( Tomdispatch.com) – “There must be some kind of way out of here…”

As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: “Stop Cop City.”

While the band played on, a strike force of Georgia state troopers assembled in the shadows. They were there to clear the way for the creation of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” a $90-million training ground for the future of urban warfare. It would destroy more than half of that urban forest. For years, the project had faced mounting local opposition and this festival was, in essence, a coming-out party for the movement to defend a priceless bit of urban green space from the bulldozer’s blade.

Now, accompanied by the dull hum of drones and the buzz of helicopters overhead, officers of the “peace” descended from all directions, their fingers on the triggers of their semi-automatics. The orders came down with the force of live rounds: “Get on the ground! Now!”

“I was playing ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ funnily enough,” remembers Suede Cassidy frontman Jeremiah Percival. “Around halfway through our set, they started arresting people… pointing AR-15s… traumatizing kids for nothing. It was very stormtrooper-esque. It’s a good reminder to know how fascism is in this country and how it’s very much alive.”

“It was after dark,” recalls Stop Cop City activist Priscilla Grim. “I was walking to see the concert. And I noticed that there was a drone tracking me. And the next thing I knew, men started chasing me, and I fell. They had me turn over on my stomach. And there was the red light of the gunsight to the right of my head. It was… frightening!”

Priscilla and 22 other protesters nabbed that night would go on to be charged with “domestic terrorism” — conduct allegedly “intended to intimidate the civilian population” or to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government of this state” — under a Georgia statute originally meant to deter would-be killers in the wake of the Charleston A.M.E. massacre. “I was completely shocked when I heard that I was being charged with domestic terrorism,” Priscilla told me. “For wearing black! In a forest! It’s absurd. It’s illegitimate. It’s an abuse… And as a survivor of 9/11, I am insulted that the state of Georgia thinks that they can do this.”

The Makings of an American Inquisition

Today, no fewer than 42 such cases are being prosecuted by Georgia’s attorney general. All 42 defendants stand accused of damaging property, not people. The only injuries that occurred were by police and correctional officers on the bodies of the accused. Some were then held for a month or more before being formally charged with a crime.

Georgia is hardly alone. The New York City Police Department recently attempted to charge multiple protesters with “terrorism” after they peacefully occupied a subway station to protest the choking to death of Jordan Neely, an unhoused New Yorker, by an ex-Marine. In an absurd turn of events, the charges were ultimately downgraded from “terrorism” to “criminal trespassing” before being dropped altogether last week.

Buy the Book

And across the country, such police work continues under the guise of counterterrorism. Since the George Floyd movement, it’s been possible to see the makings of a future American inquisition in which the machinery of state is increasingly weaponized against the body politic itself — especially against its most leftwing, most marginalized parts.

Though the fanatics of the far right have been responsible for the preponderance of deadly political violence in recent years, it’s the heretics of the left — antiracists and antifascists, environmentalists and anticapitalists, pro-choice feminists and LGBTQ+ liberationists — who have attracted the most attention from police, prosecutors, and inquisitorial politicians.

It is they who have been profiled as “domestic terrorists,” branded as “violent extremists,” and subjected to terrorism-based sentencing enhancements, often yielding harsher prison terms and crueler punishments than those for their right-wing counterparts. As a result of such disparities, hundreds of participants in the George Floyd protests remain caged in federal facilities to this day.

The Long, Hot Summer of 2020

On May 31, 2020, just days after George Floyd’s murder, President Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) all but declared war on the burgeoning racial-justice movement. Attorney General William P. Barr went before the press and promised to deploy federal forces to apprehend “radical agitators,” identify “criminal organizers and instigators,” and “coordinate” with “our state and local partners.”

“The rioting is domestic terrorism,” Barr went on to state, “and will be treated accordingly.”

Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Ken Cuccinelli had a nearly identical message for the media: “Cities across America burn at the hands of antifa and anarchists while many political leaders are refusing to call it what it is: domestic terrorism.” A DHS whistleblower later affirmed that Cuccinelli and others had specifically instructed him to play up “the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups” in his intelligence assessments — and downplay threats of terror from the far right.

And so began a long, hot summer of inquisition into, and counterinsurgency against, the Black Lives Matter movement. By the second week of June, more than 13,643 protest participants had been arrested by state and local authorities. Some, like a group of three teens in Oklahoma City, even faced charges of felony “terrorism” for alleged acts of property destruction.

By the time the protests were over, some 326 people had been apprehended by federal agents, including members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC). At least 54 U.S. Attorneys’ offices were involved, as were all 56 of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

In May 2023, new reporting on FBI activities would reveal that the agency had improperly run “batch queries” of foreign intelligence sources for information on 133 individuals, all of whom were arrested “in connection with civil unrest and protests” in 2020. They were looking for “counter-terrorism derogatory information on the arrestees.” According to recently declassified documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, they were also spying on American citizens without “any specific potential connections to terrorist-related activity.”

In 20 of the cases prosecuted at the federal level, there is evidence of direct involvement by FBI agents in the arrests themselves. And in two particularly egregious cases, U.S. Marshals and their deputies functionally acted as judges, juries, and executioners, with “Violent Offender Task Forces” fatally shooting two suspects — antifascist activist Michael Reinoehl in Washington and Black Lives Matter advocate Winston Smith in Minnesota — on sight.

Up until January 6, 2021, the supposed danger posed by left-wing “extremism” continued to be deemed greater than, or at least equal to, the threat of right-wing terrorism. No matter that the right had been responsible for the lion’s share of lethal incidents linked to extremism of any kind.

There were, of course, no terrorism bulletins released ahead of the events of January 6th. Nor would there be terrorism enhancements after the fact awaiting those who participated in the Capitol siege. Such charges were reserved for Americans of a different description.

A Bipartisan Inquisition

The inquisition did not end with Trump’s first term. For all the rhetoric about criminal justice reform — and for all the conspiracy theories claiming that the president had “quietly” pardoned thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2021 — Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has doubled down in a determined fashion on an inquisitorial strategy of counterinsurgency in the name of counterterrorism.

In the White House’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” released in June 2021, the administration pledged to “disrupt and deter those who launch… attacks in a misguided effort to force change in government policies that they view as unjust.” Subsequent documents, like last fall’s “Strategic Intelligence Assessment,” a joint product of the FBI and the DHS, confirmed what many in the Black Lives Matter movement already knew: that federal intelligence agencies had set their sights on “threat actors” motivated by “real or perceived racism or injustice in American society.”

Over the course of the Biden presidency, the DOJ has prosecuted Trump-era protest crimes with vigor and enthusiasm, while federal prosecutors have expanded the use of terrorism sentencing enhancements, delivering dozens of political prisoners to the doorstep of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A grossly disproportionate share of them have been people of African descent.

The vast majority of federal cases involve offenses against property or “commerce.” At least 17 have faced felony charges for unlawful use of the Internet (for instance, “using an instrument of interstate commerce to incite riots”). One of every three defendants was charged with obstructing “interstate commerce,” one in five with crimes of “civil disorder,” and another one in five for “conspiring,” “attempting,” or “aiding and abetting” some underlying crime they did not themselves commit.

Take the case of a young Black woman named Tia Pugh, of Mobile, Alabama, who was initially charged with two simple misdemeanors for breaking a window on the night of May 31, 2020.

“We were attacked first,” she would recall. “I was getting my people out of there… We get killed for less.” After being tracked down on Facebook, then interrogated by the FBI, she was brought up on felony charges for interfering with the police “during the commission of a civil disorder” which “adversely affected commerce.” Facing more than five years in prison, her sentence was reduced to time served after she spent more than a year in pretrial detention in an Alabama jail.

Though many have seen their charges dropped, others have seen their cases pursued to the bitter end by local prosecutors. Black activist Brittany Martin was, for instance, convicted in 2022 of “breaching the peace” for shouting in officers’ faces during a peaceable assembly in Sumter, South Carolina, in 2020. Although the alleged offense typically carries a maximum penalty of 30 days, prosecutors charged her with a crime of a “high and aggravated nature.” Last spring, she was sentenced, while pregnant, to no fewer than four years behind bars.

Future Enemies of the State

By any measure, the white supremacist movement is now officially acknowledged to pose the deadliest terrorist threat in America. The White House, the DOJ, and the DHS have made much of their commitment to confronting such far-right forms of terror, but the numbers coming from the federal government tell a different story.

On June 6th, the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General released its annual internal audit, assessing the Department’s strategy to “address the domestic violent extremism threat.” The audit revealed that investigations into white supremacist, “racially motivated,” and “anti-government/anti-authority” activity fell dramatically from 2021 to 2022. At the same time, the number (and share) of investigations involving “abortion-related” (including “pro-choice”) extremism skyrocketed, increasing by more than 800% and surpassing that recorded in any other year on record.

There is little mystery as to who is being targeted by such investigations since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, which revoked a pregnant parent’s right to choose. Last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray clarified which side was the most suspect and which side considered the most victimized: “You might be interested to know that, since the Dobbs decision, probably in the neighborhood of 70 percent of our abortion-related violence cases, are cases of violence or threats against pro-life… where the victims are pro-life organizations. And we’re going after that.”

The case of Pilsen Community Books (PCB), a worker-owned bookstore on Chicago’s Lower West Side, is illuminating in this regard. PCB was recently revealed to be the subject of an FBI “assessment,” based on three factors: its status as a “not police friendly place”; its role as a “meeting, planning, and networking venue”; and its recent use by “pro-abortion extremists…to prepare for a pro-abortion direct action.” In other words, it’s a dangerous hotbed of constitutionally protected activity.

“Everything is very much out there in terms of what we believe and what we do,” says worker-owner Mandy Medley. “I was shocked that the FBI would be interested in us this way… Community organizing is not illegal and should not be treated as such.”

Elsewhere, the Department of Homeland Security and its national network of 80 “fusion centers” have been hard at work collecting and aggregating data on “anarchist” or “environmental violent extremists.” And they’ve cast a wide net, even ensnaring writers and artists in their web of surveillance.

State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., inquisitorially-minded Republican politicians have been pressuring the FBI and DHS to crack down ever harder on their ideological adversaries. Last month, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced legislation that would designate “Antifa,” and “any other affiliated group or subsidiary of Antifa” to be a domestic terrorist organization based on its “unlawful conduct” and its belief in “communism, anarchism, socialism… and lawlessness.” That same month, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on “Countering Left-Wing Organized Violence,” at which Greene called for a clampdown on the newest enemy of the state: “The movement that wants to use trans terrorism against Americans.” No mention was made of the very real movement that approves of the use of terror against trans Americans.

One such trans American was Manuel Terán, an indigenous forest defender known as Tortuguita, who was killed by a barrage of 57 bullets one cold January day in that Atlanta forest. While it was a state trooper who fired the fatal bullet, it was DHS, the FBI, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that provided the intelligence for the operation. In the months since Tortuguita’s killing, those very agencies have continued to beat the drums of war, warning of the threat of “violent extremists in Georgia” and singling out those motivated by “anti-law enforcement sentiment.”

In a real sense, it may be that this latest American inquisition has simply come full circle, returning us to our historical roots: to a society where the caging of Black people, the spilling of indigenous blood, and the violent policing of the body politic are the stuff of business as usual — a society where state terror, in the name of counterterrorism, is accepted as a way of life.

On the other hand, if Black Lives Matter and the movement for bodily autonomy are any indication, it may be that we, as a society, have a lower tolerance for state terror than we once did.

Copyright 2023 Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Via Tomdispatch.com

This sharing by 71 CA police agencies violates state law and could be used by other states to identify and prosecute abortion seekers and providers.

( Electronic Frontier Foundation ) – SAN FRANCISCO—Seventy-one California police agencies in 22 counties must immediately stop sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with law enforcement agencies in other states because it violates California law and could enable prosecution of abortion seekers and providers elsewhere, three civil liberties groups demanded Thursday in letters to those agencies.

The letters from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU NorCal), and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) gave the agencies a deadline of June 15 to comply and respond. A months-long EFF investigation involving hundreds of public records requests uncovered that many California police departments share records containing detailed driving profiles of local residents with out-of-state agencies.

ALPR camera systems collect and store location information about drivers, including dates, times, and locations. This sensitive information can reveal where individuals work, live, associate, worship—or seek reproductive health services and other medical care.

“ALPRs invade people’s privacy and violate the rights of entire communities, as they often are deployed in poor and historically overpoliced areas regardless of crime rates,” said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Pinsof. “Sharing ALPR data with law enforcement in states that criminalize abortion undermines California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy.”

The letters note how the nation’s legal landscape has changed in the past year.

“Particularly since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, ALPR technology and the information it collects is vulnerable to exploitation against people seeking, providing, and facilitating access to abortion,” the letters say. “Law enforcement officers in anti-abortion jurisdictions who receive the locations of drivers collected by California-based ALPRs may seek to use that information to monitor abortion clinics and the vehicles seen around them and closely track the movements of abortion seekers and providers. This threatens even those obtaining or providing abortions in California, since several anti-abortion states plan to criminalize and prosecute those who seek or assist in out-of-state abortions.”

Image by Simon from Pixabay

Idaho, for example, has enacted a law that makes helping a pregnant minor get an abortion in another state punishable by two to five years in prison.

The agencies that received the demand letters have shared ALPR data with law enforcement agencies across the country, including agencies in states with abortion restrictions including Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. Since 2016, sharing any ALPR data with out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies is a violation of the California Civil Code (SB 34). Nevertheless, many agencies continue to use services such as Vigilant Solutions or Flock Safety to make the ALPR data they capture available to out-of-state and federal agencies.

California law enforcement’s sharing of ALPR data with law enforcement in states that criminalize abortion also undermines California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy, specifically a 2022 law (AB 1242) prohibiting state and local agencies from providing abortion-related information to out-of-state agencies.

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation

Published under Creative Commons License 3.0.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – To residents of Memphis’s resource-poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods, the Scorpions were easy to spot. The plainclothes patrols were known for driving their unmarked Dodge Chargers through the streets, often all too recklessly, sowing fear as they went, spitting venom from their windows, jumping out with guns drawn at the slightest sign of an infraction.

On the night of January 7th, Tyre Nichols was two minutes from home when members of that squad pulled him over. Probable cause: reckless driving (if you believe the official story). Five Scorpions, all of them trained use-of-force specialists, proceeded to take turns hitting him with everything they had, including boots, fists, and telescopic batons.

The 29-year-old photographer died three days later. Cause of death? “Excessive bleeding due to severe beating.” A body-cam snuff film of sorts was later released, showing some of Nichols’s last moments. The video transcripts speak for themselves.

Officer to Tyre:
“You’re gonna get your ass blown the fuck up. Oh, I’m gonna knock your ass the fuck out!”

Tyre to officers:
“OK. You guys are really doing a lot right now…”

— “Lay down!”
— “Stop! I’m just trying to go home.”
— “Spray him! Spray him!”
— “Stop! I’m not doing anything.”
— “Tase him! Tase him!”

Tyre cries out:
“Mom! Mom!”

Officer to Tyre:
“Watch out! I’m gonna baton the fuck out of you!”

— “Dude, hit him!”
— “Hit him!”
— “Hit him!”
— “Mom…”

Plainclothes Paramilitaries

Welcome to America’s emerging predator state.

Memphis is anything but an outlier. There are thousands of “elite” teams like that city’s Scorpion unit and they come in all calibers, shapes, and sizes. They range from specially trained teams in small-town police departments to sprawling “anti-crime” squads in big cities like Atlanta and New York, not to mention federal tactical units like the Border Patrol’s BORTAC and counter-terrorism task forces like the one that killed Manuel Terán in Georgia last month.

Beyond the scary names, such specialized units tend to share some other characteristics. In their warlike tactics, their strategic outlook, and their often-violent subculture — if not always in their uniforms — they are virtually indistinguishable from their counterparts in the military. In their “wars” on crime, drugs, and terror, they work with a similar playbook imported from U.S. combat missions overseas but seemingly stripped of any reference to the rules of war.

They conduct themselves, in other words, as plainclothes paramilitaries in America’s urban war zones (or what they like to call “hot spots”). Like Army Special Operations forces, they are regularly charged with the execution of “time-sensitive,” “clandestine,” and often “unilateral” missions — with or without the support of the local population — using “assurance, deterrence, and coercion” to fight the enemies of the state and exert control over “hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments.”

Buy the Book

What’s more, these units operate with a legal guarantee of “qualified immunity” for violence against civilians. In other words, despite the recent Memphis exception, they normally have near-total impunity when it comes to violent offenses which, had they been committed in another country, might be classified as war crimes, crimes of aggression, or even crimes against humanity.

For offenses of this nature, the United States is itself an international hot spot. In the course of a given year, according to one recent study, our law enforcement agencies were responsible for 13% of all fatalities caused by the police globally, even though Americans make up just 4% of the world’s population. And as investigative journalism has revealed, specialized units like the Scorpions are responsible for a wildly disproportionate share of those deaths.

Take the New York City Police Department. Since 2000, its own use-of-force reports show that nearly one in three police killings have been by non-uniformed officers, especially “anti-crime” plainclothes units with paramilitary training and a long-standing reputation for terrorizing communities of color.

Nearly a decade before the slaying of Tyre Nichols, there was, for instance, the murder of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old street vendor, “neighborhood peacekeeper,” and father of six. His life was snuffed out thanks to a police chokehold after he was stopped for selling “loosies,” unlicensed cigarettes, on a Staten Island street corner in the summer of 2014. (In the end, the only person to serve jail time in Garner’s death was the young filmmaker of color who had the courage to record the encounter.)

Like the officers in the South Bronx who gunned down Amadou Diallo outside his home as he reached for his wallet, the ones in Queens who sprayed Sean Bell with 50 bullets on his wedding day, and the ones in Brooklyn who opened fire on a mentally ill man named Saheed Vassell in 2018, those responsible for Garner’s murder were members of the infamous “anti-crime” units whose work would become a blueprint for Scorpion-style policing.

The force’s predatory philosophy is often summed up in a single sentence lifted from Ernest Hemingway’s 1936 (satirical) short story, “On the Blue Water.” Officers of the peace have been known to quote it, to wear it to work, and to plaster it on the walls of their precincts: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

In the words of one New Yorker, a nurse from Crown Heights who witnessed the killing of Vassell, “The undercovers think they have the authority to do anything they want. They hunt [people] — like us black people — down… They act tough… like they’re from a gang. But they’re only like that because they have a badge.”

A History of Violence Against Women

In December 2019, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, rolled out its version of the Scorpion unit. It was labeled the Place-Based Investigations Squad (PBI) and put under the aegis of its police department’s Criminal Interdiction Division.

Following paid consultations with “problem-oriented” academics and police executives from other cities, the Louisville Metropolitan department implemented a then-little-known practice called “Place-Based Investigations of Violent Offender Territories,” or PIVOT. In the end, this would prove but a variation on an already all-too-familiar theme of hot-spot policing first pioneered by “police scientists” in Minneapolis some 30 years before George Floyd’s murder. (In fact, the use of the term “hot spots” can be traced back to the early years of World War II.)

Under this model, police assets were to be specially directed toward a handful of hot spots or “chronically violent urban locations.” That such places were home to populations of disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and immigrant Americans will no longer shock anyone; nor that they overlapped strikingly with areas of concentrated impoverishment and “planned abandonment”; nor that an influx of heavily armed strangers was undoubtedly the last thing such communities needed from the government. All of this was beside the point. The “marginal deterrent effect” — the minimal difference such hot-spot policing purportedly made in the calculations of would-be criminals — was enough to keep most critics quiet.

Three months after the rollout, the Place-Based Investigations Squad would play an integral part in the police raid that took the life of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman and emergency-room technician at the University of Louisville, accused of no crime, but executed anyway by three Louisville police officers standing in the hallway of her own home. Officers from the PBI Squad had requested and obtained five search warrants with “no-knock” clauses, including one for Ms. Taylor, acting on what one would later call a “gut feeling.”

Within moments of the officers’ arrival at her apartment on the night of March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor lay dying, felled by six of 32 shots fired into her home. It would be 20 minutes before she even received medical attention — 15 minutes too late to save her life. Although four officers have now been federally charged for civil rights violations, and three stand accused of lying on the affidavit they used to secure the warrants, a grand jury ultimately failed to return a single indictment for the officers who opened fire.

That night in 2020, Ms. Taylor joined a long litany of Black women, robbed of their lives while simply trying to live them by those supposedly tasked with their protection. According to the latest count, some 280 women have been slain in encounters with law enforcement over just the past five years. Researchers have found that women made up nearly half of all police-initiated contacts and Black women were three times more likely than white ones to experience the use of force during a police-initiated stop.

“Elite” police units have played an outsized role in such state-sanctioned femicides.

Take the case of India Kager, 27, a Navy vet killed by a tactical team in Virginia Beach in 2015, as she sat in her car with her four-month-old baby in the back. Or consider Atlanta’s RED DOG (short for “Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia”) Unit. On November 21, 2006, plainclothes officers from that narcotics squad — having lied under oath to obtain a no-knock warrant — barged into the home of Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old grandmother, and promptly gunned her down. Drugs were then planted near her body in a sorry attempt at a cover-up.

Disbanded or Rebranded?

We’ve been here before: Officers are charged with second-degree murder. Sweeping reforms are promised. Controversial units are “deactivated,” their officers reassigned to other bureaus.

We saw this with the Amadou Diallo protests and the New York Police Department’s Street Crimes Unit in the early 2000s. We saw it with Atlanta’s RED DOGs after the killing of Kathryn Johnston. We saw it with Louisville’s PBI Squad in the months following the murder of Breonna Taylor — and we’re seeing it now in the aftermath of the assault on Tyre Nichols.

Count on this, however: as time passes and attention subsides, reforms are abandoned, charges are dropped, or the defendants found not guilty by juries of their peers. And special ops teams are rebranded and brought back to life under different names.

Today, Atlanta’s “Titans” have replaced the “RED DOGs” of old, while the very police executive who ran the old unit, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, was made commissioner of the Memphis police department. The city of Memphis has also sought guidance from Ray Kelly, who was New York police commissioner during a particularly trigger-happy period in that department’s history (including the deaths of Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury, Ramarley Graham, and Kimani Gray).

Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, himself a veteran of a plainclothes police unit, is touting his “Neighborhood Safety Teams” (along with another elite strike force inherited from his predecessors, the “Strategic Response Group”) as the basis for a whole new approach to policing. In truth, they are simply picking up where the Street Crimes Unit left off. The only real differences: longer guns, modified uniforms, and body cameras that can be turned on or off at will.

The names change, but the strategy (such as it is) remains the same and the body counts only climb higher.

“Collateral Damage” and the War at Home

Yet such police killings are not truly local matters. The final piece of the puzzle is the national security state, itself a predatory entity and the source of much of the surplus that supplies the police with significant military-grade weaponry and the bipartisan consensus that keeps the dollars flowing.

Local police agencies would not have anything like the arsenals they have today — ones that would be the envy of many of the world’s militaries — without the largesse of the Pentagon’s popular 1033 program. For years, it has been arming police departments around the country in a distinctly military fashion, sometimes even with weapons directly off the battlefields of this country’s distant wars. Thanks to that program, the Memphis police department has managed to obtain a significant stockpile of high-powered rifles and multiple armored personnel carriers, while the State of Tennessee alone has received $131 million worth of weaponry from the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, paving new ground, the Special Operations Bureau of the San Francisco Police Department has procured unmanned, remotely piloted killer robots with names like TALON and DRAGON RUNNER. It is now advertising its intent to use them as a “deadly force option” in criminal apprehensions and other incidents like “riots, insurrection, or potentially violent demonstrations.”

None of this would be possible without the support of politicians from both parties. The 2023 budget agreed upon by both parties, for instance, promises $37 billion in new spending on law enforcement — with double-digit percentage increases in discretionary funding for local police departments, above and beyond the nearly $1 trillion for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. As a “moral statement,” that document bears a striking resemblance to its predecessors, backing the blue with billions of public tax dollars, while bearing witness to the priorities of a government on the warpath against enemies domestic and foreign.

Zooming out, we can see this kind of predatory policing for the national crisis it really is.

In recent decades, according to a definitive study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, more than 30,000 American civilians have lost their lives in encounters with law enforcement, a figure perhaps best compared to the rates of “collateral damage” in war-torn places like Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, or the Sahel. And whatever we call them, “elite” units like the Scorpions have played a leading role in that carnage. From their basic training to their advanced technology and heavy weaponry, they are increasingly cast as the protagonists in what has become America’s homeland theater of war, producing content of spectacular violence as this country’s war machine turns inward.

At a time when significant crossover can be seen between law enforcement and the white nationalist militia movement, it should be obvious that police departments are, among other things, playing a dangerous game with democracy. With Donald Trump and his crew still going full Blue Lives Matter and the Biden administration failing to pass meaningful police reform, count on another bloody harvest of police violence in 2023 and 2024. In the event of sustained civil conflict, there is little mystery about which side some elite police units would choose to fight on or who would find themselves in the scopes of their semi-automatic rifles.

Still, the predator state is not invincible, nor is its ascendancy inevitable. After all, the claims of police departments to legitimacy rest upon the support of elected officials who remain vulnerable to popular pressure, while the very existence of such paramilitary units depends on their access to the public purse. In a very real sense, then, they can still be fired, or at least defunded.

For now, in the absence of consequences, the hunt for humans goes on uninterrupted and that’s likely to continue as long as so many Americans remain willing to put up with it.

Copyright 2023 Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Minnesota Reformer) – Only six months ago, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s future looked cloudy, her political base shaken. She had barely fended off a primary challenge. Her political judgments appeared questionable. Her critics appeared to have grown in number.

Now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his Republican allies have shoved her off the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It might look like she has been brought low. Yet the opposite is true. Omar’s ouster caps her rapid rise in stature in her party — not as a gadfly, but as an insider and a rallying point for Democratic Party unity.

Omar got into the U.S. House as a boat-rocker, defeating a long-serving incumbent in a 2016 legislative race before running for Congress in 2018. She replaced Keith Ellison in the 5th District metro Minneapolis seat. 

Omar is a woman and wears a hijab, which inflames Islamophobic as well as sexist opposition to her. Her comments concerning the impact of pro-Israel campaign contributions and the commitments of American Jews to the state of Israel — delivered in a flippant tone better suited to Twitter than to Congress — alienated many in her own party. On the other hand, a lot of progressive voters in the district have been proud to support a Muslim woman, and they admire Omar’s willingness to advocate for Palestine and to criticize imperialism and its legacies. Ellison, also a Muslim, remains a beloved figure among vast numbers of DFLers in Minnesota.

Neither Islamophobia nor sexism explains why Don Samuels almost defeated Omar in her August primary. In 2020, Antone Melton-Meaux primaried her. He was actively supported by pro-Israel groups (which stayed away from the race this year). Omar beat Melton-Meaux easily.

In 2022, Omar faced a new kind of challenge from Samuels, her strongest conceivable opponent. People who know Minneapolis politics knew this would be a real race as soon as Samuels declared. He has deep and extensive connections in the historic Black community of North Minneapolis.

Omar had championed police reform measures that became associated with the “Defund the Police” slogan that proved politically toxic over the past two years. In 2021, she supported a Minneapolis ballot measure that would have replaced the city police department with something new. She also had intervened, needlessly, in city politics by opposing the reelection of Mayor Jacob Frey, who had staked his campaign on his opposition to that ballot measure — and who reaped the rewards by getting stronger support from Black than from white Minneapolitans as he emerged victorious.

Then, in November of 2021, Omar, along with other members of the progressive “Squad” in the U.S. House, voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. They wanted the far more expansive Build Back Better legislation to pass first — but the infrastructure bill was all that President Joe Biden could get through both the House and Senate at the time. It was that or nothing. The infrastructure bill had progressive features and is bringing significant money to Minnesota. Omar was not supporting the governing agenda of her party’s sitting president, a stance that was not especially popular among DFLers, even progressive ones.

After Omar’s close call in August 2022 came her turnabout. As detailed in the national press  she worked closely with Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat, to salvage the compromise Invest to Protect Act of 2022. The law will provide more, not less, federal funding to local police departments, while emphasizing mental health support and violence de-escalation training. Other squad members — Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Cori Bush of Missouri, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — voted against it. Omar’s new pragmatism seemed to show she had gotten the message from the DFL voters in her district. Samuels had criticized her for not being a team player, and she showed she knows how to be just that.

Congressional progressives are tactically divided. Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington leads the faction that wants to be in “The Room Where It Happens,” to quote from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.” They believe that supporting their party’s leadership is the path to positive policy change. 

Ocasio-Cortez and her allies remain inclined to stake out maximal positions in the hope of shifting national debate leftward.

For now, Omar has sided with Jayapal. Perhaps this will not last, but the politics of Omar’s district favors her new direction.

McCarthy thinks it’s all gain, no pain for him to serve up a Muslim, immigrant Black woman who has been critical of the U.S. as red meat to his party’s base. Yet he may have misunderstood Omar’s rising position within her caucus and the respect she has gotten for her serious, well-informed attention to African issues on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

She has mended fences with Democratic colleagues who have found her Israel-related comments grating — recently signing on to a House resolution supporting Israel. U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, a Jewish colleague who increasingly looks poised for statewide office, has defended her against charges of antisemitism. (Phillips and Omar are in position to help one another, and Phillips comes out of this episode smelling like a rose.)

Her party’s ranks rallied around her, and whenever Democrats retake House control in Washington, Omar may turn up in “The Room Where It Happens” on future occasions.

 

Doug Rossinow

Doug Rossinow is professor of history at Metro State University in St. Paul, and the author of many works, including “The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s,” published in 2015.

Via Minnesota Reformer

( Otherwords.org ) – Last year was the deadliest on record for police killings in the United States. According to a Washington Post database, law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people in 2022. 

And that’s likely an understatement. 

According to Abdul Nasser Rad, a research director at Campaign Zero, the Post “only captures incidents where a police officer discharges their firearm and the victim is killed.” This means that it wouldn’t count the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, for example, which resulted from asphyxiation.

In contrast, Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence project includes any action that a law enforcement officer takes that results in a fatal encounter. Rad’s project counted 1,158 police killings in 2021 compared to 1,048 for the Post. (Final results for 2022 are not yet available.) 

The upshot is that in spite of the huge public attention to police violence since 2020, police are actually killing more people than before. We can expect 2023 to be even deadlier if the years-long trend continues.

Another clear conclusion is that communities of color face a much higher risk. 

According to the Washington Post, Black Americans “are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.” Mapping Police Violence puts the figure closer to 3 times. Police killings of Latinos and Indigenous people are similarly disproportionate.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, some activists called for “defunding the police.” 

They argued that over-funded police departments — which can often consume a third or more of city budgets — were using their resources to kill people. These advocates wanted to shift some of those funds to reduce poverty, improve mental health, and take other steps to make people safer.

That seemingly reasonable call was greeted with a reactionary backlash. Politicians across the spectrum, including President Joe Biden, promised to increase police funding instead. Biden even begged local governments to use federal stimulus funds to bolster their police departments in 2022.

But does giving police more money result in greater public safety? 

One recent study analyzing funding for hundreds of police departments over nearly three decades concluded that “new police budget growth is likely to do one thing: increase misdemeanor arrests.” 

These arrests do little to reduce violent crime. Instead, the authors explained, they lead to more police encounters that result in killings. 

On the contrary, cities that took steps to reduce arrests for petty crimes saw a decrease in police killings, according to data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, a cofounder of Campaign Zero. He also concluded that crime rates in those cities did not increase.

These issues needn’t be divisive. None of us should simply accept that police will continue to kill more and more people each year. Making sure our local budgets invest in real safety, not just deadly force, is one place to begin.

The Community Resource Hub has created a powerful internet tool, DefundPolice.org, to help communities put police spending into perspective and reimagine their city budgets. The site includes a detailed video tutorial on how to use tools like a “people’s budget calculator” to advocate for change locally.

We all want safer communities. To get them, we need to put our money toward people’s needs, not deadly deeds.

Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is the host of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.

Otherwords.org

(The Conversation) – As the video goes public of Black police officers in Memphis beating Tyre Nichols to death, it is a stark reminder of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. That set up the largest protests in U.S. history and a national reckoning with racism.

But beyond any protests, every police killing – indeed, every violent act by police toward civilians – can have painful and widespread consequences.

Each year, U.S. police kill about 1,000 people, which equals approximately 8% of all homicides for adult men. This risk is greater for Black men, who are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than white men.

The effects of these killings ripple from the individual victim to their families and local communities as they cope with the permanence of injury, death and loss. People victimized by the police have demonstrated higher-than-usual rates of depression, psychological distress and even suicide risk.

But the pain doesn’t stop there.

Public health research I am conducting with my research team at the University of California, Berkeley finds that the harm from police killings of Black people goes beyond the people and places directly involved in these incidents to affect Black Americans far from the site of the killing, who may have never met the victim.

Evidence shows that many Black Americans across the U.S. experience police killings of other Black people as traumatic events, and that this trauma diminishes the ability of Black communities to thrive.

The ripple effect

One of the key studies illustrating this ripple effect of police killings on the mental health of Black Americans was published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2018.

Boston University researchers surveyed 103,710 people in the U.S. to measure the relationship between police killings and Americans’ mental health.

Among survey respondents, each police-related fatality of an unarmed Black person in the state where they lived was associated with an increase in the number of days when they reported poor mental health relating to stress, depression or emotional issues.

The authors estimated that the cumulative impact of U.S. police killings of unarmed Blacks could add up to 55 million additional poor mental health days for the U.S.‘s 44 million Black people.

Police killings of armed Black people did not elicit the same distress among Black Americans. And white Americans suffered no additional poor mental health days, as defined by the researchers, after exposure to police killings – no matter the circumstances or race of the victim.

The authors speculated that historical and institutional patterns of systematic, targeted violence against Black people – combined with a general lack of legal consequences when police officers commit such crimes – make the killings of unarmed Blacks particularly stressful for Black Americans.

“Racism, like trauma, can be experienced vicariously,” they concluded.

A 2021 study substantiates the Boston University’s mental health findings.

Scouring emergency department admission records in 75 counties in five U.S. states, researchers found that within three months following a police killing of an unarmed Black person in the county in which they reside, Black Americans sought treatment at local emergency departments for depressive symptoms 11% more frequently than in other months.

Prenatal and childhood trauma

Black women experience acute fear that their children will be harmed by the police.
Those who expressed beliefs that Black youth are at higher risk for having negative police experiences were 12 times more likely to report symptoms of depression during their pregnancy than other women, according to one study from 2017.

Depression during pregnancy can increase the risks for health problems for both parent and child, including newborns with low birth weight or premature delivery – both major causes of infant death. Depression during pregnancy also puts new mothers at higher risk for postpartum depression, which may negatively affect their ability to nurture their children.

Police killings can also directly harm the mental health of young people of color. According to Brendesha Tynes’ 2019 study, exposure to viral videos of police killings is associated with symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder among adolescents of color.

Health effects

Police killings and other negative encounters with police create a climate of fear in Black communities that takes a physical toll on residents.

For example, aggressive policing can cause fear and excessive watchfulness among Black Americans that, at elevated levels, are associated with high blood pressure. A New York City-based research team found in 2016 that in neighborhoods where police engaged in the invasive practice of “stop and frisk,” residents were more likely to have not only high blood pressure but to also suffer from diabetes, get asthma attacks and be overweight.

A 2016 study conducted in 75 metropolitan areas across the U.S. found that a police killing of a Black person in the area the year prior was associated with a 7.5% rise in local syphilis rates and a 4% rise in gonorrhea rates – perhaps, the authors suggest, because the associated psychological stress leads to riskier sexual behavior. Fear of a police run-in and distrust of institutions might also lead people in these areas to avoid medical services.

Police violence in a given neighborhood is also linked to lower trust in government, less frequent voting and higher crime rates. It decreases residents’ perception of their ability to stand together and control what happens in their neighborhood.

Policing seen as racism

Many people in heavily policed neighborhoods see negative police encounters as forms of discrimination or racism – both of which are scientifically documented to worsen the health of Black people.

“People understand that this system is filled with all sorts of inequality and injustice, and that implicit bias and just outright racism is embedded in the way that policing is done in this nation,” said Opal Tometi, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, in an interview with the New Yorker. It amounts to “a war on Black life.”

Ultimately, the cumulative impact of harmful policing can shred the social fabric of Black neighborhoods and drain Black people and their communities of the health and social resources they need to live healthy lives.

This is an updated version of an article originally published May 24, 2021.

Denise A. Herd, Professor of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The police killing of George Floyd begs for effective remedies that respond both to past harms while also preventing future harm.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of three counts in the killing of Floyd after he kneeled on the Black man’s neck for more than nine minutes as he pleaded for his life in May 2020. But what will be done now to ensure no one else dies a similar death at the hands of police, especially given there have been several police killings following Floyd’s murder?

As legal theorist William Blackstone famously wrote, “every right when withheld must have a remedy.”

But American federal courts have never recognized Blackstone’s truism because of a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, which protects police or government officials from lawsuits by requiring plaintiffs to establish not only that their rights have been violated, but that state officials did so with a high level of fault.

Given the egregious nature of Floyd’s killing, qualified immunity was not an issue in Floyd’s case. This helps explain why Minneapolis City Council agreed to pay the family US$27 million in damages.

But courts and legislatures are increasingly finding fault with qualified immunity.

Decision overturned

The U.S. Supreme Court recently held that lower courts had erred when they dismissed damage claims by a Texas prisoner on qualified immunity grounds. It ruled that he can sue six prison officers who allegedly forced him to sleep naked in a cell covered with feces and sewage for days.

The court indicated that some violations are so egregious that they might merit damages even in the absence of clearly established law. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

The court also recently decided that damages can be sought for free speech violations even when the violation does not cause calculable harm. And in another recent case, the court ruled that a woman shot by the police when fleeing was subject to an unreasonable seizure.

City councils and legislatures are also chipping away at qualified immunity measures that often prevent damages from being awarded to plaintiffs. New York City Council recently repealed qualified immunity provisions that have sheltered police officers from lawsuits.

The U.S. House of Representatives has also passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. If enacted, it would repeal qualified immunity. That means damages could be awarded even if the police acted in good faith or violated rights that were not clearly established.

Damages are important. They serve as a visible and reportable symbol that the state has violated rights. But they are not enough. Effective remedies must also prevent future violations.

Consent decrees

How? Consent decrees require some police departments to collect data about police practices that harm racialized people. Some require police to intervene when there are warning signs of officers abusing their powers.

The Minneapolis Police Department was not under such a consent decree. It should have been.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has indicated that it will seek more consent decrees to monitor police departments.

But more ambitious systemic remedies won’t necessarily prevent police killings and brutality. There’s no way of knowing whether a consent decree would have stopped Chauvin from killing Floyd.

In recent weeks there have been two fatal police shootings of unarmed Black young men in the United States, 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Minnesota and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago, where a consent decree is in place.

More substantial systemic reform could be achieved by a two-track approach that combines individual remedies for the past and systemic remedies for the future.

Signs of change afoot?

The ultimate remedy for a police department that cannot or will not respect rights would be to disband it. Failing that, the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions are promising. They may allow courts to compensate the victims of the most egregious forms of police abuse.

But that alone will be inadequate.

The courts and, if not the courts, the people must demand governments take reasonable and measurable steps to prevent future rights violations. The damages paid to Floyd’s family are an important step in remedying a searing injustice. But much more needs to be done to prevent similar violations in the future.

There are no easy or guaranteed victories when it comes to legal remedies. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t important or should not be vigorously pursued.

Kent Roach, Professor & Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

KVUE: “Derek Chauvin verdict: A rare murder conviction for a former police officer”

The police officer charged with murder in the death of George Floyd is currently on trial in Minneapolis amid continued calls for defunding or abolishing police forces — not just in the United States, but in Canada and other places that have also grappled with police brutality.

The problem with these proposals is that they’re presented as solutions to police abuse without an appreciation that some element of coercive authority will still be required in society. Consequently, these efforts are unlikely to be successful.

Many of the calls for drastic change highlight the failure of police reform efforts. While many attempts at change have met with limited success, I suggest the reason for these outcomes is not because change is impossible; it’s more to do with an unwillingness to confront systemic issues within police forces.

For example, the former commissioner of the RCMP indicated that workplace misconduct and other forms of abusive behaviour were simply the actions of a few “rotten apples.”

As a former chief superintendent with the RCMP, where I held leadership roles implementing cultural change within the organization, I believe this statement ignores the potential potency of the police socialization process and what happens when new recruits come in the door.

An emphasis on danger and risk

From the early days of training, police recruits are socialized by war stories that glamorize the dangerous aspects of police work and place an exaggerated focus on the mission of police to deal with danger as the supposed gatekeepers of society.

Ultimately, these narratives shape expectations of what it means to be a “real” police officer. For some individuals, becoming a real police officer means doing the dirty work that no one else wants to do, including whatever it takes to put “bad guys” in jail.

But rather than promoting an image of police working with communities to solve problems, this emphasis on physicality and fighting crime has helped craft the image of the “warrior cop” who is ready to do battle and is isolated from the public.

The continued preoccupation with danger and crime control means that aggression, competitiveness and physical action are often associated with the image of the ideal police officer.

To determine who fits in and who doesn’t, clear distinctions are frequently made between the tasks of “real policing” and those discounted as feminine, such as the prevention aspects of the job.

Building on prior studies, my research shows that the pressure to conform and fit in can be so intense that officers engage in masculinity contests (the competitive pursuit of workplace status that is defined by traditionally “masculine” rules) by adopting these supposedly desirable forms of masculinity and avoiding any actions that might be deemed weak or unmanly.

Toxic masculinity

As noted in a report on sexual harassment within the RCMP, when masculinity contest norms are endorsed by police organizations, they can have grave consequences for the women (and even men) who are viewed as a weak fit.

In addition to officers hiding poor health or taking excessive risks, I also illustrate in my research how attempts to prove masculinity can spill out onto the streets in the form of overly aggressive action against stigmatized members of society.

A recent research paper looking into police shootings in the U.S. shows that officers are well aware of the expectations to display certain types of masculinity, and that a willingness to use violence can engender respect from fellow cops. As noted by one officer in the study, there is a perceived need to present a “tough, manly bravado … and to put to rest any concern about the ability to handle the job.”

Over the past five years, I have studied Canadian police organizations to better understand the factors that either amplify or counter these harmful workplace behaviours.

What I found is that masculinity contests are more prevalent in police organizations that adhere to a paramilitary control model, apply heavy-handed discipline practices and promote a competitive environment that pits officers against each other through policies and practices that favour some people over others.

I also discovered that officers have a greater sense of inclusion, report fewer instances of workplace misconduct and are more likely to feel they can safely speak up about workplace issues in organizations where leaders practise procedural justice — treating people with respect, engaging in consistent, ethical, and bias-free decision-making processes and giving people a voice in decisions that affect them.

Moving forward

There is no doubt that increasing instances of police misconduct erode trust and confidence in the police, yet disbanding the police is not the answer. My research indicates that a more inclusive and procedurally just policing model is more likely to begin from the inside out.

The New Zealand police are often heralded as exemplars of police reform because they revisited the “why” of policing and focused on initiatives to enhance the trust, confidence and satisfaction of the public.

In addition to clarifying the role of the police, we also have an opportunity in North America to promote a more justice-oriented style of police leadership and to put in place long-term mechanisms of accountability to support and sustain change.

At the same time, we need to be active participants in challenging societal norms that continue to equate policing with manliness and aggression.

Angela Workman-Stark, Associate Professor, Organizational Behaviour, Athabasca University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Star Tribune: “Day 20: The trial of Derek Chauvin in killing of George Floyd”

The Insurrection

( ProPublica) – The Effort to Overturn the Election

The riot squad defending the embattled entrance to the west side of the U.S. Capitol was surrounded by violence. Rioters had clambered up the scaffolding by the stage erected for the inauguration of President Joseph Biden. They hurled everything they could get their hands on at the cops beneath: rebar, plywood, power tools, even cans of food they had frozen for extra damage.

In front of the cops, a mob was mounting a frontal assault. Its members hit officers with fists and baseball bats. They grabbed at weapons slung from the officers’ waists. They unleashed a barrage of M-80 firecrackers. Soaked in never-ending streams of bright orange bear spray, the officers choked on plumes of acrid smoke that singed their nostrils and obscured their vision.

One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter’s face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

The combat veteran was hit with bear spray eight times. His experience overseas “was nothing like this,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

Over the last several weeks, ProPublica has interviewed 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers about the assault on the Capitol. Following on the dramatic video of officers defending the building that House lawmakers showed during the first day of the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, the interviews provide the most detailed account to date of a most extraordinary battle.

The enemies on Jan. 6 were Americans: thousands of people from across the country who had descended on the Capitol, intent on stopping Congress from certifying an election they believed was stolen from Trump. They had been urged to attend by Trump himself, with extremist right-wing and militia leaders calling for violence.

Many of the officers were speaking to reporters for the first time about the day’s events, almost all anonymously for fear of retribution. That they spoke at all is an indication of the depth of their frustration over the botched response. ProPublica also obtained confidential intelligence bulletins and previously unreported planning documents.

Combined, the information makes clear how failures of leadership, communication and tactics put the lives of hundreds of officers at risk and allowed rioters to come dangerously close to realizing their threats against members of Congress.

In response to questions for this story, the Capitol Police sent a one-sentence email: “There is a multi-jurisdictional investigation underway and in order to protect that process, we are unfortunately unable to provide any comment at this time.”

The interviews also revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

For the members of the riot squad who formed the first line of defense on the Capitol’s lower west terrace on Jan. 6, the lack of information could not have come with higher stakes.

Thrust into the most intense battle of the insurrection, the roughly two dozen officers bought lawmakers crucial time to scramble for safety. For about 100 heart-pounding minutes, they slipped and skidded across a stone surface slick with blood and bear spray, attempting to hold their ground against a rampaging mass of thousands.

To many of them, it felt like no one was in charge of the Capitol’s defense. All they could hear on the police radio were desperate cries for help.

At one point, the combat veteran was forced to stumble back from the line, his face so covered in bear spray he could barely see or breathe.

When he came to, a surge spilled over to his south. The crowd pushed over several bike racks. He realized the unfathomable had happened. His squad had lost the line; the mob could now enter the Capitol. There was no choice but to fall back. The officers stumbled over blood and debris until they were pressed against a limestone wall at the rear of the terrace. The mob had them cornered.

The officers, drained from their standoff, found a narrow staircase leading to an entrance of the building. But it could fit only one officer at a time. So they took turns climbing it as the crowd closed in, screaming obscenities and threatening murder.

“You fucking faggots!” one shouted. “You’re not even American!”

Waiting to climb the stairs, the combat veteran feared the worst. “This is where they’ll find my body,” he thought.

The Intelligence: “A Normal Fucking Day”

On the morning of Jan. 4, members of a civil disturbance unit gathered in a briefing room. A small group of officers were shown a document from Capitol intelligence officials that projected as many as 20,000 people arriving in Washington that week. The crowd would include members of several militia and right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois and the white supremacist Patriot Front. Some were expected to be armed, according to one officer who attended the briefing. The document anticipated that there could be violence.

The officers weren’t allowed to physically share the document with anyone else, but they relayed its substance to the rest of their squad in a separate meeting. Together, the unit members discussed possible scenarios and pored over a map of the Capitol and its surroundings to identify vulnerable areas that could erupt in conflict.

The iconic west front of the Capitol emerged as an obvious target. Donald Trump was going to speak at the Ellipse across from the White House; from there, it’s a direct walk past the Washington Monument and the reflecting pool outside the Capitol to the western facade of the building. The riot squad knew that if the crowd was going to violently confront police, that’s where it would probably happen.

But the intelligence the unit relied on to make that judgment was not widely shared within the department. Several officers assigned to other commands told ProPublica they received no warning whatsoever going into Jan. 6. “We went to work like it was a normal fucking day,” one said.

“It was business as usual,” said another, who has been on the force for more than 15 years. “The main thing we were told was to be on the lookout for counterdemonstrators.”

The Capitol Police force is made up of four main divisions, each responsible for safeguarding its own section of the Capitol complex. But ProPublica learned that these divisions operate in silos, often out of sync with one another. On Jan. 6, their failure to coordinate led to disastrous results. One group of officers was left stranded, separated from their riot gear, which sat unused on a parked bus near the Capitol while unprotected officers endured beatings with metal pipes and flagpoles.

The officers said that in the past, weekly Capitol Police intelligence briefings had kept the force well-informed about potential security threats from upcoming events. But those briefings stopped years ago.

Several weeks before Jan. 6, many officers were ordered by their leadership to return their helmets because they were so old, the officers said. One officer told ProPublica he had received his helmet decades ago, and the padding was rotted out. Many said their helmets were never replaced. On the day of the riot, the department only had helmets available in medium size, one officer said. Many officers didn’t have gas masks. Most hadn’t received riot training in years.

“They’ve been asking about this for over 10 years — this kind of equipment, this kind of training,” said one officer, who asked for anonymity out of concern for retribution. “We’ve always talked about the big one.”

McFaden, the officer who retired last month after more than two decades as a Capitol Police officer, said that the communication failure going into Jan. 6 was consistent with recent history.

As second-in-command at the Capitol Police union, McFaden said, he met with then-Chief Steven Sund and other leaders of the force every two weeks.

“We’d consistently ask them, for years, ‘What are the contingency plans for upcoming events?’” McFaden told ProPublica. “We’d always get either a no response, or that things were in flux and it’s a national security issue and we can’t divulge that information at this time.”

In the absence of communication from the upper ranks on how to prepare, officers turned to social media or to each other.

One officer said he first heard about the planned protest a week before, when a friend from another federal agency called him to say, as he recalled: “You all are gonna have your hands full next week. You got some mean boys coming up there.” The officer was confused. “What do you mean?” he replied.

As the day drew nearer, the chatter became more tense. Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with hotel rooms filling up, and Trump supporters were pouring into Washington, announcing their plans to initiate a “civil war” or “revolution.” On a well-trafficked pro-Trump forum, one of the most popular posts from Jan. 5 said Congress “has a choice to make tomorrow”: certify Trump’s victory, or “get lynched by patriots.”

Officers, particularly the younger ones, spent shifts glued to their phones, forwarding ominous posts to their sergeants.

Similar warnings reached the Capitol Police’s intelligence division. ProPublica obtained a previously unreported 17-page Capitol Police operational plan that showed select officials were notified of “numerous social media posts” encouraging protesters to arrive armed.

The document, which is dated Jan. 5, also states that white supremacists and the Proud Boys were expected to attend the rally, along with “other extremist groups,” including antifa, the left-wing movement that has clashed with far-right groups and drawn the ire of some Republicans. The plan called for “counter-sniper teams” on the Capitol dome and officers monitoring for concealed weapons, but did not discuss a potential breach of the Capitol.

Other intelligence reports reviewed by ProPublica reveal inconsistencies — a sign of internal confusion about how best to respond.

ProPublica also obtained four daily reports from the department’s intelligence division that were shared widely among commanders of the force, spanning the dates Jan. 4 through Jan. 7. The documents make no mention of expected extremist groups or the possibility that demonstrators would be armed. Instead, they note simply that “folks could organize a demonstration on USCP grounds.”

The intelligence reports provide a kind of threat scale that gauges the likelihood of arrests. The Jan. 6 rally was scored as “improbable,” meaning it had a 20% to 45% chance of resulting in arrests. Two small anti-Trump counterdemonstrations organized by local left-wing and antifascist groups were assigned the same risk level.

Sund, who submitted his resignation as chief of the Capitol Police on Jan. 7, later said he had tried to call in the National Guard two days before the riot. He said the sergeants-at-arms — the House and Senate officials responsible for security of lawmakers — denied his request. Both officials have since resigned. Reached by phone, former House sergeant-at-arms Paul Irving declined to comment. Former Senate sergeant-at-arms Michael Stenger did not immediately respond to a message left by phone.

In an emailed response to questions for this story, Sund said he and other departmental leaders were not responsible for assigning risk levels to upcoming events, and that he is “not sure of the process” the Capitol Police intelligence division uses to assess risk. He said intelligence was shared with division commanders to pass along to their troops, and that he emailed the assistant and deputy chiefs on Jan. 5 to ensure officers knew what to expect the following day. Sund also said “the force did much more to prepare for the events of January 6 than we did to prepare for BLM demonstrations,” including expanding the perimeter around the Capitol and coordinating support from Metropolitan police. He said any “breakdown in communication” on Jan. 6 was “surely the result of the extraordinary events of that day.”

He also defended his actions in an eight-page letter to congressional leaders dated Feb. 1, saying, in essence, that he and his fellow leaders did the best they could with the information they had.

Sund said he ordered an “all hands on deck” response, meaning every available officer “would be working.” He said he deployed about 250 specialized crowd control officers, “approximately four platoons” of which were outfitted in riot gear. He said that during the riot he urgently requested help from a variety of federal and local agencies. He added that the Capitol Police ordered more helmets and received about 100 of them on Jan. 4. But he acknowledged that “a number of systems broke down.”

“I also wish we had had better intelligence and warnings as to the possibility of this type of military style armed insurrection,” Sund wrote, pointing out that there was a shared responsibility across a number of agencies. “The entire intelligence community seems to have missed this.”

Run-Up to the Riot: “If Something Happens, Just Find Work”

At 7 a.m. on Jan. 6, an officer on the department’s midnight shift finished work and got into his car near the Capitol. Already, swarms of people were walking past, waving Trump flags. He sat in the driver’s seat for a minute, watching. He called up an old colleague and marveled at the crowd.

The officer was surprised his superiors were letting him off duty. During the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, the night shift had often been held over to help. But he hadn’t heard anything from his bosses, so he drove home to the Maryland suburbs and went to sleep. When he woke up, he saw on television what was happening and sped back, following an unmarked police car that had its lights flashing.

Meanwhile, officers belonging to the riot squad were making their way into the district to start their shifts. They could see throngs of people pouring out of Union Station, the railway hub within sight of the Capitol. They, too, were startled by the number of people on the streets that morning — it seemed that at every red light, a hundred demonstrators crossed in front of them. The officers hurried to prepare themselves for a long day.

At 10 a.m., as Trump supporters began to gather to listen to the president, the riot squad held roll call at a building a few blocks from the Capitol steps. There was little new to share from the intelligence division. Instead, the riot squad’s sergeants played clips found on social media: videos of protesters meeting in cities across the country, getting ready to drive to D.C. They told officers to make sure they had filters in their gas masks and snacks in their pockets.

With no real direction from their superiors, the sergeants tried to get their troops mentally prepared.

“You guys all drove in, you guys saw the same thing we did,” one of the sergeants told the officers, according to members of the team. “If something happens,” another instructed, “just find work.”

The unit put on their riot gear: helmets and body armor. Shields were placed in strategic areas around the Capitol complex, though some officers later said they could not get to them. One sergeant gave officers a final warning. “If this goes good, then we’ll laugh about it,” he told them. “But if it goes bad, it’ll change your life and you’ll never forget about it. They’ll talk about this for years and years and years.”

The riot squad members got on a bus to await their orders.

Sitting in his gear, one officer was struck by the age range of the people in attendance. “People had their little kids, 2-year-olds, babies in strollers,” he recalled. An elderly woman with a walker inched toward the Capitol: “Every two steps, she has to stop and catch her breath.”

After about an hour, the radio crackled: A possible bomb had been found outside the Republican National Committee headquarters, southeast of the Capitol complex. Capitol Police officers raced to the scene.

On the bus, the information did not set off panic. Suspicious packages are discovered all the time on the Hill; usually they are false alarms.

Then another, more urgent call went out. A 10-33, code for an officer in distress. An officer had been knocked backwards and hit her head on a flight of steps. The outer perimeter surrounding the west front of the Capitol had been breached.

Normally, the sergeants on the bus would wait for orders. But one snapped. “Fuck this, we’re going,” he said. The bus steered around the Capitol, barely squeezing between parked cars and protesters that had clogged a drive alongside the building.

Realizing they were effectively marooned, the sergeants ordered the riot squad off the bus. They began to walk across a wide lawn outside the Capitol.

As the officers drew closer, they realized that the lower section of the building’s west terrace was guarded only by what is known as a “soft squad,” officers with little protective gear dressed in neon yellow outerwear and baseball caps. The rioters were attempting to pull away metal barricades known as “bike racks,” and striking officers with their fists. With about 150 yards to go, the squad members broke into a dead sprint.

Once they reached the lower steps, the riot officers spread out behind the soft squad, tapping its members out, one by one. The riot squad came into formation in front of their less-protected colleagues: about two dozen officers attempting to hold 120 feet of open space, behind the line of barricades.

Looking out toward the Mall and the Washington Monument, the squad realized the grass had disappeared from view, blocked out by a crowd of thousands.

The Attack: “Pick a Side”

At about 1 p.m., Trump gave a rousing speech to protesters, suggesting they head to the Capitol to protest the election certification. “We’re going to walk down” to the Capitol, where they must “fight,” he said.

“We’re going to the Capitol,” he told the increasingly agitated crowd of protesters. “We’re going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Vice President Mike Pence had just arrived in the House Chamber. The lawmakers awaiting him still hadn’t realized just how dire the situation was becoming.

To Sund, it was already clear that “the situation was deteriorating rapidly,” he wrote in his letter. He requested support from a number of agencies, including the Secret Service, and asked the sergeants-at-arms to authorize the National Guard and declare a state of emergency. According to the letter, Sund recalled that Irving, the House sergeant-at-arms, said he “needed to run it up the chain of command.”

Outside on the lower west terrace, the rioters had begun launching their offensive. At first, they pushed officers from across the bike racks, almost testing to see what they could get away with. Soon it became a fistfight. In what felt like minutes, it turned into an all-out brawl involving scores of armed rioters.

To the police on the line, it seemed like every time they shoved one protester back, three more surged ahead to take their place.

“Some of them, as they are holding a thin blue line flag, looked you dead in the eye and said, ‘Pick a side,’” one officer told ProPublica.

One officer hit a demonstrator and watched a pistol pop out of the rioter’s waistband. The officer picked the weapon up off the ground and, with no time or backup to initiate an arrest, put it in his pocket and continued fighting.

Plumes of tear gas billowed behind the police line. Officers were startled by the sight of department commanders joining their desperate troops to defend the Capitol.

Inspector Thomas Loyd, the man in charge of the department’s Capitol Division, threw off his hat and raised his fists. Deputy Chief Eric Waldow waded into the crowd. With the build of a linebacker, he cut a menacing figure, throwing punches as the bear spray stained his white uniform orange.

The two are now revered by the department’s rank and file, who complain that other leaders were missing in action. Waldow and Loyd referred ProPublica to the Capitol Police public information office, which declined to comment.

The only other high-ranking official who officers said they heard on the radio that day was Yogananda Pittman, the department’s assistant chief for protective and intelligence operations. Multiple officers told ProPublica that Pittman addressed the troops only once on the radio, when she ordered that the Capitol be locked down. Loyd, the union said in a public statement in January, had already given the same order about an hour before.

Elsewhere, another riot squad was in even worse shape. These officers had been dispatched to help quell a group of protesters gathered near a monument west of the Capitol. But they had been instructed by their superior officers to leave their gear on a bus. Now they were separated from the bus, defenseless.

“They were holding back some protesters, with just bike racks,” said McFaden. “Well, those bike racks actually were used as weapons against the officers. Who had the bright idea of sending a hard squad with no gear? … The coordination was just not there.”

McFaden said that one member of that squad was hit in the head by a bike rack and knocked unconscious.

As the battle raged, officers stationed away from the combat were still trying to figure out if they were authorized to respond. They heard calls on their radios for “all available units.” But officers at fixed posts didn’t know what that meant.

“How the fuck am I supposed to know if I’m available?” thought one officer, stationed at a perimeter post with no rioters in sight. The officer’s supervisors didn’t know either. The group decided to stay put: If they left, there was a chance their post could be overrun. They were stuck listening to their colleagues fight and cry for help over the radio.

McFaden was also stationed away from the rioters, tasked with guarding a parking garage on the Rayburn House Office Building’s west side. From his post, he had a clear view of the battle on the west front, but he’d received orders to stay at the garage entrance. At 56 years old, he had worked for the Capitol Police House Division for more than 20 years. He was slated to retire in just a few weeks. Now he was watching, powerless, as flash-bang grenades went off in front of a building he was sworn to protect.

By this point, time had become a blur to the officers at the west front. But somewhere around 1:15 p.m., it felt for a moment like the cavalry arrived. Dozens of officers in black riot gear came over the wall on the south side of the terrace. Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, the only other members of law enforcement on the west front in riot gear that day, had arrived.

But the reinforcements could only slow the crowd. About an hour and a half after the Metropolitan police arrived, the rioters broke through the line. In the melee, a rioter was captured on video hurling a fire extinguisher at the Capitol police. It struck an officer in the head, giving him a concussion, according to his colleagues. That officer was one of at least two to be assaulted with such a device that day; another, Brian Sicknick, died from his injuries the following day.

The rioters pulled at least two of the Capitol Police officers in riot gear into the crowd, stealing their batons and pepper spray and setting off a kind of human tug of war, before other officers were eventually able to pull their colleagues out.

Soon, the police had their backs against a wall. They formed a semicircle, doing their best to defend themselves against jabs with flagpoles and shots from bear spray canisters and pepper spray guns.

The officers made their way toward the staircase leading up to the second floor of the west terrace. A line of officers pushed each other up the narrow steps. When they got to the terrace, they rushed through a door leading to the inside of the building. Metropolitan police formed a wall of riot shields behind them, sealing off the entrance.

The crowd never made it through the doors. Video footage shows a Metropolitan police officer trapped in the door, screaming in agony. As the police poured inside, some members of Congress were still on the House floor, yet to be evacuated.

At around this time, Sund was on a conference call with four different agencies and had just learned that he needed Pentagon approval to activate the National Guard. According to Sund’s letter, Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff, remained skeptical. “I don’t like the visual of the National Guard standing [in] a line with the Capitol in the background,” Piatt said, suggesting that the guard relieve Capitol Police officers from their fixed posts instead. Piatt and the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to an emailed list of questions. (In a statement on Jan. 11, Piatt denied making such a comment. He later acknowledged that he “may” have said it.)

Once inside, the riot squad searched desperately for water. The pepper spray and bear spray cocktail was overwhelming, seeping through the tiny breathing holes of their masks.

Officers spat out phlegm and vomited into trash cans. When they eventually found water, they rushed to wash the chemicals out of their eyes and put their helmets back on. They climbed up another flight of stairs to get to the Capitol crypt, the circular room directly beneath the rotunda.

As the officers ascended, they met more rioters, who were being pushed down the stairs by Metropolitan police. The Capitol police felt like they were swimming upstream through a mob, grabbing the protesters by their limbs and shoulders as they tried to reach the next level of the Capitol.

One officer said the crypt looked like something out of a Michael Bay movie, trash strewn everywhere, the air thick with smoke.

After the crypt was cleared, another officer made it to the Capitol rotunda. He said he still can’t shake the scene: On the walls, a 19th-century frieze depicted the Battle of Lexington and the signing of the Declaration of Independence; on the ground, pepper balls whizzed into the crowd and the smell of chemicals wafted through the air.

McFaden, too, finally got a call to jump into the action, and was ordered to the rotunda. When he arrived beneath its domed ceiling, already breathless from the run over, he got hit in the face with bear spray.

“I felt like you could fry an egg on my forehead,” he said.

The Aftermath: “I Don’t Trust the People Above Me to Make Decisions to Bring Me Home Safe”

By about 4 p.m., other agencies had arrived in the rotunda: FBI SWAT teams, police officers from surrounding counties. Law enforcement moved in lines two or three deep, pushing the demonstrators out of the building’s east doors.

With their guns drawn, officers teamed up and began searching the Capitol, clearing rooms one by one. Members of Congress were now huddled with their staff, cowering petrified behind furniture they had piled against their office doors.

The first 150 or so members of the National Guard finally arrived at 5:40 p.m.

“I still cannot fathom why in the midst of an armed insurrection, which was broadcast worldwide on television, it took the Department of Defense over three hours to approve an urgent request for National Guard support,” Sund wrote in his letter. In response to questions for this story, the National Guard sent a timeline that confirmed their 5:40 p.m. arrival and referred ProPublica to a press release stating they worked with Capitol and Metropolitan police “to assist with an immediate response.”

At around 8 p.m., Capitol Police declared the complex secure. It was pitch-black outside by the time the riot squad that fought on the west front reunited. There was little conversation. They sat exhausted on the steps by the Memorial Door, helmets at their feet, staring at each other in disbelief. Some hugged each other. Others cried.

One saw that he had missed 17 calls and nearly 100 text messages. High school friends he hadn’t spoken to in years reached out on Instagram. In text after text, the same words: “I saw the news.” “Call me when you get this.” “I love you.”

The messages made some of the news coverage that came later, in which police were accused of siding with the mob, easier to stomach. He knew nothing he had done that day could be construed as complicit with the rioters. It looked like at least some of his friends and relatives knew it too.

Several officers said they didn’t get home until the early morning hours of the next day. One said when he got home he went straight to his washing machine to put his bear-spray-soaked uniform into a cold-water wash. Another said that he could not get rid of the smell or the itch of the chemicals for days.

For a week afterward, one officer said, he cried nightly. Three Capitol Police officers died in early January: Brian Sicknick, who was beaten over the head with a fire extinguisher; Howard Liebengood, who died by suicide following the riot; and Eric Marshall, who died of cancer four days before the riot. Almost 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police officers were injured, according to a union statement. One had two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs.

A week or so later, McFaden and union chair Gus Papathanasiou met with leadership for the first time since Sund’s resignation on Jan. 7. Acting Chief Pittman, Assistant Chief Chad Thomas and other senior officers were in attendance.

Loyd, the inspector who had thrown punches on the west front, was also there. McFaden had the sense that Loyd was only brought in to defuse tension with the union, which had more questions than leadership had answers.

Pittman acknowledged that the force was in a dark place and a culture change was sorely needed. But McFaden said the acting chief quickly became taciturn. When she was asked where she and her fellow chiefs were during the riot and why they weren’t on the radio, she dodged the question.

Meetings with union leadership usually last at least an hour, but after 30 minutes, McFaden said, Pittman got up to leave for another engagement.

The union leaders were enraged. They turned to Thomas and asked why he wasn’t on the radio that day.

“He said he was trying to do that for like 10 to 15 seconds, and he couldn’t get on the radio,” McFaden said. “This event lasted for hours. … I mean, come on.” Pittman and Thomas did not respond to calls for comment.

It was only through Pittman’s testimony at a closed Congressional briefing on Jan. 26 that most Capitol Police officers learned that the force did in fact have intelligence warnings of possible violence. She admitted that the department failed to adequately act on it.

The officers said they are still waiting for an apology. Many are looking for new jobs.

“Let’s face it. Now the whole world knows where the vulnerabilities of the Capitol are,” said one officer. “I don’t trust the people above me to make decisions to bring me home safe.”

Joaquin Sapien was one of the first reporters hired at ProPublica in its first year of publishing in 2008. Since then, his journalism has explored a broad range of topics, including criminal justice, social services, and the environment. In 2019, he was a co-producer and correspondent for “Right to Fail,” a film for the PBS documentary series Frontline.

Joshua Kaplan was a Senior Reporting Fellow at ProPublica. Previously, he wrote a column about criminal justice for the Washington City Paper, reporting on topics such as police misconduct during undercover prostitution stings and prosecutors’ tactics for depriving defendants of the right to a jury trial. He also reported on behavioral health care quality inside schools, psychiatric hospitals and addiction treatment facilities, including a series of investigations into mismanagement at D.C.’s Department of Behavioral Health.

Via ProPublica

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Harrowing New Audio Reveals Panic As Trump Mob Overran Capitol Police | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC