Since the midterm elections I have been behaving myself — relatively speaking. No long-winded missives or rants for quite some time. But today I am about to break my streak. There is just too much going on to to remain silent.

For starters, there are the police who just murdered another black man, Tyre D. Nichols.

As a New York Times editorial argues, we have an obligation to view — to face — each one of these abuses of police power — the tortures, the beatings, the tasering, the gassing, the terrorizing of young black men like Mr. Nichols. Each day in America a dozen civilians are killed by police — double that if you factor in the asphyxiations and Taser deaths police inflict on disproportionately people of color.

It can’t go on this way.

We must also acknowledge the humanity, the love of their families, the talents, the potential, and the hopes of each of these victims. Nichols, who was just trying to get home when he was intercepted, dragged from his car, and murdered by a group of thugs with badges, died with his mother’s name on his lips and left behind a portfolio of lovely photography. How is his life any different from yours or mine?

We need to get up off our asses and finally do something to rein in police abuse. While a few people associated with an organization called BLM may have taken some wrong turns, let’s not ignore the point — that Black lives really do matter. Police abuses really are an epidemic and they put all of us at risk.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, wrote an excellent response to a piece in the Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf, who pronounced “Black Lives Matter” a dead letter and argued that public outrage wouldn’t fix bad policing and that, well, police killings are actually fewer than in the past. Ifill tore into Friedersdorf’s flabby and execrable arguments by pointing out that, first of all, the lack of public outrage and apathy is a white people problem. Moreover, Ifill argues, “Whatever modest reforms to policing have been adopted [following BLM pressure], were undertaken after long, pitched battles with those determined to maintain the status quo.” We saw it in the 100% Democratic Party controlled Massachusetts state legislature when the police lobby preserved Qualified Immunity — the license to kill without consequence.

With the murder of a Black man by five Black cops, many have finally realized that it is police training and police institutions which create bad cops — who just happen to police in racist fashion regardless of their own color. Compounding this is the fact that police are organized as paramilitary organizations where target practice is valued more than deescalation, where loyalty to fellow officers counts more than responsibility to the public. Police are truly a gang unto themselves. A few years ago a former California police officer spelled out exactly how the institution corrupts individuals. In his accounting, no cop can completely escape becoming an abuser.

Recent demonstrations over Cop City in Atlanta and the killing of a protester ought to also make us all think twice about America’s growing Police State. Over the strenuous objections of voters, the police lobby succeeded in getting approval for an 85 acre, $90 million (and growing) facility some have described as Fantasyland for cops. And a Police State also means that citizens must be convinced, ham-handedly if necessary, in the eternal good intentions and necessity of the police. We are constantly reminded, via well-placed Copaganda, that Officer Friendly is our pal. Particularly when he’s a “School Resource” officer.

In America everything is ultimately connected in some twisted way to race. In the case of Tyre Nichols’s murder, all five cops were Black. And in the case of Cop City, the City Council that approved the project is majority Black and the former mayor who pushed it is herself Black. Ex-mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is now working — just as ironic as it sounds — as “Senior Advisor for Public Engagement” in the Biden administration.

So how do we account for this? Is Bottoms a flaming racist? Is Biden a flaming white supremacist? Of course not, but the institutions they work in and through, and to which they have hitched their fortunes, are most definitely racist. Capitalism, colonialism, militarism, white supremacy, and authoritarianism — all have built and corrupted everything they touch. Our Constitution is the rulebook by which our institutions can stack the game against citizens. Racist laws, racist institutions, and racist justice operate by that rulebook have created a nightmare for some of us.

And a culture war is raging about teaching these truths.

We learned this week that the Sports Medicine Committee of the Florida High School Athletics Association wants to make mandatory the reporting of menstrual cycles by female student athletes. The same state — just in time for Black History Month — has also banned the College Board’s Advanced Placement course in AP African American Studies. In fact, Florida teachers now face felony charges if they use non-approved textbooks in their classrooms. You can view the AP African American History course framework here. The AP course consists of four principal units: Origins of the African Diaspora; Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance; the Practice of Freedom (including a critical view of Reconstruction); and (most damning) Movements and Debates (including anti-colonial responses to slavery and the Civil Rights Movement). Somehow, Florida did not feel the need to ban AP European History which also covers philosophical and political debates. Just not Black ones.

What Florida Republicans have done is to edit out Blacks from American history in exactly the same manner that Nazis did in removing Jews from Germany’s civil service and its cultural institutions. Before they really got going.

Hitlerjugend (Hitler youth)

If you think Florida is an outlier, you would be wrong. Local school boards and librarians are under attack by town Republican committees all over the country. The Massachusetts ACLU points out that a very small minority of ultra-conservatives is responsible for all the noise. This may or may not be the case, as it has been my observation that much of this is the work of Republican Town Committees. Indeed, virtually every Republican in Congress mouths these same sentiments.

In the Tri-Town area [of SouthCoast Massachusetts] a couple of Republican hacks are trying hard to do their own impressions of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Joe Pires worries that Diversity and Equity committees are harming white students. Pires also doesn’t like library books that represent the identities and concerns of gay kids. Well, too damn bad! Schools and libraries are for all the children in a community — not just for kids whose parents look like Ozzie and Harriet.

Ozzie and Harriet was a television program in the 1950’s

Joining town Republicans like Pires with precisely the same views and similarly attacking marginalized members of society are neo-Nazis and Proud Boys who use physical intimidation as they did recently in Fall River. If attacks like these on gay and brown and black children and their families don’t concern you, they are precisely the same tactics the Hitlerjugend and Brownshirts used in Germany of the Thirties. As a famous German theologian famously observed, first they come for the “other”; then suddenly it’s you. Contact the SouthCoast LGBTQ+ Network if you want to help fight back.

After a quarter of a century of Tom Hodgson’s excesses going unpunished and no politician ever mounting much of a challenge, voters finally gave a pink slip to a sheriff who preferred playing the national stage to tending to his office back home.

Hodgson’s defeat represents the tireless efforts of regular citizens, church groups, and community organizations across Bristol County who had simply had enough of Hodgson’s intentional and egregious cruelty. Paul Heroux’s win over Hodgson rides on the wings of surprising electoral wins by Democrats across the country.

Heroux’s victory was not only a rejection of the incumbent and his carceral notions but an endorsement of professionalizing what has become a highly and dangerously politicized office. In Barnstable County voters similarly elected Donna Buckley, who like Heroux ran on a campaign of reducing recidivism and doing more to treat drug and mental health problems in jail.

Because Hodgson had placed himself squarely in the national spotlight, the Bristol County election took on national significance. Heroux, with a much smaller budget and an all-volunteer campaign team, amazingly beat an incumbent with a massive war chest, a slick media campaign, and a professional and unscrupulous campaign manager.

Hodgson’s campaign attempted to re-frame the tough-talking, gun-toting Western sheriff wannabe as a kind grandpa protecting Bristol County from rising crime, which he frequently attributed to “criminal aliens” and the “woke” criminal-loving Democrats who coddle them. Hodgson spared no effort to smear Heroux as a pedophile-loving Communist funded by Jews with a global agenda. His extraordinarily sleazy campaign may have done him in as much as a quarter century of abusing Bristol County’s sons and daughters.

In the end, all of Hodgson’s mendacity and cruelty caught up with him.

On October 31st Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson dropped another Willie Horton style campaign ad. He’d already tried to frighten voters by accusing his opponent of coddling pedophiles with a non-existent vote on non-existent legislation.

This time Hodgson’s target was George Soros — who Hodgson accused of coddling criminals, funding his opponent, and having the ultimate goal of destroying America: “They have their sights set on our way of life,” Hodgson warned with an ominous “they.”

The hate groups Hodgson works with — and on whose advisory board he sits — all hate Soros, a Hungarian Jewish philanthropist who was not involved in funding the anti-Hodgson campaign ads that have so irked the sheriff. Nope, it was Everytown for Gun Safety, the work of American Jewish philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, a frequent thorn in the side of NRA shills like Hodgson.

At first blush the sheriff, who already has a racism problem, didn’t seem to be able to keep his Jews straight.

But Hodgson’s “mistake” was intentional. Like his dishonest pedophile-coddling scare ad, this one was calculated to reach a certain constituency who watches Glen Beck (“Soros: The Puppet Master”) or Tucker Carlson (“Soros has decided to destroy the American justice system”) — a constituency whose political heroes returned recently from CPAC-Hungary, where autocratic Christian nationalist president Viktor Orban, shut down a university Soros founded and used the pandemic as a pretext for a power grab.

For today’s new crop of antisemites, George Soros has replaced a 19th Century j’accuse involving financier Nathan Rothschild which went on to become a 200-year conspiracy theory.

The sheriff’s antisemitic ad was promptly slammed by Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Deborah Goldberg, and other Massachusetts politicos. Hodgson’s Tweet also drew more than 60 comments, most negative: “Well if that isn’t the most antisemitic thing I’ve heard all day… Honestly Southeastern MA, he is the biggest embarrassment in the Commonwealth… Your mustache is too wide. You gotta trim it to just a little patch under your nose… Halloween’s over but maybe next year you can go full Nazi cosplay…”

Another commented: “These people no longer have dog whistles they have bull horns. It is no longer a silent wink wink it is full out public bigotry…”

In choosing George Soros — the wrong Jew, and he knew it! — Hodgson was trotting out time-worn antisemitic tropes, implying that “they” are unpatriotic and systematically destroying “our way of life” — which MAGA politicians themselves freely call white Christian nationalism. There’s really not much of a line between this and the Charlottesville tiki-torch neo-Nazis with their “Jews will not replace us.”

For years the Anti-Defamation League has tracked two organizations Hodgson is intimately involved with — the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The ADL’s factsheet “Mainstreaming Hate” describes one a as hate group and the other as an extremist organization. In 2018 the ADL published “The Antisemitism Lurking Behind George Soros Conspiracy Theories,” which explains why groups like FAIR and CIS are so obsessed with Soros. They routinely employ precisely the same dog whistles Hodgson used not-so-subtly in his antisemitic campaign ad: “They have their sights set on our way of life.”

In his defense, Hodgson tweeted that he couldn’t possibly be an antisemite because his parents are buried in a private crypt on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Yet antisemitism was no impediment to Hodgson’s father, “Sir John,” being buried in Israel. According to a memoir written by Hodgson’s youngest sister, their parents were given a private crypt in Israel because of “Sir John’s” services to the Vatican. The memoir recounts numerous examples of the father’s antisemitism. The elder Hodgson’s burial in a churchyard says everything about his connection to the Church and nothing about respect for Jews.

For years Hodgson has attended events sponsored by FAIR and its front groups, as well as an event called “Hold their Feet to the Fire,” where sheriffs and a variety of homophobes, Neo-confederates, Muslim-bashers, antisemites, and Christian Nationalists fill slots on right-wing talk radio programs. In 2016 Hodgson gave a talk at a FAIR national advisory meeting that preceded one by Ira Mehlman entitled “Soros Hacked: The Truth Behind His Big Money Network to Destroy U.S. Borders.”

Mehlman calls Soros’ Open Society Institute a “shadowy foundation” with a “globalist agenda” to attack U.S. immigration policy. But “globalist” is white supremacist code for “Jewish” and FAIR and CIS have an axe to grind with Soros not only because he is a liberal philanthropist, but especially because he is a liberal Jew.

The American Jewish Committee has this to say about so-called “globalists”:

“Much like dual loyalty, Globalist is used to promote the antisemitic conspiracy that Jewish people do not have allegiance to their countries of origin, like the United States, but to some worldwide order–like a global economy or international political system–that will enhance their control over the world’s banks, governments, and media. […] Today, Globalist is a coded word for Jews who are seen as international elites conspiring to weaken or dismantle “Western” society using their international connections and control over big corporations (see New World Order)–all echoing the destructive theory that Jews hold greed and tribe above country.”

In 2001 Stephen Steinlight published a report for the Center for Immigration Studies — a group with which Hodgson has testified at Congress many times — entitled “The Jewish State in America’s Changing Demography.” Steinlight blasted secular Jews for their historical support for liberal immigration policies, arguing that Mexicans would soon erode Jewish political power. Steinlight said that his own views had been changed though dialogue with CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian, a racist who once said “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough…”

In 2004 Steinlight ratcheted up his polemics with an essay, “High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry,” but he still wasn’t making progress with secular Jews. By 2010 Steinlight was frustrated and angry at his co-religionists, accusing leading Jewish organizations of censorship and repression.

In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s governmental affairs director and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to be the worst enemies of the country” — a sentiment that former president and Hodgson idol Donald Trump echoed on October 16th when he wrote, “Jews have to get their act together…”

Hodgson is so often found in cesspools with antisemites and racists that he can hardly smell the sewage. A case in point is Hodgson’s flirtation with Rick Wiles, a virulent antisemite and Christian nationalist who renounced his US citizenship because of marriage equality. Wiles broadcasts an “End Time” radio program that has featured Hodgson and received Trump White House press credentials.

Hodgson’s numerous and habitual problems with hate groups and bigotry are bad enough. But this is what he has chosen to do instead of competently running his jails and making a best effort to rehabilitate people.

Vote this embarrassment out of office on November 8th.

Choose Paul Heroux.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson must be feeling the stinging criticisms of his substandard jail food, his systematic violations of human rights, his suicides, his recidivism rate, and his refusal to help inmates deal with drug addiction.

After 24 years in office, only this week – barely a week before an election that could well unseat him – Hodgson announced to great fanfare that he had scored a “perfect score” on his opioid treatment program from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, joining his “perfect score” from the American Corrections Association.

ACA Certifications not worth the paper they’re printed on

Readers of this newsletter are aware that ACA certifications are not worth the paper they’re printed on. As Senator Elizabeth Warren found when investigating them:

“The ACA accreditation process is a rubber stamp. It is almost impossible for a facility to fail an ACA audit. The ACA grants facilities three months’ advance notice of audits; provides facilities with “technical assistance,” including “standards checklists” and an “audit readiness evaluation” that help a facility know when to schedule its audit and what to expect; and, at a facility’s request, will conduct a “mock audit” to help the facility prepare.4 If problems persist despite these ample opportunities to correct–or hide–them, the ACA Commissioners can ignore audit finding altogether and allow a facility that failed its audit to receive accreditation, rendering these standards toothless.”

Ditto, NCCHC certifications

It turns out that the NCCHC certifications are equally meaningless. A 2016 article in Prison Legal News showed that the NCCCH misrepresents the stringency of its “inspections.”

“Like the ACA, the NCCHC warns prison officials of upcoming inspections but claims they also conduct unannounced reviews. Also like the ACA, the NCCHC has historically relied on self-reported information from the facilities it accredits.”

Like the ACA, the NCCHC is an opaque organization with too many interests in private prison licensure, and it’s little more than a pay-to-play scheme:

“Both the ACA and NCCHC are also plagued by conflicts of interest, including the fact that they effectively sell accreditation to their correctional colleagues and promulgate their own voluntary standards with no oversight.”

As with the ACA, the NCCHC frequently gives “perfect scores” to institutions that habitually violate the constitutional rights of their inmates. But don’t believe me. Believe the Department of Justice:

“The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division issued a letter in April 2008 that found the Worcester County Jail and House of Correction in Massachusetts had unconstitutional conditions of confinement. Specifically, the jail failed to protect detainees from harm, failed to protect them “from exposure to unsanitary and unsafe environmental conditions,” and did not provide detainees with adequate mental health care. County officials rejected the allegations, noting the facility was accredited by both the ACA and NCCHC – which, in light of the DOJ’s findings, indicates the inadequacy of accreditation.”

The PLN article goes on to recount horror stories at the Idaho Correctional Center, where inmates were subjected to “gladiator school” beatings while corrections staff did nothing to intervene. It mentions the Walnut Grove Youth Correction facility in Mississippi where young people were sexually abused and subjected to high levels of violence. It mentions a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility in Texas where prisoners were given substandard medical care. It lists a number of mental health abuses at jails in Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, and others – all where NCCHC certifications papered over the abuses, giving the institutions either “perfect” or passing scores.

In 2009 – only after the Department of Homeland Security had revoked Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio of his 287(g) program – did the NCCHC revoke Arpaio’s certifications that had previously given his facilities glowing reports. A facility that Arpaio himself called a “concentration camp.”

Hodgson’s “First in the Nation” drug treatment program

In the same self-congratulatory press release announcing his NCCHC “perfect” score, Hodgson went a step further, announcing a drug treatment program in collaboration with Correctional Psychiatric Services (CPS), Hodgson’s healthcare vendor – a major donor to his campaign.

In another press release, Hodgson described his outpatient drug treatment program as the “brainchild” of CPS president Jorge Veliz and a “first-in-the-nation inmate reentry clinic.” Of course it is nothing of the sort. Hampden County Sheriff Nicholas Cocchi has been operating a similar program for four years in conjunction with the Department of Corrections – which ought to be running all county jails. Another Hodgson lie.

But why now?

One wonders why it took Hodgson 24 years – other than facing stiff campaign opposition – to take an interest in medically assisted [drug] treatment. In 2019 Hodgson fielded questions from community members at the last 287(g) hearing he ever conducted. In this clip Hodgson whines that administering MAT treatments to inmates is “controversial,” can take up to 10 minutes, and who has the time for that? Nope, all Hodgson’s going to do is give them a spritz of vivitrol and wish them good luck on the way out of jail.

CPS is part of the problem

Besides the recidivism and suicides, and the many reports of medical neglect, Hodgson’s jail leads in jail deaths. CPS has not only presided over the administration of substandard mental health services to inmates; since 2020 there has been clear evidence that it provides demonstrably bad medical care.

In October 2020 Reuters released a national comparison of jail deaths. Bristol County again was #1 on the wall of shame:

From Reuters data

Roughly one out of 500 detainees in the Bristol County Jail ends up dead compared to less than one per thousand in most other jails.

Dr. Jorge Raul Veliz, the owner and president and founder of Correctional Psychiatric Services, has a staff of about 200 and contracts with Dukes, Bristol, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth and Suffolk county jails in Massachusetts and has contracts in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine. His employees are not unionized. Veliz founded CPS in 1994, co-founded Boston Clinical Consulting (a Guatemalan healthcare company) in 2007, and in 2009 co-founded the Hospital Psiquiatrico Mederi in Guatemala.

In 2017 Barnstable County downsized its nursing staff, outsourcing care to Correctional Psychiatric Services. Within weeks, there were two suicides at the Barnstable County jail. Before CPS services even started work, Barnstable nurse Hillarie Gaynor Clarke penned a prescient warning of the risks of using CPS: “I strongly urge the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office to reconsider CPS as an ally, based on its blatantly poor and sometimes fatal track record. Unfortunately, at this rate, it seems that inmate care will only worsen at our county correctional institution.”

CPS employees have been accused repeatedly of medical neglect by both local and ICE detainees. One report from a California-based immigration group details a case of medical neglect by CPS. A search of nursing licenses for the four caregivers mentioned in the complaint showed one with an Associate Degree in Nursing from Laboure College, another with an LPN from Lindsey Hopkins Technical College, another with a vocational certificate from Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School – all supervised by a Nurse Practitioner from the University of Louisville, who only saw the patient after the worst neglect had already occurred.

Click here for a longer profile of CPS, the detailed account of medical neglect by an ICE detainee which names CPS employees by name, a presentation on suicide by CPS principals Jorge Veliz and Beth Cheney, and the Reuters data.

Conflicts of Interest – “The Paid Jailer”

Besides CPS’s dismal record as a medical and mental health services provider, voters ought to be very skeptical of CPS’s involvement in Hodgson’s latest public relations con.

In January 2022 Common Cause released a report, “The Paid Jailer,” which looks at the role of campaign donations to sheriffs by their vendors. Not surprisingly, the report starts with the Bristol County sheriff:

“In Bristol County, Massachusetts, more than 30 people have died behind bars in the last 10 years. Overwhelmingly, these are people awaiting trial. Some have died because of substance withdrawal and others by suicide. And the people who remain incarcerated say that they’re not receiving basic health care, including one man in Bristol County who has given us permission to share his story anonymously…

Yet Thomas M. Hodgson, the longtime sheriff of Bristol County and the sole leader of the jail facility, has made no changes to the health care provider, CPS Healthcare. CPS has spent more than $20,365 on sheriffs’ campaigns in Massachusetts, and $12,040 has gone directly to Hodgson. The State of Massachusetts reports that state sheriffs paid a total of $9.82 million in contracts to CPS Healthcare from 2012 to 2021. Hodgson appears to be the rule, rather than the exception, which we show in The Paid Jailer: How Sheriff Campaign Dollars Shape Mass Incarceration…”

Final thoughts

Hodgson’s operation is a nightmare. For both inmates and taxpayers. On November 8th voters have a chance to replace death, neglect, starvation, lawsuits, and lies with a sheriff with experience in corrections who takes corrections seriously. Paul Heroux will reform and professionalize a cruel, corrupt, hyper-politicized, patronage-based operation with data-driven programs that actually rehabilitate incarcerated people.

And after all, that’s all Massachusetts sheriffs are supposed to do.

In Massachusetts, sheriffs and deputies are law enforcement officers with limited powers who may assist genuine police officers when requested. But they are not police officers. Sheriffs run jails, transport prisoners, serve eviction and other notices, and are prohibited from patrolling cities and towns — which are chartered (through state laws) to appoint and hire police officers with full police powers (a crucial point mentioned shortly). Sheriffs, however, do enjoy a few limited police-like powers; for example, while they are transporting prisoners through a foreign jurisdiction or when asked to assist in quelling a riot. And that’s about it.

But like Hershel Walker, Bristol County’s Sheriff Thomas Hodgson keeps trying to pass himself off as the police — and whenever Hodgson’s tried it, it’s either been unappreciated or he’s failed at it. Hodgson implies he has police powers by claiming to be tough on crime, but since he has very limited police-like powers all he can really do is suggest that women carry pepper spray, hand out swag to seniors at “safety” talks, lend out canines, and have his jail officers pose with children and his $250K “Homeland Security” command truck at parades.

It may seem like a trivial matter to Hodgson, but democracies require both the consent of the people to be governed — and to be policed. Only law enforcement officers elected or appointed by chartered Massachusetts municipalities have the police powers that Hodgson has repeatedly, and illegally, attempted to usurp.

But don’t expect to see Sheriff Hodgson show up when you call 911

In November 2003, Hodgson (without being asked, and even after being asked to stop) decided that New Bedford’s police force wasn’t doing a good-enough job. So he began sending his officers to patrol the city’s streets. The New Bedford Police Chief was not amused, nor the mayor, and neither was the District Attorney. The Standard-Times reported, “Bristol District Attorney Paul F. Walsh […] said Hodgson has made no effort to coordinate with city police and has a track record of legal failures when investigating crimes inside his own facilities. Walsh also said that arrests made by the sheriff’s deputies, who typically serve warrants and act as guards at the county jail, would be subject to challenges in court. ‘You can’t have the guy who was serving mashed potatoes to inmates last week calling himself a drug detective this week,’ Walsh said.”

But that’s exactly Hodgson’s shtick — playing cop — and he’s been doing it throughout his entire time in office.

Between 1991 and 2005 Peter Larkin was Hodgson’s “Detective Lieutenant of Internal Affairs.” Larkin resigned from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) three years after botching a drug investigation the BCSO undertook — again without “assistance from other police agencies.” One lawyer described the low quality of BCSO investigators, “They’re not trained for investigative work,” while another called the BCSO itself “a task force of goofballs who couldn’t cut it as real cops.”

ABC6 News reported in July 2020 that Larkin, who eventually found work as an attendance officer with the New Bedford Public Schools, had been fired (again) from that job for advocating lynching Black Lives Matter protesters: “I would roll tanks and bulldozers. Mush any human in the way. Shoot everyone else. Pile up the bodies and burn them on national tv.” Within days Larkin had to resign. This news was no surprise given Hodgson’s membership in a hate group and memberships in several extremist organizations.

On January 12, 2017 the state Supreme Judicial Court considered the legality of a sheriff calling himself a police officer, and drew a clear distinction between law enforcement officer and police officer in Commonwealth v. Gernrich where it concluded that “sheriff’s deputies are not police officers.”

The SJC had to consider the case of an inmate in the Worcester County jail who had lied to a deputy and was charged with violating G. L. c. 269, § 13A, which reads, “Whoever intentionally and knowingly makes or causes to be made a false report of a crime to police officers shall be punished by…” The inmate disputed that the deputy he had lied to was a police officer, so the matter before the SJC was the “issue whether a deputy sheriff is a police officer within the meaning of G. L. c. 269, § 13A, present[ing] a question of statutory interpretation…” The Justices reviewed Massachusetts law and concluded:

“For the reasons explained above, a deputy sheriff is not a ‘police officer’ for purposes of G. L. c. 269, § 13A. Thus, we reverse the defendant’s conviction, and a judgment of not guilty shall enter.”

The reasoning behind the ruling is critical. The Justices wrote that G. L. c. 41, § 98 defines “unique” police powers that other law enforcement officials lack; therefore only police can be called police:

Although the term “police officer” appears in a variety of statutory contexts, we adopt the definition in G. L. c. 41, § 98, to guide our analysis of the issue. General Laws c. 41, § 98, which authorizes the appointment of “police officers” for cities and towns, is an appropriate guide for the interpretation of G. L. c. 269, § 13A, because it permits a distinction between the broad class of law enforcement officers empowered to perform only certain police duties and those expressly designated as “police officers” without such limitations. The definition of police officer in G. L. c. 41, § 98, encompasses a broad range of authority, including the power to make warrantless arrests, that is unique within the class of law enforcement officers. In other words, a police officer is a law enforcement officer, but not all law enforcement officers are police officers. It is this broad authority, granted only to persons appointed as police officers by cities and towns, that defines the term for the purposes of G. L. c. 269, § 13A.

Bottom line: “a deputy sheriff is not a police officer.” You’d think that a ruling so clear and from the highest court in the state would stop Hodgson from trying to impersonate a cop.

But no.

Barely three months following the SCJ ruling, the Fall River Herald News reported that Hodgson and disgraced former mayor (and now incarcerated felon) Jaziel Correia had entered into a backroom deal to have Hodgson run Fall River’s police lockup. Hodgson had tried and failed to sell a similar scheme before when Deval Patrick was governor. This time around Hodgson enlisted the help of a con man. The now incarcerated former mayor swore up and down that two local state representatives had promised to find state funding for Hodgson.

There were just two problems with the Correia-Hodgson deal. The Fall River police reminded all parties that policing by sheriffs was illegal. And Carole Fiola, who served on the Joint Ways and Means Committee and whose name Correira dropped, had to set the record straight when she told the Herald: “It was the first time I heard about it and I am not aware there is a budget request.”

The scheme was both illegal and based on lies.

Classic Hodgson.

Paul Heroux at the State House

Not only in Bristol County, but all over the United States, sheriffs are on the ballot. Given the previous administration’s love affair with Anglo-American sheriffs, America is now paying a bit more attention to these races than ever before.

In Massachusetts sheriffs have extremely attenuated powers but extremely long terms — rivaling that of a U.S. Senator — and very little accountability — all of which affords them a lot of time and opportunity to get into mischief.

By now everyone knows about Bristol County’s Angry White Man sheriff — the community college dropout who has been running our jail by the seat of his pants while making frequent trips to the border with militia members and white supremacists. Not to mention letting an indecent number of people die by suicide while half-starving inmates and gouging their families with usurious phone charges.

Tom Hodgson is like your neighbor, the do-it-yourself plumber, who broke the toilet, flooded the first floor, and left sewage all over. Now cooler heads have to call someone with professional skills — somebody who actually knows what the hell he’s doing — to fix the mess the stubborn hubby has made.

And Paul Heroux is just the guy to do it. Heroux has a bachelor’s in psychology, a master’s in corrections, has worked in corrections doing corrections, and has been running a city government with a budget three times larger than Hodgson’s.

In the process Heroux has also managed to steer clear of the state auditor, the state attorney general, and the Department of Homeland Security — unlike the incumbent clown who couldn’t document a third of his expenses to the auditor’s satisfaction, misplaced ICE payments in one of a dozen slush funds he keeps, who has systematically violated the civil rights of his prisoners, and last year lost his prized 287(g) program because of gross incompetence and cruelty — cruelty borne out of pandering to and offering Republican voters angry red meat.

Thomas Hodgson in an election ad telling voters that jail is not a country club.

Paul Heroux, who sometimes comes across as a brainy technocrat and not a movie-goer’s image of a Western sheriff, is nevertheless unlikely to jet down to the Texas ranch of militia members at taxpayer expense to play dress-up with Western sheriffs, take time off to run the Massachusetts Trump campaign, pose on the Capitol steps with Ted Cruz, Louis Gohmert, or various extremist and anti-government groups he belongs to, or sit on the national advisory board of a hate group — like the incumbent.

Heroux’s not going to put inmates in chain gangs, try to circumvent laws that keep Massachusetts sheriffs from doing police work, try to make deals with a Fall River mayor now serving time in federal prison, do favors for a New Bedford waterfront crime boss, or break federal law by deputizing military recruiters (which earned Hodgson a visit from Navy investigators). And no multi-million dollar legal appeals for lost cases that would never have been heard if the incumbent hadn’t broken laws by violating the rights of inmates or his employees.

No, it’s going to be the sound of crickets again when Heroux is elected sheriff.

Besides not racking up massive legal bills paid for by taxpayers for grandstanding and law-breaking, Heroux is also not going to write “love letters” to racists like Stephen Miller, Trump’s evil genius immigration advisor, or rat out his own church like Hodgson did for the “crime” of his parish caring for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. For a guy who likes to remind his Trumpy base how “Christian” he is, Hodgson sure seems to have forgotten Exodus 22:21: “You shall not oppress or mistreat a stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” Like everything about Hodgson the poseur, even his piety is all show.

But the million-dollar question is — do voters want an aggressive grandstander who just won’t stay in his lane and do his damn job — or are they ready for a little professionalism in a sheriff? I honestly have no idea. Who truly knows the heart of the fickle American voter?

But I’m not the only one to speculate. The Marshall Project covers criminal justice issues and only yesterday published a timely piece: “Progressive Sheriffs Are Here. Will They Win In November?” Since Trump was elected, Progressive sheriff candidates have increasingly run and won.

Sheriffs in the thrall of the Dear Leader

Part of that reason is that voters are beginning to realize just how extremist these overwhelmingly Trump-fanny-kissing sheriffs really are. Overwhelmingly white, a survey by the Marshall Project of sheriff’s political views showed that less than 1% consider themselves liberal, 75% support ultra-right politics, most regard protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to be orchestrated by left-wing provocateurs and not reflect an authentic response to a police murder. And forget accountability. Less than half are in favor of tracking bad cops. And so on. In addition, a majority of sheriffs think they are more powerful than a sitting U.S. president and can interpret the Constitution any way they see fit and selectively enforce laws.

In short, today’s sheriff’s hold views diametrically opposed to those of majorities in Democratic states like ours.

In Essex County, Massachusetts, social worker Virginia Leigh ran against incumbent sheriff Kevin Coppinger in the Democratic primary and got 48% of the vote — not bad for a first-timer. In Hampshire County, Caitlin Sepeda, a nurse and (again) a first-time challenger, garnered 25% of the primary vote but hammered away on services. Sepeda ran on a platform of delivering treatment to inmates, pointing out that 60% of her county’s incarcerated people have substance abuse problems and 70% self-report mental illness. “Those are not law enforcement issues. Those are nursing issues. Those are social service issues,” Sepeda told one reporter.

And she’s absolutely right. Which brings us to the general election on November 8th.

In Barnstable County, Donna Buckley, who is running on a platform of prioritizing programs for inmates and “preparing our inmates for pre-release,” got 30,000 primary votes in the Democratic primary, while Republican Tim Whelan got only 18,000. May these proportions hold in the general election. Besides delivery of services to inmates, federal ICE programs are on the ballot. Buckley has promised to end Barnstable County’s 287(g) program, the only county jail program remaining in Massachusetts.

In Bristol County, Paul Heroux is similarly promising to use — not Hodgson’s cruel medieval approach — but 21st Century tools to run the county jail, to provide services to inmates, to use data-driven management to evaluate rehabilitation programs, and to focus on the mundane job of care, custody, and control of incarcerated people.

To invoke the incumbent’s platform, “Jail is not a country club.” Well, no, it’s not. But it’s also not a torture chamber. It ought to be a short-term treatment center for mentally-ill and chemically-dependent people. The courts and the DA are in the punishing business. The sheriff provides care, custody, and control. Seems simple. Except, perhaps, for some percentage of voters who want sheriffs to impose their own arbitrary punishments on people already being punished.

In her latest essay in the Boston Globe, long-time Hodgson-watching columnist Yvonne Abraham quoted Carol Rose of the ACLU: “Voters are waking up. […] Maybe not this time, but soon, [a sheriff] is going to be held accountable by the voters.” To which Abraham adds: “Please, please, let it be this time.”

Amen to that.

Bristol County’s Chief Trump Bum-Kisser

The New Bedford waterfront has its share of crime, including organized crime. Carlos Rafael, aka the “Codfather,” served time in federal prison on numerous charges, including money laundering. Though no criminal connection has been established between Rafael and Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, two of Hodgson’s officers were convicted of using a Thanksgiving turkey airlift to the Azores (for repatriated deportees) as an opportunity to illegally transfer money offshore for Rafael. The money was carefully divided among couriers (so as not to raise suspicions) and was then recombined and deposited into the “Codfather’s” accounts.

James Melo, a captain with the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, was convicted in Federal court of “conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States and one count of structuring the export of monetary instruments.” Melo got a mild slap on the wrist: twelve months of probation. Sheriffs Deputy Antonio Freitas was slightly less lucky. Freitas, who also served as a deputized ICE agent for Hodgson, was convicted of charges similar to Melo’s but served twelve months in prison.

There is a fascinating account of Rafael’s money-laundering and the role Freitas played in it buried in an appeal from federal prosecutors Mark T. Quinlivan and Trump appointee Andrew E. Lelling. In the document, Rafael boasted of his close relationship with Hodgson and the influence it played in obtaining both a job and a raise for Freitas:

“I got him the job, I got him the raises, so he’ll do what the fuck I tell him to do. He called me. He says, ‘what the fuck is going on, everybody got a promotion in this fuckin’ place but me.’ So I’m like this [gestures] with the sheriff. I called the Sheriff and I said ‘what the fuck are you doing to me Tom? Fuckin Freitas has been there for so many fuckin’ years, you’re not going to give him a fuckin’ promotion and a raise?’ ‘Jesus Carlos, we do not have enough money in the budget.’ I said fuck off, find a way, give the kid a raise. He got his promotion, right, so he called me and said I want to thank you very much, I finally got my fuckin’ promotion and my raise. So it’s nice to know people.”

Rafael’s claim that Hodgson had assisted Freitas was confirmed by Freitas himself, who admitted to Federal investigators “that he had carried money for Rafael in the past because Rafael had helped him get a promotion [from Hodgson] and had co-signed a home improvement loan for him.”

When Hodgson was called to the witness stand during Freitas’ trial, “Hodgson remembered Rafael saying over the phone that he needed a promotion. But Rafael’s call did not influence his decision, Hodgson stressed.” Incredibly — as in “I don’t believe a damn word of it” — Quinlivan and Lelling simply took Hodgson’s word that he had granted the favor because, well, he was going to do it anyway.

But Rafael had access to the sheriff and knew that Freitas “worked on customs with the immigration unit of the Sheriff’s Department. And Rafael said that Freitas could also help the co-conspirators get their cash out of the country by bypassing airport security.” This is because Freitas had received the requested promotion to deputized ICE agent at the jail and had “completed a multiday training program for ICE officers that covered (among other topics) financial crimes, including structuring and bulk-cash smuggling — an instructor, for example, told attendees that structuring involved”having more than $10,000 in cash and breaking it into smaller amounts to conduct financial transactions in order to avoid the reporting requirements.”

Freitas was not only well-positioned to launder money for Rafael, but perfectly trained to commit the crime.

All thanks to Tom Hodgson.

Is Tom Hodgson a white supremacist?

If not, he would have resigned from this ugly crew of satin sheets and brown shirts long ago

Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson has built a career as a cruel jailer on top of allying himself with white supremacists.

In 1999 Hodgson visited Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Tent City” — a facility for Hispanic detainees that Arpaio himself called a “concentration camp,” where inmates lived in 120-degree heat the desert in surplus tents from the Korean War and received half-rations of barely-edible food. Hodgson, who enthusiastically adopted Arpaio’s methods, joked to a Boston Herald reporter, “it’s not a buffet here.” After returning to Massachusetts, Hodgson increasingly modeled his own practices after Arpaio’s and even began using Arpaio’s tag line: “jail is not a country club.” And following the footsteps of Arpaio, who in 2016 lost access to his 287(g) ICE program because of systematic violations of constitutional and human rights of his inmates, Hodgson lost his own 287(g) program in 2021 for all the same reasons — cruelty and incompetence.

After September 11, 2001 Hodgson had realized the financial potential of collaborations with the Department of Homeland Security. With massive amounts of money being thrown around to protect the “Homeland,” Hodgson easily received $3.2 million from DHS to build the C. Carlos Carreiro immigration center in 2007, which later became a full-fledged ICE detention facility. He also received federal money for a $250K DHS command center van — now used primarily for Fourth of July parades and public relations.

In 2011 an organization created by a white supremacist optometrist named John Tanton began recruiting sheriffs to do its dirty work. The 2011 Annual Report of the Federation for American Immigration (FAIR) — which both the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) regard as a hate group — began using county sheriffs as spokesmen to oppose (and in many cases to flaunt) national and state immigration and gun control laws. Hodgson was one of the first to sign up. Working with a FAIR organizer named Susan Tully who both the SPLC and the ADL had long been monitoring, Hodgson organized a “fact finding” mission to McAllen, Texas in July 2014. Since then Hodgson has attended dozens of FAIR’s conferences and events, including its “Hold their Feet to the Fire” broadcast events that draw speakers from a variety of allied hate groups. In March 2015 Hodgson appeared with Tully at the Fisherman’s Club in New Bedford and he has appeared at most of FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events coordinated by Tully (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021).

By 2014 Hodgson was on FAIR’s National Board of Advisors and was “educating” the American Right to the dangers of even DACA recipients. In one of his many trips to Washington DC paid for by Massachusetts taxpayers, on October 11, 2014 Hodgson spoke to fellow FAIR National Board of Advisors on “The Effect of The President’s Decisions on DACA and Its Impact on Our Law Enforcement Challenges.” On September 24, 2016 Hodgson again spoke to FAIR’s National Advisors. The topic this time was “Sanctuary Cities.” Hodgson’s dinner talk immediately preceded one about Jewish “Big Money” and the plot to “Destroy U.S. Borders.” FAIR’s National Board of Advisors is a virtual Who’s Who of conspiracy nuts, anti-Semites, racists, Neo-Confederates, Muslim bashers, white supremacists, eugenicists, and Christian Identitarians.

In October 2015 Hodgson again visited the “Rio Grande” — this time with Robert J. Sylvia, then one of Hodgson’s top brass but now retired, who was all set to run for Sheriff in next month’s election but managed to file his ballot signatures on the wrong form. The sheriffs and their entourage toured the border but also went 70 miles out of their way to visit the ranch of Mike and Linda Vickers, founders of the vigilante group Texas Border Volunteers, an offshoot of the Minuteman Project, a loose-knit group of vigilantes, some of whom are affiliated with White supremacist militias and have been linked to both murders and incidents like the illegal detention of hundreds of migrants in April 2019.

Besides FAIR, Hodgson is also involved with another Tanton group — the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). SPLC does not categorize CIS as a hate group, but CIS functions as a disinformation and lobbying group with extensive white supremacist and antisemitic links. It is led by Mark Krikorian, who first worked at FAIR and who once said about Haiti: “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.” The group’s most visible face is Jessica Vaughan, who used the antisemitic newspaper American Free Press, founded by Holocaust denier Willis Carto, to flog CIS talking points — as did Hodgson’s fellow FAIR national advisor Frosty Wooldridge. On March 28, 2017 Hodgson testified with CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan at Border Security and Immigration Enforcement hearings in Washington. He also appeared with Vaughan at a CIS-organized event in Boston the following month, and another in West Roxbury the month after that. In January 2020 Hodgson again appeared with Vaughan (a resident of South Carolina) before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. FAIR-AVIAC also sent two others to testify before Massachusetts legislators.

In 2015 Hodgson appeared with Dennis Michael Lynch at Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a synagogue run by Islamophobe rabbi Jonathan Hausman. Hausman had previously hosted Dutch Neo-fascist and Islam basher Geert Wilders. Over 100 members of the clergy, including other rabbis, protested a similar hate fest the synagogue hosted the following year featuring Muslim-basher Frank Gaffney and Christian nationalist Jerry Boykin. When I asked Hodgson about his talk with Hausman and Lynch, Hodgson said with a straight face that he was just there doing his duty to inform the public about terrorism: “They asked me to come speak about terrorism. That’s what they asked me to do. […] That’s why I was there, because of my my involvement with the terrorism task force.”

In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s “governmental affairs director” and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to be the worst enemies of the country.” It was not the first time Hodgson ignored the anti-Semites he was rubbing elbows with. His involvement with the Jew-bashing Tanton group is no aberration. In November 2014 Hodgson appeared on TruNews — the “End Times Newscast” with Rick Wiles, a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite who claimed that Obama was inspired by Lucifer and killed Supreme Court Justice Scalia as a pagan human sacrifice, that the Irgun has kill teams all over America, and that Jews will use gun control laws to kill Christians. Wiles devoted “the first half of the program to recount several profound prophetic dreams his family received years ago” and the second half to Hodgson, who discussed immigration and his work with FAIR.

In 2016 Hodgson was one of three speakers at a “Patriots Unity Day” rally in Randolph. The second speaker was Jessica Vaughan. The third speaker was Raymond Hanna from the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America which also maintains white supremacist ties. For example, in Arkansas ACT’s “March Against Shariah” events were organized by a Nazi and publicized on Stormfront. Perhaps because of its far-too-frequent neo-Nazi connections, ACT for America was too toxic for even Donald Trump. Following an article in the Miami Herald announcing ACT’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, which was to have been headlined by Michelle Malkin (another friend of Hodgson’s), the Trump administration had second thoughts: “[The gala] will absolutely not be taking place at Mar-a-Lago,” a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization announced. In September 2016 the sheriff also appeared at a Republican unity rally in Norfolk county attended by his old friend Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies and by ACT for America’s Ray Hannah.

In June 2017 Hodgson appeared with Dan Stein and Michelle Malkin at an annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” broadcast with anti-gay bigot Sandy Rios. Malkin has links to white supremacist groups, including several Tanton groups and VDARE, as well as to Islamophobic organizations. Malkin opposes the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to slaves. And, of course, Malkin is also a big fan of both John Tanton and The Camp of the Saints, a racist book that has attained almost scriptural reverence among believers in the Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that maintains that White people are being consciously replaced and outnumbered by immigration sponsored and financed by Liberals and Jews — a view shared by the 18 year-old white supremacist who marched into a Buffalo supermarket in full body armor last May and murdered ten Black people.

In 2018 Hodgson announced with great fanfare that the National Sheriff’s Association (NSA) would be crowdfunding Trump’s wall. But Hodgson’s NSA project folded after raising less than $100K in three months — despite a false claim that excessive web traffic had crashed the site. The NSA site redirected donors to a group called the American Border Foundation, whose Director of Communications was Jeremy Messina, who identifies with the white Nationalist Identitarian movement and whose Facebook postings bore striking similarities with the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto. The American Border Foundation‘s crowdfunding scheme never reached its $450 million goal. During its three-year run, ABF’s less-than 4,000 donors raised barely over $227K. The fund’s managing director, Quentin Kramer — who like Hodgson has ties to FAIR through FAIR’s sister organization AVIAC — went on the conspiracy and white supremacist circuit trying to sell the project. For example, Kramer appeared on the far-right Southern Sense podcast and also on an “anti-federalist” program that frequently invokes Article IV, Sec. 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution (“the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”).

Despite lackluster donations, Hodgson claimed that as a sheriff he could cut through the red tape to ensure donations got to the Department of Homeland Security and that the wall would be built. In November of 2018, Hodgson claimed he had submitted a form to DHS to donate $100,000 to pay for “border barriers on the Southern border.” But DHS informed the American Border Foundation it could not accept their donation. Nevertheless, in 2019 Hodgson and Kramer were still acting as if the crowdfunding effort was still viable. Both spoke at a FAIR-AVIAC-sponsored press conference in Washington, whose main function was to highlight the “Angel Families” who had lost family members to auto accidents or crimes committed by undocumented migrants. As of today, the whereabouts of $227,657 in ABF donations are still unaccounted for. Neither the ABF nor Hodgson has ever responded to information requests from Bristol County for Correctional Justice or American Oversight.

Hodgson’s newest project is Protect America Now. Once again, Hodgson is not just a member: he’s on Protect America Now’s national advisory board.

On the surface, PAN’s leadership looks like another collection of uber-patriotic, God- and gun-waving Constitutional sheriffs. PAN members number about 85 far-right sheriffs, some with Oathkeeper affiliations. But the brains behind PAN is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative and acolyte of Karl Rove, long involved with numerous voter suppression efforts. A while ago I looked into Sproul and Kory Langhofer, a Trump Stop the Steal lawyer accused of ethics violations, who is also involved with PAN and other voter suppression efforts, and is not coincidentally the owner of Signafide, a company whose AI software is intended to challenge ballot signatures.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) connects Protect America Now, the Constitutional Sheriffs Association (CSPOA), and TrueTheVote in resurrecting Trump’s plan to have sheriffs intervene in the next election. And by “intervene” we’re talking about sheriffs seizing voting machines.

Besides his leadership role in PAN, Hodgson is also a member of CSPOA; in 2014 his membership dues were recorded by the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance.

In June, PAN spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb, announced the creation of an “election integrity” project that will funnel reports (no doubt as ridiculous as those from Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell) to sheriffs for “quick evaluation of incoming information.” And at the FreedomFest 2022 conference in Las Vegas CSPOA founder Richard Mack announced that sheriffs would seize voting machines. Lamb, Hodgson’s fellow advisor at Protect America Now, recently teamed up with True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, who was already working with the CSPOA. Lamb has promised to investigate so-called “ballot mules” — a reference to the Big Lie movie “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted on felony charges of using “straw donors” to make illegal campaign donations but was later pardoned by Donald Trump.

This is the world Hodgson not only lives in but has chosen to create. Whether Hodgson himself is a white supremacist — or has simply built a career by supporting white supremacists for decades — is a trivial distinction.

Hodgson is either a monster or a fool. In neither case does he deserve to be returned to his job as Bristol County Sheriff.

Detail

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson is a member of the National Board of Advisors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR was founded by John Tanton, a white supremacist, and a majority of its advisory board are also white supremacists, Islamophobes, homophobes, racists, and conspiracy theorists. Here are a few of the people Hodgson rubs elbows with at board meetings:

Lou Barletta, former mayor of Hazelton, PA who signed anti-immigration legislation in 2006 that was declared illegal a year later;

Sharon Barnes, clearly no DACA lover, who wrote: “It is our country. They and their parents need to be kicked out […] strengthen our laws and get rid of the locusts;”

Gerda Bikales, who regards Spanish as a ghetto language: “I don’t think Yiddish or Italian represented a threat to the union. But we are now setting ourselves up for an entrenched language ghetto;”

William Chip, who wants to repeal the 14th Amendment;

Donald A.Collins, who contributes to the white nationalist journal VDARE;

Dino Drudi, another Massachusetts zealot who has written for VDARE;

Don Feder, a Muslim-basher who thinks US troops should have “shoot-to-kill” orders on the Southern border;

Robert Gillespie, a proponent of population control — not for white Christians but in developing countries;

Joseph Guzzardi, a member of VDARE’s “editorial collective;”

Carol Joyal, who wrote a review of The Camp of the Saints calling it a “prophecy” of Third World destruction of the West while everyone else just called it racist;

Richard Lamm, former Colorado governor who said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are;”

K.C. McAlpin, an Islamophobe who wants to ban Muslims for ideological reasons: “Congress has used that power in the past to ban the immigration of Communist Party and National Socialist (Nazi) party members who were deemed to be threats to our national security. This case is no different;”

Scott McConnell, another VDARE author, Executive Director at Lifeway Research (“be ready when homosexuality devastates”), and a member of the Family Research Council;

Paul Nachman, a Montana white supremacist who writes for VDARE who calls refugees “good liars” and questions the existence of “moderate Muslims;”

Robert D. Park, founder of the “Article IV – Section 4 Foundation,” a group which maintains that government has abdicated its responsibility to uphold a Constitutional clause requiring it to defend the U.S. from “invasion;”

Randy Pullen, former chairman of the Arizona GOP and self-appointed expert on black crime: “Yes black lives matter. The best way to end the slaughter of young black men is to take guns away from blacks as they are the main killers;”

John Philip Sousa IV, great grandson of the famous Sousa, a Birther, and friend of Joe Arpaio;

Alan N. Weeden, whose family owns the Weeden Foundation, major donor to white supremacist initiatives, and proponent of Secure ID, a national identification system.

A couple of years ago Massachusetts state representatives Antonio Cabral and William Straus sponsored H.5083, An Act Relative to Polling Place Security and Integrity. The bill limits sheriffs and deputies from policing polling places unless both local police and the secretary of public safety request assistance. The bill went nowhere.

Massachusetts law already authorizes police to preserve order at polling places, but the bill was filed only after Donald Trump began laying the groundwork in August 2020 for “Big Lie” accusations of voter fraud — three months before the election — boasting to FOX’s Sean Hannity that “we’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement” at polling stations sniffing out voter fraud. Trump’s demand for sheriffs to oversee the 2020 election was clearly intended to recycle time-tested racist and authoritarian voter intimidation and suppression tactics.

No sooner had H.5083 been filed when Bristol County’s scofflaw sheriff — and then-state Trump campaign director — Thomas Hodgson promised to defy the law if enacted. “No legislator is going to tell me when I can and cannot respond to someone who needs protection,” Hodgson told the Boston Herald.

Though still smarting from the loss of his 287(g) ICE program, Hodgson hasn’t dropped his anti-immigration rhetoric. But now he’s focused on enabling GOP voter suppression and ballot box tampering.

Hodgson’s new project is Protect America Now. On the surface, PAN’s leadership looks like another motley Hodgson crew of faux-patriotic Constitutional sheriffs. PAN members include an additional 69 far-right sheriffs, some with Oathkeeper affiliation.

But the brains behind PAN is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative and acolyte of Karl Rove, long involved with numerous voter suppression efforts. A while ago I investigated Sproul and Kory Langhofer, a Trump Stop the Steal lawyer also involved with PAN, both of whom share the same office address.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) has connected Protect America Now, the Constitutional Sheriffs Association (CSPOA), and TrueTheVote in resurrecting Trump’s plan to have sheriffs intervene in the next election.

But by “intervention” we’re now talking about sheriffs seizing voting machines.

In June, PAN spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb, announced the creation of an “election integrity” project that will funnel reports (no doubt as ridiculous as those from Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell) to sheriffs for “quick evaluation of incoming information.” And last week at the FreedomFest 2022 conference in Las Vegas CSPOA founder Richard Mack announced that sheriffs would actually seize voting machines.

Massachusetts voters have reason to fear that Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, ever the Trump sycophant, would put his deputies at Trump’s disposal as enthusiastically as he tried to use his inmates to build Trump’s wall.

Hodgson did not appear on the speakers list of the FreedomFest 2022 conference but there is a gap in his social media posts between July 13-16. I have called, emailed, and texted Jon Darling, Hodgson’s media representative, to confirm if Hodgson attended FreedomFest. So far, nothing.

In any case, if we want to prevent the theft of voting machines (and elections), it’s time to dust off Cabral and Straus’s bill keeping our increasingly partisan and authoritarian sheriffs out of polling places.

And then we need to send Hodgson packing in November.

He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will be destroyed. (Proverbs 13:20)

Hodgson’s Great Replacement

On Saturday, May 14th, 2022 an 18 year-old white supremacist in full body armor walked into an East Side Buffalo, New York supermarket and slaughtered ten Black people precisely because they were Black.

Payton Gendron left behind a 180-page manifesto citing the Great Replacement – a conspiracy theory which holds that Liberals and mainly Jews (“globalists” or the “new world order”) are intent on replacing white people with compliant mongrel races who reproduce at higher rates. “This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility,” Gendron wrote, “is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”

For white supremacists, the end of white domination is as frightening as death. Though whites dominate government, courts and commerce, the fears of white supremacists have nevertheless magnified into nightmares of “white genocide” and “replacement” and are found not only in the manifestos of mass-murderers but in mainstream Republican political dogma.

And this includes Bristol County’s white supremacist sheriff, Thomas M. Hodgson.

Replacement was the theme of a 1973 novel by French nationalist Jean Raspail, a book that has captured the imagination of American white supremacists like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, the Identitarian movement, and a considerable number of anti-immigration and white supremacist organizations – three to which Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson has close ties and all of which flog the narrative of the Great Replacement.

Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints was first published in 1973, translated into Englsh two years later and distributed by the Social Contract Press (more on this Tanton group later). The publisher described the book’s theme: “By the year 2000 there will on present projections be seven billion people swarming on the surface of the Earth. And only nine hundred million of them will be white.” Kirkus Reviews noted the book’s inherent fascism: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Inspired by Raspail, in 2012 another French writer, Renaud Camus (no relation to Albert Camus), popularized the “Great Replacement” theory in a self-published novel by the same name, Le Grand Remplacement. Camus also penned You Will Not Replace Us, an homage to the American Alt-Right, and Tweeted: “the genocide of the Jews was undoubtedly more criminal but still seems somewhat small compared to global [white] replacement.”

In fact, le grand remplacement dates back at least to the Thirties when the expression was used by Nazi French collaborator Rene Binet, whose brigade ended up (I’m not making this up) in charge of defending Hitler’s bunker. An article from radioFrance notes that the phrase was probably used even earlier to characterize slave revolts in Haiti and Martinique, as well as to disparage Jews around the time of the Dreyfus affair.

While never truly defeated, Western fascism has been making a bit of a come-back. France’s Rassemblement National, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, England’s British National Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, and Spain’s Vox all wrap themselves in the same white Christian nationalism and anti-democratic authoritarianism that now characterize the American Republican Party. And all are preoccupied with “invasion” or “replacement” by non-white immigrants. It is no coincidence that the American Conservative Union’s CPAC Convention took place in Hungary this year. Fusing pan-European Identitarianism and resurrected fascism with good old-fashioned American white supremacy has long been a project of extremists like Steve Bannon.

But white supremacy cannot succeed without maintaining white Christian privilege and white numerical superiority, at least in the voting booth. Laws and maneuvers privileging white Christians, limiting immigration for non-whites, maintaining police control over largely non-white communities, preventing the diminution of the “white race” by abortion, and ensuring white election advantage – all are methods of delaying the inevitable loss of white supremacy.

The Tanton Network

Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman opens with an unhinged racist, Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard, standing in front of a screen as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is projected onto his face. Beauregard laments the halcyon days when Anglo-Saxons were unchallenged masters of the nation, and he repeats several times, “We had a great way of life.” Today that lost “great way of life” has become a dog whistle for white supremacists and anti-immigrant groups who want to “make American great again” by making it white again.

Beauregard may be a fictional character, but John H. Tanton was not. Tanton was a Michigan ophthalmologist who single-handedly created a network of over a dozen white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups, half of which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as hate groups.

The three best-known are: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a lobbying and action group with great influence within the Trump administration; the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS); and NumbersUSA, all of which produce dubious anti-immigration reports and statistics. Tanton also created the Social Contract Press, which first published The Camp of the Saints.

Thomas Hodgson sits on FAIR’s National Board of Advisors and has appeared at anti-immigrant events sponsored by both FAIR and CIS.

Federation for American Immigration Reform

Though they might sugar-coat it a bit, FAIR’s mission is the preservation of Anglo-Saxon dominance from rapacious hordes of non-white, non-English speakers who threaten to replace white Christians and destroy America, thanks to the subversive efforts of globalists and socialists.

Once mainly an anti-immigration lobbying group, during Trump’s presidency FAIR became deeply embedded in his administration. MediaMatters notes that the mainstream media often cites FAIR’s untrustworthy “statistics” indiscriminately. The Libertarian CATO Institute slams FAIR’s studies and statistics as “fatally flawed” and “sloppy.”

FAIR’s legal wing, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, formerly headed by Kris Kobach, provides legal assistance to anti-immigrant groups. In recent years IRLI has dabbled in disenfranchising voters of color based on the claim that “illegals” are risking everything to throw elections for Democrats by voting illegally.

FAIR’s founder John Tanton expressed the organization’s mission most clearly: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” And when Tanton spoke of “Europeans” he meant whites: “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”

George Washington University’s Gelman Library contains a repository of letters between Tanton and Otis Graham, a close friend of Tanton who helped him launch and run FAIR in the 1980s and who served as a board member of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Tanton and Graham wanted to create what they called a “League for European-American Defense, Education and Research.”

In 1991 Tanton and Graham took great interest in KKK leader David Duke’s campaign for the Louisiana governorship and were encouraged by Duke’s founding of the National Association for the Advancement of White People: “[T]here is a lot going on out there on the cultural and ethnic (racial) difference” [front], Tanton wrote. Appealing to racists was ultimately going to be “all tied to immigration policy. At some point, this is going to break the dam.”

FAIR, then, was created to mirror Duke’s approach and promote white interests: “There is currently no socially acceptable umbrella organization to which persons of European ancestry can belong to defend and promote their common interests,” Tanton wrote. “Absent such an organization in a highly organized society, European-Americans will continue to see their history rewritten, their character and accomplishments denigrated, and their faults magnified. They will steadily lose ground and position to other groups… For those not resigned to this gradual or not so gradual decline, a new organization tailored to the needs and interests of European-Americans as a group is essential.”

As a proponent of eugenics, Tanton also argued for sterilization of the “lesser” races: “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news to less intelligent individuals, and how will it be implemented?”

Dan Stein

FAIR’s current president is Dan Stein, who often coordinates media appearances and travel for Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson.

In a 1997 interview with “Alt-Right” darling Tucker Carlson, Stein claimed that Latino refugees arriving in the U.S. are godless, low-IQ haters: “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing […] Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans. Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?”

For Stein. immigration is a matter of maintaining white political power. He worries about a power shift attending newer waves of immigration. “It’s almost like they’re getting into competitive breeding,” Stein said in 1991. “You have to take into account the various fertility rates in designing limits on immigration.”

In addition to Stein’s views on recent immigrants, FAIR’s president indulges in a conspiracy theory that invokes the same villains responsible for the Great Replacement: “I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country’s immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it’s a form of revengism…”

Center for Immigration Studies

Like FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) was founded by John Tanton and publishes questionable reports on immigration. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, CIS maintains extensive links to white supremacist and antisemitic groups. In 2017 the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 2,012 occasions on which CIS circulated white nationalist content.

CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian, who first worked at FAIR, quipped after the deadly 2010 Haitian earthquake: “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.”

Jessica Vaughan, CIS Director of Policy Studies, may be the organization’s best known face – and certainly well-known to Hodgson, with whom she has appeared repeatedly. Vaughan is well spoken and comfortable testifying before Congressional subcommittees. Still, as the Anti-Defamation League reports, Vaughan had no misgivings in April 2014 when she gave an interview to an antisemitic newspaper, the American Free Press, founded by Holocaust denier Willis Carto.

Hodgson goes to work for FAIR and CIS

In 2011, According to FAIR’s annual report, the organization began cultivating sheriffs like Hodgson. “In 2011, we identified sheriffs who expressed concerns about illegal immigration.” FAIR staff “met with these sheriffs and their deputies, supplied them with a steady stream of information, established regular conference calls so they could share information and experiences, and invited them to come to Washington to meet with FAIR’s senior staff. We invited sheriffs who played the most prominent roles in addressing illegal immigration locally to FAIR’s national talk radio event, Hold their Feet to the Fire, where they shared their stories and expertise with listeners across the country.” Since roughly that time Hodgson has been a FAIR spokesman.

In July 2014 Hodgson visited the Rio Grande on a trip organized by FAIR’s National Field director, Susan Tully, who reported: “What we’re doing down here in the Rio Grande Valley is all about public education of our law enforcement officials so that they can see exactly what is going on along the border.”

The Anti-Defamation league already regarded Tully as a conspiracy theorist. She claimed, with no proof, that four million immigrants were granted amnesty in 1986 and – again invoking the Great Replacement – charged the Obama Administration with running school buses across the border to provide free K-12 education for Mexicans. The SPLC tracked Tully’s involvement in organizing a racist housing ban on immigrants in Fremont, Nebraska in which she called immigrants “invaders.” And, for organizing purposes, Tully simply made up the “fact” that Illinois has more “illegal aliens” than California. Tully has also been involved with an Oregon anti-immigration group with extensive militia and white supremacist links.

When FAIR National Advisory Board member Richard Lamm said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are,” he didn’t mean just Latinos but Muslims as well. Susan Tully clarified Lamm’s remarks: “They are not coming here to become Americans,” she said. Rather, Muslims are “promoting colonization of their own religion, of their own culture in towns and taking them over.”

Tully has been spreading hate since 2002 for FAIR. In one interview with radio host Phil Valentine at a 2006 FAIR event in Tennessee, Tully claimed that a Border Patrol agent in Laredo, Texas described arresting the same man seven times. Tully said she asked the agent, “What do you do on the eighth time?” and Valentine interjected: “Shoot him!” Tully laughed and the FAIR crowd cheered.

In March 2015 Hodgson appeared with Tully at the Fisherman’s Club in New Bedford. He has appeared at most of FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events coordinated by Tully, most recently in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021.

In 2016 Hodgson was one of three speakers at a “Patriots Unity Day” rally in Randolph. The second speaker was Jessica Vaughan of CIS. The third speaker was Raymond Hanna from the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America which also maintains white supremacist ties. ACT and FAIR have strong connections — and Tully figures into all of them. In 2016 Tully spoke at an ACT for America event in Idaho. ACT for America also happens to have a Nazi problem. In Arkansas ACT’s “March Against Shariah” events were organized by a Nazi and publicized on Stormfront.

On March 28, 2017 Hodgson testified with CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan at Border Security and Immigration Enforcement hearings in Washington.

In June 2017 the Sheriff appeared with Dan Stein and Michelle Malkin at an annual “Hold their feet to the fire” broadcast with anti-gay bigot Sandy Rios. Malkin too has links to white supremacist groups, including VDARE, as well as to Islamophobic groups. Malkin opposes the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to slaves. And, of course, Malkin is also a big fan of both John Tanton and The Camp of the Saints.

FAIR Board of Advisors

Over the years Hodgson has maintained numerous associations with Muslim-bashers, Anti-semites, gay-bashers, Birthers, and every variety of conspiracy theorist — many of them members of FAIR’s National Advisory Board. In November 2017 Hodgson joined that board.

When asked if his board membership might be construed as endorsement of his colleagues’ views, or at least be poor judgment on his part, Hodgson bristled: “I’m on a Board of Advisors. I go once a year to listen.”

But Hodgson is too modest. In 2014 the sheriff was not listening but speaking to FAIR’s National Board of Advisors when he conducted a two-hour dinner discussion on “The Effect of the President’s Decisions on DACA and its Impact on Our Law Enforcement Challenges.” In 2016 Hodgson participated in the National Board’s “Sanctuary Cities and Law Enforcement” roundtable with Putman County, NY Sheriff Donald Smith and FAIR’s Law Enforcement Relations Manager, Robert Najmulski. Half an hour later, FAIR Media Director Ira Mehlman gave a talk entitled “Soros Hacked: The Truth Behind His Big Money Network to Destroy U.S. Borders.”

Hodgson was present for Mehlman’s analysis of materials that Russian hackers had stolen from Soros’ Open Society Institute, which Mehlman caled a “shadowy foundation” with a “globalist agenda” to attack U.S. immigration policy. But “globalist” is often white supremacist code for “Jewish” and FAIR, as we will shortly see, has an axe to grind with Soros not only because he is a liberal philanthropist, but also because he is a liberal Jew.

Besides Hodgson, some of FAIR’s National Board members include:

Lou Barletta, former mayor of Hazelton, PA who signed anti-immigration legislation in 2006 that was declared illegal a year later;

Sharon Barnes, clearly no DACA lover, who wrote: “It is our country. They and their parents need to be kicked out […] strengthen our laws and get rid of the locusts;”

Gerda Bikales, who regards Spanish as a ghetto language: “I don’t think Yiddish or Italian represented a threat to the union. But we are now setting ourselves up for an entrenched language ghetto;”

William Chip, who wants to repeal the 14th Amendment;

Donald A.Collins, who contributes to the white nationalist journal VDARE;

Dino Drudi, another Massachusetts zealot who has written for VDARE;

Don Feder, a Muslim-basher who thinks US troops should have “shoot-to-kill” orders on the Southern border;

Robert Gillespie, a proponent of population control — not for white Christians but in developing countries;

Joseph Guzzardi, a member of VDARE’s “editorial collective;”

Carol Joyal, who wrote a review of The Camp of the Saints calling it a “prophecy” of Third World destruction of the West while everyone else just called it racist;

Richard Lamm, former Colorado governor who said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are;”

K.C. McAlpin, an Islamophobe who wants to ban Muslims for ideological reasons: “Congress has used that power in the past to ban the immigration of Communist Party and National Socialist (Nazi) party members who were deemed to be threats to our national security. This case is no different;”

Scott McConnell, another VDARE author, Executive Director at Lifeway Research (“be ready when homosexuality devastates”), and a member of the Family Research Council;

Paul Nachman, a Montana white supremacist who writes for VDARE, calls refugees “good liars,” and questions the existence of “moderate Muslims;”

Robert D. Park, founder of the “Article IV – Section 4 Foundation,” a group which maintains that government has abdicated its responsibility to uphold a Constitutional clause requiring it to defend the U.S. from “invasion;”

Randy Pullen, former chairman of the Arizona GOP and self-appointed expert on black crime: “Yes black lives matter. The best way to end the slaughter of young black men is to take guns away from blacks as they are the main killers;”

John Philip Sousa IV, great grandson of the famous musician, Birther, and friend of Joe Arpaio;

Alan N. Weeden, whose family owns the Weeden Foundation, major donor to white supremacist initiatives, and proponent of Secure ID, a national identification system.

Islamophobia

Although Hodgson swims with racists, Birthers, and antisemites, If there is one group to which he has more connections than any other, it is Muslim bashers.

In 1998 Hodgson was among the first group of municipal public safety officials to attend a four-day conference in Leesburg, Virginia on Strengthening the Public Safety Response to Terrorism. The conference was organized by the International Association of Fire Chiefs in conjunction with the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance and brought together police and fire chiefs from most metropolitan areas of the United States.

In an interview Hodgson said: “We were down there for four days to learn about this new thing that was coming onto our doorstep if we — Actually we were far behind in law enforcement. Because there [were] already people, terrorist activity long going on before that. In fact, if you look at [Steven Emerson’s] ‘American Jihad’ which will be worth your watching, you will see people — Muslims raising their — terrorists rising their rifles, dancing in the hall above stores in New York, saying, kill the infidels, kill the infidels. It’s all on tape. But anyway, so my training down there, I’m thinking, OK, you know what? This is good training, it’s good to be aware. The bag they gave us to carry our materials had a stencil on the front of it with the New York skyline with a target on one of the World Trade Center.”

Steven Emerson’s account of American Muslim rooftop celebrations of 9/11 in New Jersey, and Donald Trump’s recollections of the same have both been discredited. But Hodgson is drawn to self-anointed terrorism and Islam “experts” regardless how unreliable their information or their memory.

In 2015 Hodgson appeared with Dennis Michael Lynch at Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a synagogue run by Rabbi Jonathan Hausman – another self-appointed national security expert. Hausman’s temple had previously hosted Dutch neo-fascist and Islam hater Geert Wilders. Over 100 members of the clergy, including other rabbis, protested a similar hate fest the synagogue hosted the following year featuring Muslim-basher Frank Gaffney and Christian nationalist Jerry Boykin. When asked about Hodgson’s talk with Hausman, he explained he was just there doing his duty to inform the public about terrorism: “They asked me to come speak about terrorism. That’s what they asked me to do. So I was I was to speak with them. […] I was asked — I was invited to go there to speak. That’s why I was there, because of my my involvement with the terrorism task force.”

Lynch’s film, “They Come to America,” was reviewed by the Anti-Defamation League. “In the documentary, Lynch travels the country interviewing people about undocumented immigration. Lynch talks to figures from anti-immigrant groups such as NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform [both Tanton groups]. Lynch also interviews Glenn Spencer of the anti-Hispanic hate group American Border Patrol.”

Like Hodgson, Lynch is a supporter of the Constitutional Sheriff Movement. In 2014 Lynch made a fawning documentary about sovereign citizen rancher Cliven Bundy and in 2016 his bid for president was so off-the-wall that the GOP stood clear. Lynch routinely exaggerates the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, claims that the Chinese are sneaking across the Mexican border in order to inflict a “cyber 911” on the U.S., and that ISIS is bringing terrorists into the U.S. via Mexico. This is exactly what we hear from Hodgson.

In 2018, Hodgson appeared on FOX News with Bernard Kerik, claiming that in 2015 MS-13 had ordered its members to expand the gang’s presence on Nantucket. Both claimed that MS-13 was recruiting in island high schools. The supposed metastasis of MS-13 in New England has been one of Hodgson’s favorite themes. Yet, as violent and grisly as the gang’s occasional handiwork is, MS-13 membership is down dramatically. In fact, in 2018 the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Andrew Lelling, said that “we have all but eradicated MS-13 in the Greater Boston area. We’re running out of MS-13 targets.”

Another Islamophobic group that Hodgson is connected to, ACT for America, was founded in 2007 by Brigitte Gabriel. It claims to have more than 1,000 chapters around the country, and espouses the crudest sort of anti-Muslim hate. Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented ACT’s many links with antisemitic, neo-Nazi, Christian right, Identitarian, and white supremacist groups. ACT for America sponsors anti-Muslim legislation and organizes anti-Muslim events with neo-Nazis. ACT for America organizes around the claim that Christianity and Judaism are under attack by Islam. Pastor Jack Hibbs and Stoughton Rabbi Jon Hausman — whom we met earlier — were both speakers at ACT’s 2016 “Religious Persecution” conference in Washington, DC.

In July 2007 Gabriel spoke at the Annual Convention of Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI): “The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arabic world is quite simply the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil and this is what we’re witnessing in the Arab and Islamic world. I am angry. They have no soul! They are dead set on killing and destruction.”

Perhaps because of its far-too-frequent neo-Nazi connections, ACT for America became too toxic for even Donald Trump. Following an article in the Miami Herald announcing ACT’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, which was to have been headlined by Michelle Malkin (another friend of Hodgson’s), the Trump administration had second thoughts: “[The gala] will absolutely not be taking place at Mar-a-Lago,” a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization announced.

ACT might have been too toxic for Trump — but not for Hodgson and his friends from FAIR and CIS. In September 2016 the sheriff appeared at a Republican unity rally in Norfolk county attended by his old friend Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies and by ACT for America’s Ray Hannah.

In 2018 Hodgson and Brigitte Gabriel appeared again at FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” event in Washington DC. And on September 26th both Hodgson and Gabriel attended FAIR’s 2019 “Hold their Feet to the Fire” event.

Antisemitism

In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s governmental affairs director and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to bethe worst enemies of the country.”

Hodgson has had a long acquaintance with Rios, having appeared with her regularly at FAIR’s annual “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events. In 2017 Hodgson appeared at one with Rios, Michelle Malkin and FAIR’s Dan Stein. Rios’s interviews were broadcast on the Christian broadcast network, American Family Radio, which also hosts programs by James Dobson and Brian Fischer. Among other members of the far right in attendance were Tom Roten, Congressman Steve King, Robert Spencer, and Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka. Among other gems, Rios told listeners that immigrants “don’t know basic hygiene.”

On February 10, 2019 Hodgson appeared on the American Family Council’s “Washington Watch” program with Tony Perkins. Perkins, who says that teaching evolution to children contributes to mass shootings, whose Family Research Council fabricates false claims about the LGBTQ community, and who would deny Muslims equal rights to religious freedom and ban mosques, played a central role in the Pompeo State Department’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, a flagrant effort to make Christianity our state religion.

In 2001 Stephen Steinlight of the Center for Immigration Studies – one of the Tanton groups with which Hodgson is involved, and who suggested that Barak Obama be “hung, drawn and quartered” – wrote a report titled “The Jewish State in America’s Changing Demography.” Reflecting the Great Replacement theory and virtually screaming “Jews will not replace us,” Steinlight castigated secular Jews for their historical support for liberal immigration policies, arguing that Mexicans would soon erode Jewish political power. Steinlight offered himself as an example of a Jew who had come to see the light, saying that his own views had been changed by CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian – whose remark about Haiti you are already familiar with.

For FAIR and CIS, their war against the Jewish embrace of multiculturalism has largely been a failure, and secular Jews like George Soros who still advocate for liberal immigration have become a bitter enemy, as seen in Media Director Ira Mehlman’s 2016 talk following Hodgson’s at FAIR’s National Advisory Board meeting. In 2004 Steinlight issued a call to action with an essay, “High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry” but he still couldn’t make any progress with secular Jews. By 2010 Steinlight was frustrated and angry at his co-religionists, accusing the “Jewish Establishment” of censorship and repression.

Philosemitism

If liberal secular Jews are the “bad Jews,” then for FAIR and CIS Israel is the “good Jew” and a model of ethno-religious nationalism in which security and immigration are handled the “right” way. In 2019 FAIR’s Mehlman penned an article in the Daily Caller praising Israel’s “separation wall.” Hodsgon has also cited Israel’s wall as a model for the U.S.

In March 2017 Hodgson attended the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, also on the public dime. AIPAC, which bills itself as “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” is the most powerful foreign lobby in the United States. While Democrats (and this includes most American Jews) have increasingly distanced themselves from Israel’s hard-line policies, Republicans have embraced AIPAC, and AIPAC has returned the favor by supporting extreme Christian Right Republican candidates.

Hodgson has not been particularly discriminating in jumping under the political bedsheets with antisemites and crackpots. A poster boy for this is Rick Wiles, an End Times believer and a fierce antisemite.

In November 2014 Hodgson appeared on TruNews — the “End Times Newscast” with Rick Wiles, a conspiracy theorist who, like Hodgson, advocates locking up people whose politics he disagrees with. Wiles devoted “the first half of the program to recount several profound prophetic dreams his family received years ago,” and in the second half Wiles interviewed Hodgson, who discussed immigration and his work with FAIR.

Among Wiles’ more deranged statements in recent years: that Obama was inspired by Lucifer, that Obama killed Supreme Court Justice Scalia as a pagan human sacrifice, that the Irgun has kill teams in America, and that Jews will use gun control laws to kill Christians.

American Border Foundation

But for Hodgson it always seems to boil down to immigration.

In 2018 Hodgson watchers took note when the sheriff announced with great fanfare that the National Sheriff’s Association (NSA) would be crowdfunding Trump’s wall. But Hodgson’s NSA project folded after raising less than $100K in three months — despite his false claim that excessive web traffic had crashed the site. For a time Hodgson’s old NSA site redirected donors to a group called the American Border Foundation.

When Hodgson began his association with the American Border Foundation, its Director of Communications was Jeremy Messina, who identifies with the white Nationalist Identitarian movement and whose Facebook postings bore striking similarities with the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto.

The American Border Foundation‘s crowdfounding scheme never reached its $450 million goal. During its three-year run, ABF’s less-than 4,000 donors raised barely over $227K. Its founder, Gary Dolan, had tried wall-building before via a FundRazr campaign that raised only $12K. The fund’s managing director, Quentin Kramer – who has ties to FAIR sister organization AVIAC – went on the conspiracy and white supremacist circuit trying to sell the project.

Kramer appeared on the far-right Southern Sense podcast and on an “anti-federalist” program that frequently invokes Article IV, Sec. 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution (“the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”).

Despite lackluster donations, Hodgson claimed that as a sheriff he could cut through the red tape to ensure donations got to the Department of Homeland Security and that the wall would be built. In November of 2018, Hodgson said he submitted a form to DHS to donate $100,000 to pay for “border barriers on the Southern border.” But DHS informed the American Border Foundation it could not accept the donations.

Nevertheless, in 2019 Hodgson and Kramer were still acting as if the crowdfunding effort was still viable. Both spoke at a FAIR-AVIAC-sponsored press conference in Washington, whose main function was to highlight the “Angel Families” who had lost family members to auto accidents or crimes committed by undocumented migrants.

As of today, the whereabouts of $227,657 in ABF donations are still unknown. Neither the ABF nor Hodgson has ever responded to information requests from Bristol County for Correctional Justice or American Oversight.

Protect America Now

Hodgson’s latest project is called Protect America Now, which looks like nothing more than several God-and-Country sheriffs who oppose immigration reform, gun control, voting rights, secularism, and socialism. The sheriffs include: the group’s spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb; Green County (MO) Sheriff Jim Arnott; Livingston County (IL) Sheriff Tony Childress; Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas Hodgson; Brevard County (FL) Sheriff Wayne Ivey; Culpeper County (VA) Sheriff Scott Jenkins; and Wicomico County (MD) Sheriff Mike Lewis.

Despite Protect America Now’s call to “stand strong against lawlessness,” its sheriffs refuse to enforce state gun control laws or COVID-19 mask or social-distancing mandates. Instead, harkening back to the original function of American sheriffs as slave patrols, this motley crew support arming and deputizing their mainly white county residents against “urban” protesters and – again echoing the Great Replacement – border “invaders.”

Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb is the public face of Protect America Now and a “Constitutional Sheriff” who claimed in one speech to the Arizona Police Association that “the constitution is hanging by a thread.” Lamb belongs to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association founded by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack and spoke at CSPOA’s 2020 Virginia Conference. At least three other Protect America Now sheriffs, Thomas Hodgson, Scott Jenkins and Wayne Ivey, are also CSPOA members.

Contrary to Protect America Now’s marketing on Fox News and elsewhere — Protect America Now is not Lamb’s creation. It turns out the incorporator and director of Protect America Now is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative who has been accused of, fired for, and charged with multiple counts of voter fraud, and who set up Protect America Now most recently in June 2020. As a sometime associate of Karl Rove, Sproul’s entire career has been devoted to voter suppression and dirty tricks.

The trademark for Protect America Now was created in 2004 and was the brainchild of Kathy W. McKee, who is still listed on a PAC registration with a similar name. McKee was also the driving force behind a 2004 Arizona voter suppression bill, Proposition 200. As soon as McKee got Prop 200 on the ballot, the GOP and every brownshirt and satin-sheeted group in Arizona took an interest. But McKee made the mistake of bringing an unfiltered white supremacist, Dr. Virginia Abernethy, onto the organization’s national advisory board. Abernethy was so extreme for the rest of the racists that the Federation for American Immigration Reform removed Abernethy and took control over PAN to save Prop 200, despite previous support for Abernethy.

The lawyer who incorporated Protect America Now for Sproul is Kory Langhofer, an equally ethically-unencumbered GOP lawyer who fought both the Mueller investigation for Trump and challenged Arizona election results for Trump. Protect America Now and Langhofer’s offices share a common address. Langhofer is also the co-owner of Signafide, a company that uses AI to challenge ballot signatures.

As the GOP increasingly embraces nativism, the extremists have gone mainstream. The innvolvement by high level GOP operatives like Nathan Sproul and Kory Langhofer using sheriffs like Hodgson and their dangerous militia and white supremacist connections says a lot about the party’s transformation.

Not so very long ago it was racists and xenophobic extremists who worked behind the scenes to support the GOP. Now it’s the Republican Party operating behind the scenes to support the extremists.

Confederate Tie(s)

A couple of years ago, someone noticed that an archived page from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Department featured an official portrait of Hodgson wearing a Confederate necktie. Howard Graves, a research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), recognized Hodgson’s tie as an “Old South Confederate Necktie” which resembles the Confederate battle flag and is sometimes called an Anglo-Confederate society tie. Graves added, “Many people affiliated with the broader neo-Confederate movement wear that tie either in necktie or bowtie form.” Mark Pitcavage with the Anti-Defamation League, agreed: “The tie in the photograph seems certainly to be derived from the design of the Confederate flag.”

Despite everything you’ve read so far, Hodgson vehemently denies his sly tip of the hat to the Confederacy. “They know I would not be wearing anything that makes me the poster boy for bigotry.”

Hodgson’s spokesman provided an even more flaccid defense – that Hodgson “has never heard of neo-confederates or anglo-Confederate societies or anything like that.”

Despite the faux outrage and feigned innocence, in the last 24 years Bristol County voters have had ample time to observe a sheriff who openly advocates for white supremacy and rubs elbows with neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis. In fact, there is no one in Bristol County who qualifies better than Hodgson as a poster boy for bigotry.

It’s time for voters to finally send this companion of fools into retirement in November.

Those who have watched Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson for any length of time know of his extensive white supremacist connections and attention-grabbing moves like instituting chain gangs, offering to have his prisoners build Trump’s border wall, informing on his own church in unctuous letters to former immigration advisor Stephen Miller, or personally participating in a jail riot. Hodgson is restless and ambitious, and he spends much of his time traveling at Massachusetts taxpayer expense to events organized by the Republican Party or by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and spinoffs like Advocates for Illegal Alien Crime (AVIAC), most of which both the ADL and SPLC count as hate groups.

Hodgson’s newest project is called Protect America Now, which purports to be simply seven God-and-Country sheriffs who oppose immigration reform, gun control, voting rights, secularism, and socialism. The sheriffs include: the group’s spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb; Green County (MO) Sheriff Jim Arnott; Livingston County (IL) Sheriff Tony Childress; Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas Hodgson; Brevard County (FL) Sheriff Wayne Ivey; Culpeper County (VA) Sheriff Scott Jenkins; and Wicomico County (MD) Sheriff Mike Lewis.

Despite Protect America Now’s call to help “stand strong against lawlessness,” most refuse to enforce state gun control laws or COVID-19 mask or social-distancing mandates. Instead, the sheriffs support arming and deputizing their mainly white counties against both urban protesters and border “invaders.”

Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb is the public face of Protect America Now. Lamb is a self-promoter with numerous businesses and organizations through which he and his wife Janel market themselves and their “God and Country” brand of nationalism. He has interests in two pest control businesses with police themes. One of Lamb’s “charities,” the American Sheriff Foundation, took in $50,000 in donations but can not account for $18,000 of it. The Foundation’s main function seems to be to sell Lamb’s “brand” and the couple’s books about themselves. Lamb is being investigated by the Arizona Attorney General for refusing to seize property in 2018 owned by the family of a lobbyist friend.

Lamb is a “Constitutional Sheriff” who claimed in one speech to the Arizona Police Association that “the constitution is hanging by a thread”. He belongs to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association founded by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack and appeared at CSPOA’s 2020 Virginia Conference. At least three other Protect America Now sheriffs, Thomas Hodgson, Scott Jenkins and Wayne Ivey, are also CSPOA members.

Jessica Pishko, in a Slate article entitled “Sheriffs Helped Lead This Insurrection,” hit the nail on the head when she wrote that “ninety percent of American sheriffs are white men, and in recent years they’ve become strongly affiliated with white supremacist groups. Across the country, sheriffs have declared that they will not enforce laws they deem ‘unconstitutional,’ like COVID-19 public health orders or gun laws limiting weapons possession and permits. Their influence has only grown since the pandemic began, as mask wearing became affiliated with progressive liberals and a bare face was a sign of Trump support. Trump has always had an affinity with sheriffs. He met with more sheriffs at the White House than any other president and pardoned ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court for failing to abide by a nondiscrimination order, calling him an ‘American patriot.’“

The Protect America Now sheriffs — contrary to their mission to “stand strong against lawlessness” have arrogated themselves the additional roles of lawmakers and judges, picking and choosing which laws they flout and which they enforce. Many of these choices hinge on race.

Pishko explains the racist origins: “[…] the constitutional sheriff movement has explicitly white supremacist roots. When the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation was unconstitutional, county sheriffs were among the Southern officials who defied the court’s decision. They claimed that, in fact, desegregation was unconstitutional and invoked a legal theory called ‘interposition,’ which argues that states can independently decide federal laws are unconstitutional and nullify them.”

Which is precisely the approach Trump and the GOP took in fighting both impeachment and Trump’s election loss.

When asked for comment on the January 6th Capitol insurrection, Lamb seemed to echo QAnon, attributing insurrectionist anger to the unpunished crimes of Hillary Clinton and defending the rioters: “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they have to listen to us and know we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away.” Lamb also repeated accusations of Democrat election fraud in a video that he subsequently took down.

Lamb is well-connected with the white supremacist Tanton network, its groups FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA, Angel Families, AVIAC, as well as border wall scammers like Steve Bannon (pardoned), Brian Kolfage (indicted), and Tom Hodgson, whose crowdfunding partnership with the now-defunct American Border Foundation, still can not account for more than $227,000 it collected.

While Lamb may be the poster boy for Protect America Now, six more sheriffs round out the roster. Some of them are less the ideologue than just cruel, arbitrary, racist, and crooked jailers who work for a white constituency that thinks cruelty is the only way to run jails and conduct police patrols.

Sheriff Jim Arnott serves Green County in the Missouri Ozarks. Like his brothers in Protect America Now, Arnott does things his way, voters and employees be damned. Arnott has made a name for himself insisting on his officers’ belief in a deity. When asked by one reporter what he would do if one of his deputies objected to his mandatory “In God We Trust” decal, Arnott replied, “Well, I guess he’d have to work somewhere else if he didn’t like it that bad.”

Like several other sheriffs, including Tom Hodgson, who was investigated by Homeland Security, the Massachusetts Attorney General, and a Congressional delegation for his personal participation in a correctional officer riot, Arnott runs a cruel, filthy jail where half those incarcerated have contracted COVID-19. In 2018 a county employee blew the whistle on Arnott’s sheriff’s department being pressed into a political campaign for a county tax increase. Arnott sued the state for the identity of the whistleblower and launched a barrage of press releases designed to fight the case in the court of public opinion. Arnott even harassed a county commissioner who had objected to Arnott’s ethics violations. Ultimately Arnott lost his case and finally had to admit that he had indeed violated state ethics laws.

Tony Childress of Livingston County, Illinois, is Protect America Now’s only Black sheriff. Childress was one of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s earliest converts to its xenophobic “border invasion” campaign. With fellow Protect America Now members Hodgson and Jenkins, Childress attended a FAIR- and CIS-led junket to the Mexican border in 2014. Childress was also one of 40 sheriffs who met with former president Trump in 2019 about hardening border security. In 2018 Childress was found to have engaged in a little double-dipping — serving as sheriff while also working as a security consultant for Innovative Security Solutions. Childress defended his actions with the usual sheriff defense — whatever he had done was done solely in the interests of public safety.

Brevard County, Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey is the living, breathing incarnation of the Southern sheriff. In 2013 Ivey re-introduced slave-style chain gangs. It was a racist touch that Arizona’s Joe Arpaio used and which Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson has also tried. If Ivey’s chain gangs were not bad enough, Brevard County’s sheriff produces “Wheel of Fugitive” videos and encourages the county’s 83% white citizens to arm themselves. Slave catching is alive and well in Brevard County.

In 2018 Ivey’s deputies murdered Gregory Edwards, a jailed Black veteran, by punching, tasing, and pepper-spraying him before placing a hood over his head and strapping him into a chair. Edwards died of a non-medical “police diagnosis” called “excited delirium.” At first Ivey refused to turn over the videos of Edwards’ death, but eventually agreed to turn over a sanitized version. In 2020 Ivey’s deputies murdered two Black teenagers,18-year-old Sincere Pierce and 16-year-old Angelo Crooms, by shooting into their moving car. Again Ivey refused at first to release the video.

After his deputies killed Edwards, Ivey paid a surprise visit to Edwards’ widow “for a welfare check.” Ivey, ringed by half a dozen deputies, showed up at Kathleen Edwards’ home unannounced, demanded she “step outside,” upon which Ivey grabbed and then, inexplicably and grotesquely, hugged her. It was a bizarre, cruel, and menacing visit. “Out of respect for Mrs. Edwards’ privacy, the Sheriff’s Office will not be commenting on the nature or purpose of tonight’s service call at her residence,” Ivey’s media spokesman said, while acknowledging that the deputies had also filmed the staged confrontation.

Like Sheriff Arnott, Ivey insists that his deputies affix “In God We Trust” decals to their vehicles. And for those who like their God and Country nationalism in equal doses, Ivey also insists on playing the national anthem or staging some “patriotic moment” every Monday. In 2017 the City of Orlando passed the Trust Act, which limited the ability of city police to assist ICE. In 2018 outraged county commissioners, with Ivey’s help, sponsored an “anti-sanctuary” resolution.

For all his faux devotion to God and Country, upright behavior has not been the result. In 2011 Ivey retired from the Florida department of law enforcement (FDLE) three days after he was accused of threatening a female probation officer who just happened to be the former fiancee of Ivey’s son Robert.

Like Mark Lamb, Ivey sounded the alarm when Black Lives Matter began protesting police murders. At the height of the protests in June 2020, Attorney Alton Edmond, who organized a George Floyd rally that drew more than 3,000 people, announced an election challenge to Ivey. It was the first time the Democratic Party had bothered to challenge the Republican.

Scott Jenkins is the Sheriff in Culpeper County, Virginia. In September 2020 Jenkins posted a video rant on his department’s Facebook page: “Citizens should alert themselves to the true nature of this violence and realize the intent is for it to continue across our nation during the months ahead. Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement is not peaceful and at their heart are violent. They may bring their violence to any community at any time and especially where they see weakness in local government officials. These are a few of the many examples across our nation.”

So frightened of Black protesters was Jenkins that he advocated turning his county’s 80% white citizenry into reserve deputies to fight “lawlessness,” gun control and other forms of legislative or judicial “meddling” that he, Scott Jenkins, determined to be “unconstitutional.” Jenkins openly flouts his state’s gun laws. And if it sounds like the sheriff might just be a CSPOA member, well, it’s because he is.

A number of county residents have launched a legal effort to recall Jenkins, and he was sued by the Legal Aid Justice Center in Falls Church, Virginia, for handing over an undocumented immigrant to ICE in 2017. After serving his time in the county jail, Francisco Guardado Rios was held past his release date in order to be turned over to ICE, as Jenkins had done to 100 other undocumented detainees. It was unconstitutional and violated even state law, but Jenkins fought law and precedent, finally prevailing in U.S. District Court. This made him a hero to the far right.

Wicomico County, Maryland Sheriff Mike Lewis is another Protect America Now sheriff who refuses to enforce gun laws. “State police and highway patrol get their orders from the governor,” Lewis said. “I get my orders from the citizens in this county.” In a video Lewis told one reporter, “As long as I’m the sheriff in this county, I will not allow the federal government to come in here and strip my citizens of their right to bear arms. I can tell you this, if they attempt to do that, it would be an all-out civil war, no question about it.”

Responding to Lewis’ inflammatory rhetoric, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence launched a petition calling for the Maryland Police Training Commission to revoke Lewis’ certification. “It is difficult to see how a law enforcement officer who is threatening to wage war with the United States government meets any recognized standards of public service. In the wake of his threatening comments, Sheriff Lewis should not be given the responsibility of training law enforcement officers in Maryland.”

Contrary to Protect America Now’s marketing on Fox News and elsewhere, Protect America Now is not Lamb’s creation. It turns out the incorporator and director of Protect America Now is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative who has been accused of, fired for, and charged with multiple counts of voter fraud, and who set up Protect America Now most recently in June 2020. As a sometime associate of Karl Rove, Sproul’s whole career has been devoted to voter suppression and dirty tricks.

It is no coincidence that today’s Protect America Now has is roots in a similar organization created 18 years ago or that Nathan Sproul was involved in both. The trademark for Protect America Now was created in 2004 and was the brainchild of Kathy W. McKee, who is still listed on a PAC registration with a similar name. McKee was also the force behind Arizona’s 2004 bill. Proposition 200, a voter suppression bill. As soon as McKee got Prop 200 on the ballot, the GOP and every brownshirt and satin-sheeted group took an interest.

But McKee made the mistake of bringing a white supremacist, Dr. Virginia Abernethy, onto the organization’s national advisory board. Abernethy turned out to be even too extreme for the rest of PAN’s racists and xenophobes, so the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which had previously supported McKee and Abernethy, stepped in to save Prop 200 despite its previous support for Abernethy.

Between 2004 and 2005 there was a power struggle for control of Protect America Now between McKee and the Federation for American Immigration Reform and, once again, it involved Nathan Sproul. As he had done with the Kanye 2020 campaign, in 2004 Sproul paid signature collectors to get Ralph Nader on the ballot in order to siphon Democratic votes. But while Sproul’s signature gatherers were getting Nader on the ballot their prime mission was gathering signatures for the voter suppression bill.

The story gets even weirder when we learn that the lawyer who incorporated Protect America Now for Sproul is Kory Langhofer, an equally ethically-unencumbered GOP lawyer who fought both the Mueller investigation for Trump and challenged Arizona election results for Trump. Protect America Now and Langhofer’s offices share a common address. Langhofer is also the co-owner of Signafide, a company that uses artificial intelligence software to challenge ballot signatures.

Two years ago, Hodgson, Lamb, Ivey and the others were just a bunch of Stetson-hatted MAGA zealots supporting cruel immigration policies promoted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Trump’s immigration advisor Stephen Miller. But by dutifully groveling and doing whatever was asked of them, each has established a closer personal connection to Donald Trump and to a Republican Party that finally looks like them.

As the GOP increasingly embraces nativism, the extremists have gone mainstream. Involvement by high level GOP operatives like Nathan Sproul and Kory Langhofer with sheriffs like Hodgson and their dangerous militia and white supremacist connections says a lot about the party’s transformation.

Not so very long ago it was racist and xenophobic extremists who worked behind the scenes to support the GOP. Now it’s the Republican Party operating behind the scenes to support the extremists.

When Citizens for Juvenile Justice published their study of racially-biased police stops in New Bedford, We are the Prey, the usual Only Blue Lives Matter voices savaged the report, completely rejecting the possibility that racist policies and personnel may be operating within the New Bedford Police Department.

But no one should have been shocked by the results. Most American cities have long suffered from racist policing, as hundreds of studies over the years have amply documented and other cities have even acknowledged.

CFJJ’s report — informed by data the NBPD itself supplied — shows precisely how, when, where, by whom, and why racial profiling is done. Its findings faulted vague disciplinary policies, poor data collection, arbitrary assignment of youth to an opaque gang database, over-policing in certain neighborhoods, clear over-policing of Black and Hispanic youth, and a relatively small number of officers doing most of the racial profiling. In fact, CFJJ identified the NBPD’s “Top Ten” on page 16 of their report.

This small number of officers whom CFJJ found responsible for the many racially-motivated stops was cited in an Amicus Brief on a racial profiling case now before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The case concerns the New Bedford Police gang unit’s pretextual stop of a vehicle with a backseat passenger well-known to the unit.

The gang unit officers who searched and arrested passenger Zahkuan J. Bailey-Sweeting after the driver supposedly made an unsafe lane change included at least three officers responsible for the most stops in the CFJJ data. These three officers — Roberto DaCunha, Gene Fortes, and Kory Kubik — alone accounted for one of seven stops in the CFJJ data. Bogus, and very likely unconstitutional, traffic violations no doubt help inflate these officers’ numbers.

I was curious to see if any of these officers appeared in a “Professional Standards” document the NBPD released to the public last year. The NBPD spreadsheet shows a backlog of police complaints over many years with a status (filed, sustained, not, exonerated). The cases go back as far as 2012.

So I cross-referenced the NBPD complaints and disciplinary issues on all officers mentioned in the CFJJ report, using the number preferred by the NBPD — number of stops — rather than CFJJ’s number of individuals affected by those stops. The result was a spreadsheet shown in the image above (available for download).

Even if one stop targeted five individuals, I only looked at discrete officer stops. The results were only slightly different from CFJJ’s, but even when using NBPD’s preferred metric the results still showed a high degree of racial profiling, an apparent lack of officer discipline, and they suggest a culture of police impunity.

CFJJ’s analysis by race depended on counting individuals affected by the police. But mine was focused on the police officers making those stops. Five officers accounted for almost 25% of all stops, eleven accounted for 40%, and eighteen officers accounted for 50%. There was nothing in those results to contradict CFJJ’s conclusions — even using NBPD’s preferred metric.

One officer — Roberto DaCunha — alone accounted for 6.6% all individual stops. That’s one out of fifteen of all stops supplied to CFJJ by the NBPD. And DaCunha did it without incurring even a single disciplinary write-up — ever. In addition to his involvement in the Bailey-Sweeting stop, DaCunha is the same officer named in a lawsuit for the wrongful death of Erik Aguilar, which cost the City of New Bedford almost a million dollars to settle. In the investigation that followed, DaCunha invoked the Fifth Amendment and investigators appeared to be satisfied with that. The Aguilar family’s lawsuit maintained that DaCunha and four others “knew that leaving Mr. Aguilar in this position could cause him to die from asphyxia, yet they did not move him from this position until after his heart had stopped beating.”

I do not have list of officers in the gang unit. However, none of the officers in the gang unit whose names I recognize from past news reports or from Malcolm Gracia’s murder appear to have racked up any consequential disciplinary complaints. And many of the officers with the highest numbers of stops either received no disciplinary write-ups — or received write-ups for only relatively minor issues: mishandling evidence or failing to report for duty. This seems to suggest that their racial profiling is either condoned or incentivized.

Some of the more troubling disciplinary issues among New Bedford’s Finest include: Civility; Respect of Others; Violation of General Order 3-20 Anti-Discrimination policy; Violation of General Order 12-02 Use of Force; Knowledge of laws; Commission of an act of abusive conduct; Immoral Conduct Conduct unbecoming; Conduct injurious to the public; Neglect of Duty; Insubordination; Suspicious Conduct; [Not] Speaking the truth; Issuing False Statements; Consorting with Criminals; Use of intoxicants; Physical and mental fitness; Return of Property to Owner; Absent without Leave; and Ignorance of Departmental Rules and Regs.

Year after year officers keep violating the same policies over and over, yet they remain on the force. Chris Cotter, for example, who also serves on the New Bedford School Committee, has violated computer and social media policies repeatedly since 2014, as his sustained disciplinary cases attest.

14-1752 502.2 Respect of others; 14-1752 502.3 Civility; 14-1752 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 15-1796 Viol of General Order 13-06 – Use of Dept. Vehicle; 15-1796 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 16-1822 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 16-1822 Viol of General Order 3-24 – Social Media Policy; 17-1856 Viol of General Order 3-24 – Social Media Policy; 17-1856 Viol of General Order 7-02 Release of info to media; 17-1857 515.6(c) Insubordination – Disrespect for ranking officer; 18-1951 502.2 Civility; 18-1951 501.6 Providing police service on duty; 18-1951 501.9 Answering questions; 18-1951 515.6(l) Improperly performing duties assigned; 19-2009 515.6(c) Insubordination; 19-2009 502.2 Civility; 19-2009 502.3 Respect of Others

Paul Hodson, accused of killing Erik Aguilar in 2010, had no disciplinary issues until 2019 when he was written up for: [19-1992] 515.6(o) Commission of any act contrary to the order and discipline of the dept; and 501.1 Suspicious conduct. Despite repeatedly and publicly disparaging minorities on social media, Hodson happily enjoyed departmental impunity — until he was finally sent away on federal child pornography charges in 2019.

Damien Vasconcelos, who was also named in the Aguilar lawsuit for failure to render aid and apparently gave Hodson a congratulatory fist bump at the scene, had several, mostly low-level, disciplinary issues sustained.

When you read through the Professional Standards cases, it is striking that in any other job authoritarians, racists, drunks, liars, rude employees, no-shows, and insubordinates would be quickly sent packing.

Unfortunately, the data shows that New Bedford police are doing a far better job of serving themselves and covering their own backs than protecting and serving the people of New Bedford.

When the Citizens for Juvenile Justice report on racial profiling by the New Bedford Police was released in April 2021, the usual police zealots and members of city government attacked CFJJ’s numbers and screamed that New Bedford was different from those “other” cities. We couldn’t possibly be racists.

But it’s not as if police racism has ever been a secret or a surprise. For years local governments everywhere have brushed off community complaints of racial profiling, harassment, and police violence. But over the years a massive body of research has been amassed, showing that — and precisely how — so many of our institutions are corrupted by institutional racism. Sure, there may be a few bad apples in the barrel, but the point is — the barrel itself is rotten. But again, we have long known this and also how to fix it. We just choose not to.

Below is just a small selection of articles on racial profiling available in April 2021, as the Citizens for Juvenile Justice Report was released. While hardly exhaustive, they demonstrate that the NBPD’s racial profiling of Black and Hispanic youth is not unheard of. Everywhere. CFJJ’s numbers are not anomalous. At least one article makes the case that statistical data like CFJJ’s not only confirms the reality of racial profiling, but “furthermore, strong statistical associations should support an inference of discriminatory intent.”

And I agree. Politicians and policy experts have known about the many insidious forms of racial profiling and their costs to society’s most vulnerable for decades, as these articles illustrate. And when cities know the costs of racial profiling and racist policing and still refuse to stop it, then, yes, that’s racism by design.

• 1/3 Of People Killed By Police After A Traffic Stop This Year Were Black | The Crime Report

• 2018 Executive Summary

• 24 Frightening Racial Profiling Statistics – Vittana.org

• A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States | Nature Human Behaviour

• A new statistical test shows racial profiling in police traffic stops | Stanford School of Engineering

• Activists back Senate approach to traffic stop data – News – The Herald News, Fall River, MA – Fall River, MA

• Analysis: LAPD searches blacks and Latinos more often – Los Angeles Times

• Are Traffic Stops Prone to Racial Bias? | The Marshall Project

• Arizona Traffic Stop Data Analysis Study: Year 3 Final Report – 2009

• Bill would require collection of race data in traffic stops

• Black men are 8 times more likely to be stopped by Oakland police than White men, data shows – ABC7 San Francisco

• Black men fleeing the police is reasonable, Massachusetts court rules | PBS NewsHour

• Black, Hispanic drivers searched more often than white drivers, data shows

• Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) – Traffic Stops

• Chicago police more likely to stop Black drivers without citing them, data investigation reveals – ABC7 Chicago

• Cleveland Heights police cited by CSU Diversity Institute over 3:1 racial disparity in traffic stops – cleveland.com

• Confronting allegations of racial profiling in Massachusetts – Harvard Law Today

• Connecticut data reveal racial disparities in policing | DataHaven

• Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Data Project – CTRP3 – CTData Collaborative

• COPS Evaluation Brief – Promoting Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling – 2008

• Data suggests racial bias in NH traffic stops

• Decades of Data Suggest Racial Profiling is Getting Worse, Not Better

• Do Maryland police target minorities? The data can’t tell us – CNS Maryland

• Does the Minneapolis Police Department Traffic Stop Data Reveal Racial Bias? – Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

• Driving while Black: ABC News analysis of traffic stops reveals racial disparities in several US cities – ABC News

• Duluth group examines apparent racial disparities in DPD traffic stop data, NAACP asks for change

• Duluth to take closer look at police race bias, traffic stops – StarTribune.com

• FBI Data: Racial Profiling Is Real … and Ferguson Is Just the Tipping Point

• Few states require local police to collect race data on traffic stops – pennlive.com

• Findings – The Stanford Open Policing Project

• Grand Rapids police oversight department to start collecting racial disparities in arrest, traffic stop data – mlive.com

• Houston Police Department’s analysis of motor vehicle stop data for 2015

• Illinois Traffic and Pedestrian Stop Study – Data from 2004 to 2019

• Inside 100 million police traffic stops: New evidence of racial bias

• It’s time to start collecting stop data: A case for comprehensive statewide legislation — The Policing Project

• Mapping Police Violence – Database and GIS Mapping

• Mass Police Reform – Working to Reform Policy & Practice

• Mass. High Court Lowers Burden For Proving Racial Bias In Police Stops | WBUR News

• Mass. SJC wants lawmakers to require racial data on traffic stops | Boston.com

• Massachusetts Police Data Points to Disparities In Arrests – NBC Boston

• Massachusetts Racial and Gender Profiling Study – Final Report May 2004

• Massachusetts Statute for the Collection of Data Relative to Traffic Stops

• Newsday analysis: Suffolk police stopped, searched minority drivers at higher rates | Newsday

• North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation – Traffic Stop Statistics

• Ohio State Highway Patrol | Statistics

• Pa. State Police resume tracking racial data during traffic stops in response to Spotlight PA report

• Police data collection project (New Bedford Police Department) • MuckRock

• Police Stop Black Drivers At Higher Rate Than Whites In California | HuffPost

• Police stops are still marred by racial discrimination, new data shows. | Prison Policy Initiative

• Policing and Racial Justice | The Kansas Data Project: Injustice by the Numbers

• Portland Police Bureau Traffic Stop and Search Data – Sep 23 2009

• Project CommUNITY: Massachusetts not immune to racial bias in policing

• Race and Policing – 100+ studies

• Race-Based Traffic Stop Data Dashboard – 2019

• Racial Disparities in Traffic Stop Outcomes

• Racial Disparities In Traffic Stops Decrease, But Inequalities Remain | Connecticut Public Radio

• Racial disparities revealed in massive traffic stop dataset – UofSC News & Events | University of South Carolina

• Racial gap found in traffic stops in Milwaukee

• Racial Profiling and Mandatory Data Collection in Nevada: How will Law Enforcement Respond? will Law Enforcement Respond?

• Racial Profiling and Traffic Stops | National Institute of Justice

• Racial Profiling? A Multivariate Analysis of Police Traffic Stop Data – Michael R. Smith, Matthew Petrocelli, 2001

• SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

• San Diego Has Fallen Behind on Combating Police Racial Profiling

• Session Law – Acts of 2000 Chapter 228

• State of California Department of Justice – OpenJustice

• State police traffic stop data shows racial disparities remain  – VTDigger

• State-commissioned study finds racial disparities in R.I. traffic stops for 4th year in a row – The Boston Globe

• States Face Up To Realities Of Police Racial Profiling | The Pew Charitable Trusts

• Stops, Citations, and Arrests – Police Data Initiative

• Study of 100 million police stops finds black motorists are more likely to be pulled over | CNN

• Ten years’ worth of NC traffic stop data reveal racial disparities in searches in North Carolina

• Texas was supposed to collect racial-profiling data. It left out most of the ‘racial’ part.

• The Long Road to Ending Pretextual Stops | Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review

• The Statistical Evidence of Racial Profiling in Traffic Stops and Searches: Rethinking the Use of Statistics to Prove Discriminatory Intent

• Traffic Stop Data | Arizona Department of Public Safety

• Traffic Stop Data Reporting – Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services

• Traffic stop report shows lack of progress on racial disparities – VTDigger

• Traffic-stop data won’t halt debate over racial profiling | The Seattle Times

• UTEP Analysis of San Jose Police Department Stop Data Focuses on Racial Disparities

• Vehicle Stop Data Collection – City of Sacramento

• Vehicle Stops Report – Missouria 2020

• VSP releases 2019 traffic-stop data, racial disparities remain | Vermont Business Magazine

• What data on 20 million traffic stops can tell us about ‘driving while black’ – The Washington Post

• What decades of traffic stop data reveals about police bias – CBS News

• Wisconsin State Police Stops: How Choices in Madison have led to Missing Racial Data and Other Outcomes | Data Science Blog

• Would taking police out of traffic stops make a difference in reform?

There’s been a lot to unpack this week, both nationally and locally

The United States has over a thousand police killings each year, and many of them are of unarmed Black and brown people. In fact, America has more daily or weekly police killings than some European nations have homicides from all causes combined in a single year. And yet Americans — and I mean the majority, you, my fellow white Americans — are in deep denial of both facts and the reasons for all this spilled blood. Both the Chauvin trial and a recent report documenting the extent of racial profiling by the New Bedford Police have received a tremendous amount of blowback from white people. So I’d like to address both in this rather long essay.

Police serving American cities ought to be able to bring more to the door than a service weapon, but that’s apparently what White America wants. Those serving the public ought to have skills in psychology, first aid, social services, conflict resolution, and de-escalation. Here in Massachusetts all school teachers are expected to have masters degrees in order to be “highly qualified.” Police officers, on the other hand, are more likely to pursue memberships at health clubs and shooting ranges than college credits. And let’s face it: we hire police for their muscle, with a clear preference for combat veterans skilled in the arts of war.

The brutal truth is that the real function of the policing White America wants is evident in almost every police interaction. There’s no sugarcoating it. States hire cops for brutality — to compel immediate compliance with the law. But it’s not working. Or perhaps it’s working so well that in an age of ubiquitous cameras police forces have now exposed this brutality and, in the process, the extent of America’s police state.

For this reason, communities all over the United States are considering reallocating police funding to the essential human services now being mishandled by police. The idea is that targeting mental health and drug crises with professional skills, not Glocks and Tasers, will prevent some of this carnage. And relieving police of routine traffic control is likewise intended to reduce the pretextual (translation: Constitutionally dubious) stops that all too often result in a police shooting. But this is not enough. America also needs to face up to its legacy of policing born of slave-catching. After January 6th, though, I have a low opinion of White America’s ability for self-reflection.

America’s police, at least in Black and brown communities, are not there “to protect and to serve” so much as they are there to maintain old, discredited, unconstitutional models of “broken windows” and “stop and frisk” policing. You can dress it up — as the New Bedford Police Department has at various points — with euphemisms like “High Energy Patrols” or “Walk and Talk” or the much-abused “community policing.” But what police, many with recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, really mean by “community policing” is actually more akin to occupation and pacification of the enemy.

This “us versus them” attitude, well-entrenched in police culture and seen daily in police Tweets and Facebook posts (like the Fall River Police Department’s post on George Floyd), and reinforced by bad hiring, the rare firing, little discipline, minimal oversight, virtually nonexistent accountability and vague operational policies — none of this can be fixed overnight. Communities need to start from scratch to redefine how they want to be policed — that is, if they really want to stop the bloodletting.

The media may prefer neutral terms like “controversial” to describe the unconstitutional stops and patdowns, the pretextual traffic stops, the 24/7 surveillance, the “predictive policing,” and the racial profiling that accompany a police occupation. But there is nothing “controversial” about it. It is just plain wrong. It is illegal and it’s got to stop. Otherwise America will remain little more than a police state, especially for people of color.

Police, naturally, resist data collection and reporting obligations that might draw attention to racist practices. So, it is often up to community groups and independent researchers, using data only very reluctantly and resentfully provided by the police themselves which is intentionally incomplete or obfuscated — data they were compelled to produce by public information requests — to step into the breach and study patterns of racist policing. The CFJJ report was just that.

Last week’s Citizens for Juvenile Justice report on NBPD field police observations involving nearly 5,000 individuals showed that New Bedford Police have never stopped using racial profiling. CFJJ took some heat from the NBPD, the police union, and the Far Right for reporting on precisely what the NBPD had given them. But a 2018 Organizational Assessment study of the NBPD noted that the NBPD doesn’t collect accurate data because it just doesn’t care: “Obtaining accurate data was a challenge […] The multitude of errors present in all areas of the data indicate a lack of supervision and oversight both in communications and patrol. […] A quick review of some of the entries […] shows the errors in the data along with a disregard for the importance of collecting accurate data…”

To this date the NBPD has failed to make numerous recommendations in that 2018 Organizational Assessment of the NBPD commissioned by the Mayor, which also interviewed members of the community at large. And that report followed a 2015 report by the ACLU documenting the NBPD’s racist policing, and the 2012 Malcolm Gracia shooting — itself the result of racial profiling. Nothing has changed in at least a decade because the NBPD simply rejects reform.

From the same 2018 Organizational Assessment: “There is little evidence of a team approach, and there is significant resistance to change within the patrol division. The command staff does not appear to readily embrace innovation and often gravitated to sentiments such as ‘this is how we have always done it’ and ‘things will never change.'”

The 2018 report also noted that officer discipline cases had languished for many years and that only under the leadership of the most recent police chief was any effort made to address the backlog of disciplinary cases. Naturally, the police union retaliated by forcing a “no confidence” vote on the chief.

It’s clear that change is not going to come from within the nation’s police forces, city councils, or the nation’s mayors. It seems clear that change will be imposed upon the nation’s police by legislation like H.R.1280 – the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, and by eliminating a legal doctrine called Qualified Immunity, which confers impunity to police for even the most egregious acts. For this reason, H.R.1470, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, was filed by Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley.The goal is to eliminate outrageous deviations from normal criminal justice norms. Police shouldn’t get concierge service in the nation’s courts.

As much as New Bedford’s mayor and police officials might like to pretend that New Bedford is unique, the city’s police force is no different from most in America. If you were outraged at Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck in front of Cup Foods until he died, while several other officers stood around watching, then you would be equally outraged at watching the video of officer Paul Hodson kneeling on Erik Aguilar in front of New Bedford’s Extra Mart until he too was dead, while several other officers made no attempt to resuscitate Aguilar. The striking difference between these two cases is that, while we all watched Chauvin led off in handcuffs to prison, Hodson remained on the NBPD payroll until he was finally prosecuted — not for killing Aguilar but on federal child pornography charges. And in both killings it was not just one officer demonstrating callous disregard for human life. It was all of them.

Let me repeat that. It was all of them. There are no bad apples in the nation’s police forces. The apple barrels are so rotten that good apples don’t stand much of a chance of preserving individual integrity. This is why change must be sweeping and why it must be imposed. Police are incapable of reforming themselves.

But digging deeper, where does such contempt for non-white life come from, and why is it so easily excused? Most of White America completely rejects police accountability. To listen to many of my fellow white folks’ own words, America’s overwhelmingly white police forces are there to keep non-white “mobs” from overrunning white neighborhoods. Referencing the “carnage” that Donald Trump referred to in his racist inauguration speech, White America also sees the non-white “mob’s” demands for justice as an equal threat to their supremacy. The “Us versus them” mentality of police extends to the “Us versus them” inherent in a race war. A race war that White America seems all to eager to have.

Newsmax host Rob Schmitt called Derek Chauvin a “sacrifice to the mob.” Sheriff Tom Hodgson’s pal Michelle Malkin used almost the same words: “Chauvin was sacrificed.” Donald Trump’s friends the Proud Boys circulated a post, “Derek Chauvin Did Nothing Wrong.” Georgia Congresswoman with No Committees Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed Chauvin’s conviction on Black people — BLM particularly, which has “proven itself to be the most powerful domestic terrorist organization in our country. After Maxine Waters’ threats, could there have been any other verdict?” Fox News’ resident Alt-White host Tucker Carlson also blamed the guilty verdict on Black terror in characteristically offensive terms: “The jury in the Derek Chauvin trial came to a unanimous and unequivocal verdict Tuesday afternoon: ‘Please don’t hurt us.'”

That same white supremacy on display following the Chauvin verdict was also on display following the release of the CFJJ report on New Bedford police racial profiling. A lot of it came from WBSM, especially from Barry Richard, whose latest includes the meaningless bromides: “the system works when given a chance” and “a nation divided must learn to heal.” In a post attacking CFJJ’s report on racial profiling Richard accused the mayor of failing to defend the NBPD, and in another he called police critics “malcontents who threaten to destabilize […] society.” Richard wrote that CFJJ was “attempting to create racial division where it does not exist and is looking to drive a wedge between the minority communities and the police […] — people who have co-existed in relative peace and harmony for so many years.” Richard would have you believe that there are no local critics of New Bedford police, only outside agitators. One wonders why Richard didn’t write reams about the many out-of-staters who invaded the nation’s Capitol on January 6th.

New Bedford City Councilor Brian Gomes — the New Bedford Councilor representing the Police Ward — was featured in another of Richard’s posts, calling the CFJJ report “garbage” and promising to introduce a City Council motion to stand in support of the NBPD. Gomes, the same Councilor who introduced a resolution to reject ending qualified immunity, who wanted to buy drones to surveil New Bedford residents, and who supported Southern-style chain gangs, also accused CFJJ of trying to “stir things up” in the City. Once again, no Dixie-style defense of local law enforcement would be complete without calling critics “outside agitators.”

But the CFJJ report resonates with a lot of people in New Bedford, including most of the groups which sponsored the CFJJ webinar. Including old-time observers of local politics like former Standard-Times editor Jack Spillane, who now hosts a website on New Bedford politics. In one of his latest pieces, Spillane noted that, even if the CFJJ study made assumptions that the NBPD could find fault with, the fact remains that “it would be a very good thing if for just once all of us who live here would acknowledge the serious mistrust that exists between large segments of the New Bedford’s minority community and the police department.”

Spillane also noted that the Police based their entire refutation of CFJJ’s report on a questionable discrepancy: “The police statement took pains to paint as serious errors what to others could easily be construed as simple disagreements over what numbers should be counted. […] To be fair, whatever errors are in the report because of multiple counting would apply to the numbers of both Black and non-Black residents, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic individuals. So it’s hard to see how its conclusions would be any different than they were.”

You can view a video of the Zoom presentation of the CFJJ report here, the report itself here, and the slides used in CFJJ’s presentation here. You can also read CFJJ’s reply to the New Bedford Police criticism here. But it’s hard to argue with the numbers — particularly since they came from the police themselves and they only confirm what a similar 2015 study of NBPD field observations showed: New Bedford cops employ racial profiling on a grand scale.

I will cite Spillane again because he sums it up perfectly: “Flawed or not, the Citizens for Juvenile Justice report was a badly needed and serious effort to raise issues about the equity of policing in New Bedford. It was a long overdue attempt to start a discussion with the city’s political and law enforcement establishment about what often amounts to an occupying-force approach to policing in New Bedford. It is an attempt at a data-driven study that the city itself should have done long ago.”

Local police defenders may prefer denial and smears of police critics to actually contending with the data, but that can’t erase the fact that America has a policing problem tied to a long racist legacy. New Bedford is just one of thousands of local police forces that share those problems and that legacy. New Bedford can fix the problems locally — or wait for change to be imposed. After 70 years on this planet, and knowing more than a little about my “people,” I guarantee you it will be the latter.

Wednesday’s presentation by Citizens for Juvenile Justice was extremely powerful and damning. New Bedford has serious policing problems. The departure of a police chief will leave both a vacuum and uncertainty about what sort of leadership replaces him. And the city has a mayor who couldn’t be bothered to attend the unveiling of a study of 5,000 police stops, all of which took place over the last 5 years of his incumbency. Thankfully, New Bedford has many friends and residents who do care.

After the killings of Erik Aguilar and Malcolm Gracia by New Bedford police — which alone cost the city $1.5 million in settlements — all the same conditions still exist today and it is only a matter of time until New Bedford experiences another police killing. Action is needed to fix bad policing both at the national, state, and municipal level.

Some people may not like hearing it, but the heart of the problem of police killings is American racism. While police forces and sheriffs may no longer officially be the slave catchers they were created to be, their modern counterparts still control and surveil Black and brown neighborhoods like military occupiers. Indeed, many of today’s police officers have had recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. And aided by the Defense Logistics Agency’s 1033 program, America’s police forces not only look like military occupations but use identical equipment.

As CFJJ reported, people in non-white New Bedford neighborhoods feel that the NBPD “essentially operates as an occupying force in poor neighborhoods of color.” For the most part, White America’s neighborhoods are spared this bad- and over-policing. While many white Americans have joined the calls for police reform, many more simply don’t want to know what goes on elsewhere.

But thanks to body cameras and mobile devices we are finally seeing just how bad 21st Century policing in America really is. And this includes police training. Whether it’s de-escalation, dealing with mentally-ill people, or the finer points of patrolling neighborhoods, America’s police basically don’t have a clue. And this is precisely as designed. Because the goal of America’s police forces is not so much to “protect and to serve” as it is to keep Black and brown people in line.

Time and time again mental health emergencies turn into police slayings. Time and time again traffic stops result in a homicide. Time and time again authoritarian police “compliance” rapidly resorts to force. Time and time again interrogations turn into tragedies. Given that police officers are trained intensively to kill with skilled center shots but lack training in psychology, social work, or any of the skills that might actually serve the public, it is no wonder that so many interactions end up with a Black or brown death. For this reason, we’ve seen numerous proposals to divert police funding into the hands of agencies that actually provide human and mental health services to the public. Let police investigate real crimes but leave the rest of human services to the real professionals.

Police impunity compounds aggressive over-policing, poor training, and the misplaced use of armed police officers for social services and traffic control by rewarding bad policing. The few cases we now see of officers being tried for homicide are a totally new phenomenon. And they have only come about as a result of public outrage. Unfortunately, these cases, rare as unicorns, do not represent a consistent commitment to racial justice in which police officers receive the same justice as everyone else. On the contrary, over decades police impunity has become enshrined in law thanks to a legal doctrine known as “Qualified Immunity.”

As Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-7) wrote in a fact sheet to accompany H.R.1470, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act: “The court’s broad interpretation of this doctrine has allowed police to violate constitutional rights with impunity, providing officers immunity for everything from unlawful traffic stops to brutality and murder. Qualified immunity shields police from accountability, impedes true justice, and undermines the constitutional rights of every person in this country. It’s past time to end qualified immunity.” But, as of this moment, impunity is still the rule and the Chauvin trial the rarest of exceptions.

Compounding the structural defects mentioned previously is the absence of community control. Police departments are structured as paramilitary organizations whose members take orders from higher-ups. Therefore, just as we saw in the George Floyd killing, police usually defer to a ranking officer even when it is obvious that a murder by one of their own is in progress. Just ask former policewoman Cariol Horne, who was fired in 2008 for stopping a white officer from administering a lethal chokehold to a Black man. She didn’t “go along to get along” and it cost her a job and her pension.

In a society that refuses to see itself as a police state, why do we blindly accept that police departments look exactly like branches of the military? Who, actually, are police waging war against? Moreover, how is paramilitary organization consistent with fulfilling a municipal services function? And why are citizens completely locked out of managing police forces? You may not like the answer, but here it is anyway: because the goal of America’s police forces is not to “protect and to serve” but to keep Black and brown people in line. Public management of police departments would upend this function pretty quickly.

Following a killing, police are usually permitted to investigate themselves, with police unions setting the terms of investigations and interrogations. District attorneys, who have daily, fraternal, interactions with the police, almost always refuse to prosecute even the most egregious misconduct. We saw all this unfold after Malcolm Gracia’s murder, and America has seen it play out hundreds of thousands of times. The officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times? — he went back to work yesterday.

None of this is what any sane person would call justice. In fact, the bitter phrase “criminal justice” has become such a cruel joke that many of us can’t manage to put those words between our teeth. America may fancy itself as a nation of laws, but each time someone charged with enforcing laws breaks them with impunity while elected representatives look the other way, it shreds our democracy a little bit more.

National and state legislation is needed to set us on a different course. As of this writing, only a handful of states have lifted qualified immunity for police officers. The Massachusetts House, which only very reluctantly passed a police reform bill in an overtime session last year, preserved Qualiifed Immunity after intense lobbying by police unions. This should tell you who many Massachusetts legislators really represent.

Last month the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R.1280, the George Floyed Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which addresses policing practices and law enforcement accountability. It increases accountability for police misconduct, requires more transparency and data collection, and eliminates discriminatory policing practices. It also enables federal prosecution of unconstitutional practices by state and local law enforcement, limits qualified immunity in some cases, authorizes the DOJ to subpoena police departments more easily, create a police misconduct database, and mandates the body cameras and the reporting of incidents where force was used. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful this legislation will clear the Senate.

Changes to policing policy, such as the 19 recommendations Citizens for Juvenile Justice offered New Bedford residents, can make a big difference. For too long police forces have not only enjoyed complete impunity but also relative freedom from public controls and mandates. These at least represent policy changes. But they are recommendations, not absolute requirements. For that you need legislation. Yet too many mayors and city councilors habitually defer to the police on police matters while hypocritically micromanaging schools and other municipal departments. Too many legislators defer to police, sheriffs, or police unions. This sloppy, lazy governance has contributed to sloppy, unaccountable policing — precisely what is to be found in most of America’s police departments.

One obvious solution is to vote more wisely. But let’s not be naive. Those who want to preserve 21st Century American policing are constantly told that, without the police having carte blanche (run that through Google Translate some time) anarchy would rein and blood would run in the streets. What they really mean is — without police impunity the Black and brown people would rise up and overrun us.

In the end only complete citizen control of police forces, including the end of Qualified Immunity, will change the structure, practices, reporting, investigations, hiring and firing, discipline, and prosecution of bad cops. Instead of a primary mission to subdue the non-white population, police might then actually start serving communities who hire them.

On January 6th — in addition to avowed white supremacy and conspiracy groups — a number of firefighters, police officers, and military reservists joined the mob storming the nation’s Capitol building. In some cases they severely beat fellow law enforcement officers, in other cases flashed police credentials to gain unlawful entry into the Capitol. Law enforcement agencies around the country conducted internal investigations, and some officers have already been fired.

Yet neither the New Bedford Police, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Department, nor the Dartmouth Police Department conducted internal investigations into officers who might have participated in the insurrection. The New Bedford Mayor’s office referred inquires about investigations to the FBI. Chief Cordeiro told a Zoom meeting much the same. A Dartmouth Police spokeswoman said that “at this time” there was no investigation. The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office simply refused to answer our question.

The most charitable explanation is that local law enforcement agencies are waiting to see if the FBI turns up anything. A less charitable, but far more likely, explanation is that police and sheriff’s department are showing their usual disinterest in investigating their own, even for crimes that would permanently disqualify them from serving in any law enforcement capacity ever again. Unfortunately, the public has come to expect responses like this from police agencies that operate with increasing impunity.

Historically, the nation’s sheriffs have been closely identified with slave patrols and white supremacy. Our own local sheriff is a spokesman for the white supremacist anti-immigrant group FAIR, state campaign chair for America’s first openly white supremacist President, and spent considerable time attempting to ingratiate himself with white supremacist presidential immigration advisor Stephen Miller, as information requests by the ACLU, Political Research Associates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and others reveal. Sheriffs have a long history of racist impunity, as many remember from the Jim Crow era. Since those days, sadly, not enough has changed.

The nation’s police forces are part of a criminal justice system that Elizabeth Warren took heat for calling “racist, top to bottom.” It ought to be unnecessary to point out, especially after George Floyd’s murder, that police forces, especially, have major problems with disproportionate killings, arrests, and assaults on people of color. But then there are the white supremacist chat rooms — from Facebook, Twitter, Gab, and Parler, to Stormfront and others — where a disproportionate number of participants are law enforcement or members of the military.

A 2019 investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of police were members of neo-Confederate, militia, or white supremacist Facebook groups. The Plain View Project created a database of Facebook posts from self-identified police officers in just eight of America’s 350 cities and found tens of thousands of racist posts by police officers endorsing racial violence and bigotry. What would they have found in the nation’s 15,000+ small towns and in the remaining 342 cities?

In 2010 New Bedford Police officer Paul Hodson encountered a disturbed Guatemalan man and, within three minutes, had killed him by first pepper-spraying him and then kneeling on his back. Hodson, who was only removed from the NBPD after being convicted of child pornography charges, was known to post racist content on social media. The Standard Times printed some of his tame contributions: “After having a great time over the past 2 days spending time with friends and family, its back to work to deal with the scum of the earth,” he posted in 2011. “Time to go to work and violate some civil rights.”

Police forces historically do nothing about racism in the ranks. In the 1990’s a white supremacist gang, the “Vikings,” operated with impunity right under the noses of the brass of the Los Angeles Police Department. Klan affiliations of police and sheriffs were well-known during the Civil Rights years, and police today continue the tradition of breaking Black heads by treating Black Lives Matter activists as terrorists for simply demanding accountability or posting fantasies about running protestors over with their cruisers.

And if you think New Bedford is different from other communities, think again.

Former Bristol County Sheriff’s detective Peter Larkin, who went to work for the New Bedford Schools, was fired in 2019 for posting his own disturbed racist fantasy on Facebook. Angry at Black Lives Matter people protesting in New York City, Larkin wrote, “I would roll tanks and bulldozers. Mush any human in the way. Shoot everyone else. Pile up the bodies and burn them on national tv.” Is this an example of a someone who needs psychological help – or was Larkin simply posturing for fellow ex-cops who drink from the same racist cup?

Whatever the causes — hiring the wrong people or habitually refusing to hold “bad apples” accountable — police racism is both systemic and a self-inflicted societal wound that only radical reform and public control can fix.

The events of January 6th, which far too many law enforcement officers particpated in, provides one more example of why public oversight of police is crucial. Police simply can’t be trusted to investigate themselves. And why would any sensible person even expect them to?

If local law enforcement officers are found to have participated in the January 6^th insurrection, they must be immediately dismissed, stripped of their pensions, and never permitted to betray the Constitution or the public trust again. But since local law enforcement agencies won’t do it themselves, let municipalities investigate. If municipalities won’t do it, then let the state Attorney General conduct credible investigations.

The time for taking white supremacy within the ranks of law enforcement seriously is long overdue.

We know that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts neither the schools nor the police are collecting adequate data on school-based offenses. This is not to single-out New Bedford. It reflects a state-wide, if not a national, lack of interest in tracking at-risk youth.

Many types of data describing the process of a child moving through the juvenile justice system — from schools, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), police, district attorneys, courts, probation, the Department of Youth Services, federal DOE and DOJ mandated data — must be analyzed in order to answer two critical questions about School Resource Officers: (1) does the presence of armed police in schools actually deter violence and mass shootings? and (2) is there a risk to children, particularly children of color, of disproportionate discipline and their early introduction into the criminal justice system?

However, there is some data, and we need to look at it. In January the NAACP New Bedford branch hosted a community discussion of SROs and juvenile justice. One of the invited organizations looked at data which school collect and turn over to DESE. Citizens for Juvenile Justice (CFJJ) obtained DESE data on school discipline in Massachusetts Gateway Cities. Aggregated data is published on the DESE site and there it is possible to look at specific infractions by school or by district. For example, you can find the New Bedford schools here:

From this data we find that in 2018-2019, out of 13,811 students in the entire district, 35 were disciplined for weapons (types unspecified), 69 for threats to other students, zero for sexual assault, 70 for fighting, 508 for battery (which includes any form of contact such as shoving or spitting), 65 for illegal substances, zero for felonies, and 5 for bullying.

But the New Bedford Public Schools already knows this. It’s their data.

The relative absence of violent crime in these numbers suggests that SROs are either unnecessary or are preventing serious crimes currently not being documented. Without data or specifics it is impossible to know which is the case. As the Justice Policy Institute has documented, schools have disciplined and expelled children just for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. To determine if armed police are actually needed in the New Bedford schools, a better analysis of disciplinary cases, then, is necessary to determine which cases actually rose to the level of a crime.

CFJJ obtained the raw data behind the DESE numbers in order to look at discipline by race, gender, disability, economic status, and language.

Using this data CFJJ prepared a statistical analysis for each Gateway City. The New Bedford analysis was one of them. CFJJ looked at overall discipline by race, discipline for students with a disability, students economically disadvantaged, and students whose first language is not English.

The NAACP New Bedford branch obtained CFJF’s DESE data extract. You can download it here. It was possible to reproduce CFJJ’s results and also to crunch the data in additional ways. For example, we can view high school and middle school discipline with greater granularity, and by school. You can download an extract for the New Bedford schools here.

The DESE-supplied data relies on Excel Autofilters, which anyone familiar with the software should be able to apply.

Then, using Excel’s charts, visual respresentations of the data can be produced:

While CFJJ’s Gateway City report looked at discipline by the percentage of, for example, Black students over all students disciplined, it is also possible to look at the percentage of Black students disciplined over only Black students. We found that, within each racial group, Black males were always the statistically most likely to be disciplined — reflecting what national research already shows — even when they represented a smaller proportion of total disciplinary cases.

For example, the chart above for Roosevelt Middle School shows that almost one out of three Black males were disciplined while only one out of five white males were. In fact, the discriminatory over-discipline of Black males is a feature throughout all New Bedford non-elementary schools and also at Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech, whose numbers we also obtained.

Similar analyses can be done for non-English-speakers, students with disabilities, and those living in poverty. As both the ACLU and the American Bar Association point out, students of color with disabilities are especially likely to be injected into the school-to-prison pipeline.

The Sentencing Project recently released a report on racial disparities in youth incarceration in the United States. Guess which state had the 9th worst disparity in Black youth incarceration? Massachusetts. And guess which state was Number One in incarceration disparities for Latino children? Massachusetts. And this follows significant 2018 reforms affecting youth in the criminal justice system.

So why is all this important? Because SROs are frequently asked to handle disciplinary matters that have nothing to do with crimes, and the DESE data CFJJ has published shows that school officials who may ask SROs to intercede are more likely to discipline children of color.

Until the New Bedford Public Schools can prove that the benefits outweigh the risks, we call on Superintendent Anderson to suspend, immediately, their SRO program with the New Bedford Police.

Downloads

• CFJJ / DESE Collection
• NAACP Extract for New Bedford

The 192nd General Court of the Massachusetts Legislature is considering a number of bills related to school resource officers.

The Chapter 69 Criminal Justice reforms and Chapter 253 police reforms now give school superintendents complete discretion to run SRO programs. New legislation also requires schools to collect discipline and arrest data, which for the most part they have failed to do. With school resource officers being advertised by both police departments and school districts as “mentors” and “teachers,” and with even some SROs admitting they are often pressured into being used as disciplinarians by school staff, several new bills make it clear that police in schools are not to replace professional support staff and that their role is solely to deal with clear criminal activity.

• HD.2534 – Lindsay N. Sabadosa (D-First Hampshire) has proposed HD.2534, An Act relative to the location of school resource officers. This bill removes SROs from school grounds and makes it clear that SROs will never replace school counselors, psychologists, or disciplinarians.

• SD.2043 – Harriet L. Chandler (D-First Worcester) has proposed SD.2043, An Act relative to safer schools. This bill makes it clear that SROs will not (i) serve as school disciplinarians, enforcers of school regulations or in place of licensed school psychologists, psychiatrists or counselors; and (ii) use police powers to address traditional school discipline issues, including non-violent disruptive behavior. The bill also prohibits SROs from intervening in all but clearly criminal acts.

• HD.3090 – Kay Khan (D-11th Middlesex) has proposed HD.3090, An Act relative to safer schools. This bill makes it clear that SROs will not (i) serve as school disciplinarians, enforcers of school regulations or in place of licensed school psychologists, psychiatrists or counselors; and (ii) use police powers to address traditional school discipline issues, including non-violent disruptive behavior. The bill also prohibits SROs from intervening in all but clearly criminal acts.

• SD.180 – Sonia Chang-Diaz (D-Second Suffolk) has proposed SD.180, An Act to prioritize violence prevention and social emotional health in school support staff hiring. In the event that schools keep SROs, it should not be at the expense of professional support staff. This bill requires at least seven “Mental and social emotional health support personnel” for every SRO and requires DESE to document compliance.

• HD.2748 – Brandy Fluker Oakley (D-12th Suffolk) has proposed HD.2748, An Act to prioritize violence prevention and social emotional health in school support staff hiring. In the event that schools keep SROs, it should not be at the expense of professional support staff. This bill requires at least seven “Mental and social emotional health support personnel” for every SRO and requires DESE to document compliance.

Republicans didn’t care much for the Chapter 69 Criminal Justice reforms passed in 2018 and no sooner did the Chapter 253 police reforms go into effect on January 1st than they began devising ways to return to the good old days when police controlled school hallways, not superintendents.

• SD.856 – Patrick M. O’Connor (R-Plymouth and Norfolk) has proposed SD.856, An Act Creating a School Resource Officer Grant Program and Fund. This bill establishes a state-administered fund to be shared only with communities who adopt SRO programs, and funds must be matched by local communities. The Commissioner of Public Safety (a political appointment) appears to exert significant influence in grant awards.

• SD.857 – Patrick M. O’Connor (R-Plymouth and Norfolk) has proposed SD.857, An Act promoting local control and effective training of school resource officers. This bill returns appointments of SROs exclusively to police chiefs, despite the title’s claim to restore community control.

• SD.2171 – Bruce E. Tarr (R-First Essex and Middlesex) has proposed SD.2171, An Act relative to school safety issues. This bill replaces superintendent’s discretionary appointment of SROs with an appointment by the Commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Two additional bills with SRO provisions from James Arciero and Walter Timilty seem to be cases of Democrats pandering to the police lobby. A third stange bill from Cynthia Creem is sure to offer both opponents of SROs and opponents of gun control something to jointly despise.

• HD.2052 – James Arciero (D-2nd Middlesex) has proposed HD.2052, Resolve establishing an Enhanced Public School Safety Commission. This resolution would create a commission to study placing bulletproof glass, classroom surveillance, and retired police officers in schools.

• SD.769 – Walter F. Timilty (D-Norfolk, Bristol and Plymouth) has proposed SD.769, An Act relative to school safety and security. This bill involves school resource officers in a requirement to hold live intruder drills within 90 days of the beginning of the school year.

• SD.1506 – Cynthia Stone Creem (D-1st Middlesex and Norfolk) has proposed SD.1506, An Act relative to firearms and firearms violence. This bill sets up a Firearms Violence Prevention Trust Fund, which among other things, prioritizes “programs that support the provision of school resource officers.” Revenue for the fund comes from a 4.5% tax on guns and ammunition sales.

On February 3rd the Sentencing Project published a new study, Racial Disparities in Youth Incarceration Persist, by Josh Rovner, Senior Advocate Associate at the Sentencing Project. It examines disparities in arrests of white children and children of color, and it does not paint an encouraging picture.

For the NAACP the findings are no surprise. Black, Native, and Latino youth have been historically disciplined and arrested in disproportionate numbers and make up a lopsided percentage of those who are fed into the criminal justice system.

The good news from the study is that in the last decade youth incarceration has been cut in half. The bad news is that, for children of color, they are still targets of overzealous and racist policing and school discipline. Disparities in Latino youth incarceration have dropped by 21% — still not on par with national improvement — but Black and Native youth incarceration disparities have remained “essentially unchanged” in the last decade.

The Sentencing Project study quotes Tufts University Sociologist Daaniki Gordon, who notes that “police are […] more likely to intervene in behavior by youth of color that would go unremarked or ignored by police in neighborhoods where white youth predominantly live. Residential segregation leads to school segregation, and students of color often experience their misbehaviors treated as a disciplinary or policing issue while their white peers’ misbehaviors are more frequently seen as behavioral health concerns, potentially meriting a modified curriculum and additional school support personnel to assist with behavioral needs.”

As the study notes, criminalization of children of color often begins with, and right in, the schools. With very good reason schools have been correctly identified as the first stop in the school-to-prison pipeline. It is NAACP policy that armed police have no place in school hallways. Now that Massachusetts police reform has given school superintendents complete discretion over SRO programs, especially with case after case after case after case after case after case of children abused by SROs, it is up to school superintendents to prove that these programs do no harm to children of color. We call on Superintendent Thomas Anderson to stop the SRO program immediately and prove to city residents that it serves some positive function.

While Massachusetts has the fifth lowest youth incarceration rate in the United States, these low rates do not extend to Black, Native or Latino Children. Massachusetts has the ninth highest disparity between Black and white youth incarceration rates and is #1 in disparity in the nation between Latino and white youth incarceration — and it’s only worsening.

The Sentencing Project has offered three recommendations for state, city, and school policy makers:

1. Racial impact statements: States and localities should require the use of racial impact statements to educate policymakers about how changes in sentencing or law enforcement policies and practices might impact racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system.
2. Publish demographic data quarterly: States and counties should publish demographic data quarterly on the number of incarcerated or justice-system involved youth, including race and ethnicity. The federal government should disseminate this information nationwide.
3. Invest in communities: States and localities must invest in communities to strengthen public infrastructures, such as schools and medical and mental health services, with particular focus on accommodating the needs of children of color.

Let’s look at how these are — or are not — being addressed currently.

As we learned in last week’s forum on Juvenile Justice and School Resource Officers, racial impact and racial justice are poorly-considered factors in both school and policing policy, or are simply not considered at all. Juvenile justice data is either not collected — in violation of state law — or it must be obtained by FOIA request or lawsuit. And budget priorities for communities frequently overlook social and human services in favor of simply throwing more money at policing.

The NAACP believes that this study adds to what many Americans have finally woken up to — that the American criminal justice system is deeply racist and needs much more reform than the band-aids and minimal reforms that timid legislators have come up with to-date.

You can download a PDF of the full Sentencing Project study from their website.

As of January 1st, 2021 Massachusetts law on School Resource Officers (SROs) has changed.

In past years the deployment of SRO’s was entirely up to the Chief of Police. But the choice of whether to place armed police in schools is now entirely up to school superintendents.

When Governor Baker signed S.2963, the compromise police reform bill, it redefined many elements of the SRO program, striking Section 37P in its entirety, and now gives superintendents the final word on whether they want armed police in district schools:

“(d) For the purpose of fostering a safe and healthy environment for all students through strategic and appropriate use of law enforcement resources and to achieve positive outcomes for youth and public safety, a chief of police, at the request of the superintendent and subject to appropriation, shall assign at least 1 school resource officer to serve the city, town, commonwealth charter school, regional school district or county agricultural school. In the case of a regional school district, commonwealth charter school or county agriculture school, the chief of police of the city or town in which the school is located shall, at the request of the superintendent, assign the school resource officer who may be the same officer for all schools in the city or town.”

I’ve attached a PDF of the legislation.

The New Bedford schools, which last October kicked off a community “conversation” with a propaganda video supporting SROs, have now enlisted community members to help improve the program. But instead of improving the optics of their SRO program, the school district now needs to justify its continued existence. And there are two questions the School Superintendent must answer:

1. what risks do placing armed police in schools pose to children, particularly children of color?
2. has the police presence in schools actually kept children safe and deterred rampage shootings?

The NAACP New Bedford Branch is sponsoring a community discussion on January 28th from 6-7PM via Zoom which may offer some answers to these questions — questions the schools ought to be asking as well. The panel will feature: Leon Smith, Seq., Executive Director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice; Dr. Ricardo Rosa, Co-Chair of New Bedford Coalition to Save Our Schools; Matthew Cregor, Staff Attorney at Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee; and will be moderated by NAACP member Moriah Wiggins.

Everyone is welcome to attend. Connect via Zoom at 6PM on Thursday, January 28th:

On January 6th Bristol County Sheriff and Massachusetts Trump campaign Chair Thomas M. Hodgson condemned in the weakest terms possible the violence of fellow Trump supporters storming the Capitol building, planting bombs, preparing to lynch both legislators and the Vice President, and attempting to prevent certification of Electoral College votes. Hodgson tweeted, “What happened at the United States Capitol today was outrageous and completely unacceptable. It is never acceptable or appropriate for anyone to resort to violence and malicious destruction to express grievances.”

Hodgson, a supporter of United Cape Patriots, a Massachusetts group that descended on the Capitol on January 6th, echoed the rioters’ false claim that the vote had been stolen: “The fastest way to end the ongoing debate over elections issues and the deep divide in our country is to have an audit prior to Jan. 20 so both Democrats and Republicans can be assured they can continue to have faith in our elections.” The problem is, post-election vote audits are not a Constitutionally-permitted alternative to counting Electoral College votes that the states have already certified.

The January 6th siege, which claimed the life of at least one police officer, was barely two months from the date Hodgson praised Trump for his “commitment to uphold the rule of law and support law enforcement in our mission to keep our families, neighborhoods and nation safe.”

Hodgson hypocritically claimed right before the election that Trump’s enemies were “attempting a ‘coup’ based on their ‘Russian Hoax’, in an attempt to deny the American people the legitimate outcome based on our nation’s electoral process.” Hodgson’s non-condemnation of the protesters and complete dismissal of the President’s responsibility for inflaming them, tell us a lot about his concern for the electoral process, the rule of law, or even Hodgson’s support of law enforcement. There is none.

The Bristol County Sheriff knows full well that marauding rioters at the Capitol had been enraged by Trump’s non-stop lies that the presidential election was fraudulently stolen from him, an assertion that Hodgson has not sufficiently distanced himself from.

If Hodgson is truly sad at “disorderly and violent behavior” then let him acknowledge the Massachusetts Attorney General’s report that he, himself, was largely responsible for an unjustified attack on detainees in his own jail. Hodgson, who has repeatedly been found by both state and federal judges to have violated the civil rights of his prisoners, personally attacked and unleashed dogs on non-resisting ICE detainees on May 1st, 2020. Hodgson would not consent to be interviewed by the AG, and the ACLU has had to sue for tapes of the riot that Hodgson provoked, which Hodgson will not release.

It seems that Hodgson shares a lot of political DNA with the Capitol rioters. And Hodgson’s well-established neo-Confederate and his white supremacist connections make his perfunctory condemnations of white supremacist and white militia violence meaningless.

If Tom Hodgson truly wants “an election audit before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration” — an audit whose only goal is erasing over 60 state court rulings rejecting challenges to their election outcomes — he ought to welcome audits of his own jail. But Hodgson crudely dismissed the Attorney General’s report: “It’s about halfway down the sewer pipe,” Hodgson said. “That’s about how much value I put into the attorney general’s recommendations that are politically motivated.”

The validity of the presidential election was certified in fifty states, upheld by a multitude of court decisions, and then supported by Republican and Democratic officials who adhered to their oaths of office. But that’s not good enough for Hodgson, who only a day after the coup attempt said, “I do believe that there’s likely fraud, based on what I’ve seen so far, it appears that [fraud] is very likely.”

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Capitol insurrectionists were fed false and fantastical conspiracy theories that undermined any possibility of accepting a valid election outcome. They assembled, marched and viciously attacked the Capitol because of those lies.

Lies that Hodgson continues to spread.

Part 3: Comparing your city’s police spending to others

Part 1 of this series was a quick overview of New Bedford’s 333-page FY2021 city budget along with a spreadsheet created from those numbers. Part 2 was a look at New Bedford’s department funding and how it changed from last year’s numbers. In general, the New Bedford Police is being spared the brutal “defunding” that other departments will suffer — even as COVID-19 wipes out the city’s cash reserves.

What should a community really be spending on policing? How much is enough? What do similar-sized communities to ours spend? Is there a relationship between spending on policing and crime? Education and police? Do grants and state subsidies permit municipalities to spend more on police? How are poverty and race related to policing?

There are 75 communities in Massachusetts with populations over 25,000 for which more extensive demographic, economic, racial, and policing data are available than the state’s smaller towns. Since larger communities wrestle more with police issues we’ll focus on this subset.

You can find some useful data here:

• FBI Law Enforcement Staffing data
• FBI Violent and Property Crime data
• MA 12-Month Average Unemployment data
• MA DESE data on the racial composition of students
• MA DESE Full Time Teaching Staff data
• MA Median Household income from the Census bureau
• MA Presidential Election results 2020

From these downloaded numbers I constructed a second spreadsheet and built multiple worksheets which look at policing rates (measured as officers per 10K population) compared to staffing of teachers, crime rates, median family income, degree of political conservatism, and race.

You can refer to the spreadsheet for city-specific data, but the graphs depict only the general relationships between factors.

1. Increasing officers per 10K did not affect (raise or lower) teachers per 10K population. In Massachusetts many communities are free to spend a greater percentage of their budgets on police since they know the state will pick up the tab for education. New Bedford is one of these. Not every community spends similar proportions of their budget on police or teachers; and the data shows it.

2. Increases in police per 10K population correspond to increases in violent crime. Note that some communities with lower crime rates have the same proportion of officers per 10K as others with higher crime rates. There is great variation in what a community deems an appropriate level of policing for the crime it experiences.

3. The next graph surprised me. There seems to be no connection between the degree of a community’s political conservatism and an increase in officers per 10K. I had suspected that the more conservative the community, the larger its police force would be. But in fact the trend line for officers per 10K decreases almost imperceptibly as Trump support rises. Go figure. Massachusetts.

4. Another result that matched prediction was that the higher a community’s median family income, the lower the police per 10K. The trend line shows that upscale [and usually whiter] communities do not police themselves as intensively as poorer communities.

5. Finally, race. I computed the percentage of non-white students in each community’s public schools and plotted them against policing per 10K. As I had suspected, as the percentage of Black and brown children increases, police per 10K increases as well.

We have known for a long time that poverty is an incubator for crime, and that racism creates conditions that create and sustain generational poverty.

A simple-minded solution for dealing with crime is to militarize, surveil, and occupy neighborhoods with over-policing, and to fill jails and prisons with people who after entering the “system” will never work, vote, or have sustained connection to their children or communities again.

For many of our elected officials there is always some excuse for slashing social programs but there is always money in the budget for mass-incarceration and increasing police presence on our streets and in our schools.

So while we debate whether the New Bedford police budget ought to be $32 million or some other arbitrary number, or if armed police serve any useful purpose in our schools, we should not forget that lifting people out of poverty, not promoting a police state, is the only thing that reduces crime in the long run.