Chicago Youth Nonprofit Sues City After Police Raid Over Free Food for Protesters

Chicago

A Chicago nonprofit that works on behalf of the city’s young adults sued the city this week. The lawsuit was filed by Chicago Freedom School (CFS)—an acclaimed nonprofit that provides support and educational programs for young Chicagoans—against the city, three police officers, and the Chicago Department for Business Affairs & Consumer Protection.

CFS alleges Chicago officials illegally raided a group facility on May 30 after the group offered a safe space to young city residents who had been protesting the police killings of George Floyd and other black Americans. The suit claims the city and its employees violated the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and Illinois state law, including state civil rights laws.

As the suit details, many protesters were caught off guard by a curfew the suit contends wasn’t even announced until anywhere from minutes before, to minutes after, it was set to take effect. Chicago government’s failure to notify protesters was exacerbated when the city also halted public transportation and ordered bridges downtown to be raised. Those actions by the city trapped many protesters downtown, both mandating they go home and leaving them without any legal or practical means to do so.

Left without other options, some protesters trapped by the city’s furtive curfew and closures sought refuge at CFS after several tweets invited them to do so.

“Two aldermen and other frontline organizers tweeted to let protesters know to head to the Freedom School if they needed free food, or just to charge their phones and drink some water,” Block Club Chicago reported. “The school was also organizing rides home for protesters stranded due to the curfew and [transit] stoppage.”

Police came, too, accompanying city regulators, the suit details. Once there, they “demanded entry” to the CFS facilities. Rebuffed, the suit alleges, they “conducted an illegal raid.” Inside, they claimed they saw CFS “serving large quantities of food without a proper retail food establishment license.”

CFS counters that it bought commercially made pizzas and snacks (including bottled water and Clif bars) for the protestors.

“[CFS] provided hungry young people with take-out pizza, granola bars, and bottled water,” says attorney Joey L. Mogul of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, which is representing CFS in its suit against the city, in an email to me this week. “Practically every youth organization in the City of Chicago provides young people the same types of food as part of their programming and practice.”

Indeed, CFS appears to be no more an unlicensed foodservice establishment than is a church that offers communion wafers to congregants, an office that buys lunch for employees and guests, a soccer team that provides orange slices to players, or a nonprofit that offers thousands of free meals to Chicago police officers.

So why this raid? Mogul tells me the raid was “retaliation” against CFS by city police and regulators “for supporting the protestors and the demonstration against racist police violence.”

I can’t imagine the city will win this case. It deserves to lose. And I certainly hope it does.

But I think there’s also a much larger point here. Chicago officials appear to view a community nonprofit that serves young black adults as some sort of licensing scofflaw because it bought and gave away free pizzas. Chicago officials also appear to believe that responding to that charitable act necessitated sending armed police officers to the nonprofit’s doorstep.

If that’s how Chicago officials treat nonprofits that serve vulnerable young members of the black community there, how must they treat black-owned for-profit businesses? 

That’s not a Chicago-only problem. Not by a long shot. Consider this black-owned Baltimore business was raided by police so many times its owner sued the police—and won. In a column last month, I discussed the terrible history of armed police actions against unlicensed food vendors in New York City, many of whom are immigrants and people of color.

And if a spurious licensing raid results in a criminal record?

“Laws restricting licensing opportunities for workers with criminal records have a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic workers,” a 2015 report prepared by the Obama administration noted.

For all these reasons and more, licensing reform must be a part of any effort to reduce the harms visited by the state upon black Americans and other marginalized communities. But first, Chicago’s mayor, police department, and consumer protection head must apologize to the Chicago Freedom School and the young adults the group’s work benefits.

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via IFTTT

Despite Its Government’s Antics, America Has Made Moral Progress in a Difficult Time

July 4th Independence Day

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently pointed out that 2020 started off like 1974 (an impeachment crisis), quickly became 1918 (a pandemic), turned into 1929 (an economic crash), and then became 1968 (massive urban unrest). Any country that endured so much in so short a time would lose its way. But over the last month, despite the increasing political polarization and strife, America has made some real moral progress on issues of racial justice. That is a far cry from many other countries, including India, my native land, where the pandemic has aborted the struggle to win basic rights and protections for persecuted minorities.

The turmoil in America after a cop’s brutal murder of George Floyd is giving authoritarian rulers around the world a serious bout of schadenfreude. China’s state media has gone into an overtly gloating mode. The Global Times‘ editor-in-chief wrote that he hoped U.S. politicos were enjoying what they were seeing “from their own windows,” given that Nancy Pelosi “once called the violent protests in Hong Kong ‘a beautiful sight to behold.'” During a phone call with Trump to discuss the pandemic, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the opportunity to express concern about the “ongoing civil disturbances in the U.S.” and wished Trump luck in bringing things under control, slyly suggesting that America’s travails with black agitation were no different from India’s with Muslim unrest.

And truth be told, judging by government tactics during the protests, there often isn’t much that separates the land of the free from other countries.

American law enforcement has responded to the protests over police brutality with…police brutality. It has deployed the same methods—tear gas, rubber bullets, batons—that China and India have deployed against protesters. And just like the leaders of those countries, Trump has suggested protesters are “thugs.” The Chinese media might be overstating matters by suggesting that its autocrats have responded to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters with more restraint. But Trump doesn’t exactly help by repeatedly tweeting “Law & Order” to signal the iron fist of the state. Or when he fantasizes openly about unleashing the most “vicious dogs and the most awesome weapons” against demonstrators.

And then there was his Bible photo-op, which primarily served to remind religious conservatives to stick with him through this period of unrest, just as he is sticking with them. This is exactly in line with Modi donning traditional Hindu saffron attire to rally his base, especially when he’s in political trouble.

But the moral compass of a country is not set by what the government does; it’s set by how the people respond to what the government does. And on that there is a world of difference between America and many other countries, especially India.

India’s Muslims are struggling not to upgrade themselves from their status as second-class citizens but just to remain citizens. Modi is an unabashed Hindu nationalist whose first act last August after his landslide re-election was to scrap the governing autonomy of majority-Muslim Kashmir, a northern state bordering Pakistan, and put it under federal control. It was a wildly popular move, even among the country’s secularly inclined Hindus, even though Modi put Kashmir’s duly elected leaders under house arrest, imposed a curfew, shut down schools, blacked out news, and suspended the internet. (Even during the pandemic, Kashmiris are being forced to travel several hours by train to neighboring states to access the internet and get basic information.)

That’s not all Modi did. He also obtained a favorable ruling from the Indian Supreme Court to build a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque that Hindu militants, himself included, razed with their bare hands some decades ago. And then he launched a diabolical scheme to scrap the citizenship of millions of Indian Muslims and ultimately send them to detention camps.

When this triggered protests by India’s Muslims and their progressive backers, especially on college campuses, the Modi government responded with brutal violence. The police stormed Muslim colleges and bashed unarmed students, and they allowed private militants associated with Modi’s party do the same on a prestigious New Delhi campus.

Hindus have long stereotyped Muslim men as inherently dangerous and excused all kinds of harsh tactics to “domesticate” them. So in the wake of the growing state violence, Muslim women took it upon themselves to use Gandhian tactics of civil resistance to spearhead a movement for Muslim rights. They cobbled together a site in southeast Delhi for a 24/7 vigil, drawing tens of thousands of protesters—many of them Muslims, but also others.

Far from taking their plight seriously, the broader Hindu community complained bitterly about the traffic disruptions, prompting some local Hindu politicians to call the protesters “traitors.” The result? Even more violence, resulting in a mini-pogrom in February.

Worse, whatever little goodwill the Muslim women enjoyed evaporated as soon as the pandemic hit. Many Indians openly pilloried them as scientifically backward Neanderthals jeopardizing public health for the sake of an overblown crusade—never mind that many of the protesters took social distancing precautions. Authorities used coronavirus as a pretext to unceremoniously evict them in late March, although the virus didn’t stop Modi from holding prayers ahead of breaking ground for the temple on the site of the razed mosque.

Contrast this with how Floyd’s murder galvanized the movement against police brutality in America. Spontaneous protests erupted in 2,000 cities and towns across the country. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the Republican contender for the presidency in 2012 and not exactly the activist type, joined the Black Lives Matter march in Washington, D.C.

Even when the protests turned rowdy and violent, the broader American public did not turn its back on their cause. In the two weeks immediately after Floyd’s death, there was a 20-point jump in support for Black Lives Matter. A Monmouth University poll found that a whopping 76 percent of Americans have come to regard racism and discrimination as a “big problem,” up 26 points from 2015. The poll also found that 57 percent of voters thought the anger behind the demonstrations was fully justified.

This is simply stunning, given that when Black Lives Matter was launched in 2013, it was widely regarded as an extremist, America-hating outfit. Now far more people are taking its concerns about systemic racism in policing seriously.

Even the political classes are taking their demands seriously. Confederate symbols are finally being purged everywhere—including such stubborn bastions as Mississippi. (Arguably, the danger now is that the pendulum might swing too much in the opposite direction.) There is growing local momentum for reforming violent policing practices with a dozen states working on laws to ban chokeholds and kneeling on suspects. There is a new openness to experiment with new forms of community policing (some of them rather daft) that don’t involve cops, to demilitarize the police, and to scale back police funding.

At the national level, even Trump has realized that simply harrumphing “Law & Order” won’t cut it anymore and has signed an executive order encouraging police reform. Police unions are no longer a political sacred cow, not even for Republicans. The GOP has floated a criminal justice reform bill in the Senate to counter the more sweeping reform bill proposed by the Democratic House. The House bill even takes aim at “qualified immunity,” the doctrine that has protected rogue cops from civil liability. This has been such a sacrosanct doctrine around the country that The Washington Post‘s veteran criminal justice writer, Radley Balko, recently observed that if someone had told him two months ago that qualified immunity would be on the political chopping board, he would have laughed.

America obviously has a long way to go to end police brutality and achieve anything approaching full racial justice. (And under Trump, it has taken a disturbingly draconian turn on immigration.) But there is a growing urgency to get there, even during a pandemic and political tumult, which shows just how deeply moral striving is woven into the American psyche. In India, the more the state brutalizes persecuted groups, the more the dominant majority turns on them. Americans, by contrast, never stop facing up to their country’s manifold injustices and sins.

That’s what makes America great—and will continue to make it better, regardless of the antics of its rulers.

Happy Fourth!

A version of this column appeared in The Week.

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Chicago Youth Nonprofit Sues City After Police Raid Over Free Food for Protesters

Chicago

A Chicago nonprofit that works on behalf of the city’s young adults sued the city this week. The lawsuit was filed by Chicago Freedom School (CFS)—an acclaimed nonprofit that provides support and educational programs for young Chicagoans—against the city, three police officers, and the Chicago Department for Business Affairs & Consumer Protection.

CFS alleges Chicago officials illegally raided a group facility on May 30 after the group offered a safe space to young city residents who had been protesting the police killings of George Floyd and other black Americans. The suit claims the city and its employees violated the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and Illinois state law, including state civil rights laws.

As the suit details, many protesters were caught off guard by a curfew the suit contends wasn’t even announced until anywhere from minutes before, to minutes after, it was set to take effect. Chicago government’s failure to notify protesters was exacerbated when the city also halted public transportation and ordered bridges downtown to be raised. Those actions by the city trapped many protesters downtown, both mandating they go home and leaving them without any legal or practical means to do so.

Left without other options, some protesters trapped by the city’s furtive curfew and closures sought refuge at CFS after several tweets invited them to do so.

“Two aldermen and other frontline organizers tweeted to let protesters know to head to the Freedom School if they needed free food, or just to charge their phones and drink some water,” Block Club Chicago reported. “The school was also organizing rides home for protesters stranded due to the curfew and [transit] stoppage.”

Police came, too, accompanying city regulators, the suit details. Once there, they “demanded entry” to the CFS facilities. Rebuffed, the suit alleges, they “conducted an illegal raid.” Inside, they claimed they saw CFS “serving large quantities of food without a proper retail food establishment license.”

CFS counters that it bought commercially made pizzas and snacks (including bottled water and Clif bars) for the protestors.

“[CFS] provided hungry young people with take-out pizza, granola bars, and bottled water,” says attorney Joey L. Mogul of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, which is representing CFS in its suit against the city, in an email to me this week. “Practically every youth organization in the City of Chicago provides young people the same types of food as part of their programming and practice.”

Indeed, CFS appears to be no more an unlicensed foodservice establishment than is a church that offers communion wafers to congregants, an office that buys lunch for employees and guests, a soccer team that provides orange slices to players, or a nonprofit that offers thousands of free meals to Chicago police officers.

So why this raid? Mogul tells me the raid was “retaliation” against CFS by city police and regulators “for supporting the protestors and the demonstration against racist police violence.”

I can’t imagine the city will win this case. It deserves to lose. And I certainly hope it does.

But I think there’s also a much larger point here. Chicago officials appear to view a community nonprofit that serves young black adults as some sort of licensing scofflaw because it bought and gave away free pizzas. Chicago officials also appear to believe that responding to that charitable act necessitated sending armed police officers to the nonprofit’s doorstep.

If that’s how Chicago officials treat nonprofits that serve vulnerable young members of the black community there, how must they treat black-owned for-profit businesses? 

That’s not a Chicago-only problem. Not by a long shot. Consider this black-owned Baltimore business was raided by police so many times its owner sued the police—and won. In a column last month, I discussed the terrible history of armed police actions against unlicensed food vendors in New York City, many of whom are immigrants and people of color.

And if a spurious licensing raid results in a criminal record?

“Laws restricting licensing opportunities for workers with criminal records have a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic workers,” a 2015 report prepared by the Obama administration noted.

For all these reasons and more, licensing reform must be a part of any effort to reduce the harms visited by the state upon black Americans and other marginalized communities. But first, Chicago’s mayor, police department, and consumer protection head must apologize to the Chicago Freedom School and the young adults the group’s work benefits.

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via IFTTT

Despite Its Government’s Antics, America Has Made Moral Progress in a Difficult Time

July 4th Independence Day

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently pointed out that 2020 started off like 1974 (an impeachment crisis), quickly became 1918 (a pandemic), turned into 1929 (an economic crash), and then became 1968 (massive urban unrest). Any country that endured so much in so short a time would lose its way. But over the last month, despite the increasing political polarization and strife, America has made some real moral progress on issues of racial justice. That is a far cry from many other countries, including India, my native land, where the pandemic has aborted the struggle to win basic rights and protections for persecuted minorities.

The turmoil in America after a cop’s brutal murder of George Floyd is giving authoritarian rulers around the world a serious bout of schadenfreude. China’s state media has gone into an overtly gloating mode. The Global Times‘ editor-in-chief wrote that he hoped U.S. politicos were enjoying what they were seeing “from their own windows,” given that Nancy Pelosi “once called the violent protests in Hong Kong ‘a beautiful sight to behold.'” During a phone call with Trump to discuss the pandemic, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the opportunity to express concern about the “ongoing civil disturbances in the U.S.” and wished Trump luck in bringing things under control, slyly suggesting that America’s travails with black agitation were no different from India’s with Muslim unrest.

And truth be told, judging by government tactics during the protests, there often isn’t much that separates the land of the free from other countries.

American law enforcement has responded to the protests over police brutality with…police brutality. It has deployed the same methods—tear gas, rubber bullets, batons—that China and India have deployed against protesters. And just like the leaders of those countries, Trump has suggested protesters are “thugs.” The Chinese media might be overstating matters by suggesting that its autocrats have responded to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters with more restraint. But Trump doesn’t exactly help by repeatedly tweeting “Law & Order” to signal the iron fist of the state. Or when he fantasizes openly about unleashing the most “vicious dogs and the most awesome weapons” against demonstrators.

And then there was his Bible photo-op, which primarily served to remind religious conservatives to stick with him through this period of unrest, just as he is sticking with them. This is exactly in line with Modi donning traditional Hindu saffron attire to rally his base, especially when he’s in political trouble.

But the moral compass of a country is not set by what the government does; it’s set by how the people respond to what the government does. And on that there is a world of difference between America and many other countries, especially India.

India’s Muslims are struggling not to upgrade themselves from their status as second-class citizens but just to remain citizens. Modi is an unabashed Hindu nationalist whose first act last August after his landslide re-election was to scrap the governing autonomy of majority-Muslim Kashmir, a northern state bordering Pakistan, and put it under federal control. It was a wildly popular move, even among the country’s secularly inclined Hindus, even though Modi put Kashmir’s duly elected leaders under house arrest, imposed a curfew, shut down schools, blacked out news, and suspended the internet. (Even during the pandemic, Kashmiris are being forced to travel several hours by train to neighboring states to access the internet and get basic information.)

That’s not all Modi did. He also obtained a favorable ruling from the Indian Supreme Court to build a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque that Hindu militants, himself included, razed with their bare hands some decades ago. And then he launched a diabolical scheme to scrap the citizenship of millions of Indian Muslims and ultimately send them to detention camps.

When this triggered protests by India’s Muslims and their progressive backers, especially on college campuses, the Modi government responded with brutal violence. The police stormed Muslim colleges and bashed unarmed students, and they allowed private militants associated with Modi’s party do the same on a prestigious New Delhi campus.

Hindus have long stereotyped Muslim men as inherently dangerous and excused all kinds of harsh tactics to “domesticate” them. So in the wake of the growing state violence, Muslim women took it upon themselves to use Gandhian tactics of civil resistance to spearhead a movement for Muslim rights. They cobbled together a site in southeast Delhi for a 24/7 vigil, drawing tens of thousands of protesters—many of them Muslims, but also others.

Far from taking their plight seriously, the broader Hindu community complained bitterly about the traffic disruptions, prompting some local Hindu politicians to call the protesters “traitors.” The result? Even more violence, resulting in a mini-pogrom in February.

Worse, whatever little goodwill the Muslim women enjoyed evaporated as soon as the pandemic hit. Many Indians openly pilloried them as scientifically backward Neanderthals jeopardizing public health for the sake of an overblown crusade—never mind that many of the protesters took social distancing precautions. Authorities used coronavirus as a pretext to unceremoniously evict them in late March, although the virus didn’t stop Modi from holding prayers ahead of breaking ground for the temple on the site of the razed mosque.

Contrast this with how Floyd’s murder galvanized the movement against police brutality in America. Spontaneous protests erupted in 2,000 cities and towns across the country. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the Republican contender for the presidency in 2012 and not exactly the activist type, joined the Black Lives Matter march in Washington, D.C.

Even when the protests turned rowdy and violent, the broader American public did not turn its back on their cause. In the two weeks immediately after Floyd’s death, there was a 20-point jump in support for Black Lives Matter. A Monmouth University poll found that a whopping 76 percent of Americans have come to regard racism and discrimination as a “big problem,” up 26 points from 2015. The poll also found that 57 percent of voters thought the anger behind the demonstrations was fully justified.

This is simply stunning, given that when Black Lives Matter was launched in 2013, it was widely regarded as an extremist, America-hating outfit. Now far more people are taking its concerns about systemic racism in policing seriously.

Even the political classes are taking their demands seriously. Confederate symbols are finally being purged everywhere—including such stubborn bastions as Mississippi. (Arguably, the danger now is that the pendulum might swing too much in the opposite direction.) There is growing local momentum for reforming violent policing practices with a dozen states working on laws to ban chokeholds and kneeling on suspects. There is a new openness to experiment with new forms of community policing (some of them rather daft) that don’t involve cops, to demilitarize the police, and to scale back police funding.

At the national level, even Trump has realized that simply harrumphing “Law & Order” won’t cut it anymore and has signed an executive order encouraging police reform. Police unions are no longer a political sacred cow, not even for Republicans. The GOP has floated a criminal justice reform bill in the Senate to counter the more sweeping reform bill proposed by the Democratic House. The House bill even takes aim at “qualified immunity,” the doctrine that has protected rogue cops from civil liability. This has been such a sacrosanct doctrine around the country that The Washington Post‘s veteran criminal justice writer, Radley Balko, recently observed that if someone had told him two months ago that qualified immunity would be on the political chopping board, he would have laughed.

America obviously has a long way to go to end police brutality and achieve anything approaching full racial justice. (And under Trump, it has taken a disturbingly draconian turn on immigration.) But there is a growing urgency to get there, even during a pandemic and political tumult, which shows just how deeply moral striving is woven into the American psyche. In India, the more the state brutalizes persecuted groups, the more the dominant majority turns on them. Americans, by contrast, never stop facing up to their country’s manifold injustices and sins.

That’s what makes America great—and will continue to make it better, regardless of the antics of its rulers.

Happy Fourth!

A version of this column appeared in The Week.

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via IFTTT

Editorial Notes on Police Brutality

topicsfuture

A deadly pandemic originates in Asia and sweeps around the globe, killing more than 100,000 Americans. A successful manned space mission briefly unites a nation with a sense of wonder. Police and National Guardsmen face off against protesters demanding racial justice and suppress riots in city streets. The military is tied up in unwinnable foreign entanglements, a culture war rages, and electoral politics is a dumpster fire.

It is 1969.

Reason magazine is a baby, just over a year old, and editor Lanny Friedlander is wrapping up the November issue. It is a small operation, so he has also written most of the contents.

The question he poses on the cover is “The Cops: Heroes or Villains?” He sketches the landscape: “After each recent mass police action that shed blood—People’s Park, Chicago, Harvard, Columbia—debate begins anew. ‘Liberals,’ ‘conservatives,’ ‘radicals,’ ‘lawnorder Democrats’ argue endlessly: were or were not the cops brutal?”

More than 50 years after Friedlander published his “editorial notes on police brutality,” you can add to that list George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis with a knee on his neck, Eric Garner choked on a New York City street corner, Breonna Taylor shot in her Louisville home during a drug raid gone wrong, and thousands of clashes between law enforcement and private citizens in the nationwide protests that followed. It is the same argument, with the same factions, in 2020.

“As is so often the case,” Friedlander writes ruefully, “it is the New Left that comes closest to the truth, if only accidently. It is absurd, they say, to argue whether or not the police were brutal in any particular instance because the system is brutal by definition. As the system’s agents of enforcement, the police cannot but be brutal.”

When it comes to police misconduct, there has been enough talk of “bad apples” in recent years to squeeze out gallons of cider. But the problem is not primarily the quality or character of the police officers themselves—though there are certainly police officers who lack character. It’s the damaging and backward incentives created by the system in which they operate.

The best way to minimize police violence is to maximize freedom and individual responsibility. (It is not, as the left in Friedlander’s time and our own might prefer, to abolish capitalism.) The reforms that he gestures toward—and that Reason has gone on to advocate in the decades since—are stunningly similar to many items on the wish lists of the Black Lives Matter protesters and their allies who have taken to the streets to protest violence and racism following Floyd’s death. But they also reflect the concerns of the entrepreneurs and homeowners who fear the destruction of their property and the threat to their safety posed by the protesters, or at least by the opportunistic looters and revolutionaries who accompany them, as well as by the state.

At the core of Friedlander’s argument is the notion that law enforcement officials—like everyone in a free society—must be answerable for their actions. “As it stands in America today, the police aid in the trampling of rights on such a massive scale that there is hardly a word sufficiently descriptive,” he writes. “Limited liability? The price of retribution due to the victims of the crimes committed by police on any single day would be beyond calculation, yet not only do these crimes go undenounced (for the most part), and the perpetrators, police and politicians, unpunished, but, even worse, the victims are forced through taxes to finance the operation and salaries of the criminals.”

This tracks neatly with several of the most promising avenues for reform in 2020. The first is the elimination of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields police and other government officials from liability in civil rights lawsuits unless the illegality of their specific actions was “clearly established” at the time of the offense.  At press time, the only Libertarian Party member of Congress, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, had just introduced a bill to eliminate that protection. He was joined in the effort by one of his most progressive colleagues, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass).

“The brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police is merely the latest in a long line of incidents of egregious police misconduct,” they wrote. “This pattern continues because police are legally, politically, and culturally insulated from consequences for violating the rights of the people whom they have sworn to serve.”

“Several of the things that allow police to stand above the law,” Friedlander goes on, “include the secrecy and tightknit quality of the police force, the personnel rules that characterize departments, and the comparative homogeneity of outlook among police (due to preselection, attrition, and assimilation).” The undue influence of police unions on the disciplinary process for officers accused of misconduct, and on the political officials who often have the final say in such matters, is a major and hitherto underappreciated barrier to reform. Breaking the police unions would align the incentives of officers better with the citizens they are meant to serve.

We must seriously revisit the scope of the powers and duties of police. While the movement to defund police forces is the simplest and most symbolic of these notions, the nitty-gritty list offers more to chew on: terminating 1033, the program that funnels surplus Department of Defense equipment to local police departments; eliminating techniques such as the chokehold from the police playbook; requiring officers to report inappropriate use of force by their colleagues.

One popular reform, mandatory wearable cameras, has failed to deliver on its promise. Video is a powerful medium, but data from districts where bodycams have been tried show their existence doesn’t seem to prevent violence, and the video itself is often contested. Friedlander anticipated this critique: “One cannot merely view a film of a cop clubbing a student and declare apriori [without] further data that what one has seen is or is not brutality.”

Today, officers caught on camera abusing peaceful protesters during gatherings specifically intended to draw attention to police brutality are being quickly identified, investigated, and suspended or fired, including officers in Buffalo, New York, who were captured shoving a white-haired man and then walking past him as he lay on the ground bleeding. But the fact that dozens of such interactions occur even in such high-scrutiny environments demonstrates the limits of reforms focused solely on transparency or policing itself. Cops don’t behave in a callous and brutal manner because they think they won’t get caught. They do so because they feel like they must.

Police officers are not, by and large, sadists. They are operating within a system that demands brutality from them. No reform can make a lasting impact if we continue to insist that officers enforce bad legislation. Because every interaction between police and citizens can escalate to deadly violence, we must think carefully about when such violence could possibly be worthwhile. People must be free to defend themselves if they are unjustly attacked. But too many of our laws require authorities to initiate force in order to prevent voluntary transactions. They also disproportionately punish those who seek to defend themselves from police. The Louisville police used a battering ram to knock down Taylor’s door while she was sleeping because a drug dealer sometimes received packages at her address. Her boyfriend tried to defend her. She ended up dead.

Floyd, and Garner before him, were initially accosted for the pettiest of crimes. In Floyd’s case, it was passing a suspected counterfeit $20 bill at a local food market. In Garner’s, it was selling loose cigarettes without a tax stamp in New York. Both men died crying out that they couldn’t breathe. While the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck was fired the next day, it took five long years before the same fate finally came to the officer responsible for Garner’s death. At press time, the officers responsible for Taylor’s death still have their jobs.

Right as that 1969 issue of Reason went to press, the first message was being successfully sent and received on ARPANet, the precursor to the internet. In the end, that message may prove to be the most important development in fostering a free and just society. Friedlander was right that video alone cannot get the job done. Nor will a single essay make much of a dent. “I don’t expect the reader to accept the material here as proof conclusive—it isn’t meant to be,” he wrote. “But at the very least the reader should now be aware how far from precise or rational are the statements and critiques concerning the police being offered by the mass media-recognized polemicists of the ‘left’ and ‘right.'”

In 2020, the national conversation about police brutality and its deep roots is more widespread, urgent, and voluminous than ever. It has been five decades since Friedlander’s essay. If we’re going to fix this broken system, it’s time to get started.

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Editorial Notes on Police Brutality

topicsfuture

A deadly pandemic originates in Asia and sweeps around the globe, killing more than 100,000 Americans. A successful manned space mission briefly unites a nation with a sense of wonder. Police and National Guardsmen face off against protesters demanding racial justice and suppress riots in city streets. The military is tied up in unwinnable foreign entanglements, a culture war rages, and electoral politics is a dumpster fire.

It is 1969.

Reason magazine is a baby, just over a year old, and editor Lanny Friedlander is wrapping up the November issue. It is a small operation, so he has also written most of the contents.

The question he poses on the cover is “The Cops: Heroes or Villains?” He sketches the landscape: “After each recent mass police action that shed blood—People’s Park, Chicago, Harvard, Columbia—debate begins anew. ‘Liberals,’ ‘conservatives,’ ‘radicals,’ ‘lawnorder Democrats’ argue endlessly: were or were not the cops brutal?”

More than 50 years after Friedlander published his “editorial notes on police brutality,” you can add to that list George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis with a knee on his neck, Eric Garner choked on a New York City street corner, Breonna Taylor shot in her Louisville home during a drug raid gone wrong, and thousands of clashes between law enforcement and private citizens in the nationwide protests that followed. It is the same argument, with the same factions, in 2020.

“As is so often the case,” Friedlander writes ruefully, “it is the New Left that comes closest to the truth, if only accidently. It is absurd, they say, to argue whether or not the police were brutal in any particular instance because the system is brutal by definition. As the system’s agents of enforcement, the police cannot but be brutal.”

When it comes to police misconduct, there has been enough talk of “bad apples” in recent years to squeeze out gallons of cider. But the problem is not primarily the quality or character of the police officers themselves—though there are certainly police officers who lack character. It’s the damaging and backward incentives created by the system in which they operate.

The best way to minimize police violence is to maximize freedom and individual responsibility. (It is not, as the left in Friedlander’s time and our own might prefer, to abolish capitalism.) The reforms that he gestures toward—and that Reason has gone on to advocate in the decades since—are stunningly similar to many items on the wish lists of the Black Lives Matter protesters and their allies who have taken to the streets to protest violence and racism following Floyd’s death. But they also reflect the concerns of the entrepreneurs and homeowners who fear the destruction of their property and the threat to their safety posed by the protesters, or at least by the opportunistic looters and revolutionaries who accompany them, as well as by the state.

At the core of Friedlander’s argument is the notion that law enforcement officials—like everyone in a free society—must be answerable for their actions. “As it stands in America today, the police aid in the trampling of rights on such a massive scale that there is hardly a word sufficiently descriptive,” he writes. “Limited liability? The price of retribution due to the victims of the crimes committed by police on any single day would be beyond calculation, yet not only do these crimes go undenounced (for the most part), and the perpetrators, police and politicians, unpunished, but, even worse, the victims are forced through taxes to finance the operation and salaries of the criminals.”

This tracks neatly with several of the most promising avenues for reform in 2020. The first is the elimination of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields police and other government officials from liability in civil rights lawsuits unless the illegality of their specific actions was “clearly established” at the time of the offense.  At press time, the only Libertarian Party member of Congress, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, had just introduced a bill to eliminate that protection. He was joined in the effort by one of his most progressive colleagues, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass).

“The brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police is merely the latest in a long line of incidents of egregious police misconduct,” they wrote. “This pattern continues because police are legally, politically, and culturally insulated from consequences for violating the rights of the people whom they have sworn to serve.”

“Several of the things that allow police to stand above the law,” Friedlander goes on, “include the secrecy and tightknit quality of the police force, the personnel rules that characterize departments, and the comparative homogeneity of outlook among police (due to preselection, attrition, and assimilation).” The undue influence of police unions on the disciplinary process for officers accused of misconduct, and on the political officials who often have the final say in such matters, is a major and hitherto underappreciated barrier to reform. Breaking the police unions would align the incentives of officers better with the citizens they are meant to serve.

We must seriously revisit the scope of the powers and duties of police. While the movement to defund police forces is the simplest and most symbolic of these notions, the nitty-gritty list offers more to chew on: terminating 1033, the program that funnels surplus Department of Defense equipment to local police departments; eliminating techniques such as the chokehold from the police playbook; requiring officers to report inappropriate use of force by their colleagues.

One popular reform, mandatory wearable cameras, has failed to deliver on its promise. Video is a powerful medium, but data from districts where bodycams have been tried show their existence doesn’t seem to prevent violence, and the video itself is often contested. Friedlander anticipated this critique: “One cannot merely view a film of a cop clubbing a student and declare apriori [without] further data that what one has seen is or is not brutality.”

Today, officers caught on camera abusing peaceful protesters during gatherings specifically intended to draw attention to police brutality are being quickly identified, investigated, and suspended or fired, including officers in Buffalo, New York, who were captured shoving a white-haired man and then walking past him as he lay on the ground bleeding. But the fact that dozens of such interactions occur even in such high-scrutiny environments demonstrates the limits of reforms focused solely on transparency or policing itself. Cops don’t behave in a callous and brutal manner because they think they won’t get caught. They do so because they feel like they must.

Police officers are not, by and large, sadists. They are operating within a system that demands brutality from them. No reform can make a lasting impact if we continue to insist that officers enforce bad legislation. Because every interaction between police and citizens can escalate to deadly violence, we must think carefully about when such violence could possibly be worthwhile. People must be free to defend themselves if they are unjustly attacked. But too many of our laws require authorities to initiate force in order to prevent voluntary transactions. They also disproportionately punish those who seek to defend themselves from police. The Louisville police used a battering ram to knock down Taylor’s door while she was sleeping because a drug dealer sometimes received packages at her address. Her boyfriend tried to defend her. She ended up dead.

Floyd, and Garner before him, were initially accosted for the pettiest of crimes. In Floyd’s case, it was passing a suspected counterfeit $20 bill at a local food market. In Garner’s, it was selling loose cigarettes without a tax stamp in New York. Both men died crying out that they couldn’t breathe. While the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck was fired the next day, it took five long years before the same fate finally came to the officer responsible for Garner’s death. At press time, the officers responsible for Taylor’s death still have their jobs.

Right as that 1969 issue of Reason went to press, the first message was being successfully sent and received on ARPANet, the precursor to the internet. In the end, that message may prove to be the most important development in fostering a free and just society. Friedlander was right that video alone cannot get the job done. Nor will a single essay make much of a dent. “I don’t expect the reader to accept the material here as proof conclusive—it isn’t meant to be,” he wrote. “But at the very least the reader should now be aware how far from precise or rational are the statements and critiques concerning the police being offered by the mass media-recognized polemicists of the ‘left’ and ‘right.'”

In 2020, the national conversation about police brutality and its deep roots is more widespread, urgent, and voluminous than ever. It has been five decades since Friedlander’s essay. If we’re going to fix this broken system, it’s time to get started.

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The Declaration of Independence will never be outmoded, as President Coolidge explained

The 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was commemorated in a 1926 oration by President Calvin Coolidge, delivered in Philadelphia. Born of the Fourth of July, 1872, Coolidge explained the eternal truth of our nation’s founding document.

In 1926, as today, some persons held theories that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were obsolete. They might have been alright in their time, but social and technological changes had made them impractical. Such had been the view of President Woodrow Wilson (1913-21). Others insisted that that the Declaration’s words “all men are created equal,” were false. Supposedly, people were unequal because of inherent racial or ethnic difference; according to the Ku Klux Klan, which was powerful in American politics at the time, racial difference obliterated common humanity.

President Coolidge debunked anti-Declaration notions. He traced the history of the three key ideas of the Declaration. The principle of consent of the governed had been present earlier English and Dutch history. So had the idea of inalienable rights.

One idea was new: “All men are created equal.” As Coolidge “But we should search these [historic European] charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality. This principle had not before appeared as an official political declaration of any nation. It was profoundly revolutionary. It is one of the corner stones of American institutions.”

As Coolidge well knew, the United States of 1926 and 1776 were hardly perfect in equality, security for inalienable rights, or consent of the governed. In his first State of the Union speech, he stated:

Numbered among our population are some 12,000,000 colored people. Under our Constitution their rights are just as sacred as those of any other citizen. It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights. The Congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crime of lynching, of which the negroes are by no means the sole sufferers, but for which they furnish a majority of the victims.

Coolidge favored strict economy in government. Apparently essential, in Coolidge’s view of government, was new federal funding to support medical education at Howard University–the most venerable of historically black universities in America, located in D.C. Further, Coolidge urged, there should be a commission “composed of members from both races, to formulate a better policy for mutual understanding and confidence.”  Such an effort is to be commended. Everyone would rejoice in the accomplishment of the results which it seeks. But it is well to recognize that these difficulties are to a large extent local problems which must be worked out by the mutual forbearance and human kindness of each community. Such a method gives much more promise of a real remedy than outside interference.

 

 

openedthesegmentofthisspeechonracialreformwiththeringingdeclarationthatundertheConstitution,”therightsofcoloredcitizenswereassacredasthoseofanyothercitizen”andthatit was”botha publicandprivatedutytoprotecttheserights.”ThePresidentwentontourgetheCongress”toexerciseallitspowerofpreventionandpunishmentagainstthehideouscrimeoflynching.”Healsoacknow

 

Born on the Fourths of July, 1872,e

Calvin Coolidge—Speech on Economy in Government

Half-hour documentary Calvin Coolidge: Our American Journey.

Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.

 

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Phony Overtime, Fictional Drug Buys, and Mysterious C.I. Payments Offer a Glimpse of Houston Police Corruption

Gerald-Goines-and-Steven-Bryant

On January 22, 2019, Houston narcotics officer Hodgie Armstrong paid a confidential informant who bought drugs as part of a case he was investigating. The informant made the purchase around 6 p.m. that day at 4437 Knoxville Street, and another narcotics officer, Steven Bryant, was there to observe the transaction and Armstrong’s payment to the informant an hour and a half later, serving as the witness required by Houston Police Department policy.

Or so Armstrong and Bryant claimed. According to the local prosecutors who this week accused Armstrong of tampering with a government record, cellphone location data showed Bryant was nowhere near that address at the time of the purported drug purchase or the subsequent payment. At 6 p.m., the charge against Armstrong says, Bryant was more than 30 miles from 4437 Knoxville Street; between 7:30 and 8 p.m., he was more than 25 miles away.

That incident illustrates the widespread irregularities in the HPD’s Narcotics Division that have been discovered following the January 2019 drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, in their home on Harding Street. The Harding Street raid, which discovered no evidence of drug dealing, was instigated by veteran narcotics officer Gerald Goines, who obtained a no-knock search warrant based on a fictional heroin purchase by a nonexistent informant. Goines faces state murder charges and federal civil rights charges, both of which are punishable by life in prison, because of that fatal fraud.

By contrast, the charge against Armstrong, Goines’ former partner, carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail. But the false report Armstrong allegedly filed fits a pattern of shady practices and lax supervision in the Narcotics Division exemplified by Goines, who was employed by the HPD for 34 years. That environment apparently made Goines think he could get away with implicating Tuttle and Nicholas by concocting a story that no one would try to verify.

Bryant, the officer who falsely claimed to have witnessed the transaction that Armstrong supposedly arranged six days before the raid that killed Tuttle and Nicholas, also figured in the latter case. Because he backed up Goines’ account of a heroin purchase that never happened, Bryant faces a state charge of tampering with a government record and a federal charge of obstructing justice by falsifying records.

This week Harris County prosecutors filed two more record tampering charges against Bryant, one related to Armstrong’s 2019 report and another related to a confidential informant payment that Goines claimed to have made in April 2018. Although Bryant said he witnessed that payment, prosecutors say cellphone data contradict that account. Furthermore, the informant identified by Goines—the same person he initially claimed had bought heroin from Tuttle—denied making any purchases for him at the location he identified.

Bryant was also charged with stealing about $3,000 in taxpayer money by falsely claiming overtime pay between March 21, 2018, and January 22, 2019. Prosecutors say cellphone data show he did not actually work the hours he claimed.

In addition to the charges that had already been filed against him, Goines now faces a theft charge and three more charges of tampering with a government record related to search warrants. Prosecutors are reviewing drug cases he handled and so far have identified 164 questionable convictions—including a 2004 case involving Houston native George Floyd, whose May 25 death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers triggered nationwide protests.

The charges announced this week also include three Narcotics Division supervisors.

Sgt. Clemente Reyna faces three counts of tampering with a government record based on false statements similar to the ones Bryant is accused of making. In December 2018, for example, Reyna claimed to have witnessed Goines’ payment to a confidential informant for a drug purchase. Prosecutors say cellphone data show that meeting never happened, and the informant identified by Goines—again, the same person who supposedly bought heroin from Tuttlle—denied participating. Reyna, like Bryant, is also charged with theft.

Sgt. Thomas Wood is likewise accused of falsely claiming to have witnessed Goines’ payment to a confidential informant, this one in October 2017. Prosecutors say the informant—once again, the same person Goines named during the investigation of the Harding Street raid—denied making the purchase that Goines described, and cellphone data showed Wood could not have observed it in any case. Wood, like Bryant and Reyna, is also charged with theft.

Lt. Robert Gonzales is charged with misapplication of fiduciary property, a felony punishable by up to two years in jail, for failing to properly verify and authorize expenditures. Prosecutors say he violated department rules by approving thousands of dollars in confidential informant payments after they had already been made and/or without laboratory testing of the drugs used as evidence in those cases.

More charges are expected. “The new charges show a pattern and practice of lying and deceit,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said on Wednesday. “Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented.”

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