In the immediate aftermath of the ICE killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis last week, the Trump administration smeared her as a “domestic terrorist,” claiming that she had weaponized her vehicle. They labeled Good a “violent rioter” and insisted every new video angle proved their version of the truth: Good was a menace and the ICE agent a potential victim. That’s despite video evidence to the contrary, showing Good, by all appearances, trying to leave the scene of the altercation, while ICE agents acted aggressively. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, spent Sunday doubling down, insisting that Good had supposedly been “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.”  Last Thursday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz invoked Orwell’s 1984 to describe this break between what millions of people saw, and what Trump and his allies insisted had taken place: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he quoted. “It was their final, most essential command.” So, on Sunday, I joined the throng in Manhattan for one of many dozens of protests held around the country this past weekend. In the middle of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by raucous, defiant New Yorkers, I asked protesters the simple question: What did you see?  “I mean, it seems like the bottomless, self-radicalizing thing that the government is going through,” said Anne Perryman, 85, a former journalist. “Is there any point when they’re actually at the bottom, and they’re not going to get any worse? I don’t think so.” “I think there’s a small minority of Americans who are buying that,” said Kobe Amos, a 29-year-old lawyer, describing reactions to the government’s gaslighting. “It’s obviously enough to do a lot of damage. But if you look around, people are angry.” “I saw an agent that overreacted,” he added, “and did something that was what—I think it’s murder.” Protesters also described a growing resolve amid the anger sweeping the country. “This moment has been in the works for too long,” said Elizabeth Hamby, a 45-year-old public servant and mom. “But it is our time now to say this ends with us…Because we want to be a part of the work of turning this tide in a different direction.”

Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective.  “At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen.  This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2025.

A video reportedly filmed by the federal agent who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this week was released on Friday by a conservative Minnesota outlet whose most prominent reporter is married to the city’s former police union head. Alpha News—notable in part for its sympathetic coverage of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted in 2021 of murdering George Floyd—has since Wednesday published a flurry of articles including “ICE shooting in Minneapolis: Minnesota attorney explains how presumed innocence has been ignored again” and “REPORT: Woman killed by ICE agent was member of ‘ICE Watch’ group working to disrupt immigration arrests.” Conservative commentators have seized on the 47-second clip to argue that it exculpates Ross and shows Good driving towards him. > 100 percent confirms they were left wing agitators intentionally trying to > provoke an altercation with law enforcement, and then they drove right at him. > > Any “conservative” who bought the media narrative on this case is permanently > discredited and there’s no coming back from it https://t.co/mTvu5KBOUi > > — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 9, 2026 Other viewers see the clip as further evidence against Ross. > I synced up the video from the Johnathan Ross and a bystander to help show > what was happening when he fumbled his camera. He was already out of the way > at that point and already had his gun drawn. It wasn't him being hit, it was > him shooting Renee Good. > > — RagnarokX (@ragnarokx.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T19:20:37.388Z Vice President JD Vance has shared the Alpha News video multiple times as of early Friday evening, writing in one post, “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Trump administration has maintained that Good was a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle” in order to carry out “domestic terrorism.” Visual investigations by publications including the New York Times, Bellingcat, and the Washington Post have refuted that account. Yet the fact that the video from the shooter’s perspective was released at all, and with such speed, is remarkable—as is who it was leaked to. Alpha News, founded in 2015, is a Minnesota outlet that has distinguished itself for years by running pieces that suggest Derek Chauvin suffered a miscarriage of justice. Its highest-profile reporter, Liz Collin, is married to former Minneapolis police union president Bob Kroll; in 2022, Collin published a book titled They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd. In 2020, the ACLU of Minnesota sued Kroll in connection with claims that Minneapolis police used excessive force against protesters, according to Minnesota Public Radio, leading to a settlement that barred Kroll from serving as a police officer in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, and two neighboring counties, Ramsey and Anoka, for the next decade. A 2020 article by Mother Jones‘ Samantha Michaels details decades of allegations against Kroll of extreme brutality, as well as another lawsuit—filed by Medaria Arradondo, then the city’s chief of police—who accused Kroll of wearing a white power patch and referring to a Muslim congressman as a “terrorist.” (Collin’s book, in an excerpt published by Alpha News, decries protests against her husband: “‘Bob Kroll is a racist’ was a popular theme,” Collin writes.) It’s unclear how Alpha News obtained the video apparently taken by Ross as he killed Good. Collin and Alpha News’ editor-in-chief did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the video, Ross exits a vehicle and begins circling Good’s SUV before pointing the camera at Good, who says, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Ross films the rear of the vehicle and the license plate. The camera pans to Good’s wife, also filming, who speaks to Ross—saying, among other things, “Go home.” An agent instructs Good to “get out of the car.” Good reverses before appearing to turn away from Ross and drive away. Simultaneously, the angle of the video shifts quickly, no longer pointing at Good, and several gunshots are audible. The camera briefly refocuses on Good’s car, turning away moments before it runs into a nearby vehicle.  In the background, a voice says, “Fucking bitch.” 

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Louisiana Department Of Wildlife And Fisheries (LDWF), typically responsible in part for overseeing wildlife reserves and enforcing local hunting rules, has assisted United States immigration authorities with bringing at least six people into federal custody this year, according to documents WIRED obtained via a public record request. According to the documents, LDWF signed a memorandum of agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May, which gives the wildlife agency the authority to detain people suspected of immigration violations and to transfer them into ICE custody. Since then, at least six men entered ICE custody after coming into contact with or being detained by LDWF officers. None of the men were issued criminal charges at the time they came into contact with LDWF officers, the documents show. Two of the men were known by ICE to have been in the country legally at the time the agency took them into custody. The documents also indicate that at least one “joint patrol” took place in a Louisiana wildlife management area in which LDWF agents were accompanied by officers with Customs and Border Protection and the US Coast Guard. The memorandum of agreement between ICE and LDWF makes no mention of CBP or the possibility of working with the agency as part of the agreement. However, the documents indicate that a relationship with CBP may have been facilitated through LDWF’s partnership with ICE. LDWF partnered with ICE under the agency’s 287(g) program, named after the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that enables officers and employees at the state or local level to perform some of the functions of US immigration officers, such as investigating, apprehending, detaining, or transporting people suspected of violating immigration law. As of December 3, exactly 1,205 agencies have partnered with ICE through the 287(g) program. (An additional eight agencies are currently pending approval from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.) Some 1,053 of these agreements were signed this year, meaning enrollment has increased by 693 percent compared to the end of 2024. The LDWF is one of just three state wildlife agencies—the others being the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources—that have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE, according to public ICE records. All three agreements were signed this year. The marked expansion of the 287(g) program this year has generated relatively little attention. However, the documents from the LDWF indicate that the state and local agencies enrolled are actively detaining people not guilty of any crimes, and facilitating their arrests and possible deportation. CBP did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The LDWF answered questions about one particular incident, but did not respond to WIRED’s complete request for comment. ICE spokesperson Angelina Vicknair—when given the men’s full names, the dates and locations they were detained, all known circumstances of their detainment, and all other identifying information included in the documents—said that the agency did not have enough information to determine if the men were in custody, released, or deported. She also said that the number of men WIRED asked about, seven, constituted “too large a query,” adding, “We’ll need you to narrow it down.” Per a LDWF “After Action Report” obtained by WIRED, three men were taken into a federal custody after the agency conducted a joint patrol on August 11 with five US Coast Guard officers and an unknown number of CBP agents in Lake Borgne, which is in Louisiana’s sprawling Biloxi Marsh Complex. According to the report, the officers were looking for people allegedly violating state statues for seed oyster harvesting. The report claims that no one on the patrol witnessed any crimes or civil violations. Despite this, it says that “the federal partners were able to identify and detain 3 subjects for immigration issues,” adding that “all arrestees were transported by Federal agencies to detention centers.” It’s unclear why these individuals were singled out, but all three appear to have Hispanic last names. The report claims that two of the arrested individuals legally entered the United States but overstayed the amount of time they were allowed to remain in the country. The third person, it claims, entered the country illegally and had an unspecified “criminal history.” Given the report’s sparse information about the men, it’s unclear if any of them have been deported or remain in federal custody. Some time after the August 11 patrol, the report claims, a CBP lieutenant asked LDWF about organizing “future patrol opportunities and joint patrols” with the agency. “After this operation, CBP has reason to believe that future patrols will be beneficial and productive,” the report reads. “They also expressed how much they learned traversing some of the more specific waterbodies with the local knowledge of our agents, they were able to learn new routes across the area that will allow them to extend the effectiveness of their independent patrols.” In an August 22 email obtained by WIRED, LDWF regional captain Tim Fox says that CBP wanted to organize future patrols “on a less formal basis.” It’s unclear whether a less formal patrol would still produce a paper trail. According to a later LDWF incident report, the agency arrested three additional people in October, all of whom were taken into ICE custody. The men were issued civil citations for going to a wildlife management area and using their firearms without the proper permits, the report says, but none were issued any criminal charges. The report claims that on October 23, two LDWF officers patrolling the Maurepas Swamp Wildlife Management Area heard several gunshots in an area where “people often illegally target shoot.” The suspects, three men in their twenties, all cooperated with LDWF at the scene. When asked to show their weapons, they showed the officers a pistol, an AR-15, several magazines, and a few dozen rounds of ammunition. The officers confirmed that none of the firearms were stolen. One of the men also showed the officers where they had been shooting. The men showed identification—a Louisiana ID card, a Honduran ID card, and a Honduran passport, respectively—when asked, but did not have the appropriate permits for being in a Wildlife Management Area and firing a weapon. The two men who fired weapons were issued three civil citations, while the one who didn’t was issued two. At some point during LDWF’s interactions with the men, the agency called immigration authorities. “Due to the unknown immigration status and them possessing firearms, we made contact with Homeland Security Investigations,” the report reads. A HSI agent reportedly told LDWF that one of the men had a final removal order, one had “pending” immigration proceedings, and one man had legal parole to be in the US. When LDWF contacted the local ICE field office, ICE sent two agents to the scene. Upon arrival, the report claims, “The ICE Officers made several phone calls and they decided to take custody of all three subjects.” All three men were placed in handcuffs and escorted to the ICE officers’ vehicles. It’s unclear if any of these men were deported, but based on information in the report, none of them appear to currently be in ICE custody, according to the agency’s detainee locator. In response to WIRED’s public record request, LDWF also included an incident report filed on October 6. The report describes a man who allegedly littered “roofing shingles, nails and other assorted building materials” near Cypress Lake for which he was issued one civil citation for “gross littering.” It notes that the man didn’t speak English, but “was cooperative during this investigation” with the help of a translator. The incident report says that the man had “unverified citizenship,” but it does not specify whether he was taken into ICE custody. When asked about the incident and why it was included in the response to WIRED’s public record request, a LWFD spokesperson clarified that the agency reported the man to ICE after he was issued the littering citation. The spokesperson said that as a result of the man’s “unverified citizenship,” the LDWF “forwarded the citation and report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” “LDWF has no further information regarding Mr. Garcia’s current status or location,” the spokesperson said.

THE STATE WILL PERMIT A VERSION OF THE TRUTH TO EMERGE—ONLY ONCE IT’S TOO LATE FOR CONSEQUENCES ~ punkacademic ~ The Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC) yesterday released its report on the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster, the worst in British sporting history. During the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough, Sheffield, a crush at the Leppings Lane End of the ground took the lives of 97 Liverpool fans, some of them in the following weeks and years due to injuries sustained. Many more fans and families suffered irrevocable trauma. The IOPC report states that officers from South Yorkshire Police could have faced disciplinary proceedings including charges of gross misconduct for their actions on the day and after. The scale of the injustice perpetrated against the Liverpool fans who died and were injured at Hillsborough, their families, friends, and indeed the city as a whole, has belatedly, gradually, been acknowledged by the state machine – but only because of a concerted campaign for justice mounted by the families and their supporters in the decades since. Many of those campaigners are dead. Anne Williams, who lost her son Kevin, died in 2013. Rose Robinson, who lost her son Steven, died in 2021. Williams never lived to see the outcome of the Goldring Inquests, which overturned the original verdicts of accidental death and ruled the fans had been unlawfully killed. Robinson never lived to see the IOPC say that police officers should have faced consequences for their actions. Several of those officers are themselves now dead, and others retired. Put simply, there will be no justice for the cop atrocity that is Hillsborough, as Margaret Aspinall has powerfully noted. The report acknowledges that the media response to the disaster was fuelled by briefings and lies on the part of South Yorkshire Police, the force responsible for policing the match, which worked hard to blame the fans for its mistakes, and traduced the memories of the dead. The 1990 Taylor Report and 2012 Hillsborough Independent Panel Report found the force to have been culpable for the disaster. The role of one particular officer, Norman Bettison, merits its own section in the IOPC report. Subsequently knighted, Bettison was both involved in the disinformation campaign which followed the disaster and later appointed Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, the force that polices Liverpool. Bettison’s appointment was controversial at the time, with two members of the Merseyside Police Authority resigning in protest. The IOPC report finds that, were Bettison still in police service, he would have a case to answer for gross misconduct on the basis of statements he made minimising his role in the cover-up and the briefing campaign which followed the 1989 disaster. Hillsborough is the latest in a series of state crimes against the public to result in a moment of nominal state catharsis once a ‘minimum safe distance’ is reached from the incident. As long as there is no real possibility of justice, the state will allow a modicum of the truth to ‘come out’, once it has been dragged kicking and screaming to that point by campaigners who will not let the matter rest. But it does so only for the sake of its own legitimacy, to maintain the facade that we live in a world where police lawbreaking is the exception, not the rule, and the state ‘learns lessons’. As with Hillsborough, so too with Bloody Sunday when the final Inquiry reported so late (after an earlier Inquiry had been a whitewash) that again many family members and campaigners were dead, and where even the one prosecution against a soldier – more than 50 years after the incident – failed. So too with the Spycops Inquiry, where whatever emerges from it has already been superseded by the fact that the very illegal acts that police spies engaged in have now been made lawful for future officers by the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act 2021. It is now lawful for the police to break the law. This is the true ‘lesson learned’; make sure you’re covered for this sort of stuff, so you don’t have the potential of a difficult investigation in the future – even thirty or fifty years hence. In Liverpool, the IOPC report has told us no more (and in fact less) than we already knew. From 15 April 1989 to now, the people of Liverpool have known what really happened at Hillsborough, just as they knew what the state was doing in the weeks and months after, and just as they knew from bitter experience the nature of the slander and lies promoted by the press. The damage is done; both the lives lost and those permanently injured mentally and physically, but also the damage to a whole city, slandered by police and government in the context of a 1980s  political culture where anti-Scouse diatribes had been a feature of media representation of a city that had refused (unlike much of the rest of England) to bend the knee to Thatcherism. Justice isn’t coming, despite the valiant efforts of the campaigners. The IOPC report provides no ‘closure’. Scousers were expendable in 1989, demeaned thereafter, and wounds will not heal. Saying that some of the perpetrators might have faced a HR process (but won’t) is, in the end, the most British of responses from a state apparatus that holds its people in contempt.   The post Hillsborough: Police condemned, but no justice appeared first on Freedom News.

A RECORD 100 DISPLAY CASES WERE HIJACKED FOR BERLIN DEPORTATION CONFERENCE ~ from antifawerkstatt ~ The Tiergarten District Court has once again dismissed criminal proceedings for adbusting with fake police posters. A penal order had been issued, and a court date was set for November 6. The proceedings, which had dragged on for over two years, have now been dismissed. According to the Interior Ministers’ Conference in Berlin in February 2023, the communications guerrilla group “Against German National Police Violence” (GdP) hijacked a record-breaking 100 advertising display cases in S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations. They placed their own posters in these displays, designed as part of a police image campaign. The adbustings addressed police violence, racism, and deportations. Despite already having issued a penalty order for 60 daily rates of €30 each (a total of €1,800), the court now declined to proceed with the case. “We probably drew too much attention to police arbitrariness at the last court case in August!” said Kai N. Krieger from the Workshop for Antifascist Actions (W2A), who coordinated the solidarity work. The Interior Ministers’ Conference took place in Berlin in June 2023. This was a good opportunity to demonstrate to the public that this was a meeting of deportation ministers. The communications guerrilla group “Against German Nationalist Police Violence” (GdP) therefore organised the largest adbusting campaign in years in Berlin. The group hijacked a near-record 120 advertising display cases in subway and S-Bahn stations. The group designed the posters themselves. The style was inspired by the police’s official “110% Berlin” campaign. Illustrated with a document shredder, one of the poster motifs featured the slogan: “Our reappraisal of racism. 110% not.” The activists combined an image of a special task force (SEK) blowing down doors with the statement: “Deportation to a war zone? Gladly! 110% violence.” A PR advertising image of a young policewoman at a desk with a file folder is combined with the slogan “Racism? Let’s deport! 110% goodbye.” The police responded to the action with an immediate manhunt. Unfortunately, the officers arrested two people. They were searched, interrogated, and detained at the station until the early hours of the morning. According to the file, the State Security Service explained to the investigating federal police officers by phone on the day of the action that adbusting with self-brought posters was not a criminal offence. “If you don’t steal or break anything, it’s neither theft nor property damage,” explained Sam A. Hax at the time. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office had already issued a dismissal notice in 2020, which the adbusting scene promptly published as “Darfschein” (permission to allow) and which remains in effect today This was preceded by arbitrary and disproportionate police measures. From 2015 to 2019, the Berlin State Criminal Police Office (LKA) attempted, with enormous effort, to criminalise adbusting through house searches and reports to the Counter-Terrorism Center. After determined solidarity efforts, a failed court case in 2019, as well as dozens of parliamentary inquiries and extensive media coverage in 2020 and 2021, the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office quietly dropped all criminal proceedings against satirically altered advertising posters.  Nationwide Repercussions Public prosecutors from other cities have also followed Berlin’s example of not prosecuting satirical poster activism. For example, in Erlangen in 2021, Stuttgart in 2021, and Göttingen in 2024. In December 2023, the Federal Constitutional Court even declared three house searches illegal for anti-militarist adbusting. In a recent case heard at the Tiergarten District Court on August 25, 2025, the court was also unable to reach a verdict and discontinued the proceedings. However, after the adbusting campaign for the 2023 Conference of Women Interior Ministers, the Federal Police were unfazed by this legal situation. According to the file, the first idea for criminalisation came to them while searching the suspect. The person had a BVG day ticket with him. This ticket had not been validated. The police immediately initiated criminal proceedings for “obtaining services by deception.” The public prosecutor’s office quickly dropped the case: “There is no law in Germany that requires a valid ticket in police stations,” explained Kai N. Krieger, spokesperson for the Workshop for Antifascist Actions. But the cops blithely continued their investigation. They simply acted as if they had no knowledge of the legal situation and accused the activist of theft and property damage. They forced the company who owned the advertisements to report even the smallest, presumably old, damage to advertising display cases. Furthermore, the Federal Police, with at least two officers, spent nine months analysing video camera recordings at the train stations affected by the operation. “I would be happy if they were as dedicated to searching for my next stolen bike…” said Kai N. Krieger. “Maybe I should write slogans about police brutality and racism on it to get the cops interested?” No damage to property, no theft. Finally, the Federal Police handed over the investigation to the State Security Office (LKA 521). This office, too, suddenly, despite better judgement, insisted on the allegations of damage to property and theft and handed over the investigation results to the public prosecutor’s office. However, the LKA received a setback from there. The public prosecutor’s office discontinued the proceedings regarding these charges saying: “With regard to the offences of June 13, 2023 (sic!), the evidence of damage to property cannot be provided with the certainty required for indictment. […] The proceedings are therefore discontinued with regard to the allegations of damage to property and theft pursuant to Section 170, Paragraph 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.” A new allegation was needed. Officers noticed that one of the posters featured a press photo from the Saxony police. It depicts a police officer smiling at the camera from her desk. The group “Against German Nationalist Police Violence (GdP)” captioned the poster with the slogan: “Racism? Let’s deport!” The LKA 521 found that this violated the police officer’s right to their own image under Section 22 of the Art Copyright Act. A parliamentary inquiry in the House of Representatives by Niklas Schrader revealed that the case had become a political issue. The public prosecutor’s office had initially declined jurisdiction. However, once the case was referred again to the public prosecutor’s office they now felt they had jurisdiction and requested a penal order. A penal order landed in the mailbox of one of the arrested individuals in the spring of 2025. The charge: violation of Section 22 of the Art Copyright Act. The Tiergarten District Court imposed a fine of 60 daily rates of €30 each, a total of €1,800. The defendant appealed the penalty order; the district court initially set a court date for November 6th. Section 23 of the German Art Copyright Act explicitly lists exceptions when a person’s image may be used without their consent. One of these exceptions is so-called “portraits from the area of contemporary history.” According to Kai N. Krieger, this is precisely such an image: “The police officer knowingly allowed herself to be photographed for a press photo, which the police still use to recruit new recruits.” Thus, she is not depicted as a private individual, but rather as part of the police’s public self-portrayal: “And it is precisely this public self-portrayal that adbustings satirically address. Of course, this image can be used for that purpose! The fact that the district court is using this section to criminalize satire critical of the police is a scandal!” But the trial never came to fruition. The Berlin adbusting scene was undeterred by the criminal proceedings and simply carried on. For example, during the 2024 European Football Championship several mega-billboards in major train stations were targeted. Adbusters pasted speech bubbles onto the posters. They made the policewoman pictured utter self-criticisms like, “…I’m so sick of this racist business!” and “…we’re actually just a bunch of state-paid violent criminals!” This campaign also received media feedback. Here, too, according to the file, the police invested a massive amount of manpower in watching videos. An officer at the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) 521 believed he recognized the second suspect from the action at the Interior Ministers’ Conference. Hoping to have a clear, easily prosecutable incident, the public prosecutor’s office dropped the ongoing proceedings against this individual for copyright infringement after the Interior Ministers’ Conference. They applied for a penal order for the adbusting action at the European Championships. This was a mistake, as it turned out. The trial against the second suspect for the European Championship campaign took place on August 25, 2025. Accompanied by a solidarity campaign, a rebellious audience, and lively media interest, the court dismissed the proceedings due to their triviality in exchange for a donation of €900.00. The fuss didn’t go unnoticed. Things were happening behind the scenes. Two weeks after the trial, the defendant in the adbusting campaign at the Interior Ministers’ Conference received a dismissal offer in exchange for a donation of €900. “Suddenly, the court and the public prosecutor’s office were no longer so concerned about pursuing adbusting campaigns that criticised the police!” Kai N. Krieger rejoiced. Our conclusion: Appeals against penal orders make sense. Public relations work on court cases also makes sense. Conducting court cases makes sense because they have an impact on other proceedings. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation The post Germany: Charges dropped against adbusters appeared first on Freedom News.

A new California law will effectively ban a deceptive policing tactic used for years against the families of people killed by police and popularized by the nation’s largest developer of law enforcement policy manuals.  The legislation, signed Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, will require investigators for police agencies and prosecutors’ offices to tell the families of people seriously injured or killed by police what has happened to their loved one before questioning them.  Investigators will also be barred from lying to families or pressuring them into consenting to interviews, and will be required to allow the families to bring a support person to interviews. All California police agencies and prosecutors will be required to incorporate the new restrictions into their department policies by January 2027.  The law will not require investigators to take the same steps in circumstances where the family member is under arrest or the delay could result in the destruction of evidence. State Assembly member Ash Kalra, who represents the city of San Jose, co-authored the new law and has been pushing for a version of the legislation for two years. He said he hoped the new law would signal the need for law enforcement officers to respect the families of people who have died during police encounters.  > “I want you sending a uniform[ed officer], detective—I don’t care—somebody out > there to their friends and family to find out what they’ve been up to.”  “I think it’s time for law enforcement to relearn their processes and create a new process that’s respectful of all life and allows them to build more trust with their community,” Kalra said. “ It’s really about giving justice to these families, but more immediately, giving them the truth.” Kalra added that he would continue to monitor the rollout of the law and would consider introducing new legislation if law enforcement agencies resisted its implementation.   The legislation comes in response to a 2023 investigation by Reveal and the Los Angeles Times, which found that investigators routinely withheld death notifications from families while they collected disparaging background information about people killed by officers. The reporting confirmed 20 instances of investigators across the state using the tactic in the immediate aftermath of police shootings and in-custody deaths in order to collect information about the deceased, such as their mental health history, drug use or family feuds. In some cases, law enforcement agencies then used the information to justify their officers’ actions or argue for lower settlements in lawsuits by portraying the deceased as mentally disturbed, a deadbeat parent or a liability to their family. “I’m proud of all the families, and even the assembly and senate and the governor, for having the courage to make this law,” said Jim Showman, who has been campaigning for the new law for two years. “It’s good to know that you can push things through and make change for the better.” In the moments after a San Jose police officer shot his 19-year-old daughter, Diana, officers rushed Showman to a police station, where detectives isolated him from his ex-wife and questioned him in an interrogation room for 27 minutes before revealing that Diana had died.  The department’s attorneys later used the information from the interview to push for a zero-dollar settlement in the case, he and his attorney, Jaime Leaños, said. The tactic was popularized in a 2019 webinar hosted by Lexipol, a company that develops policy manuals for thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country, including nearly all of California’s police departments.  In the webinar, Lexipol co-founder Bruce Praet encouraged police officers to rush to the families of people killed by officers and question them about the person’s mental health, drug use and family conflicts.  “The grapevine has gotten lightning fast,” Praet said in the webinar. “Before the dust settles, I want you sending a uniform[ed officer], detective—I don’t care—somebody out there to their friends and family to find out what they’ve been up to.”  Praet then pantomimed an interaction between an officer and a confused mother, who tells the officer about her son’s drug use and family problems before the officer reveals he is dead. Shocked, the mother reverses course, calling her son an “Eagle Scout” before Praet makes a gameshow buzzer sound. > Praet encouraged officers to describe people experiencing mental health crises > as being on drugs so that future jurors would be less likely to sympathize. “Sorry lady, you’re married to that evasive concept called the truth,” he said in the video. Lexipol removed the webinar from its website in 2022.  In an email, Praet declined to comment on the new law or his advice, saying he preferred to “ allow the legislators to comment on their legislation.” Silicon Valley DeBug, a San Jose advocacy group comprised of families who have lost loved ones to police violence, teamed up with Kalra in 2023 to author the first version of the bill, which failed to clear the state Senate last year.  The families didn’t give up. Their coalition grew to include dozens of people from across the state. Members campaigned for the bill at the Capitol and visited dozens of legislators to share their stories of being tricked or pressured into giving interviews to investigators after their loved ones were killed.  Kalra introduced an overhauled version of the bill this spring, which passed the senate in September. Among the families who advocated for the new law was DeAnna Sullivan, whose son, David, was fatally shot by Buena Park police officers in 2019 after the 19-year-old stole merchandise and a car from a gas station where he worked while in the midst of a mental health crisis.  After the shooting, Sullivan said Orange County DA investigators questioned her and her daughter about David’s mental health, his struggle to lose weight and his decision to join the military.   When she and her family sued the Buena Park Police Department for the wrongful death of her son, Praet, who defended the department in the lawsuit, used the information that she gave investigators to argue that the shooting was justified.  Praet paired the background information with the discovery of apparent suicide notes among David’s belongings after the shooting to argue that he had committed “suicide by cop,” which Sullivan denies.  Praet declined to comment on the case, but directed Mother Jones to court records detailing the apparent suicide notes. A former law enforcement officer and long-time defense attorney known for defending police agencies in civil lawsuits, Praet has also spent years training officers across California. His advice has long centered on helping departments avoid or beat civil rights lawsuits.  Since Praet co-founded it in 2003, Lexipol has grown into the nation’s largest private developer of policies for police agencies.  The company has fallen under scrutiny in the past for writing what some critics allege are vaguely-written, cookie-cutter policies that make it difficult to hold officers accountable. In a series of webinars that were on the company’s website until early 2022, he encouraged officers to describe people experiencing mental health crises as being on drugs in their police reports so that if they sued, Praet said, future jurors would be less likely to sympathize with “druggies.” He also told police to encourage wounded suspects to pose and smile in evidence photos as a method for preemptively undermining the suspect’s potential future lawsuits.  After reporting by Reveal and the Los Angeles Times exposed that advice, Lexipol distanced itself from its co-founder and apologized for Praet’s comments.  Lexipol representatives did not respond to requests for comment for this story.  Because Lexipol writes the policy manuals for the vast majority of California law enforcement agencies and updates many of those policies when relevant new laws are passed, the company will likely be responsible for updating those policies and effectively banning the tactic its co-founder helped popularize.  “That is irony, isn’t it?” Jim Showman said. Showman added that it also meant the families would need to remain vigilant as Lexipol began updating police policies to reflect the new law.  “I guess the fight’s not over,” he said. “We’ve gotta hold their feet to the fire to make sure they make policy with the spirit of the law.”

“Good afternoon,” is how Magistrate Judge Heide Herrmann welcomed detainees into DC Superior Court room C-10 when it was their turn to stand in front of the bench on Monday. But at 8:37 p.m., it was hardly “afternoon” anymore. Nor was it a good day for most of the inmates. They had been brought over from DC’s central cellblock, where accommodations consist of metal “beds” without mattresses. Some of the detainees were still in the pajamas they were wearing when they were first arrested. All were shackled at the wrists and ankles.  > “MPD knows how to do this. The other law enforcement mentioned who are out > making arrests apparently do not.” Judge Herrmann was responsible for deciding whether they would continue to be held or released on the promise to appear at their next court date. The constitution requires defendants see a judge within 48 hours of arrest, but because superior court is closed on Sundays, Mondays consist of two days’ worth of criminal misdemeanor arraignments and felony presentments. It’s often the courtroom’s busiest day. Several of the 105 cases Herrmann considered involved serious allegations: one defendant allegedly shot someone, requiring the victim to undergo bladder surgery, and there were also a litany of domestic violence charges. But since President Donald Trump has unleashed scores of federal law enforcement officers to help police DC’s modest population of 702,000, the caseload has been especially long—and often frivolous. Just a couple Mondays ago, it took a judge until almost 1:30 a.m. to get through what lawyers call the “lock-up list.” (A lawyer who sometimes represents defendants in C-10 says that before Trump’s crackdown, ending between 7-8 p.m. would have been considered an especially late Monday. ) The recent liveliness of C-10 should concern DC locals as well as the residents of blue cities that Trump has alluded to targeting next. But not because the room’s fullness proves Trump’s bold thesis that the entire city has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.” Rather, experts say, the surging volume of charges and the allegations therein indicates a different problem: overzealous and ineffectual prosecuting. “We are in the in the DC Superior Court pretty much every day and have seen enormous changes under Trump,” says Abbe Smith, the director of a Georgetown Law School clinic that provides criminal defense assistance to people who can’t afford other representation. “None of them good.” The aggressive posturing is no doubt putting a tremendous strain on judges and public defenders. “Aye yai yai,” grumbled one of about five public defenders in the room on Monday when she learned she had more than a dozen clients left to represent after 6 p.m. At one point, even the stoic judge bemoaned the contents of some of the arrest affidavits. She attributed this to federal agents who, unlike members of the Metropolitan Police Department, are not accustomed to street patrol duty. In this case, federal agents had helped apprehend a young man arrested for smoking weed in a park. Possession of marijuana is legal in DC, but public consumption of it is not (though it’s rarely prosecuted). After he was arrested, MPD and federal agents performed a subsequent search that led them to conclude the young man was storing THC wax—a more concentrated form of weed that isn’t legal in DC—in a backpack. Law enforcement tacked on a possession charge, but the affidavit said nothing about how agents knew the backpack (and the THC wax) belonged to the defendant. “MPD knows how to do this,” the magistrate judge said of the incomplete affidavit. “The other law enforcement mentioned who are out making arrests apparently do not.” In early September, another man was approached by law enforcement because DEA agents “observed a bulge consistent with a bag of marijuana coming from the pants pocket” of the individual, the affidavit says. He willingly showed the agents the bag of marijuana (which, again, is legal in DC). They then patted him down and noticed an “abnormal bulge” in his sock. It was a small bag containing what the agents described as five Oxycodone pills. They arrested the man for possession of a controlled substance. This case was recently dismissed, but normally, such cases wouldn’t have been prosecuted in the first place. Instead, they are usually “no-papered,” meaning the prosecutor would opt against filing formal charges after the arrest. Smith says it was previously common for as many as a quarter or a third of cases to be no-papered misdemeanors because the allegations lack sufficient evidence to convict, or because there are questions about whether the defendant’s constitutional rights were violated. But now in DC, she says, “nearly every single misdemeanor is being papered.” Anecdotally, law enforcement seem to be more aggressively pursuing searches that may not be legally justified. In one instance, federal agents approached a man in a lawn chair merely for being close to a miniature bottle of wine—the kind you can buy on an airplane. Moments later, he was thoroughly searched and then charged for drug possession and for carrying a handgun without a permit. Less that two blocks from the superior court sits DC’s federal district court. Here, convictions are generally accompanied by stricter sentences. Yet, the federal charges defendants have faced in recent weeks haven’t necessarily been any more serious than those judged in local court. In between a sprinkling of serious child pornography and narcotics hearings were more negligible matters, such as shoving and vague threats. A man who allegedly shoulder-checked a National Guard member and said “I’ll kill you” was initially charged with assault and threatening to kidnap or injure a person, which carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. (On Tuesday, a grand jury declined to indict him. Subsequently, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office charged him with two misdemeanor counts instead.) There was also a woman arrested for assault while protesting ICE agents in July. Amid efforts to restrain her, an FBI agent’s hand was allegedly scraped against a cement wall. Extraordinarily, a grand jury opted against indicting her for felony assault three times. She’s since been charged with a misdemeanor and awaits from home a trial in October. Pirro’s office also won’t give up on convicting the the infamous former Justice Department paralegal, Sean Dunn, accused of assault for tossing a wrapped Subway sandwich at the chest of a Customs and Border Patrol agent in August. A grand jury opted against indicting him, too. (He’s since been charged with misdemeanor assault; jury selection for the trial is slated to begin November 3.) Shootings have continued amid the crime crackdown, but Trump and Pirro can count at least one win: Nobody in DC has thrown a sandwich at an officer since prosecutors tried to throw the book at Dunn. Our long national nightmare is over.

When Trymaine Lee began writing his first book, he didn’t realize that the gun violence he was reporting on was such a central part of his own story. But then he began digging into his family history, only to fully learn about a series of racially motivated murders involving his ancestors. Lee’s book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, soon became more personal than he’d planned. He realized he needed to “speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 2 of a conversation about generational trauma, the challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how learning about his family’s history has changed how he writes and reports on Black Americans killed by violence. And if you haven’t listened to part 1, you can find that conversation here. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: You have this book that you finished right before this massive heart attack and then you dive back in to make your edits and to polish it up, but your experience just changed the whole trajectory of the book. Talk to me about that Trymaine Lee: Yeah, man. More than that, when I first turned that 90,000 word manuscript in it was really super rough. The book it is today is honestly about 25% of what it was into what it became. Initially, I was always going to hold the reader’s hand a little bit and speak to my own experiences. My grandfather’s murder in 1976 is this massive space in my life. It occupies a massive space in my family’s life. Two years before I was born, growing up seeing my family’s portraits of better days and people talking about his voice and his sense of humor and just how he moved through the world, I always knew that part. So part of the storytelling was even your friendly neighborhood journalists who you’ve come to know telling these stories has been touched by this thing, and here’s what it cost my family. What I had less of an understanding of was that my grandfather’s was not the first murder in our family. Going back to the rural South, Jim Crow Georgia in the early 1920s to discover that my grandmother, who was a baby at the time, had a 12-year-old brother who was shot and killed in a sundown town where the men came together, and this is documented in the newspaper, came together in Fitzgerald, Georgia to outlaw Black labor and Black voting in this community in the late 1800s, ’cause that sparked my family’s journey into the migration to Philadelphia first and then South Jersey only to have a second of my grandmother’s brothers shot and killed by a state trooper, and to for the first time look at those headlines where it says, trooper’s gun kills youth, as if this gun just hopped up and shot a Black teenager under these weird circumstances. Then 20+ years later, my grandfather’s murder. A prospective tenant. They owned an apartment in Camden, New Jersey and were going to rent it to a guy. He disappeared after leaving a deposit, wanted his money back, and my grandfather said, “No, I’ll see you in court.” He came back and murdered my grandfather. 20 years after that, my stepbrother’s shot and killed in Camden. A girl put a bullet in the back of his head. In the early 2000s, another cousin killed in Atlantic City. So, the psychic residue of what’s been passed down and me grappling with telling these stories that Black families across the country experience in terms of the violence of police in the system and the violence of the community and the systemic violence, again, that binds us all, wraps us all up, this became so much more personal. As you know, for a long time I was trying to be somewhat arm’s length, even though I was very close to telling these stories. Now, was time to drop all of that and speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history. Yeah, as you were talking about it, it just made me think about my own family history and think our stories are so similar. My great-grandfather, the reason why my family ended up in New Jersey is because something happened to him in the South, and there are no records of it, but family lore is that he was lynched. I don’t have anything to prove that, but the family lore is that he was lynched and then that moved my family to New Jersey, and then all sorts of violent incidences happen there as well, and it just kind of seeps into you. The funny thing for me is that I had no idea about any of that until I started reporting on a story and I thought, let me look into my genealogy and just think about … and when I saw it all, I was like, wow, I am reporting on the story of my family and didn’t even know it. Time and again. Time and again. Time and again you find yourself in these horrible stories, sad stories about people that look like you and then you find out they are you, and it’s a heavy weight to carry. At Reveal we worked on this series called Mississippi Goddam, and I get choked up when I talk about it. I remember … ooh, God, man, I’m so sorry, I’m getting choked up. No, man. I remember feeling like it was going to kill me. My blood pressure was ridiculous. I would check my blood pressure in the morning and I thought to myself … literally the blood pressure thing would tell me to go to the hospital, because it was that high, but I couldn’t stop, because I had to turn in this story. I had to turn in this story and I felt like I … and I did. I don’t think this was wrong, but I felt like I owed this family and I owed the young man that I was telling the story about like I had to finish it, but also when I look back, I owe my children to be around if I can. But I couldn’t see it then, I just was like- Of course not. … “You got to get through this thing.” Oof, man, I’m so sorry. No, of course, man. But every time I sat down at that computer or to write these episodes and listening to this tape and looking at autopsy reports and all of that type of stuff, and graphic photos of this young man’s death, I felt like I had to keep doing it. The more I did it, the higher my blood pressure went, the more I thought … I literally would think I’m going to stroke out, but I don’t have a choice, I have to finish this, I have to finish this. I mean, just to be honest, Reveal, especially at that time, most of the people in that workplace were white, and I had worked so hard and championed the story for so long that I was finally getting a shot, and I knew I couldn’t drop it and just the amount of pressure and time it took. Then afterwards I realized like, bro, you acting crazy, so I went to a therapist that guided the therapy and I took three months off from Reveal. I just couldn’t do it, ’cause I thought it was going to kill me, and I think by the grace of God it didn’t, but carrying that, oh my God. Brother, that same feeling. Again, I feel like I’m looking into a mirror and I’m hearing a echo bounce from me to you and back to me. Those early days especially, there’s nothing like arriving at a crime scene and seeing someone that looks just like you, dressed just like you, got some Air Force 1’s fresh just like you with their brain matter splattered across the pavement. Yeah. The family and that look in a mother’s eyes that could be your mother, there’s zero things in this universe like that pain, and that we are the burden bearers of that and we have to be and we have always had to be. Ida B. Wells did not like this season either. Yeah. Her blood pressure was probably through the roof- Absolutely. … but it’s a reminder that we cannot report our way out of the pain, we cannot educate our way out of the pain, we cannot drink our way out of the pain. No. When you’re a young man, you can’t run around and have sex. You can’t sex it away, we have to engage with it. Until we have those conversations about what it means to carry that weight when you have to carry the weight, because no one else will and no one will care when we die of a heart attack, because it happens every single day, right? Yeah. No, absolutely. What you got me doing here, bruh? What you got me doing here? You got me. That’s what we need though, that’s what we need. [inaudible 00:09:49] Hey listen, I’m just mirroring you, bro, ’cause I’m sitting here talking to you with tears in my eyes trying to be like, “Brother, calm down. What are you doing, Mr. Letson?” So, to go back to trauma- Yeah, let’s do more. Yeah, let’s do more. One of the things in your book that I think about a lot, and again I’m giving so much personal information here. So my oldest son, I had no idea he was born. I didn’t find out about him until he was five years old and he lived all the way across the country. We had no communication or contact until I found out when he was five and I was 23. So I was 23, I was a kid when I flew out to get him, I was taking him home back to Florida and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d seen his picture, this was long before the days when we had video calls, so I talked to him on the phone a little bit. Back then my thing was with him when I found out about him, I started writing postcards and sending him … ’cause he was a kid and getting mail’s a big thing, right? I was a flight attendant, so I’d be in different places and sending him stuff. Anyway, I go to get my kid, first time meeting him in-person, and the thing that tripped me out is that he was so much like me at that age. I mean, things that he would say were things that I … really specific things. I’m a little bit older than you, but when I was young, we had this saying, I think it went something like up your nose with a rubber hose or something like that, right? I remember the first time I’m meeting my kid, he’s like, “Up your nose with a …” I was like, “What?” Then I brought him home to my mother and my mother who likes him more than me was like, “This is you as a kid.” He was so much like me. I tell that story to just say that I believe that DNA is way more powerful than we talk about. Yes, yes. That I believe that our family’s history is encoded in our DNA and we carry both the good, but also the trauma. You can’t get away from it, it is in you. It is in your blood, it is in your bones, it is who you are. I think especially for Black folks in this country whose ancestors have experienced a crazy amount of trauma, you carry it with you every day. So when you talk about going into your grandparents’ home and being at the spot where you know your grandfather died, can you talk to me about that? Yeah, man, there’s the ways that these moments reshape the way we raise our children and the way we move through the world, how we teach them to survive in America and teach them to carry a bit of this trauma, that’s one thing in a practical way, right? This moment changes everything, there’s the emotional pain that we experience. When you think about those epigenetics and that post-traumatic slave disorder, that we’ve arrived at that moment after a long series of these cuts and slices. There’s one part of the book that I had to shrink down for the sake of the story, but it’s the guns for slave cycle and a psychic connection to the violence and the pain. Not just a genetic one too, but there’s this other one, this ethereal psychic trauma that we carry from being bartered for guns, and that Europeans plied these regional African powers with guns and some would only trade in guns for enslaved people to create war instability. So this idea that we were forced out of Mother Africa with a muzzle of a gun at our back, and then we arrive at the hell of the Western world and experienced all this other violence and trauma that we then pass down for five, six, seven, eight generations to arrive on the South Side of Chicago, to arrive in Camden, New Jersey, to arrive in West Berlin, New Jersey where my grandfather was killed and stand in that spot, and then read in the newspaper about how the blood was smeared on my grandmother’s nightgown and what it means. How do we disrupt that? Is there any disrupting that? I think acknowledging it, that it exists and it’s not some sort of fantasy of our Hoodoo, Voodoo imaginations that we’re carrying that, but I think it’s something that we have to acknowledge it, because it’s there, and we know it’s there. We know it’s there, and I just don’t know how we reconcile that. Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right is that the key is talking about it, ’cause America will convince you it is not there. We’re I wouldn’t say the beginning, but maybe America has always been in the process of the great forgetting. America loves this idea of collective amnesia that it continually pushes on people, and so if you’re pushing the collective amnesia, we’re not engaging with all the things you just talked about. That’s right. If you don’t engage with it, it just gets bigger and it begins to guide your steps in the future, because you don’t know it’s there, so you have to talk about it. That’s right. One of my guiding, and this is a guiding principle for my journalism, but also for this book in particular, because this is not a very prescriptive book, this is not a policy book, this is about how we’ve been shaped and our experience with the violence, but it’s that ain’t nothing wrong with us. Ain’t nothing wrong with us. If you want to understand what’s wrong with us, let’s look at this machinery around us. Right. Right? Let’s look at what we’ve carried in us, what was sparked by this white supremacist violence and a society bent on our breaking, that’s what’s wrong with us. So even though the gun is certainly the vehicle and that kind of violence is the vehicle, for me it’s like this is how we arrived at this moment, this is how we got here. But ultimately there is nothing wrong with us except for how we’ve experienced this country. So, this country is moving. I’ve heard people say that this is unprecedented what we’re seeing right now. I would say that we saw all this at the end of reconstruction, and this is a rerun of reconstruction. Just the writers of America season five are pretty bad. This season- They really jumping the shark, man. This is crazy. This is like, what are you doing? We need new characters. But as we are living in this time period, and given all that you have reported on and gone through personally, where’s your work going to take you now that we’re here? You know what? I’ve been having these conversations a lot lately with Black men in particular, but Black people in general. Not unlike those post-reconstruction days when the nadir or the nadir … I’m from New Jersey, I say nadir. Yeah, right, right, right. I might be wrong. Nadir just sounds right to me, so nadir. But beating back our efforts at nation building and institution building, and finding for the first time some fullness, some fullness of what it means to be an American and solidify this conditional citizenship that we’ve had. I think now is the time that we build and collaborate and double down on telling our stories and telling the truth. So for me, I think this book is an important bridge for me. For more than 20 years, I’ve been a journalist in the newsroom, in print, in digital, in broadcast, in podcasting, now I have my first film coming out on the anniversary of Katrina on Peacock, I have the book coming out, I want to [inaudible 00:19:12] ways in which we speak to the Black American experience. This is not new or novel, but I think now is the time to continue to build in that catalog, because what’s going to happen is as they continue to try to erase us and erase our story, in 100 years when they’re on the fourth nadir, when they’re on the fourth burning down of any kind of reconstructive efforts, they have to understand that this is not unprecedented, that this is precedented, that this is the default position and this is how you survive it. Yeah. This is how you survive it is to look it square in it’s face and tell the truth as they’re renaming military bases after these fake Robert E. Lee. They’re so bent on making sure they honor- It’s so ridiculous. … the heroes of [inaudible 00:19:55] Can we just talk about the ridiculousness of white- That’s Robert Jenkins Lee. Right, exactly. Thing about this. We’ve been around long enough, we are just now comfortable enough to say white supremacist system, white supremacy. Oh my God, absolutely. We couldn’t say that- No. … we’re just there. It’s just that America’s understanding of what it means to be Black and how we see the world and experience the world, we haven’t caught up and journalism absolutely hasn’t caught up. Even among our friends and friends of the truth, there is an acceptable level of anti-Blackness in this country that is okay- It’s okay. … even among people who wish it would be different. Yep, it’s okay. But we’ve accepted it, it’s part of what this is, right? So that’s why you have to have an argument about whether the founders of this country, these transnational human traffickers are white supremacists or not. But the idea that my ancestors’ lives didn’t matter. One of the things that our friend Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about a lot is that you can’t have this history and it matter, and suddenly this history doesn’t matter. That’s right. It doesn’t make sense. That’s right. It doesn’t make sense. You got to own the whole thing America, you just got to own it. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, you can’t have the credits without the debits, right? Exactly. It has to be both, but also the idea that our existence and experience is kind of inconsequential when we are foundational in all of the ways. We were the economy- Absolutely, exactly. … we were our flesh. Exactly. But the fact that we’re still fighting to tell these stories. Exactly. You’d imagine a great nation would say, look how far we’ve come, and when we couldn’t do the right thing we did. Certainly this founding was A, B, C, or D, but we are such a great nation where look at the strides. The strides were made through bloodshed and sacrifice. Absolutely, absolutely. Come on. The truth, as we know, is so dangerous though, because the idea that … especially with Black people, this idea of liberation, but that America itself will be freed, finally freed, that’s a very dangerous proposition for those who don’t believe in our equality or humanity. Yeah. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Trymaine, is there anything that you wanted to hit on the book before I let you go? I don’t think so, just that this truly is my life’s work. I have joked that this book almost killed me, which it did, but it truly is my life’s work and it finally became what it was supposed to be. I hope people not only find an understanding about how guns have shaped us and the industry that profits while there’s so much pain here, but that there is a healing and power and strength in facing down the hardest parts of what we harbor within, right? Confronting the violence, the silent, quiet violence from within. As men in particular, but in general, finding the strength and courage to face that down and live freely and live happily and find peace. That’s why this matters, because it hurts so bad what we’ve experienced, what we’ve carried in our genes, the psychic residue of the violence that we’ve experienced, the systemic violence and the actual violence. What it means to finally find peace within that, that to me I hope is the great strength and power of this book, and I hope it finds the audience that it deserves. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

HUNDREDS ARRESTED IN A MASS KETTLE OF MARCH CLOSING ACTION CAMP AGAINST THE ARMS INDUSTRY ~ Gabriel Fonten ~ Police in Cologne, Germany used heavy handed tactics on Saturday (30 August) against a peaceful mass march concluding an anti-militarist camp in the city. The 3,000-strong parade had set out from the “Rheinmetall Entwaffen” antimilitarist camp to meet the yearly rally of the Cologne Peace Forum. One participant described the event as “a historic moment when the few hundred, mostly older participants of this rally watched hundreds, mostly younger people from the camp, who had travelled from both near and far”. Yet the march was not allowed to continue uninterrupted, as marchers were set upon by around 1,600 police in full riot gear, backed by water cannons and armed with pepper spray. The demonstrators quickly reconfigured into a protective block formation (using banners to separate and protect participants from police) taking “3 hours to move one kilometre” under consistent harassment by the police. After dividing and kettling the parade, around 600 participants were arrested over the next five hours. Medical non-profit “Demosanitäter” reported treating 147 injured participants and at least 216 were treated at the “Rheinmetall Entwaffen” camp. Justifications for this brutal crackdown were manufactured by both the police and the establishment media, with the Tageschau news program running headlines including “Riots at anti-war demonstration in Cologne”—presenting protesters, rather than the police, as the instigators of violence. In fact, of the 600 people arrested only one was charged with “resisting arrest”. Cologne police had previously prohibited both the camp and parade citing risks of “radicalisation”, but this was overturned in court. While it stood, the ban seems to have only increased participation with organisers reporting growing mobilisation as well as the creation of an “anarchist neighbourhood” at the camp. The post Germany: Heavy repression at Rhinemetall anti-militarist demonstration appeared first on Freedom News.