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18 February 22
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This is why we need millennials to rise up and take over; there are too many people my age in power whose minds are like attics, packed with disposable antiques. I want someone to be elected president who doesn’t remember the era of doo-wop and long-distance phone calls. These memories take up brain space that could be used to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind.
My generation had no memory of the Depression, which enabled us to create rock ’n’ roll, but tell me: what did rock ’n’ roll contribute to the world other than make a few people enormously rich? I was a Beach Boys fan and every so often, without warning, the line “Catch a wave, you’ll be sitting on top of the world” goes through my head. This alone disqualifies me for any position of public responsibility.
Presidents Day was created to combine the February birthdays of Abe and Georgette Lincoln, but it lacks a clear purpose, and I propose that it be devoted to hearing potential candidates under 50, Gretchen Whitmer, Tom Cotton, Chris Sununu, bring them on, give them twenty minutes of national TV time, and simultaneously hold a plebiscite to lower the age of eligibility for Congress to 18 and let’s get some young minds in the chamber to whom Reagan and Humphrey are just names.
I am going on the premise that decades of repetitive experience is not a great learning experience. I support Uncle Joe but his thirty-six years in the Senate did not serve him well and hobnobbing in hallways and giving speeches to an empty chamber are not edifying activities. It would’ve been good for him or any other senator to take a two-year sabbatical and teach tenth-grade history.
So I propose lowering the age for the presidency to 30. If a person doesn’t have a good grip on things by then, too bad, but we need to hear them and let my age group shut up.
I happen to admire the waitress/bartender from Queens who, deep in college debt, grieved by the death of her dad, was inspired to run for Congress and whupped an old Irish pol who was out of touch with the district, and off she went to Washington. A person can learn a lot about human foibles from tending bar and she came to Congress full of p…v and has stood up well to the opposition’s attempts to slime her and I think Rep. Ocasio-Cortez should find a broader audience and talk to farmers and truckers and also geezers like me.
I don’t think classrooms have a front anymore, the kids face in toward the middle, it’s holistic, and the children’s artwork hangs on the walls, rather than the sad bearded man and his fierce wife with the bad teeth. Maybe politics and government are outmoded and our problems will be addressed by science, which has been the case lately. Democrats and Republicans have lived in the shadow of Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and Google, and perhaps the White House is only a straw man whom we hold responsible for the perils of life and throw on the bonfire and find a new straw man.
I don’t know. That’s my motto now. I failed to catch the wave and became a beach toy lying in the shallows amid flotsam and jetsam and I’m cheering for my millennial nieces and nephews to dash past me and launch themselves onto the enormous wave of 2022 and go flying on the tide of good fortune and I will go sit under an umbrella. I’m an American and I love the story of the Latina waitress who beat the old white guy. It’s an iconic American story. Talent wins out. Smarts beat clichés. The quick lightweight KOs the big palooka. So do it.
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill. Her lawyers allege Facebook misled investors about its work to combat climate and Covid misinformation. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Legal experts called the filings a ‘creative’ approach to holding the tech giant accountable for misinformation
Filed by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit representing former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, the complaints allege that the company made “material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors” about its efforts to combat misinformation. The complaints, which have not been previously reported, build on Haugen’s congressional testimony and filings her lawyers submitted to the financial regulator last year, and they draw from thousands of internal documents that she took before leaving the company in May.
One complaint alleges that climate change misinformation was prominently available on Facebook and that the company lacked a clear policy on the issue as recently as last year, despite Facebook executives’ committing to fight the “global crisis” during earnings calls. A second, companion complaint argues that while Facebook executives were publicly touting their efforts to remove harmful covid misinformation, internal documents “paint a different story.” The complaint cites internal company communications about the spread of vaccine hesitancy in comments and internal surveys that showed the proliferation of covid misinformation on the service.
“Some investors simply will not want to invest in a company that fails to adequately address such misinformation and then engages in misstatements and omissions on the topic,” one complaint says.
Facebook rebranded itself as Meta last year, after Haugen left the company and went public as a whistleblower. The company continues to remove false claims about vaccines and has worked to elevate “authoritative information” about climate change and public health, Meta spokesman Drew Pusateri said.
“There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to stopping the spread of misinformation, but we’re committed to building new tools and policies to combat it,” Pusateri told The Post in a statement.
For years, Democrats have criticized social networks over what they argue is a negligent approach to misinformation about public health, democracy and the environment. The White House last year pressured Facebook to do more to address vaccine misinformation, a push that culminated in President Biden telling reporters “they’re killing people.” But despite public fireworks, policymakers and regulators in the interim have taken little action to rein in the proliferation of falsehoods online, in part because many proposals targeting misinformation risk running afoul of the First Amendment.
Haugen’s lawyers have sidestepped this concern by focusing their complaints on corporate interests: whether the company has lied to investors.
Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School and director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, called the strategy a “creative” approach to the problem. “You cannot pass a law in the U.S. banning disinformation,” Persily said. “So what can you do? You can hold the platforms accountable to promises they make. Those promises could be made to users, to the government, to shareholders.”
While the SEC has not publicly commented on the status of Haugen’s complaints, the agency has signaled a “very strong enforcement stance” under Democratic Chairman Gary Gensler, said Jane Norberg, who headed the SEC’s whistleblower program until April and is now a partner at Arnold … Porter, a law firm that specializes in business regulation. (Haugen sought whistleblower protection from the SEC, which could shield her from retaliation by Facebook.) The agency has been broadly clear that companies need to make clear and accurate disclosures to investors, Norberg said.
“If the company says one thing to investors, but internal documents show that what they were saying is untrue, that could be something the SEC would look at,” she said.
The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the status of the complaints.
A congressional staffer shared redacted versions of the SEC complaints with a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post. The complaints cite confidential documents, originally collected by Haugen, also shared with the consortium.
The climate change complaint, filed with the SEC on Feb. 7, cites records that show employees internally grappling with the company’s perceived role in spreading climate misinformation. In a document from the first quarter of 2021, an employee said they searched for “climate change” in the social network’s Watch tab. The second result was a piece of “climate misinfo,” the employee wrote, and had been viewed more than 6.6 million times.
Another employee working on Facebook’s search integrity called for the company to do more to address climate denialism. “Can we take it a step farther and start classifying and removing climate misinformation and hoaxes from our platforms,” they wrote.
The complaint also cites internal records about the platform’s Climate Science Information Center, a much-touted hub designed to connect people with authoritative climate information. Awareness of the webpage was “very low,” even for people who had visited it.
“Climate change knowledge is generally poor,” one of the internal reports from 2021 said. “Given how many people use Facebook for information about climate change … climate science myths are a problem across all surveyed markets.”
The filings argue that it’s particularly urgent that Facebook tackle climate change misinformation, in part because of the popularity of the site. An internal company document cited in the complaint says Facebook is the second-most common source for news related to climate change, behind only television news and ahead of news aggregators, movies, online climate news sources and other social media platforms.
The company adds information labels to some posts about climate change, and it reduces distribution of posts that its fact-checking partners rate as false. But it generally does not remove those posts, as it does with certain false claims about vaccines and the coronavirus. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, called the company’s approach “disturbing.”
“Unmitigated climate change is projected to lead to far greater numbers of human fatalities than covid-19,” said Mann, author of “The New Climate War.” “The fact that they’re treating greater threat with so much less urgency and care is problematic.”
Pusateri, the Meta spokesman, said that misinformation makes up a small amount of climate change content in the company’s apps, and that it spikes periodically, such as during extreme weather events. He said the company has taken steps to make it easier for fact-checkers to find climate content.
In the other filing, dated Feb. 10, the whistleblower lawyers argue that internal documents showing the spread of covid misinformation contradict the public statements the company has made. An internal Facebook document cited in the complaint shows that in April 2020, the company saw a 20 percent spike in users reporting and seeing false or misleading content. A Facebook employee cites covid as a reason. The complaint cites a May 2020 company record, in which employees warned that hundreds of anti-quarantine groups were active, with many high-ranking comments linking to conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. The SEC complaint also cites an internal Facebook survey, which found 1 in 3 people in the United States said they saw misleading or false information related to covid and voting.
The Washington Post previously reported that coronavirus misinformation was dominating small sections of Facebook’s platform, creating “echo-chamber-like effects” and reinforcing vaccine hesitancy. Other researchers documented how posts by medical authorities, like the World Health Organization, were often swarmed by anti-vaccine commenters. These documents were also cited in the complaint.
The filings are part of Haugen’s team’s broader legal strategy. Her lawyers filed at least eight other complaints last year with the agency based on the trove of company documents. One complaint alleges that the company misled investors about its role in “perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6 insurrection.” Others accused the company of misleading investors about its removal of hate speech and the negative consequences of its algorithms promoting misinformation and hate speech.
Persily, the Stanford law professor, said complaints like this could be a model for how to regulate in the area of content moderation. “It is extremely difficult to enact regulation regarding content moderation because it’s such a fast-moving area,” he said. “If you do hold the platforms to rules that they agree to, that’s a different mode of regulation.”
Protests over Daunte Wright's death lasted for days after he was fatally shot by then-Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP)
The former Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer said she was reaching for her Taser during an April 11 stop last year but instead pulled a service weapon.
Hennepin County Judge Regina Chu handed down the punishment for the former Brooklyn Center police officer after emotional courtroom statements from the victim's loved ones and the defendant herself.
Chu ordered Potter to spend two-thirds of her sentence behind bars and one-third of it on supervised release. She's already served 58 days behind bars, which will go to her credit.
Potter's online Department of Corrections records were quickly updated after Friday morning's sentencing, showing she will likely walk free on April 24 next year.
Chu said Potter deserved less than the 86-month sentence sought by prosecutors because the officer was trying to use her Taser and not her gun.
The judge said she knows her ruling will be unpopular.
“I recognize there will be those who disagree with the sentence; that I granted a significant downward departure, does not in any way diminish Daunte Wright’s life,” Chu said.
The judge said she's never seen a case like this before.
"This is one of the saddest cases that I’ve had in my 20 years on the bench," Chu said.
Outside court, the victim’s mother, Katie Wright, said "the justice system murdered him all over again."
The grieving mom appeared to discount the tears Potter shed in court as the former police officer apologized for her deadly actions.
“This isn’t OK,” she said. “This is the problem with our justice system today. White women’s tears trumps, trumps justice. And I thought my white woman tears would be good enough because they’re true and genuine.”
Ben Crump, an attorney for the family, was particularly angered by Potter's sentence, compared to the 57-month punishment against former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor.
Noor, a Somali immigrant, was convicted of shooting a 911 caller, mistaking her as a threat to his partner.
"He was remorseful but they didn’t make a downward departure for the Black police officer like they made for this white policewoman," Crump said. "And that’s problematic for many people of color in America. That we continue to see this intellectual justification."
Before sentence was issued, Wright’s mother asked a judge to send her son’s killer to prison, telling Potter that she’ll “never be able to forgive you for what you’ve stolen from us.”
“Daunte Wright is my son, my baby boy and I say ‘is’ and not ‘was’ because he will always be my son and I’m proud to say that,” Katie Wright told the court. “Daunte’s smile was genuine and big, just like his dreams. You took them. You took his future.”
Potter, 49, has been in custody since just before Christmas last year, when jurors convicted her of first-degree manslaughter for the April 11, 2021, slaying of 20-year-old Wright in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center.
The victim’s father, Arbuey Wright, told the court he loved his son.
"I was so proud to be his father. He was handsome, he was my son, my prince,” he said. “He was my reason to do better. He was my reason to change in life.”
Wright was pulled over and police tried to arrest him on an outstanding weapons charge when he tried to get back into his car.
During a brief struggle, Potter — with a Glock holstered her right, dominant side, and her Taser on the left — pulled the firearm and fatally shot Wright.
She testified in her own defense, saying the shooting was an accident and that she had meant to pull her non-lethal Taser.
A sobbing Potter on Friday apologized to Wright's loved ones.
"To the family of Daunte Wright, I am so sorry that I brought the death of your son, brother, father, uncle, grandson, nephew and the rest of your family to your home," she said.
"Katie I understand a mother’s love and I am sorry I broke your heart."
Defense lawyer Paul Engh called Potter's act "an unintentional crime" and said his client is a suitable candidate for probation and not prison.
“This (case) is beyond tragic for everyone involved,” Engh told the court.
Potter sat at the defense table wearing a purple sweater and a blue paper medical mask.
Engh challenged claims by the prosecution and victim's family that Potter didn't show concern for Wright after she shot him.
"She was remorseful from the moment the gun was fired," he said. “We can’t have a Kafkaesque standard of what remorse is.”
Potter has been held in isolation for her own protection, the defense said. Engh showed the judge a box of "thousands" of sympathetic letters and cards mailed to Potter.
“People took the time to write her,” he said. “This is unheard of for a defendant. I dare say no one in this room has ever seen anything like this.”
But prosecutor Matthew Frank said the crime's impact cannot be understated, whether intentional or not.
“His name is Daunte Wright. We have to say his name. He’s not just the driver he was a living human being, a life," Frank said.
“The highest principle of law enforcement is the sanctity of life. His life counted. His life mattered. And that life was taken and the law recognized the severity of the loss of life when setting criminal penalties.”
Frank choked back emotion as he told Chu that this case demands significant prison time.
"This is a courtroom full of pain and anger," he said. "How do we fix that? What can we do? "
The slaying of Wright by a white officer sparked renewed protests and calls for justice in and around Minneapolis and other U.S. cities.
Wright was gunned down about 10 miles north of the courthouse where former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was tried for killing George Floyd.
Days later, Chauvin, who is white, was convicted of second- and third-degree murder, as well as second-degree manslaughter. The May 25, 2020 killing of Floyd, a Black man, touched off a summer of national protests against police brutality and institutional racism.
Potter’s trial was held in the same courtroom where Chauvin was tried.
Once again, a bomb threat has derailed classes at Howard University - one of more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities targeted with bomb threats during Black History Month. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
This week marks more than 60 — rather, this week, more than 60 educational groups called on Congress to take immediate steps to support and protect historically Black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs, after a wave of bomb threats against them. Federal authorities say more than a dozen HBCUs nationwide received bomb threats this month alone. February is Black History Month.
This is Dr. David Wilson, president of one of the HBCUs, Morgan State University, testifying Thursday at a congressional hearing on the violent intimidation.
DAVID WILSON: As a young Black boy growing up in rural, segregated, Jim Crow Alabama on a sharecropping plantation, who was not permitted to, of course, attend school full-time until I was in the seventh grade, I have experienced firsthand this type of trauma and this type of racial violence, if you will. And this is why I have devoted my entire career to providing educational leadership to campuses, to enable them to nurture the intellectual growth of Black students and not to stifle it.
And it is so unfortunate that there is so much hatred in our nation today being held by those who are trying to simply prevent HBCUs from educating a disproportionate number of Black students. Yes, the vast majority of these more than 100 institutions have been around since the mid-19th century. And from their inception, they have just simply been targets of domestic terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: David Wilson is president of Morgan State University, testifying remotely before the House committee. Just on Thursday, a bomb threat paused classes at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina before classes resumed at the 155-year-old school established shortly after the Civil War.
Today we spend the rest of the hour with the legendary documentarian Stanley Nelson, who’s made more than 30 films about the Black American experience, including a 2017 PBS documentary on the pivotal role played by historically Black colleges and universities in shaping Black life, creating a Black middle class and dismantling segregation. Nelson has received his first Oscar nomination for his new film about Attica, the prison uprising. We’ll talk about that in a minute, but, first, this trailer for Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: The question for African Americans has always been: What is education’s purpose? Who controls it? And what is the relationship of education to the broader aspirations of our people?
JONATHAN HOLLOWAY: The more the system denies you the chance to read and to write, the more that becomes a prize that you must have.
MICHAEL LOMAX: Black colleges were redefining what it meant to be Black in America. You were pursuing a career where intellect mattered.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: An educated Black population could not be an enslaved Black population.
PROTESTER: We want Black power!
JOHNNY PARHAM: If you weren’t out there demonstrating, then something had to be wrong with your school.
UNIDENTIFIED: We wanted freedom now. But whites were not prepared for any changes here.
MAN ON THE STREET: I think they should be kept out any way possible.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: A slaveholder could work a slave to death. He could rape a slave. He could do virtually anything but teach a slave how to read or write.
JOHNNETTA COLE: As soon as the war breaks out, the first thing they want is to get an education. They wanted those schools to be as free as possible from paternalism, from racism, whether subtle or blatant.
JESSIKA WARD: Movements are easily birthed on HCBUs’ campuses.
We must love and protect each other.
We’re all going through the same experience.
ALVERSIA WADE: HBCU is somewhere where I can be completely myself.
JOHNNY C. TAYLOR JR.: The Black college experience provides the place to be in the majority. That is such a unique and empowering experience.
CALVIN LONG: This HBCU experience has taught me that anything is possible as long as you have that one spark.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities, the 2017 film by Stanley Nelson, one of the leading documentarians of the Black American experience.
Stanley, welcome back to Democracy Now! In a moment we’re going to talk about the film you’ve been nominated for an Oscar for, Attica, but can you talk about the significance of HBCUs and the threats they’re facing right through to today, this dramatic congressional hearing that took place yesterday on the bomb threats?
STANLEY NELSON: First off, Amy, thank you so much for having me on.
You know, the significance of HBCUs cannot be overstated. You know, it’s probably been the biggest pusher for African Americans to come into the middle class. My parents both went to HBCUs. You know, the significance of HBCUs can’t be — it’s just amazing.
And I think it’s really significant, because HBCUs, many of them, were formed right after the Civil War, and so they’ve been around for over 150 years. And I think the threat that they’re under now is really significant and really is almost — is really telling, because it’s kind of like where this country is, that 150 years after their formation, once again they’re under threat. When they were first formed in the 1870s, 1880s, they were burned and under threat. And now, 150 years later, they’re under threat again.
AMY GOODMAN: And how have HBCUs developed? What has changed over these years, and the role they play in American society, and the stress, especially during the pandemic, that these schools face?
STANLEY NELSON: I think one of the — it’s really interesting, because, in many ways, the role they play is very similar to the role they played early on. You know, they’ve always played a role for African Americans to get an education who might not get an education in any other way. So, when they were first formed, African Americans were not allowed in colleges. Today African Americans are allowed in colleges, but the grade school education, the high school education that African Americans get, so many times, is inferior. So, still HBCUs are a way for African Americans to go to college, and many of them then go on to mainstream institutions for graduate school and are kind off vaulted into the middle class. So, I think, in many ways, the role that they play is really similar for the role that they play historically.
AMY GOODMAN: And the development of Black leadership in the United States, the number of people who have gone who are leaders in all different professions.
STANLEY NELSON: Yeah. I mean, you know, we can name them, from Kamala Harris to W.E.B Du Dois, you know? So, they’ve played a huge role. And in so many ways — there’s one little bit of that clip you played — you know, they’re, in many ways, still like Wakanda for African Americans, you know? It’s a way for four years of your life to be in the majority, for four years of your life, maybe, just maybe, to be away from the racism and the racially charged atmosphere that’s so prevalent in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to your latest film, Attica, that’s streaming free on YouTube for Black History Month, that was just nominated for an Academy Award, your first, Stanley Nelson, leading documentarian. Stay with us.
Hundreds of community members gathered Thursday for the funeral of Amir Rahkare Locke. (photo: Kerem Yucel/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Meet the High School Students Who Organized
Thousands to Walk Out for Amir Locke
Officer Mark Hanneman has not been charged with a crime, but a community in mourning was freshly enraged on Thursday.
Meanwhile, even as family, friends, and locals mourned, new details were emerging about the white cop who fired the shots that killed Locke.
Rev. Al Sharpton delivered a eulogy while surrounded by Locke’s family at the Shiloh Temple International Ministries, just two miles from the Feb. 2 disaster. The grim occasion attended by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is hardly a novel spectacle in Minneapolis, a metropolitan area stained by high-profile killings of Black men at the hands of law enforcement in recent years.
“Amir was not guilty of anything other than being young and Black in America,” Sharpton said.
This week alone is seeing movement in at least two of those cases: On Friday, a judge is set to sentence former Brooklyn police officer Kim Potter for killing Daunte Wright in the suburb of Brooklyn Center last year, while three former Minneapolis police officers continue to face a federal trial for the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“That’s why George Floyd’s family and Botham Jean’s sister is here, cause we’re strong enough, and we’ll keep coming back,” Sharpton said.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the Locke family, touched upon the endless cycle of police brutality in Minneapolis—and the rest of the country—during his speech at the funeral.
“Amir Locke was just sleeping on the couch while Black and the police shot and killed him. What can we do to make sure our children don’t become a hashtag?” Crump said, earning cheers from the crowd. “We have to stand up, we have to speak up and we have to fight for our children. Their lives depend on it.”
Locke’s mother, Karen Wells, slammed the Minneapolis Police Department over the death of her son, warning that reform is coming because “the chickens are coming home to roost.” His father, Andre Locke, described how he has been sick since Amir’s death.
“How can you eat something when you can barely breathe?” he said.
“Imagine if Amir was your son,” Locke asked the crowd. “Hold your sons tight, and your daughters tight as well.”
The funeral home is the same one in which 20-year-old Wright was laid to rest last April after he was fatally shot during a traffic stop launched over allegedly expired tabs.
Authorities have conceded that Locke was not the intended subject of the St. Paul homicide investigation that prompted a Minneapolis SWAT team to execute a no-knock search warrant at the Balero Flats apartment building around 7 a.m. on Feb. 2.
Police records made public last week show that St. Paul police asked for search warrants to be conducted in Minneapolis for three apartments, including the one where Locke was shot. Multiple local outlets have reported that St. Paul cops did not ask for the highly controversial no-knock procedure—one they themselves have avoided in recent years—only for their colleagues in Minneapolis to insist on one, going so far as to claim it would actually improve safety.
In gruesome footage of the incident, Locke can be seen wrapped in a blanket in the dark apartment only lit by a television. At least four officers unlock the door and enter without knocking, shouting “Police! Face forward!” as Locke stirs. As he begins to move from the couch, a pistol can be seen in his hands.
It takes about nine seconds before Minneapolis police officer Mark Hanneman begins shooting, hitting Locke three times, according to a police report obtained by The Daily Beast.
The police report and video both show that Locke was armed at the time—but while the report initially stated that he was aiming the firearm at officers, in the video the gun does not seem to be aimed at anyone. The video shows an officer firing three shots while Locke—still wrapped in a blanket—falls to the floor.
“An officer fired his duty weapon and the adult male suspect was struck. Officers immediately provided emergency aid and carried the suspect down to the lobby to meet paramedics,” the report states. “The suspect was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center where he died.”
Only adding to the horror was the realization that authorities were actually looking for Locke’s 17-year-old cousin and two others in connection with a murder in St. Paul. The relative was arrested and charged on Feb. 8 with two counts of second-degree murder. As The Daily Beast reported, the apartment where Locke was fatally shot was rented by the girlfriend of one of his cousin’s brothers.
Facing a fresh onslaught from enraged activists, Mayor Jacob Frey announced a moratorium on no-knock warrants soon after Locke’s death, even as he left the door open to their use in some circumstances.
Hanneman has been placed on administrative leave per department policy, and prosecutors are currently weighing whether to press charges in the incident that sparked new tensions in a city still traumatized by the grisly murder of Floyd nearly two years ago.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that probes killings by police, is tasked with investigating the shooting that killed Locke. But the video, according to Locke’s family and many of the protesters who have routinely crowded freezing city streets in recent days, should be more than enough grounds for Hanneman to be fired and charged with a crime.
After all, Locke’s killing is not the first time Hanneman has been accused of police misconduct, court documents obtained by The Daily Beast and local news reports show.
In a federal civil rights lawsuit obtained by the Daily Beast, Hanneman was one of several cops accused of violating a man’s civil rights nearly a decade ago.
Trevor Coon alleged that he was stopped by a McLeod County deputy in December 2013 after he exited a car with a friend. Hanneman, still a Hutchinson, Minnesota, police officer at the time, was called to the scene and conducted a field sobriety and drug recognition test without cause, according to the 2014 lawsuit.
After he passed all the tests and Hanneman searched his car for almost two hours, the officer told Coon to “get the fuck out of here,” the suit claimed. Officers did not arrest or file any charges against Coon, but did impound his car. In 2015, Judge Richard Kyle ruled in Coon’s favor, ordering Hanneman and the other officers to pay him a total of $4,500.
While Coon told The Daily Beast he appreciated being contacted about Hanneman and his case, he did not wish to comment about the officer or Locke’s death. Hanneman’s lawyer on this case did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Court documents obtained by a local ABC affiliate also show that, in November 2020, Hanneman illegally searched a man while executing a search warrant in St. Paul, Minnesota. In that case, too, the cop targeted someone who was not actually being sought by investigators.
According to a judge’s ruling, “The pat search of [the St. Paul man] was unconstitutional. Police were not… justified in searching [the man]” because he “was not referenced in the warrant.”
Hanneman was not disciplined by the Minneapolis Police Department for the incident. Per 5 KSTP, Locke’s family has said that case speaks to the police department’s “custom and practice of engaging in unconstitutionally excessive searches and seizures.”
Amir Locke’s aunt, Linda Tyler, on Thursday chastised elected and law enforcement officials for their continued insistence that more training will solve the national police brutality problem.
“Stop the rhetoric that police officers need more training,” she said at the funeral. “You cannot train away racism.... If you think being a police officer is a difficult profession, try being a Black man.”
Reginald McClure, one of Locke’s cousins who works in law enforcement in Texas, was the last family member to speak at the funeral. Calling Locke his “little brother,” McClure recounted the shock he experienced when he saw the video of his cousin’s death—noting that he instantly saw problems in the raid from a law-enforcement perspective.
Those problems, he said, mean that Hanneman and the “colleagues that just stood there” should be held accountable for the incident.
A string of high-profile embarrassments have highlighted the threat of far-right infiltration faced by military and police forces around the world. (photo: Getty)
A string of high-profile embarrassments have highlighted the threat of far-right infiltration faced by military and police forces around the world.
An outsized role was allegedly played that day by a group called the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia, whose membership is drawn heavily from the ranks of serving and former military and police. During the riot, the group, which had already carved out an intimidating reputation for showing up, heavily armed, at protests across the US, could be seen moving swiftly through the crowds in a formation drilled in military training.
Prosecutors say the group was there that day with a clear purpose: to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power and keep Donald Trump in office.
They’ve charged Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper who was arrested in January alongside other members of his group, with seditious conspiracy.
"Rhodes spearheaded a conspiracy to oppose by force the execution of the laws governing the transfer of presidential power in the United States," prosecutors wrote. "Rhodes stood at the cent[re] of the seditious conspiracy – orchestrating plans to use force, recruiting and financing co-conspirators, purchasing weaponry and tactical gear, inciting support and action, and endeavoring to conceal his and other co-conspirators’ crimes."
They say Rhodes had helped organise so-called “quick reaction forces” to be in the area on the 6th of January, and had written in a group chat with his co-conspirators that the day of the riots could be the “final nail” in the US’s coffin.
Trump "must know that if he fails to act, we will. He has to understand that we will have no choice," wrote Rhodes, according to an NBC News report citing the US government.
Experts say the alleged heavy involvement of the Oath Keepers in the Capitol riot highlights the urgency of tackling the problem of extremism in the security and defence forces.
At least 80 military members are revealed to have signed up for the Oath Keepers while still serving in the US military – with more than a dozen even signing up using their official military email addresses, according to reports. That’s on top of the dozens of current and former police officers confirmed to have joined the group.
The risks of this are obvious. As serving military or police officers, individuals swear an oath to defend the country and follow orders, and are given specialist tactical training, and access to high-tech weaponry in response.
Their membership of anti-government groups like the Oath Keepers, which are steeped in conspiracy theories about elites coordinating to oppress the people, run in direct conflict with that, raising the risk that those assets will be brought to bear against the government these soldiers have sworn to serve.
“It undermines the legitimacy of both the military and law enforcement,” said Peter Simi, an associate professor at Chapman University who studies extremist groups and violence.
“It's hard to say you have a democratic institution when you have … active members of the far-right who are interested in undermining the government, or essentially advocating for various kinds of vigilante violence.”
The Oath Keepers, in particular, are known for pushing far-right conspiracies about an impending totalitarian New World Order, with Rhodes repeatedly claiming that the US was descending into civil war and advising his followers to arm themselves.
“They will talk about things … like the United Nations being a vehicle for tyranny that is orchestrated by some murky cabal of international elites,” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor at the University of Albany.
“Oath Keepers doesn't depict politics as a way for us to come together to solve common problems. Instead, it's a place driven by this fight between good and evil.”
And it’s not just an American phenomenon. In recent years, a string of high-profile cases have emerged of extremists within Western military forces. In 2018, a British soldier was jailed for being a member of a neo-Nazi terrorist group. Last year, a Belgian soldier went on the run, armed with stolen rocket launchers and guns, vowing to attack leading virologists in response to COVID restrictions. And Germany’s military has been plagued by a string of far-right scandals.
Experts say problem has been driven by a number of factors: far-right groups deliberately targeting the forces for recruitment; a macho, hierarchical and authoritarian mindset in the services that is perhaps more susceptible to far-right ideology; and a lack of adequate response from the authorities so far to the threat of far-right infiltration.
These latest incidents only underline that it’s long overdue to take the problem more seriously, say experts.
“In the case of law enforcement … they are the ultimate authority to take another person's life. If they deem it's necessary, they carry a badge that gives them that [power],” said Simi.
“The question is: do you want a person in that position of authority, with that level of power… who subscribes to neo-Nazi or other far right extremist beliefs?”
In this photo provided by Estelle Shuttleworth in February 2022, bald eagles compete for a deer carcass in Montana. (photo: Estelle Shuttleworth/AP)
While the bald eagle population has rebounded from the brink of extinction since the U.S. banned the pesticide DDT in 1972, harmful levels of toxic lead were found in the bones of 46% of bald eagles sampled in 38 states from California to Florida, researchers reported in the journal Science.
Similar rates of lead exposure were found in golden eagles, which scientists say means the raptors likely consumed carrion or prey contaminated by lead from ammunition or fishing tackle.
The blood, bones, feathers and liver tissue of 1,210 eagles sampled from 2010 to 2018 were examined to assess chronic and acute lead exposure.
“This is the first time for any wildlife species that we’ve been able to evaluate lead exposure and population level consequences at a continental scale,” said study co-author Todd Katzner, a wildlife biologist at U.S. Geological Survey in Boise, Idaho. “It’s sort of stunning that nearly 50% of them are getting repeatedly exposed to lead.”
Lead is a neurotoxin that even in low doses impairs an eagle’s balance and stamina, reducing its ability to fly, hunt and reproduce. In high doses, lead causes seizures, breathing difficulty and death.
The study estimated that lead exposure reduced the annual population growth of bald eagles by 4% and golden eagles by 1%.
Bald eagles are one of America’s most celebrated conservation success stories, and the birds were removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List in 2007.
But scientists say that high lead levels are still a concern. Besides suppressing eagle population growth, lead exposure reduces their resilience in facing future challenges, such as climate change or infectious diseases.
“When we talk about recovery, it’s not really the end of the story — there are still threats to bald eagles,” said Krysten Schuler, a wildlife disease ecologist at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
Previous studies have shown high lead exposure in specific regions, but not across the country. The blood samples from live eagles in the new study were taken from birds trapped and studied for other reasons; the bone, feather and liver samples came from eagles killed by collisions with vehicles or powerlines, or other misfortunes.
“Lead is present on the landscape and available to these birds more than we previously thought,” said co-author Vince Slabe, a research wildlife biologist at the nonprofit Conservation Science Global. “A lead fragment the size of the end of a pin is large enough to cause mortality in an eagle. ”
The researchers also found elevated levels of lead exposure in fall and winter, coinciding with hunting season in many states.
During these months, eagles scavenge on carcasses and gut piles left by hunters, which are often riddled with shards of lead shot or bullet fragments.
Slabe said the upshot of the research was not to disparage hunters. “Hunters are one of the best conservation groups in this country,” he said, noting that fees and taxes paid by hunters help fund state wildlife agencies, and that he also hunted deer and elk in Montana.
However, Slabe said he hopes the findings provide an opportunity to “talk to hunters about this issue in a clear manner” and that more hunters will voluntarily switch to non-lead ammunition such as copper bullets.
Lead ammunition for waterfowl hunting was banned in 1991, due to concerns about contamination of waterways, and wildlife authorities encouraged the use of nontoxic steel shot. However, lead ammunition is still common for upland bird hunting and big game hunting.
The amount of lead exposure varies regionally, with highest levels found in the Central Flyway, the new study found.
At the University of Minnesota’s Raptor Center, veterinarian and executive director Victoria Hall said that “85 to 90% of the eagles that come into our hospital have some level of lead in their blood,” and X-rays often show fragments of lead bullets in their stomachs.
Eagles with relatively low levels can be treated, she said, but those with high exposure can’t be saved.
Laura Hale, board president at nonprofit Badger Run Wildlife Rehab in Klamath County, Oregon, said she’ll never forget the first eagle she encountered with acute lead poisoning, in 2018. She had answered a resident’s call about an eagle that seemed immobile in underbrush and brought it to the clinic.
The young bald eagle was wrapped in a blanket, unable to breathe properly, let alone stand or fly.
“There is something hideous when you watch an eagle struggling to breathe because of lead poisoning – it’s really, really harsh,” she said, her voice shaking. That eagle went into convulsions, and died within 48 hours.
Lead on the landscape affects not only eagles, but also many other birds — including hawks, vultures, ravens, swans and geese, said Jennifer Cedarleaf, avian director at Alaska Raptor Center, a nonprofit wildlife rescue in Sitka, Alaska.
Because eagles are very sensitive to lead, are so well-studied and attract so much public interest, “bald eagles are like the canary in the coal mine,” she said. “They are the species that tells us: We have a bit of problem.”
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