Part 2: Most departments “defunded” except for the New Bedford Police

Budget: bud-jet; n. A systematic plan for the expenditure of a finite resource, such as money or time.

Part 1 of this series is a quick overview of the City’s 333-page FY2021 New Bedford City budget along with a spreadsheet created from the numbers. In this post we look at department funding and changes from last year’s numbers. Besides the generous funding they receive, and even with a delay in building a new police center, New Bedford Police will be spared the brutal “defunding” that other departments will suffer — even as COVID-19 continues to overwhelm city resources and cash reserves.

Let’s jump right into the revenues. In 2021 the Buttonwood Zoo will bring in $150K less, revenue from traffic tickets will decrease by $200K, building permits will be down by $200K, half a million dollars in investment income are up in smoke, and a quarter of a million dollars of “miscellaneous non-recurring” revenue will be lost. But the most painful loss of all will be $3.9 million of so-called Free Cash revenue lost to the pandemic; this is the money carried over from the preceding fiscal year. It’s all gone now. Consequently, funding for many city departments will be slashed in 2021. But the NBPD is not one of them.

On the Expense side the loss of $4+ million in revenue doesn’t worry City Council enough to stop it from giving themselves a 5% raise while taking away $50K in funding from the Mayor’s office and another $50K from Purchasing. “General Government” — the catch-all budget category for most familiar city services — fares worst of all, losing more than a million dollars in funding.

The Department of Public Safety will also be defunded — that is, all departments but the Police. The projected FY2021 Police Department budget increases ever-so-slightly, but the Fire Department is defunded to the tune of $1 million and EMS services loses $180,000 despite contributing an additional $200K in revenue. This has got to be an especially painful slap in the face for public employees who actually save lives.

While the City spends $50 million a year on “Public Safety” (most of it for the police) it spends only $5 million a year on human services. In 2021 New Bedford will spend slightly more ($1.2 million) on Community Services than it did last year but will slash Health Department funding — even as the pandemic is still raging. You might think of Veterans Services as a federal responsibility, but the City pays more ($2.7 million) for Veterans Services than Community Services and Health combined.

The budget is just full of surprises.

The Zoo and libraries get a tiny boost in 2021, and there is another $35K more for parks and beaches, but funding for tourism and marketing will be slashed by $65K.

Two big changes in City expenses are a $30 million increase in the school budget and a $25 million decrease in Health and Life Insurance. These numbers are related because, in a bookkeeping change, the school budget now reflects healthcare costs. This is not the case with other departments, however.

It would be nice if future budgets would do the same for all departments — reflecting health care costs in their total operating expenses. Future budgets should also reflect pension obligations and the portion of debt maintenance that each department or Enterprise Fund incurs, as well.

The City Council — over-represented by bankers and real estate agents, beneficiaries of patronage, and the Chamber of Commerce — has consistently opposed raising property taxes on City residents but is only happy to cash state checks which fund more than half of all City programs. And when the “free money” or state aid dries up the City has always been quick to borrow. In fact, it’s done so much borrowing over the years that it now pays roughly $12 million in debt service each year to lenders.

Besides the New Bedford Public Schools, the City’s single largest expenditures are $32 million in pension payouts, a similar number for police, $18 million for healthcare, a similar number for Fire, $6 million for running Greater New Bedford Voc, and a similar number for EMS.

Some city services are organized into Enterprise Funds which are somewhat self-supporting. The airport costs about $1 million a year to run, cable access costs about $1.2 million a year, the parking authority $1.2 million, wastewater $25 million a year, and city water $17 million. But these are use-based services which invoice customers instead of levying taxes. Unlike police or general government, Enterprise Funds themselves fund the wages of those who provide their services.

When it comes to police spending, the best estimate of the cost of the 302 officers on the job in 2021 and the infrastructure required to support them is about $32.6 million. This number is derived from the $25,527,814 shown in the budget, plus another $4,235,554 in estimated pension payouts and $2,894,190 in estimated health premiums, for a total of $32,657,558. This is a conservative estimate because police benefits and salaries outstrip everyone else’s and police pensions are much higher. In all likelihood total police costs are much higher than $32.6 million.

So when we look at city budgets we ought to return to the definition of a budget — planning around a finite resource called money — and think about what else we might purchase with all those finite resources.

The cost of the New Bedford Police Department is more than all the tax money the City spends on EMS, highway and street repair, Community Services, Health Services, Veterans Services, Parks and Beaches, Refuse Management, and making interest payments on its debt — combined.

A “budget is a profoundly moral document,” presidential advisor Paul Begala once noted. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be.”

Last night I read through Charlie Baker’s objections to S.2693, the conference version of the Police Accountability Bill.

In his 13-page letter to both the House and Senate, Baker proposed extensive changes to the Legislature’s reforms. His main objection to Police Accountability was public accountability itself. Baker’s amendments to the Police Accountability bill remove:

• civilian oversight

• specifically, advice and oversight from racial justice groups

• provisions to ban facial recognition

As Progressive Mass points out, Baker had three options. “(1) He could show that he cares about police accountability and listen to the activists demanding action and just sign it. (2) He could show that he doesn’t care and simply veto it. (3) Finally, he could again show that he doesn’t care, but by sending back amendments to weaken the bill. He chose #3.”

This wasn’t a passive veto, and yet it wasn’t Baker negotiating either. This was the governor mailing a Fuck You Very Much letter to racial justice advocates written for him by the Massachusetts police lobby.

After George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered, Baker made all the right noises, giving lip service to the concerns of civil rights groups, civil libertarians, and people of color. In early December Globe columnist Joan Vennochi asked, “Will Charlie Baker back police reform or police unions?” It was mainly a rhetorical question, as she reminded the governor that it ought to be a no-brainer since he claimed to believe in the bill’s reforms. In the end, of course, Baker caved to the police unions.

In rejecting civilian oversight Baker even regurgitated the police line: “I do not accept the premise that civilians know best how to train police.”

Until recently the United States has had a tradition of excluding ex-military from running the Pentagon. Baker himself ought to understand how it works: the National Guard is ultimately under his command, not its own. Only in weak and failed states are paramilitary organizations accountable only to themselves.

But in rejecting civilian control Baker struck a number of sections from S.2963 (3, 5, 7-8, 12, 14, 17, 19-20, 24-25, 27-29, 31-36, 40, 55-56, 62, 66, 71, 75-76, 81-82, 88-89, 93, and 121) — for the most part simply restoring the name of the training committee from the Legislative reforms to the original “municipal police training committee.”

Baker also struck section 26, which barred the use of facial recognition, and significantly modified section 30, which requires officers to use proportional force and de-escalation techniques and which prescribes decertification and revocation procedures. Baker’s section 30 makes officer misconduct subject (as before) to internal affairs investigations that can take up to a year or more to complete and places additional constraints on officer interrogation. Who else gets to investigate themselves but police? And where else but a police state?

It was apparent that the unions had leaned heavily on Baker because he also removed section 60, which specifies the process required for an officer to return to work after a year-long break in service; and section 61, which describes requirements for returning from physical or mental disability. Baker also removed Section 74, which defines an officer as a trainee regardless of collective bargaining agreement, until the officer has completed his certification course.

There are few bright spots in Baker’s hollowed out and gutted version of police accountability. But one may be that the Governor left the Legislature’s changes to SRO programs in place, the most important of which gives School Superintendents discretion to use SROs instead of Police Chiefs.

Baker’s letter to the Legislature opens by completely cutting the public out of public oversight of the police and restructuring the Municipal Police Training Committee. His letter calls for 16 voting appointees, each to serve a 3 year term: five police chiefs by region; one selected by the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association; one of his own choice; one officer from the Massachusetts Police Association Executive Board; two sheriffs of his choosing (God help us if one is Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson); the chair of the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement (Eddy Chrispin); president of Massachusetts Association of Women in Law enforcement (Marie Cleary); Boston Police Commissioner (William Gross); Colonel of the State Police (Christopher Mason); Attorney General (Maura Healey); and one person designated by his EOPSS Secretary.

The Municipal Police Training Committee also includes several non-voting members from: Personnel Administration; Corrections; Youth Services; Probation; Parole Board; Committee on Criminal Justice; Chief Justice of the Trial Court; Chief justice of the District Court; Commissioner of Education; Massachusetts Bar Association; Special Agent in charge of the Boston FBI; a District Attorney; and a grab-bag including city administrators; the Clerk of Superior Court; one social worker; one mental health clinician; and one lonely public defender.

Baker’s training committee is responsible for re-writing policies for Use of Force and hiring new officers. Given that the public now has no say in their own policing, neither the type of officers hired nor the manner in which they are trained to shoot to kill or interact with civilians will change.

No reforms, no oversight, no accountability, no change. Just the way the police lobby likes it.

But Blue Lives most certainly matter to the Governor. Baker’s police version ensures that police officers get a 2-hour in-service course each year to help them with their PTSD and suicide prevention, and each officer will attend and complete a course on mental wellness and suicide prevention. Unfortunately, the public won’t know which officers are time bombs ready to go off. But even if we could identify them, we’d have no say in removing or disciplining them.

The tepid reforms that made it into the conferenced version of S.2963 were weak and disappointing enough after the House stripped out limits on Qualified Immunity. But now the governor is determined to deliver the coup de grace to police accountability. Police will continue to be accountable only to themselves, shielded by a governor who has decided that Black and brown lives don’t matter all that much — and that the real goal of police reform is complete impunity for cops.

Ignoring the concerns of people of color, deaf to the demands of civil rights and racial justice advocates, Baker’s edits are not only bad — they’re an insult to the people of the Commonwealth, especially those who need protection from bad cops the most.

Part 1: Introduction to New Bedford’s City Budget

In the wake of a national moment of reckoning with policing in America, while some communities are making deep cuts to their police budgets, others have begun to examine them. To my knowledge no one has yet started the process of studying the New Bedford Police budget, so I offer this introduction to the City Budget as nothing more than a starting point for anyone who wants to open an honest conversation about how the City spends taxpayer money.

Download and read through the 333-page FY2021 New Bedford City budget. You may also want to download the spreadsheet I created from the budget numbers (I also talked with the City’s CFO, Ari Sky, to obtain additional insight into the percentages of pension and healthcare money spent on various departments).

The 2021 New Bedford City budget is slightly over a third of a billion dollars — $363,897,500. Of that amount, local taxes raise 8%, real estate and property taxes pull in 36.7%, and borrowing and grants account for another 2.77%. But the largest chunk of revenue — a whopping $190,962,433, or more than 52% of the budget — comes in the form of state aid.

The $190 million in revenue from the Commonwealth is very nearly the entire cost of running the New Bedford Schools. The remaining revenue, which New Bedford residents themselves contribute through assessments and property taxes, is $167,247,075 and must be used to pay for everything else.

Of this portion paid by New Bedford taxpayers, 20% goes to the New Bedford Police, 15% to the Fire Department, 14% to state and county assessments, 7% to debt service, and the rest to running a variety of municipal services — highways and streets, inspections, human services, culture and recreation, refuse management, and many others. Naturally, the greatest expenses occur in departments which offer pensions and healthcare to large numbers of employees. My spreadsheet reflects departmental pensions and healthcare in Department budgets.

According to the FY2021 budget the City will employ 3,227 people — 2,162 school employees and an additional 1,065, including 302 police officers, 211 firemen, 88 Water Department employees, 70 City fleet mechanics, 64 Public Infrastructure workers, 42 EMS technicians, 34 Wastewater workers, 25 zoo employees, and 24 library workers. Many of these other services appear under “General Government” in the graph above. The New Bedford labor force numbers roughly 42,308. Of these, 38,482 are employed. This means the City of New Bedford is a major employer, providing work for approximately 8.3%, or one out of twelve people.

What is striking about the budget numbers is that, while two-thirds of all City jobs are in the New Bedford Schools, of the remaining jobs almost a third are police officers.

So read the budget yourself. Crunch the numbers yourself. Create a budget with your own priorities.

And ask yourself — should a hard-luck city that can’t even pay a half of its own expenses be spending 20% of its taxpayer money on police — and reserving 30% of its non-teaching jobs for police?

Wouldn’t New Bedford’s many pressing needs be more appropriately met by employees whose toolkits aren’t limited to a Glock and a Taser?

On December 1st, after an endless and opaque process of reconciling House and Senate versions of police accountability legislation, both houses of the Massachusetts legislature voted to send S.2963 (“An Act Relative to Justice, Equity and Accountability in the Commonwealth”) to the Governor’s desk for signing.

Following national outrage at the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and thanks to unrelenting pressure by police reform advocates, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Joint Judiciary Chair Claire Cronin were unable to bury police reform, as the House often does with reforms or progressive legislation.

Still, the reconciliation process ended up shielding police unions from many of the reforms in the Senate version. Among the legislation’s bitter disappointments: it preserves Qualified Immunity for police officers; fails to reform civil service laws which govern the hiring of police officers; leaves unchanged shoot-to-kill training for police cadets; doesn’t touch structural racism anywhere — including police departments; and fails to create alternatives to police handling of medical and psychiatric emergencies.

On the plus side, S.2963 adopts language regulating the use of face recognition, establishes a POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) Commission with subpoena power to certify and investigate law enforcement officers — though not corrections officers. The bill also spells out the types of evidence necessary to suspend or revoke officer certification.

Under the POST Commission established by this legislation there are to be two divisions: one for police training and certification; another for police standards. This second division maintains a database of complaints of misconduct for each officer, and investigations carried out are subject to public records law (with some limitations).

The bill before the Governor limits the use of chokeholds, attack dogs, tear gas, and specifies de-escalation policies. It is the POST Commission’s responsibility to enforce these use of force standards. The bill also ends no-knock warrants — unless police can demonstrate they are life-saving.

School Resource Officers (SROs) will now be assigned by request of the school Superintendent, not the Chief of Police. And both school personnel and SROs are prohibited from sharing certain types of student information with law enforcement. The bill also expands expungement of juvenile records.

S.2963 defines police violence as a public health issue and requires the Department of Public Health to collect and report information on injuries or deaths at the hands of law enforcement. Besides the commission to study Qualified Immunity, the bill also establishes commissions to study: body cams; facial recognition; emergency hospitalization; civil service law; police cadet training; structural racism in correctional facilities and in the parole and probation systems; rewriting the model Memorandum of Understanding for SRO programs; and examining alternative emergency services.

While not daring to touch discriminatory hiring practices, the bill tweaks hiring, promotion, and discipline rules, especially where overtime fraud, corruption, and patronage may be involved.

The many study commissions established and the many decisions deferred by S.2963 show that the legislation is only the beginning in achieving real police accountability in the Commonwealth.

The City Councils of Springfield and Boston — where there have been numerous and high-profile cases of police abuse — have both applauded the bill’s measures. Boston City Council President Kim Janey and Springfield City Council President Justin Hurst penned a letter to the Governor on December 2nd urging him to sign the legislation without delay and without amendment.

In New Bedford, where Councilors were quick to condemn the Senate version of the bill for its Qualified Immunity provision, only a few members of the Council were prepared to offer opinions on any of the other provisions. Most I talked to claimed ignorance of its provisions.

Joseph P. Lopes, Ward 6 Councilor and Council President, said his main concern with the bill was Qualified Immunity and its impact on the morale of police and EMS workers. Lopes supports the School Resource Officer program and is concerned that, whether it’s the Chief or the Superintendent who requests SROs, that they have the discretion to move them around between schools. Lopes claims students want police officers in their hallways and he took a swipe at the Legislature for not inviting student testimony on SROs. Lopes was not alarmed by the establishment of the POST program, but could not comment on other provisions because he said he’d need more time to read through the entire bill.

Brian Gomes, the chair of Mayor Mitchell’s Use of Force Commission, and an author of a letter to the Legislature blasting Qualified Immunity, told me emphatically that he would never support the new bill. In consultation with the Police Union president, Gomes told me, he has determined that the bill will do a disservice to the public. When asked what provisions of the bill he objected to — now that Qualified Immunity is no longer a concern — Gomes told me that’s all he was prepared to say.

Councilor Debora Coelho, who earlier this year enrolled herself in the New Bedford Citizen’s Police Academy, is not only a fan of the police but an enthusiastic supporter of School Resource Officers. Asked about the change in discretion over SROs, Coelho said it’s not necessarily a bad thing to give a Superintendent discretion over their assignment. Similarly, she supports Qualified Immunity but does not oppose establishing a commission to look further into the issue.

Coelho disagrees with the bill’s ban on facial recognition. She has been a long-time supporter of CCTV and sees no reason that facial recognition should not be added to the law enforcement toolbox. Coelho does not oppose the new POST commission; in fact she believes it will ultimately give the public more confidence in officers and, therefore, actually be a good thing for police. Coelho doubts whether the Council will issue a statement on the entire police reform package anytime soon.

Scott Hovsepian, president of the 4,000-member Massachusetts Coalition of Police, is not happy that he didn’t get everything he wanted at the State House. Even after the Legislature yielded to police unions on Qualified Immunity and abandoned reforms of hiring and training of police, any measure of accountability was too much for Hovsepian: “The final compromise legislation is a final attack on police officers by lawmakers on Beacon Hill. It is 129 pages crowded with punitive measures, layers and layers of new bureaucracy and the abridgment of basic due process rights of police. It was delivered with almost zero notice and zero time for our leadership, our legal team and our members to process it before debate and votes were scheduled.”

But police reformers have found enough good in the legislation to get behind it.

Sonia Chang-Diaz is a member of the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, a fierce proponent of police accountability, and one of the sponsors of S.2963. On December 2nd Chang-Diaz sent out an email to supporters requesting that they contact the Governor about swiftly signing the bill.

Carol Rose, Executive Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, also welcomed the legislation. “This bill represents meaningful progress for Massachusetts, even as more work remains to be done. The ACLU will keep fighting for reforms to protect Massachusetts communities from over-policing and police violence–and end the impunity with which some officers operate. It’s time for systemic change and an end to policing as usual.”

Marlene Pollock, an organizer for the Coalition for Social Justice and a member of Bristol County for Correctional Justice, characterized the bill as “an important piece of legislation [that] bans racial profiling and chokeholds, creates a Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission which establishes the possibility of civilian oversight of police, among other things. This bill has enough in it that police unions are fighting like mad to tank it. The fact that Qualified Immunity was not tackled shows how much still needs to be done both at the legislative and grass roots level to elevate the many voices of victims of police misconduct.” Pollock urged immediate and un-amended passage of S.2963.

NAACP New Bedford Branch President, Dr. LaSella L. Hall, expressed disappointment with a Democratic legislative supermajority tasked with addressing police accountability in the midst of a national reckoning. “In the context of all the blood spilled in 2020, if this legislation is the best we can do, then we have a hell of a lot further to go. This bill is about 25 years too late. Police accountability should not be a political football. It’s about the lives of innocent people.”

Hall faulted the timidity of the Legislature in failing to end Qualified Immunity, the “get out of jail” doctrine that provides impunity for even bad cops. He cited the bill’s limited input from community groups, the disproportionate influence of police voices, weak community representation on civilian boards, ineffectual tweaks to hiring and training, and the lack of value placed on multilingual officers.

Despite the bill’s weaknesses, Hall describes S.2963 as “a necessary step in a long campaign for police accountability. The NAACP will use the measures afforded in the bill as a tool to advance the policies we believe in: community control or abolition of SROs, improvements to a long-overdue POST system, and promoting a task force that will promote ending racial bias.”

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, formerly a Boston City Council member, said that the bill “fell short” of needs and expectations by refusing to rein in Qualified Immunity: “For far too long, the doctrine of qualified immunity has protected the very people charged with enforcing the law from any consequence for breaking it, allowing police officers to use their badge as a shield from accountability. The legislation does not go far enough to address this systemic problem. By merely creating a commission to study the impact of qualified immunity in the Commonwealth, and limiting immunity only for decertified officers, rather than ending the harmful doctrine outright, Massachusetts has missed an opportunity to lead by ensuring that those responsible for upholding the law are subject to it too.”

Pressley continued, “In any other occupation in America, there are standards of conduct and consequences for violating them — doctors can be sued for malpractice, lawyers can be sued for negligence. Policing should be no exception.”

Despite the legislation’s shortcomings, Police Reform Now (MA), a grassroots coalition of civil rights, religious, labor, and other organizations that advocate for legislative solutions to over-policed communities and for greater transparency in policing, is also urging the Governor to sign the bill without changes. But the coalition stops short of calling S.2963 “real” police reform because it doesn’t end Qualified Immunity, fails to include racial justice leaders in the POST Commission, and does not change how police are hired and trained.

Though America’s moment of national reckoning seems to have appeared quickly, it was grassroots organizing and years of advocacy that paved the way for these legislative reforms.

New Bedford police reform activist Erik Andrade, a member of Police Reform Now (MA) and BREATHE!, notes that “this bill affirms the power of the people and the importance of grassroots solidarity across the state. This step forward is promising and yet this is not a promised land. So we must continue to organize until real police accountability and restorative justice is achieved for families like Malcolm Gracia’s and for communities like New Bedford.”

Demands for police accountability aren’t going away in SouthCoast, Massachusetts, no matter what some officials think.

In the absence of progress on police accountability in a legislature with a Democratic supermajority, residents have been attempting to address police abuse at the local level. But at every step of the way they have been thwarted and disrespected by politicians who don’t even bother to conceal their contempt for police accountability or those demanding it.

New Bedford City Councilor Brian Gomes has convened another of his “non-listening” session to consider only the PD’s Use of Force policies. Bigger issues — qualified immunity, SROs, community review boards with subpoena power — aren’t up for discussion. And in any case, neither the Mayor nor the Council care to listen: “The public hearing is not intended to be a forum to engage in debate nor address issues not directly relevant to the policies.”

2020 New Bedford Commission on NBPD Use of Force Policies Public Hearings on Zoom Wednesday, December 2nd, 6:00-7:30pm

https://www.newbedfordpd.com/new-bedford-commission-on-nbpd-use-of-force-policies

United Interfaith Action, which is one of a number of community groups that has been attempting (unsuccessfully) to gain the ear of Fall River and New Bedford mayors, has scheduled two events in both cities:

UIA Police Reform Community Action Fall River: Community Action Meeting on Zoom Monday, November 30th, 6:30-8:00pm

https://mcan.salsalabs.org/uiacamnov30/index.html

UIA Police Reform Community Action New Bedford: Community Action Meeting on Zoom Thursday, December 3rd, 6:30-8:00pm

https://mcan.salsalabs.org/uiacamdec3/index.html

Legislators — take note.

Sometime after midnight on March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor was sleeping when plainclothes Louisville narcotics officers, acting on faulty information, executed a “no-knock warrant” — a violation of almost everything in the Fourth Amendment — breaking down her front door with a battering ram and killing her in the hallway of her own home.

According to Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, police were looking for a drug stash owned by Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who did not live with her and had already been arrested. During the botched raid, Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, assumed it was a home invasion and fired what he said was a warning shot. Police then unleashed a fusillade of 35 rounds on both occupants of the apartment. Taylor was hit six times and several shots were fired into adjacent apartments, endangering three people. As Breonna Taylor bled out, police stood around watching her die, offering her no aid.

Breonna’s killing has brought some changes to Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) procedures and also resulted in a $12 million wrongful death settlement with the City of Louisville.

But holding police to account was a bridge too far.

A Kentucky grand jury presented Judge Annie O’Connell with its recommendation that none of the three officers who shot Taylor ought to face charges. Although former Det. Brett Hankison was indicted on three charges of wanton endangerment — for shooting up the apartments next door — Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove will not face any charges for killing Taylor.

Police have been less than honest. Although at least one officer, Tony James, was photographed wearing a body camera, and another officer was filmed wearing a bodycam mount on his vest, LMPD at first insisted there was no bodycam footage. Then Todd McMurtry, Sgt. Mattingly’s attorney, miraculously produced bodycam footage of the raid that showed that his client, who was shot in the leg, could not possibly have shot Taylor.

Likewise, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s whitewash makes a mockery of fact and law. Cameron claims that Walker was the only one at the scene who could have shot Mattingly because all the officers were carrying .40 caliber handguns. But Det. Brett Hankison — the one who shot up the neighboring apartments — had a 9 mm weapon. Worse, Cameron turns justice on its head by declaring that the police had a right to defend themselves from Walker — even after breaking in, unannounced, in error, and plainclothed. Whatever Cameron’s tortured rationale, officers were not defending themselves from a little 26-year-old EMT when they fired almost two dozen rounds at her.

Following the release of Cameron’s findings, on September 21st the same police department that killed Breonna Taylor declared a state of emergency, announcing that in anticipation of protests they would be shutting down traffic, limiting parking, and setting up barricades — to protect property.

Breonna Taylor’s killing has left Louisville in turmoil. Hearts are broken and in the absence of justice many windows are going to have to be broken to vent outrage at a system that values property more than human life, and black lives least of all.

Breonna Taylor. Say her name. Honor her name.

If we truly believe in the rule of law in this country, Breonna Taylor’s killers must be held to account.

There’s quite a story behind New Bedford’s City Council offering up a “Blue Lives” resolution at precisely the time the City needs reassurance that Black Lives matter.

On May 25, 2020 George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer triggered protests all over the country. In New Bedford, where the memory of police murders of Malcolm Gracia and Eric Aguiar were fresh, Mayor Jon Mitchell, a former federal prosecutor, appointed a Use of Force Commission on June 15, 2020 and put it in the hands of City Councilor Brian Gomes, a law and order zealot who supported chain gangs in the late 90’s. Both Mitchell’s Commission, and his choice of Gomes to lead it, drew howls of protest from citizen groups who foresaw that neither Michell nor Gomes were likely to act in good faith.

On July 7, 2020 NAACP New Bedford President LaSella Hall gave New Bedford and county officials a list of demands for protecting communities of color, including establishing a Community Review Board, prohibiting choke holds, training and officer credentialing, reducing blanket surveillance, revisiting the police budget, reopening the Malcolm Gracia case, and stopping High Energy Patrols — aggressive stop an frisk.

BREATHE! Timeline here

But as far as Mitchell and the Council were concerned, they had created a “study” — and that would be the end of it. Behind the scenes the Council was moving — not to reform the police — but to shield it from public accountability.

On August 20, 2020 New Bedford City Council President Joe Lopes requested that

“a member of the Mitchell Administration, the Police Chief, the Fire Chief, the EMS Director, the New Bedford Police Union and the New Bedford Fire Union meet with the members of the Committee on Public Safety and Neighborhoods to discuss the implementation and protection of Qualified Immunity language for the members of the Police Department, the Fire Department, and the Emergency Medical Service.”

The motion carried and was referred to the Council’s Committee on Public Safety and Neighborhoods. On October 14, 2020 the committee met to discuss LED street lights, crosswalks, and vandalization at pocket parks. The Council had also invited New Bedford Police Chief Joseph Cordeiro to consider

“the implementation of using drones to monitor high crime neighborhoods for surveillance across the City, adding another tool in fighting crime; and further requesting, that the drones be used for surveillance and security purposes when the City is holding major events, along with monitoring the City as a whole.”

At this meeting the Council revisited a 2018 request to Mayor Jon Mitchell and then- School Superintendent Pia Durkin to install

“security in all schools throughout the City, which includes panic buttons, cameras, and evacuation plan; and further, consider hiring armed guards possibly using former retirees from the Police Department and/or Veterans; furthermore, that the School Department install a hotline within the school system for students to report unusual activity, threats or even comments about guns or anything that threaten [sic] the wellbeing and safety of all faculty and students, titlle it ‘YOU HEAR IT, YOU SEE IT, YOU REPORT IT, TOGETHER WE MAKE OUR SCHOOLS SAFE.'”

But the highlight of the October 14th committee meeting was to follow through on the August 20 motion on Qualified Immunity. Lopes moved, seconded by Councilor Brad Markey, that the Council write a letter to the State delegation (Rep. Tony Cabral and Sen. Mark Montigny) “voicing the Council’s position against the proposed Qualified Immunity Proposition” in the Police Accountability legislation still languishing in the State House. According to minutes of the October 14th meeting filed by Clerk of Committees Denis Lawrence, Jr.:

“Councillor Lopes asked Police Chief Cordeiro how the current legislation at the State Capital, as it relates to Qualified Immunity, would affect the local police force. He was told if passed, this would cause a problem with the city along with other cities of the same size in Massachusetts. It may end up preventing the police force from protecting the very people they are trying to protect. Neighborhoods that are struggling will continue to struggle if not more so. A police officer will now be hesitant to be proactive if their decisions to act can be used against them. [Cordeiro] believes that the people who should know about the possible problems with Qualified Immunity do not know about it at all. Councillor Lopes expressed his concern for the future quality of police officers this would attract when the department looks to recruit officers; the Chief agreed. The Chief explained that currently the department is operating below their budget and does not have full complement of officers. He predicts an exodus of officers from cities to better communities. The Chief suggested that the Council and other entities flood the State Legislature with calls against the Qualified Immunity proposal. Councillor Lopes expressed his concern of when an Officer uses Narcan to revive a person from an overdose that they can be held liable. The Chief agreed that this could be an issue if passed.”

On September 21, 2020 the 60-Day Use of Force Commission report was released. There were no surprises. The mayor’s mission had been accomplished in those 60 days — to blunt public anger at the police. On September 24, 2020, reading that political winds were in their favor, Mitchell and Cordeiro backed out of a community discussion on police accountability sponsored by United Interfaith Action.

The Qualified Immunity motion had been the product of closed discussions involving the Mayor’s office, the Police Department, Police, Fire, and EMS unions, Lopes, Gomes, Markey and others on the Council. No troublesome citizens were invited. Gomes rushed to announce the motion in an October 22, 2020 statement to the same Councillors who had voted for it. The list of recipients who would soon receive copies was far more important.

On October 26, 2020 the actual letter was supposedly sent to Tony Cabral and Mark Montigny. On that same date Gomes scheduled a Zoom-based Use of Force Commission hearing, which he said would record public questions regarding the New Bedford Police Department’s Use of Force Policy, but Gomes ruled out answering any questions related to police accountability in general.

On November 13, 2020 WBSM’s Chris McCarthy wrote about the Council’s letter, incorrectly characterizing it as “unanimous” when at least one Councillor was not present, and the New Bedford Police Union celebrated McCarthy’s piece on Facebook.

As of November 14, 2020 at least one of the the intended recipients, Rep. Tony Cabral, still had not seen the letter to him that WBSM, the Police Union, and the Standard Times had all received. And Sen. Mark Montigny, when asked for comment by the Standard Times, had none.

These back-room machinations are a slap in the face to New Bedford residents, community groups, and the religious community that had all attempted to engage in good faith with Mitchell and the City Council on matters of police accountability.

The letter Lopes and the Council sent to SouthCoast legislators demonstrated once again that, rather than reflecting the opinions of New Bedford’s citizens, the Mayor and Council have little regard for them. When the Mayor, the PD, police and fire unions, and much of the City Council (half of whom are not accountable to any specific ward) begin doing backroom political favors for the police — locking the public out of the discussion in the process — voters ought to take notice.

There is no reason that police, who claim to need Qualified Immunity because they make split-second, life-and-death decisions, need it any more than surgeons or air traffic controllers. Accountability to the public by both police and public officials is at stake here.

Just as Qualified Immunity confers special protections on the police that no other citizen enjoys, the Mayor and Council doubled down on the injustice by permitting the “special” police voice to be the only one to represent the city on Qualified Immunity.

Voters in King County, Washington just amended their county charter. Charter for Justice had endorsed the 7 amendments and all passed. Of note were three amendments to the charter that pertaine to sheriffs and a fourth that applies to all law enforcement officers in the County.

According to the Seattle Times, the Charter Review Commission overwhelmingly recommended returning the sheriff to an appointed position. An appointed sheriff can now be replaced between elections in case of wrongdong or incompetence, and it removes politics from administration of the department. In addition, an appointed position enables a national search for the best law enforcement and jail administration candidates.

Amendment 1 requires an inquest any time a prisoner dies in custody. And Amendment 6 gives the county discretion to redefine a sheriff’s duties — rather than giving carte blanche to a sheriff.

Finally, Amendment 4 gives teeth (and subpoena power) to King County’s civilian Office of Law Enforcement Oversight (OLEO).

Remarks at the Pleasant Street Police station on October 24th, 2020 at the BREATHE for Malcolm march.

My name is David Ehrens. I am a member of the NAACP New Bedford Branch and Bristol County for Correctional Justice.

Many of us have viewed Attorney Brisson’s evidence in Malcolm Gracia’s murder. It deserves a second look — not by the New Bedford Police, which rushed to exonerate its own officers. And not by the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office, which produced a disgraceful whitewash eight years ago. They weren’t up to the job then — and they certainly aren’t now.

We have called for an investigation by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division and by the U.S. Department of Justice. But ultimately only community police review commissions with the power to subpoena and fire officers can really address police abuse. Law enforcement institutions and the legislators they lobby show little interest in holding police accountable to the public. This is what I’m talking about:

• A Police Department that has called the public “thugs” and cannot be trusted to investigate itself.

• A police department that over 2 years paid more than a million and a half dollars in payouts for wrongful deaths.

• A DA who defends his predecessor’s whitewash and is personally responsible for some of the highest pre-trial detention and pre-trial death rates in the state

• A sheriff who serves as a spokesman for a white supremacist group, abuses ICE detainees, and has the highest jail suicide rate in the state.

• An Attorney General who refused to use her Civil Rights Division to investigate those jail suicides and whose predecessor wouldn’t look at the Gracia case.

• Representatives on Beacon Hill who — right now — are trying to water down a police accountability bill

• Police unions whose contract provisions bar the public from participating in police misconduct commissions.

• A mayor who co-opts community voices while refusing to listen to them.

• And in this same community we have a school superintendent who began a “community discussion” about police in schools with a police propaganda video.

What these men and women and institutions have in common is that they are all part of a dual system of justice — one in which the law comes down like a ton of bricks on the powerless, while police and the privileged get a pass when they break the same laws.

We’re supposed to be a nation governed by the rule of law. But this is empty rhetoric when every day laws are applied so arbitrarily — or depending on the color of your skin.

This is what has brought us to this march today — to demand equal justice for Malcolm — and for every other Malcolm.

Police reform is not training the public to accept police control. This is how you train a dog. Police reform isn’t singing kumbayah or having coffee with the police. Police reform is changing how communities are policed, and that will NEVER be achieved by ride-alongs, listening sessions, gimmicks or placebos.

Police reform will only come about when WE have the power to hire, fire, train, and discipline police — and when WE get the final say in how our own communities are served.

The Gracia family’s lawyer, Don Brisson, finished a series of presentations last week on Malcolm’s murder. Brisson spent considerable time discussing inconsistencies in detectives’ testimony and forensic evidence collected at the crime scene.

But one of the more shocking pieces of evidence Brisson released were videos that had been withheld from the public until December 2018. There are three videos of the evening of May 17th, 2012. One is high resolution surveillance footage from the Temple Landing basketball court. It is what Detective Safioleas would have been watching from the Rockdale Ave. police headquarters. The other two are residential CCVT camera footage from Middle and Ash streets displayed side-by-side.

What is striking is the sheer speed with which New Bedford Police murdered Malcolm Gracia.

At 8:36 Malcom is seen leaving the Temple Landing basketball court. He walks down Middle and turns left on Cedar Street. Eleven seconds later New Bedford police speed around the same corner. And 27 seconds after that, a camera records neighbors and children out skateboarding scattering as Malcolm is apparently shot out of sight of the cameras.

The 27 seconds it took police to kill Malcolm Gracia is never questioned as investigators simply accept detectives’ accounts of a much more professional, by-the-book, and leisurely encounter.

If you watch the videos, it’s clear that police accounts could not have been truthful.

Video #1: the elaborate handshake

This is the surveillance footage from the Temple Landing basketball court, which shows Malcolm Gracia interacting with other observers at pick-me-up basketball games.

The Gang Unit’s surveillance camera, which recorded the correct date, was about 24 minutes, 51 seconds fast. For reference it was best to use seconds into the video instead of erroneous time stamps on it.

At about 413 seconds into the video (estimated to be 8:28:55 PM) the surveillance camera first picks up Malcolm Gracia and Adam Carreira. At about 520 seconds we see Gracia wearing black pants and a black hoodie, smiling and shaking hands with a spectator seated in the bleachers of the basketball court farthest from Cedar Street. This is the handshake that sets a police murder in motion. Sgt. Brian Safioleas, who has been watching Adam Carreira’s cigarette, switches to Gracia for a minute, and zooms in on Carreira’s cigarette again as he passes it to Gracia. Viewing the video now it appears Safioleas’s interest was what the boys were smoking. At about 585 seconds Safioleas zooms out to the entire bleacher and zooms back in to put Gracia entirely in the frame of the camera. Gracia is a bit more reserved than Carreira. But he is smiling, talking to a spectator in a striped shirt, and having a smoke. At about 880 seconds spectators start getting up out of the bleachers and are getting ready leave. By my calculations the actual time is around 8:28 PM. By 900 seconds into the video the spectators are leaving and all are shaking hands as they leave. At about 936 seconds Gracia says something to Carreira and both exit the camera frame. It is only a few footsteps to the Middle Street entrance and a residential CCVT camera records them leaving. The estimated time is roughly 8:36:19 PM.

It is interesting that the camera stops following Gracia and Carreira at this point and remains directed at the remaining spectators and ball players until everyone has left the frame. Of course, Safioleas could now be scrambling to dispatch Fonseca, Sylvia, Barnes and Brown and may have simply left the camera unattended. But wasn’t Safioleas concerned about the direction they were headed? The camera keeps recording a static image of the bleachers until 1310 seconds, when it then pans north across both basketball courts to show at least four police cruisers and an ambulance. The video runs another 500 seconds, zooming into the corner of Cedar and Middle where officers are stringing crime scene tape and residents — later described as a “mob” by the EMS technician who first treats Barnes — stand around watching the aftermath of another police shooting.

Video #2: police chase Gracia around the corner

The second video displays synchronized footage from two different Housing Authority cameras. One shows officers arriving on the scene. Another shows Malcolm leaving the courts and turning the corner of Middle and Cedar. Seconds later police do the same.

The camera which provided the footage in the left frame is most likely housed in a street lamp in front of 347 Middle Street and looks southeast down Middle Street toward Cedar Street and toward the entrance of the basketball courts. The camera which provided footage in the right frame is likely in a walkway behind 263 Ash Street. It looks northeast, down Ash Street, through the climbing structures and swing sets, past the basketball courts to the corner of Middle and Cedar. Unfortunately, both video quality and lighting are poor and, owing to the distance, distorted like telephoto photos. Both frames in the one video are time-stamped but do not record seconds.

At 8:36 PM — 27 seconds into the composite video — you can see Malcolm Gracia leaving the courts with Adam Carreira. His pointed hoodie is clearly visible as he makes his way down Middle Street and at 63 seconds the two turn the corner to Cedar. At this precise moment you can see Sylvia and Fonseca’s cruiser in camera two’s frame on the right. Fonseca, the driver, has driven past Middle Street in error, and is seen backing up onto Elm Street near the white rock at the intersection. The children’s playground on Ash Street is clearly visible in front of him. At 8:37 PM — 68 seconds into the video — Fonseca turns left and races back down Middle Street.

At 8:37 PM on camera one — at 71 seconds — you see Fonseca and Sylvia speeding down Middle Street. An unidentified silver vehicle just beats them to the intersection and precedes them as they turn onto Cedar at 74 seconds into the video. At 103 seconds another vehicle comes up Cedar. At 110 seconds — 27 seconds after the police turn onto Cedar — camera one picks up residents scattering and running. Fonseca and Sylvia have probably just fired the last of six shots caught by Shotspotter. This would make the time 8:37:42 PM. At 194 seconds into the video residents start running toward the corner of Middle and Cedar to see what’s happening. Police cars begin arriving at 225 seconds.

Timeline

** estimated from Shotspotter records and video of residents reacting to sounds of shooting

Last year I began working on a profile of Bristol County Thomas M. Hodgson’s associations with far right and white supremacist organizations for The Public Eye magazine. It took a long time to research and write, and even longer to edit, but after Covid-related delays it is finally out and you can read it online here or download the issue’s PDF here.

Allow me to plug buying a subscription to PRA’s print magazine, even in the digital age. Your support will help Political Research Associates keep investigating and reporting on America’s extreme Right.

PRA is running a Fall Webinar series that so far has tackled sheriffs, militias, and austerity. They have all been interesting and the moderator does a great job of posing questions and keeping everyone on schedule. Tomorrow’s webinar is Mobilizing Misogyny in the Service of Authoritarianism.

Since Malcom Gracia’s killing in 2012 there is now a new New Bedford police chief, a new Bristol County District Attorney, and a new Massachusetts Attorney General. Almost everyone who could have investigated or pursued Malcolm Gracia’s wrongful death has been replaced with interchangeable functionaries equally disinterested in righting the wrong done to him– except for Mayor Jon Mitchell, a former Federal prosecutor who was mayor at the time and should have shown more interest in justice for all of his citizens.

Instead, Mitchell convened a group of citizens to work on a Department of Justice “Action Plan” to address hate crimes. No real change ever came of it, but it successfully cooled off an angry city.

Fast forward to 2020. We now find ourselves in an unprecedented moment of change. Following the murder of George Floyd, with a nation focused on police violence and impunity, the Gracia case is once again in the news. Mitchell’s 2012 tactics worked so well for him that he convened a Use of Force commission. From what we’ve seen so far, we can expect little to come of this exercise in blunting public anger, as well.

With compelling evidence of mishandled forensics, overly friendly interrogation of the police officers who murdered Gracia, an assistant DA who couldn’t be bothered to gather critical evidence, mishandled forensics, the DA’s final report riddled with factual errors and implausible assumptions – and now a gag order on medical records of the police officer who claimed to be stabbed – the Gracia case screams out for a second look. But Mayor Mitchell won’t look at the information, won’t talk to the family’s lawyer, won’t be questioned by the public, and won’t lift the gag order in question.

Despite the City’s half-million dollar settlement with the Gracia family, citizens are still calling for the prosecution of officers Trevor Sylvia and Paul Fonseca, and discipline for filing false police reports by officers Tyson Barnes, David Brown, Paul Fonseca, Brian Safioleas, and Trevor Sylvia. The Gracia family’s lawyer, Don Brisson, just finished a five-part series on how these officers managed to elude prosecution for their crimes – and his evidence, some of it newly released, casts a disturbing light on the New Bedford Police, the District Attorney’s office, and even the Mayor himself in the wake of Malcolm Gracia’s shooting.

We think there’s enough substance in Brisson’s presentations to at least take another look. We join with others in our community calling for re-opening the case. Despite the many years that no one has been held accountable for the 15-year-old’s death, we remind everyone that there is no statute of limitation on murder.

Throughout the United States, justice is routinely denied to Black and Brown victims of police killings. Despite taxpayer-funded payouts to their families for unlawful death, both Malcolm Gracia’s and Breonna Taylor’s lives were cheap enough that no one felt the need to hold their killers to account. And that has got to change.

The NAACP New Bedford Branch demands that the Gracia murder case be reopened and that charges be filed against officers for lying to investigators. Local and state police and the Bristol County DA’s office couldn’t manage a credible investigation in 2012, and we doubt they can in 2020. We call for new investigations by the Massachusetts Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice. For those who committed murder, prison not pensions must be the consequence. For those who falsified reports, lied to investigators or colluded with others to coordinate their tales, they must feel the sting of justice. Any of these officers still on the job should be fired. The pensions of officers and others who knowingly derailed a murder investigation must be returned to taxpayers who are always expected to fund civil settlements.

If America is truly a nation of laws, then laws have to mean something. And they must apply equally to all. The Gracia case is far from over.

Let’s look at the science for a change

Police in schools are not a new phenomenon. Apparently the first school police were used in the Fifties in Flint, Michigan. In the 1990’s the Clinton administration created the COPS program which expanded and militarized the police, deepened mass incarceration, and put police in schools to wreak more damage there, too.

SRO’s disproportionately harm poor students and students of color – all in the name of protecting students from mass shootings. But the irony is that school shootings are largely a suburban and rural phenomenon, virtually all school shooters are white, and 92% are male.

Suburban kids do the rampaging but city kids get the cops. Something’s wrong with this picture.

The following links are to mainly research studies and organizations, and they overwhelmingly point to how little empirical data actually exists to support the contention that SROs deter school shootings. Links to commonly-cited NRA and DOJ/COPS materials are provided so you can see for yourself how thin their claims are.

On the other hand, there is a mountain of evidence showing that SROs harm poor children and children of color.

1. A Comparison of Averted and Completed School Attacks from the Police Foundation Averted School Violence Database (2019) This data comes from a police foundation but it nevertheless shows that school rampages are largely a white, suburban phenomenon. In addition, 92% of all attackers are male.

2. A Preliminary Report on the Police Foundation’s Averted School Violence Database (2019) Jeffrey A. Daniels’s report is frequently cited by pro-SRO sources

3. A Retrospective Study on Rampage School Shootings: Considerations for School-Based Threat Assessment Teams (2017) The Classroom Avenger is a white rural or suburban male. Great tables.

4. Armored school doors, bulletproof whiteboards and secret snipers (2018) Although school security has grown into a $2.7 billion market — an estimate that does not account for the billions more spent on armed campus police officers — little research has been done on which safety measures do and do not protect students from gun violence.

5. Assigning Police Officers to Schools (2013) Not a lot of science in here, but references here are often used to bolster the NRA and police case for SRO’s

6. Averted School Violence Statistics (2017) 95% of school violence is suburban and rural. There are numerous cases of attackers being stopped by teachers, guidance counselors, and others; and of attacks that an SRO would not have seen coming: Sandy Hook, for example, where the attacker was not a student.

7. Bullies in Blue: The Problem with School Policing (2016) Over the past 50 years, our schools have become sites of increased criminalization of young people–a disturbing fact that is even truer for poor Black and Latino communities. Today, police officers assigned to patrol schools can legally use physical force on students, arrest and handcuff them, and bring the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear on kids who are simply misbehaving. The primary role of police in schools is to enforce criminal laws, and virtually every violation of a school rule can be considered a criminal act if viewed through this police-first lens. Though these police are often referred to as “school resource officers,” their legal power and attending actions reveal that this designation only serves to mask that their presence has transformed schools into another site of concentrated policing. Such policing marks the start of the school-to-prison pipeline–the entry point to the criminal justice system for too many kids–and fuels mass incarceration.

8. Circumventing the Law: Students’ Rights in Schools With Police (2010) Over the past several decades, public schools in the United States have been increasingly transformed into high security environments, complete with surveillance technologies, security forces, and harsh punishments. The school resource officer (SRO) program, which assigns uniformed police officers to work in public schools, is one significant component of this new brand of school security. Although the intentions of the SRO program are clear–to help administrators maintain order in schools, deter students from committing criminal acts, and arrest students who do break the law–the potential unintended consequences of this program are largely unknown. This study employs ethnographic methodology in two public high schools with SROs to examine how students’ rights, including Fourth Amendment rights, Fifth Amendment rights, and privacy rights, are negotiated in public schools with full-time police presence. The results of this study suggest that schools administrators and SROs partner in ways that compromise and reduce the legal rights of students.

9. Conflicting Cultures With a Common Goal: Collaborating With School Resource Officers (2014) The National Association of School Psychologists is not wild about armed guards in the classroom but has tried to steer a middle course by advocating for better cooperation between those who practice the social sciences and cops. Good luck to that.

10. Cops and Cameras: Public School Security as a Policy Response to Columbine (2009) To implement effective policy, officials need to know what options work. A review of the existing literature emphasizes the need for evaluative studies of school security measures to determine whether these measures are truly effective. The few studies that have been conducted rely on perceptions as to whether security measures are effective. Such information provides initial insights but ultimately is not helpful. Programs such as Scared Straight and D.A.R.E. sounded incredibly promising and were proven to be ineffective (or even harmful) through evaluative studies (Gottfredson, 1997; Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, & Finckenauer, 2000). The dearth of evaluative work is surprising given the growing movement in criminal justice toward evidence-based policies. The lack of evaluations is also in stark contrast to other, more vetted school policies and programs implemented since Columbine, such as antibullying and antidelinquency programs.

11. Discipline and Participation: The Long-Term Effects of Suspension and School Security on the Political and Civic Engagement of Youth (2014) Since the early 1990s, schools across the United States have tightened their security practices and increased the punishments they give to students (see Cornell, 2006; Dinkes, Kemp, & Baum, 2009; Kupchik & Monahan, 2006). It is now common to find armed police officers, drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance cameras, and zero-tolerance policies in all types of schools and all areas of the United States. Existing research documents several problems with these new school discipline and security practices, including the increasing marginalization of poor students and youth of color (e.g., Noguera, 2003; Skiba et al., 2000), unnecessary denial of future educational opportunities due to suspension and expulsion (e.g., American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008; Fabelo et al., 2011), and increases in the numbers of students who are formally prosecuted in the juvenile and criminal justice systems (known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”; for example, Kim, Losen, & Hewitt, 2010; Na & Gottfredson, 2013; Wald & Losen, 2003). This body of research consistently finds large discrepancies in punishment rates between White youth and youth of color, where African American and Hispanic American students are far more likely than Whites to be punished, even when controlling for self-reported rates of misbehavior (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008).

12. Do Police Officers in Schools Really Make Them Safer? (2018) While there are conflicting studies about the effectiveness of police in schools, Schindler says research shows they bring plenty of unintended consequences for students. He says that includes higher rate of suspensions, expulsions and arrests that funnel kids into the criminal justice system. That’s especially true, he says, in schools attended predominantly by students of color.

13. Final Report of the Federal Commission on School Safety (2018) A report on School Safety through the lens of the COPS program under the Trump administration.

14. Focusing on School Safety After Parkland (2018) The Heritage Foundation, as to be expected, does not believe in gun control but in arming teachers and installing a massive security presence in schools.

15. Mass Shootings in America: Moving Beyond Newtown (2013) The white students who perpetrated the massacre at Columbine High school apparently chose Hitler’s birthday for their attack. This article looks at a number of myths surrounding mass shootings and also asks the provocative question: If armed guards and armed teachers are indeed worthy strategies for protecting children, then what should schools do to protect the students before and after school? Expanding this approach would dictate providing weapons to coaches, athletic directors, and even bus drivers. How slippery do we want the slippery slope to be?

16. Now is the Time: the President’s plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence (2013) The Obama administration’s plan to fund 1,000 SRO’s.

17. On the school beat: police officers based in English schools (2017) The results of this British study clearly show that police officers are more likely to be based in schools with higher levels of pupils eligible for free school meals, that is, with a more disadvantaged population of pupils. Almost allschools where 50 or more percent of pupils are eligible for free school meals have an onsite police officer deployed there. The fact that the percentage of schools with a police officer increases as the percentage of pupils eligible for FSM increases indicates that this is not an accidental occurrence. None of the, albeit small, number of schools that have no pupils eligible for free school meals have an onsite officer. It has long been argued that the origins of mass compulsory schooling in Britain lay in attempts at social control, particularly of the children of the urban poor (Cunningham 2012; Rose 2000; Walkerdine 1992). Schools are more than enclosures for a certain sector of the population, as Andrew Hope writes: Schools are institutions of social control that seek to dictate, monitor and enforce ‘appropriate’ behavior. Historically, surveillance has played a central role in such processes. (2015a, 2) Schools are increasingly adopting diverse methods of electronic surveillance (Hope 2015a). Given the levels of electronic surveillance in place in many schools, Taylor (2012) claims that school pupils in the UK and the US are becoming the most surveilled subgroup of the whole population.

18. Patrolling Public Schools: The Impact of Funding for School Police on Student Discipline and Long-Term Education Outcomes (2018) The widespread use of police officers in public schools is a relatively recent development. While school police programs have gained popularity as a policy to protect students against rare but tragic school shooting events, in practice, these officers are often actively involved in the enforcement of school discipline. When school police officers, or school resource officers (SROs), are involved in the daily lives of students, they have the capability to alter student behavior, disciplinary consequences, attachment to school, and educational attainment. Though the potential consequences of school police interventions are large, there have been few evaluations of their efficacy. There is a large qualitative and ethnographic literature that documents the growth of harsh school sanctions policies and their disparate impact on low-income minority students (e.g. Nolan, 2011; Kupchik, 2010; Devine, 1996). This work has found that administrators’ and teachers’ roles in school discipline and classroom management are increasingly outsourced to SROs, and that SROs not only utilize their ability to arrest students for criminal offenses, but frequently participate in school discipline matters such as code of conduct violations.

19. Policing Schools: Examining the Impact of Place Management Activities on School Violence (2015) The present study examines whether the presence of school resource officers (SROs) and their level of involvement in place management activities are associated with higher or lower rates of school-based serious violence. This study uses data from the 2010 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) conducted by National Center for Educational Statistics. Propensity score matching is used to create a quasi-experimental design and isolate the influence of SROs and their level of involvement in place management activities on school-based serious violence. The analysis reveals that schools with a school resource officer are associated with higher rates of reported serious violence and those schools with SROs that participate in more place manager duties are also associated with higher rates of reported serious violence. These findings do not support the notion that SROs are acting as effective place managers and through this place management, reducing reported serious violence. Rather, it appears that the presences of a SRO and their execution of place manager duties is associated with an increase in the reporting of serious violence. Policy implications and limitations of the current research are also discussed. In other words, SRO’s don’t prevent violence but merely increase reports of it

20. Preventing School Shootings: The Effectiveness of Safety Measures (2017) The key policy issue, however, is whether SROs reduce school crime. To that point, few studies have examined the role of SROs in reducing crime in the school, with no study assessing the preventative capabilities of an SRO with mass school shootings (James & McCallion, 2013). Research testing the link between SROs and crime or victimization have yielded mixed results. […] With the current state of the research, the true effect of SROs remains inconclusive. Further, as Madfis (2016) explained, it is important to note that two of the deadliest school shootings — Columbine and Virginia Tech — were not deterred by the presence of armed police. In 1999, Columbine High School had both an armed SRO and an unarmed school security guard. During the shooting, one of the killers exchanged multiple rounds of gunfire with the SRO then proceeded to murder students in the library (Erickson, 2001). The morning of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, five officers plus the police chief were present on campus (TriData Division, System Planning Corporation, 2009). The killer at Virginia Tech was familiar with the police, having had a previous encounter with them five months prior to the shooting. All three killers involved in these two cases were well-aware of the armed officers present on their respective campuses, yet in neither instance did that deter them from carrying out their crime.

21. Public Mass Shootings in the United States: Selected Implications for Federal Public Health and Safety Policy (2013) Congressional Research Service’s analysis of COPS under the Obama Administration.

22. Race, Poverty, and Exclusionary School Security: An Empirical Analysis of U.S. Elementary, Middle, and High Schools (2014) As violence and crime within and around U.S. schools has drawn increased attention to school security, police, surveillance cameras, and other measures have grown commonplace at public schools. Social scientists commonly voice concern that exclusionary security measures are most common in schools attended by poor and non-White students, yet there is little empirical basis for assessing the extent of differential exposure, as we lack research on how exclusionary measures are distributed relative to school and student characteristics. To address this gap in the research, we use nationally representative school-level data from the School Survey on Crime and Safety to consider the security measures employed in elementary, middle, and high schools. Results indicate that while security measures are ubiquitous in U.S. high schools, those considered more exclusionary are concentrated in elementary, middle, and high schools attended by non-White and/or poorer students.

23. Rampage School Shooters: A Typology (2014) School shooters match Trump voters quite nicely: “A few of the common individual features included narcissism, bigotry, alienation, poor anger management, fascination with violence, low self-esteem, and a lack of empathy.”

24. Relationships among school climate, school safety, and student achievement and well-being: a review of the literature (2015) What fosters true safety and well-being in a school.

25. Report of the National School Shield Task Force (2013) This is the NRA’s proposal to arm teachers and promote SRO’s.

26. School resource officers (SROs) and other school safety issues: Results from a state census of law enforcement executives and public school principals. South Carolina Law Enforcement Census 2013 (2013) This is only useful as an example of how policy is often driven by what the Police want, rather than by using empirical data.

27. School Resource Officers and Law Enforcement in Schools (2020) The position of the National Assoc of Secondary School Principals on SRO’s is: love ’em.

28. School Resource Officers: Law Enforcement Officers in Schools (2013) In 2013 the Congressional Research Service was tasked with determining if additional SRO’s were warranted. It answered the question by saying that school students are quite safe, but “middle schools, city schools, and schools with a higher proportion of low-income students have higher rates of reported violent incidents, and schools with a higher proportion of low-income students had higher rates of reported serious violent incidents.” To the question of whether minority and low-income students would find their way quicker into the criminal justice system, the answer was “Research in this area is limited to a small number of studies, but these suggest that children in schools with SROs might be more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses. On the other hand, some studies indicate that SROs can deter students from committing assaults on campus as well as bringing weapons to school. Schools with SROs may also be more likely to report non-serious violent crimes (i.e., physical attack or fights without a weapon and threat of physical attack without a weapon) to the police than schools lacking SROs.”

29. School Safety Technology in America: Current Use and Perceived Effectiveness (2003) Between 1999 and 2001, the COPS program of the U.S. Department of Justice provided $567 million through the Cops in Schools program (CIS) to hire 4,900 SROs. Although this sounds like a large number of SROs, one must consider that there are more than 92,000 public schools in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002); therefore, there are simply not enough SROs to go around. Although there has been no large-scale systematic evaluation of this program, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is a successful collaboration. […] In the spring of 2002, COPS allocated another $121 million to hire more SROs. Though this appears to be a positive step toward improving school safety, it should be noted that each new SRO will cost the federal government approximately $125,000 (COPS, 2002). As such, only about 968 more SROs will be hired — far short of what is needed in our schools. […] It is not good public policy to continue to expand programs and invest resources in programs that are untested. This mistake has been made time and again with unsatisfactory results (e.g., zero-tolerance policies and the widespread installation of complicated school security technology systems). Thus, the efficacy of individual SRO programs in each school district should be measured to ensure that the programs actually enhance school safety and are not just another “cosmetic response” to school violence.

30. School Suspensions and Adverse Experiences in Adulthood (2017) During the 1980s and early 1990s, violence and drugs in American schools emerged as a policy priority. The available statistics and anecdotal evidence suggested that these problems were common in American schools, particularly those in poor, urban settings (Midlarskey & Klain, 2005; Skiba,2013). In response, the federal government passed two key pieces of legislation aimed at addressing the problem. The first piece of legislation, the Gun Free Schools Act of 1995, made education funding contingent on the adoption of zero tolerance policies that mandated the expulsion of students who brought weapons on school property. Following its enactment, zero tolerance policies spread rapidly throughout the country (Stinchcomb, Bazemore, & Riestenberg, 2006). States and school districts often expanded the scope of their zero tolerance policies beyond weapons offenses to include drug offenses, interpersonal violence, and more minor misbehavior. Not surprisingly, the spread of zero tolerance policies led to a significant increase in suspensions and expulsions (Skibaet al., 2014). The second piece of legislation, the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act of 1994, provided support and funding for school resource officer programs through the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. School districts received funding to contract with local police departments to place trained police officers in schools. These officers respond to incidents of student misbehavior, such as breaking up fights in the hallways, and arrest students accused of criminal behavior, thus expanding the potential disciplinary consequences facing students. Importantly, arrests are not mutually exclusive of school disciplinary responses, so students often face suspensions or expulsions in addition to delinquency or criminal charges (Kupchik, 2010). Thus, just as schools increasingly turned to suspensions and expulsions, they also integrated the justice system into their disciplinary responses to student misbehavior. In addition to stationing school resource officers in their hallways, Americans chools also introduced other heightened security measures. These measures included security cameras, random locker and personal property searches, identification cards, metal detectors, and strictly controlled school entrance and exit procedures (Hirschfield, 2008). It is reasonable to assume that these measures contributed to the expanded use of exclusionary school discipline punishments, as they made it more likely for students to be caught violating school rules, mandated strong disciplinary responses to relatively innocuous behavior (such as talking back or acting disorderly), and provided additional strict rules for students to violate (such as requiring students to always carry their identification cards) (Lyons & Drew, 2006). Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and in-school arrests grew as the punitive school discipline trend became entrenched (see, e.g. Losen, 2011; New York Civil Liberties Union, 2013; Skiba et al., 2014). More than three million students are suspended each year in the United States (see Losen, Hodson, Keith, Morrison, & Belway, 2015). Data also suggest that the use of other exclusionary actions are more common now than they were two decades ago, including arrests in school (e.g. Advancement Project, 2005; Blue Ribbon Commission on School Discipline, 2007; Fields & Emshwiller, 2014; Krezmien, Leone, Zablocki, & Wells, 2010). Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health, we analyze whether being suspended from school relates to the likelihood of students experiencing a number of adverse events and outcomes when they are adults. We find that being suspended increases the likelihood that a student will experience criminal victimization, criminal involvement, and incarceration years later, as adults.

31. School-Based Policing in Maine: A study on School Resource Officers in Maine’s public schools (2019) While school-based policing has become commonplace at campuses across the country, there is no centralized or continuous tracking of how many schools use SROs, no national governance of SROs’ roles and training requirements, and only ad hoc evaluation of their effectiveness in improving school safety. Local law enforcement agencies deploying SROs are not required to register with any national database, and school systems are not required to report how many SROs they use. The National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) estimates there are between 14,000 and 20,000 SROs deployed in schools nationwide. The National Center for Education Statistics found that 42% of all public schools in 2015-16 employed at least one full-time or part-time SRO, and that 94.4% of public high schools with enrollment of at least 1,000 students maintained a law enforcement presence for security enforcement and patrol. Similarly in Maine, neither schools nor police departments have been required to report whether they deploy SROs.

32. The Comprehensive School Safety Initiative: 2015 Report to Congress (2015) Schools have adopted a number of approaches for increasing safety, including the use of controlled access to buildings, security cameras, metal detectors, and the placement of school resource officers (SROs). Using SROs, generally sworn law enforcement officers, is a costly and widely used practice: the 2009-2010 School Survey on Crime and Safety estimated that 43 percent of public schools have at least one SRO present at least once a week. However, few rigorous studies have evaluated the effectiveness of SROs, including whether there are possible unintended consequences that may harm students, such as increased arrests for disorderly conduct (which might otherwise be handled by a school administrator) or exclusionary disciplinary practices (such as suspensions and expulsions) that disproportionately affect minority youth and youth with disabilities.

33. The Cost of Arming Schools: The Price of Stopping a Bad Guy with a Gun (2013) The common denominator of most school shootings is the availability of semi-automatic weapons. The price of implementing the NRA’s proposal (which does not involve controlling semi-automatics) to place an armed security guard in every school building in the nation is nearly $13 billion a year (2013 dollars). The opportunity cost to taxpayers for fully protected schools can reach $23 billion. The cost per student approaches $500 and would take up half of federal spending on elementary and secondary education if paid for by the federal government. Is this the cost of protecting schools? Or, is it just one cost for permitting unlimited access to semi-automatic weapons and large capacity ammunition clips and preventing the potential for mass murder in our schools?

34. The Growing Concerns Regarding School Resource Officers (2018) Some harsh statistics on how SRO’s and zero-tolerance policies turn students into life-long criminals.

35. The Menace of School Shootings in America (2018) While the murders of children by semi-automatic weapon was what was keeping America up at night, American politicians decided that fighting terror, profiling potential perpetrators, outfitting school and office in high-tech security gear, and increasing police presence in schools was what we needed – a beefed-up police state.

36. The Nature of Crime by School Resource Officers: Implications for SRO Program (2014) a little-considered look at the harms and crimes SRO’s can commit as authority figures while on school property, although they do not report to school administration. Rapes and accidental sidearm firings are the least of our worries.

37. The New American School: preparation for post-industrial discipline (2006) We take as a starting point the socializing effects of schools to analyze armed police officers and technological surveillance systems on school campuses, and relate these new social control strategies to the social relations engendered by mass incarceration and post-industrialization. In contrast to schools in the early twentieth century, which prepared youth for dependable factory labor, contemporary schools prepare youth for volatile labor markets and uncertain service sector employment. The modern world that embraces students is marked by the demise of the welfare state, privatization of social services and entrepreneurial approaches to modern social problems, including private for-profit prisons and mass incarceration of over two million people (in the United States alone). Public institutions and public life are subjected to ongoing processes of globalization, militarization and corporatization, altering how citizens participate in politics and react to social problems, as well as how states control citizens in places like schools (Saltman & Gabbard, 2003). We argue that these larger forces are mediated by public education and manifested as police and surveillance presence at school sites, such that students are exposed to social control forces that simultaneously create and are produced by conditions of mass incarceration and post-industrialization.

38. The Presence of School Resource Officers (SROs) in America’s Schools (2020) Similar to the declines in national crime rates in recent decades, school-basedoffenses have also been steadily falling. As of 2017, the National Center for Education Statistics reports that victimization, theft, and violent crimes are at a multi-decade low. In the 2015–2016 school year, there were 18 homicides at schools, accounting for 1.2 percent of all youth homicides. Despite the rarity of serious violence in schools, a major policy argument in favor of SROs has been the claim that they are needed to respond to active shooter situations. Those events remain extremely rare, and in 2015-2016 accounted for 43 deaths on school property, including 10 deaths by suicide. This is not to minimize the importance of efforts to respond to school shootings, but there are little data supporting the efficacy of SROs in preventing these rare events.

39. The prevalence of police officers in US schools (2018) Students attending high schools that have substantial shares of black or Hispanic students attend schools with a police officer at higher rates than students attending schools with few black and Hispanic students.

40. The school resource officer perspective: examining crime, violence, law enforcement, and education on public high school campuses (2012) Can SRO’s successfully provide the mentoring, teaching, and community-building that proponents claim to be co-responsibilities of the job? Through interviews we were able to see how SROs are symbolic to theories on law enforcement, police, and crime. As it was previously noted, SROs display some of the same characteristics representative of traditional police culture. Examples include SROs discussing ways in which they maintain control, authority, and an edge on students paying particular attention and awareness to gangs and drug activity. There were also numerous times when the SROs reinforced their legitimized power over students, shared instances in which they had to use aggressive and punitive action, or discussed the great differences that lie between police and non-police. Although we are nowhere close to being able to define a distinct police subculture amongst SROs, the substantial differences in settings and experiences between them (SROs and other law enforcement) which impact their beliefs and behaviors, are evident. On the surface many elements of traditional police culture seem problematic to the successful functioning of our public education system. However even though some of the characteristics of traditional police culture were found amongst this small sample of SROs, the extent to which all SROs display the same culture is unclear.

41. The School-Security Industry Is Cashing In Big on Public Fears of Mass Shootings (2016) Reality check. School shootings aren’t quite the national epidemic the media depicts. Far more children and young adults are killed on the impoverished streets of America’s large cities every year. By several orders of magnitude, far more kids die each year in car crashes or drowning accidents–or from asthma. And far more young lives are lost to a host of other diseases closely correlated with poverty. There are approximately 55 million K–12 students in America and roughly 3.5 million adults employed as teachers. There are also millions of support staff – janitors, nurses, cooks, after-school-program providers, and so on. Even in the deadliest years, the chance of a student or adult being killed at school is roughly one in a million. By contrast, roughly five out of every 100,000 American residents are murdered each year. Extrapolating from this, schools are somewhere in the region of 50 times safer than society overall. But lately, America’s school-security fetish has reached a whole new level of bizarre. In the wake of the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, one company after another has rushed to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the epidemic of fear that emerged in response to school violence, and to exploit the emotional vulnerabilities of terrified parents. As a result, a huge number of utterly inane products have entered the market.

42. Threat Assessment for School Administrators and Crisis Teams (2020) The National Association of School Psychologists is not not wild about SRO’s and encourages schools to weigh whether they legitimately need them. If so, SRO’s are not to be used for zero-tolerance discipline or in positions a “civilian” could fill. However, SRO’s are preferable to armed guards, in their view.

43. Understanding School Rampage Shooters: Implications for Police Use of Force (2019) This study looked at a number of factors and took a generally positive view of SRO’s, as 26.9% of all shooters were stopped by police. However, it concedes that civilians do a much better job of terminating school rampages. Knox found that “Police intervention, however, was not the winner with respect to saving lives: intervention by unarmed citizens was. Unarmed citizens stopped 23 (39.5%) shooters, as many as stopped their rampages by committing suicide. However, when unarmed citizens intervened, the shooters killed an average of only one person. When school rampage shooters ended their rampages voluntarily or by firearm malfunction or ammunition depletion, they killed six times as many people on average as did shooters who were stopped by the intervention of unarmed citizens.”

44. What Do We Know About the Effects of School-Based Law Enforcement on School Safety? (2018) Are SRO’s effective in preventing school shootings? “There is insufficient evidence for drawing a decisive conclusion about the overall effectiveness of non-educational, school-based law enforcement programs (Petrosino et al., forthcoming; Petrosino et al., 2012; Gonzalez, Jetelina, & Jennings, 2016; James & McCallion, 2013; Raymond, 2010).” OK. Forget efficacy. Do students feel safer with SRO’s? “There is no conclusive evidence that the presence of school-based law enforcement has a positive effect on students’ perceptions of safety in schools. In their review of 12 quasi-experimental studies, Petrosino and colleagues (forthcoming) found that school-based law enforcement is not associated with statistically significant changes in students’ perceptions of safety at school.”

Introduction

On May 17, 2012 15 year-old Malcolm Gracia was shot by New Bedford police. The circumstances of the killing are something that today would receive a more thorough investigation than the Gracia family got in 2012. Following a $500K settlement for the unconstitutional stop that triggered Gracia’s murder, various reports which exculpated the City and New Bedford Police, an effort to conceal information from the public, and finally a gag order to muzzle the family attorney, many people thought the Gracia story had gone away.

But Don Brisson, the family’s lawyer, just can’t let it go. In a Zoom meeting on September 20th, Brisson said there are a number of things that continue to haunt him about the Gracia case. Foremost is the fact that police didn’t have to illegally stop, and then assault, Gracia. If they thought he was a gang member, they could have gone back to their offices and checked their photo registry.

Despite Brisson’s ambling pace and a four-hour marathon Zoom meeting, it was impossible to leave the online meeting. Brisson raises some very disturbing questions. His walk through the evidence reveals an unnecessary killing, an improbable tale concocted and clearly coordinated by officers on the scene, revealing contradictions between police and a civilian witness, overly friendly questioning by the state police, a DA whitewash, with much information about the case sealed by a gag order to this day.

Brisson raises questions that still deserve an answer.

Named as defendants in the Gracia family’s civil suit were police officers Tyson Barnes, David Brown, Paul Fonseca, Brian Safioleas and Trevor Sylvia, along with the city of New Bedford and the estate of David Provencher, who was the police chief at the time.

The heart of Brisson’s marathon 4 hour presentation was a review of witness reports of the altercation between Tyson Barnes and Malcolm Gracia, an examination of DA Sutter’s report, and a summary of Barnes’ medical records.

DA Sam Sutter

Sam Sutter was the Bristol County District Attorny at the time. Brisson notes that Sutter’s report is full of omissions and failed to ask criticial questions. For example, it does not mention Detective Tyson Barnes’ initial assault on Malcolm Gracia.

Sutter’s report also claims Gracia grasped Barnes’ back, removed his knife from a sheath, thrust the knife twice into Barnes’ abdomen and made repeated attempts to stab him after that. Then, carrying the sheath, Gracia runs at another officer. Brisson points out that Barnes, if he actually feared for this life, could have shot Gracia but did not. Although Sutter’s report says that eyewitnesses corrorobate police accounts, this is not actually true.

Det. Tyson Barnes

Brisson reviewed testimony from various witnesses. Despite the fact that the interviews referenced diagrams and witnesses occasionally physically acted out events they were discussing, video interviews were apparently banned. What the public has going on a decade later is audio-only.

In Barnes’ interview eight days after the shooting he says he does not know what happened to his Taser. Barnes says Gracia began running South and was no longer a threat. “I just knew he wasn’t a threat anymore.” But there was no mention of jamming Gracia against the building, which several other witnesses recalled.

The questioner, State Police Sergeant Dolan, never asks why Barnes doesn’t shoot Gracia if he is in fact attacking other officers. Dolan also never asks Barnes about the extent of his injuries — an issue of considerable controversy. Sergeant Dolan asks Barnes about being stabbed in the “chest” (not in the abdomen). So which was it?

There are numerous pauses in the questioning, as if to provide officers to get their stories straight. After one such pause, upon requestioning, Barnes now says he was in a lot of pain, while previously he claims not to have felt anything. Suddenly Barnes hears “officer down, suspect down” A Detective Gangi is now applying pressure to his chest, Detective Fonseca is calling for an ambulance, and Trooper Mark Lavoie takes Barnes’ belt and gun. EMS staff cut off Barnes’ clothes as he is transported to the hospital, supposedly with a “sucking chest wound.” Barnes says he gets his gun back several days later.

Det. David Brown

Dolan interviews Detective David Brown four days after the shooting, again audio-only. Brown contradicts Barnes’ testimony about seeing the unholstering of the knife. Brown says Barnes immediately grabs him and drives him into the building. Then Gracia “controls” Barnes and stabs him twice. Now Brown says Barnes is in shock, white as a ghost, suprised at events.

Brisson asks how it is possible that a 200-pound, 5’11” detective with two hands could be controlled by a 5’8″ 150-pound kid with one hand on his shoulder. And why doesn’t Brown either Tase or shoot Gracia, given that he has just purportedly stabbed Barnes? And why would Barnes be surprised, given that he had just assaulted a kid?

Brisson again questions the pauses in the interrogations, the hints, the guided testimony, the lack of video, the “clarifications” and the leading questions. Brisson finds it totally biased. No tough questions are asked.

Det. Trevor Sylvia

Before encountering Barnes, Detective Sylvia recounts Gracia running, Barnes is running to intercept Gracia, then Gracia turns around, fumbling in his waistband. Sylvia does not pull his own weapon and warn Gracia. Dolan asks Sylvia if anyone has issued verbal commands, and Sylvia says “no.” Barnes catches up with Gracia and tackles him from the side and pushes him into the house. Then Sylvia says he hears someone say “he’s got a knife” — which contradicts both Brown and Barnes. Also, Sylvia reports Gracia switching to his non-dominant hand after attacking Barnes.

Det. Paul Fonseca

Paul Fonseca is the officer who shoots Gracia through the head. He claims not to know if Barnes has grabbed Gracia or not (despite the running tackle Sylvia describes). Fonseca claims Barnes pushes him with his shoulders into the building as Gracia tries to control him. Brisson asks why the Asst. DA, DA Sutter, Sergeant Dolan, and others fail to ask if Gracia may have felt threatened. Fonseca says Gracia says is grabbing Barnes by the back of the head. Brisson asks how this is possible, given the difference in height and physical stature between Barnes and Gracia, and why the location (head/shoulders) is not consistent.

Postmortem Trial by Press

An EMS report mentions a “sucking chest wound” and WBZ and CBS report “serious life-threatening injuries.” The exaggeration of injuries and demonization of Gracia by Gracia’s former teacher Nick Baptiste are fodder for news articles. Sutter’s report also exaggerates the threat Gracia posed and omits mention of the Taser. The press loves pictures of Gracia’s knife, a scary-looking gut hook (fishing knife). The press also indulge in arm-chair psychology, imagining why a crazed teen killer was trying to go out in a blaze of glory, taking as many cops with him as possible. Such demonization, as we see in many police shootings, is either launched by the police or the press. Take your pick.

Medical records

Interrogrator Dolan asks Barnes’ lawyer Gambaccini for a description of his injuries — no one apparently ever looked at RI Hospital records and it is now subject to gag order. The question of whose blood is on the knife was never answered as no one ever tested the knife. Under his T-shirt, Barnes was wearing a white muscle shirt. There was no blood on it. A photo of Barnes’ torso shows a small 1cm superficial scratch. Barnes didn’t need either stitches or trauma treatment. He got two percosets and ibuprofen. Barnes was cleared to go home without restriction. He arrived in the hospital at 9pm. He was cleared by doctors by 11:43pm. X-rays ruled out pneumothorax involvement. Barnes was observed overnight. No antibiotics were administered. He got a tetanus shot. Vital signs were normal. Barnes had been taking prednisone, percosets, and valium for a “back injury.” He was discharged at 5:12am. Barnes’ tox screen, which Brisson had to fight to obtain, revealed benzodiazepine and opiates. Valium lowers inhibitions, Brisson points out. Prescriptions written by Barnes’ doctor were never delivered to Superior Court — in violation of a subpoena.

DA Sutter’s report never mentions Barnes’ tox screen — only the marijuana in Gracia’s system.

Medical Record requests by Brisson

Despite police and EMS concern for Barnes’ injuries — they considered medevac at one point — Brisson ask why EMS didn’t stop at Charlton or St. Anne’s if Barnes’ injuries were truly life-threatening.

Animation

An animation depicts the improbable 20 foot distance that Barnes fell back, according to his follow detectives’ accounts. The animation also raises questions about why no one tried to stop Gracia. There are also discrepancies in where shell casings were found.

Misc

After the killing Barnes goes out on disability for a non-injury.

Restraining Order

Brisson raises the issue of Barnes’ mental health and behavior.

It turns out that Barnes, in addition to having questionable drugs in his system at the time of the shooting, has a restraining order requiring his weapon to be confiscated.

The restraining order is not found in personnel file. Brisson asks why the NBPD didn’t ask for Barnes’ weapon. Brisson has to fight for discovery of injury, drug, and personnel records on Barnes, which it turns out strongly call his conduct in question. Brisson asks why Sutter didn’t drag Barnes through the same mud as he did Gracia?

Barnes apparently received explicit photos from another officer’s wife or girlfriend at some point. He meets with the officer regarding this dispute at a city Burger King and threatens to shoot the other officer. Then Police Chief Teachman gives Barnes a one-day suspension — which Mayor Scott Lang simply voids.

Disability

Fast forward to 2020. Barnes is now applying for disability.

Next Week: Physical evidence

To watch the final Zoom presentation, contact MalcolmGraciaEvidence@gmail.com

The New Bedford Commission on Use of Force just issued its four-and-a-half page 60-day findings. Aside from three pages of bureaucratic blather about its mandate and a rather defensive section on how it complied with Open Meeting laws, it was short on both analysis and prescriptions. The only real substance was found on the last page and a half.

It begins by dismissing accountability. According to the author, presumably Chairman Brian Gomes, there is already adequate accountability for police officers:

The NBPD “use of force” policies guide officers in performance and behavior. When an officer violates any of those policies, he/she is held accountable through the department’s governing Rules & Regulations. Disciplinary action ranges from counseling to termination. The department receives an average of 60 complaints a year. Reports of violations can come from both inside and outside of the department.

No, the real problem is apparently lack of training. Training has become the “go-to” prescription for “doing something” that everyone can get behind: the public can be deceived into thinking it will help; and the police can always use more money. Here are the Commission’s thoughts:

Officers are required by state statue to also undergo 40 hours of In-Service Training annually. The agenda of this training is set by the MPTC (Municipal Police Training Committee) and the MA Chiefs of Police. Topics that are mandatory every year are Legal updates (both Criminal Law and Motor Vehicle Law), Use of Force/Defensive Tactics, and CPR & 1st Responder. Topics that are additionally added are usually based on the landscape of what is going on in policing that we need additional training on or what is new in policing. During the past 2-3 years topics have included Fair & Impartial Policing, Officer Wellness & Suicide Prevention, Active Shooter Response, Dealing with Alzheimer issues, conducting Cruelty to Animal Investigations and responding to calls from those experiencing a mental health crisis, Alzheimer’s, Autism, other cognitive conditions and disabilities.

The 2020-2021 schedule is not quite completed, but discussions are centering around additional training in de-escalation, Integrating Communication, Assessment and Tactics (ICAT), Racial Profiling, Cultural Competency, Effective Communication and LGBTQ Rights. This Commission has discussed the importance of including trainings on unconscious bias, racial justice and racial equity along with other programs to address the needs of diverse communities who are experiencing oppression.

De-escalation training

Tactical de-escalation involves the use of techniques to reduce the intensity of an encounter with a subject/suspect and enable an officer to have additional options to gain voluntary compliance or to mitigate the need to use a higher level of force, while still maintaining control of the situation. The goal of de-escalation is to avoid a violent encounter with the key elements of de-escalation techniques being for officers to create distance, take time and use shielding. Throughout the summer, the Commission has repeatedly discussed the topic of de-escalation. Currently, the Commission is in the process of writing recommendations to further articulate and strengthen de-escalation language in the NBPD Use of Force Policies. The main learning objective of de-escalation training is to provide police officers with an organized way of making decisions about how they will act in any situation, including situations that

In light of the events of 2020, the MPTC is currently in discussions about additional training that can be brought in at the state level. This will include officers of the New Bedford Police Department.

The Commission provides no insight into the accountability required after incidents in which officers fail to use their new expensive training.

Other than this, the Commission could not come to any other conclusions — even after a raucous public meeting at which community members demanded that the Commission look at an independent police review commission and create meaningful accountability measures. In fact, the Commission’s report doesn’t even acknowledge any of these concerns:

To date, the Commission has reviewed data on public complaints of police abuse or use of force. The data has included the race of the complainant when known. The Commission has not yet determined which recommendations it will make and present to the Mayor. This will only occur after full deliberation of the Commission on each recommendation being considered.

There is a link to a form the public can use to comment on the Commission’s 60-day results.

But why bother?

Mayor Mitchell has accomplished what he set out to do — which was to blunt public demand for police accountability in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and renewed demand to revisit the Malcolm Gracia case.

Neither the public nor SouthCoast community organizations ought to continue participating in Mayor Mitchell’s and Brian Gomes’ charade.

Police Accountability legislation, which was expected to die in the Massachusetts legislature this Summer, has been given a surprising reprieve. In the wake of George Floyd’s asphyxiation murder by a Minneapolis cop, while three others stood around watching Floyd die, the Massachusetts House has been unable to pursue its usual tactics of deep-sixing progressive legislation. Members of a conference committee are still hammering out differences between a thoughtful Senate version of the Reform, Shift + Build Act and a toothless House version apparently edited by police unions.

Police unions have lobbied hard to neuter any legislation for reining in police excesses. They don’t appreciate being held accountable to the public — or to courts — for the felonious assaults and murders committed while on duty. Unions object to limits on “Qualified Immunity,” bans on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and are only truly happy when legislators offer them more cash for “training” intended to make them sweeter, gentler souls — but never to hold them accountable by discipline or termination.

Angry that such legislation was ever filed in the first place, Boston Police Patrolman Association President Lawrence Calderone said, “Angry would be an understatement.” And dismissing the need for legislation, Calderone added, “We’re angry about it. Boston, Massachusetts in general is not Minneapolis.” State Senator Ryan Fattman echoed the sentiment, saying that Massachusetts cops aren’t like bad cops elsewhere: “… our Massachusetts law enforcement officers are the best trained, well educated, and well-meaning in our nation, bar none. […] The egregious sins of other law enforcement in other parts of our country should not be their burden to bear.”

This is, of course, absolute nonsense. Massachusetts has plenty of police abuse horror stories. Most recently, in July 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded an investigation of the Springfield Police Department’s Narcotics Bureau. Undercover police in Springfield were routinely beating suspects about the head, using immediate force without identifying themselves as police, and routinely lying in statements and in court.

Closer to home, where people are still calling for the release of details on Malcolm Gracia’s killing — the details of which are subject to a gag order related to the City’s $500,000 settlement with the Gracia family — we only have to look back two years earlier to find a case similar in many ways to George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.

No, Massachusetts is exactly like Minnneapolis. We have a breathing problem in New Bedford too.

* * *

At about 4:17 am the morning of July 22, 2010 Erik Aguilar, 42, walked into the New Bedford XtraMart gas and convenience store and asked for help. Aguilar said someone was about to kill him. The store clerk called police for help. The store’s security footage captured Aguilar’s subsequent killing by one officer and a civilian, and the contempt for human life shown by five more officers who arrived on the scene and did nothing to try to revive Aguilar.

Seven minutes after entering the XtraMart Aguilar exits the store and is seen wandering around the parking lot when Officer Paul Hodson arrives. At 4:25:28, with the store clerk looking on, Hodson gets out of his car, playing with his baton, wedging Aguilar between himself and his cruiser. Hodson reaches into Aguilar’s pockets and conducts some sort of inspection. Aguilar looks uneasy, as if he is about to run off.

At 4:26:40 — only slightly over a minute after arriving — Hodson grabs Aguilar by the arm and wheels him around onto the hood of the police vehicle. Aguilar, who has committed no crime, resists. At 4:27:29 Hodson pepper-sprays Aguilar in the face after taking him down onto the pavement. At 4:27:41 Hodson flips a handcuffed Aguilar onto his stomach and both Hodson and a civilian passer-by kneel on Aguilar’s back with his face pressed into the pavement. From about 4:27:48 forward in the video the civilian can be seen kneeling on Aguilar’s neck. For the next minute we see Aguilar’s legs move a little, then his struggling ceases at about 4:29:44.

Aguilar is either dying or is already dead.

At around 4:29:57 a second officer shows up. He looks at Aguilar’s immobile body. Hodson and the civilian release their hold on Aguilar, though Hodson keeps kneeling on him. At 4:31:28 three more officers show up and the civilian leaves. A sixth officer appears. Not one of them at any point makes any effort to resuscitate Aguilar. At 4:33:36 Hodson stands up. He has been kneeling on Aguilar for a full seven minutes.

For the next 18 minutes the five officers stand around talking. At 4:51:40 an ambulance finally pulls up in front of the XtraMart. At 4:54:09 Aguilar’s body is placed in the ambulance. At 5:09:03 the ambulance leaves the convenience store. At 5:11:52 the last of the police cruisers leaves the scene.

* * *

Attorney Howard Friedman, who previously took on the NBPD in the case of Morris Pina, filed a lawsuit, naming five of the stand-about officers as defendants: Paul Hodson, Antonio Almeida, Damien Vasconcelos, Roberto DaCunha and John Martins.

The usual machinations of the state kicked in to exonerate the officers. Former Hampden County District Attorney William Bennett was tasked with an “independent” investigation. Bennett concluded that alcohol and cocaine were responsible for Aguilar’s death. However, he did note that “the failure to detect that Aguilar needed immediate medical care and the miscommunication and time wasted waiting for a van that never arrived are troubling circumstances of this tragic loss of life.”

Police Chief Provencer refused comment, as did City Solicitor Markey — three separate times. And Mayor Jon Mitchell — about to become a recurring fixture in New Bedford police abuses cases — refused to talk to the press. No one wanted to take responsibility, especially city officials.

The Bennett report — to the surprise of no one — did not recommend prosecution. Jon Mitchell, apparently satisfied that no one would have to take the heat, issued a statement: “New Bedford residents can take confidence in knowing that the New Bedford Police Department will demand that its officers hold themselves to the highest standards of professionalism and respect for our citizens now and in the future.”

Bennett’s report was naturally seen as a betrayal by Aguilar’s family : “We are not surprised that Mr. Bennett did not recommend criminal prosecution of the police officers. Police officers are almost never charged with crimes. The video shows the officers disregarded police policies. The police were called to provide assistance. Eric needed immediate medical attention. Instead of providing care, the police officers left Eric handcuffed lying face down on the ground. They finally provided emergency medical care after it was too late to help. We believe the police officers violated Eric’s civil rights.”

Strangely enough, the New Bedford Police Department — not the police union — agreed with the Aguilar family. Lieutentant Robert Aguiar [no relation] of the New Bedford Police Department’s Division of Professional Standards wrote, “I would classify this event as a tragedy for the family of Erik Aguilar, an embarrassing disgrace to the New Bedford Police Department, and a case of absolute negligence on the part of the … police officers on scene, as well as their supervisor Lieutenant Michael Jesus. [… They]”had the training, the duty and the obligation as police officers to help and protect Erik Aguilar, and they undeniably failed to do so.” An internal investigation recommended disciplinary action, though not termination, for seven officers involved in the Aguilar case. Their slap on the wrist — four day suspensions.

The New Bedford Police Department’s Divison of Professional Standards maintains a spreadsheet of case files which the NAACP New Bedford was finally able to obtain. In it, Officer Hodson, appears twice in June 2019.

Neither lawsuits, video, nor even the Police Department’s own disciplinary mechanisms were enough to get rid of the bad apples, much less punish them meaningfully. Officer John Martins left the New Bedford Police Department in 2012 after being charged with drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident. The rest stayed on the force after receiving their four-day suspensions.

It wasn’t until December 18, 2019 that Hodson pled guilty — in the United States Attorney’s office in the District of Massachusetts — and not for klling Aguilar, but for the distribution of child pornography.

Hodson is now serving a sentence of five to twenty years in federal prison.

The Massachusetts House just passed their own police accountabily bill — long on police concessions and short on accountability. Despite language that says Qualified Immunity will be “studied,” everybody knows what that means. This is House Speaker Bob DeLeo’s way of strangling progressive legislation — even reforms that a majority of the public supports. As a lobbyist once said of the Massachusetts Legislature, “Don’t confuse what goes on in this building with democracy.”

Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, released the following statement on the House bill:

“For months, people across the country and the state have been marching in the streets to demand systemic change. Unfortunately, this bill does not reflect the fierce urgency that deadly police violence against Black people demands. Instead, it reflects the depth of entrenched opposition to necessary police reform. Police unions and officers used the weapon of fear to maintain the status quo and undermine even very moderate reforms.

“Ultimately, this piece of legislation misses the mark, because it will not help victims of violence hold police accountable. Let’s be clear: Massachusetts is not immune to police misconduct. In order to make any laws about excessive use of force or other police abuses meaningful, Massachusetts must reform our civil rights laws – including by ending qualified immunity, which denies victims their day in court. When the final bill is negotiated, it should empower victims of police violence to seek justice for the harms they have suffered and to hold abusive officers directly accountable.”

Progressive Mass. has published a guide, Here’s How Your State Rep Voted on Police Reform, including how House members voted on the Senate version, S.2820. Bristol County “Democrats” Carole Fiola, Jim Hawkins, Chris Markey, Alan Silvia, and Paul Schmid all voted with Republicans against the Senate version.

When it comes to supporting wars and the police state, we can usually count on the media to tell us a plastic fork is silver cutlery. Several media outlets have described the House bill as “sweeping” when in fact it sacrificed critical police accountability measures to police union lobbying.

• House Approach To Qualified Immunity Lacking For Some; Police Say Reform Starts With Department Accreditation
• MA House approves police reform bill on 93-66 vote
• Mass. House Passes Police Reform Bill – CBS Boston
• Mass. House Passes Police Reform Bill – NECN
• Massachusetts Bans Police Chokeholds in Sweeping Reform Bill
• Massachusetts House passes sweeping police reform bill; lawmakers still face opposition on qualified immunity
• Massachusetts House releases its version of police reform bill
• Police Budgets Are Ballooning as Social Programs Crumble
• Sweeping police reform bill passes in Massachusetts House, 93-66
• Sweeping police reform bill that passed state Senate draws swift condemnation from police unions

Let’s be honest. neither political party wants police reform — even in supposed Liberal bastions like Massachusetts. What just happened in the Commonwealth has played out all over the nation. In Missouri, for example, when Kansas City Mayor David Alvey assembled his Task Force on Community and Police Relations, he invited Police Chief Michael York and Wyandotte County Sheriff Don Ash — but snubbed Kansas City’s reform District Attorney Mark Dupree, a Black man, because he wasn’t sufficiently “objective.”

• Reform Prosecutor in Kansas Excluded From “Objective” Task Force on Policing

Finally, no discussion of police accountability would be complete without the local press quoting a man who is neither a police officer nor has ever been held accountable to the Massachusetts legislature.

• Thomas Hodgson calls the police reform bill Outrageous, Dangerous, Atrocious and Reckless

The following is reposted with the author’s permission from an editorial in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. The community Lois refers to here is unimportant; it could be any in America.

Lois Ahrens: Defund the police and break the chain

I want to talk about one long chain. Starting in this tiny city and in every city where mayors and councilors decide on policing budgets. Here the amount for police is almost $7 million a year. A big chunk considering there is almost no crime. But like everywhere, it starts with mayors and city councils giving too much money and too much power to too many cops.

The money goes to cops in schools where Black children and Latinx children get disciplined, suspended and expelled at much higher rates than white children. It moves on to racial profiling with stops of drivers and people walking down the street.

And, sometimes policing and especially over-policing leads to arrests and then charges and then over-charging by district attorneys, including Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan. That means piling up so many charges that people have little choice but to take a plea bargain out of fear of a longer sentence if they risk going to trial.

From there, the chain goes to prisons and jails. In Massachusetts, we pay $1.2 billion to keep about 14,000 people caged in jails and prisons, overstaffed by guards with unions as powerful as the ones police have. Like police outside, they are trained in the same us versus them “warrior “mentality.

When you add this up — too many police, racial profiling, cops in schools, district attorneys and plea bargains — what we get is a state where more than half of the prison population is Black and Latinz, even although those groups account for 17% of Massachusetts’ population.

And, right now prisoners, that is people, in state prisons have been locked down for months. This is really a “lockdown,” not just being unable to eat in a restaurant or take a trip to California. This is being locked in a cell the size of a parking space. This is locked down where social distancing is impossible. This is locked down, where in the Framingham women’s prison, 85 of 180 women have COVID.

It starts here. In this city council and in every city council, which is why we need to defund the police and start breaking the chain.

Lois Ahrens

Northampton

The writer is founding director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project.

Although Republicans have defunded education, food stamps, public housing, Planned Parenthood, NPR, sanctuary cities, environmental and occupational health, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the UN Refugee agency, what really upsets Liberals is when police reformers call for “defunding the police.” Objections range from worries that Hannibal Lecter will be running loose, to how it might look if Liberals called for something radical.

In the midst of a pandemic and the breakdown of American democracy, it’s the least of our worries.

Liberals have been as incapable as Conservatives of re-imagining a world without a highly-militarized paramilitary force occupying, in effect, urban neighborhoods. If only now they are beginning to understand the need to demilitarize the police, they still seem more afraid of the blowback from adopting this phrase — and of alienating the mythological white swing voter — than of finding common cause with police reformers. Hopefully this will change.

But there are many police programs that can be, and ought to be, completely defunded. There is no need to quibble or clarify what “defunding” means in these cases. It means exactly that — stop wasting taxpayer money making cops more dangerous, and stop throwing money at useless and deceptive public relations gestures.

Here’s what many of the “defunders” have been proposing:

• defunding the 1033 program, which puts military weaponry into police hands
• defunding the Department of Justice COPS program that assures preferential hiring of ex-military and subsidizes local P.D. hiring of them
• defunding school-based police (so-called “resource” officers) and the construction of actual jail cells for children in some schools
• defunding forfeiture programs that permit police departments to keep the proceeds
• defunding municipal fine programs that automatically flow to police departments
• defunding the enforcement of non-violent crime and harrassment of the homeless (fewer officers are necessary)
• defunding sensitivity training for officers who should never have been hired in the first place
• defunding “advisory” boards, ride-alongs, drug awareness and athletics programs that are basically public relations campaigns that offer the public no real oversight or control of the police
• defunding costly overtime and “details” programs (why can’t the electric company provide a flagman?)

If people think that “defunding the police” requires too much parsing and too much explanation, they aren’t spending any time questioning the phrase “community policing.”

Liberals have been some of the greatest champions of “broken windows” policing and “community policing,” which filled city streets with hundreds of thousands of additional cops, filled the nation’s jails and prisons to overflowing, and led to unconstitutional “stop and frisk” practices by police forces which suddenly began receiving piles of cash and military gear — including cities run by Liberal politicians.

One of their inventions, “community policing,” is little more than a public relations sham — a transparent attempt to convince a community [that knows better] that the White buzz-cut with a badge on their porch is really Officer Friendly. “Taking a knee,” as some police officers did last week (instead of putting that knee on someone’s neck), was another P.R. stunt, a “charm offensive” police departments resort to on occasion.

But it’s not working. And the police response to recent protests showed it’s all a big act when people protesting police abuse and members of the press were shot at, beaten, injured, tear-gassed, and pepper-sprayed by police, often for no reason. It only confirmed how comfortable police are with abusing the public and getting away with it.

As the Department of Justice defines it, “community policing” is based on [unequal] “community partnerships” involving the police, media, and community groups, and places a few hand-picked community leaders and clergy on various “advisory” boards — which in the end have no real political power.

In its most benign form Community Policing is simply lipstick on a pig.

New Bedford residents will recall the Justice Department-brokered Action Plan, which was meant to defuse community anger and distrust after the murder of Malcolm Gracia, and which constituted an advisory board of community representatives and the media — but never challenged the power of police unions and never resulted in real community oversight or control of the New Bedford police.

Provisions of the Action Plan were striking: the community, not the police, was responsible for being informed of its own rights and avoiding complications with rogue police officers; and community “relations” and “choices” by young people — not police misconduct — were identifed as the root causes of the Gracia murder.

So here we are again. We’re way past the lipstick. Clearly, somebody needs to do some thinking outside the box.

Max Rameau, an activist with Washington DC based Pan African Community Action, recently discussed a more democratic definition of community policing — members of a community board are chosen from the community by lottery and directly oversee police hiring, firing, and management of their own police departments. Voters in every precinct vote on whether to decommission or continue using existing police personnel. But oversight and management of the newly-constituted police departments is very different from today’s.

If it makes Liberals feel any better, taxes are used to fund the operations of this form of policing — Hannibal Lecter isn’t a worry — but old, ineffective, dangerous, repressive and undemocratic forms of policing would be decommissioned. And all the old budgetary and legal machinery are scrapped and defunded.

Last year over a thousand Americans, mainly men of color, were shot and killed by police. Almost the same number died after being electrocuted by Tasers. In contrast, in Germany, a country with a quarter of our population and certainly no stranger to racism, there have been roughly 11 police killings each year since 1990, and the number has been going down. Police accountability and oversight is the reason for the dramatically smaller number of killings.

It’s going to take ideas like Rameau’s, studying how police in other countries are managed, and experiments like the decommissioning of the Minneapolis Police Department, to re-imagine what policing ought to be. Given that America has a race problem not going away any time soon, police reform solutions must cede control of policing to victimized communities — today.

Yes, today — and no uncomfortable phrase, no uncharted territory, and no experiment is too radical in the service of stopping the unnecessary slaughter of Americans by their own police, particularly people of color who are its disproportionate victims.

On Tuesday Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson was photographed standing behind Donald Trump as the President signed an executive order on policing.

Trump’s police “reforms” may have been meaningless — especially since his administration deep-sixed real reforms as soon as he parked his rump in the Oval Office, and none of the families of police murder victims Trump claims to have invited with were present for the signing — but it was an opportunity for Trump to show off what Trump does best — dousing fire with gasoline.

Trump’s signing speech was precisely the plate of red meat people like Hodgson love. In fact, Hodgson could easily have written it himself: “Americans know the truth, without police there is chaos. Without law there is anarchy and without safety there is catastrophe. […] As we did in Minneapolis after it got out of control for 4 days. We sent in representatives, commonly known as the National Guard and it was all put down very quickly.”

But Bristol County voters may be wondering: what the hell was Hodgson doing there?

Good question. For starters, a Massachusetts sheriff’s job consists solely of running a county jail — something Hodgson can’t even do without killing and abusing a disproportionate number of his detainees. For all his posturing and attempts to expand his powers to patrols — rejected by the DA and the cities of New Bedford and Fall River — Hodgson is nothing but a jailer. He’s not a lawman. And if this was ever in doubt, in 2016 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that “a deputy sheriff is not a ‘police officer’ for purposes of G.L. c.269, §13A.” Hodgson runs four jails in Dartmouth and New Bedford. That’s it. Or should be.

If Hodgson had a role to play at the White House yesterday, it was as an extra in whatever cowboy drama Trump thinks he’s starring in, and to sell his tough lawman image by rubbing elbows with Stetson-hatted brethren.

But playing a lawman on TV is not the same as competently doing the job. Hodgson is such a clueless and reckless martinet that he appears to have personally triggered a recent riot in his own facility. Hodgson is absolutely the last person anyone would want to ask for “good policing” best practices.

Hodgson will get red in the face and sputtering mad any time a detractor mentions his cruelty and incompetence or pleads with government officials for long-overdue oversight. In Hodgson’s book anyone who thinks he’s unfit for office must be a pinko Commie anarchist with a political agenda.

But the fact is, the phrase “political agenda” was custom-made for Hodgson and everything he does — from sucking up to Stephen Miller, to ratting out his own church, to shilling for Identitarians at the American Border Foundation who are raising money for Trump’s border wall, to testifying with racists and eugenicists from the Center for Immigration Statistics, to attending meetings of the national advisory board of the Federation for American Immigration “Reform,” to participating in training exercises on the ranch of a couple affiliated with the Minuteman [militia] Project, to his numerous media appearances with racists, Muslim bashers, Christian nationalists, gay bashers, Birthers, End Times preachers, and conspiracy nuts. Not to mention Hodgson’s never-ending pilgrimages to the White House on the public dime.

His recent controversy is hardly surprising. That Hodgson would pose for an official photo in Confederate Battle Stars demonstrates that Hodgson the politician values the power of silent signals and dog-whistles, which apparently work as well in Massachusetts as they do in Mississippi.

No, very little of what Hodgson does is related to his day job, but everything he does is political — and of the worst sort.

It’s time taxpayers stopped paying for Hodgson’s white supremacist hobby. And where are those Congressional, state Senate, and AG investigations?

The following is based on an unpublished 2011 article.

When a policeman “Tases” you, a seven-ounce gun shoots nitrogen-propelled darts which puncture up to one inch of clothing and deliver 50,000 volts to your central nervous system through filaments that stretch up to ten meters.

The manufacturer’s website describes the product as “turning off” a person for up to 30 seconds. Police departments are buying up the thousand-dollar devices like hotcakes. Close to a million are in police use in the United States because law enforcement officers say they need new “non-lethal” tools in their arsenal for dealing with violent criminals without resorting to shooting them. Tasers are also available for personal use in 43 states (not MA or RI).

Despite public relations campaigns to sell these weapons, in which willing subjects, often police-friendly journalists, allow themselves to be zapped by a Taser while being lowered gently to the ground by officers, the “real world” deployment of these new “Electronic Control Weapons” (ECW’s) has been much more destructive.

That’s because Tasers, while less lethal than firearms, still kill. And they can and are routinely abused by police officers.

In one case of Taser abuse, a conservative student, Andrew Meyer heckled John Kerry at a campaign speech, refused to stop talking, and was then zapped with 50,000 volts after pleading, “Don’t Tase me, bro.”

In 2009 in Oakland, California, officer Johannes Mehserle reached for his Taser to “turn off” Oscar Grant, who was already lying on a subway platform on his stomach in handcuffs. Mehserle instead shot Grant in the back with his service revolver, killing him. This fatal confusion of Taser for firearm has occurred several times in other cities.

But, even taking Mehserle at his word that he had confused the service revolver for a Taser, the officer’s purpose for using a Taser on a handcuffed subject was not because Mehserle was ever in danger — but to simply compel “compliance.”

In 2009 in Oklahoma, Lona Varner, an 86 year old stroke victim on oxygen, was Tasered in her bed after her grandson called for medical assistance. Mrs. Varner, who had dementia, has lashed out at police who were stepping on her oxygen.

Also in 2009, Prospero Lassi, a Southwest Airlines employee, suffered a diabetic seizure. While being transported to the hospital and still experiencing seizures, he bumped the arm of an officer who then Tasered him 11 times while he was still unconscious.

Again in 2009 in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Deacon Frederick Williams suffered an epileptic seizure but was taken to jail instead of to the hospital. A video of his being Tasered five times while in police custody and then dying on-screen was seen by millions.

At a Phillies game, a rowdy fan ran around the field until he was Tasered by a policeman. The crowd, which had first laughed at the man’s hijinks, booed the official for excessive brutality. There had never been any concern the man posed a danger to anyone. He was simply holding up a baseball game.

Many victims of Tasers, both by abuse and homicide, are those without medical care, with mental and psychological problems, the poor, and very often minorities.

There have been numerous cases of protestors being Tasered in civil disobedience actions where only passive resistance was being offered. In former times, protesters would be led to a van in plastic handcuffs, booked, and that was it. Increasingly, people are now being Tasered for “non compliance.”

At some point, the level of physical coercion of citizens a Taser provides stops being preservation of the peace and simply becomes suppression of dissent. It is not surprising, then, that the United Nations and human rights groups have reacted with alarm to their increasing use in peaceful protests, using the word “torture.”

And the abuse of Tasers is only growing.

Between 1999 and 2004 there were approximately 71 Taser-related deaths in the US and Canada, but the death rate is rising fast. Between 2001 and 2008 there were 334 deaths and many cases of abuse like those mentioned which have been recorded in some cases by an officer’s own cruiser or body camera, or which have been posted on YouTube and Vimeo.

The use of this technology is outpacing community control of it.

The company which manufactures the Taser ascribes the many fatalities to “preexisting medical conditions” or offers an explanation popularized by a former medical examiner, Vincent DiMiao, who was hired by the company to promote so-called “Excited Delirium Syndrome” (EDS) as a rationale for the deaths. Other studies of the Taser include those by the military, which never met a weapon system it didn’t like, and law enforcement agencies like the Department of Justice, which have never questioned the EDS explanation.

Neither the American Medical Association nor the American Psychological Association recognize Excited Delirium Syndrome, but the American College of Emergency Physicians does recognize it as a cause of death. However, the definition provided by fellows Matthew Sztajnkrycer and Amado Baez of the Mayo Clinic offers little more than cocaine and struggle with police officers as contributing factors and this does not logically rule out excitation by Taser. They write:

The actual cause of cocaine-associated ED and sudden death is unknown. Studies have suggested that the elevated temperatures seen in these patients is due to abnormal changes in brain dopamine receptors. The vast majority of these patients died after a struggle. Such struggles increase the levels of circulating epinephrine, and may also result in a metabolic acidosis.

The National Association of Medical Examiners also recognizes EDS, but also qualifies it: “Chronic drug use is necessary to induce the changes in the neurochemistry that lead to agitated delirium.” Many of the cases of “EDS” linked to the many Taser fatalities did not involve drugs; merely repeated shocks.

Almost all studies purporting to demonstrate Taser safety are based on delivering shocks to healthy volunteers who do not fight the 50,000 volt blast to their central nervous systems. However, a University of California (San Francisco) cardiology study found the device to be far more lethal than the company would have us believe. And a “real world” statistical study of 185 deaths by White and Ready at the University of Arizona found that Tasers are widely abused or misused by officers who either shock subjects repeatedly when not in any real danger themselves, or who fail to recognize that the subject is already in some kind of medical or drug-related distress in which using a Taser contributes to their fatality.

Dartmouth Police officers receive only six hours of training on the Taser X26, a device which according to its marketing literature has “greater incapacitating power than the Advanced Taser M26 ECD.” How many hours of firearms training do officers receive in comparison? In Los Angeles, that number is 113. According to Massachusetts law 501 CMR 8.05, the Taser curriculum may be anything Taser International provides. Given the company’s adamant protestations that the device is non-lethal, the provided information is either incorrect, should be augmented, or the device regulated in order to eliminate fatalities.

Dartmouth Police rules for Taser use permit it to be used on minors over the age of 10 and seniors under the age of 70. How do you feel about having your 13 year old daughter or 67 year old grandmother Tasered? Even if they are on drugs or are experiencing dementia?

Dartmouth Police rules permit the device to be used for non-violent (Level 3) “non-compliant behavior.” If the Taser is intended to keep officers from harm, the public should also be kept from harm during its deployment. Dartmouth’s Level 4 is a more proper threshold for use of a device which can potentially kill. Normally Level 5 is the only one in which a firearm should be used. Why then is the criterion for a Taser so much lower, given lethality which is not common to the other remedies in its class (spray, restraint, and canine)?

The Dartmouth police guide to force and firearms states that Tasers may be employed “for self-defense, defense of another against unlawful violence or attack to his/her person or property, to overcome resistance to arrests, to conduct searches and seizures, prevent escapes from custody, preserve the peace, prevent the commission of crimes, or prevent suicide or self-inflicted injury.” Some of these categories include fleeing (which presents no danger to an officer) or are sufficiently vague (“preserving the peace”) as to be downright frightening from a civil liberties perspective.

But where is the justification for using the device in the first place? What are the cases of officer injury which could have been avoided only by the use of a Taser, and not pepper spray, a K9, bean bags, or some other non-lethal means? Is it a great new toy, like your iPhone, or is the Taser really necessary? Perhaps the department’s “less than lethal” force reports could shed light on this.

At a minimum, it is something a community itself should review and control.

Without knowing a subject personally, an officer can unwittingly use a Taser on a disabled, pregnant, minor, senior, handicapped, intoxicated, epileptic, uremic, acidotic, autistic, deaf, or diabetic person; a pacemaker patient, someone with an undiagnosed heart problems, stroke, neurological problems, psychotic, or someone on drugs for whom electroshock could contribute to death. Most of these people are not going to be able to respond to an officer’s commands predictably or quickly-enough (especially for an impatient officer), and especially given a disability or impairment.

We have seen numerous examples where officers have had no idea what type of medical or psychological episode a subject was having but “turned off” the subject with a Taser. The solution, it seems to me, is to limit Tasers only to situations where someone’s life is in danger. Simple “non-compliance” is not a good enough reason to use these lethal devices.

As in many communities, Dartmouth Police regulations do not place restrictions on Tasering subjects even after they have been taken down or handcuffed. Other communities do impose this restriction. What purpose, other than running the risk of killing someone, does repeatedly shocking a person who’s already in cuffs?

According to Dartmouth police guidelines, there is nothing to prevent Tasering fleeing subjects, even though the officer is not in danger. Would Dartmouth officers actually Taser a rowdy fan running around at a Crapo Field little league game? After all, we have a precedent in Philadelphia. Yet nothing is worth risking a human life just so a game is not delayed. If officers can show restraint in imminent pursuit of motor vehicles, they can also treat a Taser with as much caution as an automobile.

Dartmouth and Massachusetts regulations call for an EMT to be called to treat a Tasered subject, yet there is no requirement that officers using Tasers be able to revive a subject or even carry a defibrillator. There have been numerous cases where an apparently healthy young drug-free man was Tasered and died within 15 minutes, well before EMTs could arrive.

Some communities (for example, Mountain View and Boise) restrict the use of Tasers effectively to situations in which the use of a service revolver would be permitted. Rather than supplement less-than-lethal options like K9 and spray, in these communities Tasers are an extension of options to be used only where lethal force would be employed. This is a sensible recognition of the fact that Tasers are lethal. Shouldn’t we have such restrictions on their use in every community?

The Town of Dartmouth’s guidelines for the use of a Taser are so vague that it is not clear how “excessive force” would ever be defined. Any claim of “resisting” by an officer would be justified by vague rules and, by definition, whatever force an officer applied would not be regarded as excessive. With a service revolver it’s obvious if a mistake has been made. But how do you define excessive force when Tasers are used? And what about transparency and oversight?

For example, is there a process for community review whenever a Taser is deployed in Dartmouth and neighboring communities? In cases of lethal force, the District Attorney is to be notified. However, for less than lethal force, only a shift commander is notified, according to Dartmouth police regulations.

According to a University of Arizona study, there is a striking correlation between multiple Taser shocks and death. This is something that cannot be safely left solely to the judgment of an officer who wants to believe in the non-lethality of the device. What, then, is the maximum number of shocks which officers are permitted to administer to a person? What happens if an officer exceeds this number? What are the legal ramifications? And are members of Select Boards and City Councils aware of the insurance and legal risks?

In Charlotte, North Carolina a jury awarded a 17-year-old’s family $10 million for a wrongful death claim against the Taser manufacturer. Cities are directly on the hook for damages if officers violate civil rights, ignore Taser operating instructions, or fail to provide adequate medical care for a subject after being Tasered. The city of Albuquerque paid out $275,000; Moberly, Missouri paid out $2.4 million; Antioch, California paid out $750,000; Fort Collins, Colorado $225,000; and dozens of other cities paid out sums capped by $100,000 or $200,000 limits of state liability for wrongful deaths. Several Illinois cities joined in a suit against the manufacturer because Tasers had been marketed as non-lethal and the cities were themselves being sued in wrongful death cases. Max Vasquez was awarded a $1 million settlement from the Ventura County police department. A man who was having a stroke and was Tasered for “non-compliance” won a half million dollar settlement from the city of Riverside, California. A man in Marin County, California who was Tasered for falling and refusing to go to the hospital was awarded $1.9 million. Waveland, Missouri had to settle an epidemic of police abuse cases in which town officers improperly used Tasers on people who were stopped, detained or arrested. Even law enforcement officers accidentally shocked by Tasers have sued for lost wages and injuries. Rosalind Jones of Galveston, Texas was training officers on the use of Tasers when she suffered lasting nerve damage. Two officers in Las Vegas won similar cases. While Massachusetts has limits on punitive damages, the lifelong care of a paraplegic or coma victim of Tasering would be quite expensive.

The Taser X26 permits downloads of usage statistics. What procedures are in place for an independent body to collect and review these statistics? Again, accountability is the concern. Currently, according to Massachusetts law St.2004, c. 170 data must be conveyed to various state offices and transmitted to a university for analysis within one year. This same information should be conveyed monthly to municipal government and made available to the public long before it is bundled for academic studies.

Finally, Massachusetts is one of eight states that restrict the use of Tasers to law enforcement officers. Why? Because Massachusetts recognizes the lethality of the device:

Section 131J. No person shall possess a portable device or weapon from which an electrical current, impulse, wave or beam may be directed, which current, impulse, wave or beam is designed to incapacitate temporarily, injure or kill, except: (1) a federal, state or municipal law enforcement officer…

We, as a community, ought to severely restrict the use of such equipment. Tasers should only be used by specially-trained officers with EMT training or used only when EMT’s are en route. It should be up to a community, not the police, to adopt guidelines for Taser use similar to those used by Mountain View, California and elsewhere.

Technology can be extremely seductive. Whether you’re a teacher, auto mechanic, or a police chief, you want the latest gadgets and technology. But Tasers are not toys. They’re not pepper spray. They’re not bean bags. They’re not K9’s, which might chew someone’s hand up a bit. Tasers can and do kill. They can also be easily abused for trivial or punitive purposes, as many examples demonstrate. For all these reasons there must be restrictions and community oversight on their use.

Additional References

• Unregulated Use of Taser Stun Guns Threatens Lives, ACLU of Northern California Study Finds
• U.N.: Tasers Are A Form Of Torture
• U.N. Calls Tasers Torture

Safety

• Judge rules for Taser in cause-of-death decisions
• National study by the DOJ examines Taser deaths Study of Deaths Following Electro Muscular Disruption

Sample Abuses

86-year old bedridden woman Tasered:

• Tased 86 Year Old Granny Receives Settlement From El Reno Police

Diabetic seizure victim Tasered:

• For Being Tasered Repeatedly While Having A Diabetic Seizure, Man Sues Police

Political Expression suppressed:

• Pittsburgh police fire Tasers at recruiting protest
• Police surround peaceful demonstration using tazer and rubber bullets

Other Filmed Taser incidents

• Family Seeks Justice In Taser Death – CBS News
• Man tased for Philly game disruption
• Man Tased by bored Utah cop… gets $40,000!
• Missouri Police Taser Boy With Broken Back 19 Times
• Off-duty Cop Uses Taser on Man Holding His Newborn Baby
• Ohio cop Tasers pregnant woman
• Police Taser Handicapped Teen
• Racist Cop Tasers Young Black Male To Death
• Taser Torture Death of Deacon Frederick Williams After Epileptic Seizure
• Taser Torture of a Skateboarder
• Tasered in 23 seconds
• University of Florida student Tasered at Kerry forum

No one should be surprised by this week’s outpouring of sadness and rage over the nation’s most recent police slaying of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop who had 10 complaints of bad conduct, none ever resulting in disciplinary action. As much as the president attempted to portray the protests as the handiwork of lawless criminals, to many it is now finally dawning that the issue is really lawless cops and systemic racism.

As with Ferguson and Minneapolis, whenever we read stories of police abuse they invariably involve white cops and black or brown citizens. If not the police it’s the courts, prisons, or immigration authorities dispensing routine cruelty to people of color. You don’t have to be particularly perceptive to recognize the common factor; you just need a long memory and open eyes. Racism permeates every aspect of American life — especially the criminal justice system. Most lethal and shameful of all, American police are murdering black and brown men and women with impunity.

And if you think George Floyd’s protesters are angry only at so-called officers of the law, think again. That the protests are happening on a national scale ought to tell you that it’s the system protesters are angry at — and those who defend that system.

The Black Lives Matter movement arose after the murder of Michael Brown by a white Missouri cop. Since the Ferguson riot that followed Brown’s death there have been many more such killings — regarded properly as lynchings since no court of law condemned the accused, pronounced a guilty verdict, or determined a death sentence.

No, a buzz-cut with a badge took it upon himself to end a black man’s life. And, with rare exceptions, white police officers often manage to avoid consequences with a phrase few even believe anymore: “I feared for my life.” Then, the officer’s union makes sure no serious investigation is done, while the city offers blood money to the victim’s family while refusing to press charges against the officer. In this manner most of these lynchings have been quietly resolved without ever creating a ripple in a system that actually encourages them.

The particular outrage of George Floyd’s murder was that officer Derek Chauvin calmly knelt on the handcuffed man’s neck for seven minutes until he died on the spot. All while a frantic public recorded the slaying, imploring Chauvin to get off Floyd and let him breathe. This time there could be no “I feared for my life” defense. It was simply a case of a white cop committing a murder he thought he could get away with in broad daylight.

Because a thousand other cops have gotten away with exactly the same.

Early in the Democratic primaries, when Elizabeth Warren was still campaigning, Scott Hovsepian of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police (MassCOP) blasted Warren for referring to the shooting of Michael Brown as a “murder.”

But Warren was spot-on. With black men having a one in a thousand chance of being fatally shot by police in their lifetime — two times the rate for whites — there really is no other word that suits such extreme indifference to life but murder. We are in fact so indifferent to these killings that police shootings aren’t even tracked by a government agency.

Delicate ears may prefer the phrases “wrongful death” or “unauthorized use of force.” But who are we kidding? Even when the evidence is crystal-clear that a police shooting was completely unnecessary and violated any number of departmental policies or protocols, officials rarely admit to mistakes, instead trotting out a legal doctrine known as Qualified Immunity which effectively gives policemen a license to kill — even when they have previously exhibited bad judgment, have psychological problems, or a history of violence toward the non-white public. Even when the officer lies. Even when there is a video.

Hovsepian’s angry letter to Warren recited a litany of bullshit arguments law enforcement officials regularly use to reject public oversight and accountability:

“I want to make this as clear as possible and every member of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police wants you to understand; your labeling of law enforcement as racist and violent is unacceptable and dangerous. Maybe I didn’t deliver the message strong enough the last time we spoke. YOUR POLITICAL PANDERING FOR PRESIDENTIAL VOTES IS GETTING POLICE OFFICERS AND CITIZENS HURT AND KILLED. […] Your inflammatory rhetoric results in the erosion of relationships that members of law enforcement have developed within our communities. […] Graham v. Connor 490 U.S. at 396-97 (1989), provides in part: The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene…”

Unacceptable and dangerous. For a moment, a reader might be excused for thinking Hovsepian meant the national epidemic of police officers slaughtering black men, two thirds of them unarmed. Hovsepian actually cited Qualified Immunity as the police officer’s shield from charges that would normally count as murder in the second degree — “acts that demonstrate extreme indifference to human life.” But it’s not police killings that we ought to be worried about, says Hovsepian — no, it’s public criticism of the police that is killing officers.

Two years ago at Dillard University, Hovsepian took issue with Warren’s characterization of the entire U.S. criminal justice system. Warren said that “the hard truth about our criminal justice system: it’s racist… I mean front to back.” Hovsepian hissed at Warren’s characterization as “cancerous rhetoric” and charged that criticism of police was lethal: “Your statements put each and every one of us in danger. Your statement dehumanizes every officer who puts on a uniform…”

Playing the part of the wronged and “dehumanized” party may be nothing but a rhetorical ploy, but it is precisely the same racist argument that Alt-Right darling Tucker Carlson makes that White Supremacy is a hoax because white people have become the real victims of the American legacy of slavery.

Last year the Washington Post reported that, “among men of all races, ages 25 to 29, police killings are the sixth-leading cause of death, according to a study led by Frank Edwards of Rutgers University.” In 2018 police killed 1,164 people. The number of black people killed by police (215) exceeded all police officers who died in the line of duty (148), servicemen killed in action (2) and Americans killed by Islamic terrorists (0) combined. There were only 23 days in 2018 when police did not kill someone. Thirteen of the 100 largest police departments accounted for a large percentage of police murders that year. 99% of all police killings never resulted in officers being convicted of any charges. In 2018 Americans were ten times more likely to die from being shot by a cop than in a mass shooting.

So, if anyone has a legitimate and “reasonable fear,” it is civilians fearing police violence, not the other way around. Americans are increasingly afraid, too, of militarized policing that is morphing into something very like an occupation. Following the protests of Michael Brown’s murder, police turned Ferguson’s Canfield Drive into Fallujah. This week, in an absolutely fascist move for no other purpose than a photo-op, Trump called in a heavily militarized force to disperse non-violent protestors.

While there are obviously many good police officers and some decent police chiefs, from the 30,000 foot view Warren was absolutely right. The list of black victims of the pandemic of police abuse never stops growing – Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, just to name a few of the thousands in my lifetime.

We know what skin colors predominate among America’s 2.5 million incarcerated brothers and sisters, sons and daughter, mothers, and fathers. The legacy of slavery is apparent to anyone who has studied criminal justice issues or simply reads the newspaper. The Central Park Five, whose story was recently portrayed in Netflix’s “When They See Us,” embody everything that is wrong with America’s racist criminal justice system — police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct and overreach, brutal prisons — even an ad from a future president that read like a call to lynch five young men of color.

No, MassCOP’s Scott Hovsepian had it completely backwards when he charged that criticism of police racism puts officers at risk and undermines their work. In truth it is racist cops who undermine community confidence in police departments and contribute to a community’s fear of helping police reduce crime. No matter how many public relations campaigns, youth programs, listening sessions, or ride-alongs police departments use to blunt community criticism, nothing compensates for all the damage that racist officers inflict.

Take the case of 20 year Muskegon, Michigan police officer Charles Anderson. Anderson put his house on the market and apparently didn’t think he needed to put his KKK application or his Confederate flags away. A black couple touring the home realized the officer was a racist and dug into Anderson’s history, discovering he had been cleared in the fatal shooting of a black man in 2009. Neither the killing nor the exoneration was a surprise.

Or a story last year describing Galveston, Texas cops leading a black man, slave-style, between the mounted officers’ horses. Police chief Vernon Hale offered a feeble explanation, “Although this is a trained technique and best practice in some scenarios, I believe our officers showed poor judgement in this instance.” But it was poor judgment neither investigated nor punished.

Sergeant Heather Taylor, a member of the St. Louis Metro police department, was interviewed by CBS News as part of a series on racial bias in American police departments. “Do you think that there are white supremacists on the police force?” CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues asked. “Yes” Taylor replied. “You didn’t even pause,” Pegues said. “Have you seen some of the Facebook posts of some of our suspended officers right now?” Taylor responded. “Yes.”

Taylor could have been referring to Facebook posts collected by the Plain View Project, which to date has permanently recorded over 5,000 racist posts — that’s from only eight cities. The Project’s homepage says that “our concern is not whether these posts and comments are protected by the First Amendment. Rather, we believe that because fairness, equal treatment, and integrity are essential to the legitimacy of policing, these posts and comments should be part of a national dialogue about police” — a dialog shut down by police officials who claim that such a discussions put their lives at risk.

Blue Lives matter to police officers, but the same concern for human life doesn’t seem to extend to civilian life — especially black lives. In 2016 an Oregon police officer posted an image of a Black Lives Matter protest with a comment, “When encountering such mobs remember, there are 3 pedals on your floor. Push the right one all the way down.” No surprise, this was precisely what at least one NYPD cop did to citizens in New York protesting the murder of George Floyd: hit the gas pedal and plowed into the crowd.

The Facebook page of Santa Fe, New Mexico Sergeant Troy Baker, also the police union president and a police cadet instructor, was a veritable cesspool of racist and homophobic rants, violent threats, and Confederate flags. Baker survived an internal investigation when no violation of department policy was determined, and he was allowed to retire early, remaining on the city payroll for eight months to obtain his pension.

Springfield, Massachusetts cop Conrad Lariviere thought white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. running down Heather Heyer in Charlotteville was pretty funny. “Hahahaha love this, maybe people shouldn’t block roads,” Lariviere wrote on Facebook. When confronted with the post, Lariviere told MassLive.com, “I am not a racist and don’t believe in what any of those protesters are doing, I’m a good man who made a stupid comment and would just like to be left alone.”

Lariviere was eventually fired but the damage had already been done. “It will take us months, if not years, to earn back the level of public trust we once had,” Police Commissioner John Barbieri said. “It’s never easy to terminate a fellow officer, and I take no comfort in doing so.” But Lariviere’s union, Local 364 of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, issued a statement saying it was —

“extremely disappointed in the decision of Commissioner Barbieri to terminate the employment of Officer Conrad Lariviere. Officer Lariviere’s comments on Facebook were made in his capacity as a private citizen […] While some may find Off. Lariviere’s comments to have been insensitive, we do not believe that they rise to the level of misconduct, and certainly do not warrant termination, even if there was a clear policy involved […] We also believe that the subject of the Facebook posting was a matter of public concern, and protected speech. We believe that the termination is based on political considerations, not a fair, impartial assessment of the evidence…”

Racist conduct and exercising poor judgement are, for many police associations, insignificant or irrelevant concerns for officers charged with serving the public fairly.

In Phoenix, Arizona, 75 cops were caught on Facebook bashing Muslims, African-Americans, gays, and feminists. When Trayvon Martin was murdered, Phoenix officer Joshua Ankert wrote, “CONGRATULATIONS GEORGE ZIMMERMAN!!! Thank you for cleaning up our community one thug at a time.” Officer Dave Swick posted a roadside sign that said, “Ferguson protestors ahead, speed up, aim well.” Police dispatcher Christina Begay shared a picture of two cops laughing with the caption: “They said, ‘F–k the police,’ so I said ‘F–k your 911 call, I’ll get to your dying home boy when I finish my coffee.” Officer David Pallas posted a meme showing the Quran, with a caption that read: “HOW ABOUT BANNING THIS. IT OFFENDS ME!!” The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association defended the posts. “People — including cops — say things they regret.”

Add to a climate of hate the many unfortunate interactions between police officers and young people. Stop and Frisk — violations of the Fourth Amendment — go by many names: “community engagement,” “meet and greet,” “youth liaison.” But they only add to the fear, distrust and hatred many people have of police officers. In New Bedford a young man, Malcolm Gracia, is dead because police officers decided to aggressively “engage” a group of young men at Temple Landing after seeing what they thought could be a “gang handshake.”

After allegedly stabbing an officer — the details of which the police greatly exaggerated — Gracia was shot three times in the back and once in the side of the head. But the entire interaction should never have happened. “Even on the [police] version of the facts, the stop would be unlawful,” Judge Thomas F. McGuire Jr. wrote in a memorandum on a civil lawsuit filed by the victim’s sister. The City of New Bedford for many years claimed that the incident had occurred because of insufficient policies on “engagement” with youth. But after the ACLU filed several FOIA requests, the city’s argument collapsed. Police should have simply followed the law.

But it’s not just a few bad apples or the frequently-cited lack of clear policies. As we saw in the case of Santa Fe, New Mexico, departmental racism often reflects, and is even encouraged by, the leadership of police unions and associations who represent tens of thousands of officers.

Consider Hovsepian’s Brother in Blue, Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, New York City’s second largest police union. Mullins thought it was fine to share a video made by white supremacist Colin Flaherty (author of “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry”) that calls black people “welfare queens,” “scam artists” and “monsters.” The film uses Trump-styled language:

“When a suspect chooses to flee from police, it is never for anything good,” the narrator says. “When a suspect flees a car at night in the projects, it can only be for something incredibly bad. One of the most astonishing aspects of police work in an urban environment, is the fact that almost literally no one has a job. The section 8 scam artists and welfare queens have mastered the art of gaming the taxpayer. Bounce from baby mama to baby mama, impregnate as many women as possible. She gets the welfare benefits, and you get the flop house benefits. Symbiotic.”

Mullins, nose freshly rubbed in his own white supremacy, uttered “I have black friends, white friends, Asian friends. I wouldn’t want to insult anyone. I don’t think one incident defines who I am.”

Or consider the nation’s largest group of sheriffs, the National Sheriff’s Association, which once sponsored its own crowdfunded border wall donation site but has now outsourced it to the American Border Foundation (ABF), an organization managed by white supremacists and supported by armed militias. (After months, ABF has raised only $222K of its $450 million goal).

According to Political Research Associates, a group that tracks nationalist currents in the U.S., sheriff departments throughout the country are riddled with members of the Patriot movement, Constitutional Sheriffs, militia members, Christian Identitarians, and white supremacists. Right here at home, Bristol County Massachusetts sheriff Tom Hodgson sits on the board of a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group — FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, established by white supremacist John Tanton.

But combine police racism with hyper-patriotism, militarism and PTSD, and you’ve got a big, big, big problem.

Since 9-11 more than 2 million Americans have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Justice runs a program called COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) which provides grants to communities to turn “vets to cops.” In 2016 the DOJ handed out $119 million to help communities pay for approximately 900 policemen. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has created a recruitment guide for veterans, and veterans can use their GI Bill benefits while attending police academy. America increasingly says “thank you for your service” to its warriors by re-deploying them domestically.

But programs like these, and hiring practices that favor ex-military, have a serious downside. By prioritizing military experience over diversity, police departments put communities at risk. For example, the San Jose Police Department, a force with serious racism problems, sees veterans as naturals for the police “because we have a paramilitary structure, [and] military veterans often times can easily integrate.” What ever happened to community policing?

Then there are the after-effects of war. With an increasing percentage of veterans becoming police officers thanks to programs like COPS, many officers seem to think they are still fighting the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents. Ellen Kirshman, a psychologist who works with police officers, says that between 19% and 34% of all officers show some sign of PTSD: “This is pretty alarming. An officer with PTSD cannot think clearly, is probably hyper vigilant, has a short fuse, may not be sleeping well because of nightmares, might be policing in a reckless manner…” And this is precisely what one frequently sees in videos of police encounters with black men. Legislation has been signed into law to help officers with PTSD, but what about the public? Aren’t there cops who are simply too traumatized to serve the public? Even when they are identified, it’s difficult to remove them from the force.

When Elizabeth Warren spoke about the criminal justice system, she was talking about much more than policing. Yet police unions have become powerful lobbies and relentless opponents of criminal justice and prison reform. Natasha Lennard reports in the Intercept on the savage negative campaign the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA) waged against Governor Mario Cuomo’s criminal justice reforms. Likewise, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent over $10 million lobbying for the Three Strikes law, mandatory life sentences, and prison expansions. In Illinois, police unions waged a campaign to stop the closure of the brutal Tamms Supermax prison. And we have fifty states just like this.

But nothing shows how racist the criminal justice system is as clearly as the history of opposition to reforming it.

In 1991 Rep. William Edwards introduced H.R.2972, the Police Accountability Act of 1991. The bill made it “unlawful for any governmental authority to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that deprives persons of their constitutional or statutory rights, privileges, or immunities.” The bill had only 10 co-sponsors and never made it out of committee.

In 2000 John Conyers Jr. sponsored H.R. 3927, the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act of 2000, which sought to impose national standards on law enforcement as we currently do in education. It had only thirteen Democratic co-sponsors and never made it to a vote. In 2015 Conyers again filed H.R.2875, this time with 48 co-sponsors. But again it died.

In 2015 Rep. Henry Johnson Jr. sponsored H.R.1102, the Police Accountability Act of 2015, which had 15 co-sponsors and died. The bill amended “title 18, United States Code, to provide a penalty for assault or homicide committed by certain State or local law enforcement officers, and for other purposes.” Again in 2017 Johnson filed H.R.4331, with 8 lonely co-sponsors. Again, it died.

In 2017 Rep. Gwen Moore sponsored H.R. 3060, Preventing Tragedies between Police and Communities Act of 2017, which required that police departments receiving federal funding train officers in de-escalation techniques. The bill had only 24 co-sponsors and died in committee — having also failed in 2016.

In 2017 Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee sponsored H.R.47: Kalief’s Law, which sought to amend the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to provide for the humane treatment of youths in police custody. The bill had only one co-sponsor and there was never a roll call vote.

Whether a majority or minority in Congress, police accountability has never been a priority for Democrats or Republicans. E. Tammy Kim, in an excellent piece in the Nation (“What to Do About the Police”), writes that, “as it stands, the three branches of government are unwilling to regulate the police. Mayors and governors defer to police chiefs and union presidents; judges make cheesecloth of the Fourth and 14th Amendments; and legislators vote again and again to increase law-enforcement budgets.”

In a 2015 ruling the Supreme Court gave police broad latitude to shoot at citizens recklessly and with impunity, when it rejected a suit against a Texas police officer who fired into a car with a high power rifle from an overpass, paralyzing a driver. The officer joked: “How’s that for proactive?”

In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Kisela v. Hughes that police officers can not be sued for arbitrary and unnecessary shootings — effectively granting law enforcement a deluxe edition of Constitutional rights. In dissenting, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling another sign of “unflinching willingness” to protect rogue cops and wrote that the decision “transforms the doctrine [of qualified immunity] into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.” Cops in America today truly have a license to kill.

With one exception, every piece of reform legislation mentioned above was sponsored by an African-American. And that ought to tell you something — white people are failing to step up in sufficient numbers to fix injustices involving police, the courts, prisons, parole and probation systems, or to provide adequate rehabilitation and treatment of those ensnared in the “system.”

To quote Warren’s again, “the hard truth about our criminal justice system: it’s racist… I mean front to back.”

This is a lightly edited version of a post from August 2019.

A March 18 complaint from 51 ICE detainees at the Bristol County House of Corrections warns of a potential outbreak of the COVID-19 virus at the Dartmouth, Massachusetts facility because of unhealthy conditions of their confinement. Another 10 detainees did not sign the complaint for fear of retaliation from jail officials, according to a copy of the complaint. Detainees say that at least two potentially infected officers, one who was sent home on March 16, may have exposed an entire wing of ICE detainees to the Coronavirus.

The complaint reads in part:

“The ICE detainees of Unit B of the Bristol Correctional Center, individually and collectively, would like to highlight serious concerns about the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus within the facility of Bristol Correctional Center.

The facility safety conditions and the conditions of its personnel, in light of two recent and separate episodes, have raised the concern into a very serious matter.

Specifically, on March 14, 2020 a Correctional Officer was observed to be symptomatic of the COVID-19 virus during his shift followed by another C.O. on March 16, 2020 that was later on replaced by a colleague.

Two separate and serious episodes recently occurred and have alarmed the entire detainee population of Unit B and prompted a number of detainees to file their own Sick Call / Medical Encounter Request.

Unit B is comprised of sixty-six (66) beds, fifty-seven (57) of them occupied, one of them filled as recently as 24 hours ago…”

The detainees assert that prisoners are held in conditions that almost guarantee that they will become infected: they are housed closer than 6 feet apart; and in groups six times larger than the recommendation of 10 people in proximity at one time.

The complaint asks that detainees be released if they have serious medical conditions or are considered low-risk, or that they be released on bond if they have rescheduled hearings. The complaint also asks that detainees scheduled for deportation be repatriated within five days instead of remaining in dangerous condidtions for an indeterminate period of time.

Copies of the complaint were sent to Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, the Bristol County Sheriff, Correctional Psychiatric Services (the medical vendor), the Massachusetts Department of Health, and the ACLU.

The ICE detainees are appealing to the public for help.

“We are hoping that you will mobilize on our behalf by contacting your local congressman and any and all TV and media outlets. […] We are trapped inside […] and in fear for our lives. Please help!”

Despite prisoner claims that a couple dozen detainees are already showing symptoms of the virus, including coughing, the Sheriff’s media spokesperson, Jonathan Darling, told us on March 20 that there were no illnesses in the ICE wing and that no one was at risk.

On January 24th a handful of white extremists appeared before the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security to lie about immigrants and about the provisions of the Safe Communities Act. This relatively small number of opponents is loud and extremely well-funded. Almost all are financed or fronted by two organizations identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center — the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Both were founded by white supremacist and Michigan ophthalmologist John Tanton.

Indeed, it was Old Home Week at the State House for most of these people, who appear together repeatedly. And it’s time legislators knew precisely who they were listening to.

FAIR – Federation for American Immigration Reform

Tom Hodgson, who testified on January 24th in the Gardner auditorium, is not so much a county sheriff as he is a spokesman for FAIR. Hodgson serves on its National Advisory Board and sticks Massachusetts taxpayers with his travel expenses to FAIR events. Hodgson’s neglect of his day job in favor of his anti-immigrant crusade is costing incarcerated people their lives, health and rehabilitation.

Donald Rosenberg dropped in from Westlake Village, California to testify. Rosenberg is the president of AVIAC, Advocates For Illegal Alien Crime, a front group for FAIR whose events, such as the September 2019 “Angel Families” event in Washington DC, are organized by FAIR (whose legal arm, IRLI, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, provides legal services for AVIAC). Susan Tully, FAIR national field director and friend of Tom Hodgson, even admitted the connection to AVIAC in a Facebook post: “Working with our new group AVIAC.”

Maureen Maloney, AVIAC’s Vice President, also testified at the State House. Maloney told attendees at a 2017 event that the Catholic Church isn’t doing enough to turn its back on its own values: “The Catholic bishops make a fortune off of the refugees and the illegal aliens, and I’m a Catholic,” she claimed. When Maloney and Rosenberg (and FAIR) kicked off their organization at the National Press Club in Washington DC, their featured speaker was America’s white supremacist legislator Steve King, who was stripped of his committee assignments by Trump’s Tea Party GOP — no mean accomplishment in an age of concentration camps for Central American children and Stephen Miller’s brainstorm to ship DACA recipients out of the country in boxcars. Maloney herself is no slouch when it comes to unvarnished racism. Maloney was previously a member of The Remembrance Project, a group similar to AVIAC, also with substantial white supremacist connections.

CIS – Center for Immigration Studies

Jessica Vaughan fled Massachusetts for South Carolina’s more agreeable (to her) racial climate and is now the “Director of Policy Studies” for the Center for Immigration Studies. Vaughan testified for five minutes and answered questions for fourteen more before the Joint Committee. Rather than focus on the SPLC’s designation of CIS as a hate group, just consider Vaughan’s own words and deeds: “Vaughan haspreviously discussed her work with The American Free Press, a virulently anti-Semitic newspaper founded by Willis Carto, a Holocaust denier who was active on the radical right for over five decades before his death in 2015. She has also been a featured speaker at multiple extremist events including white nationalist publisher The Social Contract Press‘s annualWriter’s Workshop and the Federation for American Immigration Reform‘sSheriff Border Summit. At the Writer’s Workshop, white nationalist Peter Brimelow of the racist website VDARE also spoke. In 1996, Vaughan appeared on an episode of ‘Borderline,’ a show produced by FAIR, alongside Chilton Williamson, a longtime editor of Chronicles magazine, a publication with strong neo-Confederate ties that caters to the more intellectual wing of the white nationalist movement.”

Lou Murray, whose group Bostonians Against Sanctuary Cities appears to be a front for CIS (with ties to FAIR), sat right next to Vaughan and yielded most of his time to her. Many of Murray’s public appearances feature Vaughan, Hodgson, and retired ICE agents. Murray’s group’s Facebook page is also littered with links to FAIR and CIS. When Michelle Malkin was disinvited from an appearance at Bentley College, Murray and Vaughan organized a private event for her. And as if to demonstrate how insular this little circle is, Murray and Vaughan hosted Maureen Maloney at one of their events in West Roxbury. Murray, who was a 2016 Republican National Convention delegate, hates Muslims just as much as he does Latinos. Murray serves on Trump’s Catholic Advisory Group and has “nothing but high praise” for Trump’s 2017 executive order to ban Muslims. Murray said the US government should help “those populations who are most vulnerable,” including “the Christian population who is most at risk from ISIS, Al Qaeda and other Islamic dangers.”

Steve Kropper of MCIR, the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform, also testified before the Joint Committee. Kropper, who in 2012 was arrested for violating a domestic violence restraining order, came to the microphone joking about his divorce. The rest of his testimony was equally unamusing. MCIR appears to be another CIS front group, but is also affiliated with another of white supremacist John Tanton’s groups, the Social Contract Press. MCIR’s president John Thompson wrote in 2016 in the Social Contract Press that immigrants “are natural constituents for politicians desirous of expanding the welfare state. They could potentially provide career opportunities for social workers, ethnic militants, immigration lawyers, and poverty activists for generations to come.” Thompson goes on to quote Jason Richwine, a white supremacist known for his paper, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” which says, among other things:

• “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
• “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ, but the extent of its impact is hard to determine.”
• “The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.”

Thompson also quotes Robert Rector, of both the Heritage Foundation and CIS, whose 2007 study of the costs of undocumented refugees was rejected by even conservative Republicans (and eventually the Heritage Foundation itself) and Rector was blasted for his report’s sloppiness and dishonesty.

In March 2005 MCIR member Robert Casimiro, a Weymouth resident, flew to Arizona to join up with an armed militia called the Minuteman Project. According to a press release, “the project’s participants will also be conducting auxiliary border patrols, ‘spotting’ people crossing illegally and reporting them to the border patrol and the local authorities.” The Anti-Defamation League reported that Minuteman “members belonging to active vigilante groups, including their leadership, have been arrested on weapons charges and white supremacist and anti-governments groups continue to express interest and take part in organized ‘patrols’ of the border.”

These are just a few of the liars, racists, and extremists that routinely testify against Safe Communities.

On January 18th, a little over a hundred people marched from William Street to the Ash Street Jail to protest the incompetence and abuses of Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson, and to call for his resignation.

“After careful consideration
We invite your investigation
We don’t need your fascist nation
We don’t want your bloviation
Down with prison exploitation
You are always on vacation
You turned in your Congregation
Down with ICE participation
You are Bristol’s humiliation…”

Accompanied by a New Bedford Police Department escort, marchers chanted and carried signs with messages like “Hodgson is a Failure as a Jailer,” “No 287g,” “Stay Home and Do Your Job,” “Resign!” and “$348,922” — the dollar amount Hodgson received from ICE and “forgot” to pay back to Massachusetts taxpayers. Others read “Programs not Walls!” or “Demasiados suicidios – que verguenza!!!” (Too many suicides – shame!!!).

At the Ash Street jail marchers were met by about a dozen Bristol County Sheriff’s officers who said nothing and for the most part simply stared at protestors. Standing outside the oldest jail in the country, Bristol County for Correctional Justice (BCCJ) members cited the neglect, abuses, and malfeasance that characterize Hodgson’s administration of the jail and called for the sheriff to resign.

Protestors then marched back to Grace Episcopal Church, where there was a short speaking program followed by an opportunity for people from over a dozen groups from Providence to the Cape to exchange contact information.

At the church BCCJ member Joe Quigley moderated the presentation. Betty Ussach talked about jail suicides, Kathy Williams about Hodgson’s financial corruption and abuse of taxpayer money. Susan Czernicka covered Hodgson’s medical neglect, while Marlene Pollock highlighted Hodgson’s extensive contacts with white supremacists. Bishop Filipe Teixeira spoke about the struggle to visit immigrants in Hodgson’s jail and Kerry Mahoney, a community member, spoke movingly about the needless death and suffering at the jail because of Hodgson’s refusal to provide medically-assisted opioid treatment and other types of health care.

Lindsay Aldworth from the Coalition for Social Justice, Richard Drolet from the New Bedford Democratic City Committee, Diane Hahn from 1199 United Health Care Workers East, Jim Pimental from the Bricklayers Union and the Labor Council all offered their organizations’ support. Sally Fehervari from the Mansfield Dems and Adrian Ventura from Centro Comunidade de Trabajadores also spoke in support of ridding the county of Hodgson. Several organizations were unable to attend but sent greetings: the NAACP New Bedford Branch, FANG, Freedom for Immigrants, and Barnstable County’s Safe Communities Coalition. Immigration Justice in Eastern MA (from Plymouth County) and several members of Marching Forward (Dartmouth) also attended both the march and followup meeting.

Despite the outpouring of broad community support, WBSM’s Chris McCarthy — where ACLU FOIA records show Hodgson was actually offered a regular time slot — tried to portray the marchers as “the illegal alien lobby” and “the radical left,” accusing them of trying to overturn the will of voters — voters who were never offered another option in 2016. This was all par for the course for the aptly-named McCarthy, whose Islamophobia and gay-bashing can be seen in his Tweets from the ACLU filing. The Standard Times did not send a reporter to cover either the march or the meeting that followed.

Regardless of how the local media chose to ignore or characterize the fight by BCCJ and other groups opposed to Hodgson’s abuses — the fight goes on.

We will hold the rogue sheriff accountable.