04 February 23
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Protester who opposed Georgia’s planned police-training facility was first environmental activist killed by police in US history
Officers from multiple agencies shot and killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, on 18 January after authorities moved through the camp of activists who were in a forest to protest a planned $90m police training facility. Dozens of officers from the Atlanta police department, the Dekalb county police, the Georgia state patrol, the Georgia bureau of investigation and the FBI swept through the camp.
According to police, Paez shot and injured a state trooper with a handgun first. However, Georgia’s bureau of investigation – or GBI – has said the shooting was not captured on body camera, prompting activists to call for an outside entity to review the case.
A private autopsy that has since been performed on Paez’s body revealed that several different officers shot him at least 13 times.
“Manny was a kind person who helped anyone who needed it,” said a statement attributed to Paez’s mother, Belkis Terán, which was released Friday. “He was a pacifist. They say he shot a police officer. I do not believe it.”
Terán added that authorities haven’t taken the time to “privately explain” to her family how her son was killed.
The limited release of official information as described by Terán has also raised many questions among the family’s supporters.
A statement from civil rights attorney Jeff Filipovits argued that the GBI, which is leading the investigation into Paez’s killing, has so far “selectively released information about Manny’s death”.
“They claim Manny failed to follow orders,” said the statement from Filipovits, who is representing Paez’s family. “What orders? The GBI has not talked about the fact that Manny faced a firing squad, when those shots were fired, or who fired them?”
Paez’s family has since requested the GBI release any related audio and video footage surrounding his killing. “Any evidence, even if it is only an audio recording, will help the family piece together what happened on the morning of January 18. This information is critical, and it is being withheld,” said attorney Brian Spears, who is working with Filipovits.
Since the Atlanta city council voted to approve the 85-acre Cop City project in 2021, the local government has been met with a slew of opposition from activists seeking to protect the natural resources of the forest where the facility is supposed to be built.
Last December, a handful of activists protesting there were arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism” under state law, an unprecedented move in US environmental activism.
According to experts, Paez’s death was the first time that an environmental activist has been killed by police in US history, signaling an alarming crackdown on environmental activists across the country.
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Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany. (photo: Clemens Bilan/EPA/Shutterstock)
The decision has revealed something of an enigma. Who is the man leading Germany during the fiercest conflict in Europe since World War II: a strategic genius or a fainthearted dawdler? Over a year into his tenure, Chancellor Olaf Scholz remains hard to decipher. On the one hand, his agreement with the United States will bring Ukraine more military power than expected. On the other hand, it took him half a year of ever-mounting pressure from allies, coalition partners and large parts of the German press to move on the issue, robbing Ukraine of time it doesn’t have.
So there’s something for both interpretations. Yet decoding Mr. Scholz is crucial, not so much for understanding his first year in office as for navigating the months that lie ahead. Because the decisive question for Mr. Scholz — as well as for NATO as a whole — is not whether to send battle tanks to Ukraine. Rather, it’s the question of what the West should do once Ukraine starts using those tanks, especially in a potential advance toward Crimea. For all the importance of the past week, that test is still to come.
So far, the chancellor has been notably timid: He tends to look on until, well, push comes to Scholz. He intervened in a fight about extending nuclear power only after his Green and Liberal ministers had spent months scratching each other’s political eyes out. It took him an entire year to accept that his original appointment as defense minister was clearly ill suited for the job. Rather than sack her for a series of blunders, he waited until she resigned.
Mr. Scholz’s tendency to wait until the last minute to act — a kind of strategic bystanderism — has been most damaging when it comes to Ukraine. In the months it took him to forge his tank deal, thousands of Ukrainians died from Russian bombs, rockets and artillery. Potentially even more Ukrainians and Russians are going to die in the months that it will now take to make the tanks, both American and German, operational.
These deaths, of course, are not Mr. Scholz’s fault. But a quicker, bolder decision on tanks could have alleviated the situation, allowing the Ukrainians to make decisive breakthroughs and shift the battlefield dynamics in their favor. Instead, as the British historian Timothy Garton Ash has warned, the conflict is in danger of becoming an “escalating stalemate,” with both sides dug in for World War I-style trench warfare.
Securing the United States’ support, in the form of 31 M1 Abrams tanks, is generally seen as a success. But there’s a drawback here, too. By insisting that the United States take an equal risk in opposing Vladimir Putin with battle tanks, Mr. Scholz has shown a lack of faith in a core principle of NATO itself. Article 5, after all, states that an attack on one member will be considered as an attack on all members. Forcing the issue, said Roderich Kiesewetter, a foreign policy expert in the opposition Christian Democratic Party, “undermines the credibility of the alliance.”
Mr. Scholz proudly calls it “responsible” to have gained an extra layer of reassurance. He reportedly sees his move in the tradition of one of his predecessors as chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt, also a Social Democrat, pressed the Americans to station medium-range Pershing II missiles in Germany in the 1980s. He wanted Washington to be able to retaliate in kind should the Soviets attack Europe with their new SS-20 missiles.
But Mr. Schmidt’s main intention was to close a defense gap, while Mr. Scholz’s is seemingly to fill a courage gap. The German public is split on the Leopards decision, not least because Germany does not have a nuclear deterrent of its own. But was it wise to leverage this anxiety against a resolute alliance partner like the United States? Real leadership should have meant the opposite: to use the alliance with the United States, longstanding and of indisputable worth, to assuage German angst. The fact that Mr. Scholz didn’t chose this option will be remembered not only in Washington but also in Moscow.
There is one last exhibit of Mr. Scholz’s slowness, one that allies in the East and West should heed. The chancellor steadfastly refuses to utter a sentence that most other Western leaders have said by now: that Ukraine must win this war. Mr. Scholz goes only so far as to say that Ukraine must not lose it. Why? The most probable reason is to signal to Ukrainian officials that a victory as they envision it — including the reclamation of Crimea — is not what Germany has in mind.
Here, for a change, Mr. Scholz’s caution could be justified. As much as one can argue about Mr. Putin’s red lines, possession of Crimea is certainly one that the Russian president is determined to stick to. The peninsula is not only holy to Mr. Putin as the place of baptism of Vladimir the Great, the father of Russian Christianity, but also sacred to him personally. The fate of Crimea is very likely to determine his own.
If Mr. Putin were to lose Crimea, he would fail the promise on which the entire war in Ukraine is founded: to restore national glory and greatness, in compensation for the humiliations that — as Mr. Putin sees it — the West has inflicted on Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. A Ukrainian recapture of Crimea would not be just a territorial defeat. Psychologically, it would be dangerously more than that: a humiliation of the effort to undo humiliation. Nobody knows whether Mr. Putin, in a meltdown moment, might resort to a nuclear strike to avoid this ultimate degradation.
In this setting, a push from Ukraine to win back the peninsula with Western tanks should worry more than just the faint of heart. Mr. Scholz likes to present his slowness as prudence that others recognize only in hindsight. Yet when it comes to Crimea, his strategy of caution surely won’t hold. He will have to stop playing the bystander, and act.
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Rosa Parks speaking at the conclusion of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, with Reverend Ralph Abernathy on left, on March 25, 1965, in Montgomery, Alabama. (photo: Stephen F. Somerstein/Getty Images)
Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1913. Far from being a face of respectability politics, she was a defiant and seasoned working-class organizer who despised the cringing submission that Jim Crow induced and who doggedly fought oppression in all its forms.
-Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born 110 years ago today. Her courageous stand on a Montgomery bus in December 1955 is now American legend, yet her political voice and radicalism are still largely unrecognized. Even many who know she wasn’t a simple seamstress still miscast her as a face of respectability politics — distorting her political beliefs, the suffering she endured, and the radicalism of the civil rights movement.
Rosa Parks was a forty-two-year-old, working-class, seasoned organizer when the Montgomery bus boycott began. She had grown up in a family that supported pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey and started her adult political life alongside her activist husband, Raymond. She joined the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NCAAP) in 1943 and spent the next decade working on a series of anti-rape and anti–legal lynching cases.
Alongside Montgomery activist and Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters leader E. D. Nixon, Parks pushed the city’s NAACP to take more assertive, mass-based action against Jim Crow. Mentored by legendary organizer Ella Baker, she was inspired by the radical democratic visions of Septima Clark and Myles Horton when she attended the Highlander Folk School the summer before her arrest.
Rosa Parks moved to Detroit in 1957 and spent the second half of her life fighting the racial injustice of the North, seeing “not too much difference” between its segregation in schools and housing, job discrimination, and police brutality and that of the South. She embraced both nonviolent direct action and the moral right of self-defense, citing Malcolm X as her personal hero.
To the end of her life, Parks believed that the struggle was not over and much work laid ahead. Yet in the pantheon of Black radicals, she is often omitted, and her political ideas remain largely unrecognized.
Before the Boycott
At the age of eighteen, a mutual friend introduced Rosa to a politically active barber, Raymond Parks. She described him as “the first real activist I ever met.” Raymond was organizing on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young men aged twelve to nineteen who had been wrongfully accused of rape and, all but the youngest, were ultimately sentenced to death. (The campaign was largely spearheaded by communists and other leftists, because the NAACP shied away from cases that involved or alleged sexual violence.) Meeting Raymond opened a new world of collective struggle. When they married, Rosa joined him in this dangerous enterprise; she recalled late-night gatherings, guns on the table, because it was risky even to hold a meeting.
In 1943, galled by the fact that Black people were fighting overseas and unable to vote at home, Rosa Parks joined the Montgomery NAACP. Along with E. D. Nixon and activist Johnnie Carr, she helped transform it into a more activist branch. They worked on mass voter registration campaigns, fought injustices in the criminal legal system, and organized for school and bus desegregation. Seeking justice for lynching, rape, and assault victims — including twenty-four-year-old African-American Recy Taylor, who was kidnapped and gangraped by six white men in Alabama in 1944 — she traveled the state documenting these abuses.
“Whites would accuse you of causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing,” she explained. Parks wrote repeatedly of the “major acrobatic feat” of negotiating white supremacy against Black people. This work with the NAACP was dangerous, and she was part of a small group willing to do it. She grew discouraged — and Raymond even more so — by the fears and “complacency” of many other African Americans. “A militant Negro was almost a freak of nature to [white people],” she lamented, “many times ridiculed by others of his own group.”
Elsewhere, Parks wrote: “There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take . . . The line between reason and madness grows thinner.” She noted the constant pressure to acquiesce and that there was “no solution for us who could not easily conform to this oppressive way of life.”
In reading Parks today, it is striking how much she stressed the difficulty of dissenting and the pressure that came down on those who did so. She theorized the effort and ostracism of being a rebel and how the system was designed to prevent being one, a testament to decades of being a grassroots activist. If contemporaries like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Bayard Rustin thought deeply about the same theme, they didn’t write about it to the same extent.
Parks struggled with this pressure and hostile climate for more than a decade before the bus boycott began — despairing for years, alongside Nixon and Carr, that no mass movement was emerging.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Then on March 2, 1955, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to relinquish her bus seat. The police dragged her off the bus, and when she fought their manhandling, they charged her with assaulting an officer. Rosa Parks fundraised for Colvin’s case and invited her to be secretary of the Montgomery NAACP’s Youth Council, which Parks had started the year before to train and encourage young people to take stronger stands against segregation.
When community leaders petitioned the city for better treatment after Colvin’s arrest, Parks refused to attend: “I had decided I wouldn’t go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.” In the summer of 1955, Parks attended a two-week workshop at Tennessee-based Highlander Folk School; this rejuvenated her spirits, and she redoubled her efforts with the Youth Council.
Four days before her arrest, Parks attended a packed mass meeting. The lead organizer in the Emmett Till case, Dr. T. R. M. Howard, had come to town to bring the bad news that the two men who killed Till had been acquitted. Parks was angry and despairing. There had been more attention to Till’s case than any other they had worked on, and still the men walked free.
Rosa Parks had been kicked off the bus several times for being unwilling to follow the practice of some Montgomery bus drivers, who forced Black people to get off the bus after they paid and reboard from the back. That night, December 1, 1955, when she refused bus driver James Blake’s order to move, Parks thought about her grandfather and his gun. She thought about Emmett Till. And she decided to stand fast. “Some people say I was tired . . . The only tired I was was tired of giving.”
Although shy by nature, Rosa Parks was not quiet that night. When Blake decided to have her arrested and the police boarded the bus, asking why she didn’t move, she countered, “Why do you push us around?” It was not about a seat next to a white person, she later explained: “I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I’ve been called that . . . Integrating that bus wouldn’t mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.” Her aim was “to discontinue all forms of oppression.”
Montgomery’s Black residents were at a breaking point. Late that night, when Parks decided to pursue a legal case, the Women’s Political Council (WPC) sprang into action. WPC leader and Alabama State professor Jo Ann Robinson went to the college in the middle of the night and, with the help of a colleague and two students, ran off thirty-five thousand leaflets reading, “Another woman has been arrested on the bus . . .”
The leaflet didn’t say Rosa Parks had been arrested; it was the accumulation of injustice that was clear. The boycott would continue for 382 days — fueled by organized Black Montgomerians that set up forty pick-up stations around town. At the height of the boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association was coordinating ten thousand to fifteen thousand rides per day.
The Parks family had been living in the Cleveland Court Projects for twelve years when she was arrested. Five weeks after her bus stand, she was fired from her job as an assistant tailor at Montgomery Fair Department Store; shortly after, Raymond lost his job as a barber at Maxwell Airforce Base. The family plunged into poverty.
Despite the boycott’s successful conclusion a year later, the Parks family still faced death threats and could not secure steady work. So eight months after the boycott’s end, in August 1957, they left Montgomery for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived.
She called it “the Northern promised land that wasn’t.” They still struggled to find work or a decent place to live for years. In 1965, newly elected congressman John Conyers hired her to work in his Detroit office. A decade after her bus stand, Parks had at least attained a modicum of economic stability. She finally got health insurance.
Rosa Parks’s Global Vision of Freedom
Parks had long drawn sustenance from the militancy of young people. Here again she did — working alongside a growing Black Power movement. She loved Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Ella Baker and Queen Mother Moore. For her, “any means to show we are dissatisfied” was essential, and she took part in scores of initiatives against social injustice.
During the 1967 Detroit uprising, police killed a number of Black residents, including three unarmed teenagers at the Algiers Motel. When no police were indicted and the media refused to investigate, young radicals decided to hold a “People’s Tribunal.” When they asked her to serve on the jury, she agreed. When young people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) helped build an independent Black political party with local residents in Lowndes County, Alabama, Parks journeyed down to support them. When Detroit judge George Crockett challenged the mass arrests of people attending a Republic of New Afrika (RNA) convention by setting up court in the police station, the police union launched a petition to impeach him. So she joined the campaign to protect him. She visited the Black Panther school in Oakland; attended the 1968 Black Power convention in Philadelphia; served on staff at the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana; helped organize many local prisoner defense committees (including for Joan Little, the Wilmington Ten, and the RNA Eleven); and fought for reparations with the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA).
Parks’s vision of freedom was global. An early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam, she opposed US policy in Central America in the 1980s and protested US complicity in South African apartheid. Eight days after 9/11, she joined Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and other civil rights activists to demand the United States work through international institutions and not resort to war.
Simply having Black people in high places was not Parks’s definition of justice. She issued a public statement against Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court (before Anita Hill’s testimony was made public), dismayed that the Supreme Court was “turning its back on the undeniable fact of discrimination and exclusion.” Given Thomas’s poor record on civil and voting rights, his appointment “would not represent a step forward in the road to racial progress but a U-turn on that road.”
Sometime in the 1990s, an older Rosa Parks doodled over and over on a paper bag “The Struggle Continues . . . The Struggle Continues . . . The Struggle Continues.” To the day she died, in October 2005, she insisted: “Don’t give up and don’t say the movement is dead.”
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Fred Hampton speaks at a rally in Chicago's Grant Park in September 1969. (photo: Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)
They leaked the documents to the press and on March 24, 1971, The Washington Post ran a cover story on the vast program initiated by the FBI in 1956 to neutralize suspicious persons and organizations. Although initially formed to target the Communist Party U.S.A., it was quickly expanded to include a wide range of groups considered “subversive.” No segment had been as central to COINTELPRO operations as civil rights activists. A wider scope of the FBI’s actions, however, was not known until Congressional hearings five years later. What came to light was exceptionally chilling—seeped in its own racism, without any checks or balances, the FBI devoted more resources to harming the Civil Rights movement than any other task in its purview.
Fourteen years before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, Dr. T.R.M. Howard founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) in Mississippi. An advocate of civil rights, Howard provided resources and assistance for Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old kidnapped and murdered in that state in August 1955. Since Till’s family had received death threats, Howard secured them with a safe haven during the trial. When an all-white jury acquitted two white men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant in September, Howard denounced the verdict and widespread racial oppression and terror. Howard then traveled to other cities, including Montgomery, Alabama, where he spoke at the church of a 26-year-old new pastor, Dr. Martin L. King Jr. on Nov. 27, 1955. Like at other meetings, Howard detailed the great abuses, corruption and indignities regularly experienced by Black people. And Howard openly criticized the FBI for doing nothing to protect Black citizens in Mississippi. Local newspapers reported on these speeches and FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, incensed, wrote a rare open letter to Howard in 1956 denouncing him. Hoover also opened a file on Howard, putting him and the RCNL under COINTELPRO surveillance, along with communists groups (Howard was, however, virulently anti-communist). The FBI then recruited local Black citizens to spy on Howard and others. One of these included Ernest C. Withers, a celebrated photographer of the Black freedom movement who was granted access into intimate meetings and gatherings of civil rights leadership. He dutifully reported his observation back to the Bureau, where it developed schemes for disruption.
Hoover despised T.R.M. Howard, but the director’s contempt for the young minister whom Howard met in Montgomery would far surpass the contempt he held for almost any other public figure. Hoover’s special attention to King has been depicted in numerous movies, documentaries, books, and a wide array of articles—journalistic and scholarly. Hoover infamously claimed that the most prominent civil rights leader was the “most notorious liar in the country.” FBI agents were directed to spy on King’s personal life and professional life and disrupt both. Ultimately, the FBI, over the course of more than a decade, collected hundreds of pages of surveillance on King, hours of secret recordings, and a trove of his public work—writings, and speeches alike. It even attempted to tarnish his reputation months after he was assassinated. Under Hoover’s direction, in the months after the 1963 March on Washington and King’s most famous speech, FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan, head of the Intelligence Division, reported to Hoover that effective exploitation of the information gathered on King, “if handled properly, [could] take him off his pedestal… the Negroes will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper direction.”
King was not alone. Every major advocate for Black people in the country had been targeted by the Bureau. In fact, there was little differentiation between ideological lines and Black leadership. In a meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson, Hoover said in reference to Black nationalist Malcolm X and integrationist King, “we wouldn’t have any problem if we could get those two guys fighting, if we could get them to kill one another off…”
The campaign against King is best understood as a continuum of government policies that pre-date King by decades. The FBI had been, like other American institutions, inextricably tied to the ideology of white supremacy. In the 1930s, everything from the military to restaurants officially discriminated nationwide. Challenges to that archaic and endemic belief were almost always considered subversive. The predecessor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), targeted the Universal Negro Improvement Association and its leader Marcus Garvey. It also spied on Garvey’s ideological antagonist, W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as the NAACP.
Hoover’s behavior is often viewed as paranoid and even exceptional, but he operated with the full sanction of the wider state. During the civil rights movement, three U.S. presidents: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all supported Hoover’s efforts which were codified to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” targeted organizations. This would be achieved through various and sundry tools, including illegal activities. COINTELPRO used informants, agent provocateurs, infiltrators, legal and illegal wiretaps, break-ins, false correspondence, and “bad-jacketing,” which was the act of making a legitimate member of a group appear to be a collaborator with the state. Psychological warfare included calling the parents of young civil rights activists to inform them that their children had been murdered or kidnapped.
FBI agents worked with journalists to plant stories in order to discredit leadership and organizations. Across the country, the Bureau collaborated with local police to repress targeted groups. Sharing resources and intelligence, activists were arrested, fired from jobs, expelled from schools and lost business contracts. COINTELPRO even used switchboard operators and postal workers to spy on citizens, with or without court order.
Though there was a special interest in civil rights groups, the FBI used its extensive resources to spy on and antagonize a wide range of communities. The Bureau established categories for various targets, which included everything from the anti-war and women’s liberation movements, to socialists, Black nationalists, student groups, journalists, intellectuals, non-violent integrations and revolutionary nationalists. They were separated into the “Agitator Index,” the “Rabble Rouser Index,” and the “Security Index.”
After King’s assassination in April 1968, the Black Freedom Movement took a turn toward the more radical permutations of Black Power, and no organization evoked Hoover’s rage and interest more than the Black Panther Party. Five months after the King assassination, Hoover called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” In internal memos, he encouraged “hard-hitting” ideas from agents to destroy the Party. The Bureau submitted anti-Panther ghost-written articles to the press, planted false correspondence between the Panthers and other organizations and used a classic “divide and conquer” tactic to foment hostility between the Panthers a Black nationalist group, the US Organization, in Los Angeles. This last effort culminated in actual shoot-outs, multiple beatings, at least one bombing, and four Panthers dead in Southern California by 1969. With excitement over the violence, the San Diego FBI office submitted in a report:
“Shootings, beatings, and a, high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program.”
Hundreds of Panthers were stopped, harassed and arrested by the police across the country. Hoover explained that the, "purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.”
The effectiveness of COINTELPRO was overwhelming. Many organizations were destabilized with arrests, raids, break-ins, and killings. The most famous raid of the Panthers occurred in December 1969 in Chicago when a 14-man police raiding party killed two Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Several other Panthers were injured in the pre-dawn attack. Nationally, the Panthers insisted that the FBI and local police were involved in a conspiracy to destroy them. Hoover denied it. The magnitude of these coordinated activities, however, were not known until the 1976 congressional hearings.
Analysis of the COINTELPRO documents revealed that the overwhelming majority of targets were not tied to the Soviet Union or any foreign power. They included many non-violent Black civil rights groups, but also organizations in other communities, including the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, the National Lawyers Guild, and women’s liberation movement groups.
In 1976 the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the "Church Committee," released a detailed report that unveiled the magnitude of the FBI’s actions and the hubris with which it functioned. The Bureau had, “at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered.” In part, it states:
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that ... the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association….
The special attention to the Black Freedom movement is sobering. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan had files, but were significantly outnumbered by files on civil rights groups. There were only two files for right wing groups. For Black nationalists, the Panthers represented 233 of 295, (79 percent) of all operations in that category. The Congressional hearings found that the FBI devoted less than 20 percent of its intelligence efforts to disrupt organized crime or to solve crimes related to bank robberies, murders, rapes and interstate theft. By contrast, more than half of all FBI targets were political organizations. The FBI was less concerned with actual criminal enterprises, like mob families, than with organizations and people who dared attempt to realize rights promised them legally.
Forty years after the Church Committee Hearings, few Americans are as universally celebrated as Dr. Martin L. King Jr. As we enter the King holiday on the last days of the Obama presidency, it is remarkable how many people, across ideological lines, continue to find utility in his wisdom. Conservatives like Sean Hannity and progressives like Melissa Harris Perry quote King alike. Just last year on Jan. 18, 2016, FBI Director James Comey met with journalists, FBI leadership and various government officials at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to honor King’s life and legacy. “Special agents and intelligence analysts now visit the memorial during their training, where they study Dr. King as part of their curriculum.” The memorial, which opened in 2011, “serves as an example of constraint and oversight in the history of the FBI and Dr. King.” J. Edgar Hoover, however, may be turning over in his grave.
In the aftermath of the revelation of these sordid policies, COINTELPRO was officially dismantled, although similar surveillance efforts continue. Comey’s remarks suggest that the FBI views the program as a cautionary tale for forging a more professional agency not marred by such corruptive forces as racism. What is most instructive about this Orwellian tale, however, is the narrative of how one person (in this case Hoover) can be such a powerful force of institutionalized—and national—corruptive activity. With further attention, of course, we see that one person is rarely acting alone.
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Shapearl Wells holds a protest in 2018 outside the police station where her son sought help. Listen to "Somebody" Episode 5, "The Two-Year Anniversary." (photo: Vidur Jang Bahadur)
A mother’s quest for answers after her son’s murder inspired an official inquiry, but the city is exercising information control.
Shapearl Wells uttered those words during our first meeting at the Invisible Institute almost six years ago. She would repeat them several times over the years we worked together investigating the murder of her 22-year-old son, Courtney Copeland. We recounted the course of that investigation in the podcast “Somebody,” a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist, hosted by Wells.
Copeland was murdered by an unknown assailant on March 4, 2016. A bullet pierced his back as he sat in his car on Chicago’s Northwest Side. He managed to drive to a nearby police station where he flagged down an officer, then collapsed on the ground. Some 13 minutes passed before an ambulance departed for a trauma center. Copeland’s heart stopped en route. When the ambulance arrived at the hospital, he was in police handcuffs, according to the paramedic run sheet and the ER nurse who received him.
What Wells wanted, above all, was to learn everything she could about the last moments of her son’s life. She was haunted by the thought that he died alone, handcuffed and frightened with no one to comfort him.
Her quest, with the support of the Invisible Institute, necessarily focused on the role of the police at the scene — How had they responded? Had they done everything they could to minister to Copeland? — and on the quality of the investigation by the detectives assigned to the murder case.
Wells’s dogged pursuit of those questions prompted the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General to undertake its own official inquiry. The OIG’s quarterly report issued early last year included a summary of that investigation. The full results, however, have not been released, and a Freedom of Information Act request for them by the Invisible Institute was denied by the city’s Department of Law.
According to the summary, the OIG recommended that two officers be disciplined: the lead detective on the case and the senior officer at the scene, a sergeant.
On the basis of audio captured by Wells and provided to investigators, the OIG found that the detective was “disrespectful” in his interactions with her.
Because the detective had retired prior to the completion of its investigation, the OIG recommended that the Chicago Police Department refer his name to the Department of Human Resources for placement on the “ineligible for rehire list.” CPD disagreed. It took the position that the detective’s behavior did not rise to the level that would warrant being placed on the list.
With respect to the sergeant, the OIG found that the handcuffing of Copeland was not properly documented and that he had failed to ensure, as required by policy, that the officer who placed Copeland in handcuffs accompany him to the hospital. As a result, there was no one aboard the ambulance who could unlock the cuffs at the hospital, and the trauma team had to wait for officers to arrive before they could work on Copeland.
CPD disagreed that the preponderance of evidence established that Copeland was handcuffed and declined to discipline the officer beyond giving him a reprimand.
The OIG summary does not answer the question of central importance to Wells: Why did the police handcuff Copeland? Would a young white professional falling mortally wounded out of a late-model BMW in front of the station have been subjected to the same treatment as her Black son? Presumably, the full report would shed some light on this question, but the city has not seen fit to release it.
however, one recommendation in the summary that is revealing as to the current state of police reform:
OIG recommended that CPD review its policy regarding the provision of first aid to injured persons to ensure that it complies with a recent change in state law, and to further examine the existing contrast in CPD policy between a mandatory duty to provide first aid to those injured by a CPD use-of-force and a non-mandatory duty to provide first aid to all other injured persons.
In other words, CPD policy at the time of the Copeland incident was that officers were required to provide first aid to those they had shot or otherwise injured but not to those who, having been injured, sought their aid.
This policy anomaly is absurd on its face. It also reflects the dynamics of scandal-driven reform: Government responds to public outrage over a particular incident by bolting a fix onto the dysfunctional machinery of policing rather than developing coherent policies that arise from first principles. The core value here is stated plainly as the first provision of CPD’s directive on use of force, which was twice revised in the course of reform efforts following the police murder of Laquan McDonald:
The Department’s highest priority is the sanctity of human life. The concept of the sanctity of human life is the belief that all human beings are to be perceived and treated as persons of inherent worth and dignity, regardless of race, color, sex, gender identity, age, religion, disability, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status, military status, immigration status, homeless status, source of income, credit history, criminal record, criminal history, or incarceration status. Department members will act with the foremost regard for the preservation of human life and the safety of all persons involved.
What better way to act on that principle than to equip and require police officers to provide first aid under any and all circumstances when someone is injured?
Even more telling is the fact that after the OIG pointed out the policy anomaly and CPD agreed to review the matter, it appears that the department has taken no action to revise the directive. Despite repeated inquiries, CPD’s news affairs desk was unable to say whether the policy will be revised. And the directive itself, as it appears on the CPD website, shows no revision.
Again, the full OIG report might illuminate the larger policy considerations, but the city has withheld it from the public. A final act of disrespect to Wells, this is part of a larger pattern. Despite significant advances in transparency in the post-Laquan McDonald era, the city continues to exercise information control with respect to OIG investigations, largely neutralizing their essential function.
Under an ordinance Mayor Lori Lightfoot pushed through in 2019, the corporation counsel — the city’s chief lawyer, who reports to the mayor — has “sole discretion” over whether to release OIG investigations. The only OIG reports the city has released during the Lightfoot administration deal with issues that arose under the previous administration, while reports of great immediate interest to the public have been withheld.
For example, the city is yet to release the OIG’s report on its handling of the botched police raid of the home of social worker Anjanette Young in 2019. Nor has it released the OIG’s report on the debacle that ensued when the city approved permits for the implosion of a coal company smokestack that resulted in massive pollution in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in 2020.
As disturbing as those instances of official secrecy are, nothing more tellingly dramatizes the character of the Lightfoot administration’s stance on transparency than Shapearl Wells not being able to read the report on the investigation she inspired.
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Protesters in Lima called for elections after the dismissal of President Pedro Castillo. (photo: Aldair Mejia/EPA)
The motion called to bring forward elections and to hold a referendum on forming a constitutional convention.
The motion put forward by the Free Peru party was rejected on Thursday with 75 votes against and only 48 in favour, with one abstention. In addition to moving elections up from April 2024 to July 2023, the proposal included the calling of a referendum on forming a constitutional convention – another key demand of protesters.
The previous day, a similar motion which failed to gain enough votes had been backed by President Dina Boluarte.
Peru has been embroiled in a political crisis with near-daily demonstrations since December 7, when then-President Pedro Castillo was arrested after attempting to dissolve Congress and rule by decree.
At least 48 people, including a police officer, have been killed in clashes between security forces and protesters, according to the human rights ombudsman’s office.
Protesters have erected roadblocks causing shortages of food, fuel and other basic commodities in several regions of the Andean nation.
The economic fallout of the demonstrations is hitting hard on workers. Luz Camacho, a local farmer who picks up pomegranates in the southern region of Ica has lost one-quarter of her wage, enough to not be able to pay her debt to the bank.
“It has affected us a lot because we haven’t worked and we have loans and debts. Where are we going to get an income?” Camacho told Al Jazeera.
The chamber of commerce estimates that the region has lost $300m since the crisis started in December.
“This political crisis is turning into a social economic crisis,” said Jose Luis Gereda, the director of Pomica, an Ica-based company that packs fruits to be shipped abroad. Gereda buys 70 percent of its products from small producers who have been prevented by protesters from accessing fields.
Chief adviser resigns
In December, lawmakers moved elections, originally due in 2026, up to April 2024, but as protesters dug in their heels, Boluarte called for holding the vote this year instead.
The unrest is being propelled mainly by poor Indigenous Peruvians from southern areas of the country.
They perceived Castillo, who is also from that region and has Indigenous roots, as an ally in their fight against poverty, racism and inequality.
Boluarte’s government began to show additional cracks on Thursday, with the departure of Raul Molina, a chief adviser.
Molina blamed Boluarte for a lack of “substantive political gestures” as well as for not establishing any clear suspects in the deaths of protesters during the crisis.
“Madam President, listen to our people, to the great majority who are asking for changes”, read Molina’s letter of resignation released on Thursday by the press.
She declined to comment on the resignation.
Five ministers in Boluarte’s government have resigned since she came to power in December.
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People navigate a flood-affected area near Dhaka, Bangladesh. (photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
New experiments show the power of giving cash right before extreme weather strikes.
Chances are, you take it to mean supporting climate change mitigation: reducing the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.
But there’s another aspect to the fight against climate change: adaptation. Adapting to life in a more dangerous climate involves building resilience to weather shocks — for example, by constructing a seawall or planting crops that can withstand droughts and floods.
Mitigation is vastly more popular than adaptation. Of all the funding directed toward fighting climate change globally, over 90 percent goes into the mitigation bucket. And I can’t claim to be surprised: For years, I’ve mostly focused on that bucket, too. I saw mitigation as the way to solve climate change, while adaptation seemed like putting a Band-Aid on one of the world’s biggest problems.
And yet, who determines the time scale of our response to that problem?
For many people — especially poorer people in poorer countries — the problem is now. Climate change is already flooding their homes and causing them heatstroke. It would be unjust for richer countries that disproportionately created the problem to say “we get to determine the time scale of the problem, not you, and we’re deciding to frame the problem as a future event to be mitigated.” Climate change is also a present event, so solving it also means addressing the problem as it exists today.
“If you look at some river that’s started flooding now, no matter what we do in even the next 100 years, these rivers are going to continue flooding,” said Miriam Laker-Oketta, a Uganda-based research director at GiveDirectly, a nonprofit helping the world’s poorest.
She was referring to the fact that it will take decades to decarbonize the world’s energy supply, and meanwhile all the carbon we’ve emitted and keep emitting will continue to warm the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Money spent to mitigate emissions will pay off over the long term but do little to protect a country from climate change right now.
“We need to increase the amount that’s dedicated to helping people adapt,” she told me.
One approach to adaptation is to direct funding to governments so they can build up the infrastructure — whether that’s a seawall or a new irrigation system — to reduce the impacts of shocks. These big public goods are definitely important, and they should get a larger share of climate financing than they do today. But implementing major projects like these can take time. If you’re, say, a smallholder farmer whose food and income source is about to be wiped away by a climate change-enhanced cyclone, you don’t have that time.
So a nascent approach to adaptation aims to help vulnerable people by giving them just-in-time cash transfers. That means free money, no strings attached, that recipients can use to improve their resilience in the days or weeks before extreme weather hits. Researchers can pinpoint when and where it’ll hit thanks to advances in data availability and predictive analytics. Recent experiments show how successful this approach is, making the case that anticipatory cash transfers should play a bigger role in climate adaptation.
How just-in-time climate cash transfers work
Humanitarian relief organizations are used to doing two things: helping people out after disaster has already struck, and helping them out by giving them stuff. A hurricane strikes, and in comes the Red Cross or the United Way with water and tarps for victims.
Just-in-time climate cash transfers turn that model on its head.
First, they offer people support before the shock hits, making them more resilient and limiting the economic and human damage when it comes. Second, they give straight-up cash. Not food. Not Super Bowl merchandise from the team that didn’t win the Super Bowl. Money.
We know from research on poverty alleviation that cash is preferable because it gives people the agency to buy the things they really need, as opposed to what outsiders think they need. And it can be disseminated much faster than goods, thanks to cellphone-based banking. Cash is now considered the baseline standard for challenges like poverty alleviation, with other interventions judged on whether they’re superior to cash.
And in the past few years, evidence is mounting that cash works very well for climate adaptation, too. Let’s look at three examples.
In July 2020, data-driven forecasts of river levels in Bangladesh showed that many households were about to experience severe flooding. The World Food Programme sent 23,434 households around $53 each a few days prior to and during the floods.
The preemptive action turned out to be a great bet. Those floods ended up being some of the worst and longest in decades: Over a million households were inundated, and food markets and health services were disrupted.
Compared to households that didn’t get a cash transfer, households that did were 36 percent less likely to go a day without eating, 12 percent more likely to evacuate household members, and 17 percent more likely to evacuate their livestock.
And the impacts were surprisingly durable. As the study authors write, “Three months after the flood, households that had received the transfer reported significantly higher child and adult food consumption and wellbeing. They also experienced lower asset loss, engaged in less costly borrowing after the flood, and reported higher earning potential.”
Soon after, the World Food Programme also tried anticipatory cash transfers in Somalia and Ethiopia, with similarly positive results: The cash infusions protected communities’ food security and livelihoods from the worst impacts of a forecasted drought.
In 2021, the government of Niger kicked off its own anticipatory cash transfer program for responding to water scarcity. The pilot program detects droughts early by using the satellite-based Water Requirement Satisfaction Index. When the index shows that water has fallen 10 percent below its median at the end of the agricultural season, it automatically triggers the unconditional cash transfers to be sent out.
The trigger was activated for the first time in November 2021, and since March 2022, emergency transfers have been sent to 15,400 drought-affected households. These transfers have allowed farmers to get help three to five months earlier than they would if they were just relying on traditional humanitarian aid. And receiving the support earlier meant they were less likely to have to resort to coping responses with costly social effects like reducing food consumption or pulling kids out of school.
The nonprofit GiveDirectly, a big believer in unconditional cash transfers, launched a climate adaptation program last year in Malawi. The extremely low-income country — where nearly three-quarters of the population lives on less than $1.90 a day — has already been hit with climate-related storms, with more expected to come.
Knowing how climate-vulnerable Malawi is, GiveDirectly gave 5,000 farmers in the Balaka region two payments of $400, one in April and one in October, to coincide with key moments in their agricultural schedule. October is also the beginning of the wet season, when 95 percent of precipitation falls, meaning it’s when cyclones and extreme weather are most likely to occur.
Simultaneously, a group called United Purpose gave the farmers trainings on climate-smart agriculture, irrigation practices, and soil conservation. GiveDirectly and United Purpose had coordinated on timing, but they didn’t inform the farmers of the connection because they didn’t want to make the farmers feel they were expected to spend the cash on building climate resilience. They wanted the cash to be truly unconditional.
The results so far are promising. More farmers are using better seeds (which are drought- and flood-resistant), more are intercropping (which improves fertility), and fewer are going hungry (specifically, there was about a 60 percent drop in the proportion of recipients who went a whole day without eating).
For Laker-Oketta, the research director at GiveDirectly, it’s clear that anticipatory cash transfers for climate adaptation are a good idea. “The cash we give is not sufficient to put up a seawall — that’s something governments have to do,” she said. “But the lowest-hanging fruit is actually giving people agency to make certain decisions they need to make now. The question is not, ‘Does cash work?’ but, ‘What is the right amount, frequency, and timing?’”
Now, GiveDirectly is planning to experiment with the timing. They want to see if getting cash to people mere days before a weather shock, as opposed to weeks before, improves resilience more. So they’re launching a pilot with the government of Mozambique to give out just-in-time transfers, sending people around $225 just three or four days before the next flood strikes.
In January, they began pre-enrolling individuals in vulnerable villages, which are selected by overlaying poverty maps, population data, and flood risk maps. That way, people will be able to get fast payments directly ahead of likely storms during the rainy season in March and April.
“The best adaptation is to be rich”
Climate mitigation and climate adaptation, along with poverty alleviation, are all absolutely crucial if we want a safe and just world. They’re also expensive, with mitigation projects alone slated to cost trillions over the next decade. How should the world divide funding between them?
When it comes to climate financing, the United Nations has called for a 50/50 split on mitigation and adaptation. But what we see so far is still more like 90/10 in mitigation’s favor — a sore point at last year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. And instead of giving poorer nations additional money for adaptation, some rich nations have diverted development aid — which is already insufficient — to fund more mitigation projects.
Charles Kenny, an economist and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, thinks that’s a terrible idea. As he’s written, foreign aid would be a drop in the bucket if it’s diverted to mitigation projects. But it can have a meaningful impact on countries with small economies by reducing poverty and fostering development (including infrastructure, health, and education). And development is a vital adaptation defense for these countries because it makes them less vulnerable to climate change.
“The best adaptation is to be rich,” Kenny told me. “Take the same size earthquake or cyclone or hurricane, and the number of people who die is considerably smaller in richer countries and even richer neighborhoods of countries.”
In other words, climate adaptation and reducing poverty go hand in hand.
That’s part of why Laker-Oketta, the GiveDirectly research director, said her organization didn’t worry about whether recipients would spend their unconditional cash on building climate resilience or on something else. “If someone makes the decision to spend the money on something else, it means that was their priority at that time,” she told me.
For Laker-Oketta personally, climate resilience was very much the priority the day we spoke. It’s currently supposed to be the dry season in Uganda, where she lives, and yet it was raining. Just hours before our call, her office flooded.
“I believe a lot of people who want most of the funding to be focused on mitigation are people who are not being directly affected by climate change right now,” she said. “Their only worry is, ‘If the climate gets worse, then I’ll be affected as well, so can we put as much as is necessary into preventing me from being part of those people who are affected?’ But if you’re living in a place where it’s flooding right now, then you’re going to think differently. Right now, what I need is a way to stop the rain from coming in!”
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