Memphis Blues

Tennessee has many problems and the largest is issues that are about poverty and race. Memphis is largely populated by Black Americans and with that they are a larger sector of poorer ones and the city is often decried for their crime and violence that has nothing and everything to do with Race. As when there is increased poverty there is increased crime and that overlap comes to define the City of Memphis. But you also realize that it is a city of Soul in every sense of the word. There are working class jobs and a strong presence of many factors that are often ignored when discussing Memphis and its place in history. But the crime issue and the now closed down Scorpion Unit of the Police which brought that negative magnifying glass down to examine once again the city and with it the revolving door of crime and policing. There are many better writers who have written on this very subject, Radley Balko, who lives in Nashville is perhaps the most significant of ones who have written about Police and Prosecutorial Misconduct, Judicial Bias and the issues of penalties and laws that are most damaging to those people of color and the poor. The largest tool in the arsenal is Civil Asset Forfeiture. This is where any cash or personal property is seized by the Police as it is believed gained from a criminal venture, all done even prior to conviction or a determination of guilt. It is ripe with abuse and exploitation and here is an excellent explanation on how that occurs, but also below is an article about Memphis and the endless cycle of pain it inflects on the residents and once again those of Color.

But what is also essential to note that none of the profiled individuals had drugs or guns in their vehicles which is often a suspicion or reason for stop and search and an explanation for why the Police were afraid and aggressive. So once again myths debunked. America is a violent nation and the Police are large contributors to that.

In Memphis, Car Seizures Are a Lucrative and Punishing Police Tactic

Vehicle seizures have been used to combat street racing and other crimes, but critics say that even people not convicted of a crime have been left for months without their cars.

The New York Times

By Jessica Jaglois and Mike Baker

• March 23, 2023

MEMPHIS — As he drove to work on a summer afternoon in Memphis last year, Ralph Jones saw a woman on the sidewalk flagging him down. Thinking she was in distress or needed a ride, Mr. Jones said, he pulled over.

After a brief conversation in which she tried to lure him to a nearby motel, Mr. Jones said, he drove away but was soon stopped by the police and yanked from his truck. The 70-year-old welder said that with just 86 cents in his pocket, he had neither the intent nor the money to solicit a prostitute, as the officers were claiming.

His protests were to no avail. Mr. Jones was cited, and his truck, along with the expensive tools inside, was seized. The charges were eventually dropped, but the truck and his work equipment remained corralled in a city impound lot for six weeks, when prosecutors finally agreed to return it in exchange for a $750 payment.

“It’s nothing but a racket,” Mr. Jones said.

Police departments around the country have long used asset forfeiture laws to seize property believed to be associated with criminal activity, a tactic intended to deprive lawbreakers of ill-gotten gains, deter future crimes and, along the way, provide a lucrative revenue source for police departments.

But it became a favored law-enforcement tactic in Memphis, where the elite street crime unit involved in the death of Tyre Nichols on Jan. 7, known as the Scorpion unit, was among several law enforcement teams in the city making widespread use of vehicle seizures.

Like Mr. Jones, some of the people affected by the seizures had not been convicted of any crime, and defense lawyers said they disproportionately affected low-income residents, and people of color.

Over the past decade, civil rights advocates in several states have successfully pushed to make it harder for the police to seize property, but Tennessee continues to have some of the most aggressive seizure laws in the country.

While some states now require a criminal conviction before forfeiting property, Tennessee’s process can be much looser, requiring only that the government show, in a civil process, that the property was more likely than not to have been connected to certain types of criminal activity — a less rigorous burden of proof. Tennessee allows local law enforcement agencies to keep the bulk of the proceeds of the assets they seize.

And the process for getting property back in the state can be prohibitive for those who have little money or the ability to hire a lawyer: Those who fail to file a claim and post a $350 bond within 30 days automatically forfeit their property.

“Tennessee’s forfeiture laws are among the nation’s worst,” said Lisa Knepper, a senior director of strategic research at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that has called for changes in state and federal forfeiture laws.

In Memphis, some of the more than 700 vehicles seized last year were taken from people who were ultimately found guilty of serious criminal charges. But other residents reported in interviews that they were compelled to pay large fees to recover their vehicles even when they had not been convicted of any crime.

In 2021, the Memphis Police Chief, Cerelyn Davis, came forward with the city’s plan to combat growing incidents of reckless driving and drag racing with vehicle seizures. This happened at around the same time that the city was launching the Scorpion unit — an acronym for the department’s Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.

No longer would police officers be merely issuing citations to reckless drivers who endangered others, she said, seeming to acknowledge that such seizures might not ultimately stand up in court.

“When we identify individuals that are reckless driving to a point where they put other lives in danger, we want to take your car, too,” she said. “Take the car. Even if the case gets dropped in court. We witnessed it. You did it. You might be inconvenienced for three days without your car. That’s enough.”

Mayor Jim Strickland was also a strong supporter of the seizure policy and even proposed destroying cars used by drag racers and other reckless drivers. “I don’t care if they serve a day in jail,” he said last year. “Let me get their cars, and then once a month we’ll line them all up, maybe at the old fairgrounds, Liberty Park, and just smash them.”

Police officers said it was on suspicion of reckless driving that they first pulled over Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died after a long and brutal beating by Scorpion officers. Five officers have been charged with murder in the case. Chief Davis subsequently said that she had seen nothing to support the reckless driving allegation. Nichols’s car was taken to the city’s impound lot.

The Scorpion unit was touted for its record of seizing drugs, cash and cars. In just the first few months of its operations, the city reported that the elite unit had seized some 270 vehicles.

Many of the vehicle seizures have revolved around drugs. In those instances, according to several defense lawyers, the agency often seized a vehicle based on a claim that it was being used in a drug-dealing operation — a common basis for such seizures in many cities, intended to deprive drug dealers of their profits and the ability to continue their work.

But even some of those not convicted of a crime said they spent weeks without a car while trying to navigate a complicated court process.

Filing a claim in court requires posting a $350 bond. Sometimes, defense lawyers said, the authorities managing the case may offer to release the car without requiring a court hearing if a person pays a fee that can amount to thousands of dollars.

Shawn Douglas Jr. lost his car in the fall after being stopped at a Memphis gas station by officers who reported finding two clear baggies containing marijuana inside a backpack.

Mr. Douglas was soon in handcuffs, arrested on suspicion of a felony drug infraction, an allegation he denied. His car was sent to impound.

In an interview, Mr. Douglas said one of the arresting officers commented to him about his 2015 Dodge Charger: “He said, ‘That would be a great police vehicle. When we take those vehicles we hope people don’t come get them back so we can do drug busts out of them.’”

Months later, Mr. Douglas’s criminal charges had been dropped, but his car was still in police custody. He was only able to recover it after paying $925, records show; crews towed it out to a dusty lot and handed it over to him, its battery dead. Mr. Douglas had to struggle with battery cables to get it started.

“It cost a lot of money,” Mr. Douglas said. “It puts you back on everything and creates more stress. When you can’t pay bills, you can’t do anything.”

Neither the police department nor the district attorney’s office responded to questions about the forfeiture cases of Mr. Douglas and others interviewed for this article, and they only briefly addressed the city’s forfeiture policy.

In Memphis, as in many cities, revenues from such impound and forfeiture fees are returned to support policing activities, becoming a regular source of revenue.

Memphis has not disclosed how much money it generated for the hundreds of vehicles that were forfeited. The city did report seizing some $1.7 million in cash last year, winning forfeiture of nearly $1.3 million.

This income is most often being generated from the city’s poorest residents, defense lawyers said.

“It’s unfair to a lot of the poorer citizens in Memphis,” said Arthur Horne, who has represented such clients. “It’s a huge tax.”

Vehicle seizures have never been a priority in the city’s overall crime-fighting strategy, Chief Davis said in a brief interview, adding that any money gained from forfeitures was not essential to police operations.

“We haven’t put a high level of priority on asset forfeiture here in Memphis,” she said. “We put more of a priority on violent crime, reducing violent crime.”

“It’s not like we’re out trying to seize vehicles. We have a budget to support the police department.”

Erica R. Williams, the communications director for the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office, says that prosecutors do not receive any share in proceeds from vehicle forfeitures.

“We attempt to handle these cases as quickly as possible in an effort to minimize the difficulty caused by the seizure of a vehicle, while simultaneously seeking to accomplish the spirit of the statute,” she said, which was to “discourage engagement in future offenses.”

Seven states do not give forfeiture revenues to law enforcement. A few states, such as New Mexico, Maine and North Carolina, do not permit civil proceedings and allow forfeiture only after criminal convictions.

A bill pending in Congress proposes a series of new rules that would raise the standards for the government to win forfeiture, give access to lawyers for people trying to recover their property and end profit incentives by sending revenues to the Treasury Department’s general fund.

John Flynn, the president of the National District Attorneys Association, said efforts seeking to limit forfeitures have at times brought together lawmakers on the left and the libertarian right. But he said such efforts could go too far, undermining a law-enforcement tool that he said provides a deterrent to wrongdoers and turns over illegal criminal profits to those trying to fight crime.

“From a prosecutor’s standpoint, any money or vehicles or property gained through illegal conduct should be forfeited,” Mr. Flynn said.

He said safeguards allowed people to present evidence that their property was not acquired through illegal means.

In Memphis, at the city’s crowded impound lot north of town, cars towed in from around the city for various reasons mix with recovered stolen vehicles and cars seized by the police. Tow trucks buzz in regularly, and a fine coat of dust from a nearby limestone supply company settles over everything.

A dozen shoppers were on hand one recent morning looking at a GMC Denali that was up for auction. It looked to be in mint condition on the passenger side, but 20 or so bullet holes dotted the driver’s side door.

Further down the lot, Kyle Lyons was standing next to a pile of belongings that he had retrieved from his 2010 BMW, which had been seized in July by police officers who said they had found heroin in the vehicle. Mr. Lyons, who said he had struggled with addiction, was hoping to get back thousands of dollars worth of Craftsman tools that had been taken along with the car — equipment he needed to work.

Once his car was gone, he said, he had lost nearly everything else.

“Everything I use to make money with was gone,” Mr. Lyons said. “I couldn’t work, couldn’t go out and buy no more. I was homeless for four months.”

He has left Memphis and moved home to Kentucky. His car is still impounded.

You’re Busted

And that is what happens when you are arrested and sometimes you are shot, tased, pepper sprayed, and beaten up. And if you are lucky you live and if you are 73 you walk away with some broken limbs.

During the New York protests over George Floyd a 75 year old man was knocked to the ground and sustained head injuries from his encounter with Police.

In most communities, we call it Elder Abuse. That can be anything from physical abuse including restraints, to financial fraud. “Hello this is Amazon your account is at the risk of being closed due to some unauthorized charges, please call this number/hit this link” So yes that is Elder Abuse, a crime. Did not see anyone taking up secondary protests about this issue, proving that according to Hidden Brain will take over 150 years to attain parity to what has become Gay Rights which is the tipping measuring point with the idea that it took 40 years to do so. They believe it will take up to 130 years for Misogyny to be overcome and Racism somewhere in between those. Well, I am a Senior so not my problem! I will be dead by then and if I manage to avoid Cops I might make it longer than I thought. I have had two serious encounters and we know that three times you’re out. So let’s avoid that one shall we?

Then I read this incident at a local Walmart and once again there will be no protests, no outrage no giving a shit. Seniors are way down on the list with regards to the who got it worse group. We treat everyone not attractive, with successful careers, a good education, between the ages of 25-40 (I actually had someone tell me that by the time you are 40 your potential for earning goes down and career ends) and of course WHITE and CHRISTIAN as utterly superfluous. This is America we got more …..ists attached to our identity than the ones we affix.

So a woman who is suffering from Dementia, wanders into a Walmart takes about $14 bucks worth of items, ends up returning them outside to other employees outside the store, then the Police are called, she reacts as most do but in her heightened state even more so and then its DOWN ON THE GROUND! Oh and the woman’s name – Karen

A 73-year-old with dementia took $14 of items from Walmart. Police broke her arm in a violent arrest.

By Tim Elfrink The Washington Post April 20, 2021

Karen Garner was plucking purple wildflowers and strolling back to her home in Loveland, Colo., last year when the police spotted her.

A few minutes earlier, the 73-year-old with dementia had walked out of a Walmart without paying for some items worth roughly $14 before returning them to employees outside. Now, as the officer tried to arrest her, she appeared confused and frightened.

“I’m going home,” she pleaded, still clutching the flowers as he wrestled her into handcuffs.

By the time two officers finally forced the 80-pound woman into a cruiser, her family says, her arm was broken, her shoulder was dislocated, and her body was covered in bruises.

Following days of outcry after the release of bodycam footage, the city announced Monday that it is opening an independent probe into Garner’s treatment. Separately, Colorado’s Eighth Judicial District Attorney Gordon McLaughlin said that his office’s critical response team will investigate whether there was “any potential criminal behavior” by the Loveland officers.

The Loveland Police Department has also suspended Officer Austin Hopp, who initially handcuffed Garner; two others who were on the scene, Officer Daria Jalali and Sgt. Phil Metzler, have been placed on administrative duty while the investigation is carried out.

Garner’s family, which filed a federal lawsuit against the city last week, praised the move by McLaughlin’s office. “This is a small, but long overdue, step in the right direction,” her family said in a statement shared with The Washington Post.

Police have faced increased scrutiny of their treatment of people facing mental crises, particularly after high-profile deaths like that of Daniel T. Prude, who died after Rochester police placed a hood over his head last year amid a mental health emergency. Some cities have begun sending non-police specialists to similar cases, while other departments have mandated training for dealing with mental health crises.

In Garner’s case, her family argued in its federal lawsuit, a mental health crises team would have been a more appropriate response than a violent arrest. In addition to dementia, her family said, she has sensory aphasia, a condition that leaves her unable to understand speech or to communicate easily.

On June 26, Garner had gone to a Walmart near her home in Loveland, a town about 50 miles north of Denver, and then walked out with soda, candy, a T-shirt and cleaning supplies worth $13.88 without paying, according to her family’s lawsuit.

Employees intercepted her outside and took the items back, refusing to take her credit card to pay for them. Confused, Garner left and started walking home.

Walmart employees called police about the incident, but also told dispatchers that Garner was elderly and that they’d already recovered the merchandise.

But when Hopp spotted her walking through a field near the road moments later, he aggressively moved to arrest her, body camera footage showed.

“I don’t think you want to play it this way,” he said as she walked away from him. Garner held her hands in the air, clutching the flowers she’d collected, and then continued walking. “Do you need to be arrested right now?” he asked.

Within seconds, Hopp grabbed her arms and began wrenching them backward to handcuff her. For several minutes, as Garner repeatedly cried that she was “going home,” he struggled with her on the ground, fighting to keep her hands behind her.

Eventually Jalali arrived to help Hopp hold Garner against a cruiser as they continue fighting to pull her arms behind her.

After Garner fell to the ground, a concerned bystander stopped to film the scene. “Do you have to use that much aggression?” the man can be heard asking in the bodycam video.

“Get out of here. This is not your business,” an officer replied.

Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Garner.

In the lawsuit, filed last Thursday in the U.S. District Court of Colorado, Garner’s family argues that her dementia and aphasia left her unable to understand the police officers demands when they attempted to stop her and ordered her to stop struggling.

The family’s attorney, Sarah Schielke, criticized how police approached the incident from the start.

“(Hopp) did not call dispatch or request a mental health unit. He did not waste even one second on calm conversation or explanation,” she writes in the federal complaint. “Instead, he immediately leapt out and physically grabbed Ms. Garner’s left arm, and violently twisted it behind her back. Then he threw her 80- pound body to the ground and climbed on top of her.”

After the lawsuit was filed last week, Loveland Police suspended Hopp and said that it had not received a complaint about the incident before the lawsuit. As the bodycam footage circulated widely over the weekend, local officials were flooded with emails and phone calls about the case, the city said in a statement on Monday.

The city said that its third-party investigation, which will likely be carried out by Loveland’s insurance carrier, will determine whether the officers broke policies in the arrest, the Loveland Reporter Herald reported.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, will carry out a separate criminal probe. That investigation “will not only ensure there is accountability for any potential criminal behavior but will also give our community the information and framework with which to evaluate our performance and have faith in the results of our investigations,” McLaughlin’s office said in a statement.

Loveland’s police chief, Robert Ticer, will address the city council on Tuesday as local lawmakers discuss the case.

Spoon Man

Ah Seattle, home to Grunge. This is the music but the city has always been just that way until the new money arrived and wanted that all gone away.  I knew the CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle was a poor man’s occupier.  Having grown up in the Northwest it is not a friendly warm place.  I have written extensively about the Seattle Freeze, the arrogance and the suppressed racism and well overall assholism that dominates the vibe.  It is a city that you speak the dogma, the message and in the manner of a passive aggressive individual with several monikers to identify your gender, your personage and political belief.   There is Liberal, there is Progressive, there is now apparently Social Democrat, and there are the supposed other angrier anarchists along with the white nationalists and other far right groups that have equal divisions.   The more labels the better to ostracize, segregate and demean you. The difference between Seattle and Nashville is the vocabulary level in which to insult.

I have first hand witnessed one elected Official after another fuck up Seattle.  From Paul Schell at the WTO to Jenny Durkan and CHOP, this is just a long line of Mayors who simply are elected as they fit a type, check a box and have the current talking points down to a point of no return. Once elected and not re-elected by choice or not, they fade into the background to never be heard of again. Seattle is like Nashville in ways I never thought I would imagine nor believe but as I sit here far away from both, I cannot say anything good about either, so I won’t.

Now as for Portland the violence and protests about black lives is raging. Is it really still about black lives?  I am not seeing anything here on this coast or in any other major metropolis at this point about the subject which again, not surprising.  But we have had major primaries and it appears that many Black Women are bringing votes to the the box and the same with some other candidates who are Gay, Black, Hispanic and are all voices of change.  Ah there is where it matters.

Portland at this point has descended into chaos and stupidity.  The Wall of Moms became infamous for being white, the color of the population there, ignoring that the faces of Mothers have long been forefront of activism going back decades. But when the Moms are white we give a shit until we don’t.  Moms Demand Action?  They came AFTER a group of Black Mothers began a similar movement.  Yes we have been here before folks and we will go there again.  And that chaos and protest is not new and like the south, racism and dissent is built into the DNA.

 Seattle is now trying to clean up the mess made and the area of town now has the scars and the bodies of the kids who in the best of moments meant well, in the worst of moments did worse. Shootings, murders, deaths of a protestor by a young black man driving into them (and now buried in the media as it doesn’t fit the narrative) are now all marks of the Summer of Loathe.  This was not about change, this was about anger, the rising homelessness, the issue of work, jobs and of course drugs and money were really the issues and black lives were the shields in which to hide behind.  I know Seattle and Portland and black is a color of the goth gear not of their friends, co-workers, neighbors or anyone who matters.  Just like Nashville, I cannot recall any face of color in the front of the house of coffee shops, yoga studios, gyms or businesses I frequented. Not one, or well one or two but they never stayed long.  My personal favorite was the woman I knew in Nashville who had a General Store, proclaimed to be an activist and never had a face of color work for her, claimed to know many Black individuals, never saw her in the company of one, quoted and cited endless tropes about racial issues, but when it came down to it, was just like the rest of those in Nashville, all talk no walk when it came to actually acting upon the narrative.

I know the street of CHOP and I know the business, I know the park, the block and some of those in the story below.  I know their neighboring businesses, the people that did live and work there and went to school there and I recall dancing at the bars when the district was a large Gay community now gentrified to meet the flow of the river of Amazon.   When I was still there in 2016 on the very corner CHOP burned, I watched a woman Cop stop a Black man with a Golf Club a Cane and haul him into jail for allegedly hiding her car.  It was noon and I was on my way to a Barre class and I did not see that, and when I mentioned it to someone, they said it happens all the time, really?  But the area was full of homeless youth, drug addicts and others who prey upon those individuals.  One morning I was walking to the same class only early and stumbled upon a man injecting himself with drugs. The bars there are notorious for drugging drinks with date rape drugs and little to nothing was done then.  Or how about thousands of untested rape kits.  Again, no protests, no hysteria, no nothing and it was already a pattern well established by Seattle Police,  the King County Sheriff, the District Attorney’s of both the City and County.  So tell me again what you are wanting to accomplish?

Nothing will change for good or bad and the lawsuit will be shut down in the Courts of Seattle as the Judges are elected, as is the Sheriff, the Prosecuting and City Attorney and all of them will talk the talking points, say the script and they will protect the quo and the status of a city in decline.  As long as Amazon is served that is all that they have on the menu.

Abolish the Police? Those Who Survived the Chaos in Seattle Aren’t So Sure

What is it like when a city abandons a neighborhood and the police vanish? Business owners describe a harrowing experience of calling for help and being left all alone.

The New York Times
By Nellie Bowles
Aug. 7, 2020

SEATTLE — Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own mayor that the protests in his hometown were peaceful, with “a block party atmosphere.”

But that was not what he saw through the windows of his Seattle coffee shop. He saw encampments overtaking the sidewalks. He saw roving bands of masked protesters smashing windows and looting.

Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Mr. Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected.

“They barricaded us all in here,” Mr. Khan said. “And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.”

For 23 days in June, about six blocks in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood were claimed by left-wing demonstrators and declared police-free. Protesters hailed it as liberation — from police oppression, from white supremacy — and a catalyst for a national movement.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, the Black Lives Matter movement is calling to defund the police, arguing that the criminal justice system is inherently racist.

Leaders in many progressive cities are listening. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced a plan to shift $1 billion out of the police budget. The Minneapolis City Council is pitching a major reduction, and the Seattle City Council is pushing for a 50 percent cut to Police Department funding. (The mayor said that plan goes too far.)

Some even call for “abolishing the police” altogether and closing down precincts, which is what happened in Seattle.

That has left small-business owners as lonely voices in progressive areas, arguing that police officers are necessary and that cities cannot function without a robust public safety presence. In Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, Ore., many of those business owners consider themselves progressive, and in interviews they express support for the Black Lives Matter movement. But they also worry that their businesses, already debilitated by the coronavirus pandemic, will struggle to survive if police departments and city governments cannot protect them.

On Capitol Hill, business crashed as the Seattle police refused to respond to calls to the area. Officers did not retake the region until July 1, after four shootings, including two fatal ones.

Now a group of local businesses owners — including a locksmith, the owner of a tattoo parlor, a mechanic, the owners of a Mexican restaurant and Mr. Khan — is suing the city. The lawsuit claims that “Seattle’s unprecedented decision to abandon and close off an entire city neighborhood, leaving it unchecked by the police, unserved by fire and emergency health services, and inaccessible to the public” resulted in enormous property damage and lost revenue.

The Seattle lawsuit — and interviews with shop owners in cities like Portland and Minneapolis — underscores a key question: Can businesses still rely on local governments, which are now rethinking the role of the police, to keep them safe? The issue is especially tense in Seattle, where the city government not only permitted the establishment of a police-free zone, but provided infrastructure like concrete barriers and portable toilets to sustain it.

The economic losses that businesses suffered during the recent tumult are significant: One community relief fund in Minneapolis, where early protests included vandalism and arson, has raised $9 million for businesses along the Lake Street corridor, a largely Latino and East African business district. “We asked the small businesses what they needed to cover the damage that insurance wasn’t paying, and the gap was around $200 million,” said Allison Sharkey, the executive director of the Lake Street Council, which is organizing the fund. Her own office, between a crafts market and a Native American support center, was burned down in the protests.

Some small businesses have resorted to posting GoFundMe pleas for donations online.

Many are nervous about speaking out lest they lend ammunition to a conservative critique of the Black Lives Matter movement. In Portland, Elizabeth Snow McDougall, the owner of Stevens-Ness legal printers, emphasized her support for the cause before describing the damage done to her business.

“One window broken, then another, then another, then another. Garbage to clean off the sidewalk in front of the store every morning. Urine to wash out of our doorway alcove. Graffiti to remove,” Ms. McDougall wrote in an email. “Costs to board up and later we’ll have costs to repair.”

The impact of the occupation on Cafe Argento, Mr. Khan’s coffee shop on Capitol Hill, has been devastating. Very few people braved the barricades set up by the armed occupiers to come in for his coffee and breakfast sandwiches. Cars coming to pick up food orders would turn around. At two points, he and his workers felt scared and called 911. “They said they would not come into CHOP,” said Mr. Khan, referring to one of the names that protesters gave to the occupied Capitol Hill area. “It was lawless.”

He had to start chipping in for private security, a hard thing to do when his business had already been hurt by the coronavirus.

But he considers himself lucky — and he was. Even weeks after the protests, blocks of his previously bustling neighborhood remained boarded up and covered in shattered glass. Many business owners are scared to speak out, Mr. Khan said, because of worries that they would be targeted further.

One mid-July morning in the neighborhood, workers in orange vests were mopping off the sidewalks and power-spraying graffiti off the sides of buildings. Two window repair guys said they had their hands full for weeks. Shattered street lamps were being unscrewed and replaced.

A confusing array of security teams wandered around, armed with handguns and rifles. Some wore official-looking private security uniforms. Others wore casual clothes and lanyards identifying their affiliation with Black Lives Matter. A third group wore all black with no identifying labels and declined to name their group affiliation.

When a tall man in a trench coat and hiking boots walked over to question Mr. Khan, the man spread his coat open, revealing several pistols on harnesses around his chest and waist. He presented a badge on a lanyard that read “Black Lives Matter Community Patrol.”

His name is Rick Hearns and he identified himself as a longtime security guard and mover who is now a Black Lives Matter community guard, in charge of several others. Local merchants pay for his protection, he said as he handed out his business card. (Mr. Khan said he and his neighbors are now paying thousands of dollars a month for protection from Iconic Global, a Washington State-based private security contractor.)

Mr. Hearns has had bad experiences with the police in his own life. He says he wants police reform, but he was appalled by the violent tactics and rhetoric he witnessed during the occupation.

He blamed the destruction and looting on “opportunists,” but also said that much of the damage on Capitol Hill came from a distinct contingent of violent, armed white activists. “It’s antifa,” he said. “They don’t want to see the progress we’ve made. They want chaos.”

Many of the business owners on Capitol Hill agreed: Much of the violence they saw and the intimidation of their patrons came from a group these business owners identified as antifa, which they distinguished from the Black Lives Matter movement. “The idea of taking up the Black movement and turning it into a white occupation, it’s white privilege in its finest definition,” Mr. Khan said. “And that’s what they did.”

Antifa, which stands for anti-fascist, is a radical, leaderless leftist political movement that uses armed, violent protest as a method to create what supporters say is a more just and equitable country. They have a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest, including the current protests in Portland.

When the occupation in Seattle started in early June, Mayor Jenny Durkan seemed almost amused. “We could have the Summer of Love,” she said.

After President Trump took aim at the governor of Washington State and Seattle’s mayor on June 11, Ms. Durkan defended the occupation on Twitter as “a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world,” she wrote, pointing to the “food trucks, spaghetti potlucks, teach-ins, and movies.”

The lawsuit by the small-business owners, filed by the firm Calfo Eakes on June 24, seizes on such language, pointing out that the city knew what was happening and provided material support for the occupation.

Matthew Ploszaj, a Capitol Hill resident, is one of the complainants. He said his apartment building, blocks from Mr. Khan’s shop, was broken into four times during the occupation. The Seattle Police were called each time and never came to his apartment, according to Mr. Ploszaj. When he and another resident called the police after one burglary, they told him to meet them outside the occupation zone, about eight blocks away. He and other residents spent nights at a friend’s house outside the area during the height of the protests.

The employees of Bergman’s Lock and Key say they were followed by demonstrators with baseball bats. Cure Cocktail, a local bar and charcuterie, said its workers were asked by protesters to pledge loyalty to the movement: “Are you for the CHOP or are you for the police?” they were asked, according to the lawsuit.

The business owners also found that trying to get help from the Seattle Police, who declined to comment for this article, made them targets of activists.

Across from Cafe Argento is a funky old auto repair shop called Car Tender run by John McDermott, a big soft-spoken man. On June 14, Mr. McDermott was driving his wife home from their anniversary dinner when he received a call from a neighbor who saw someone trying to break into his shop.

Mr. McDermott and his 27-year-old son, Mason, raced over. A man who was inside the shop, Mr. McDermott said, had emptied the cash drawer and was in the midst of setting the building on fire. Mr. McDermott said he and his son wrestled the man down and planned to hold him until the police arrived. But officers never showed up. A group of several hundred protesters did, according to Mr. McDermott, breaking down the chain-link fence around his shop and claiming that Mr. McDermott had kidnapped the man.

“They started coming across the fence — you see all these beautiful kids, a mob but kids — and they have guns and are pointing them at you and telling you they’re going to kill you,” Mr. McDermott said. “Telling me I’m the K.K.K. I’m not the K.K.K.”

The demonstrators were livestreaming the confrontation. Mr. McDermott’s wife watched, frantically calling anyone she could think of to go help him.

Later, Mr. McDermott’s photo and shop address appeared on a website called Cop Blaster, whose stated aim is to track police brutality but also has galleries of what it calls “Snitches” and “Cop Callers.” The McDermotts were categorized as both of those things on the website, which warned they should “keep their mouths shut.”

Many of the listings include names and addresses of people who are said to have called the police. Since the Cop Blaster post went up, Mr. McDermott’s shop has received so many harassing phone calls and messages that some employees have had to take time off.

A block away is Bill Donner, the owner of Richmark Label, who let police officers use the roof of his factory to monitor the demonstration. Inside, his company had spent 50 years making labels for products like whiskey, soaps and natural beef jerky. Many days during the occupation, Mr. Donner, who said he was in favor of police reform, had to negotiate with the occupiers of the zone for access to his factory.

Twice, he called 911 and was told that the police would not be coming into the area.

The experience of the small-business owners seems a universe away from the rhetoric of Seattle’s politicians. As the violence turned deadly, Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who represents Capitol Hill, defended the protesters’ use of their own armed guards instead of the police.

“Elected committees of self defense have historically played vital roles during general strikes, occupations and in mass movements, in order for the working class and marginalized people to defend themselves and carry out necessary functions in place of the forces of the state,” she wrote. She has called for the local police precinct to be permanently placed under “community control.”

When the mayor did send in police officers to end the occupation after the shootings, Ms. Sawant wrote on Twitter, “Shame on Mayor Jenny Durkan for deploying Seattle police yesterday in a brutal attack against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters & homeless neighbors at the Capitol Hill Organized Protest.”

Many protesters who remained in early July were milling around a small tent encampment on a lawn at Seattle Central College, some with rifles slung over their shoulders. The smell of weed drifted through. The streets were full of moving trucks.

The crowds were gone, but every now and then, the demonstrators gave speeches about the importance of disbanding the police. Sometimes the activists spoke about what went wrong with the occupation. One young woman on a bullhorn argued to passers-by that the police left too quickly and that a sustainable police-free region would have to be built more slowly.

These days, storefronts in the neighborhood remain boarded up, covered in Black Lives Matter signs and graffiti. Demonstrators still hold evening protests, albeit smaller and quieter than before. But the businesses remain on edge.

“This is an ongoing crisis,” Mr. Donner said on Tuesday. “Protesters are apparently staying until they get some of what they want. No one knows what level of city cooperation will be enough for them.”

But the area is slowly going back to its old normal. The park and playing fields have been cleared, and police officers have returned to the streets. An apartment building that opened earlier this summer is finally attracting prospective tenants.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Durkan did not comment on the lawsuit but acknowledged frustrations from small businesses.

“Many who live and work in Capitol Hill and other parts of the city continue to witness daily protests that are rightly demanding an end to systemic racism,” she wrote. “In some circumstances, businesses and residents have faced property destruction in the last two months.”

She encouraged the businesses to file claims.

Take a Breath

I have said repeatedly you don’t know me until you know me and then let me know what you think, be honest, be frank and be kind.  Any criticism should come from love and from that comes growth but not in America we just shame, blame, scold and walk away. Working out great.

As I wrote about the recent comments from two women about what it is like to be a face of color be in business or education there is a long road ahead for equity and parity both in gender and race.  But again there is a massive rainbow here and we have not done well finding the pot of gold for any of those who travel along it.  Dorothy may have clicked her heels three times to find her home over the rainbow but for the woman who played her she never made it home in one piece, we do that, kill or be killed; Survival of the fittest, only the strongest survive.  We get it, we really do.

When I gave a friend, who is black, Radley Balko’s articles and books on Warrior Cops and the racism endemic in the criminal justice system he was amazed.  He had no idea that over 1,000 people a year die at the hands of police, George Floyd only one of them.  His Mother is a 911 Operator and she has never discussed her job or her role in how these calls literally are the life and death of many who are the first responders on the other end. But you are right, I am White and should not teach anyone of any color other than my own about my own experience in said system, nor hear of others and in turn share that in any way that is to inform, educate and bring change.  Thank you.  And guess what? I won’t.  I have finally realized sitting in house arrest about how I mocked Nashville and its racism and poverty and values that seemed resistant to growth, to change, to be less religious and more open and then I sat down and realized how Seattle, the good white liberal town was not much different, white privilege is well for the privileged. And by that we mean never had a bad thing ever happen to them ever.  Not all white people are so fortunate but our color at times makes us invisible to those in power until they choose to see it.   And we can choose at any time to see color and just add that to the list of things we note and then we can choose to know them. Fuck that its hard I just want to be with the people who get me and my people. Thanks I am stupid and privileged. Oh how fragile I am!!

In public education, most of the schools are run by faces of color, many Teachers are faces of color, much of the staff are also very much a reflection of the school’s population.  And this varies by district and in each district each neighborhood they too add  color or lack thereof but that is about segregation in another way, economic and the taxes and costs of home that legally separate the have’s from the have nots.  To overcome that since Seattle had ended Affirmative Action which required quotas and numbers, we created a false culture of education. There were/are or have been schools that existed to reach any face and all types of learners, schools that were African American Academy’s, Interagency’ Academy’s and their focus on the kids who needed alternative support, the American Indian Academy, the Seahawks Academy, the Center School, the varying high schools with Academic Achievement, International Baccalaureate Programs, the World School of multicultural languages, and on and on with all kinds of methods and concepts to show how progressive, liberal and good they were.  They have the same in Nashville and they are all dumpsters, and the kids garbage bags. Some are better quality and are compostable and recyclable and are largely white with high achieving faces of color to round out the program. The focus on Sports and the never ending bullshit that makes it the leveler of equality by enabling boys to believe that sports will open the door to a better life.  Yes, been to an NFL Draft?  It is a slave auction just without whips.  There are no professions apparently open to faces of color other than entertainment and athletics, good to know says, Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

We have good Teachers, we have bad. We have good Administrators, we have bad, but we have one thing in common, nothing is good about public education as it stands today. Sorry but they are all just shitty as hell, from the politics to the course work they are horrific.   I have had conversations with a young black girl who works in my coffee shop, she is lovely. She never heard of the 4 Girls in the Church of Alabama or of Emmett Till. So much for Jersey City schools being quality that answered all I need to know before I ever set foot in one.

  The endless amount of faces of color who have seemingly never heard of many things until pop culture embraces it never ceases to amaze me. And much of that goes for other faces less of color. We live a me me world.    It is as if intellectual curiousity is for freaks of nature who don’t deserve respect or attention and that is when I realized why people hate me.  In the last 10 years in schools I have been accused of slapping a kid because he was black, he later retracted it but after putting me through hell and massive legal bills and I am not alone.  I have been called racist more times than I can count, had money stolen, been verbally abused and had shit thrown out me while kids laughed.  And like a true Masochist I went back for no reason other than I could and thought it will be different next time.  I recall when a Principal came in and said I was reading racist material to a class, it was an editorial by Bob Herbert in the New York Times and the importance of children of color getting into higher education; he has written a book on the subject, and that when I showed him both the article and the photo of Mr. Herbert it was snatched from my hand and never heard about it again. This a class that the former Teacher had quit, the long term sub also quit as the children were having sex in the classroom. Yes, in the classroom; It was a portable and there was a room divider and they would go behind that and have sex.  They were 7th graders.  And there were more stories like this in Seattle, the circle jerk film that circulated in another middle school leading the Police to come and the boys returning to class.  The boys in a high school raping a special needs girl in a toilet, the boy in a high achieving high school raping a student on a field trip and having done it another middle school the year before.  Do I need to add that all of these are children of color and yet you keep hoping and trying that maybe one voice will reach them.  Apparently it was because none did? No face of color seemingly did either and they were there, so explain that to me,  I can wait.

Now I have many horror stories about other kids not black but largely they share one thing in common, they are poor, they are angry and they are in public schools.

The ending of public schools began when the President Voodoo Reagan began to cut funding in his smaller Government concept that has dominated the GOP playbook for decades, it masks classism, racism, arrogance, ignorance and general disregard for the concept of Democracy.  It is not just fueled in racism but it is the biggest burner in the stove.  So when I read books calling all white people fragile and therefore racist I want to say, “You don’t know me and you generalize, you know like if I said all Black kids are crazy.”  Given my experience I could say it’s valid,  but you see I actually vest and talk and try to connect and try to learn and teach simultaneously.  So when you hear the phrase, “I can’t breathe.” Know that many before and after have said the same, at the hands of law enforcement. This white teacher reads and actually wants this to stop and has for years.  I have seen the affects of the broken families, the crime, the pain on the faces of children and I want that to stop too.  But instead I will stop teaching, I will do something white, whatever the fuck that is.

Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe.’
The deaths of Eric Garner in New York and George Floyd in Minnesota created national outrage over the use of deadly police restraints. There were many others you didn’t hear about.

By Mike Baker, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Manny Fernandez and Michael LaForgia
The New York Times
June 29, 2020

As the sun began to rise on a sweltering summer morning in Las Vegas last year, a police officer spotted Byron Williams bicycling along a road west of downtown.

The bike did not have a light on it, so officers flipped on their siren and shouted for him to stop. Mr. Williams fled through a vacant lot and over a wall before complying with orders to drop face down in the dirt, where officers used their hands and knees to pin him down. “I can’t breathe,” he gasped. He repeated it 17 times before he later lapsed into unconsciousness and died.

Eric Garner, another black man, had said the same three anguished words in 2014 after a police officer who had stopped him for selling untaxed cigarettes held him in a chokehold on a New York sidewalk. “I can’t breathe,” George Floyd pleaded in May, appealing to the Minneapolis police officer who responded to reports of a phony $20 bill and planted a knee in the back of his neck until his life had slipped away.

Mr. Floyd’s dying words have prompted a national outcry over law enforcement’s deadly toll on African-American people, and they have united much of the country in a sense of outrage that a police officer would not heed a man’s appeal for something as basic as air.

But while the cases of Mr. Garner and Mr. Floyd shocked the nation, dozens of other incidents with a remarkable common denominator have gone widely unacknowledged. Over the past decade, The New York Times found, at least 70 people have died in law enforcement custody after saying the same words — “I can’t breathe.” The dead ranged in age from 19 to 65. The majority of them had been stopped or held over nonviolent infractions, 911 calls about suspicious behavior, or concerns about their mental health. More than half were black.

Dozens of videos, court documents, autopsies and police reports reviewed in these cases — involving a range of people who died in confrontations with officers on the street, in local jails or in their homes — show a pattern of aggressive tactics that ignored prevailing safety precautions while embracing dubious science that suggested that people pleading for air do not need urgent intervention.

In some of the “I can’t breathe” cases, officers restrained detainees by the neck, hogtied them, Tased them multiple times or covered their heads with mesh hoods designed to prevent spitting or biting. Most frequently, officers pushed them face down on the ground and held them prone with their body weight.

Not all of the cases involved police restraints. Some were deaths that occurred after detainees’ protests that they could not breathe — perhaps because of a medical problem or drug intoxication — were discounted or ignored. Some people pleaded for hours for help before they died.

Among those who died after declaring “I can’t breathe” were a chemical engineer in Mississippi, a former real estate agent in California, a meat salesman in Florida and a drummer at a church in Washington State. One was an active-duty soldier who had survived two tours in Iraq. One was a registered nurse. One was a doctor.

In nearly half of the cases The Times reviewed, the people who died after being restrained, including Mr. Williams, were already at risk as a result of drug intoxication. Others were having a mental health episode or medical issues such as pneumonia or heart failure. Some of them presented a significant challenge to officers, fleeing or fighting.

Departments across the United States have banned some of the most dangerous restraint techniques, such as hogtying, and restricted the use of others, including chokeholds, to only the most extreme circumstances — those moments when officers are in fear for their lives. They have for years warned officers about the risks of moves such as facedown compression holds. But the restraints continue to be used as a result of poor training, gaps in policies or the reality that officers sometimes struggle with people who fight hard and threaten to overpower them.

Many of the cases suggest a widespread belief that persists in departments across the country that a person being detained who says “I can’t breathe” is lying or exaggerating, even if multiple officers are using pressure to restrain the person. Police officers, who for generations have been taught that a person who can talk can also breathe, regularly cited that bit of conventional wisdom to dismiss complaints of arrestees who were dying in front of them, records and interviews show.

That dubious claim was photocopied and posted on a bulletin board at the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton, Ohio, in 2018. “If you can talk then you obviously can [expletive] breathe,” the sign said.

Federal officials have long warned about factors that can cause suffocations in custody, and for the past five years, a federal law has required local police agencies to report all in-custody deaths to the Justice Department or face the loss of federal law enforcement funding.

But the Justice Department, under both President Barack Obama and President Trump, has been slow to enforce the law, the agency’s inspector general found in a 2018 report. Though there has been only scattershot reporting by departments, not a single dollar has been withheld.

Autopsies have repeatedly identified links between the actions of officers and the deaths of detainees who struggled for air, even when other medical issues such as heart disease and drug use were contributing or primary factors. But government investigations often found that the detainees were acting erratically or aggressively and that the officers were therefore justified in their actions.

Only a small fraction of officers have faced criminal charges, and almost none have been convicted.

In the case of Mr. Williams in Las Vegas last year, Police Department investigators determined that the officers did not violate the law. But the death triggered immediate changes, said Lt. Erik Lloyd of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s force investigations team.

Officers are not medical doctors and may believe that someone who says “I can’t breathe” may be trying to escape, he said.

To alleviate potential dangers, officers are told now to promptly get detainees off their stomachs and onto their sides — or up to a sitting or standing position. They are also told to call for medical help if someone has distressed breathing.

“Since the death of Mr. Williams, our department has been extremely aware of someone saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’” Lieutenant Lloyd said. “We have changed the attitude of patrol officers.”

For the relatives of many of the men and women who died under similar circumstances in police custody, watching the video of Mr. Floyd’s arrest in Minneapolis has felt painfully familiar. Silvia Soto’s husband, Marshall Miles, died in 2018 in Sacramento County, Calif., after being pinned down by sheriff’s deputies at a jail. She said she had been feeling both heartbroken and comforted amid the national outrage.

“I don’t feel alone anymore,” Ms. Soto said.
‘You want to kill me?’

While there have been dozens of “I can’t breathe” deaths over the past decade, the emergence of body cameras and surveillance footage has eliminated the invisibility that once shrouded many of these deaths.

Videos from Mr. Garner’s death galvanized changes in neck restraint policies around the country, but problematic techniques for restraining people did not go away. In the six years since then, more than 40 people have died after warning, “I can’t breathe.”

Less than three months after Mr. Garner died, police officers went out to a tidy stucco home near Glendale, Ariz., to investigate a report of a couple arguing.

The officers found Balantine Mbegbu seated in a leather chair with his dinner. Both Mr. Mbegbu and his wife assured them that no argument had taken place. According to police reports, Mr. Mbegbu became indignant when they refused to leave.

“Why are you guys here?” he said, his voice rising. “You want to kill me?”

When he tried to stand, the officers slammed him to the floor, punched him in the head and shot him with a Taser. With Mr. Mbegbu on his stomach, officers put knees on his back and neck.

As his wife, Ngozi Mbegbu, watched them pile on top of her husband, she heard him say, “I can’t breathe. I’m dying,” according to a sworn statement she made. Records show he vomited, began foaming at the mouth, stopped breathing and was pronounced dead.

The county prosecutor’s office determined that “the officers did not commit any act that warrants criminal prosecution.”

Cases in which detainees protested that they could not breathe, before dying, continued to occur. Their words could be heard on audio or video recordings, or were otherwise documented in official witness statements or reports.

In 2015, Calvon Reid died in Coconut Creek, Fla., after officers fired 10 shots at him with a Taser.

In 2016, Fermin Vincent Valenzuela was asphyxiated after police officers in Anaheim, Calif., put him in a neck hold while trying to arrest him. His family won a $13 million jury verdict.

In 2017, Hector Arreola died in Columbus, Ga., after officers forced him to the ground, cuffed his hands behind him and leaned on his back, with one officer brushing off his complaints: “He’s fine,” he said.

In 2018, Cristobal Solano was arrested in Tustin, Calif., and then died after at least seven deputies worked together to subdue him on the floor of a holding cell, some with their knees on his back.

In 2019, Vicente Villela died in an Albuquerque jail after telling guards who were holding him down with their knees that he could not breathe. “Right, because they’re having to hold you down,” one of the guards said.

Then last week, the Police Department in Tucson, Ariz., released video of an encounter on April 21 with Carlos Ingram Lopez, who was naked and behaving erratically when officers forced him to lie face down on the floor of a garage with his hands handcuffed behind his back. Part of the time, Mr. Lopez’s head was covered with a blanket and a hood. He was held down for 12 minutes, crying for air, for water and for his grandmother. Then he, too, died.
‘If you can talk you can breathe’

One of the reasons such cases keep occurring may be the persistent belief on the part of police officers that a detainee who is complaining that he cannot breathe is breathing enough to talk.

Edward Flynn, the former police chief in Milwaukee, said in a deposition in 2014 that this idea was once part of training for officers there and persisted as a “common understanding” even if it was wrong. Other departments have told their officers the same thing, records show, and the notion shows up often in interactions with detainees.

“If you’re talking, you’re breathing — I don’t want to hear it,” a sheriff’s deputy told Willie Ray Banks, who was struggling for air after officers in Granite Shoals, Texas, restrained and Tased him in 2011.

But the medical facts are more complicated. While it may technically be true that someone speaking is passing air through the windpipe, Dr. Carl Wigren, an independent pathologist, said that even someone able to mutter a phrase such as “I can’t breathe” may not be able to take the full breaths needed to take in sufficient oxygen to maintain life.

The “if you can talk” notion has persisted even in places like the jail in Montgomery County, Ohio, which had to pay a $3.5 million settlement last year in connection with the 2012 death of an inmate named Robert Richardson, who had been jailed for failing to show up for a child support hearing.

A fellow inmate called for help after Mr. Richardson, 28, had what was described as a possible seizure. Sheriff’s deputies cuffed his hands behind his back and restrained him face down on the floor, pushing on his back and shoulders, and eventually on his head and neck, according to court documents.

Witnesses said Mr. Richardson repeatedly told deputies he could not breathe, until, after 22 minutes, he stopped moving. He was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

It was that jail facility where, six years later, the photocopied sign about being able to breathe if you could talk was posted on the bulletin board.
‘We literally had to sit there and watch my brother die’

Police officers often failed to seek prompt medical attention when a detainee expressed problems breathing, and that has proved to be a factor in several deaths. In some of these cases, the person in custody had recently been Tased or restrained, but other times they were suffering from acute disorders, such as lung infections, and languished for hours. Often, this appeared to be because officers did not take the detainees’ claims seriously.

When 40-year-old Rodney Brown told police officers in Cleveland he could not breathe after being Tased multiple times during a struggle in 2010, one of them responded: “So? Who gives a [expletive]?”

One of the police officers radioed for paramedics but later said he did so only because it was a required procedure when someone had been Tased; he did not convey that Mr. Brown had claimed he could not breathe.

A lawyer for the city in that case told a panel of judges that the officers did not have the medical expertise to know when someone was in a medical crisis or simply exhausted from a vigorous fight, according to an audio recording.

Another troubling case occurred in March 2019 when the police in Montebello, Calif., were called to the home of David Minassian, 39, a former vice president at a property management firm who had suffered a heroin overdose.

His older sister, Maro Minassian, a certified emergency medical technician, had given her brother a dose of naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of opiate overdoses. He jolted awake but still appeared to have fluid in his lungs, and she dialed 911, anxious to get him to a hospital.

But it was the police, not paramedics, who arrived next. Ms. Minassian said three Montebello officers entered her family’s home as her brother was flailing on the floor.

At least two of the officers slammed him to the ground and put their knees into his back as they tried to cuff him, Ms. Minassian said, and remained on top of him until he stopped talking. “I told them, ‘My brother can’t breathe,’” Ms. Minassian said through tears. “We literally had to sit there and watch my brother die.”
‘Please take the mask off’

Despite years of concerns about some of the potentially dangerous techniques used to subdue people in custody, law enforcement agents have continued to use them.

In the 2018 case involving Ms. Soto’s husband, Marshall Miles, officers struggled to get him into jail after arresting him on suspicion of vandalism and public intoxication.

The Sheriff’s Department had produced training materials as early as 2004 warning about the dangers of suffocation when people were restrained face down or hogtied with their hands and feet linked behind their backs.

But those warnings apparently went unheeded. Mr. Miles, 36, was hogtied while being brought in by the California Highway Patrol, even though the Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, no longer allowed the restraint. Deputies removed him from the hogtie but held him face down for more than 15 minutes as he repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.” They then carried him handcuffed and shackled to a cell, where at least three deputies put their weight on his facedown body while he groaned ever more faintly. About two minutes later, he fell silent and then stopped breathing, according to video of the death.

An autopsy concluded that he died from a combination of physical exertion, mixed drug intoxication and restraint by law enforcement. Hogtie restraints were used in four other deaths over the past decade that were examined by The Times.

Another technique used in a series of cases with fatal outcomes, including at least two this year, has been the use of hoods or masks designed to prevent people from spitting on or biting officers. Law enforcement agencies around the world have grappled with whether to use them to protect officers despite concerns about whether the masks are safe.

Video from 2012 shows how one of the masks was used on James W. Brown, an Army sergeant stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso who had a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sergeant Brown, 26, was supposed to serve a two-day sentence at the county jail for a drunken-driving conviction, but officials said he became aggressive after learning he would be jailed longer.

With his hands cuffed behind him, Sergeant Brown can be seen in a video seated in a chair, surrounded by guards in riot gear holding him down. Deputies had placed a mesh-style mask over the lower half of his face, and he wore it for more than five minutes before telling the guards and a medical worker that he could not breathe.

“Please take the mask off,” Sergeant Brown pleads. “I cannot breathe. Please!”

He passed out shortly afterward, and he was pronounced dead the next day. A county autopsy ruled that his death was caused by a sickle-cell crisis — natural causes — but a forensic pathologist later hired by the county concluded that his blood condition had been exacerbated by the restraint procedures.

Sergeant Brown’s relatives sued El Paso County, the jail and 10 officers for wrongful death and other claims. The case was later settled.

“I feel like they treated him like he was less than an animal,” said Sergeant Brown’s mother, Dinetta Scott. “Who treats somebody like that?”

April’s Fools

Well appropriately it is April Fools.

What I find fascinating is that this is not Huntsville Alabama, where one would suspect and expect this kind of thing, but it is in the City by the bay. I lived in San Francisco for a decade, in the past decade the twitterfication of the City has allowed and enabled the once liberal sanctuary to turn back the blankets on the homeless that permeate the streets and in turn open a billy club to what is frankly common police behavior.

The “city” has had Police shootings which I wrote about and how that gentrification of once largely poor and/or minority neighborhoods contributed to some of the other violence and aggression as a means of handling the increasing chasm of income inequity. There have been BART shootings, beatings, and of course the infamous case of the mentally ill illegal immigrant and the status of the City being a sanctuary one that has enabled the affixing of labels as immigrants are criminals.

So do you honestly expect law enforcement to be a reflection of the legacy of San Francisco and their free love or one that is like all the rest in the United States in our increasingly angry and divisive attitude towards people who are not white and/or rich?

 Five San Francisco officers found exchanging racist, homophobic texts
 Reuters April 1 2016
 Jim Christie

The original charges were shocking enough: six San Francisco police officers were accused of stealing from suspects living in seedy residential hotels. Then federal prosecutors released racist, homophobic and ethnically insensitive email and text messages exchanged among more than a dozen officers, prompting the San Francisco district attorney to launch a wide-ranging investigation of the police department while considering dismissing up to 3,000 criminal cases involving the officers. The original charges were shocking enough: six San Francisco police officers were accused of stealing from suspects living in seedy residential hotels.

Then federal prosecutors released racist, homophobic and ethnically insensitive email and text messages exchanged among more than a dozen officers, prompting the San Francisco district attorney to launch a wide-ranging investigation of the police department while considering dismissing up to 3,000 criminal cases involving the officers. Five more San Francisco police officers have been found to be exchanging racist and homophobic text messages with one another, forcing a review of hundreds of criminal cases that may be compromised by their bias, the city’s chief prosecutor said on Thursday. The disclosure by District Attorney George Gascon came a year after 14 other members of the San Francisco Police Department were caught up in a similar texting scandal.

The latest inquiry surfaced amid heightened scrutiny of police encounters with members of minority groups following numerous high-profile killings of unarmed black people by police across the United States since mid-2014. Gascon said he recommended in a letter on Wednesday to city Police Chief Gregory Suhr that the five newly implicated officers be assigned to desk duty to avoid adding to the potential caseloads tainted by personal bias exposed in their text messages.

 The dozens of racist and anti-gay texts were unearthed in a review of 5,000 pages of material turned over by police in an unrelated investigation, Gascon said in a telephone interview. With some 20,000 additional pages still to be examined, Gascon said more officers may be implicated.

 “While the majority of San Francisco Police Department officers are hardworking men and women who serve with distinction, we cannot have this kind of conduct within the criminal justice system,” he said. Prosecutors have a duty to bring the bigoted texts to the attention of defense lawyers whose clients were charged in cases that were handled by the five officers and where discrimination on the basis of race or sexual orientation could be at issue, Gascon said.

 “They provide evidence of racial bias, which is impeachable evidence to the prosecution,” he added. The president of the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association union, Martin Halloran, condemned “the appalling racist behavior committed by a handful of officers,” in a statement quoted by news media.

The conduct in question ran from 2014 to late 2015, overlapping with the time frame of last year’s police texting scandal, although Gascon said there was no apparent connection between the two. The police department sought to fire seven of the original group of 14 officers, but a judge ruled against the dismissals, citing the statute of limitations.

 The previous scandal resulted in a review of 4,000 cases, including 1,600 in which charges were brought, with 13 dismissals so far, city prosecutors said. (Reporting by Jim Christie in San Francisco; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Peter Cooney)

Fish Stinks After 3 Days

I read the article on the murder at Fishkill Prison yesterday after reading more articles on Cop abuse, trials and chargers and videos that dominate the news.

There is this about the San Francisco cops making sure the Twitter literati are not bothered by the Tenderloin bums,

The denial of bail of an officer charged with murder.

Trial set for Ohio traffic stop gone wrong.

The charges filed in a Taser death

And each day the news is filled with stories about how another individual is abused at the hands of our criminal justice system.

I am tired of reading about it and want to know what to do about it. So this morning I read this by the writer of the Fishkill piece and his AMA at Reddit and thought it was an interesting reflection and discussion. We may be moving past the obsession with Law and Order fixation that dominates one of the oldest social psychology foundations of Kohlberg Theory of Moral Development where punishment is retribution. Some old theories still apply and some need to be updated. Clearly we might be moving up to stage 5. For those curious here is the Kohlberg’s theory.

And that also explains why many of those who partake in Reddit dialogs are firmly in the Good Boy/Bad boy phase as that is the average level of maturity of the Reddit participant but it was good to know that many more had risen above that and want to do something. We need to.

Reporter Joins Reddit Conversation on Prison Beating
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
AUG. 20, 2015

The article Michael Winerip and I wrote this week about the death of an inmate at Fishkill Correctional Facility had a huge following on social media. For a while on Tuesday it was the top item on the Reddit home page, which I’m told is a very big deal. It was another indication of how closely people pay attention to criminal justice issues these days.

On Reddit, where an initial post about the article received over 2,000 comments, I was impressed by how nuanced and thoughtful many of the responses were. Some expressed outrage, while others suggested that the abuse we documented was, and should be, part of the prison experience.

One commenter wrote: “People need to ask what they want out of prison system. I say the question should be how to maximize rehabilitation and maximize the number of productive citizens that come out. Not how can I get revenge on people.”

Several commenters identified themselves as former inmates.

“I recently did a year in prison in GA and this kind of thing happens a lot. They would routinely pick out a person to beat up during intake to make an example of.”

Other commenters said they worked as correction officers:

“As a CA corrections officer for 17 years, yes this is way too much excessive force (“guards” LMFAO!!), and I hope that the justice system gives them true judgment, but not all officers are knuckle draggers … a lot of you have never set foot inside a prison or jail and have never experienced the dangers we face every day.”

I pressed this commenter for more information about the job.

“I currently work in a Mental Health housing unit with 150 inmates that all have mental issues … yes I am more than qualified (17 years all with mental health) to deal with a inmate dealing with a mental breakdown if that you want to call it … I have used verbal commands and persuasion to talk inmates down and used only enough force to gain compliance of a lawful order to submit to handcuffs … I have been assaulted about 25 times because an inmate just was not going to comply … period … broken bones and sprains.”

On Wednesday, I held a Reddit AMA, answering questions about our reporting and issues of crime and punishment in general. I was asked about my thoughts on the death penalty and mandatory minimum sentences. I explained how we reported the story and what challenges we faced.

Many wondered what could be done to draw more attention to the problems in the country’s prisons, though had trouble coming up with ideas for solutions.

“In America, it’s virtually impossible to get voters at-large to sympathize with prisoners, one commenter said. ”To large chunks of the population, once you run into trouble with the law, you’re no longer worthy of human dignity, and voters would rather not worry about you — out of sight, out of mind.”

I’m Mad

I have nothing to add here only to say that once again mental illness, madness and danger to others is not a simple equation.  At times we say he’s crazy and one must be to get a gun and go into a church, sit there for an hour while a prayer group is meeting and then open fire on them, killing 9 people.  Or getting a gun after months of planning and shooting a school full of children.  Or getting in a car and driving to public places and gunning people down at work or on the road.  That is a special kind of madness that is about guns and gun control.

And then there are these mentally ill, unbalanced individuals who haven’t taken meds, been properly diagnosed or gotten the care they need. Families are frightened and they instinctively call the police.  They are clearly the wrong people to call as their cure for madness is the final one.

Methods That Police Use on the Mentally Ill Are Madness

Why do so many American cops believe that shooting a schizophrenic man dead for failing to drop a screwdriver is an acceptable outcome?

Conor Friedersdorf
Mar 25 2015, 7:32 AM

When This American Life dedicated two episodes to law enforcement in the United States, they titled them, “Cops See It Differently.” Citing examples like the NYPD killing of Eric Garner, which gave rise to the “I can’t breath” protests, the show illustrated how police and non-uniformed citizens assessing the same incidents would draw wildly different conclusions even after watching video footage. Last year, I observed the same phenomenon when St. Louis, Missouri, police officers shot and killed Kajieme Powell in another videotaped encounter. Many cops saw a guy with a knife who didn’t drop it and a justified use of lethal force. Critics pointed out that there was never an attempt to deescalate the situation. A similar disconnect followed the Cleveland police killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

And this week, newly released video footage is giving Americans yet another glimpse at how police are trained, their mindset, and how the results can be lethal. The killing happened last year in Dallas, Texas. The mother of Jason Harrison, a black man with schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, called police to say that he was off his meds. She wanted help getting him to the hospital—something she’d received before without incident—and requested cops trained to handle the mentally ill.

What happened next is graphic and upsetting to watch.

Within seconds of the door being opened, the two police officers saw that Harrison was fumbling with a screwdriver. They began shouting at him to drop it and quickly shot him five times. The moment just prior to the shooting is captured incompletely in the body cam footage. In conflicting reports each officer said that Harrison lunged at the other, according to CNN. An attorney hired to represent Harrison’s family says Jason posed no threat and argues that had he really lunged, his body would’ve filled the lens of the officer’s body cam before he was shot.

As this story makes the rounds at various news outlets the comments sections have functioned like a microcosm of the police/policed disconnect. Take the discussion at Fusion. Various commenters argued that the police officers overreacted, wondered why they didn’t use a taser or pepper spray instead of bullets, and otherwise questioned their judgment. “Why can a cop never back up and talk someone down?” Christopher Street asked. “Is it a concern that this will be perceived as a weakness? That’s actually a question, not a criticism. Why is force always the first instinct? Didn’t this escalate way too quickly? All it took was 20 seconds from the door opening. And then the lack of urgency after the shots, yelling at a dying/dead man to drop a screw driver he obviously wasn’t going to use.”

In a series of rebuttals, a police officer from another state, Jake Rouse, articulated some common law-enforcement perspectives. Here are several of his arguments:

•”The taser is not always effective. It is very common for it not to stop a person. The cops were within 5 feet of a subject holding a dangerous instrument who just so happened to be progressing toward them in an aggressive manor [sic]. Try this exercise. Get a friend to stand even 20ft from you. Have him run at you and see how quickly you think you could change from taser to gun if it malfunctioned without getting stabbed in the face. It’s easy to judge from the sidelines when you have minutes to critique a decision…”

•”Any person who says if a person ran at them with a screwdriver wouldn’t be scared is a liar. In the situation he was in I don’t see a way around deadly force.”

•”Honestly I can’t say what I would have done. Neither can anyone else. Until you are in the shoes of that officer you can’t say what you would have done. I’ve been in bad situations and know what it’s like to think about your wife and child and wonder if another man will take care of them like you do. I can honestly say that if you put me in a spot where I have to choose my life or yours I will spend my last breath and my last round trying to stay alive… I believe that officer thought that he had no other choice.”

•”God knows we make mistakes because we are people too. That officer probably cried himself to sleep that night. We have hearts just like everyone else. We just act different because we have to put our fear, personal feelings, beliefs, and often our lives aside to do what we have to only to be judged and torn apart by millions who will never know what it’s like to wear the badge.”

This defense is unpersuasive insofar as it narrows the analytic focus to the moment when the police officers pulled their triggers. Even if we give the officers the benefit of the doubt and assume that Harrison did lunge at them with the screwdriver, it seems to me that they made significant errors before and after that moment.

When they first saw Harrison fiddling with the screwdriver in a non-menacing way, why did they escalate the situation by shouting at the mentally ill man? They could have immediately backed up, giving themselves the time and space to try to deescalate. Why did they stand their ground instead, yelling with guns drawn? And after they shot Harrison five times, so that he lay face down on the ground bleeding and either dead or unconscious, why did they keep shouting at him to drop the screwdriver, as if he still posed a threat, rather than trying to save his life?

Understandably, the police officers involved aren’t talking to the media. We don’t know how they would answer these questions. Perhaps after looking at the video they are as convinced as you or me that they should have handled the situation better or that they ought to have been trained and acculturated to react differently.

But Jake Rouse, the policeman defending them in Facebook comments, goes on to express a more troubling attitude that I’ve seen elsewhere in law enforcement circles. This is the exchange that made me glad that he isn’t a police officer in my city:

With the caveat that not all police officers think this way, Clint Nelissen is absolutely right—and Jake Rouse has a factually inaccurate understanding of the risks that he faces. Jobs where Americans get killed at a much higher rate than police officers include loggers, fishermen, aircraft pilots, roofers, steel workers, refuse collectors, power-line workers, truck drivers, agricultural workers, and construction laborers. That isn’t to dispute that being a cop is a dangerous job compared to many or that even one dead or seriously wounded police officer is too many. But the comparison to soldiers in Iraq is wrongheaded in almost every respect and particularly absurd in the context of a mentally ill man with a screwdriver.

Eugene Robinson once pointed out that U.S. police officers shoot somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people per year, whereas “there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada—a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms—police shootings average about a dozen a year.” He added that this is partly because the U.S. is a gun-filled culture, but that something else was going on too. Since every developed country has both mentally ill people and screwdrivers, this case is a data point in support of that contention. Compare the video from Dallas to London policemen going above and beyond what anyone could reasonably expect in an attempt to disarm a man with a machete:

I wouldn’t ask that much of our police. But I’d ask for much better than the outcome in the Harrison killing—whereas a retired trainer from the Dallas police department said the two officers did “an absolutely perfect job” and that he would show their video as an example of good tactics! Not all police think that way. And Dallas has a police chief who is highly regarded by reform advocates and some officers beneath him who consistently call for thoughtful improvements to policing.

In this case that leadership wasn’t enough.

“Was this illegal? is the wrong question,” Radley Balko writes. “The better question is, Was this an acceptable outcome? And if the answer is no, then the follow-up question is, What needs to change to stop this from happening again?” Among other things, he suggests that “there’s no reason use of force policy and deescalation training shouldn’t be among the issues discussed in a sheriff’s election.” In how many jurisdictions could that issue secure a majority’s support?

The time to find out has come.

There’s Video?!!

A Grand Jury watched a video of a NYPD Officer choke a man to death and said nothing improper about that. Since that time we have heard the Police Unions defend the Police Officer, the same unions being texted by a NYC Housing Officer as a man lay dying in a stairwell after the gun went off and ricocheted to kill another young man.  It was an accident! Like the choke hold that was ultimately the fault of the victim as he was fat, a black man whom they had encountered before, had asthma, was standing there, and had the audacity to sell “untaxed” cigarettes – that was the implication by Rand Paul that infers that if there were no government taxes on said cigarettes this would not be a crime.  Okay, then!

And then we have the video of a 12 year old boy being murdered in Cleveland.  Which when you read the DOJ report on that City well all I can say Cleveland, welcome to the club of police reform!  And they had been there before and well that clearly worked out or didn’t.   Frankly that is more telling than the hideous and disturbing revelations in that report that Cleveland had been cited and duly warned and did nothing.  Again if you think DOJ scolds will be enough then move to Seattle, New Orleans and let me know.  Nothing ventured means absolutely nothing gained at all.

So as the move to arm officers with cameras rather than military weapon grade arms means well that technically there will be video to either “confirm or deny” the Officer’s account of the proceedings.  This will of course fall under the Nixon, 12 minutes of tape disappearance category as vehicle cams do now. There is a debate if these will be the panacea or cause more problems well Britain has more cameras than cars, from the streets to the Police so ask yourself which do you prefer?

And even when video exists there can be loopholes as they say in the law as in this case with a Judge pleading to not charge her with a DUI.  Well its Texas. Excuse or explanation?  You decide.

Funny that video conveniently “disappeared” only to reappear after charges were not filed due to lack of evidence. Does this fall under the hideous ## category “criming while white” or better “criming while a municipal employee”

If this Judge, theoretically, ever has a case presented to her by this cop or Prosecutor, I am sure she would be utterly unbiased, fair and just.  And if you believe that you and Virginia believe in Santa.

Every week I read more and more Police, Judges, Firefighters and varying other municipal employees being exempted from the punishments that are deemed by law. The same punishments that for the great unwashed are never exempted.  

So if you think body cams, videos and other documented evidence will change this – ask Cleveland how that last DOJ reprimand worked for them?  Clearly change is not going to come from the top down but rather the bottom up.

Who is at the bottom? Well us.  How?  Simply put we need to organize, centralize and consolidate the varying groups and fractions that exist with the same purpose and intent.  Then elect and ensure leadership is established.  Educate and inform members.  Communicate.

The next is simply start with something easy.  Compel our elected officials to restore voting rights.  Use the votes that are earned to secure an elected officials positions. Votes are the equivalent of money to these people.  If they can get guaranteed votes and job security than the check proffered by private industry is superfluous.  Votes vs cash. They are all the same for numbers.

Next up – removing credit checks and of course ban the box.  Having troubled credit should not be a precursor to having a job, no one should need to have to tell anyone about any criminal past if they have served the time,  paid the fine, then the public shaming needs to end there.   And from there work on these organizations like credit agencies and others that randomly collect data, do so without impunity and in turn can provide outdated or misinformation about individuals that can lead to further problems.

Votes versus cash and then get ways to ensure that the electorate can get cash to in turn of course help those elected officials later.  Hey just like them you can promise to pass on the wealth but well shit happens.

Start small, work up.  Get them to do what needs to be done and while that is being done get these professional assholes that have spent way to much time in the halls of the Ivy league, Wall Street and in turn Government.

Time has come to remind oneself that this is our Government and our right to change that which is not by the people for the people.

Body Cameras Worn by Police Officers Are No ‘Safeguard of Truth,’ Experts Say

By VIVIAN YEE and KIRK JOHNSON
DEC. 6, 2014

Michael Brown’s family, on the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision, called for all police in the United States to wear body cameras.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in announcing that some of New York’s police officers would begin wearing them, said “body cameras are one of the ways to create a real sense of transparency and accountability.”

And on Monday, President Obama said he would request $75 million in federal funds to distribute 50,000 body cameras to police departments nationwide, saying they would improve police relations with the public.

But even as departments have started adopting the technology, questions remain about how much it can actually prevent violent encounters with citizens or clarify the boundaries of appropriate police response.

No consensus has emerged about when officers should turn on their cameras, which could leave departments open to accusations of selective recording. And tapes do not always lead to universally shared conclusions. The footage of Eric Garner’s death this year on Staten Island and of Rodney G. King’s beating by Los Angeles officers in 1991 ultimately revealed the shortcomings of video as evidence, even as they thrust violence against unarmed black men into the public eye.

So while video offers the illusion of absolute truth, police officials and legal experts say, it can just as often turn into a Rorschach test.

“We shouldn’t just think of video as the safeguard of truth — ‘Now we have incontrovertible evidence of the truth of what happened,’ ” said Mary D. Fan, a criminal law professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former federal prosecutor. “It isn’t necessarily the magic bullet, that now we know the truth and that we’ll all agree, we’ll see the same thing and agree on the same thing.”

Body cameras have already played a role in a few police disciplinary cases. In Phoenix, for example, an officer was fired after his camera captured him in repeated instances of profanity, verbal abuse and threats against civilians.

In other cases it was the absence of video that got the officer in trouble. An officer in Daytona Beach, Fla., was forced to resign after he was caught turning off his camera at critical moments. An Albuquerque officer who shot and killed a woman in April — and whose camera was off at the time — was fired on Monday after being investigated for not complying with department orders that required officers to record all interactions with civilians.

But even when video does exist, it is often not decisive. In the case of Mr. Garner, the Staten Island man who died in July after a police officer put him in a chokehold, a video of the encounter taken with a bystander’s cellphone and viewed millions of times was enough to stir visceral outrage — but not to secure an indictment.

“I don’t know what video they were looking at,” said Gwen Carr, Mr. Garner’s mother, referring to the grand jury that cleared the officer, on Wednesday. “Evidently it wasn’t the same one that the rest of the world was looking at.”

Many of those who poured out to demonstrate after the Garner decision thought, as Greg Jackson, 25, a law student from Oakland, Calif., did, that the video would make an indictment “a slam dunk.”

But slam dunks are rare.

In the beating of Mr. King, the Los Angeles officers involved were acquitted despite a video, shot by a nearby resident, showing them repeatedly kicking and hitting him with batons. In the case that inspired the film “Fruitvale Station,” the transit officer who fatally shot Oscar Grant III in Oakland, Calif., in 2009 was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, a lesser verdict than many protesters had called for after cellphone video of Mr. Grant’s death circulated online.

For one thing, jurors are often sympathetic to police arguments. The officers charged with beating Mr. King after a car chase argued that he was uncooperative and making movements they deemed potentially threatening. (Two of the four acquitted officers were later convicted in federal court of violating Mr. King’s civil rights.)
Photo
Mayor Bill de Blasio, holding a body camera, said the devices were one way for the police “to create a real sense of transparency.” Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

And police have some latitude to use force when making an arrest. Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who applied the chokehold to Eric Garner, narrated three videos taken of the encounter while testifying before the grand jury, saying he intended only to wrestle Mr. Garner to the ground.

Confronted with a video, the police usually “have a version that seeks to explain what you see, not necessarily to contradict what you see, but to explain it,” said John Burris, an Oakland-based civil rights lawyer who worked on the King and Grant cases.

The potential for officers to tailor their testimony to video evidence highlights an ongoing debate over the extent to which police should have control of or access to the videos taken by their body cameras.

The majority of police chiefs surveyed last year by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research and policy organization, said they supported allowing officers to review videos before making statements. In New York, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said officers will have the same opportunity.

Rules about when officers should activate their cameras vary. Some departments have no written policy, according to the Police Executive Research Forum’s report. A common approach requires recording when responding to 911 calls and any situation that might involve criminal enforcement. Officers have the discretion to turn their cameras off under most policies, the report said, but must explain their decision in writing or on camera.

The concern is that “they’ll be selective, that there will be Watergate gaps in the record,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “There have to be mechanisms to ensure against that.”

The New York Police Department has yet to finalize its policy, though officials said the current draft calls for officers to record in seven instances, which include arrests and any use of force. Interior patrols in housing projects were added to the list after an officer shot and killed an unarmed black man in a housing project stairwell in Brooklyn last month.

When it comes to enforcing the policies, “the implications for legitimacy are going to be pretty profound,” said Michael White, the author of a Department of Justice study on police body cameras. “If you have a police encounter that results in a citizen’s death, and it was supposed to be recorded and it wasn’t, you can imagine what the citizens’ reaction would be.”

Cities are moving forward with camera programs even in the absence of much evidence of their benefits: Only three studies have been conducted on them in the United States, Mr. White said, though they have been promising.

In Rialto, Calif.; Mesa, Ariz.; and Phoenix, the use of force and civilian complaints against officers when they wore cameras decreased. But Mr. White cautioned: “We have no idea what the dynamics are that are leading to those reductions.”

In the Garner case, Officer Pantaleo’s lawyer, Stuart London, said his client believed he was in the right, so it did not bother him that he was being filmed.

“I expect everything to be filmed,” he said the officer told the grand jury.

Public Shaming

I found this on American Prospect and I think it accurately explains the reasoning why there is no Justice nor peace when it comes to Police misconduct, malfeasance, murder and abuse.  They are not only often legally immune they are utterly encouraged to do so by a system willing to do what it takes to protect one from crime.

And that nothing will come of these protests but the public shaming and at least the anger does send a message. It will be ignored and of course many elected officials will clutch their pearls but that is all you will see. Since Ferguson began already the matter of Police and the grants to get excess military equipment has already been dropped.  Undoubtedly the move to provide body cameras will as well.

We pretend we have this crusade against crime. And we have supposedly a drop in crime.  Funny our Courts are still overwhelmed, fines and jail terms still fill the city coffers so what crime is this?  Crime that has little to do with society or community but with racial and other extraneous often moral components that society has deemed dangerous.  Pot smoking, drug using, drinking.   It is why you see misdemeanors as the majority of offenses prosecuted and  why they are turned into felonies after that magical number “3” again.

There is no substantiation, logic or research to back up why it became three strikes your out except its used in sports and that seemed to work.  If you think that is too far fetched then you have really never looked at some of the laws on the books in detail and the minutiae in which law makers go into to define and penalize individuals for some minor offense.  This is a great explanation of how this absurd concept came into being and where it began it is now looking toward ending.. irony isn’t it. We loathe California for it’s supposed liberal nature but there is nothing about this law that is liberal.

I read of today where our Court of Appeals overturned a Judge’s inane punishment that included standing on an intersection with a sign identifying who she was and what she did for 4 hours a day.  The Prosecutor even thought it was unnecessary after jail and fines but the Judge demanded it or she was to return to jail. The appellate court thought it was public shaming that was not a part of any legislative punitive punishment required by the offense;  yet I think that sex registry and in turn minor misdemeanors that can never be expunged from one’s record is the same thing – public shaming.

Shame we don’t have the stocks.

10 Ways the System Is Rigged Against Justice for People Wrongly Killed by Cops

Steven Rosenfeld

December 4, 2014

Why is the legal system so biased against holding abusive officers accountable?

A motorist, right, shows support for people marching during a protest after it was announced that the New York City police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner was not indicted, Wednesday, December 3, 2014, in New York. A grand jury cleared the New York City police officer Wednesday in the videotaped chokehold death of Garner, an unarmed black man, who had been stopped on suspicion of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, a lawyer for the victim’s family said.

As passions and protests flared on the streets of New York City following a Staten Island grand jury’s decision Wednesday not to indict the white NYC police officer whose chokehold and rough arrest killed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, a key question emerges: Why is the justice system so biased against holding abusive officers accountable?

The answer is both simple and complex. On the simple side, the system is substantially rigged in favor of letting officers off the hook for using excessive force in the line of duty—especially if they say they needed to protect themselves. On the complex side are how the various stages of the process tilt toward covering up what abusive police have done, as well as biases built into the legal system that shield police from prosecution.

The evidence presented to the Staten Island grand jury has not yet been released. It soon may be, but what is so disturbing is that the incident was caught on video, allowing the public to watch a police squad act with impunity as they arrested Garner for the minor crime of selling cigarettes.

Let’s walk though 10 ways the system is predisposed to let New York City Police Department Officer Daniel Panteleo off the hook, just as Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson police officer who shot and killed another unarmed black man, Michael Brown, last week escaped charges by a local grand jury.

1. There is a double standard for charging citizens and police. Everybody knows that police are authorized to use force in ways civilians are not. But if a civilian shoots a person outside his car window—as was the case in Ferguson—you can bet that shooter would be arrested, charged and have to defend his actions in court, David Rudovsky, a civil rights attorney and author on police misconduct told Vox.com. But that is not the case when cops are the shooters, he said, because “police are investigating their own.”

2. This inherent conflict of interest is all over the Garner case. If you watch the July 20 video by Tiasha Allen posted on the New York Times website, you see Garner after he is placed on the sidewalk, face-down, hands tied behind his back. A dozen NYPD officers mill around and act as if nothing is unusual or wrong. Forget that this video shows a dying man’s final hour, and that the NYC medical examiner concluded the chokehold and leaving him on the sidewalk face-down killed him. Look at the cops: This team of officers would include many likely witnesses called before the Staten Island grand jury. “It’s often the police department that is charged with investigating a particular incident, deciding who’s telling the truth, who used force first, and so on and so forth,” Rudovsky said, explaining the first of many conflicts of interest.

3. Then comes the legal framework that protects cops. This is how the law is layered to protect rogue cops. It starts at the very top, as The Nation pointed out, because the standard in a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that tried to restrict when cops could use deadly force has been twisted by police to defend each other. The court held that deadly force can be used when a police officer “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” In 1989, the Court tried to be more specific by saying there had to be an immediate threat to their safety or to others. “But in actual courtroom practice, ‘objective reasonableness’ [standard] has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers,” The Nation said, explaining the loophole. “American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.”

“How many more deaths and how many more riots will it take before the Supreme Court changes course?”

4. Recent Supreme Court decisions only make this worse. Recent rulings by the Roberts Court has tilted the balance further in favor of rogue cops. In one case where cops shot and killed a speeding driver and a passenger, they held that was not “excessive force” that would violated the victims’ constitutional rights. In another case, they sided with a prosecutor who withheld evidence and kept the wrong man on death row for 14 years. These were just some examples of recent cases cited by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, in a New York Times commentary. “How many more deaths and how many more riots will it take before the Supreme Court changes course?” he concluded, linking these cases to the Ferguson grand jury.

5. Rogue cops are more common than you think. If you look at the video of Eric Garner’s arrest and death on July 17, what you see are cops who consider their actions routine. If you look at the Twitter feed for the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, you will see a long line of misdeeds, some stupid and some savage. Police drive drunk and hit firetrucks and other cars; cops arrest teenage girls and force them to have sex; cops falsify search warrant requests. And many of these officers are not going to face criminal charges.

6. Cops cover up other cops’ misdeeds, including killings. The week, the Wall Street Journal had an investigative report that documented how hundreds of police killings are not reported to federal law enforcement agencies. This blue wall of impunity keeps a lid on police misconduct and prevents elected politicians from seeing the extent of the nationwide problem of excessive and abusive policing. It’s a complete double standard, Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University, told the Journal. “When cops are killed, there is a very careful account and there’s a national database,” he said. “Why not the other side of the ledger?”  

7. Then comes the grand jury process, with its biases.There’s the frequent lack of independent witnesses, and a wall of silence from officers who “don’t want to be a rat,” AtlantaBlackStar.com reported, quoting Tim Lynch of the National Police Misconduct Newsfeed Daily Recap. Prosecutors are reluctant to go after cops, because they need to work with the same departments for their other cases. And local jurors are reluctant to indict local officers from the departments they might be forced to call if they are in a jam.

8. The result is police indictments are very rare. It would be incorrect to say that rogue police officers never get indicted. But as the investigative website fivethirtyeight.com reported, “Allegations of police misconduct rarely result in charges.” Between 2005 and 2011, there were 664 gun-related officer arrests, but only 31 were for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter when a cop was on duty. That’s about four a year. In contrast, in 2010, about a quarter of the 6,613 misconduct complaints were for excessive force. The overall pattern here confirms that cops largely evade accountablity for abusive actions.

9. Ocasionally, a cop will face murder charges. It can happen, as was the case in the central Virginia town of Culpepper, where an officer lost it when he confronted a driver in a school parking lot, got into an argument, and shot and killed the woman, saying she closed her car window on his arm and started to drive away. In that case, the officer’s mother, who worked at the police department, tried to destroy evidence. A special grand jury met for a month before deciding to press charges. He was suspended, charged with murder, and jailed while awaiting trial. But this case is an exception, according to the statistics and analysis on fivethirtyeight.com.

10. The Eric Garner case is not closed, but the odds are long. On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York asked the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation into Garner’s death, saying the grand jury decision not to indict the NYPD officer who killed him was “shocking.” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced later in the day that the Department would do so, just as it has in Ferguson.

But with the entire incident filmed on video, allowing anyone to see what happened between the NYPD and Garner on July 17, it is impossible not to conclude that the justice system is institutionally biased in favor of abusive policing and officers using excessive and sometimes lethal force. Whether or not Garner’s killer will face any individual responsibility remains an open question. But as the public watches what unfolds in coming days in the case, you can be sure there will be little attention focused on reversing the institutional biases that protect rogue cops.

This article was orginally published by AlterNet. For more great reporting and analysis, subscribe here to AlterNet’s newslette

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Ghostbusters. Frankly they couldn’t be worse than the Police.

This week a local paper columnist wrote about his pursuit of thieves over his wife’s purse being snatched from his car and the lack of Police cooperation from the 911 call made to the subsequent conversations with Police after being utterly discouraged and in fact demeaned by the 911 operator.

Having actually listened to some 911 calls I was horrified at the level of incompetence and idiocy that I heard on their end.   You think they are capable and competent, well hope you never need to find out.

I have known two others with similar stories of finding men in their homes – inside their homes – stealing and right down to the chasing, showing the Police where they were and the subsequent disdain by 911 explains all you need to know about Seattle Police.  So you see why calling them here is a waste of time, not to mention their propensity for violence.

So this brings the question:  Why the fuck would you call the Police?

Here is another roundup of Police insanity.

 Police rape women that called to resolve Domestic call. (not the first one nor the last)

Police Charged with Assault of Teen 

Police kill mentally ill man in home while family watch  (again not the first time)

Police assaults handcuffed teen (again not the first)

I could go on but there are numerous sites that document the consistent abuse of citizens at the hands or should I say with or by the hands of the Police.

We have turned our nation into a Police State all with our consent, implied or otherwise.