, several Democratic Partypresidential contenders,and hundreds of state and local officials had
cosponsored it by 2019).
To sum up, the GND had been prepared for a
decade before coming to fruition via the new millennial and Gen Z political
revolution.[See chapter 1 on earlier
preparation during 1st and 2nd IR.]
This historical sketch constitutes the
first half of chapter 2 (to p. 50).The second
half is even more important.
Rifkin perceives the transition, the
“paradigm shift,” to the Third Industrial Revolution and GND (and Paris Climate
Summit) as occurring in “four sectors that make up the Second Industrial
Revolution infrastructure” (see p. 16 ): ICT/telecommunications; energy and
electricity; internal combustion mobility; residential, commercial, etc.
buildings.Here is the battleground
emphatically from 2015 onward of the
four sectors decoupling from the fossil fuel civilization and recoupling with
green energies and technologies, and “leaving
stranded [100 trillions of dollars of] fossil fuels assets everywhere (my
italics) (50).[Here’s why the question
--why can’t people just get along?-- is so foolish, and why the ff companies and
their investors are drilling and selling with such frenzy.] Add to fear of an international binding
commitment to limit global warming by 2 degrees at the Paris Summit, CEOs and
investors also feared the rapidly “falling cost of …green power and storage,”which would leave trillions of dollars of
potential ff profits abandoned (52).
The remaining pages of the chapter gives
some details; and the rest of the book is closely tied to it.I’ll single one out that highlights his
important role in this history.One of
Rifkin’s books is The Third Industrial
Revolution.In 2012 China’s Premier Li
Keqiang read the book and instructed high-level national centers to follow up
its ideas (65).
An important factor unrevealed by my
selection of highlights is Rifkin’s long and deep leadership in the GND
movement.The main theme underlying this
history is that mitigating warming requires a comprehensive, international
political movement. He is one of the original thinkers and a steady promoter of
the concept during the last decade.This
book can be read as an autobiography of his promotion of GND. The first two chapters suggest that
the great Resolution by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Markey did not
spring out of nowhere, but is as much a culmination as it is a beginning.
My summaries and comments on chapters
one and two were intended to help us compare the book with other GND narratives
.In a critical review, I would have examined
for example Rifkin’s under-attention to population growth (zero citations) and
to Bernie Sanders (one).
THE GREEN NEW DEAL: Why the Fossil Fuel
Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on
Earth by Jeremy
Rifkin. St. Martin's Press, 2019.
An urgent plan to confront climate change, transform the
American economy, and create a green post-fossil fuel culture.
A
new vision for America’s future is quickly gaining momentum. Facing a global
emergency, a younger generation is spearheading a national conversation around
a Green New Deal and setting the agenda for a bold political movement with the
potential to revolutionize society. Millennials, the largest voting bloc in the
country, are now leading on the issue of climate change.
While
the Green New Deal has become a lightning rod in the political sphere, there is
a parallel movement emerging within the business community that will shake the
very foundation of the global economy in coming years. Key sectors of the
economy are fast-decoupling from fossil fuels in favor of ever cheaper solar
and wind energies and the new business opportunities and employment that
accompany them. New studies are sounding the alarm that trillions of dollars in
stranded fossil fuel assets could create a carbon bubble likely to burst by
2028, causing the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization. The marketplace is
speaking, and governments will need to adapt if they are to survive and
prosper.
In The
Green New Deal, New York Times bestselling author and
renowned economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin delivers the political narrative and
economic plan for the Green New Deal that we need at this critical moment in
history. The concurrence of a stranded fossil fuel assets bubble and a green
political vision opens up the possibility of a massive shift to a post-carbon
ecological era, in time to prevent a temperature rise that will tip us over the
edge into runaway climate change. With twenty-five years of experience
implementing Green New Deal–style transitions for both the European Union and
the People’s Republic of China, Rifkin offers his vision for how to transform
the global economy and save life on Earth.
We are facing a global
emergency. Our scientists tell us that human-induced climate change
brought on by the burning of fossil fuels has taken the human race and our
fellow species into the sixth mass extinction...
"[Jeremy Rifkin] is a
principal architect of the European Union’s long-term economic vision, Smart
Europe, and a key advisor to China's Third Industrial Revolution vision...The
European Commission is calling for a climate-neutral Europe by 2050. His new
book, The Green New Deal, is essentially an attempt to rouse the
United States from its slumber within a collapsing 20th century fossil fuel
era." —Forbes
“The futurist and prolific
author is the kind of thinker popular among chief executives and the TED Talk
crowd. So it’s not surprising that ‘The Green New Deal’ takes a stance quite
different from that of typical Green New Deal supporters... he’s interested in
building factories, farms, and vehicles in a fossil-free world, asserting that
‘the Green New Deal is all about infrastructure.’ He’s best at articulating the
huge financial risk the oil, coal, and natural gas industries face from
stranded assets - all the pipelines, ocean drilling platforms, ports, mining
equipment and power plants that will soon be obsolete... there is an
unmistakable sense that with disaster comes opportunity. Will we seize this
moment to become a more just, more equitable, more resilient world.” —The
New York Times Book Review
"[In The Green New Deal], economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin,
whose work has inspired climate legislation in China and in various countries
in the European Union (E.U.), is well positioned to advocate for this new
political vision. In The Green New … More…
Reviews from Goodreads
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Jeremy Rifkin
JEREMY RIFKIN, one of the most
popular social thinkers of our time, is the bestselling author of 20 books
including The Zero Marginal Cost Society, The Third
Industrial Revolution, The Empathic Civilization, The
European Dream, The Age of Access, The Hydrogen Economy,
and The End of Work. His books have been translated into more than
35 languages. Rifkin is an advisor to the European Union, the People’s Republic
of China, and heads of state around the world. He has taught at the Wharton
School's Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania since
1995 and is the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington,
DC.
In The Green New Deal, New York Times
bestselling author and renowned economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin delivers the
political narrative and economic plan for ...
An urgent plan to confront climate change,
transform the American economy, and create a green post-fossil
fuel culture. ... Facing a global emergency, a younger generation is
spearheading a national conversation around a Green New Deal and setting the
agenda for a bold political ...
Oct 8, 2019 - In his new book,
The Green
New Deal, Rifkin argues that we
are entering a zero carbon economy. Much as coal and steam powered the
First ...
The Green New Deal by Jeremy Rifkin. An urgent plan to
confront climate change, transform the American economy, and create a green
post-fossil fuel culture.
Oct 9, 2019 - Jeremy Rifkin: We're on the cusp
of a Third Industrial Revolution. It's the heart of "The Green New Deal." So the
communication internet we're ...
The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel
Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and .... Only Rifkin's god can help
you, and all it takes is to accept Rifkin as the true ...
Jun 25, 2019 - THE GREEN NEW DEAL. Why the Fossil Fuel
Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan To Save Life on
Earth. by Jeremy ...
The world is doomed to repeat four-year
cycles of booms followed by crashes if we don’t get off oil, Jeremy Rifkin
warned a Climate One audience in San
Francisco on October 3. The solution, what he calls
the Third Industrial Revolution, is the “Energy Internet,” a nervous system
linking millions of small renewable energy producers.
For Rifkin, author
of the new The Third
Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy and Changing
the World, a seminal event occurred in July 2008, when the price of
oil hit $147 a barrel. “Prices for everything on the supply chain went through
the roof, from food to petrochemicals. Purchasing power plummeted all over the
world that month. An entire economic engine of the Industrial Revolution shut
down,” he said...
"Every time
we try to re-grow the economy at the same growth rate we were growing before
July 2008, the price of oil goes up, all of the other prices goes up,
purchasing power goes down, and it collapses.” This is a wall we can’t go
beyond under the current energy regime, he said. “We’re in this wild gyration
of four-year cycles, where we’re going to try to re-grow, collapse, re-grow,
collapse.”
The solution is a
plan based on five pillars, which is being implemented in the European Union:
1) Renewable energy targets: such as the EU’s 20% by 2020 mandate 2) Green
buildings: over the next 40 years, Europe plans to convert its 191 million
buildings into energy-efficient, micro power plants 3) Energy storage:
batteries, flywheels, and hydrogen used to smooth the intermittency of
renewables 4) “Energy Internet”: create a central nervous system so that
buildings can talk to the grid and sell or store power depending on prices 5)
Plug-in electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles...MORE: http://energybulletin.net/media/2011-10-11/jeremy-rifkin-third-industrial-revolution
--Rifkin, Jeremy.The
Empathic Civilization.Rev. Amanda
Gefter, “Jeremy Rifkin: The third industrial revolution,” NewScientist (Feb.
17, 2010).In The Empathic
Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin argues that before we can save ourselves from
climate change we have to break a vicious circle and embrace a new model of
society based on scientists' new understanding of human nature. I asked him how
we can do it.MORE:http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/02/jeremy-rifkin-the-third-industrial-revolution.html
So many articles have
been published on police oppression in popularresistance.org, mronline.org, and other online magazines (plus a few print sources and a film or two) that my selective anthologizing has been overwhelmed.(I am working on #6.)You have here instead an archive in reverse
chronological order from September 7, 2016, to June
25,2020, from which all of us can draw for
our own resistance. (2nd installment from June 27 to July 28)
NEXT
10 FROM Popular Resistance.org (6-25-20)
Be
the people's resistance media! Forward this email
to your friends and share the articles on social media.
By Robert Chappell, Madison365. Hundreds of people
are protesting in downtown Madison after the arrest of activist Yeshua
Musa. Videos of the arrest posted to social media show as many as five
police officers wrestling Musa, also known as Devonere Johnson, to the
ground and carrying him to the back seat of a police cruiser, while he
asks what he’s being arrested for. After officers get him into the car,
he can be seen jumping out of the opposite car door before being tackled
again and taken into custody. In one of the videos, witnesses can be
heard asking why Musa is being arrested and saying he had only been
speaking in a megaphone... -more-
By Drug Policy Alliance. New York City
criminalizes drugs and low-level broken windows offenses at a startling
rate, with enforcement in these areas accounting for a vast proportion of
the NYPD’s policing activities and the city’s budget, according to a new
brief from Drug Policy Alliance. DPA released the brief in support of the
Communities United for Police Reform coalition call for Mayor de Blasio
and the NYC Council to cut the FY21 NYPD expense budget by $1 billion and
redirect savings to core needs in Black, Latinx and other NYC communities
of color that have long been the target of the drug war and racist
policing. -more-
By Arnie Alpert, Waging Nonviolence. When Claudette
Colvin, a Black teenager from Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing
to give up her seat on a city bus, few people paid attention. A few
months later, when Rosa Parks was arrested for the same act, it touched
off a yearlong bus boycott and ignited a movement. When Seymour Hersh
revealed the details of the My Lai Massacre in 1969, it touched off
Congressional investigations but not mass action. When President Nixon
announced that U.S. troops had invaded Cambodia the following spring,
college campuses, including Kent State, erupted in protest. -more-
By Amnesty International. Police forces
across the United States have committed widespread and egregious human
rights violations in response to largely peaceful assemblies protesting
systemic racism and police violence, including the killing of Black
people. Amnesty International has documented 125 separate incidents
of police violence against protesters in 40 states and the District of
Columbia between 26 May and 5 June 2020. These acts of
excessive force were committed by members of state and local police
departments, as well as by National Guard troops and security force
personnel from several federal agencies. -more- What Elinor Ostrom’s Work Tells Us About Defunding
The Police
By Aaron Vansintjan, Shareable. In the past
weeks, I’ve watched the news about the explosion of protests against
police brutality and racism in the United States and around the world,
and the resulting conversations on police defunding, reform or abolition.
As I scrolled through social media and obsessively scanned and rescanned
the headlines, a small thought tugged at me. It was the story of
how one of my heroes, Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Memorial
Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, had arrived at the research that made
her famous. Ostrom has become celebrated as the person who introduced the
world... -more-
By Reese Erlich, The Progressive. Contrary to the
image of brutal and repressive communists, police in Cuba offer an
instructive example for activists in the United States. Police live in
the cities they patrol. They generally treat citizens with respect. As I
documented in my book Dateline Havana, police beatings of criminals
are rare and police murders are nonexistent. Cuba has one of the lowest
crime rates in Latin America. The ongoing protests for Black lives
in the United States have forced an unprecedented national debate about
the role of policing. Should police departments be defunded and that
money be diverted to help poor communities? -more-
By Justin Feldman, People's Policy Project. “Police Killings
in the US: Inequalities by Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic
Position" examines the databases of police killings contain
important demographic information like race, gender, and age. But they do
not contain socioeconomic information like education and income. This
analysis shows that socioeconomic position plays a big role in police
killings. The highest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 6.4 per
million while the lowest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 1.8
per million, a 3.5-fold difference. A similar class skew exists within
each racial group as well. -more-
By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, and
Omar Ocampo, Institute for Policy Studies. For months
now, a deadly pandemic and deep recession have pummeled the U.S. economy.
Yet even as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, U.S.
billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by leaps and
bounds. At the same time, the Movement for Black Lives has drawn
attention not just to police brutality against Black Americans, but to
systemic racism more broadly. A huge cause and consequence of that
systemic injustice is the underlying racial wealth divide — the financial
legacy of centuries of white supremacy. -more-
By Change the NYPD. New York City - More than 170 local
& national organizations, brought together by Communities United
for Police Reform (CPR), released a follow-up to their April
letter calling on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and City
Council Speaker Corey Johnson to cut at least $1 billion directly from
the NYPD expense budget by the June 30th deadline and redirect resources
for FY21 to core social programs that are essential for Black, Latinx and
other communities hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. In
the letter released today, CPR and the #NYCBudgetJustice
coalition make it clear that the call “to cut at... -more-
By Andy Greenberg, Wired. It's been the
better part of a decade since the hacktivist
group Anonymous rampaged across the internet, stealing and
leaking millions of secret files from dozens of US organizations. Now,
amid the global protests following the killing of George Floyd, Anonymous
is back—and it's returned with a dump of hundreds of gigabytes of law
enforcement files and internal communications. On Friday of last week,
the Juneteenth holiday, a leak-focused activist group known as
Distributed Denial of Secrets published a 269-gigabyte collection of
police data that includes emails, audio, video, and intelligence
documents, with more than... -more-
As an independent
media source free of advertising, we rely on your support.
Why have the powers of the police expanded
over decades, while funding for vital social services shrinks? Laissez-faire
capitalism goes hand-in-hand with brutal coercion. | more…
As politicians and activists across the
country try to reenvision law enforcement, Black revolutionary Angela Davis
says reform can only go so far in addressing the inherent racism in policing.
| more…
Popular
Resistance.org (6-21-20)
Be the people's
resistance media! Forward this email
to your friends and share the articles on social media.
On June 18, 2020, at 1 pm, an Oakland
judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and Order to Show Cause
against the Oakland Police Department. The order was filed by civil
rights attorneys Dan Siegel and Walter Riley and National Lawyers Guild -
San Francisco Bay Area attorney James Burch. This initial victory
is part of a larger lawsuit by the attorneys on behalf of two
organizational plaintiffs, Anti Police-Terror Project and Community Ready
Corps, and individual plaintiffs, Oakland Tech student Akil Riley and
protestors Ian Mcdonnell, Nico Nada, Azize Ngo, and Jennifer Li on behalf
of themselves and... -more-
By Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. The perpetrators
of crimes against humanity are often elevated to positions of respect and
admiration. It all depends on who did the killing, and who was killed.
Now the murderers are being called to account. The new movement in the United
States against police and other state violence has inspired this welcome
change taking place all over the world. The criminals are being exposed
decades and even centuries after their atrocities took place. There is no
statute of limitations for murder nor should there be for calling out
people who have the blood of millions on their hands. -more-
By Justin Podur, Globetrotter. Recent protests,
catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, call for an end
to racist police violence. With their actions, the protesters have also
moved beyond many of the stale policing debates of the recent past.
Defund, disband, abolish—people who would never have even heard these
words in discussions about the police are now seriously considering them.
The breakthroughs in the police debate would not have been possible
without the protesters, who have remained
steadfast despite being beaten and abused by police everywhere
in the United States. -more-
By Gin Armstrong and Derek Seidman, Eyes on the Ties. As calls to defund
the police gain traction, bloated police budgets are coming under
scrutiny for siphoning public resources away from black and brown
communities. While police budgets are typically public documents that
must be approved by elected officials, there are other institutions in
place with the sole purpose of funneling even more resources toward law
enforcement. Police foundations across the country are partnering
with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding
programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement
with... -more-
By Anna Szymanski, Reuters. New York
- Around the time the United States formally abolished slavery in
1865, African Americans owned 0.5% of the United States’ wealth. Today
they own under 3%, even though around 13% of the population is defined by
the U.S. census as “black or African American.” This isn’t an accident of
history – it’s a result of government policies and institutional bias.
The interest keeps compounding. The value of income lost during slavery
is staggering. The U.S. practice lasted for nearly 250 years – almost
equivalent to the time from the signing of the Declaration of
Independence in 1776 until today. -more-
By Matt Kerr, TribuneMag. Many of those who
organised around the exemplary “no evictions” campaign over the last
couple of years gathered to show solidarity and support for people with
no vote, no opportunity to work, no money, and living in a new country
having fled conditions which were often the stuff of
nightmares. Sadly, this was met with a “counter-protest.” Quite how
anyone could protest against people being given decent food to eat should
be beyond comprehension – but for the far-right, this seemed too much like
treating people from other places and races with dignity. -more-
By Andrew Tarantola, Engadget. The modern
news industry is in crisis. For years, formerly stalwart publications
have been bought up, hollowed out, and sold for scrap by predatory (and
often utterly incompetent) venture capital firms. The recent global
outbreak of COVID-19 has further shattered the business as reporters and
editors have been furloughed, or outright laid off, en masse. Now, as
demonstrations across the country protesting George Floyd’s death at the
knees of a Minneapolis cop grow in both scope and intensity, traditional
newsrooms are finding their resources to cover these events spread
thin. -more-
By Jason Kirkpatrick, Counterpunch. The vague and
easily misinterpreted call to Defund the Police has been spreading
quickly across the USA. Some may have a knee-jerk reaction to “just say
no” to this call, but polls show a vast majority of Americans are
concerned about improving the lives of people of color across the
country. Reforms such as teaching police to de-escalate conflicts and
enforcement of body camera use have support of about 90% of Americans.
So, what could solutions to the current situation look like, how could
they be paid for, and should relative costs realistically be coming out
of police budgets? -more-
By Shireen Adeimi and Sarah Lazare, In These
Times. Nationwide uprisings over the police killing of George
Floyd have forced a long overdue discussion about the injustices of U.S.
policing—an institution that has consistently harassed and terrorized and,
in the words of organizer, writer and educator Mariame Kaba, remains
a consistent “force of violence against Black people.” As demands
to abolish the police are thrust into mainstream discourse,
promising—if uncertain and mixed—political changes are being debated
and implemented every day. We are seeing a rigorous interrogation of the
systems that uphold and compound... -more-
By Tayla Zax, Forward. In
1905, Pennsylvania did something unprecedented: It founded America’s first
state police force. The new institution, which was more highly militarized than
previous law enforcement systems, was created for one reason: The state
government wanted a more organized and efficient way to break strikes. The new
force approached that mission with zeal — and violence. In 1909, members of the
Pennsylvania State Police killed several strikers during the Pressed Steel Car
Strike, a strike by workers who built railroad cars; after a crowd broke one
state trooper’s leg, police were given orders to shoot to kill. -more-
The U.S. military’s budget, like so many
police department budgets, is bloated, and diverts our tax dollars into
forces of domination and violence. Now is the time to question our spending
priorities at the local and federal level. | more…
Sonny
San Juan
Thu,
Jun 18, 9:37 AM (1 day ago)
Date: Thu, Jun
18, 2020 at 7:12 AM
Subject: An
alternative to calling police already exists
To:
Barack Obama has offered some advice to the protesters
flooding streets across the United States. Not that anyone asked him, mind you.
But he was the First Black President™, so people better shut up and listen.
| more…
There was police brutality and there was atrocity, and the
press was just as atrocious as the police. Because they helped the police to
cover it up by propagating a false image across the country, that there was a
blazing gun battle which involved Muslims and police shooting at each other.
| more…
The United Nations
Human Rights Council has agreed to an urgent debate on Wednesday about
systemic racism, violence toward peaceful protesters and police
brutality, following worldwide protests sparked by the killing of
George Floyd. "[I]t is a moment to really discuss this issue, as
you have seen with the demonstrations all over Europe, including here
in Geneva," says president of the UN Human Rights Council
Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger.
Palestinians living under
Israeli military occupation have long dealt with the kind of brutality
being enacted by some US police officers against African-Americans.
Israeli police officers detain
a Palestinian protestor during scuffles outside the compound housing
al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City March 12, 2019. (Reuters)
A now infamous image of a white police officer kneeling on
the neck of an African-American man, who would later die, has caused
global outrage and violent unrest across the US.
Caught on video, George Floyd's death was seemingly the straw that
broke the camel's back in that it came after several other high profile killings of
several other African-Americans either by police or suspects who did
not face immediate legal consequences.
For one community,
the disproportionate violence faced by black people at the hands of US
police forces has special resonance as it reflects their own
experiences with the authorities.
For Palestinians living under military occupation in East Jerusalem and
the occupied West Bank, the worst excesses of the kind seen in the US
recently, are a near everyday occurrence.
In the aftermath of Floyd's killing, Palestinians were quick to draw
parallels between the final images of the man suffering under the knee
of the officer, and similar choke holds used by Israel occupation
forces.
"Crazy how the same thing happens in Palestine but the world
chooses to ignore it," Palestinian athlete Mohammad Alqadi wrote
on his Twitter above four separate images of Israeli soldiers pinning
Palestinians to the ground with their knees on their necks or head.
Killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces are also a regular
occurrence: in 2019, 135 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces
with 108 in Gaza and another 27 in the West Bank, according to the UN.
The similarities do not end there, as some activists have drawn
parallels between the way US police have handled protests against
police brutality in the aftermath of Floyd's death and the way Israel
has dealt with protests in Gaza.
Such comparisons come with caveats, as US police officers despite the
controversy over their tactics have yet to kill anywhere near the
numbers Israel killed in the Gaza right of return protests in 2018, for
example. Nevertheless, some of the tactics used are the same, according
to pro-Palestinian groups.
On Twitter, the BDS and Palestinian Solidarity working group within the
Democratic Socialists of America wrote: "The police violence
happening tonight in Minneapolis is straight out of the IDF playbook.
How many times have we seen uprisings in Gaza met w/ a storm of tear
gas? How many times are Palestinians in the West Bank doused w/ skunk
water during a protest? US cops train in Israel."
Police training in
Israel
Amnesty
International has warned that hundreds of police departments have been
training in Israeli alongside military officers, who "have racked
up documented human rights violations for years."
The rights group notes that one of the departments involved in the
training, the Baltimore Police Department, had been cited by the US Department of Justice for
"widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement,
and culture of retaliation."
Both Amnesty and the US State Department have cited incidences of
Israeli security officials engaging in brutality against Palestinians.
The rights group said: "Baltimore and other police departments
should find partners that will train on de-escalation techniques, how
to handle mentally challenged or ill citizens, on the constitutional rights
of citizens concerning filming and how to appropriately respond to
those using non-violent protest to express their opinions. Israel is
not such a partner."
Palestinian activist Huda Ammori of the Apartheid off Campus group told
TRT World that such links between "militarised" US police
forces and the Israeli security establishment emphasised the need for
unity between African-Americans and Palestinians.
"We're seeing the oppressors united with their training, their
same techniques. Between the Black Lives Matter community and the
Palestinian community, and other communities across the world, we need
to unite to fight against these systems." Ammori said.
"It's the same systems of oppression that are affecting all of
these communities...we must fight back to.
Gray
&
Associates, PO Box 3291, Atlanta, GA 31106
ZIONIST TRAINING OF U.S. POLICE & SUPPRESSION OF CIVILIAN
PROTESTS
-------
Date: Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 9:30 PM
Subject: Israelification of U.S policing
To:
The Israelification of American domestic
security By Max Blumenthal
(Editor’s note: The
eruption of national protests against police brutality following the murder
of George Floyd have shed new light on Israel’s training of local police
officers across the country.
100 members of the
800-strong Minneapolis police department were trained at a conference in
Israel in 2012. That means at least one of every eight members the city’s
force has been influenced by the methods of an occupying apartheid entity.)
June 15, 2020
In October, the Alameda
County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of
California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT
team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and
competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law
enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.
At the time, the Alameda County
Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the
nascent “Occupy” movement that had
set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its
repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when
it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds,
leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens
injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade
publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in
northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”
Training alongside the American
police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that
claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for
its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders
and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied
West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military
of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising
by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded
demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement
of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of
quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported
anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of
the post-9/11 American security landscape.
The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently
unleashed in full force against the Occupy
Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement,
and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented
in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight
Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature
of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has
never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip
of the iceberg.
Having been schooled in Israeli
tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing,
and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them
to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former
Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at
American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of
disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI
interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police
Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against
Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park raised
serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics have
been used to suppress the Occupy movement in general.
The process of Israelification
began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and
municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for
advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of
hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to
Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence
officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been
on junkets to Israel are the exception.
“Israel is the Harvard of
antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W.
Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the
Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No
experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to
Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police
chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We’re in a global
war.”
Changing
the way we do business
The Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs (JINSA) is at the heart of American-Israeli
law enforcement collaboration. JINSA is a Jerusalem and Washington DC-based
think tank known for stridently neoconservative policy positions on Israel’s
policy towards the Palestinians and its brinkmanship with Iran. The group’s
board of directors boasts a Who’s Who of neocon ideologues. Two former
JINSA advisers who have also consulted for Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, went on to serve in the
Department of Defense under President George W. Bush, playing influential
roles in the push to invade and occupy Iraq.
Through its Law Enforcement
Education Program (LEEP), JINSA claims to have arranged Israeli-led
training sessions for over 9000 American law enforcement officials at the
federal, state and municipal level. “The Israelis changed the way we do
business regarding homeland security in New Jersey,” Richard Fuentes, the NJ
State Police Superintendent, said after
attending a 2004 JINSA-sponsored Israel trip and a subsequent JINSA
conference alongside 435 other law enforcement officers.
During a 2004 LEEP
trip, JINSA brought 14 senior American law enforcement officials to
Israel to receive instruction from their counterparts. The Americans were
trained in “how to secure large venues, such as shopping malls, sporting
events and concerts,” JINSA’s website reported. Escorted by Brigadier General
Simon Perry, an Israeli police attaché and former Mossad official, the group
toured the Israeli separation wall, now a mandatory stop for American cops on
junkets to Israel. “American officials learned about the mindset of a suicide
bomber and how to spot trouble signs,” according to JINSA. And they were
schooled in Israeli killing methods. “Although the police are typically told
to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the
Israelis are teaching [American] officers to aim for a suspect’s head so as
not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso,”
the New York Times reported.
Cathy Lanier, now the Chief of
Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was among the law enforcement
officials junketed to Israel by JINSA. “I was with the bomb units and the
SWAT team and all of those high profile specialized [Israeli] units and I
learned a tremendous amount,” Lanier reflected. “I took 82 pages of
notes while I was there which I later brought back and used to formulate a
lot of what I later used to create and formulate the Homeland Security
terrorism bureau in the DC Metropolitan Police department.”
Some of the police chiefs who
have taken part in JINSA’s LEEP program have done so under the auspices of
the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private non-governmental group
with close ties to the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Wexler, the
executive director of PERF, was so enthusiastic about the program that by
2005 he had begun organizing trips to Israel sponsored by PERF,
bringing numerous high-level American police officials to receive instruction
from their Israeli counterparts.
PERF gained notoriety when
Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16
cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40
cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement
and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for
an interview.
Lessons
from Israel to Auschwitz
Besides JINSA, the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison
between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence
apparatus. Though the ADL promotes itself as a Jewish civil rights group, it
has provoked controversy by publishing a blacklist of organizations
supporting Palestinian rights, and for condemning a proposal to construct an
Islamic community center in downtown New York, several blocks from Ground
Zero, on the basis that some opponents of the project were entitled to
“positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.”
Through the ADL’s Advanced
Training School course on Extremist and Terrorist Threats, over 700 law
enforcement personnel from 220 federal and local agencies including the FBI
and CIA have been trained by Israeli police and intelligence commanders. This
year, the ADL brought 15 high-level American police officials to Israel for
instruction from the country’s security apparatus. According to the ADL, over
115 federal, state and local law enforcement executives have undergone
ADL-organized training sessions in Israel since the program began in 2003. “I
can honestly say that the training offered by ADL is by far the most useful
and current training course I have ever attended,” Deputy Commissioner Thomas
Wright of the Philadelphia Police Department commented after
completing an ADL program this year. The ADL’s relationship with the
Washington DC Police Department is so cozy its members are invited to
accompany DC cops on “ride along” patrols.
The ADL claims to have trained
over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law
Enforcement and Society program, which “draws on the history of the
Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased
understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s
website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to
attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training
programs. According to officialFBI recruitment material, “all
new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see
firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”
Fighting
“crimiterror”
Among the most prominent Israeli
government figure to have influenced the practices of American law
enforcement officials is Avi Dichter, a
former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and current member
of Knesset who recently introduced legislation widely criticized
as anti-democratic. During the Second Intifada, Dichter ordered
several bombings on densely populated Palestinian civilian areas, including
one on the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza that resulted in the death of 15
innocent people, including 8 children, and 150 injuries. “After each success,
the only thought is, ‘Okay, who’s next?’” Dichter said of the “targeted”
assassinations he has ordered.
Despite his dubious human rights
record and apparently dim view of democratic values, or perhaps because of
them, Dichter has been a key figure in fostering cooperation between Israeli
security forces and American law enforcement. In 2006, while Dichter was
serving as Israel’s Minister of Public Security, he spoke in Boston,
Massachusetts before the annual convention of the International Association of
Chiefs of Police. Seated beside FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney
General Alberto Gonzalez, Dichter told the 10,000 police officers in the
crowd that there was an “intimate connection between fighting criminals and
fighting terrorists.” Dichter declared that American cops were
actually “fighting crimiterrorists.” The Jerusalem Post reported
that Dichter was “greeted by a hail of applause, as he was hugged by Mueller,
who described Dichter as his mentor in anti-terror tactics.”
A year after Dichter’s speech, he
and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael
Chertoff signed a joint
memorandum pledging security collaboration between America and Israel on
issues ranging from airport security to emergency planning. In 2010, Homeland
Security Secretary Napolitano authorized a new joint memorandum with
Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz shoring up cooperation
between the US Transportation Security Agency – the agency in charge of
day-to-day airport security – and Israel’s Security Department. The recent
joint memorandum also consolidated the presence of US Homeland Security law
enforcement personnel on Israeli soil. “The bond between the United States
and Israel has never been stronger,” Napolitano remarked at a
recent summit of AIPAC, the leading outfit of America’s Israel lobby, in
Scottsdale, Arizona.
The Demographic
Unit
For the New York Police
Department, collaboration with Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus
became a top priority after 9/11. Just months after the attacks on New York
City, the NYPD assigned a permanent, taxpayer-funded liaison officer to
Tel Aviv. Under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, ties between
the NYPD and Israel have deepened by the day. Kelly embarked on
his first trip to Israel in early 2009 to demonstrate his support
for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a one-sided attack that left
over 1400 Gaza residents dead in three weeks and led a United Nations
fact-finding mission to conclude that Israeli military and government
officials had committed war crimes.
Kelly returned to Israel the
following year to speak at the Herziliya Conference, an annual
gathering of neoconservative security and government officials who obsess
over supposed “demographic threats.” After Kelly appeared on stage, the
Herziliya crowd was addressed by the pro-Israel academic Martin Kramer,
who claimed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was helping to reduce
the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” Kramer added, “If a
state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.”
Back in New York, the NYPD set up
a secret “Demographics Unit” designed to spy on and monitor Muslim
communities around the city. The unit was developed with input and intensive
involvement by the CIA, which still refuses to name the former Middle East
station chief it has posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence
division. Since 2002, the NYPD has dispatched undercover agents known as
“rakers” and “mosque crawlers” into Pakistani-American bookstores and
restaurants to gauge community anger over US drone strikes inside Pakistan,
and into Palestinian hookah bars and mosques to search out signs of terror
recruitment and clandestine funding. “If a raker noticed a customer looking
at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could
learn,” the Associated Press reported. “The bookstore, or
even the customer, might get further scrutiny.”
The Israeli imprimatur on the
NYPD’s Demographics Unit is unmistakable. As a former police official told
the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit has attempted to “map
the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli
authorities operate in the West Bank.”
Shop ‘til
you’re stopped
At Israel’s Ben Gurion
International Airport, security personnel target non-Jewish and non-white
passengers, especially Arabs, as a matter of policy. The most routinely
harassed passengers are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who must brace
themselves for five-hour interrogation sessions and strip searches
before flying. Those singled out for extra screening by Shin Bet officers are
sent to what many Palestinians from Israel call the “Arab room,” where they
are subjected to humiliating questioning sessions (former White House Health
and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala encountered
such mistreatment during a visit to Israel last year). Some
Palestinians are forbidden from speaking to anyone until takeoff, and may
be menaced by Israeli flight attendants during the flight. In one
documented case, a six-month-old was awoken for a strip search by Israeli
Shin Bet personnel. Instances of discrimination against Arabs at Ben Gurion
International are too numerous to detail – several incidents occur each day –
but a few of the more egregious instances were outlined in a 2007 petition the
Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed with the country’s Supreme
Court.
Though the Israeli system of
airline security contains dubious benefits and clearly deleterious
implications for civil liberties, it is quietly and rapidly migrating into
major American airports. Security personnel at Boston’s Logan International
Airport have undergone extensive training from Israeli intelligence
personnel, learning to apply profiling and behavioral assessment techniques
against American citizens that were initially tested on Palestinians. The new
procedures began in August, when so-called Behavior Detection Officers
were placed in security queues at Logan’s heavily trafficked
Terminal A. Though the procedures have added to traveler stress while netting
exactly zero terrorists, they are likely to spread to other cities. “I would
like to see a lot more profiling” in American airports, said Yossi Sheffi,
an Israeli-born risk analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Center for Transportation and Logistics.
Israeli techniques now dictate
security procedures at the Mall of America, a gargantuan shopping mall in
Bloomington, Minnesota that has become a major tourist attraction. The new
methods took hold in 2005 when the mall hired a former Israeli army sergeant
named Mike Rozin to lead a special new security unit. Rozin, who once worked
with a canine unit at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, instructed his employees
at the Mall of America to visually profile every shopper, examining their
expressions for suspicious signs. His security team accosts and interrogates an
average of 1200 shoppers a year, according to the Center for Investigative
Reporting.
One of the thousands who fell
into Rozin’s dragnet was Najam Qureshi, a Pakistani-American mall vendor
whose father accidentally left his cell phone on a table in the mall food
court. A day after the incident, FBI agents appeared at Qureshi’s doorstep to
ask if he knew anyone seeking to harm the United States. An army veteran
interrogated for two hours by Rozin’s men for taking video inside the
mall sobbed openly about his experience to reporters. Meanwhile,
another man, Emile Khalil, was visited by FBI agents after mall security
stopped him for taking photographs of the dazzling consumer haven.
“I think that the threat of
terrorism in the United States is going to become an unfortunate part of
American life,” Rozin remarked to
American Jewish World. And as long as the threat persists in the public’s
mind, Israeli securitocrats like Rozin will never have to worry about the
next paycheck.
“Occupy”
meets the occupation
When a riot squad from the New
York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest
encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew
on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. According
to the New York Times, the NYPD deployed “counterterrorism measures” to
mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti. The use of
anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh
police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide
“Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into
unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon.
Given the amount of training the
NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s
military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American
police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how
much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to
suppress the Occupy movement, and how much they will inform police repression
of future examples of street protest. What can be said for certain is that
the Israelification of American law enforcement has intensified police fear
and hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between
protesters, criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just
“crimiterrorists.”
Max Blumenthal is an
award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including
best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day
War, and The Management of Savagery.
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By Caitlin Johnstone. The entire role of
the Democratic Party is to enthusiastically agree with American support
for movements calling for real changes that benefit ordinary people,
while making no actual moves to provide no such changes. The actors read
the lines but remain motionless. Barack Obama made a whole political
career out of this. People elected him because he promised hope and
change, then for eight years whenever hopeful people demanded changes
he’d say “Yes, we all need to get together and have a conversation about
that,” express sympathy and give a moving speech, and then nothing would
happen.-more-
By Nick Turse, Tom Dispatch. If you had
told me that, in the span of a few months, a novel coronavirus that dates
back only to last year and systemic American racism that dates back
to 1619 would somehow intersect, I wouldn’t have believed it.
If you had told me that a man named George Floyd would survive
Covid-19 only to be murdered by the police and that his brutal death
would spark a worldwide movement, leading the council members of a
major American city to announce their intent to defund the police
and Europeans halfway across the planet to deface monuments to a
murderous nineteenth-century monarch who... -more-
By Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. The elites have no
intention of instituting anything more than cosmetic changes. They refuse
to ask the questions that matter because they do not want to hear the
answers. They are systems managers. They use these symbolic gestures to
gaslight the public and leave our failed democracy, from which they and
their corporate benefactors benefit, untouched. The crisis we face is not,
as the ruling elites want us to believe, limited to police violence. It
is a class and generational revolt. It will not be solved with new police
reforms. The problem is an economic and political system that has by
design created a nation of... -more-
By Jessica Buxbaum, Shadowproof. Members of
Congress obtained disaster loans for their businesses through the Small
Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The program
has been embroiled in controversy since it launched in March. Large
corporations received multimillion-dollar loans. Minority-owned
businesses were shut out of aid. Seventy-four members of Congress
own businesses or have relatives or spouses who own businesses. Of this
number, only 14 of them responded to repeated inquiries stating that they
did not apply for federal loans, including those with... -more-
By Tosh Anderson, Josephine Lee, Zishun
Ning, The Indypendent. Will we release some steam for a few days, be satisfied
with the prosecution and (if we’re lucky) conviction of a few
cops, accept a few reforms of a police system that will never
be accountable to anyone else but their maker — the ruling class? Will we
settle for mere survival, be content not to be killed, so that we can
live under the peace of everyday violence and robbery forced upon our
communities, our health, and our lives? Will we hang onto illusions that
equate equal opportunity with being as exploited as a vanishing
group of white, middle-class workers are or as a few... -more-
By Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Dissent Magazine. The clashes
between police and protesters in response to the recent police killings
of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and others throughout the
country expose the violence inherent to the U.S. system of policing.
Social media has been inundated with hundreds of videos chronicling
police aggression and brutality. Cities nationwide, particularly
in the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., have faced
unprecedented militarization of their streets. Police have wielded
weapons typically used only by special forces in overseas military
campaigns, even going as far as to use a... -more-
By Free Capitol Hill, Medium. In credit to the
people who freed Capitol Hill, this list of demands is neither brief nor
simplistic. This is no simple request to end police brutality.
We demand that the City Council and the Mayor, whoever
that may be, implement these policy changes for the cultural and historic
advancement of the City of Seattle, and to ease the struggles of its
people. This document is to represent the black voices who spoke in
victory at the top of 12th & Pine after 9 days of peaceful protest
while under constant nightly attack from the Seattle Police Department.
These are words from that night, June 8th, 2020. -more-
By Jae Hyun Shum, Truthout. In 2018, members
of the Minnesota grassroots groups Reclaim the
Block and Black Visions Collective dropped a banner at
Minneapolis City Hall. On it were two lists: on the left, three budget
items on the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) budget, totaling $9
million. The right side was significantly longer, listing programs and
organizations where the city could invest those $9 million to promote
community safety — like domestic violence programs, housing and harm
reduction. We were calling on the city to move our community’s dollars
out of the violent, untrustworthy MPD, and into programs that
actually keep us... -more-
By Arantxa Tirado, Resumen English. The streets of the
US are burning. Demonstrations by armed Trump supporters pressing for the
opening of the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic have been replaced
by protests for the umpteenth police murder of an African American
citizen, in this case George Floyd. The reaction is reminiscent of the
days of hate and fury that broke out in Los Angeles in 1992 after the
acquittal of the police officers who had beaten Rodney King a year
earlier. Just two examples of the many that could be used, both recent
and old, that demonstrates that American democracy has great difficulties
applying... -more-
By Lucas Johnson, Waging Nonviolence. To the police of
good conscience. What if all this demonstrating was also for you? What if
the pain you are feeling right now — the pain of feeling misunderstood
and mischaracterized — is connected to the same pain expressed by
protesters in the streets of Minneapolis, Atlanta, Louisville and
hundreds of other cities steeped in grief? You understand that suspicion
of theft or fraud doesn’t justify murder and whatever legal battles will
unfold won’t change the morality of that fact. I know the protest chants
and the opinion articles don’t cover it all. It’s a hard job and the
criticism doesn’t always speak to the... -more-
By Greg Huffman, Facing South. It was a Saturday.
The mailman never comes to my door, but there was his knock. A couple
days earlier I had ordered a book on Amazon that I had seen before only
in a library. "Sorry to bother you," he said, "but I had
to have you sign for this one." The return address on the
padded manila envelope was a post office box in Charlotte, North
Carolina. No name. I cut the shipping tape and carefully pulled out the
contents, wrapped inside a grocery bag. The worn 1941 first edition of
Mrs. S.L. Smith's "North Carolina's Confederate Monuments and Memorials"
— one of the only compilations by the United Daughters of... -more-
By Socialist Healthcare Workers, Left
Voice. Over the last few weeks, thousands have spilled
onto the streets, joining Black youth who rose up in response to the
savage murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony
McDade and countless other Black people at the hands of police.
Healthcare workers who are on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic
are taking part, painting protests across the country with green and blue
scrubs, white coats and surgical masks. This condemnation of the police
and systemic racism has been expressed through the lens of health care
with the words, “Police are a threat to public health.” -more-
By People's Movements and
Organizations, Anti-Imperialist Week. We firmly
denounce the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department
and demand full and uncompromising justice for his family. We join the
call and demand for justice of thousands of families across the United
States who have lost someone to police violence. We express our
resounding support to the people of the United States who, throughout
their history, have resisted racism. We stand in solidarity with the
hundreds of thousands who are currently protesting and repudiate the
narratives being shaped by corporate media labeling protestors
“terrorists” and... -more-
By NBC San Diego. On June 19, union
members who work at the Port of San Diego will stop operations for eight
hours in honor of Juneteenth, the anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation being first enforced in Texas. The members of the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union at 29 ports from San Diego to
Washington State will halt work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. On June 19, 1865,
Black slaves in Texas -- the most isolated rebel state in the South during
the Civil War -- were told about their emancipation from slavery two and
a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President
Abraham Lincoln, which was immediately changed... -more-
Defunding the police might
end the armed and uniformed force as we know it, but the ruling class will
then hire mercenaries to protect their wealth and enforce their will.
| more…
The media described the
uprising as a “riot” involved in violence and property destruction but the
movement responded by using videos to show black organizers trying to stop
people, some of whom seemed to be undercover police or white supremacists.
| more…
Following7 items
from Popular resistance.org (6-13-20)
By Theresa Harrington and Ali Tadyon, EdSource. Amid calls to
defund municipal police in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by
Minneapolis police, two Oakland Unified school board members are pushing to
eliminate the district’s police force. This is an acceleration of a
demand that dates back nine years, when activists began calling on
the district to dissolve its police department after a black student was shot
and killed by a district police sergeant. The proposal by board
members Roseann Torres and Shanthi Gonzales says the district would call
on Oakland City Police in emergencies. It has the support of the teachers’
union. -more-
By War Resisters International. In response to the
murder of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis police department on 25th
May, thousands of people across the United States joined protests demanding
justice for his killing, radical reform of police forces, and driving home the
message that Black Lives Matter. Many of these protests face militarised police
responses, including the use of rubber bullets, sting balls, stun grenades,
battons, police charges, and chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray.
Twitter users have photographed a large number of canisters that were fired
during the protest. -more-
By Jon Stone, Independent. The Scottish Parliament
has called for the immediate suspension of exports of riot gear, tear gas and
rubber bullets to the United States, in light of the police response to the
ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. A successful motion, which was
backed by 52 votes to 0 with 11 abstentions, says the parliament "stands
in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and considers that the UK
government must immediately suspend all export licences for tear gas, rubber
bullets and riot gear to the US". Patrick Harvie, the Green MSP who
proposed the successful amendment, said the "weapons of oppression",
which the... -more-
By Jeremy Varon, Witness Against Torture. Martin
Gugino worked together in Witness Against Torture for years, a close-knit group
dedicated to closing the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo and opposing torture.
Our community is beside itself. None of us is surprised that it was Martin
meeting the police line in a posture of non-violence. Martin is gentle,
principled, and undaunted. Allied with the Catholic Worker tradition, he is
also deeply committed to a tapestry of causes, from fair housing to immigrant
rights. Guiding his activism is belief in the sacred power of non-violent
resistance to injustice. If that makes him an “agitator,” as Buffalo’s... -more-
By Evan Bush, Seattle Times. Welcome
to the CHAZ, the newly named Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where most
everything was free Tuesday. Free snacks at the No-Cop Co-op. Free gas masks
from some guy’s sedan. Free speech at the speaker’s circle, where anyone could
say their piece. A free documentary movie — Ava DuVernay’s “13th” —
showing after dark. A Free Capitol Hill, according to no shortage of spray
paint on building facades. And perhaps most important to demonstrators, the
neighborhood core was free of uniformed police. A new protest society —
centered on a handful of blocks in Seattle’s quirky, lefty... -more-
By It's Going Down. The
other day, the police announced that they were gathering their things and
leaving their precinct. What do you make of this? This, to be very
honest, is anyone’s guess. There are many theories around why they abandoned
the precinct. Some feel that they ran out of resources, some feel that it was a
politically expedient move on the Mayor’s part. From my perspective-this was a
“good” move on the city’s part. They were getting hammered in the press for the
nightly tear gas barrages and street clashes, and the crowds never really got
smaller. When an active shooter was on the scene, people rushed to
the... -more-
By Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone. The
Israelification of America’s security apparatus recently unleashed in full
force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level
of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon
has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that
typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the
problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights
abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And
collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the
iceberg. -more-
As an
independent media source free of advertising, we rely on your support.
It takes but a few minutes for the ruling
elite to recast collective calls for an end to state violence against black
people into images of the criminality of black protesters and to call for an
end to looting. | more…
As the George Floyd protests against police
violence erupted around the nation, a massive amount of evidence of police
brutality was widely captured through social media. Unfortunately, very little
of it made it to mainstream outlets until much later. | more…
Reform efforts will fail. Only a power shift
to communities can improve public safety. | more…
“A Tank By Any
Other Name.”By Seth Kershner,
In These Times, Oct. 2016.
The Pentagon is
giving cops as much military gear as ever.
Israel
and U.S. Police Training
Joyce
Hale
11:04
AM (4 hours ago)
to John, Scott, Haley, E, me, Fran, Denise, David, Nicole, Greg, Mark
I
thought you would be interested in this. It is amazing how many
demonstrations there are around the world supporting U.S. protesters demanding
police reforms after George Floyd's killing while no massive U.S. protests
demand help for the Palestinians.
Be
sure to note the Arkansas connection. While it may be small, it may be an
indicator of one thing that needs to change.
"Law
enforcement from other U.S. states have participated in the program,
including those from Tennessee, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Floria, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina,
Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Michigan, New
Jersey, New York, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wahsington,
D.C., and West Virginia.
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Popular Resistance.org
(6-9-20).The United States is in the
midst of a mass uprising against police violence, but also a whole list of
grievances such as the lack of jobs, health care, education and more. Sustained
protests have been going on for two weeks defying curfews and severe repression
by police. The national guard has been deployed to 23 states and President
Trump threatened to deploy the military against people expressing their First Amendment
rights. We speak with Danny Sjursen, a retired Major and spokesperson for About
Face: Veterans Against the War, about how members of the military are... -more-
As protests rage across America against
police brutality and systemic racism, Akunna Eneh, an activist from Boston,
argues that the movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd has exposed the true face of American society.
| more…
This weekend, hundreds of thousands of
workers and youth will protest the police murder of George Floyd, not only in
the United States, but in Australia, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium,
Spain, Hungary, Brazil, South Korea and many other countries. | more…
WE ARE WITNESSING a truly
unprecedented attack on press freedom in the United States, with journalists
are being systematically targeted while covering the nationwide protests
over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. | more…
Across the country—in city
after city—the people have erupted in righteous indignation to George
Floyd’s recorded lynching. His extrajudicial murder set off a rebellion
that had been primed by the highly publicized white-vigilante murder of
Ahmaud Arbery and the botched, “no-knock” police raid that killed Breonna
Taylor in her bed. | more…
THE WHITE HOUSE engaged in an
extraordinary act of rumor-mongering on Wednesday, releasing a compilation
of viral video clips posted on social media recently by people who
believed, wrongly, that the piles of bricks they came across had been
planted there by anti-fascist activists, known as Antifa, to inspire
violence at protests. | more…
More than 50 years ago (on 14 April 1967),
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of his famous speeches, on “The Other
America,” at Stanford University.* King patiently explained to the audience of
students and faculty members that, while in his view “riots are socially
destructive and self-defeating,” they are “in the final analysis. . […]
| more…
Posse Comitatus Act Google Search 6-4-20
The Posse Comitatus Act outlaws the willful use of any part of
the Army or Air Force to execute the law
unless expressly authorized by the Constitution or an act of Congress. ...
Questions concerning the act's application arise most often in the context of
assistance to civilian police.Nov 6, 2018
The Posse Comitatus Act is a
United States federal law signed on June 18, 1878, by President ... The act
specifically applies only to the United States Army and,
as amended in 1956, the United States Air Force. ...
pursuant of any state's role of exercising police power
and maintaining law and order, whether part of a wider ...
Military aid
to the civil power (MACP) is the use of the armed
forces in support of the civil ... State or territory
civilian police have primary responsibility for law and order. ... The
Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878, generally prohibits Federal military personnel
(except the United States Coast Guard) and units
of the United ...
Dec 6, 2019 - No 'blue
wall of silence:' A military lawyer explains why
the US ... Yet both soldiers and police officers
put their lives on the line for their team every day. ... order to do so was
obviously illegal and should have been reported.
2 days ago - ... ready
to deploy the military to enforce order inside the
United States. ... allows a president to deploy the US
military to suppress civil disorder.
Mar 17, 2020 - This
analysis addresses the distinctive roles of U.S. federal military forces
and ... passed in 1878 in response to reconstruction of the South, forbade ...
the National Guard in this way because soldiers make
bad police officers.
Oct 26, 2016 - The use
of the active duty military in a law enforcement
role is not unconstitutional but it is prohibited by
the posse comitatus act. 18 U.S.C. ...
Dec 6, 2019 - No
"blue wall of silence:" A military lawyer
explains why the US armed ... order to do so was obviously illegal and
should have been reported.
Sep 23, 2019 - Although
the PCA prohibits only the Army and Air Force as
from performing domestic law enforcement activities, another statute, 10 USC
Section ...
Aug 16, 2012 - whenever
the laws of the United States shall be opposed, or the
... by declaring martial law and forbidding any Armed
Forces from entering the territory. It was not ... Eleven hundred
troops (mostly military police) and 80 federal ...
By Colleen Grablick, Jason Fenston and Natalie
Delgadillo, DCist. Nearly two hours after the 7 p.m. curfew went
into effect on Sunday night, dozens of people were corralled by police in a
one-way block — Swann Street NW, between 14th and 15th — as they made their way
north from downtown. As officers closed in on the group, they began setting off
what appeared to be pepper spray and flash bangs, sending the
crowd running. “I heard ‘bang bang’ and a lot of thumping and pepper spray
everywhere, my eyes started burning, people screaming, and a human tsunami
coming down the street, of piles on top of people,” says... -more-
By Chris Walker, Truthout. As President
Donald Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act to use aspects
of the U.S. military against Americans involved in the demonstrations in
response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week,
polling so far shows that most people are not happy with how he has handled the
situation. Indeed, the data demonstrates that a majority of Americans
appear to be in support of the protests in general. A Morning Consult poll
conducted on May 31 and June 1 — several days after demonstrations began in
protest over Floyd’s killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer who
held a knee... -more-
As an independent media source free of
advertising, we rely on your support.
By Timothy Karr, Free Press. The weekend saw
escalating police violence against protesters and reporters at nationwide
demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd and systemic racial
injustices. There has been an unprecedented number of attacks against journalists
at many of these protests as law-enforcement officers have specifically
targeted those engaged in First-Amendment protected newsgathering and
reporting. This mirrors the ways police are targeting those engaged in
First-Amendment protected protest. President Trump has egged on the police
crackdown in a series of recent tweets, including one that labels news
outlets... -more-
By The Collective, Anarchist News. We’ve reached a breaking
point. The murders of George Floyd—and Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade,
and the other Black people whose lives were ended by police just this month—are
only the latest in a centuries-long string of tragedies. But in
the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the state is openly
treating Black communities as a surplus population to be culled by the virus,
the arrogance and senselessness of the murder carried out by Officer Derek
Chauvin crossed a line. Supported by hundreds of thousands across the US and beyond,
the people of Minneapolis have made it clear that... -more-
By Phillip M. Bailey and Darcy Costello, Louisville
Courier Journal. Louisville, KY - David McAtee, who turned his talent for
food into a popular West End eatery, was shot and killed by law
enforcement officers early Monday morning, an incident that's now
under state, local and federal investigation. McAtee, the owner of YaYa's
BBQ in western Louisville, was known as a "community
pillar," said his mother, Odessa Riley. "He left a great legend
behind. He was a good person. Everybody around him would say that," she
said. "My son didn't hurt nobody. He didn't do nothing to nobody."
. -more-
By Jon Queally, Commondreams. Jamil Dakwar, director
of the ACLU's Human Rights Project, denounced both the nature and the timing of
the assault on the unsuspecting demonstrators, given that it happened just as
Trump delivered a speech from the Rose Garden in which he threatened tougher
police tactics—including use of U.S. military forces—to quell protests in cities
nationwide. "This appears to be grossly unjustified use of a dangerous
chemical weapon on protesters and raises serious human rights concerns under
international law," Dakwar said of what transpired in Lafayette
Square. -more-
By Shannon Osaka, Grist. Already stressed by the
threat of coronavirus and widespread unemployment, the United States has
erupted into protests after the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black
man, by a Minneapolis police officer. Now, prominent groups in the
environmental movement — which has long struggled with a dark, racist past —
are speaking out against institutional prejudice and calling for the movement
to better prioritize social justice. “For too long conservation and
environmental movements have not spoken up to address the long-standing
challenges that non-white communities face,” Fred Krupp, the president
of... -more-
By Lee Camp, Consortium News. With all the protests
and anger and violence across the country, a justified discussion about
policing has begun on our corporate media airwaves. (I would say the discussion
is overdue, but in fact we’ve had it roughly every three years for the past 40
years.) However, despite all the coverage, a deeper debate sits ignored – A
debate about why our American police system exists at all, how it works (or
doesn’t), and where it came from. The following 19 facts about American
policing will change everything you think you know. First let’s start with the
sheer amount of murder. -more-
By Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, Nation of Change. There’s no greater
frustration than working every day to build and inspire others to build a more
just, compassionate world, only to be so brutally reminded of how far away that
world is, as we are bombarded by videos of an atrocity such as the police killing
of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. Witnessing someone being killed is
terrorizing. I am experiencing episodes of terror after seeing the life leave
Floyd’s handcuffed body under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek
Chauvin, while two officers held down Floyd, and another stood idly by. That
image will stay with me for a long time, just as... -more-
By James LaPorta and Robert Burns, Associated
Press. The Pentagon said Saturday it was ready to provide
military help to authorities scrambling to contain unrest in Minneapolis, where
George Floyd’s death has sparked widespread protests, but Gov. Tim Walz has not
requested federal troops. Jonathan Rath Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesman,
said several military units have been placed on higher alert “as a prudent
planning measure” in case Walz asks for help. The Associated Press first
reported on the potential deployments and, citing sources with direct knowledge
of the orders, named four locations from which soldiers... -more-
By Joshua Frank, Counterpunch. The
looting of stores is inherently a class issue, whether you look upon it
favorably or not (there are always exceptions of course). The act of looting is
a long-standing American tradition, dating back to the theft of Native lands
and African enslavement. And today, while wealthy people don’t loot strip
malls, they are adept at looting natural resources and labor, from the
coalfields of West Virginia to Jeff Bezo’s Amazon warehouses. The poor,
exerting their nominal power—even in a destructive and violent manner—display
an entirely natural reaction to a continually powerless state of
being. -more-
The Torture Machine, Racism and Police
Violence in Chicago, by People’s Law Office and longtime National Lawyers
Guild attorney Flint Taylor, is a meticulously detailed and authentic,
truly appalling story of shame and disgrace to the city of Chicago, its
political and police administration establishments, and numerous judges of
the Cook County criminal courts; an […]
Bruce
Western.Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison.Russell Sage, 2018.About the 600,000 released each year, what
they face, what changes are needed.
David
Correia and Tyler Wall.Police: A Field Guide.Verso,
2018.Radical glossary.
A vital and influential
exploration of the rapid militarization of the police in the United States.Do Not Resist puts viewers in the center of the action — from inside a
police training seminar that teaches the importance of.
Chris
Finley and daughter Caitlyn Finley reminisce outside the house where his son
and her brother, Christopher Grant Finley, 31, died in 2015 after being shot by
a Jonesboro police officer. About 25 percent of people shot by police in
Arkansas in the past six years, including Grant Finley, struggled with mental
illness, an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette investigation shows.
Police in Arkansas shot at least 135 people in the past six
years. Sixty-seven died.
During
the same period, at least three Arkansas police officers were fatally shot by
assailants, and 31 reported being shot at when they wounded or killed someone,
according to research by theArkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Those
numbers come from theDemocrat-Gazette'sefforts to count all deadly-force
encounters -- fatal or not -- between the public and law enforcement from
2011-16.
The newspaper built a database from public records and media
reports because reliable, official statistics on police shootings are hard to
come by.
The lack of official numbers makes it difficult for police to do
their jobs, and breeds mistrust and suspicion among the public, say social
scientists, political leaders and law enforcement officials.
And while few deadly police encounters in Arkansas resulted in
the protests or public outrage seen elsewhere, that doesn't mean it couldn't
happen, Little Rock Police Chief Kenton Buckner said.
"Have you ever heard of Falcon Heights?" Buckner
asked, referring to the Minnesota town where a police officer killed school
lunchroom worker Philando Castile in July.
"You'd never heard of it, had you?" the chief said.
"So, if it can happen in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, it can happen in
Little Rock, Arkansas."
TheDemocrat-Gazettedeveloped this series of articles by
analyzing thousands of pages of documents obtained through dozens of public
records requests. The newspaper also used media reports to fill in gaps in the
official records.
Among the newspaper's findings:
• Black men make up 7.5 percent of the state's population. They
accounted for more than 39 percent of people police killed or wounded from 2011
to 2016.
• A quarter of all victims of officer-involved shootings -- at
least 35 cases -- struggled with mental disorders. Officers in those encounters
often had failed to complete training that would help them interact with the
mentally ill.
• Police investigations into deadly-force encounters often
lacked impartial oversight and rarely resulted in actions against the officers
who fired their weapons.
• The people killed by police included one woman. The rest were
men -- black, white and Hispanic, armed and unarmed, ranging in age from 15 to
107.
• Last year, Arkansas police used deadly force 33 times -- a 68
percent increase from the six-year average.
• So far this year, five people have been shot by police, two
fatally.
Incomplete or imprecise record-keeping by certain law
enforcement agencies and prosecutors means some lethal-force incidents may have
been overlooked.
Most prosecutors said they didn't have indexes on deadly-force
investigative files and could furnish only the files that they remembered
handling.
First Judicial District Prosecuting Attorney Fletcher Long
refused to dig up the files the newspaper requested under the state Freedom of
Information Act. The 1st Judicial District covers Cross, Woodruff, St. Francis,
Monroe, Lee and Phillips counties.
"I would have to go through each and every file maintained
in my office to see if they had anything to do with the use of police
force," Long emailed in response to the newspaper's request. "I
decline to do this."
Andy Riner, 18th-West Judicial District prosecutor, didn't
release deadly-force case files when the newspaper first requested them in
July; he said he considered them homicide investigations with no statutes of
limitation.
"If additional information were to be obtained in these
matters, we may reopen the investigative process," Riner said in a letter.
The state public records law exempts details of active
investigations from disclosure.
Months later, Riner released some of his files after the
newspaper questioned his interpretation of the law. He said he was still
searching for other records, which weren't provided before publication of this
series. Riner's district covers Polk and Montgomery counties.
Eight of the state's remaining 26 elected prosecutors provided
only one- or two-page cover letters rather than complete case files.
Information
shortage
Like Arkansas, other states and the federal government fail to
effectively track lethal-force cases, making any comparison difficult.
For now,
the most complete public data on police shootings have been compiled by media
outlets. The British newspaperThe GuardianandThe Washington Postbegan compiling comprehensive lists of
people killed by police in 2015.
A 2015
investigation by thePost and Courier, a
Charleston, S.C.-based newspaper, found that South Carolina police engaged in
deadly force 235 times over a 77-month period -- roughly one occurrence every
10 days.
TheDemocrat-Gazetteexamined a 72-month period and found
135 cases, almost one every two weeks.
Adjusted for population, police in both states used lethal force
at almost identical rates.
The FBI claims to track police-caused deaths and serves as a
clearinghouse for crime statistics from all 50 states.
But at a crime summit in September, even FBI Director James
Comey admitted the agency's collection methods are flawed and described the
lack of data on police-involved shootings as "embarrassing" and
"ridiculous."
The FBI's
statistics, for example, showed that Arkansas law enforcement officers have
killed two people since 2011. TheDemocrat-Gazette'sdata show that police in the state
killed twice that many people in December alone.
Under former President Barack Obama's administration, the
Department of Justice began to "re-design" how it tallies
police-caused deaths by scouring media reports before inquiring with individual
police departments and coroner's offices for verification and additional
details.
In December, the Justice Department released a preliminary
report of the redesign -- which counted shootings between 2015 and 2016 -- and
estimated that FBI statistics covered only about half of the actual deaths.
That
report matched theDemocrat-Gazette'scount of one officer-involved shooting
death in the state from June 1 to Aug. 31, 2015, but it didn't include four
other nonfatal shootings by Arkansas police.
'They're
humans'
Local police agencies often track use of force within their
departments to steer training and policy, but some officials say the absence of
large-scale data is problematic.
"I think every modern police agency recognizes the vital
importance of transparency," said Hope Police Chief J.R. Wilson, immediate
past president of the Arkansas Association of Chiefs of Police.
"Scrutiny does make policing better. Scrutiny ensures that
justice remains fair and equitable for all in a dynamic and imperfect
environment.
"But, we must be careful," he said. "A vigilante
or politically expedient approach to perceived injustice without reasonable
understanding of the facts of an incident is unreasonable, unconscionable and
not acceptable."
Many officers say that the heightened scrutiny they face has
made their jobs harder.
In a nationwide survey released in January, police reported that
the attention surrounding high-profile fatal shootings increased tensions
between police and blacks, and made officers less willing to stop and question
suspicious people.
The findings of the Pew Research Center survey included
attitudes and experiences drawn from almost 8,000 police officers belonging to
departments of 100 or more officers.
The report shows that police and the public disagree over the
causes of police shootings and that police don't always agree with each other
on that issue.
Sixty-seven percent of officers surveyed described the killing
of black Americans in police encounters as "isolated incidents,"
while 60 percent of the public reported that these shootings were "signs
of a broader problem."
The survey also noted differences in the views of black and
white police: 92 percent of white officers said the country has already made
the changes "needed to give blacks equal rights," while 69 percent of
black officers said more needed to be done to ensure that blacks are afforded
"equal rights with whites."
A large majority of officers surveyed also said they thought the
public "doesn't understand the risks [police] face."
In many
of the cases reviewed by theDemocrat-Gazette,police had just seconds to weigh
life-or-death decisions.
Since 2011, three officers in the state have been shot dead, two
officers were killed in vehicular assaults, and two prison guards were killed
by inmates.
"Officers are operating in an environment now that they
didn't used to operate when I was just starting," said 23rd Judicial
District prosecutor Chuck Graham.
"Officers have been shot for no other reason than they were
a police officer. How do they operate in that? They're humans."
Graham was president of the Arkansas Prosecuting Attorneys
Association last year and has decades of law enforcement experience with the
U.S. Air Force.
"You're not the one that has a gun pointed at you," he
said. "You're not the one that's having to make a decision like
that."
Arkansas prosecutors charged police with crimes in only two of
the 135 cases the newspaper reviewed, but neither officer was convicted at
trial.
Prosecutors across the United States have struggled to
successfully try cases against police officers -- a trend law experts attribute
to juries' predisposed leniency toward police.
Overall, 2016 was different for prosecutors than previous years.
Nationally, at least four officers were convicted by state-court
juries for on-duty shootings as compared with 2014 and 2015, when no officers
in the United States were found guilty on murder charges, according to Philip
Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in
Ohio.
Stinson worked for police departments in Virginia and New
Hampshire before earning advanced degrees in law and criminology. In 2005, he
started collecting data on police shootings -- which are frequently cited by
researchers and media outlets -- by sifting through media reports, court
records and videos.
Thirteen officers were convicted of murder or manslaughter for
deadly on-duty shootings between 2005 and 2015, Stinson's research shows.
This does not include cases in which officers faced lesser
charges.
In cases
reviewed by theDemocrat-Gazette, local
police officers involved in shootings generally were granted special
concessions, such as extra time to prepare their statements to investigators.
Often, the officers who fired their weapons were questioned by
their colleagues -- a potential conflict of interest, say survivors and legal
experts.
These practices have created a feeling of helplessness in
victims' families -- families like the Finleys.
'The
last thing'
As he stands in a cold October drizzle, Chris Finley recounts
the worst night of his life -- the night his son Grant died at the hands of a
Jonesboro cop.
Finley slowly turns a brass shell casing between thumb and
forefinger, and points to the spot where his 31-year-old son took his final
breath.
The night Grant Finley died, his father cleaned up the pool of
his son's blood left behind by crime scene investigators -- and found the
.40-caliber shell casing now wheeling in his hand.
"This didn't have to happen," Chris Finley says.
Grant Finley was typical of mentally ill individuals whose
interactions with police led to injury or death from officers who had little or
no training in calming agitated, confused people.
His family knows he wasn't perfect. His schizophrenia, and use
of legal and illegal drugs to deal with his troubles led to several run-ins
with police.
And while his father and sister acknowledge that he shouldn't
have brandished a machete the night he was killed, they also say the officer
shouldn't have shot him. The officer was not charged.
The Finleys and other victims' families feel the system intended
to protect them has done the opposite.
"I feel like the last thing you want to do is call the
police for help," said Caitlyn Finley, Grant's sister.
"I don't want to deal with them unless I have to, and
that's sad. They should be the first person you want to call if you're in
trouble."
Some families seek justice through the federal courts.
Thirteen
separate federal lawsuits have been filed so far involving the cases reviewed
by theDemocrat-Gazette. More than
a million dollars in settlements have gone to some families, court records
show.
'A
lot of anecdotes'
Some Arkansas lawmakers are pushing changes this year to alter
the way police shootings are tracked.
Their intent is to give lawmakers and police the information
needed to have an "educated discussion."
Rep. Vivian Flowers, D-Pine Bluff, filed a shell bill last week
"to establish a uniform standard for data collection among law enforcement
agencies." In a phone interview, she said that would encompass
officer-involved shootings. She added that she is working with the Commission
on Law Enforcement Standards and Training to sort out how to effectively record
the data.
Some lawmakers, though, worry that their colleagues will be
hesitant to support a bill that receives push-back from the law enforcement
community.
"When we talk about tracking this, we start moving into
corners right away," said Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock.
"Officers feel accused, but it's not accusatory at all. We
have a lot of anecdotes. But if we had data, that would tell us if those
anecdotes are trends," she said.
Elliott filed a shell bill in the 2015 legislative session that
called for creating a statewide "citizen's review board on policing
practices" aimed at promoting "positive relationships" between
law enforcement and communities, and providing for fair and transparent police
practices. The bill did not contain any details and wasn't pushed further.
Legislatures in eight other states have passed laws requiring
the collection of data on police use of deadly force. But most of those laws are
new and haven't been as effective as intended, according to studies and news
reports.
The central problem is that police agencies often fail to report
use-of-force encounters and aren't penalized, according to officials in those
states.
In Texas, for example, a public database debuted this year, but
it was missing several notable instances of use of force. State officials have
said it will take time for all agencies in the state to grow accustomed to
reporting fatal force encounters.
In Maine, the state's attorney general reviews all deadly force
investigations and posts the reviews online. But there is no collective data
set that would identify trends, which could then be addressed through policy.
As for Arkansas, James Golden, a criminal justice professor at
the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, believes more data would be helpful,
but he doubts steps will be taken to collect that information anytime soon.
"More data is always good," said Golden, a former
Jonesboro police officer. "However, nobody is ever willing to pony up the
money."
A
final embrace
At 9 p.m., April 4, 2015, Jonesboro police confronted Grant
Finley about an earlier altercation with a woman at his home, but he refused to
answer the door.
Chris Finley persuaded officers to allow him to take his son to
the police station early the next morning. The officers agreed and left 30
minutes later.
Or so the Finleys thought.
At 10:50 p.m. Chris Finley wrapped his son in a tight hug and
whispered good night, unaware it would be their final embrace.
Meanwhile, officer Heath Loggains waited behind bushes across
the street. Through the leaves, he saw Chris and Chris' daughter drive away in
a white pickup.
Loggains later told investigators that he and several other
officers took it upon themselves to stake out Grant Finley's home, believing he
would hurt others or himself.
Loggains' statements to detectives tell what happened next:
About
11:40 p.m., Grant Finley stepped onto his front yard, in socks and camouflage
pants. A machete sheath hung from his belt.
Loggains
jumped from behind the bushes, barking commands.
Grant
retreated into his tiny home and shut the metal door.
The
officer kicked the door several times trying to get inside.
The door
jamb abruptly gave way. The two men pushed against the door from opposing
sides.
Losing
ground to Loggains, Grant swung the blunt end of the machete through the space
between the jamb and the door.
Loggains
stepped back and unholstered his gun.
Fourteen
bullets punched through the thin metal door.
For two hours, police reports show, a tactical team waited
outside, unsure of whether it was safe to enter. Finally, they pushed a pole
camera through the front window of the small home.
The camera screen showed Grant, with streaks of blood staining
his chest, slumped against the door, dead.
SundayMonday
on 03/12/2017
Print Headline: Deadly-force data lacking; Shootings by police
deserve study, officials say
DEADLY FORCE: In 6 years, 53 blacks shot by police in
Arkansas
Roseetta
Robinson cries at her Memphis home as she describes the death of her father,
Cletis Wayne Williams, who was shot by a white Jonesboro police officer on
Halloween 2011.
JONESBORO — Roseetta Robinson wept alone on Halloween 2011 after
a policeman killed her father.
There were no protests, no riots, no public calls for
accountability. No activists or TV cameras showed up in Jonesboro.
Her father, Cletis Williams, was black. Former Jonesboro
patrolman Nick Holley is white.
Williams, 57, didn’t have a gun, and he was inside his home.
“If it were to happen now, it probably would have gotten more
attention,” Robinson said, noting the added media coverage of police shootings
in recent years.
Williams
was one of 53 Arkansas black men killed or wounded by police in the past six
years, an ArkansasDemocrat-Gazetteinvestigation found.
Seventeen of them, like Williams, were unarmed.
Black men accounted for 73.9 percent of the unarmed suspects
shot by police in the years studied by the newspaper. They make up 7.5 percent
of the state’s population.
By comparison, police shot five unarmed white men and one
Hispanic man from 2011 through last year. White men make up about 37.9 percent
of Arkansas’ population; they accounted for 21.7 percent of all unarmed victims
shot by police.
Not every
police-shooting case reviewed by theDemocrat-Gazetteinvolved a white officer shooting an
unarmed black man. In a handful of cases, the officers were black.
And in most cases, regardless of the participants’ race, the
person shot by police was armed.
Arkansas
has not seen the level of outrage and protest that police killings of unarmed
black men sparked elsewhere in recent years, but the tension between police and
people of color exists here, theDemocrat-Gazette’sresearch shows.
It’s nothing new, said state Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock.
“Everyone is seeing it now because there are cameras
everywhere,” she said.
“Black people aren’t surprised because they’ve experienced it
for years. It’s taken cameras to validate what we’ve been saying” about police
treatment of blacks.
Criminal justice experts caution against drawing sweeping
conclusions about race and police shootings from raw statistics.
The outsize share of black men who have been shot by police is
disturbing, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s entirely police
officers’ fault, those researchers say.
Joseph Rukus, a criminology professor at Arkansas State
University, said there’s a disproportionate number of blacks caught up in the
criminal justice system.
“What this highlights is it’s an overall problem,” Rukus said.
“It doesn’t show racial bias on police per se, but racial bias in the criminal
justice system as a whole.”
Civil rights leaders agree with Rukus that blacks are
systemically overrepresented, but they aren’t as quick to shift blame away from
law enforcement, pointing out that police in Arkansas are far more likely to
shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man.
Does that mean police perceive a greater threat when dealing
with black suspects?
“That’s a good ground of inquiry,” said Rukus, who conducted
research in Ferguson, Mo., last summer. “We have to take it in the context of
the neighborhood where it occurred. Is it cause for concern? Yes.”
BEHAVIOR
IS TARGET
Law enforcement officials largely dismiss the idea that implicit
bias is widespread within their ranks. Instead, they cite high crime rates in
areas with predominantly black populations.
Some officers are “bad apples,” or as Little Rock Police Chief
Kenton Buckner put it, there are “some that I wouldn’t want making a run to my
mother’s house.”
But most cops are fundamentally good guys who want to do the
right thing, he said.
Shuffling through a stack of spreadsheets scattered on his desk,
Buckner, who is black, recites his department’s arrest statistics — about 70
percent of arrestees are black.
Therefore, he reasons, the majority of suspects shot by Little
Rock officers would be black.
The newspaper’s findings bear that out: 78.6 percent of those
killed or wounded by Little Rock officers since 2011 were black — the highest
rate of any department in Arkansas when adjusted for population.
Buckner said the “socioeconomic cocktail” of single-parent homes,
substance abuse, mental illness and lack of education plagues the city’s black
youths.
“That’s uncomfortable for people to hear, but it’s a fact,” he
said. “The truth is the truth. And in no way, shape or form would anyone be
able to say to you that we are targeting African-Americans because of their
race or skin color.
“We target people because of their behavior.”
POLICE
CULTURE
Buckner may be right, said Cody T. Ross, a University of
California-Davis researcher who has studied police shootings across the nation.
His research has flagged Pulaski County and seven other U.S.
counties where “racial bias in shooting rates is strongest.”
The other counties were Miami-Dade County, Florida; Cook County,
Illinois; Los Angeles County, California; Orleans Parish, Louisiana; Harris
County, Texas; Baltimore County, Maryland; and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
Police departments in those counties, including Pulaski, “may
benefit from [a] review” to determine whether arrest and shooting numbers are a
result of racial bias or higher criminal activity among black residents, Ross
said.
Matthew DeGarmo, a criminal justice professor at ASU, said crime
rates may be higher in Arkansas’ black communities because of a history of
systemic racism in the state.
Black families, he said, were isolated into segregated
neighborhoods. Those communities became impoverished after jobs moved away,
which sowed seeds for increased criminal activity.
“In many places, officers know that African-Americans commit
more crime, so when an officer sees a black suspect, that can affect their
actions,” he added.
Such a notion frustrates Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell
Griffen, who instead sees a police culture that allows “incompetent” officers
on the streets.
“Why would people who profess to be trained in subduing unarmed
people using less than lethal force be killing so many unarmed people and
disproportionately doing so when that person is black and male?” he asked.
For example, Carleton Wallace, who was black, was killed by a
barely trained officer on Sept. 8, 2012, in Alexander, records show.
Officer Nancy Cummings told detectives she accidentally shot the
unarmed 30-year-old in the back while arresting him.
Cummings had worked for the Alexander Police Department for
seven months, but had not attended the police academy. Her only firearms
training had been target practice, according to trial testimony.
Cummings was charged with manslaughter. A jury acquitted her.
Wallace’s family has a civil suit pending against Cummings and
the city of Alexander in federal court.
Allowing untrained cops to patrol the streets leads to
preventable police shootings, said Griffen, who is often outspoken on civil
rights issues.
“That’s a charitable conclusion,” Griffen said. “The damning
conclusion is there is a culture in policing that intends to kill people — two
out of three of which are black males — who aren’t a lethal threat.”
‘YOU
SHOT ME’
In retrospect, the paths that led officer Nick Holley and Cletis
Williams to a confrontation on Oct. 31, 2011, seem clear.
From 2010-12, Holley used excessive force 14 times when
arresting suspects, four times more than the average Jonesboro cop, according
to federal court records. Of all of the Jonesboro officers, Holley was the only
one to resort to force more than 10 times, court records show.
Jonesboro’s population is 18 percent black. Holley patrolled in
a predominantly black neighborhood of the city, and 10 of the 14 suspects he
used force to arrest were black.
Williams, an Army veteran, started having problems with the law
in Jonesboro in 2009 after he was ticketed for excessive noise.
On Oct. 10, 2009, an officer stopped him while he walked along
the street and arrested him on a warrant for failing to appear in court on the
noise citation.
After that, the warrants began to snowball, Craighead County
District Court Clerk Joe Monroe said.
Police stopped Williams every few months for the next two years
for infractions like riding his bicycle without a light or driving with a
broken tail light.
His daughter believes those minor violations were simply excuses
to stop a black man.
When Holley saw Williams riding his bike home that Halloween day
in 2011, Williams was named in 16 bench warrants for failure to pay fines and
seven for failure to complete public service — all misdemeanors.
He was also due in federal court the next day for a hearing in a
pending lawsuit that he had filed against guards at the Craighead County jail
for excessive use of force.
So when Holley knocked on Williams’ front door, Williams asked
the officer to issue him a citation commanding him to appear in court, instead
of arresting him.
When Williams reached out the door to show Holley some papers
indicating that he had a federal court hearing in the next few days, the
officer grabbed his arm.
A struggle ensued, Holley said. Williams dragged him into the
mobile home, he said.
Holley said he tried to subdue Williams with a Taser. It didn’t
work, and Williams ripped the device away, the officer told investigators.
Williams then jammed the Taser into Holley’s shoulder, he told
detectives. They never found any burn marks from the Taser on Holley’s uniform
or his skin, investigative reports say.
Holley said he fell on his back with Williams on top of him.
“That’s when he said, ‘You shot me,’” Holley said in his police
interview.
The struggle continued, Holley said, and he fired several more
times, striking Williams in both arms and five times in the chest.
“I was scared,” said Holley, whose actions were ruled as
justified.
FADING
SUNSHINE
Roseetta Robinson, 34, moved to Memphis after her father’s
death.
Jonesboro didn’t feel like a place to raise black children
anymore, and those drives past the empty lot where her father’s mobile home
once stood never got easier, she said.
In October, four of her six children, sat across from her in a
dimly lit living room in Memphis as she told the story of what happened to
their grandfather five years earlier.
Hearing police sirens on Jonesboro’s Warren Street, Robinson had
stepped out her front door and peered through binoculars several blocks to
south.
Through the fading sunshine, she could see Jonesboro police cars
lined up along the road near her father’s house.
But she didn’t think much of it and returned inside.
That’s when she noticed a TV breaking news alert that someone
had been shot.
She grabbed her keys and drove down the street, more curious
than concerned.
Her dad’s mobile home was surrounded by crimescene tape.
“They killed your dad,” a neighbor said.
Robinson had planned to take her kids trick-or-treating that
night.
Instead, she sat sobbing on the pavement surrounded by police.
Her children learned to hate Halloween that day, she said.
‘NOT
THE FIX-ALL’
After a series of high-profile shootings across the country
since 2015, police departments everywhere have put more emphasis on socalled
community policing.
In the past month, for example, Fayetteville police donated
coats to needy children.
In Little Rock, officers talked with residents over coffee.
In Jonesboro, cops threw a block party in one of the city’s
high-crime neighborhoods.
Photos from those events are scattered among the mugshots of
wanted suspects on the departments’ social media pages.
Those may be great events, but they don’t fix the problem that
exists between police and communities of color, said Griffen, the circuit
judge.
“You don’t fix the situation by a community night out,” he said.
“You don’t fix that situation with a ride-along. You don’t fix that situation
by playing basketball with kids at night. You don’t fix that situation with a
police chief talking about black-on-black crime.
“It’s an attempt to direct attention away from police who kill
unarmed people and are treated like God, like they’re infallible.”
Some civil rights leaders have called for cities to require
police to live within the city limits, or even in the neighborhoods they
patrol. Little Rock and Pine Bluff rejected such measures in recent years.
Buckner and others have suggested a compromise. Instead of a
residency requirement, cities could offer incentives for officers to live in the
city.
“It’s not the fix-all, but it’s a start,” said Dale Charles,
president of the Little Rock branch of the NAACP.
“If they were in the community, they’d see us for more than
eight hours a day on patrol. We still see everything too much on the basis of
race. We’ve got to interact, or that’s not going to change.”
‘HE’D
BE PROUD’
After Cletis Williams’ death, his daughter says she changed as a
parent, becoming more cautious.
Her boys, 14 and 13, will start driving in a few years. They’ll
be on their own even more.
She worries that like many other black men, police will pull
them over whether they’ve done something wrong or not.
She’s had that talk with them and what they should do if it
happens.
“I just tell them to ‘Watch what you say, do what you’re supposed
to and make no sudden movements,’” she said.
Elliott, the state senator, gave her son the same talk “over and
over again.”
Sylvia Perkins did too. After a Little Rock officer killed her
15-year-old son in 2012, she told her other son and her grandsons to drive to
her house if a cop tries to pull them over.
“That way I can watch,” she said.
Robinson still has questions about the death of her father.
Why didn’t Holley call for backup? Why did he shoot so many
times? Why did her father have to die?
They’re all in her pleadings in U.S. District Court where she
sued Holley and the city of Jonesboro.
U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker denied Holley qualified
immunity, writing in an order that “a reasonable juror could find it
unreasonable that Officer Holley pulled his gun and shot Mr. Williams.”
The lawsuit was settled shortly after for $22,155.
The settlement helped put Robinson through school. She graduated
from Remington College in Memphis in September as a certified medical
assistant.
As she told what happened the day her father died, Robinson
calmly described how her father was shot seven times, and the sadness, panic
and anger that surged through her that day.
But, as she described her father’s personality, her lip quivered
and she buried her face in her arms: Strongwilled. Tough. Strict. Happy.
Across the room, her 16-year-old daughter’s cheeks shone with
tears.
Robinson looked sideways at her family then raised her head.
“He’d be really proud,” she said.
Some officers are “bad apples,” or as Little Rock Police Chief
Kenton Buckner put it, there are “some that I wouldn’t want making a run to my
mother’s house.” But most cops are fundamentally good guys who want to do the
right thing, he said.
Policing the Planet:
Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.Edited
by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton.2016.
A New York
Public Library pick for "A Reading List of America"
Combining
firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections
from artists, Policing the Planet
traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first
established in New York City under Police Commissioner William Bratton. It’s a
doctrine that has vastly broadened police power the world over—to deadly
effect.
With
contributions from #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson
activist and Law Professor Justin Hansford, Director of New York–based
Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, poet Martín Espada, and
journalist Anjali Kamat, as well as articles from leading scholars Ruth Wilson
Gilmore, Robin D. G. Kelley, Naomi Murakawa, Vijay Prashad, and more, Policing the Planet describes ongoing
struggles from New York to Baltimore to Los Angeles, London, San Juan, San
Salvador, and beyond.
Paperback, 320
pages
Reviews
“A major work…As
someone who certainly admires the work of these scholars, I couldn’t think of a
more compelling and timely work such as this. I am pleased to not only be in
community with these amazing people but to listen and learn from them…Policing
the Planet comes at an incredibly important time.”
– Khalil Gibran
Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
“This book is
the best analytical and political response we have to the historic rebellions
in Ferguson! Don’t miss it.”
– Cornel West,
author of Black Prophetic Fire
“We owe Jordan
Camp and Christina Heatherton a great expression of gratitude for this
brilliant and provocative collection of voices that compels us to see the Black
Lives Matter Movement in the larger context of twenty-first-century racial
capitalism and the growing carceral state.”
– Barbara
Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
“When this
series of essays addressing contemporary activism's biggest movement hits
stands in May, we'll be ready. A variety of contributors, including anti-police
brutality and militarization activists from around the country and world,
promise to make Policing the Planet a definitive work for anybody confused
about exactly what structural law enforcement powers lead to our current racial
justice climate.”
– Colorlines
“Through
compiling so many critical voices in one place, Camp and Heatherton have
created a much-needed guidebook of resistance to our planet’s police state and
the structures of urban governance that feed it.”
Since 2007, Urban Shield has brought police
agencies and weapons giants from around the world together in
California. This weekend they will be at it again. After a decade,
we've had enough: #StopUrbanShield!
Two years ago, the Stop
Urban Shield Coalition demanded that the City of Oakland stop
hosting the weapons expo and won! Yet Urban Shield - the largest SWAT
training in the world - continues to take place in nearby Pleasanton, with
participating SWAT teams, emergency respondents, and arms dealers only
growing in number and public funding. But our side is getting
stronger too, and we've got the momentum!
Join WRL, together with the Stop Urban Shield Coalition and communities
across the country, to resist the racism and repression of police
militarization. 80,000 SWAT raids a year!? How about livable housing and
quality healthcare instead? Join the growing movement against
militarization and policing in cities everywhere! Act now:
By Margaret Flowers
and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. The Trump
Administration sent federal law enforcement, including the paramilitary squad
of Customs and Border Patrol, BORTAC, which has been deployed to Iraq and
Afghanistan, to the streets of Portland, OR to stop the ongoing demonstrations
against racist police violence. Federal law enforcement, working with local
police, is also being sent to other cities where anti-racist protests are going
on. We speak with constitutional lawyer Mara Verheyden-Hilliard about the
legality of this and how activists can fight back to protect the rights of
everyone and... -more-
By Conrad Wilson and
Jonathan Levinson, OPB. Several dozen
additional out-of-town federal law enforcement officers are deploying to
Portland as they look to make additional arrests in the coming days, while also
shifting tactics from the use of tear gas, according to multiple federal law
enforcement sources. The federal response has so far sparked four civil
rights lawsuits, a Department of Justice inspector general investigation,
proposed legislation in Congress limiting the role of federal law enforcement
in American cities, and has injured a number of protesters. Rather than quell
the protests as was the intent, it’s served to... -more-
By Eric Umansky, Pro
Publica. Until last month, New York state prohibited
the release of police officers’ disciplinary records. Civilians’ complaints of
abuse by officers were a secret. So were investigators’ conclusions. The public
couldn’t even know if an officer was punished. Today, we are making this
information public and, with it, providing an unprecedented picture of
civilians’ complaints of abuse by NYPD officers as well as the limits of the
current system that is supposed to hold officers accountable. We’ve published a database
that lets you search the police complaints so you can see the information
for yourself. -more-
By Benjamin G.
Davis, Jurist. Remember
the protestors with guns walking into statehouses and protesting the
stay at home orders? Do you remember a single case where teargas or pepper
spray was used against those nearly all white protestors who were protesting in
the sense of trying to encourage reopening which is what the Executive has been
imprudently pushing? Fast forward to this last week. Were teargas and pepper
spray used on looters? No. It was used on peaceful protestors who were
protesting after the murder of George Floyd. Now, given teargas and
pepper spray have the nefarious quality of causing people to cough... -more-
By David Kroman,
Crosscut. A federal judge late Friday halted the
implementation of a Seattle ban on police use of tear gas, pepper spray and
other so-called less lethal weapons used for crowd control. His decision gives
more latitude to law enforcement to use the tools ahead of what could be a
weekend of protests, as federal agents arrive in Seattle with the stated orders
of protecting federal property. A separate court injunction against
use of the crowd control weapons remains in place, although that order
allows for their targeted and limited deployment in certain
circumstances. -more-
By Ben Carroll,
Workers World. By Workers
World. Data are everywhere. In 2020, technology is a ubiquitous part of
everyday life for many workers in this country and around the world. We use
social media and email to keep in touch with family and friends. We watch
live streams of events and activities that take place across the
globe. We text and stream music on our commutes to work. The list
goes on. Technology has increased capital’s ability to put workers
into direct competition with one another for jobs — and drive their wages
downward and worsen their working conditions, irrespective of the country in
which they reside. -more-
This week on CounterSpin:
Some corporate media appear agog that militarized federal agents—deployed
with a mission reflected in Defense Secretary Mark Esper's comment that
city streets are a "battlespace," filled with what acting
Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf called "violent mobs"—would go
ahead and tear gas protesters in Portland, Oregon, even though Portland's
Democratic mayor, Tom Wheeler, was among them. Outrageous, sure, but
we're a bit beyond outrage now, aren't we? While we wait to see if
corporate media can decide which optic is an optic too far, we talk about
the legal, constitutional elements of the fight for our right to protest,
including against the very forces that are sent to police the protesting.
Our guest is Marjorie Cohn, past president of the National Lawyers Guild,
professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and contributor/editor
on a number of books, including The United States and Torture:
Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse, and Drones and Targeted
Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.
This week on CounterSpin:
Some corporate media appear agog that militarized federal agents—deployed
with a mission reflected in Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s comment that
city streets are a “battlespace,” filled with what acting Homeland Security
chief Chad Wolf called “violent mobs”—would go ahead and tear gas
protesters in Portland, Oregon, even though Portland’s
Democratic mayor, Tom Wheeler, was among them. Outrageous, sure, but
we’re a bit beyond outrage now, aren’t we? While we wait to see if
corporate media can decide which optic is an optic too far, we talk about
the legal, constitutional elements of the fight for our right to protest,
including against the very forces that are sent to police the protesting.
Our guest is Marjorie Cohn, past president of the National Lawyers Guild, professor emerita at
Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and contributor/editor on a number of
books, including The United States and Torture: Interrogation,
Incarceration and Abuse, and Drones and Targeted Killing:
Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.
We want to update you on the situation on the ground in Portland, Oregon. Over this past week, militarized federal forces have
escalated their violent attacks against the city's people. In response, the
ACLU of Oregon immediately sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and
the U.S. Marshal Service.
Since June, police have fired tear gas and other munitions
into crowds gathered to protest police brutality in Portland. Now, federal
agents are occupying the streets – inflicting pain on and silencing people
who believe Black Lives Matter. Protesters and members of the press
have been shot in the head with kinetic impact munitions, swept away in
unmarked cars, and repeatedly tear gassed.
These actions are unconstitutional and inhumane, and they are
not going unanswered. On Wednesday, the ACLU of Oregon sued on behalf of a
group of medics attacked by unmarked federal agents as they tried to care for
injured protesters. This followed our lawsuit last week, which has already
succeeded in blocking federal authorities from arresting or attacking
journalists and legal observers.
This is likely only the
beginning, Dick – so please read more to stay informed. Federal
agencies are doubling down on their harsh tactics, stating that they will not
leave the streets of Portland and they will take their disturbing practices
nationwide. The government is crafting plans to deploy roughly 150
federal agents to Chicago soon.
We cannot accept this as the new normal. That is why we will
be watching nationwide, ready to challenge any constitutional abuses.
Our democracy and our safety are on the line right now. We
will not stop fighting to protect both.
Thank you for being part of this critical work,
Vera Eidelman
ACLU attorney, fighting for free speech
Unemployment
insurance laws were developed prior to the widespread use of contingent
faculty, and were designed to prevent K-12 teachers and full-time college
professors from collecting unemployment during scheduled term breaks and
summer vacations when they weren’t teaching. In nearly all states, these
laws are being used to prevent adjuncts, who have since become the […]
| more…
In what may come to
be viewed as a historic court case, a group of UK Uber drivers from London,
Birmingham, Nottingham and Glasgow have launched a legal action against
Uber in the Netherlands, supported by the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU),
the International Alliance of App-based Transport Workers (IAATW) and
Worker Info Exchange. | more…
The excessive use of
force and killings of unarmed Black Americans by police has fueled a
popular movement for slashing police budgets, reimagining policing, and
directing freed funds to community-based programs that provide medical and
mental health care, housing, and employment support to those in need. This
is a long overdue development. | more…
Chanting, “Feds stay
clear! Moms are here!,” groups of women congregated at the Mark O. Hatfield
Federal Courthouse and other locations in Central Portland. They were met
with tear gas, flashbangs, and pepper round bullets, injuring many.
| more…
We’ve seen the way that the police responded to nonviolent
civil disobedience at Standing Rock or in Ferguson versus the laissez-faire
approach they’ve used in a number of these white supremacist riots. They
clearly can regulate their behavior. Why they choose not to when it’s groups
protesting police violence is what I think local government […] | more…
Cutting police budgets without establishing
public control over their behavior doesn’t solve the problem, and invites
politicians to shuffle budget numbers around like a three-card monte
swindle. | more…
The Nation (July 13/20,
2020)
Five articles examine US police violence,
and several other articles comment on violence in general. The editor D. D. Guttenplan’s editorial,
“Disarm the Police,” quickly surveys the history of arming the police, cites
London’s mainly unarmed Metropolitan Police, and urges the nation at least to
“remove [this] one factor” from “the epidemic of US gun violence.” In “De Blasio’s Betrayal,” the editors
condemn New York Mayor De Blasio for failing to live up to his promises of
police reform. Sociologist Alex Vitale,
author of The End of Policing, criticizes
“procedural justice” and recommends reducing police budgets “in as many
dimensions as we can.” Likewise, in “How
to Make ‘Defund the Police’ a Reality,” Bryce Covert would divest from the
overfunded police and invest in underfunded social services: homeless, health
departments, housing, youth, workforce, etc.
And Destin Jenkins calls on the “divest and invest” movement not to
“exchange the violence of the police for the violence of finance capitalism.”
The
Nation is one of my favorite sources of information, print or online. If you hesitate to subscribe to yet another
magazine (or buy another book) because you already purchase more than you can
keep up with, remember we won’t have these good sources if we don’t subscribe. If you ever wonder how you can make a
difference, send your check.
Articles on other subjects are outstanding
too : Patricia Williams‘ “Circus Maximus” on T. as “a master of political
misdirection “; Katha Pollitt’s “Goodbye, Columbus?” on no longer celebrating
monumentally mass murderers, torturers, exploiters, war-makers; and more. Dick
The
defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather a
deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain
social control in the wake of the largest and most militant protests in
recent memory. This article examines the dimensions of how this defanging
took place: how, within the […] | more…
Every. Single. Vote.
is a non-profit organization that will fund vote-by-mail ballot
propositions thrughout the country.You can support us by going to everysinglevote.com.
You can also unsubscribeat
any time.
Studies show that
militarized police departments are more likely to kill civilians. Despite the
data, departments across the country are still militarizing their police
forces.
Police often use riot gear, tear gas, a surplus of guns, and even tanks in
situations that don't call for it.
This type of military
equipment doesn’t belong on American soil.
Thank you for taking action,-- Every.
Single. Vote.
Every. Single. Vote. aims to make
voting easier and more accessible by funding ballot initiatives
to expand
vote-by-mail and automatic voter registration. Join us by visiting everysinglevote.com.Paid
for by Every. Single. vote.Every. Single. Vote.
2120 University Ave.Berkeley, CA 94704
Community control of the police means
empowering the people to shape and oversee the mechanisms of their own security
and end forever the armed occupation of our communities by hostile forces.
| more…
Be the people's resistance media! Forward this
email to your friends and share the articles on social media.
Following 7 items from Popular Resistance.org (6-27-20)
By Richard D. Wolff, Economy for All. Capitalism’s
cyclical crises could potentially turn their victims against it and make
them receptive to the system’s critics. This would more likely happen if
everyone in the society were roughly equally vulnerable to cyclical
downturns. Most employees would then rightly worry that their jobs would
be lost in the next crash. They would periodically face income losses,
interrupted educations, lost homes, and so on. Whatever relief employees
felt if neighbors, rather than themselves, got fired, they would know
that it might well be their turn in the next cycle. -more-
By Anat Rubin, Tim
Golden, and Richard A. Webster, ProPublica. While the novel
coronavirus burned through Angola, as the country’s largest
maximum-security prison is known, officials insisted they were testing
all inmates who showed symptoms, isolating those who got sick and
transferring more serious cases to the hospital in Baton Rouge, about 60
miles to the south. But from inside Angola’s walls, inmates painted a
very different picture — one of widespread illness, dysfunctional care
and sometimes inexplicable neglect. They said at least four of the 12
prisoners who have died in the pandemic, including Williams, had
been.... -more-
By Danny Sjursen, Antiwar.com. Though the
bizarre story has been subsumed by other events, last month’s
aborted invasion of Venezuela should’ve hardly shocked anyone.
The United States has long used mercenaries to do its bidding. They have
provided Washington distance and deniability for unsavory operations.
During the Cold War, the U.S. hoped this would limit domestic and
international protest. Policymakers also discerned mercenary alternatives
to bloody, expensive quagmires like the Vietnam or Iraq Wars. Traditionally,
most of these hired guns were foreigners – ex-soldiers of declining
European empires. -more-
By Nader Issa, Chicago Sun Times. Chicago’s
school board has voted against ending a program that puts police officers
in public schools, following the wishes of the mayor and top Chicago
Public Schools leadership while rejecting the demands of students and
activists who for years have called for police-free schools. While the
narrow 4-3 vote, the most suspenseful by the Board of Education in years,
keeps intact a scrutinized $33-million contract between the school system
and the Chicago Police Department, another vote is likely in the next two
months on whether to renew the contract that’s set to expire at the end
of August. -more-
By Tess Owens, Vice. The U.S.
military appears to have a brewing boogaloo problem. Active-duty military
are flocking to online networks frequented by the anti-government
movement, known for its meme culture and Hawaiian shirt-clad adherents,
who are often called Boogaloo Bois. “Boogaloo” is code for civil war,
which is the ultimate goal of the movement, and some of its followers
trade in memes glorifying violence against federal agents and crack jokes
about the impending “Boog.” Recently they’ve become regular fixtures at
anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests in states that allow
open-carry of military-style firearms. -more-
By Bobby Vanecko, Southside Weekly. The
book Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to
Black Power, published last year, details the history of the Chicago
Police Department’s quasi-military occupation of the city’s Black
communities from the race riots of 1919 through the present day. Author
Simon Balto, an assistant professor of African American history at the
University of Iowa, demonstrates that “there is not a time in Chicago’s
history where the city was home to large percentages of black people, and
in which they had a smoothly functioning relationship with the
CPD.” -more-
By Wilson Walker, CBS San Francisco. After about a
two-hour debate the Oakland School Board tonight voted unanimously to
eliminate the Oakland Unified School District Police Department from
campuses. The “George Floyd Resolution” eliminates the school districts
police force of 10 sworn officers and 50 unarmed campus safety officers.
The Board also added several amendments to the final proposal. One
requires the superintendent to ensure all staff receive training. Citing
the disproportionate arrests of Black students by Oakland’s school
police, as well as the district’s “obligation to promote the healthy
development of each one of its... -more-
By Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. Journalist and
photographer Linda Tirado was standing near a police line in Minneapolis
May 29, covering the George Floyd protests engulfing the city. All of a
sudden, her face “exploded” in her own words. She had been shot from
close range in the eye, permanently blinding her. Her goggles shattered
and tear gas entered the wound, causing even more pain. The
police had shot her. Protestors pulled her away from her attackers,
put her into a vehicle and drove her to the hospital where they were
unable to save her eye, but were able to give her a $58,000 bill, likely
the first of many. -more-
"?tHIS ENDS INSTALLMENT #2 IN REVERSE CHRON ORDER = MAINLY JULY 2020
None
The world is doomed to repeat four-year
cycles of booms followed by crashes if we don’t get off oil, Jeremy Rifkin
warned a Climate One audience in 
