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NYPD "Goon Squad" Manual Teaches Officers to Violate Protesters' Rights
John Bolger and Alice Speri, The Intercept
Excerpt: "When thousands of New Yorkers poured into the city's streets last summer following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, they were met with the very police violence they had come to protest."
Exclusive: Internal NYPD documents shed new light on the Strategic Response Group, or SRG, the heavily militarized police unit behind the crackdown on George Floyd protesters.
hen thousands of New Yorkers poured into the city’s streets last summer following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, they were met with the very police violence they had come to protest.
In the days following Floyd’s death, and then again during protests last fall, New York police arrested hundreds of people, many with no probable cause. They pepper-sprayed protesters and struck them with batons, trapped them in the streets with no way out, pushed them to the ground, and shoved them with bikes. In Brooklyn, on May 30, an officer pulled down a man’s Covid-19 mask and pepper-sprayed him at close range, bragging about it to fellow officers but failing to provide the man with medical assistance, as required by police regulations. Days later, another officer in Brooklyn struck a protester in the back of his head while he was complying with orders to disperse, causing a gash that required ten staples. And in the Bronx, on June 4, police in riot gear corralled hundreds of people before an 8 p.m. curfew, then beat and arrested them under the watch of the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief of Department Terence Monahan.
Over multiple incidents, police regularly and unjustifiably used force against peaceful protesters, with state investigators finding that they beat people with blunt instruments at least 50 times, unlawfully pepper-sprayed them in at least 30 instances, and pushed or struck protesters at least 75 times. Officers targeted and retaliated against people engaging in constitutionally protected activity, New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office concluded, and “blatantly violated the rights of New Yorkers.”
Leading the violent crackdown was the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group, or SRG, a heavily militarized, rapid-response unit of several hundred officers. Since its founding in 2015 to deal with public disorder events and terrorist acts, civil rights advocates have objected to the deployment of the unit to protests, and then-NYPD chief of department and later Commissioner James O’Neill pledged at the time that the SRG would “not be involved in handling protests and demonstrations.”
The pledge turned out to be hollow. That same year, the SRG was deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters. Since then, the unit’s armor-clad officers and bike squads have become a regular presence at protests, where they stand out for their confrontational and aggressive tactics. After each confrontation, complaints about the unit streamed into the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent body tasked with reviewing allegations of police abuse. Investigators found a disproportionate number of SRG officers accused of wrongdoing to have exceeded their legal authority, when compared with the wider department. The group earned a reputation among activists as the NYPD’s “goon squad.”
Inside the SRG
Despite its visibility, little is publicly known about the SRG and how its specialized officers are trained to respond to protests. Even the frequently cited number of 700 SRG officers is an estimate; the NYPD will not confirm the unit’s headcount.
Now a series of internal documents obtained by The Intercept shed new light on the police unit behind some of the most brutal repression of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. The Intercept is publishing three of the public records with this story, including the SRG’s guidelines and manuals for its field force operations and bike squads.
The documents offer a comprehensive overview of how the SRG operates. They outline the unit’s responsibilities during routine assignments to precincts across the city, to which its officers are dispatched in response to spikes in crime and during special mobilizations, including to protests. The documents provide instructions regarding “mass arrest” procedures, guidelines for officers equipped with Colt M4 rifles, and directions for plainclothes, “counter-surveillance” officers tasked with shadowing tactical teams in the field.
Marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and bearing destruction notices, the documents also detail a variety of formations and maneuvers for bike squads and teams of officers on foot and in vehicles. Some of the maneuvers described in detail are variations of what the NYPD refers to as “encirclement,” the police’s name for what demonstrators call “kettling,” a technique civil rights advocates have long denounced as leading to police abuses.
Over the last months, a series of scathing reports by independent agencies condemned the NYPD’s response to the protests. The reports, which underscored the department’s lack of preparedness and officers’ poor training, contributed to a narrative that has become frequent in the wake of police abuses: that officers would have better handled such situations with better training — and thus more resources.
That narrative is complicated by the internal documents reviewed by The Intercept. Many of the policies laid out in the documents were not followed last summer or during more recent police crackdowns on protests. But the documents also raise questions about the content of police training on protest response itself. While paying lip service to protesters’ constitutional rights, the documents do little to explain how those rights should be protected, offering instead page after page of instructions on how to circumvent them.
A spokesperson for the NYPD defended the SRG’s training, which he said includes a specialized SRG Academy as well as an annual, two-day course and eight monthly, two-hour unannounced drills. Members of the SRG Bicycle Squad participate in an annual two-day refresher course, he added. In August 2020 the department expanded training on the policing of protest to all members of the service.
“The NYPD protects the Constitutional right to peaceful protest, and works to ensure public safety for any New Yorker exercising their First Amendment rights,” the spokesperson, Sergeant Edward D. Riley, wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Many different units of the NYPD respond to major events — including protests — to ensure the safety of the public at these events.”
The NYPD documents include several drawings of tactical maneuvers as well as photos taken during police training and real-life protests, including some featuring prominent activists like Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Jose LaSalle. Overall, the SRG materials reflect a heavy-handed approach to the policing of protest and echo the war-on-terror mentality on which the unit was premised, at one point referring to protesters as potential “hostile targets.”
Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition of community organizations, argued that the problem with the NYPD’s response to the protests was not so much a matter of preparedness as of culture.
“Training is the easiest thing for elected officials to call for every time there is a controversy around police violence,” she said. “That has historically never worked to actually decrease police violence, or increase the firings of officers who violate people, or increase accountability.”
The NYPD documents, which detail a clear chain of command in protest situations, also underscore how top department leadership, rather than rogue cops, bears responsibility for police actions during the protests, including the decisions to “kettle” people and resort to mass arrests. The Civilian Complaint Review Board received more than 300 allegations of police abuse in connection to the protests, and dozens of New Yorkers offered hours of harrowing public testimony about police brutality.
The incidents are now at the heart of a series of federal lawsuits against the city, including one by the New York attorney general. Nearly 450 people have also indicated their plans to sue the city individually over their treatment at the hands of police, suits that are expected to cost taxpayers millions in settlements.
The lawsuits zero in on abuses by SRG officers. In one, attorneys seeking to represent hundreds of protesters accuse the city of “deploying one particularly problematic, inadequately trained, poorly supervised and disciplined group of NYPD members: the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group.”
“SRG officers are not only inadequately trained to respond to peaceful protests,” the attorney general’s office echoed in its own complaint, “but their training in terrorism response, which necessarily requires aggressive tactics and extreme force, is almost certain to result in constitutional violations when applied to peaceful protesters.”
Critics of systemic police abuses noted that in seeking reforms to police’s protest responses, the lawsuits risk the pitfalls of previous, similar efforts that followed high-profile crackdowns on dissent and led to little substantial change.
“There’s no justice in it, there’s no real improvement,” said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor and the author of “The End of Policing,” who was involved in some of those earlier efforts. “It’s really hard to say that things really got any better as a result of that. They just work around it, or they just ignore it.”
The “Goon Squad”
The SRG was conceived by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first NYPD commissioner, Bill Bratton, as an elite unit to deal with both “counterterror” and civil disorder. Originally approved in 2015 as a 350-officer unit, the SRG included teams in each borough and incorporated the Disorder Control Unit, or DCU, which had been central to aggressive crackdowns on mass protests in the past. The DCU had been instrumental in policing large events like Occupy Wall Street and protests surrounding the 2004 Republican National Convention, which resulted in massive numbers of arrests and alleged abuses. The crackdown on the 2004 protests led to record legal settlements, which observers say could be surpassed by suits surrounding last summer’s uprising.
Within a year of its founding, a controversial push to expand the NYPD’s head count by 1,300 officers ended up doubling the size of the SRG. Its budget quickly ballooned from $13 million to nearly $90 million. Equipped with state-of-the-art anti-riot gear and heavy weaponry, as well as its signature fleet of bicycles and combat armor-clad riders, the SRG, a voluntary unit, attracted cops looking for “more action,” many with lengthy misconduct records. Since 2015, SRG officers have met peaceful protests with violence, failed to intervene as far-right activists assaulted counterprotesters, and participated in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man.
Despite initial reassurances to the contrary, the SRG ended up policing protests far more than it did any “counterterrorism” work — already the job of the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau — but it brought its militarized mentality and tactics to the policing of civil unrest. The SRG engaged in what the unit’s guidelines refer to as “high visibility static deployment,” a show of force intended to “provide and enhance visibility at sensitive or other locations.” The unit dispatched officers donning military-style gas masks, ready for the “hazards of a weapons of mass destruction event” thanks to training in Chemical Ordinance, Biological and Radiological Awareness, or COBRA.
Organizers like Kang, of Communities United for Police Reform, opposed the formation of the SRG in its early days, not least because of the group’s conflation of protest with terrorism. That the SRG was quickly deployed to protests, despite assurances that it would not be, was to Kang emblematic of “the NYPD being able to unilaterally do whatever it wants, at any time that it wants.” Kang noted that the department faced no pushback from the administration over its broken promise and added that the City Council did not hold a hearing about the SRG until a public uproar over its role in the arrest of immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir by federal immigration agents in 2018.
Ultimately, Kang said, the SRG’s abuses reflected broader issues with the NYPD as a whole.
“The SRG is a symbol of the hyper-aggressive, militarized, unaccountable police violence in New York City, but that’s not exclusive to the SRG,” she said. “We have to understand this is part of the fabric of how the NYPD has historically treated protests and has historically treated Black, Latinx, and other communities of color.”
Policing Protests
According to the NYPD documents, one of the SRG’s core missions is to “respond to citywide mobilizations, civil disorders and major events with highly trained personnel and specialized equipment to maintain public order.” The documents lay out procedures for dealing with emergencies, to which the SRG can respond by answering calls over citywide radio.
Unlike with emergency calls, the SRG often has advance notice and time to prepare for protests. As soon as a detail is approved, an SRG field intelligence officer begins compiling a package of information on the situation for distribution to the SRG executive staff and commanding officer. According to the SRG documents, the intelligence packets include information such as the group size, planned arrests, key members of the protest group, and the group’s hierarchy. Based on the intelligence, SRG executives make tactical decisions and supervisors debrief officers on the response plan, including the “past history of this event or others involving this location or organization.” Other SRG documents repeatedly refer to the unit’s reliance on intelligence and the monitoring of social media.
When the SRG arrives at a protest, it plays a supporting role in the NYPD ecosystem. SRG officers report to the local commander in charge, who has the authority to order arrests. Before such an order, according to the documents, SRG officers are instructed to follow directions and not to exercise discretion. They may make arrests unilaterally if they witness any felony or serious misdemeanor, such as vandalism, reckless endangerment, possession of a weapon, or assault. But the decision to engage in mass arrests of protesters for nonviolent behavior like unlawful assembly or “obstructing governmental administration,” the most frequent protest-related charges, rests squarely with department leadership.
As the NYPD’s premier riot breakers, SRG units come heavily equipped, ready to make a show of overwhelming force against demonstrators. When a show of force fails, the SRG has a catalog of formations designed to break up protests. According to the SRG documents, these range from the basics, such as the “Wedge Formation,” used to split a crowd in half, to the more advanced, such as the “Separation Formation,” used to get between two dueling factions of protesters and push them apart.
One of the maneuvers best known to protesters is the “Encirclement Formation,” which is used “when there is a need to take a group of people into custody,” according to the guidelines. Commonly known as “kettling,” the formation allows police to surround protesters, leaving them no means of escape. Encirclement formations can be as small as one squad of eight officers or as large an entire platoon of four squads. In either case, the move to encircle protesters indicates that the decision to arrest has already been made, the document notes, and that the targets have been chosen.
On paper, the SRG’s formations may seem well organized, but in practice, their execution is violent and chaotic. At a September demonstration in Times Square, SRG officers encircled a group of people protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including several on bikes, before they had even started moving, a protester who took several videos of police that day told The Intercept.
“The moment the bikes lined up on the street, the NYPD just immediately rushed over, started grabbing people by their hair, like five or six officers per person, throwing people to the ground, arresting all the bicyclists,” he said. “The protest hadn’t even really started yet.”
The Bike Squad
The SRG takes considerable pride in its bike fleet and deploys it frequently to protests. Rather than tamping down disorder, the SRG’s interventions have sowed chaos amid largely peaceful demonstrations.
The training material repeats department lore about the founding of New York’s very first “Scorcher Squad” fleet of bicycle cops by Theodore Roosevelt when he was police commissioner in 1895. Today’s SRG bike squad is modeled after the Seattle Police Department, and some of the early SRG bicyclists received training in Washington.
The bike squad’s high maneuverability is perhaps the SRG’s most important tactical innovation and the only function of the SRG that is not redundant with previously existing NYPD units. The bike squad has the capability to speed ahead of protest marches, and the SRG documents instruct bike officers to report real-time protest intelligence back to command, such as overheard plans, identities of “aggressors” and “ringleaders,” presence of improvised weapons, and injuries. The bike units can also move ahead to flank protests, selectively blocking streets to dictate the path of an oncoming march.
NYPD training documents say that in close quarters, the bicycle represents a “force multiplier”: One cop on a bicycle can take the place of three officers with batons. In addition to bike versions of on-foot formations, the bike squad has its own moves, such as the “power slide” and the “dynamic dismount,” which consist of an officer lunging from a moving bicycle without breaking speed, taking down a suspect by surprise.
“Get bicycle up to a controlled rate of speed and aim for target. While in attack position, swing right leg over the rear of bicycle,” an SRG bike squad training module states, “After step through, place right foot on ground and dismount bicycle … make contact with subject and proceed with arrest or rescue.”
One of the unit’s highly visible tactics, the “Mobile Fence Line,” used to “gain ground and compliance,” employs SRG officers standing with their bikes across their chests, forming a line tire to tire. Shouting “MOVE BACK!,” the bicycle fence will advance aggressively over short distances. When a mobile fence line rakes across a protest area, it is because the police intend to make arrests, according to the SRG documents. One way this happens is with a maneuver called a BLAM.
In the “Bike Line Arrest Maneuver,” officers are instructed by the SRG documents to shout “BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!” as they advance. The documents outline the procedure for scooping people, right down to the “clinch” hold used to restrain them in emergency situations. “Clinch maneuver is control of subjects head by clinching your hands and arms behind the head of subject and bringing head against your chest,” the BLAM training module states, adding a warning: “DO NOT CHOKE HOLD, DO NOT BLOCK AIRWAY.”
During the June 4 incident in the Bronx, SRG officers used bicycles as weapons in what Human Rights Watch later described as a “planned assault” on protesters. In public testimony to the attorney general’s office, demonstrators described what happened when the SRG bike squad’s mobile fence line advanced: “The officer right in front of me gave a command, and they raised their bikes and rammed into me and all protesters in the front,” testified Sami Disu, an adjunct professor at John Jay College, adding that he was also pepper-sprayed during the incident.
Others described being squeezed by the advance. Another protester arrested that night, Christina Ellsberg, described how the SRG trapped a group of protesters: “They tightened their ranks and forced us together using their bikes and swinging batons until we were crushed and trampling each other,” Ellsberg said in the testimony. “At that point, panic set in. People were screaming, others struggling to breathe.”
Push for Accountability
As the SRG’s aggressive tactics against demonstrators came into stark display last summer, top city officials stood by the police. De Blasio repeatedly defended officers’ conduct, and NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said, hours after police kettled and arrested dozens of protesters in the Bronx incident, that the action had been “a plan which was executed nearly flawlessly.”
Virtually everyone else condemned the police’s handling of the protests, with civil rights groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union and the public defenders of the Legal Aid Society denouncing police’s “indiscriminate brutalizing of peaceful protestors” throughout the demonstrations.
In their joint lawsuit, NYCLU and Legal Aid are seeking damages for a dozen people who were beaten, pepper-sprayed, shoved to the ground, and arrested during several incidents last summer. The lawyers also want the police to declare that police violated the First and Fourth amendments.
In another class-action lawsuit, attorneys are seeking damages on behalf of a potentially enormous group of plaintiffs, including “all people arrested between May 28 and June 6, as well as all people who have been or will be subjected to the NYPD’s practices of violently disrupting protests.”
And in its own lawsuit, the New York State Office of the Attorney General has called on the courts to install an independent federal monitor to oversee the NYPD’s policing tactics at future protests as well as a declaration that the tactics deployed last summer were unlawful. (A federal judge has temporarily combined these lawsuits.)
As his record on policing came under scrutiny during the protests more than at any time in his troubled tenure, de Blasio, in his last year in office, once again pledged reforms. “I’m reflecting on what happened in May and June, and I look back with remorse,” the mayor said last December.
He and Shea pledged to accept the recommendations of the city’s Department of Investigation, which called for the NYPD to create a new protest response unit that does not report to the SRG and to “reevaluate the central role of the Strategic Response Group and Disorder Control Unit in response to large protests given their orientation to handle counterterrorism, riots, and other serious threats, and better calibrate their use to circumstances that require such specialized force.”
Others, like New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, have gone further. In a set of recommendations, Stringer, who is running for mayor, called for tactical police teams and heavily armed officers to be removed from protests altogether, replaced by a mostly civilian force tasked with managing the movement of people during large demonstrations. “The SRG Disorder Control Unit should be disbanded,” Stringer wrote.
Yet disbanding the SRG won’t do much if its role and tactics end up repurposed under a new unit, critics warn, citing the SRG’s roots in the DCU and the NYPD’s long history of shutting down controversial units only to resurface them with rebranded names. Because the department operates with virtually no transparency, the public and even elected officials sometimes don’t learn of internal changes or the shuffling of units and officers until months after these changes happened, said Kang.
“The SRG should be disbanded, yes,” she added. “But that in itself won’t solve all the problems of what the SRG actually symbolizes: the hyper-militarization, the hyper-aggressive policing tactics. That’s not an SRG problem only, that’s an NYPD problem.”
People link arms at a gun reform rally at the Colorado State Capitol on 28 March, 2021 in Denver, Colorado. (photo: Getty)
'We Did It': Parkland Victims Respond With Joy Over 'Bold' Biden Gun Control Plan
Mayank Aggarwal, Independent
Aggarwal writes: "Victims' families from the 2018 Parkland school shooting expressed happiness on Wednesday over the Biden administration's plans, to be signed through in executive orders on Thursday, for improved gun safety measures."
Organisations fighting for gun control are asking the US Senate to follow Biden’s lead
ictims’ families from the 2018Parkland school shooting expressed happiness on Wednesday over the Biden administration’s plans, to be signed through in executive orders on Thursday, for improved gun safety measures.
“On February 14, 2018 my daughter Jaime was murdered in the Parkland school shooting. Jaime and I have been on a journey since to save lives. [President Biden], thank you for listening. I am truly emotional at the significance of this. JAIME, WE DID IT!!!,” tweeted Fred Guttenberg within hours of the Biden administration releasing its plan for controlling gun violence.
“THIS IS HUGE AND THIS WILL SAVE LIVES!!! America, these are the boldest reforms in over 30 years,” he said.
On 14 February 2018, a gunman with an AR-15 rifle burst into the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and killed 17 people. Survivors and families from the school have been at the forefront of the US gun control debate ever since.
On Wednesday, the Biden-Harris administration said in a statement that the president is committed to taking action to reduce all forms of gun violence – community violence, mass shootings, domestic violence, and suicide by firearm – as it announced a set of six initial actions to address the “gun violence public health epidemic.”
The set of actions include the Justice Department, within 30 days, issuing a proposal for rules to help stop the proliferation of “ghost guns” – untraceable weapons without serial numbers – an annual reports on firearm trafficking, and the nomination of David Chipman as the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a key agency for enforcing gun laws.
A statement from the White House said that the Justice Department will within 60 days issue a proposed rule “to make clear when a device marketed as a stabilising brace effectively turns a pistol into a short-barreled rifle subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act”.
It said that the department in the next 60 days will also publish model “red flag” legislation for states “which allows family members or law enforcement to petition for a court order temporarily barring people in crisis from accessing firearms if they present a danger to themselves or others.”
Kris Brown, president of Brady United, one of America’s oldest gun violence prevention groups, in a series of tweets said the White House’s actions are “not just bold, but comprehensive.”
“Just as gun violence is a multi-faceted epidemic, we need multi-faceted solutions. In order to save lives, we must tack(l)e this public health crisis from all angles,” she tweeted.
Ms Brown said: “President Biden’s executive action on gun reform comes at a solemn time, as our country heals from a spate of high-profile gun massacres. Those massacres are just part of an epidemic that wounds or kills +115,000 Americans every year.”
Giffords, the gun violence prevention organisation founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, also praised Mr Biden for the executive actions on gun violence.
“[President Biden] is fulfilling his promise and taking immediate action to prevent gun violence. This is a huge step, but we still need congressional action to ensure our long-term safety. We call on the Senate to follow the president’s lead,” tweeted Giffords.
In his statement announcing the measures, Mr Biden also reiterated his call for the US Congress to pass legislation to reduce gun violence which, unlike his executive orders, could not simply be repealed by a future president.
The testimony of Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo against Derek Chauvin breaks the paradigm of excessive-force prosecutions. (photo: AP)
Derek Chauvin's Trial Is Bringing Down the Blue Wall of Silence
Janelle Griffith, NBC News
Griffith writes: "During his lengthy testimony Monday, Minneapolis' police chief minced no words in condemning the actions of Derek Chauvin, the former officer who is charged with murder in the death of George Floyd."
"I think the officers who are testifying want to model what good cops look like, both for the jury and the public, in contrast to Chauvin," one legal analyst said.
uring his lengthy testimony Monday, Minneapolis' police chief minced no words in condemning the actions of Derek Chauvin, the former officer who is charged with murder in the death of George Floyd.
"To continue to apply that level of force to a person proned out, handcuffed behind their back, that in no way, shape or form is anything that is by policy," Chief Medaria Arradondo said. "It is not part of our training, and it is certainly not part of our ethics or values."
Arradondo's testimony should have come as no surprise. In his opening statement, prosecutor Jerry Blackwell told jurors that Arradondo wouldn't hold back in his assessment that Chauvin used "excessive force" when he knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes, 29 seconds last May.
Still, Arradondo's testimony was rare. That he was joined by a string of other law enforcement officers was remarkable.
Among those joining Arradondo on the stand as prosecution witnesses were Lt. Richard Zimmerman, the longest-serving officer in the Minneapolis Police Department, and Inspector Katie Blackwell, who at the time of Floyd's death was the commander of the training division.
Sgt. David Pleoger, Chauvin's former supervisor, also admonished his actions. Pleoger testified last week that, among other things, when Floyd "was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers, they could have ended their restraint," and that Chauvin didn't initially divulge that he had knelt on Floyd's neck.
Arradondo, Zimmerman, Pleoger and Blackwell didn't protect Chauvin behind the so-called blue wall of silence for various reasons, legal experts say. The "blue wall of silence" describes an unofficial oath among police officers not to report a colleague's wrongdoing, including crimes.
Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said the blue wall means "that sometimes police officers close rank and — right or wrong — they're blue."
Many times when police officers are charged with killing someone, it is because they shot the person, said Butler, an MSNBC legal analyst who is also a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.
"The act of shooting someone requires a split-second decision," he said.
In those instances, police officers might be reluctant to testify against a colleague in part because they resent being second-guessed by people who don't know the dangers of their profession, Butler said in an interview Wednesday.
Chauvin's restraint of Floyd, however, was measured, Butler said.
"He had 9 minutes and 29 seconds to consider his actions," he said.
The international protests against racism and police brutality spurred by Floyd's death also may be a reason the blue wall of silence has crumbled, Butler said.
"I think the officers who are testifying want to model what good cops look like, both for the jury and the public, in contrast to Chauvin," he said. "I've been impressed by how many officers are willing to go on the record about how Chauvin violated both police procedures and criminal law."
Zimmerman made a series of damning statements Friday about Chauvin's actions.
"Pulling him down to the ground facedown and putting your knee on a neck for that amount of time, it's just uncalled for," said Zimmerman, who joined the department in 1985 and leads its homicide unit.
Zimmerman responded to the scene after Floyd was taken away in an ambulance. He testified that what Chauvin had done was "totally unnecessary." He said he saw "no reason for why the officers felt they were in danger — if that's what they felt — and that's what they would have to feel to be able to use that kind of force."
His testimony was compelling, Butler said, because police witnesses are often reluctant to draw conclusions like that because either they don't want to be part of getting an officer convicted or they want the jury to determine whether the force was excessive.
That hasn't been the case for some of Chauvin's former colleagues.
Arradondo, the city's first Black police chief, also testified in the trial of Mohamed Noor, a former police officer who was accused of murder in the fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, who had called the police to report hearing what she thought was a sexual assault of a woman in an alley behind her home. Noor was convicted of third-degree murder.
DeLacy Davis, who retired as a sergeant with the East Orange Police Department in New Jersey in 2006, said it is rare for a police chief to testify against an officer in a criminal case.
Davis, a use-of-force and community policing expert, said he believes there are three reasons Arradondo testified against Chauvin, the first being that Chauvin's actions were "egregious."
Davis said that was evidenced by how quickly Arradondo fired the four officers involved in Floyd's arrest. They were fired May 26 — the day after Floyd died. Typically, Davis said, police chiefs will wait weeks or months to discipline officers for misconduct — if they do at all — and, in most cases, only after facing public pressure.
The second reason he believes Arradondo testified was to bolster morale.
"To also support the men and women who are still working in Minneapolis but have to somehow pick up their morale and re-center their practice as professional law enforcement officers, he needed to send a very clear message," Davis said. "And I think he did that."
Davis said Arradondo did not "condemn all of policing — he condemned the actions of the four involved officers." Davis quoted Arradondo's statement in June saying Floyd's death was a "murder" that one of the responding officers had caused and the three "others failed to prevent."
Davis, who is Black, said he believes race also influenced Arradondo's decision to testify.
"Being a police chief of color, he has clearly demonstrated either the unwillingness or the inability to detach his melanin from the reality of what Black and brown people experience at the hands of law enforcement in this country," Davis said. "Because my experience has been, even with Black officers, they'll toe the company line."
Davis said he believes the Minneapolis police officers condemned Chauvin's actions because his actions were "indefensible."
"They could not defend it without shaming their entire agency," he said.
Floyd, who was Black, had been accused of using a fake $20 bill to buy cigarettes at a convenience store. He was recorded on widely seen bystander video handcuffed, facedown on the pavement, telling the officers he couldn't breathe.
Katie Blackwell, the inspector who took the stand Monday, said that she has known Chauvin for about 20 years and that he had received annual training in defensive tactics and use of force. She said he would have been trained to use one or two arms — not his knee — in a neck restraint.
After the prosecution showed her a photo of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd's neck, she said, "I don't know what kind of improvised position that is."
Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson, has argued that Floyd's use of illegal drugs and his underlying health conditions caused his death, not Chauvin's kneeling on him, as prosecutors have said.
The county medical examiner's office classified Floyd's death as a homicide — a death caused by someone else. The report said Floyd died of "cardiopulmonary arrest, complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression." Under "other significant conditions," it said Floyd suffered from hypertensive heart disease and listed fentanyl intoxication and recent methamphetamine use. Those factors weren't listed under cause of death.
Davis said he believes Floyd's death was the result of a split-second decision.
"I believe Derek Chauvin made a split-second decision that George Floyd was not worthy of any of the basic humanity that he was pleading for," he said. "I hope this is a tipping point in law enforcement that we are now seeing officers of many races speaking up and speaking out."
President Biden leaves after speaking about his sprawling $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan on Wednesday. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP)
With His Legacy in Mind, Biden Seeks US Transformation With Infrastructure Plan
Domenico Montanaro, NPR
Montanaro writes: "President Biden's infrastructure train is leaving the station."
In remarks Wednesday pushing for his sweeping $2.3 trillion plan, Biden said he wants to meet with Republicans about it and hopes to negotiate in "good faith" — a political tenet that hasn't been practiced much in Washington, D.C., in recent years.
But Biden is not waiting around.
"We will not be open to doing nothing," the president said. "Inaction, simply, is not an option."
Translation: Get on board or step aside.
This Biden technique is one former Gov. Howard Dean, D-Vt., recently described to Politico as "smiling as he steamrolls."
To be clear, Biden will have challenges when it comes to passing his infrastructure and jobs plan through Congress — and not just with Republicans, but with members of his own party, too. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a more moderate Democrat, has voiced opposition to hiking the corporate tax rate as much as the president wants, for example, while Virginia Sen. Mark Warner has expressed concerns as well.
With the narrowest of majorities, one defection kneecaps the ability of Democrats to pass anything — even through partisan procedures such as budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority and was used for the COVID-19 relief bill.
But Biden's overall approach to legislating so far — on a big, bold agenda — is winning plaudits from political strategists, left and right.
"I am more impressed with Joe Biden than I ever thought I could be in the last few months," said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic political analyst who worked as an adviser to the Democratic National Committee during Barack Obama's first run for the White House and in the Clinton administration.
Several strategists said Biden has been more organized and disciplined out of the gate than former Democratic Presidents Obama or Bill Clinton, and they said his team's steadiness — so far — resembles someone Biden has almost nothing in common with from a policy standpoint: George W. Bush.
"In contrast to his immediate predecessor and President Obama, the Biden team's policy rollouts have been about as smooth, methodical and drama-free as you could expect, particularly given the polarized nature of our politics," said Brian Jones, a veteran of the 2004 Bush reelection team.
"The Biden team," Jones added, "is effectively taking advantage of D.C.'s Trump hangover by just engaging in straightforward communications tactics."
Jones noted that the Bush White House made a point of having "a very focused, businesslike approach when it came to his policy priorities, and he scored some victories early in his first term with No Child Left Behind and his tax cuts. It seems like Biden has taken a page from the Bush playbook, essentially cauterizing the chaos that defined Trump's policy announcements and replacing it with a fact-driven, drama-free approach that's working."
Maria Cardona — who worked in the Clinton administration, on the Hillary Clinton 2008 primary campaign, and served as a surrogate for both Obama elections — agreed and said the early success is in no small part due to experience and professionalism.
"It reinforces the fact that governing actually does take experience and does take knowledge," she said. "Experience and knowledge are not conspiracy theories against a certain bereaved class that Trump ran on and won. Governing really does take experience. George W. Bush, he got some stuff passed, like No Child Left Behind and tax cuts, and, yes, it was because he had seasoned political people at his side."
"An opportunity to deliver massive change"
Biden clearly wants to do big things. On Wednesday, he made a case for a grand vision when it came to infrastructure. He drew on the past but looked to the future, and he swatted down GOP concerns about the size of the plan and criticism that he should focus on "traditional infrastructure" like roads, highways and bridges.
"We are America," the president said. "We don't just fix for today, we build for tomorrow. Two hundred years ago, trains weren't traditional infrastructure either until America made a choice to lay down tracks across the country. Highways weren't traditional infrastructure until we allowed ourselves to imagine that roads could connect our nation across state lines."
Biden has been acutely aware of attempting to establish his place in history, even though he's been in office fewer than 100 days. Last month, in fact, the 78-year-old met with historians at the White House. Biden wants to be a bridge to the transformation of the country — and this infrastructure proposal is clearly a big part of that.
"He sees this as an opportunity to deliver massive change, the literal infrastructure of the country," said Gurwin Ahuja, who worked in the Obama administration and was an early supporter of Biden's and worked on his campaign. "His general approach of not being distracted by the day to day is why he is president. It is the singular reason he was able to defeat so many candidates when he was running in the Democratic primary."
Biden's tactics are different from Obama's, analyst Simmons said.
"It's the return of traditional politics in a way that neither Trump nor Obama were willing to do," Simmons said, noting that "the Obama people did really good things. I think that they did not sell them very well."
Ahuja sees the difference as something not unprecedented in U.S. politics.
"It's a Kennedy and Johnson-type dynamic," Ahuja said, referring to former Democratic President John F. Kennedy and his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy as president. "Lyndon Johnson was phenomenal at working Congress, because that's what he did. President Obama was phenomenal at inspiring the public, as did Kennedy."
Biden has much smaller majorities in Congress than Johnson had, however, and this is a time of embittered partisanship. And while Biden would prefer bipartisanship, Cardona notes that Biden "learned the lessons of the Obama era" — not to wait around for Republican support that never materialized.
"A lot of people in the Democratic Party thought, this guy is living in 'la-la land,' " she said. But despite fears that some of the pitfalls of the Obama administration would be repeated, Cardona sees Biden operating on "parallel tracks."
"He's not giving up on bipartisanship," she noted, "but he is living in a cold and cruel reality. ... These are things Biden has learned the hard way and taken to heart."
Republicans, though, don't see Biden as willing to come around to their positions and say he is instead paying lip service to bipartisanship with the intention of forcing through partisan legislation.
"The Biden team is playing the game as the rules currently exist," Democrat Simmons said. "This is the bus. You can argue about the paint color, the tires, but this is the bus. ... They [Biden's staffers] don't have a choice. They just have to get the bus down the road, get accomplishments and show the American people that the government and reestablished order can produce results."
Biden seems very aware of that need to show competence — and results.
"We're at an inflection point in American democracy," Biden said Wednesday. "This is a moment where we prove whether or not democracy can deliver."
And whether or not he can, too.
Unaccompanied minors waited to be transported by the US Border Patrol after crossing the Rio Grande River into the United States from Mexico in La Joya on April 7, 2021. (photo: Go Nakamura/Reuters)
Texas Investigating Allegations That Unaccompanied Migrant Children Are Being Abused, Sexually Assaulted in San Antonio
Jolie McCullough, The Texas Tribune
McCullough writes: "Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday called for the federal government to close a San Antonio facility housing unaccompanied migrant children after he became aware of allegations of sexual assault."
The governor did not know the identities of those who alleged assault, nor did he provide many details. He said he was concerned more than one child may have been assaulted.
ov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday called for the federal government to close a San Antonio facility housing unaccompanied migrant children after he became aware of allegations of sexual assault.
“In short, this facility is a health and safety nightmare,” Abbott said at a press conference outside the Freeman Coliseum, which is reportedly housing more than 1,300 teens who recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or guardian.
The announcement came as Texas and the federal government are locked in battle over a recent increase in the number of migrants crossing the state’s southern border.
Abbott said complaints about sexual assault were reported early Wednesday to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services as well as the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. The governor did not know the identities of those who alleged assault, nor did he provide many details. He said he was concerned more than one child may have been assaulted. He also said that DPS will investigate the allegations.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to questions after Abbott's announcement.
The press conference, Abbott said, was to alert President Joe Biden’s administration and push them to move the children housed in the coliseum to other federally run facilities with more “space, personnel and resources to ensure safety.” He also said the facility was short on staff, some kids were not eating enough food and those infected with the coronavirus were not separated from healthy teens.
A spokesperson for Abbott said the governor told federal officials about the allegations before the press conference.
Rebeca Clay-Flores, a Bexar County commissioner, painted a different picture of the conditions than the governor described, however. She said, having been in the facility many times, she saw children being well cared for. The Freeman Expo Center in San Antonio, which KSAT-TV reported held 1,370 teens on Monday, has the ability to house up to 2,500 children, according to the federal health department.
“What I saw when I went in there on several occasions, it was well-staffed, the children are very happy and very excited to be here,” she told reporters after Abbott left. “This is not a political issue. This is about children who deserve protection from adults.”
Abbott acknowledged to reporters that he had not been inside the coliseum.
Vulnerable children are often victims of sexual assault. In Texas, children kept in foster care and state-run juvenile lockups often report sexual assault, as well, without the governor's immediate intervention. Last fall, juvenile justice advocates pleaded for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate sexual abuse in Texas' youth lockups, which have been plagued by scandal for more than a decade.
Abbott and many other Texas Republicans have repeatedly criticized the Biden administration as it struggles to address an increase in migrants being apprehended near the U.S.-Mexico border. Almost all single adults are being immediately expelled under a pandemic health order issued by Trump that Biden has kept in place, although the current administration is allowing in unaccompanied minors and some families to await their immigration court hearings in the U.S. But Democrats are also loudly questioning where the conservative compassion was less than two years ago under President Trump’s watch, when apprehensions hit near-record figures despite his crackdown on the border.
The number of people crossing the border illegally increases nearly every spring thanks to the weather getting warmer. The past three presidents have struggled at times during their tenures with surges in border crossings. But the number of children being apprehended has been particularly high in recent months, straining federal facilities.
As of Tuesday, the Biden administration had more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in Border Patrol custody and roughly 16,000 in the care of federal shelters run by the federal Department of Health and Human Services. By law, unaccompanied children are not supposed to be held in Border Patrol custody for more than 72 hours except for in emergencies. Since Feb. 22, the White House has opened at least eight emergency influx sites of unaccompanied migrant children in Texas, including Freeman, with a total capacity of about 14,000 beds.
Health-care workers treat a patient among others suffering from covid-19 at a field hospital set up Wednesday at Dell'Antonia sports gym in Santo Andre, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil. (photo: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters)
"Biological Fukushima": Bolsonaro Resists Calls for Nationwide Lockdown as Brazil Sees World's Worst COVID Surge
Erin Cunningham, The Washington Post
Cunningham writes: "Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro resisted calls for a nationwide lockdown to halt the out-of-control spread of coronavirus cases, even as the nation reached several grim milestones, including a record number of deaths."
“We’re not going to accept these policies of ‘stay home, close everything, lock down,’ ” he said on a visit to the southern city of Chapeco, Agence France-Presse reported.
“There’s not going to be a national lockdown,” said Bolsonaro, who fell ill with covid-19 last year. “Our army isn’t going into the streets to force the Brazilian people into their homes.”
The country’s public health institute, Fiocruz, had recommended stricter regulations to prevent the collapse of the health-care system. On Tuesday, Brazilian authorities said that nearly 4,200 people died due to covid-19 in a single day — the highest daily death toll there since the pandemic began.
The recent outbreak has been fueled by the more virulent P.1. variant first identified in the Amazonian city of Manaus. It has since spread across Brazil, driving waves of more severe illness, hospitalization and death, including among younger patients.
Now scientists there say that they have identified Brazil’s first case involving a similar, more transmissible variant discovered in South Africa. That discovery could portend an even worse phase of the pandemic.
Local officials in Brazil’s most-populous city, Sao Paulo, said Wednesday that they are adding 600 new graves to municipal cemeteries each day to grapple with the rising number of dead.
Over 1000 scientists sign letter calling on Biden to cut emissions in half by 2030. (photo: Getty)
More Than 1,000 Scientists Sign Letter Urging Biden to Cut Emissions in Half by 2030
Union of Concerned Scientists
Excerpt: "Following its re-entry into the Paris climate agreement, the Biden administration is currently devising a national plan to reduce global warming emissions-also known as a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC)-over the next decade. "
ollowing its re-entry into the Paris climate agreement, the Biden administration is currently devising a national plan to reduce global warming emissions—also known as a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC)—over the next decade. Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a letter signed by over 1,000 scientists urging President Joe Biden and his administration to commit to reducing U.S. heat-trapping emissions by at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The number of letter signers could continue to grow as the letter remains open for additional signatories.
According to these experts, this ambitious goal is both scientifically feasible and necessary in order to limit the worst impacts of climate change and achieve the principal goal of the Paris Agreement—limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, and as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible. They also emphasized that emissions reductions from the transportation and power sectors, which are the two leading sources for U.S. global warming emissions, must be prioritized, along with investments and policies that create good-paying jobs and further climate resilience, environmental justice, and racial equity.
Scientists who have already signed onto the letter include: Dr. Joel Clement, senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and UCS; Dr. Lauren Edwards, executive director of 500 Women Scientists and director of Fellowship for the Future; Dr. Anne Kapuscinski, director of the Coastal Science and Policy Program at the University of California-Santa Cruz and board chair of UCS; Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report; Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, climatologist and atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient and an author of the IPCC Second Assessment Report; and Dr. T. Jane Zelikova, research scientist at the University of Wyoming and co-founder of 500 Women Scientists.
UCS has the following experts, many of whom are letter signatories, available to speak about how the United States can reduce its emissions in half over the course of the decade:
- Dr. Dave Cooke, senior vehicles analyst in the Clean Transportation Program at UCS. He is based in Washington, D.C. Click here to view his full biography.
- Dr. Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist in the Climate and Energy Program at UCS. She has attended the UN climate talks and partnered with the international community on climate and energy policies for more than 14 years. Dr. Cleetus is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Click here to view her full biography.
- Dr. Marcia DeLonge, research director and senior scientist in the Food and Environment Program at UCS. She is based in Oakland, California. Click here to view her full biography.
- Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science and senior climate scientist at UCS. She is a co-author of the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Dr. Ekwurzel is based in Washington, D.C. Click here to view her full biography.
- Dr. Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy and chief climate scientist at UCS. He is the lead author of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Dr. Frumhoff is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Click here to view his full biography.
- Dr. Jonna Hamilton, senior manager of government affairs for the Clean Transportation Program at UCS. She is based in Washington, D.C. Click here to view her full biography.
- Dr. Adrienne Hollis, senior climate justice and health scientist at UCS. She is based in Washington D.C. Click here to view full her biography.
On March 8, UCS joined the World Resources Institute, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and University of Maryland for a media briefing where experts put forth detailed scientific analyses showing how the United States could achieve such a target. To watch the recording of this media briefing featuring Dr. Cleetus, click here.
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