The heat in Chicago on July 9, 2001, was blistering. At the Stateway Gardens public housing development, it was the sort of midsummer day that draws tenants and their children outside in hopes of catching a breeze. As adviser to the resident leadership at Stateway, I worked out of an office on the ground floor of a high-rise on South State Street with a small team of residents known as the Neighborhood Conservation Corps. One of our projects — a collaboration with professor Craig Futterman and law students from the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School — was to monitor police performance in an effort to improve police-community relations. That afternoon, we were meeting with Futterman and two of his students to discuss an incident that had occurred a few months earlier.

Kenya Richmond, one of my colleagues, had witnessed white officers in a police vehicle strike a young Black man they were pursuing outside our State Street office. Richmond attempted to document the incident. The officers responded by arresting him on false charges, destroying his notes, and subjecting him to racist invective. En route to the police station, they told him to stay out of their way — “Who the fuck do you think you are?” — and called him “a fucking monkey” and “a fucking nigger.” The officers involved in the incident were members of the Special Operations Section, or SOS. When they failed to appear in court, the judge dismissed the criminal charges against Richmond. We were meeting on July 9 to prepare a civil lawsuit.

Our meeting was interrupted by a commotion outside. When we emerged on State Street, we found a middle-aged Black man — his name proved to be Nevles Traylor — pinned under a police car. He was moaning in pain and distress. Within a few minutes, the two white SOS officers were surrounded by a curious and then increasingly angry crowd of roughly a hundred residents. The officers’ names, we later learned, were Raymond Piwnicki and Robert Smith.

We fanned out through the crowd and set to work documenting the incident. According to multiple witnesses, Traylor had been riding a bicycle across the grounds of the development. Piwnicki, who was driving the squad car, had deliberately struck his bike from behind, pinning him against a fence. Piwnicki had then jumped out of the vehicle and repeatedly struck Traylor in the head.

Among the witnesses were several Black officers from the public housing unit. I spoke with one who was as outraged by what she had witnessed as any of the residents. Another exchanged sharp words with Piwnicki, then used wire cutters to cut through the fence and extricate Traylor from under the police car.

An ambulance arrived and Traylor, having been handcuffed by the SOS officers, was taken to the hospital. As the ambulance drove off, a television news crew drove by, assessed the situation, then, apparently realizing they had missed the “when it bleeds, it leads” moment, drove on.

Traylor was charged with two counts of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, felonies that would require, if he was convicted, a mandatory minimum sentence of four years and would allow a maximum sentence of 15 years. Unable to make bond while awaiting trial, he remained in jail for four months.

The Mandel Legal Aid Clinic represented Traylor in his criminal case and later brought a federal civil rights suit against Piwnicki and Smith. In the criminal case, the officers testified that they had observed Traylor engage in a hand-to-hand drug transaction and had undertaken pursuit in the course of which he had fallen off his bicycle. They also claimed that they had found no money from the drug transaction on his person because he had flung it away during his flight. The defense demonstrated that it was physically impossible to see what the officers claimed to have seen from the location a block away where they placed themselves. (As a witness for Traylor, I testified on that point.) They argued that the officers struck Traylor with their vehicle to amuse themselves, then fabricated evidence and falsely arrested him to cover their abuse.

The judge found that Piwnicki and Smith arrested Traylor without probable cause, in violation of his constitutional rights, and dismissed all charges. The subsequent civil suit was settled in 2003.

On the day of the incident, a complaint was filed on Traylor’s behalf with the Office of Professional Standards, which at that time was the agency within the police department that investigated police shootings and citizen complaints of excessive force. As chance would have it, the OPS office was less than a block away from the site of the incident. Yet the investigator made no effort to interview any of the scores of witnesses to the incident. Nor did he interview the accused officers. On the basis of an interview with Traylor, his medical records, and written statements from Piwnicki and Smith denying the allegations, he made a finding of “not sustained” “due to lack of evidence to either prove or disprove” the alleged misconduct. After the judge ruled in the criminal case that Piwnicki and Smith had violated Traylor’s constitutional rights, OPS saw no need to reopen its investigation.

Racism as Sport

In 2006, the SOS unit imploded in scandal. Not surprisingly, in view of the quality of the Traylor investigation, OPS played no role in exposing the criminal activity within the unit. Rather, investigations were initiated by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and later pursued by the U.S. attorney, after it became apparent that SOS officers were consistently failing to appear to testify in drug cases.

The investigations exposed a robbery and home invasion ring within SOS: A group of officers had begun by shaking down drug dealers, then graduated to robbery, extortion, and kidnapping of anyone likely to have cash on hand.

Ultimately, 11 officers were convicted. Jerome Finnigan, the reputed ringleader (and one of the officers who abused Richmond), was given a 12-year sentence for crimes that included soliciting the murder of another SOS officer whom he believed would testify against him. And the city has paid out millions of dollars in settlements and awards in civil suits brought by victims of the rogue SOS officers.

The political fallout from the scandal was intense. Together with other high-profile police misconduct cases at the time, it generated a serious crisis for Daley, who responded by forcing the resignation of his police superintendent, disbanding the SOS unit, and replacing OPS with a new investigative agency: the Independent Police Review Authority.

The true mission of OPS — to protect officers from discipline while maintaining the illusion that there was a system in place to investigate misconduct complaints — was made clear when it was revealed that an extraordinary number of citizen complaints accused Finnigan and his co-conspirators of precisely the forms of criminal activity for which they were ultimately convicted, yet they had virtually never been disciplined.

Finnigan is near the top of the list of CPD officers with the most citizen complaints. Also high on that list is Piwnicki. The difference is that Finnigan went to prison for his transgressions, while Piwnicki remains on the force. His career was not affected by the SOS scandal, for most of the citizen complaints against him allege not corruption, but racist abuse — something which the accountability system, then and now, largely ignores.

That is not to say that Finnigan and his cohort of rogue SOS officers were not deeply racist. Their racism was apparent in their selection of victims: Black and brown residents of low-income neighborhoods rendered vulnerable and presumptively not credible due to the criminalization of their communities by the war on drugs — a war in which the SOS unit served as shock troops. And it was apparent in their fluency with racial invective such as they inflicted on Richmond and many others. (I once heard an SOS officer, making a routine announcement about a traffic matter over the loudspeaker of his vehicle, address the residents of Stateway Gardens this way: “Listen, you hood rats.”)

Yet it was not their overt racism that brought down the SOS officers. Nor is that how their crimes are categorized. Their racism only made news as a coda to the scandal, when some nine years into Finnigan’s incarceration, a photograph became public in court documents that had been taken in a police station in 2003 or thereabouts. It shows Finnigan and Timothy McDermott, another member of SOS, holding rifles while kneeling over a Black man with antlers on his head and his tongue hanging out — their hunting trophy.

The photo provides a glimpse of something at once fundamental and elusive: the practice within the CPD of racism as sport. Officers so disposed have enjoyed license to toy with Black and brown Chicagoans. The performance of racial contempt is not incidental to some other purpose. It’s the point of the exercise, an end in itself, a perverse source of pleasure.

The U.S. Department of Justice report on its investigation of the CPD, undertaken in the wake of the police murder of Laquan McDonald, speaks to the failure of the department to identify and discipline patterns of racist behavior: “We have serious concerns about the prevalence of racially discriminatory conduct by some CPD officers and the degree to which that conduct is tolerated and, in some respects, caused by deficiencies in CPD’s systems of training, supervision and accountability.”

The report notes elsewhere that the sort of racist mindset reflected in the Finnigan hunting trophy photograph “has desensitized many officers from the humanity of the people of color they serve, setting the stage for the use of excessive force.”

In the years since the January 6 insurrection, the Chicago Police Department, like other law enforcement jurisdictions across the country, has been forced to acknowledge the problem of white supremacists in its ranks. It has, however, been slow to address the problem. Now the issue is receiving renewed public attention due to a Chicago Sun-Times series on the failure of CPD to terminate officers whose names appeared on Oath Keepers membership rolls made public by NPR in 2021.

In response to the Sun-Times series, Police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who assumed office in September, has said that the department will undertake “stringent” and “thorough” investigations of suspected “members of hate groups” and “will do everything we can to remove those members from our ranks.” A recently established citizens oversight panel — the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability — has adopted a policy banning officers from being active members of certain hate groups. And Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has placed active CPD members affiliated with the Oath Keepers on the “no call list” of officers barred from testifying in Cook County criminal cases. 

Predictably, a dissenting voice has been that of John Catanzara, president of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. While he agrees that “there’s things officers should be disqualified over,” he has characterized the proposed remedies as “a broad brush” and argued that officers should be judged by their actions rather than solely on the basis of their affiliations. 

He has a point. Whatever the merits of monitoring officers’ political affiliations and social media activity — both of which raise possible First Amendment issues — the department has failed to make use of the most powerful tool at its disposal for the purpose of identifying white supremacists on the force: pattern analysis of citizen complaints. Such analysis can reveal racist behavior that is in plain sight, and it can illuminate the systemic conditions that allow racists to operate with impunity as police officers. For both purposes, the 25-year career of Chicago police sergeant Piwnicki, who has no known affiliation with extremist organizations, is instructive.

“Unfounded” Allegations

The 2001 incident at Stateway Gardens occurred early in Piwnicki’s career. A complaint filed against him with the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, more than a decade later illustrates a pattern repeated again and again throughout his career. The occasion was a backyard family barbecue in the Englewood neighborhood on May 5, 2012. The alleged victim was 37-year-old Kendall McClennon. As McClennon tells the story, he stepped out into the alley to relieve his bladder at about 7:15 p.m. Moments later, Piwnicki and two other officers — Brian McDevitt and Thomas Carey — burst into the yard with their guns drawn. Piwnicki did a takedown of McClennon, forced him down on a wooden deck, handcuffed his hands behind his back, and struck him repeatedly.

McClennon’s 39-year-old sister Cicely took out a camera to document what was happening. One of the officers seized the camera and cuffed her hands behind her back. McClennon, face down on the ground in handcuffs, asked the officers to leave his sister alone. Piwnicki responded by discharging his taser into McClennon’s body. When the taser malfunctioned, he reset it to “dry stun” — a mode in which it functions as a “pain compliance” tool without incapacitating the subject — and applied it to McClennon’s ear. Throughout the incident, McClennon alleges, Piwnicki directed racial invective at him and his family, at one point calling them “animals.”

Piwnicki tells a different story: While patrolling the neighborhood, he and his partners observed McClennon urinating in an alley. When McClennon saw the police car approach, he fled. The officers gave pursuit and entered McClennon’s cousin’s backyard. McClennon resisted arrest. When Piwnicki attempted to handcuff him, a struggle ensued, in the course of which McClennon’s nails cut Piwnicki’s wrist.

After Piwnicki tased him, McClennon no longer resisted. When they searched him, the officers found a dime bag of marijuana. They arrested him and charged him with aggravated battery of a police officer, resisting an officer, possession of cannabis, and urinating in the public way. The aggravated battery charge is a Class 2 felony carrying a three- to seven-year sentence.

That evening, Cicely filed her formal complaint. Two years later, on May 29, 2014, IPRA issued the results of its investigation. The investigator, Alice Chico, determined that the allegations of excessive force against Piwnicki were “unfounded.” That is, she found that the alleged misconduct did not occur. Chico’s analysis focused on the accounts given by McClennon’s sister and his cousin who was the host of the barbecue. (Contacted on the night of May 5, 2012, at a hospital where he was being assessed for injuries, McClennon declined to be interviewed by IPRA.) In her interview, Cicely stated that when her brother was handcuffed on the ground, Piwnicki punched him five times in the face, kicked him once in the abdomen, and tased him. She also stated that Piwnicki smelled of alcohol and that officers took her digital camera but did not inventory it or return it.

The cousin was inside the house when the police entered the backyard. When she went to her back door, she found that three of her guests, including McClennon, were handcuffed. She says she saw Piwnicki strike McClennon once on the left side of his face. They struggled, and Piwnicki tased him. She also stated that as Piwnicki escorted McClennon out of the yard, he slammed him against the back gate.

Chico wrote that the two witnesses “gave conflicting accounts of the incident,” that there was no evidence McClennon had suffered any injuries, and that Piwnicki was within department policies when he tased McClennon, “who was an assailant.” She also noted that Piwnicki passed a Breathalyzer test and that Cicely’s camera was, in fact, inventoried.

“Based on the totality of the circumstances surrounding this incident,” she concluded, “there is no evidence to establish that the incident occurred as alleged.” In light of her finding of “unfounded,” she did not find it necessary to obtain reports from Piwnicki and the other officers on the scene.

The 2001-02 investigation of the Traylor complaint by OPS and the 2012-14 investigation of the McClennon complaint by IPRA share two characteristics that make findings of “not sustained” and “unfounded” all but inevitable.

First, the investigator’s assessment of credibility is heavily weighted toward the police: The credibility of officers is assumed, while that of complainants and witnesses is sharply questioned. In neither instance does the investigator find it necessary to interview the accused officers; a written statement suffices. In the case of community members, by contrast, any inaccuracies or inconsistencies, no matter how marginal to the alleged misconduct, are seized upon to impeach credibility.

Second, the investigators do not consider the officer’s disciplinary history in assessing the allegations in the particular case. This is not an oversight. The collective bargaining agreement between the police union and the city in force at the time effectively barred the agency from employing even the most rudimentary pattern analysis — e.g., reviewing a past history of complaints alleging similar misconduct — as an investigatory tool. In negotiations with the union, Chicago, like a number of other cities, had over the years made concessions with respect to discipline in lieu of increasing compensation and benefits. As a consequence, an accused officer’s disciplinary history could only be considered at the point at which the investigator, having sustained the complaint, was determining what discipline to recommend, and only past “sustained” complaints could be considered for this purpose.

At the time of the 2012 incident, McClennon, a man in his late 30s, had no criminal record. Piwnicki, by contrast, had accumulated a total of 87 complaints over his 14-year career, putting him close to the top of the list of active officers with the most complaints. In McClennon’s criminal trial, the defense demonstrated that in 42 instances, the complaints allege the same pattern of misconduct by Piwnicki: Approaching people of color, they argued, he subjected them to physical and verbal violence. When they challenged his behavior, he imposed false charges. Each of these elements of abuse — excessive force, racial verbal abuse, and false arrest — figured in the McClennon complaint. Yet those patterns were not considered by the investigator. She assessed the complaint in isolation and concluded that there was no way to determine whether the alleged abuse had occurred.

In 2014, in Kalven v. City of Chicago, a case in which I was plaintiff, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that completed police misconduct investigations are public information under the Freedom of Information Act. Prior to that, the disciplinary histories of officers and underlying investigative files known as complaint registers, or CRs, were hidden from the public behind a heavily defended wall of official secrecy. Occasionally, CRs were produced in discovery in civil rights lawsuits, but under protective orders that barred the parties from sharing them with the public.

The victims of abusive policing practices had no doubt about the realities, and, despite the long odds, some brought formal complaints, but because the investigations of those complaints were kept from the public, it was impossible to document the nature and extent of the phenomenon.

According to CPD records, Piwnicki currently has 99 complaints, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of officers with the most complaints.

In the wake of the Kalven decision, that changed. The Invisible Institute created the Citizens Police Data Project, a public database that currently contains information about 250,000 investigations of allegations of misconduct and the disciplinary histories of 34,000 officers.

According to CPD records, Piwnicki currently has 99 complaints, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of officers with the most complaints.

Contacted through the Chicago Police Department, Piwnicki declined to be interviewed or provide comment.

It also should be noted that there is a large ghost phenomenon of individuals who believe they have been abused by the police but do not file a formal complaint. Studies by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics based on national survey data indicate a ratio of roughly one complaint for every eight people who believe they were subjected to excessive force by the police. There is reason to believe that ratio is conservative, at least with respect to populations most affected by unconstitutional policing.

Nothing to See Here

Although these aggregate numbers are stunning, they do not fully reveal the realities. To grasp the racist nature of the abuse and the institutional failure to identify and discipline it, it is necessary to examine the CR investigations themselves. This is not only a matter of capturing concrete narrative detail; it is also necessary because of the manner in which CRs are categorized. When, as is often the case, a complainant makes multiple allegations of abuse, the CR is coded according to the investigator’s judgment as to the most serious of the allegations. As a result, allegations of racist behavior tend to disappear from an officer’s disciplinary profile, for excessive force will generally trump and thereby bury allegations of racist verbal abuse. But the difference between beating someone up and beating someone up while spewing racist invective is essential. Indeed, in another context, these would be elements used in identifying a hate crime.

Here is a sampling of complaints against Piwnicki and the outcomes of investigations of those complaints. Although none of these complaints were sustained by investigators, the pattern they form is powerful evidence.

August 13, 2000
A Black pregnant woman alleged she was stopped at gunpoint by an unidentified partner of Piwnicki, who forced her to get on the ground. She was handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car, where she got into a verbal argument with Piwnicki, who slapped her face. Piwnicki’s partner said, “We don’t like black pregnant women,” and made other derogatory statements of a racist and sexist nature.
Not sustained. (CR 266694)

August 13, 2000
A Black man alleged Piwnicki and officer Louis Gade approached him in an unmarked police car in an alley and told him to come to the car. When he ignored the officer’s request, Piwnicki sprayed him in the face with pepper spray. Gade then hit him in the face with a flashlight. He fell to the ground. Piwnicki and Gade repeatedly kicked him. He was handcuffed and taken to the station. The officers refused his request for medical treatment.
Not sustained. (CR 265117)

October 26, 2000
A Black man alleged that he was walking to a restaurant when he was stopped by Piwnicki and other officers. Piwnicki searched under his car and claimed to find narcotics. He was arrested, handcuffed, and put in a squad car. While cuffed in the car, Piwnicki punched and slapped him in the face and punched him in the stomach.
Not sustained. (CR 267343)

November 27, 2000
A Latino man alleged that he was walking down the street when Piwnicki and two other officers stopped him and searched him for drugs. Piwnicki slapped him in the face, one of Piwnicki’s partners elbowed him and also slapped him in the face, and the third partner called him a “fucking Puerto Rican.” A bystander witnessed the incident and reported it to the OPS.
Not sustained. (CR 267496)

March 8, 2002
A Black man alleged that he was walking with his cousin, sister, and girlfriend when they were approached by a police car. Piwnicki and Robert Smith exited the car with their guns drawn. Smith pushed him against a wall, handcuffed him, and put him in the squad car, where Piwnicki punched him in the face. The officers accused the man of being involved in a car accident that caused damage to a police vehicle. When he denied the allegations, one of the officers said, “This one is going on you.” When he asked why he was being falsely charged, one of the officers said to him, “Shut up you black bitch. You are a waste of sperm, nigger.”
Not sustained. (CR 279202)

March 23, 2002
A 13-year-old Black girl alleged that she was playing with her brother and cousins when she threw a stick in the street as Piwnicki and Smith were driving by. The officers exited their car. Piwnicki approached her, pushed her face with his hand, grabbed her arm, and pulled it behind her back. He threatened to “smack the shit out of her” and called her and the other children “cocksuckers.”
Not sustained. (CR 279250)

June 2, 2002
A Latino man alleged that he was driving with his wife, father, and brother when he was stopped by Piwnicki and Smith. Piwnicki told him to “put his fucking hands up,” grabbed him, yanked him out of his car, and handcuffed him. When he asked what was going on, Piwnicki told him “to shut the fuck up” and smacked him on the back of his head. When he attempted to read Piwnicki’s badge, Piwnicki told him not to look at him. Piwnicki also told the man’s wife to “shut the fuck up” and ordered her away from the car. The complainant, who was not arrested, identified the license plate of the car driven by Piwnicki.
Not sustained. (CR 281125)

August 13, 2002
A Black woman alleged that she was standing inside the gate of her apartment building when Piwnicki approached and asked her where she lived. She replied, “I live here where I am standing.” “You better tell me, bitch,” he said and threatened to throw her to the ground and arrest her for trespassing. She countered that he could not do that because she was not trespassing. He grabbed her by the arm, called her a “cunt,” threatened to put marijuana on her, and handcuffed her. “You had to get fucking smart on me,” he said. “Now you are going to jail.” When she asked why he put the handcuffs on so tight, Piwnicki said, “Shut up you cunt nigger bitch,” and slapped her face. Piwnicki then put her in his squad car. “Why did you put your hands on me?” she asked. Piwnicki stopped the car, grabbed her hair, and struck her repeatedly in the face. Later, at the police station, when she asked to speak to a sergeant, Piwnicki grabbed her by the neck, threw her down on a bench, and said, “Shut up you fucking cunt.” Piwnicki falsely charged the woman with drinking on the public way. Witnesses unrelated to the woman corroborated her allegations of physical and verbal abuse. The victim received medical treatment for her injuries. The investigator sustained the allegations against Piwnicki. During the command channel review — the process by which supervisors review a complete complaint investigation into allegations against an officer under their command — Piwnicki’s supervisors objected to the findings, and the findings were overturned.
Sustained finding overturned. (CR 283229)

May 10, 2003
The complaint alleged that three Latino men and two Latina women were parking their car when the drivers in two vehicles behind them honked their horns. After parking the car, one of the men was approached by Piwnicki, who was in plainclothes. “What the fuck,” he said. “Why are you rolling your eyes?” The man replied he didn’t know Piwnicki. “Shut the fuck up, wetback,” said Piwnicki. The man told Piwnicki to leave them alone. Officer Jennifer Chapin Mayoski, who was also in plainclothes, approached and said, “You don’t know who you are fucking with,” and drew her gun. When the complainant started to write down the license plates of the police cars, Mayoski told Piwnicki they should go. As Piwnicki was leaving the scene, he punched the man in the face, breaking his glasses. A second Latino male in the car corroborated the allegations of the first. He also reported that as Piwnicki was leaving, he punched him in the jaw and said, “You ain’t going to do nothing! Fuck you, you spics, you wetbacks.” The two female passengers corroborated the versions given by the two men and further noted that both Piwnicki and Mayoski called them “fucking Mexicans” and “stupid Mexicans.”
Not sustained. (CR 289333)

October 5, 2003
According to the complaint, two Black men were approached by Piwnicki and officer Keith Rigan after one of them was in an altercation with a third party. They alleged that Piwnicki and Rigan asked the third party if they were having a problem with these “niggers and animals.” The officers then punched one of the men in the neck, knocked him to the ground, picked him up, and kneed him in the groin several times. The other man alleged that he was punched, knocked to the ground, and kicked. Both men received medical treatment for their physical injuries.
unfounded. (CR 292855)

June 17, 2007
A Black woman alleged that Piwnicki and officers Russell Willingham and Anthony Martin ordered her and two companions to get out of their parked car and pick up litter around the vehicle. In the course of the interaction, the officers called them “morons,” “ignorant,” and “nigger.”
No affidavit. (CR 1006665)(No action was taken because the complainant did not execute the required affidavit.)

June 17, 2007
A half hour after the incident above — a Black woman alleged that Piwnicki said to her, “Pick up this fucking trash from the ground, this is what niggas do, you fucking moron.”
No affidavit. (CR 1006666)

February 20, 2011
A Black man alleged that he was standing on the street giving his mother a hug when Piwnicki and officer Daniel Sullivan drove up in an unmarked squad car. Piwnicki ordered the man over to the car, saying, “Get over here, you fat greasy nigger.” When the victim responded “wow” and failed to head toward their car, Piwnicki and Sullivan exited their car, chased the man, and knocked a bottle of juice out of his hands. He was criminally charged.
Not sustained. (CR 1043517)

May 18, 2011
According to the complaint, a Puerto Rican woman was driving through an alley en route to a medical appointment when she was stopped by Piwnicki. When she acknowledged that she was cutting through the alley, Piwnicki told her that she was breaking the law. “You people should go back to Mexico,” he said. “Because of people like you, this City is messed up.” The complainant then exited the alley, parked her car, and returned to the area to request Piwnicki’s name and badge number. Piwnicki responded by handcuffing her tightly. He put her in the back of his squad car and berated her: “You people only understand beatings.” When she informed him the handcuffs were too tight, he responded, “I don’t care what the fuck they are.” He also threatened her with the loss of her job as a special education teacher, saying he was going to contact Chicago Public Schools and inform them of her arrest. She was eventually released from Piwnicki’s custody and received medical treatment for the slight fracture she sustained to her wrist from the handcuffs Piwnicki placed on her too tightly.
Not sustained; unfounded. (CR 1045507)

Notwithstanding the long odds of achieving redress, the complainants, all of them Black or brown — and presumably unacquainted with each other — independently filed strikingly similar complaints against Piwnicki alleging excessive force coupled with racist and sexist verbal abuse. The pattern that emerges has probative value, despite the fact that it cannot be determined, in the absence of further investigation, whether the allegations in any given case are true. In a high-functioning accountability system, that pattern would have been discerned early in Piwnicki’s career and prompted appropriate interventions. In a system committed to removing white supremacists from the force, analysis of that pattern would be a priority. In the system we currently have, it has been willfully ignored.

Beyond Impunity

The systemic conditions that have allowed Piwnicki to operate with virtual impunity throughout his career despite these multiple accusations are further illuminated by the rare instances in which complaints against him have been sustained. There are seven such cases:

July 15, 2000
A Black female CPD sergeant filed a complaint alleging that Piwnicki and two other officers were insubordinate, inattentive to duty, and disobeyed a direct order. Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 2000-0263967)

May 6, 2005
A CPD lieutenant initiated a complaint against a CPD police officer for engaging in a bar fight while off duty, in the course of which he was accused of injuring a Black man and calling him a “fucking nigger.” The altercation resulted in the officer’s arrest by the Lake Geneva Police Department. Piwnicki, who was not present at the scene of the incident, subsequently bailed the officer out. Found to have violated a rule requiring that CPD officers file a report when a member of the department is under investigation by a law enforcement agency other than the CPD, Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 297735)

September 29, 2005
A Black husband and wife were at the county courthouse to attend a court date for a relative. The wife alleged that while she was attempting to step into the elevator, Piwnicki (who was wearing a shirt that covered his uniform) slammed his hand across her chest and moved her away to create space for his partner to step onto the elevator. When the woman’s husband verbally confronted Piwnicki, he responded, “Shut the fuck up you coon … You fucking cluck.” Piwnicki then pushed the woman and started swinging at her husband. Piwnicki and the husband attempted to strike each other. During the encounter, Piwnicki grabbed the husband by the neck and called him a “nigger.” Cook County deputy sheriffs separated the husband from Piwnicki and held him against the wall. Even after the husband was physically restrained by deputy sheriffs, Piwnicki continued to attack him saying, “I’ll see you in court you fuckin coon, and I’m going to see to it that you will pay.” In addition to the wife and husband reporting these events, several deputy sheriffs corroborated the portions of the incident they witnessed. Piwnicki followed through with his threat and falsely charged the husband with making threats to an officer. The criminal charges were ultimately dismissed. The allegations made by the couple were sustained, and Piwnicki was suspended for 20 days.
(CR 308792)

October 12, 2005
Piwnicki had a verbal and physical altercation with a Black male CPD officer. He was in the process of arresting two Black women, when the officer, who was in plainclothes, approached him and asked to see his identification. Piwnicki refused. “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he is alleged to have said to the officer, who proved to be Sgt. Ronald Watts. (It would later be established that Watts was the leader of a criminal enterprise that preyed on residents of the public housing development where the confrontation between the two officers occurred.) Piwnicki and Watts grabbed at each other. “I know how you motherfuckers roll,” Watts is alleged to have said. “You’re not on the plantation anymore.” The Internal Affairs Division found that the two officers engaged in an unjustified altercation. Each was suspended for 10 days.
(CR 309085)

July 10, 2006
A Black female CPD officer filed a complaint on behalf of her son. She alleged that her son was sitting in his yard when Piwnicki approached him. He told him, “Come here, you fucking Negro,” then slapped him in the face repeatedly and placed an empty alcohol bottle that was laying on the street in his back pocket. When the man removed the bottle from his pocket and threw it on the ground, Piwnicki kicked him in his groin area and repeatedly called him “nigger.” Piwnicki falsely arrested the complainant for drinking on the public way. The man’s mother observed the incident and heard Piwnicki call her son a “nigger.” The investigator sustained the allegation that Piwnicki verbally abused the man, finding there was “sufficient evidence to support the allegation that PO Piwnicki used profane and derogatory language toward the victim.” Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 306868)

June 10, 2010
A Black woman was sitting on the porch of her home with several neighbors. From his squad car on the street, Piwnicki is alleged to have addressed them as “motherfuckers” and ordered them off the porch. “Well, sir, I live here,” she responded. Piwnicki is then alleged to have threatened “to lock her black ass up.” A male neighbor approached the porch and encountered Piwnicki, who is alleged to have said, “You gonna run, nigger?” “No,” he replied, “why would I run if I haven’t done anything?” Piwnicki got out of his vehicle, grabbed the man, and handcuffed and arrested him. As he left, Piwnicki told the woman on the porch, “When I come back, I’m locking your black ass up, too.” The woman called her landlord, a CPD officer, who advised her to call a sergeant to file a complaint. When the sergeant arrived, he refused to take her complaint. Piwnicki received a 10-day suspension, and a complaint against the sergeant was also sustained.
(CR 1037059)

March 15, 2019
Piwnicki failed to serve notice on the person named in an order of protection. The individual who had secured the order filed a complaint against Piwnicki for failure to provide service. The complaint was sustained, and he was given a reprimand.
(CR 2019-0003252)

Putting aside the last of these complaints, the other six sustained complaints against Piwnicki share a common feature: All involve other law enforcement personnel as antagonist, complainant, or witness. Under those circumstances, the disciplinary system responded. What it has proved unwilling to address are the scores of complaints alleging racist abuse by Piwnicki filed by Black and brown Chicagoans without any connection to law enforcement.

Despite the massive public record describing Piwnicki’s racism, the only change in his status within the CPD over the course of his career is that he was promoted to detective in 2013 and then to sergeant in late 2017. The latter promotion came more than two years after the political upheaval precipitated by release of the video of the police murder of McDonald and a year after the release of the Department of Justice’s report on its investigation of the CPD in which it expressed “serious concerns” about patterns of racially discriminatory conduct by CPD officers and found that “the impact of CPD’s pattern or practice of unreasonable force falls heaviest on predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.”

Since his promotions, Piwnicki has had relatively few CRs. An obvious reason for this is that the nature of the job is different. There is less direct contact with community members. At the same time, as a sergeant, he remains in a position to do harm. It is a widely shared belief among those working to advance police reform that sergeants as first-line supervisors are the key to changing institutional culture. By the same token, Piwnicki’s promotion to sergeant puts him in the position to perpetuate the ugly racist subculture within the department that he has embodied throughout his career.

Piwnicki’s promotion to sergeant puts him in the position to perpetuate the ugly racist subculture within the department that he has embodied throughout his career.

Just as the Office of Professional Standards was replaced by the Independent Police Review Authority in the wake of a police scandal, the IPRA was replaced in 2017 by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in the wake of the police murder of McDonald. Over time, the quality of COPA’s investigations of misconduct complaints has significantly improved, but it remains constrained by the police union contract from doing the sort of pattern analysis necessary to effectively curb the immense damage to public trust caused by officers such as Piwnicki.

Although those constraints have been relaxed somewhat, they continue to hobble effective pattern analysis. Under the most recent version of the union contract, negotiated last year, COPA and the Bureau of Internal Affairs may consider complaints up to seven years old alleging excessive force, racial verbal abuse, and criminal conduct for the purpose of assessing credibility. They may only consider other categories of complaints if they are sustained. And under no circumstances can they consider complaints that have been determined to be “not founded.”

Fraternal Order of Police president Catanzara’s argument that officers should be judged by their actions is impeached by his union’s long history of using collective bargaining to block such accountability. Applied to Piwnicki, the seven-year look back would not even begin to reveal his career-long pattern of behavior that results in complaints of racial abuse by Black and brown Chicagoans.

If the administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson is serious about addressing racism within CPD ranks, it will go beyond investigating officers affiliated with extremist groups and will prioritize vigorous pattern analysis of citizen complaints, while taking steps to remove the constraints imposed on such analysis by the police union contract. Unless and until it does, the career of Piwnicki will stand as the cautionary tale: An officer who, for over a quarter century, has been allowed to openly act out his racial hostilities by an oversight system that has only seen fit to discipline him when his abusive behavior spills over onto others in law enforcement.

Toward the end of his tenure, I asked Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson what he had learned since assuming leadership of the department. A Black officer who had not sought the position, he had been appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the McDonald revelations.

Johnson replied that he had been surprised above all by the intensity of the racism within the department — an unexpected observation from a Black officer who had risen through the ranks — and he expressed the hope that the problem would be resolved over time by the retirement of certain older officers.

Piwnicki refutes that hope. As he approaches the end of his career, his complaint history is a teaching. To the extent that the department has allowed him to abuse people of color with impunity while promoting him first to detective and then to sergeant, his career stands as a model for others disposed to engage in racial abuse within their job descriptions as Chicago police officers.

In response to inquiries from The Intercept, the Chicago Police Department provided the following statement:

The Chicago Police Department’s members are held to the highest standard and expected to conduct themselves with the utmost professionalism both on and off duty. Per CPD policy, all members are prohibited from engaging in any illegal discrimination against an individual or group on the basis of any protected class under federal, state and local law.

We have also been working to implement a strengthened policy prohibiting members from participating, supporting and associating with criminal and bias-based organizations. We are updating this policy in close collaboration with the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), which recently voted to approve the revised policy. 

Allegations of Department members violating CPD policy are thoroughly investigated. During the course of these investigations, members are afforded due process. Members found in violation will be held accountable based on the findings of these investigations.

The post Why Does the Chicago Police Department Tolerate Abusive Racists in Its Ranks? appeared first on The Intercept.

Cory Doctorow’s latest book is “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.”

The techlash has finally reached the courts. Amazon’s in court. Google’s in court. Apple’s under EU investigation. The French authorities just kicked down Nvidia’s doors and went through their files looking for evidence of crimes against competition. People are pissed at tech: about moderation, about monopolization, about price gouging, about labor abuses, and — everywhere and always — about privacy.

From experience, I can tell you that Silicon Valley techies are pretty sanguine about commercial surveillance: “Why should I care if Google wants to show me better ads?” But they are much less cool about government spying: “The NSA? Those are the losers who weren’t smart enough to get an interview at Google.”

And likewise from experience, I can tell you that government employees and contractors are pretty cool with state surveillance: “Why would I worry about the NSA spying on me? I already gave the Office of Personnel Management a comprehensive dossier of all possible kompromat in my past when I got my security clearance.” But they are far less cool with commercial surveillance: “Google? Those creeps would sell their mothers for a nickel. To the Chinese.”

What are they both missing? That American surveillance is a public-private partnership: a symbiosis between a concentrated tech sector that has the means, motive, and opportunity to spy on every person in the world and a state that loves surveillance as much as it hates checks and balances.

Big Tech, cops, and surveillance agencies were made for one another.

The Privacy Deficit

America has a privacy law deficit. While U.S. trading rivals like the EU and even China have enacted muscular privacy laws in response to digital commercial surveillance, the U.S. has slept through a quarter-century of increasing corporate spying without any federal legislative action.

It’s really something. America has stronger laws protecting you from video store clerks who gossip about your porn rentals than we do protecting you from digital spies who nonconsensually follow you into an abortion clinic and then sell the data.

In place of democratically accountable privacy laws, we have the imperial fiat of giant tech companies. Apple unilaterally decided that in-app surveillance should be limited to instances in which users explicitly opted in. Unsurprisingly, more than 96 percent of iOS users did not opt into surveillance (presumably the remaining 4 percent were either confused, or Facebook employees, or both).

When Apple finally allowed its users to block Facebook surveillance, they cut off a torrent of valuable data that Facebook had nonconsensually acquired from Apple device owners, without those owners’ permission. But — crucially — it was Apple that decided when consent was and wasn’t needed to spy on it customers. After 96 percent of iOS device owners opted out of Facebook spying, Apple continued to spy on those users, in precisely the same way that Facebook had, without telling them, and when they were caught doing it, they lied about it.

Which raises a question: Why don’t Apple customers simply block Apple’s surveillance? Why don’t they install software that prevents their devices from ratting them out to Apple? Because that would be illegal. Very, very illegal.

One in four web users has installed an ad blocker (which also blocks commercial surveillance). It’s the “biggest boycott in world history.” The reason you can modify your browser to ignore demands from servers to fetch ads — and reveal facts about you in the process — is that the web is an “open platform.” All the major browsers have robust interfaces for aftermarket blockers to plug into, and they’re also all open source, meaning that if a browser vendor restricts those interfaces to make it harder to block ads, other companies can “fork the code” to bypass those restrictions.

By contrast, apps are encrypted, which triggers a quarter-century-old law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, whose Section 1201 makes it a felony to provide someone with a tool to bypass an “access control” for a copyrighted work. By encrypting apps and locking the keys away from the device owner, Apple can make it a crime for you to reconfigure your own phone to protect your privacy, with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine — for a first offense.

The Rise of Big Tech

An app is best understood as “a webpage wrapped in just enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad blocker” (or anything else the app’s shareholders disapprove of).

DMCA 1201 is only one of a slew of laws that restrict the ability of technology users to modify the tools they own and use to favor their interests over manufacturers’: laws governing cybersecurity, trademarks, patents, contracts, and other legal constructs can be woven together to block the normal activities that the tech giants themselves once pursued.

Yes, there was a time when tech companies waged guerrilla warfare upon one another: reverse-engineering, scraping, and hacking each others’ products so that disgruntled users could switch from one service to another without incurring steep switching costs. For example, Facebook offered departing MySpace users a “bot” that would impersonate them to MySpace, scrape their inboxes, and import the messages to Facebook so users could maintain contact with friends they’d left behind on the older platform.

That all changed as tech consolidated, shrinking the internet to what software developer Tom Eastman calls “five giant websites, filled with screenshots of text from the other four.” This consolidation was not unique to tech. The 40-year drawdown of antitrust has led to mass consolidation across nearly every sector of the global economy, from bottle caps to banking. Tech companies merged, gobbled up hundreds of small startups, and burned billions of investor dollars offering products and services below cost, making it impossible for anyone else to get a foothold.

Tech was the first industry born in the post-antitrust age. The Apple ][+ hit shelves the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail. When tech hit its first inter-industry squabble, jousting with the much more mature and concentrated entertainment industry during the Napster wars of the early 2000s, it was trounced, losing every court, regulatory, and legislative fight.

By all rights, tech should have won those fights. After all, the tech sector in the go-go early internet years was massive, an order of magnitude larger than the entertainment companies challenging them in the halls of power. But Big Content was well-established, having boiled itself down to seven or so companies (depending on how you count), while tech was still a rabble of hundreds of small and medium-sized companies that couldn’t agree on its legislative priorities. Tech couldn’t even agree on the catering for a meeting where these priorities might be debated. Concentrated sectors find it comparatively easy to come to agreements, including agreements about what to tell Congress and federal judges. And since those concentrated sectors also find it easy to agree on whose turf belongs to whom, they are able to avoid the “wasteful competition” that erodes their profit margins, leaving them with vast war chests with which to pursue their legislative agenda.

As tech consolidated, it began to feel its oats. Narrow interpretations of existing laws were broadened. New, absurd gambits were invented and then accepted by authorities with straight faces.

Just as important as the new laws that tech got for itself were the laws they kept at bay. Labor laws were treated as nonexistent, provided that your boss was an app. Consumer protection laws were likewise jettisoned.

And, of course, the U.S. never passed a federal privacy law, and the EU struggled to enforce its privacy law.

Cops and Spies

Concentrated sectors of large, highly profitable firms inevitably seek to fuse their power with that of the state, securing from the government forbearance for their own actions and prohibitions on the activities they disfavor. When it comes to surveillance, the tech sector has powerful allies in government: cops and spies.

It goes without saying that cops and spies love commercial surveillance. The very first Snowden revelation concerned a public-private surveillance partnership called Prism, in which the NSA plundered large internet companies’ data with their knowledge and cooperation. The subsequent revelation about the “Upstream” program revealed that the NSA was also plundering tech giants’ data without their knowledge, and using Prism as a “plausible deniability” fig leaf so that the tech firms didn’t get suspicious when the NSA acted on its stolen intelligence.

No government agency could ever hope to match the efficiency and scale of commercial surveillance. The NSA couldn’t order us to carry pocket location beacons at all times — hell, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention couldn’t even get us to run an exposure notification app in the early days of the Covid pandemic. No government agency could order us to put all our conversations in writing to be captured, stored, and mined. And not even the U.S. government could afford to run the data centers and software development to store and make sense of it all.

Meanwhile, the private sector relies on cops and spies to go to bat for them, lobbying against new privacy laws and for lax enforcement of existing ones. Think of Amazon’s Ring cameras, which have blanketed entire neighborhoods in CCTV surveillance, which Ring shares with law enforcement agencies, sometimes without the consent or knowledge of the cameras’ owners. Ring marketing recruits cops as street teams, showering them with freebies to distribute to local homeowners.

And when local activists and town councils ponder limitations on this kind of commercial surveillance, the cops go to bat for Ring, insisting that every citizen should have the inalienable right to contribute to an off-the-books video surveillance grid that the cops can access at will.

Google, for its part, has managed to play both sides of the culture war with its location surveillance, thanks to the “reverse warrants” that cops have used to identify all the participants at both Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6 coup.

Distinguishing between state and private surveillance is a fool’s errand. Cops and spies need the surveillance industry, and the surveillance industry needs cops and spies. Since the days of the East India Company, monopolists have understood the importance of recruiting powerful state actors to go to bat for commercial interests.

AT&T — the central node in the Snowden revelations — has been playing this game for a century, foiling regulators attempts to break up its monopoly for 69 years before the Department of Justice finally eked out a win in 1982 (whereupon antitrust was promptly neutered, allowing the “Baby Bells” to merge into new monopolies like Verizon).

In the 1950s, AT&T came within a whisker of being broken up, but the Pentagon stepped up to defend Ma Bell, telling the Justice Department that America would lose the Korean War if they didn’t have an intact AT&T to supply and operate their high-tech backend. America lost the Korean War, but AT&T won: It got a 30-year reprieve.

Stumping for his eponymous antitrust law in 1890, Sen. John Sherman thundered, “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.”

Today, as our snoopy tech firms hide in the skirts of our spies and law enforcement agencies, we have to get beyond the idea that this is surveillance capitalism. Truly, it’s more akin to surveillance mercantilism: a fusion of state and commercial power.

The post Why Big Tech, Cops, and Spies Were Made for One Another appeared first on The Intercept.

Late last month, Jesse Bloom, a computational virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle released a paper in which he analyzed raw genomic data from hundreds of environmental swabs that Chinese scientists collected from cages, carts, and other surfaces at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. The swabs were collected beginning on January 1, 2020, after Chinese authorities abruptly shut down the market amid the worsening Covid-19 outbreak in the city.

The Huanan seafood market’s role in the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic is at the center of a hot debate. Many of the early Covid cases in Wuhan (though not all) have been linked to the market, which was known to sell live animals, including species like common raccoon dogs that are susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2. Some have argued that these and other findings make the market the likely site of one or more natural spillover events in which SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population from a raccoon dog or another intermediate animal host. But no infected animal was found at the market, and others have argued that the bustling facility was more likely the site of a super-spreader event, in which a virus that had already entered the human population in late 2019 was amplified. Which was it: the site of the original spillover or only a super-spreader venue? This question has been a key battleground in the tumultuous debate about Covid-19’s origin.

Given this context, the raw data from the environmental swabs have long been seen as a possible clue to what happened at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. But the data only became available to the global research community in 2023, after years in which Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its researchers kept it out of the public domain. The data has since sparked a firestorm of discussion, including numerous stories in mainstream news outlets that have relied on the data to report a link between raccoon dogs and Covid’s origin. Bloom’s new paper helps clarify what has become something of a confused, and confusing, media spectacle.

Bloom’s paper, which was published as a preprint on bioRxiv on April 26, found that the data from the swabs provide no evidence one way or another about whether raccoon dogs or other animals at the market were infected with SARS-CoV-2. It also highlights what is perhaps the most significant limitation of the data from the environmental swabs collected by Chinese scientists. The swabs were collected, Bloom writes, “at least a month after the first human infections in Wuhan.”

“It is just very hard to take data collected that far downstream of initial entry into humans and to convincingly support any precise scenario for how the virus got into humans,” he said in an interview.

“Even if you had animal-to-human transmission in the market in December, by the time you collected samples in January, it could have been easily spreading back from humans to animals,” added Sergei Pond, a computational virologist at Temple University who was not involved in Bloom’s research. “Any self-respecting defense attorney would have a field day with this.”

Bold, Exaggerated Headlines

Bloom’s analysis contains other significant insights (more on that below), but he was not the first nor the only scientist independent of Chinese institutions to obtain and analyze some of the raw data from the Huanan market environmental swabs. In March, an international team of virologists, evolutionary biologists, and other scientists — many of whom have been starring players in the heated scientific and social media debates about Covid’s origins — discovered that a portion of the raw data had been uploaded by Chinese researchers to a global online database. The international group put together their own independent report on the available data and first informed the World Health Organization of their preliminary findings on March 11. Before the report was ready to be released publicly, the press got wind of the team’s work. What followed was a bumper crop of bold headlines.

“The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” declared The Atlantic in a March 16 headline. “New Data Links Pandemic’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market,” announced the New York Times that same day. “New Evidence Supports Animal Origin of Covid Virus through Raccoon Dogs,” wrote the Scientific American a day later. The news of a link between raccoon dogs and Covid’s origins spread like a conflagration.

What was this strong evidence? The Atlantic’s March 16 story described the international team’s work like this:

“A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019,” wrote The Atlantic’s Katherine Wu. “It’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.”

Wu reported, among other things, that the international team of researchers had “discovered that several market samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock-full of animal genetic material — much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog, a small animal related to foxes that has a raccoon-like face.”

At the time The Atlantic published its article on March 16, the international team’s report was not yet publicly available; it wouldn’t be released until the following week. In the days before and after the report’s release, several of its authors gave interviews to top news outlets about their findings. One of the scientists involved in the international team’s analysis was quoted in The Atlantic saying: “This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.” Another author told the New York Times: “This isn’t an infected animal. But this is the closest you can get without having the animal in front of you.”

The actual text of the international team’s report, though, offered more limited conclusions than the press statements of some of its authors.

“Declarations in the media are what people as individuals think and their interpretation and different people in the group had different certainty on what you can deduce,” said Florence Débarre, a French evolutionary biologist and one of the authors of the international team’s report, who did not speak to The Atlantic for its story.

The international team’s report appeared on Zenodo on March 20. Contrary to the quoted assertions of a few days before, the published report did not claim that its findings could only sensibly be explained by infected animals at the market, or that its work was the closest you could get without having an infected animal in front of you. What it did convincingly show was that raccoon dogs and other mammals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were being sold at the market in the run-up to its closure on January 1, 2020. “It was a significant finding given that the Chinese CDC had not mentioned them before in the context of these data,” Débarre said.

The international team’s report also said that the genetic material from susceptible nonhuman animals were at their “highest frequency” in stalls in the southwest corner of the market, where live wildlife was known to have been sold and where most SARS-CoV-2 genetic material was collected. And the team’s report engaged in a metagenomic analysis of the data they had from the environmental swabs: Among other things, the team parsed the mix and quantity of animal genetic material found in environmental swabs that had been designated as positive for SARS-CoV-2 by the China CDC.

The team found that there were several SARS-CoV-2 positive swabs from the market that also contained some quantity of genetic material from raccoon dogs and other susceptible mammals. As the New York Times reported in its March 16 story, one swab, in particular, caught the researchers’ eyes: a swab labeled Q61. This swab was collected from a cart in the southwest corner of Huanan market on January 12, 2020; it was designated as positive for SARS-CoV-2 in the China CDC’s data set; and when the international team analyzed the contents of the swab, it contained a large quantity of raccoon dog genetic material and very little human genetic material.

As one of the team’s scientists told the New York Times: “We were able to figure out relatively quickly that at least in one of these samples, there was a lot of raccoon dog nucleic acid, along with virus nucleic acid.”

In the end, based on these and other findings, the international team stated the following in their report: “Although we cannot identify the intermediate animal host species from these data, a plausible explanation for the co-occurrence of the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2 and susceptible animals is that a subset of these animals were infected. Combined with the previously published observation of the strong association of the earliest reported Covid-19 cases with the west side of the market, and the clustering of SARS-CoV-2-containing environmental samples near the wildlife stalls, this provides further support for the hypothesis that wildlife were the source of the first human SARS-CoV-2 infections.” Elsewhere in the report, the authors write that their findings identify “these species, particularly the common raccoon dog, as the most likely conduits for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019.”

Statistically Insignificant

This is where Jesse Bloom entered the picture. After the international team’s work made major headlines across the news media, the Chinese researchers posted their own analysis of the Huanan seafood market swab data online, in a revision to an earlier preprint from February 2022. A peer-reviewed version was then published in the scientific journal Nature. That paper confirmed the presence of raccoon dogs and other susceptible animals at the market but noted that the environmental samples “cannot prove that the animals were infected.” At this point, Bloom decided to jump in too and take his own look at the raw data.

Bloom’s analysis took a slightly different approach than the international team that preceded him. Among other things, he was working from a more complete data set, which had been released by the Chinese researchers after they posted their paper. And Bloom not only looked at the quantity and type of animal genetic material in the environmental swab data, but he also analyzed and published the quantity of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material found in the swabs. When Bloom looked under the hood, he made some surprising findings.

For instance, he took a close looked at swab Q61: the swab featured in the New York Times article that contained a great deal of raccoon dog genetic material and was also purportedly positive for SARS-CoV-2. What Bloom found was that the swab indeed contained a significant quantity of raccoon dog genetic material but very low amounts of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material.

As Bloom reports in his paper, “This sample tested negative by RT-qPCR and appears to have been called positive on the basis of containing 1 of ~200,000,000 reads that mapped to SARS-CoV-2.”

In other words, as Sergei Pond explained, the swab Q61 that got all that media attention was not all it was reported to be.

“One read out of 200,000,000 is completely statistically insignificant,” said Pond. “It really had no SARS-CoV-2. There is no evidence based on genetic analysis there was SARS-CoV-2 in that sample. One read out of 200,000,000 — it could have been a low level of trace contamination.”

What’s more, as Bloom’s preprint reports, Q61 was the only swab above a certain threshold for raccoon dog genetic material that contained any SARS-CoV-2 RNA at all: “13 of the 14 samples with at least 20% of their chordate mitochondrial material from raccoon dogs contain no SARS-CoV-2 reads, and the other sample [swab Q61] contains just 1 of ~200,000,000 million reads mapping to SARS-CoV-2.” When Bloom plotted the quantity of animal genetic material found in the swabs with their SARS-CoV-2 RNA content, he determined that there was in fact a negative correlation between the abundance of SARS-CoV-2 and genetic material from raccoon dogs in the swabs.

“I wouldn’t read too much into these correlations, but to the extent SARS-CoV-2 genetic material is associated with any of the material from these species, it is not with species that we think could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2,” he said. “It just sort of suggests that by the time these samples were collected, SARS-CoV-2 was all over the place, probably unrelated to the distribution of the animals and animal products [at the market].”

Media Hype vs. Scientific Method

Bloom notes that his preprint confirms many of the international team’s findings, including the presence of raccoon dogs and other susceptible mammals at Huanan market in the run-up to January 1, 2020. But the bottom line, Bloom said, is that “when looked at carefully these data are not sufficient to conclude anything either way about whether there were infected animals.”

He also had pointed words (at least in the context of a staid scientific paper) for the media coverage of this matter. The findings from his preprint, Bloom writes, “are somewhat inconsistent with related media articles that emphasized co-mingling of raccoon dog and viral material (Wu 2023; Mueller 2023) — in fact, raccoon dogs are one of the species with the least co-mingling of their genetic material and SARS-CoV-2.” Instead, Bloom found that the greatest co-mingling of viral and animal material involved species that were “almost certainly not infected with SARS-CoV-2,” such as fish and livestock.

James Alwine, a virologist and emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written on the Covid origin debate and favors the natural spillover hypothesis, said he worries about the negative impact that sensational headlines and overhyped press statements have on the credibility of scientists.

“I must say I am always worried about the sensationalism that comes out with every one of these discoveries, because it just goes against my idea of how science should be talked about to the public,” he said. “And you know,” he added, “scientists are humans just like all of us, they get carried away and don’t always say the right things. But it has a deleterious effect.”

Apart from the media coverage, Alwine was keen to point out that the papers from Bloom and the international team actually show the iterative scientific process at work. Indeed, Bloom and some of the key scientists from the international team have had a professional and fruitful debate since their respective publications appeared. Several authors on the international team, including Débarre, have offered feedback on Bloom’s preprint. Bloom, in turn, slightly revised the piece to incorporate some of their comments.

Débarre, for her part, noted that despite Bloom’s findings regarding the Q61 swab, the international team still showed that raccoon dog genetic material was located in the same area of the market, indeed in the same stall, where other separate swabs found SARS-CoV-2 material.

“Overall we pretty much agree with what Jesse Bloom concludes,” she told me. “It is more a matter of interpretation in how you weigh other data and other pieces of evidence to form an interpretation.”

In terms of the broader picture — the overall debate about the origin of Covid-19 and whether it spilled over from nature or emerged out of a lab — Bloom told me he remains agnostic.

“I mean it is obviously hard when you are interpreting what is all circumstantial evidence. All publicly available evidence right now about how SARS-CoV-2 entered humans, it is all circumstantial,” he said.

“I think it is very unclear how SARS-CoV-2 first entered humans,” he added.

Since incorporating the comments he received, Bloom has submitted his preprint for peer review at a scientific journal. According to Débarre, the international team is working on new analyses that it hopes to submit for peer review at a future date.

The post The Rise and Fall of the Raccoon Dog Theory of Covid-19 appeared first on The Intercept.

The peer-reviewed paper proved to be hugely influential. Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, announced its findings in a post on the agency’s website in late March 2020. When asked during an April 17 press briefing at the White House about concerns that SARS-CoV-2 had come out of a lab in China, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who recently stepped down as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, referenced the paper, describing its conclusions and calling its authors “a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists.” The paper has been accessed online more than 5.7 million times and has been cited by more than 2,000 media outlets. ABC News, for instance, ran an article on March 27 titled “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes Covid-19 ‘Is Not a Laboratory Construct.’” In that article, one of the paper’s authors, Robert Garry, is quoted saying, “There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy theories that went to a pretty high level, so we felt it was important to get a team together to examine evidence of this new coronavirus to determine what we could about the origin.”

What that quote didn’t quite convey was that Garry and several of the paper’s other co-authors were themselves initially suspicious that SARS-CoV-2 may have emerged from a lab. They communicated their suspicions to Fauci, Collins, and others in late January and early February 2020, and what ensued was a period of intense and confidential deliberation about the origin of the virus.

Unredacted records obtained by The Nation and The Intercept offer detailed insights into those confidential deliberations. The documents show that in the early days of the pandemic, Fauci and Collins took part in a series of email exchanges and telephone calls in which several leading virologists expressed concern that SARS-CoV-2 looked potentially “engineered.” The participants also contemplated the possibility that laboratory activities had inadvertently led to the creation and release of the virus. The conversations convey a sense of anxious urgency and included speculation about the specific types of laboratory techniques that might have caused the virus’s emergence. After roughly a week of debate and data collection, one of the key figures involved in the deliberations characterized the focus of the group’s work as follows: “to disprove any type of lab theory.” Several of the scientists on the calls and emails then went on to write and publish “Proximal Origin.” It became one of the best-read papers in the history of science.

The records presented here were made public by the NIH in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by this reporter. Their release in late November came as Fauci prepared to leave the agency after decades of service, and as Republicans in Congress, in anticipation of their imminent control of the House, geared up to launch oversight investigations into the origin of Covid-19.

Many of the documents analyzed in this article were first obtained in 2021, in heavily redacted form, by journalist Jason Leopold. Some of them were later presented to Congress, where staffers were allowed to look at them and take notes but could not keep full copies. It was only after more than a year of litigation that the NIH released these documents without redactions. Their contents have been met with widely divergent interpretations by the participants in the often vitriolic debate about the origin of Covid-19. What most people seem to agree on, however, is that the documents are a valuable record of the early days of the pandemic and belong in the public domain.

“These documents are important, and they should have been available earlier. The public has a right to know,” says Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, who favors a natural origin explanation for SARS-CoV-2 but doesn’t rule out the possibility of a lab origin. “All the world has suffered from Covid-19, and we deserve to have all information open and transparent, with a rigorous evaluation of what the cause was.”

Wild West

On January 31, 2020, Fauci received an email from Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, an influential health research foundation based in the U.K. “Tony, really would like to speak with you this evening,” he wrote.

“Will call shortly,” came an emailed response from Fauci’s assistant.

Farrar then wrote to Fauci: “Thanks Tony. Can you phone Kristian Anderson [sic] … He is expecting your call now. The people involved are: Kristian Anderson … Bob Garry … Eddie Holmes.” Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, Robert Garry of Tulane University, and Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney are all eminent biologists and virologists, and all three would go on to be co-authors of “Proximal Origin.” Garry and Andersen have both been recipients of large grants from the NIH in recent years, as has another “Proximal Origin” author, W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University.

Fauci had his phone call with Andersen that night, and what he heard clearly disturbed him. In an email to Farrar after the call, he wrote the following: “I told [Andersen] that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5.”

A comparison of redacted and unredacted versions of a Feb. 1, 2020, email from Anthony Fauci to scientists discussing concerns about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Freedom of Information Act

What were Andersen’s concerns? And why were they so dire they might merit a call to the FBI?

Andersen laid them out plainly in an email to Fauci that same evening. “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” Andersen wrote in the email. “I should mention,” he added, “that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.”

Thus began a scramble to probe in private the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The following day, Saturday, February 1, Farrar organized a conference call with Fauci, Andersen, Holmes, Garry, and several other scientists, including Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh and Ron Fouchier, a prominent Dutch virologist whose work experimenting with the H5N1 influenza virus has sparked controversy in the past. Also invited on the call were Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser to the U.K. government, and Collins. This “close knit group,” as Farrar later described it, was to treat their discussion “in total confidence.”

Fauci spent part of the morning before the 2 p.m. ET conference call brushing up on what sorts of grants and collaborations his agency was involved in with research institutions in China. In an email to his deputy Hugh Auchincloss, he wrote: “It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. … You will have tasks today that must be done.”

In a recent deposition, Fauci said he emailed Auchincloss before that afternoon’s conference call because he “wanted to be briefed on the scope of what our collaborations were and the kind of work that we were funding in China. I wanted to know what the nature of that work was.”

In the deposition, Fauci was asked if he was concerned that the work he had funded in China “might have led to the creation of the coronavirus.”

“I wasn’t concerned that it might have,” he responded, “but I didn’t like the fact that I was completely in the dark about the totality of the work that [was] being done, and I was going into a phone call with a larger group of established scientists and I wanted to have at my fingertips just what we were and were not doing.”

If he wasn’t aware of the details already, Fauci may have learned that morning that the NIH, via a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, had provided money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Among other things, the NIH helped fund experiments at WIV that infected genetically engineered mice with “chimeric” hybrids of SARS-related bat coronaviruses in what some scientists have described as unacceptably risky research. As The Intercept has reported, these particular experiments could not have sparked the pandemic — the viruses described in the research are too different from SARS-CoV-2 — but it does raise questions about what other kinds of experiments were going on in Wuhan and haven’t been disclosed. Key details of these U.S.-funded experiments were made public only after The Intercept filed a FOIA lawsuit.

On February 2, for instance, the scientists and health officials sent a series of emails explaining their views on the virus’s features and its possible origin. The possibility that the virus emerged from a lab release was top of mind for some of the scientists. In one email to Fauci, Collins, and another NIH official, Farrar wrote, “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release—I am honestly at 50!”

Farrar then summarized the perspectives of several other scientists, including Michael Farzan, of UF Scripps Institute. Farzan, Farrar wrote, was particularly puzzled by the presence in the virus’s genome of a furin cleavage site, which is a feature that has not been found in other SARS-related coronaviruses. The furin cleavage site plays an important role in helping the virus infect human airway cells. Farzan was “bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely).” On the question of whether the virus had a natural origin or came from some sort of accidental lab release, Farrar reported that Farzan was “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental-release” explanation and that “Bob” — an apparent reference to Robert Garry — was also surprised by the presence of a furin cleavage site in this virus. Farrar quoted Bob saying: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … it’s stunning.”

Several other scientists, including the Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, offered very different perspectives. In a lengthy February 2 email, Fouchier wrote, “It is my opinion that a non-natural origin of [the virus] is highly unlikely at present. Any conspiracy theory can be approached with factual information. I have written down some of the counter-arguments.” Among other things, he explained that a “natural origin of the furin site is certainly not impossible.” He also warned his colleagues that further debate about the “accusation” that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered and released into the environment by humans “would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.” He expressed doubt that a follow-up discussion about the origin question “needs to be done on very short term,” given other pressing issues.

Throughout these exchanges, the scientists and health officials showed keen awareness of the growing public interest in and social media discussion about the question of Covid-19’s origin.

“I agree that we really cannot take Ron’s suggestion about waiting,” Fauci wrote on February 2. “Like all of us, I do not know how this evolved, but given the concerns of so many people and the threat of further distortions on social media, it is essential that we move quickly.”

“Hopefully we can get [the World Health Organization] to convene,” he added. Fauci, Farrar, and Collins had decided to alert top WHO brass to the concerns about the origin of the virus and ask the organization to convene a group to explore the matter. WHO apparently declined to do so at the time.

“Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this and are not reacting to reports which could be very damaging,” Farrar wrote that same day.

By February 4, after a brief period of debate and data collection, Edward Holmes and some of the other scientists involved in the calls and emails had written up a rough summary of their deliberations. “It’s fundamental science and completely neutral as written,” he explained in an email. “Did not mention other anomalies as this will make us look like loons.”

In contrast to the scientists’ concerns a few days prior that the virus looked potentially engineered, the summary definitively stated that the “deliberate engineering” of the virus could be ruled out with a “high degree of confidence as the data is inconsistent with this scenario.” Instead, it laid out two main hypotheses for the virus’s emergence: that it evolved via natural selection in an animal host or that it emerged accidentally from a laboratory practice known as “selection during passage.” “It is currently impossible to prove or disprove either,” the summary stated, “and it is unclear whether future data or analyses will help resolve this issue.”

Holmes sent the summary to Farrar, who forwarded it to Fauci and Collins. It sparked a speculative discussion among the three men about the kind of laboratory work that could have inadvertently created the virus. Their speculations centered on “serial passage” or “repeated tissue culture passage,” a practice in which a virus is evolved in a lab by repeatedly passaging it through mice, other lab animals, or cell culture. In some cases, this technique involves passing viruses through the bodies of mice that have been genetically altered to express certain human proteins. The technique can also make it possible for scientists to “fairly rapidly select for more pathogenic variants [of a virus] in the laboratory,” as Garry would note in a later email.

After reviewing the summary document from Holmes and his team, Collins wrote: “Very thoughtful analysis. I note that Eddie is now arguing against the idea that this is the product of intentional human engineering. But repeated tissue culture passage is still an option—though it doesn’t explain the O-linked glycans,” another feature of the virus that the scientists scrutinized.

Farrar replied in an early-morning email: “Being very careful in the morning wording. ‘Engineered’ probably not. Remains very real possibility of accidental lab passage in animals to give glycans.” The scientists seem by this point to have made a sharp distinction between a scenario in which the virus was deliberately engineered in a lab and a scenario in which the virus was generated during serial passage experiments in a lab.

“Eddie would be 60:40 lab side,” Farrar added. “I remain 50:50.”

“Yes, I’d be interested in the proposal of accidental lab passage in animals (which ones?),” Collins wrote.

“?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice,” Fauci responded.

“Exactly!” Farrar replied.

“Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL-2 lab?” wrote Collins, referring to biosafety level 2 labs, which do not have the most stringent safety protocols.

“Wild West…” was Farrar’s response, an apparent reference to lab practices in China or possibly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself.

In the above exchange, the health officials seem to be contemplating the possibility that the repeated passage of a coronavirus through genetically modified mice in an insufficiently secure lab could have resulted in the accidental emergence and release of SARS-CoV-2. In a later email exchange, Farrar, quoting Garry, noted that serial passage in animals had been proved to result in the appearance of furin cleavage sites in other viruses, specifically the H5N1 flu virus. “There are a couple passage of H5N1 in chicken papers—the furin site appears in steps.”

Trying to Disprove Lab Theory

In the days after February 4, the summary document written by Holmes and his colleagues continued to circulate among the scientists and health officials, including Collins and Fauci, as it was revised and reworked. The scientists were now contemplating three main hypotheses for the virus’s origin: two involving a natural spillover event and one involving a lab origin. They hypothesized that it jumped from its original host, likely a bat, directly into humans, where it evolved its pandemic potential; that it spilled from its original host into some intermediate animal host before jumping into humans; or that it was the result of some sort of lab accident involving serial passage. The scientists wrote that “current data are consistent with all three” scenarios.

On February 7, Farrar notified Fauci and Collins that new preliminary data had come in from China concerning coronaviruses found in pangolins, one of the world’s most heavily trafficked mammals. It seemed to excite the scientists: “Reports coming out overnight that Chinese group have pangolin viruses that are 99% similar,” Farrar wrote. “This would be a crucially important finding and if true could be the ‘missing link’ and explain a natural evolutionary link.”

“That will be VERY interesting,” Collins responded. “Does it have the furin cleavage site?”

The pangolin data, it turned out, did not provide an explanation for the scientists’ central concerns about the furin cleavage site, and the viruses isolated from some pangolins were not 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2, but the data did show that coronaviruses circulating in pangolins shared other key features with the pandemic virus. This seems to have played an important role in shifting the scientists’ thinking away from the lab hypothesis.

Holmes, who had been described in an earlier email as being “60:40 lab side,” wrote, “Personally, with the pangolin virus possessing 6/6 key sites in the receptor binding domain, I am in favour of the natural evolution theory.”

 “Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”

The scientists and health officials began debating whether to publish their work and how to address the issue of a possible lab origin. On February 8, Farrar wrote to several of the scientists asking for their views on the revised summary document and seeking their advice on potential publication.

Christian Drosten, a scientist from Germany, responded. Among other things, he wrote: “Can someone help me with one question: didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it?”

“Who came up with this story in the beginning?” he added. “Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”

Holmes replied, in part: “Ever since this outbreak started there have been suggestions that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, if only because of the coincidence of where the outbreak occurred and the location of the lab. I do a lot of work in China and I can you [sic] that a lot of people there believe this and believe they are being lied to.”

A comparison of redacted and unredacted versions of a Feb. 9, 2020, email among scientists discussing the advisability of publishing a paper on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Freedom of Information Act

“As to publishing this document in a journal,” he added, “I am currently not in favor of doing so. I believe that publishing something that is open-ended could backfire at this stage.” Andersen suggested that the scientists wait and collect more evidence so they could publish some “strong conclusive statements that are based on the best data we have access to. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Though it is unclear from the documents what convinced them to do so, the scientists decided to publish the final paper the following month. On March 6, Andersen wrote to Farrar, Fauci, Collins, and others announcing that “Proximal Origin” had been accepted for publication. “Thank you for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 ‘origins’ paper,” he wrote. “We’re happy to say that the paper was just accepted by Nature Medicine and should be published shortly (not quite sure when).”

“Thanks for your note,” Fauci replied. “Nice job on the paper.”

No Definitive Data

“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published on March 17, and its findings were much more conclusive than those of the earlier summaries circulated among the scientists. The summaries had not taken a strong stand on whether the virus had emerged from a natural spillover or was the result of selection during passage in a laboratory. The final version explicitly favored a natural origin: “Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features … in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” The earlier summaries had also included a direct reference in the text to labs in Wuhan: “Basic research involving passage of bat SARS-like [coronaviruses] in cell culture and/or animal models have been ongoing in BSL-2 for many years across the world, including in Wuhan.” The reference to Wuhan was cut from this sentence in the final paper, among other changes.

Holmes would later describe the evolution of the paper as the scientific process at work: “I’ve absolutely no problem with people knowing that my views on this issue have evolved as more data have appeared. That’s science,” he wrote in a document obtained via FOIA request. “Indeed, I’ve told this to many people: the way see [sic] it is that we set-up an hypothesis and then tested it. As far I [sic] can tell we are only ‘guilty’ of following the proper scientific method.”

Scientists interviewed for this story had varied interpretations of what the unredacted documents show. Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral research associate and evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, called them a “valuable addition to the body of knowledge surrounding these discussions.”

“In these e-mails we can see science in action—while initially alarmed by certain genomic features, the authors of The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 consult with accomplished experts in coronavirus biology, which substantially improves their analysis of the viral genome,” he wrote.

“That said these e-mails also clearly reveal just a fraction of the work that would have gone into producing ‘Proximal Origin,’” he added, noting that many of the conversations that informed the paper are likely not captured in the recent FOIA release.

“I think they did what was reasonable given the information they had at the time and given the pace they were moving at here,” said Michael Imperiale, a virologist at the University of Michigan. “This is the way the scientific process works — we make conclusions based on what we know and modify as we learn more.”

Others, however, have a less sanguine view about what these unredacted emails contain. Sergei Pond is a computational virologist at Temple University who is “agnostic” on the question of the virus’s origin. He described reading this new batch of emails as a “revelatory experience” and likened it to watching the TV show “Breaking Bad,” in which the main character, through a series of small, understandable decisions, ends up in a bad place. He sees in the emails a desire to downplay the deep concern about the possibility of a lab origin.

“It started out being a fairly careful discussion, with anomalies being aired out and people saying multiple times that there is simply not enough data to resolve this,” he said in a recent interview. “But at some point, I think there was such strong pressure that they went from ‘Let’s just wait to get more data’ to ‘Let’s publish something that has a very strong opinion favoring one explanation over another without acquiring any new data.’”

“The big question,” he said, “is why did this happen?”

Pond added that there was no data then, and there is no data now, that would definitively indicate that a lab origin like the one contemplated in “Proximal Origin” is not at least plausible.

David Relman, a professor of microbiology, immunology, and medicine at Stanford University, also has critical words for the paper, arguing that it rests on “flawed assumptions and opinion” and doesn’t fairly contend with the possibility of a lab-associated origin, which he believes is as plausible as a natural origin.

“When I first saw it in March 2020, the paper read to me as a conclusion in search of an argument,” he said. “Among its many problems, it failed to consider in a serious fashion the possibility of an unwitting and unrecognized accidental leak during aggressive efforts to grow coronaviruses from bat and other field samples. It also assumed that researchers in Wuhan have told the world about every virus and every sequence that was in their laboratories in 2019. But these [unredacted emails] actually provide evidence that the authors considered a few additional lab-associated scenarios, early in their discussions. But then they rushed to judgment, and the lab scenarios fell out of favor.”

“It appears as if a combination of a scant amount of data and an unspoken bias against the [lab origin] scenario diminished the idea in their minds,” he added.

Several academic scientists who were asked to comment for this article expressed their gratitude that these documents are now public but declined to speak on the record given the rancor surrounding this subject. Others, including all five authors of “Proximal Origin” as well as Fouchier and Farzan, declined to comment, did not respond to queries, or were otherwise unavailable. The NIH did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Wellcome Trust declined to make Farrar available. In December, WHO announced that Farrar would be its new chief scientist. Also that month, Republican members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent letters to Andersen, Garry, Fauci, Collins, and others seeking documents and testimony concerning the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

As the search for that origin continues, both in Congress and in the scientific community, it is unclear whether dispositive evidence to support either the lab or natural origin theory will ever emerge. Georgetown’s Lawrence Gostin, for his part, is not optimistic, noting that the Chinese government has foreclosed the possibility of a rigorous, transparent, and independent investigation into the emergence of the virus in Wuhan.

“I think it is extraordinarily sad for humankind that we probably will never know for sure,” he said. “But I lay much of that in the hands of China.”

The post Unredacted NIH Emails Show Efforts to Rule Out Lab Origin of Covid appeared first on The Intercept.

Every year, the expectations for what all of this can accomplish dip lower and lower, while cynicism about the traffic jam of private jets headed to the summit reaches new heights.

So far, however, this year’s summit, known as COP27, has been anything but routine. That is less because of its content than its location. It is taking place under the most repressive regime in the history of the modern Egyptian state, headed by Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who seized power in a military coup in 2013 and has held on to it through sham elections ever since. Sisi’s regime is known for its barbarity under the best of circumstances but, like every dictatorship, Egypt’s rulers are on particularly high alert because of the Iranian uprising — fearing that, like the Arab Spring in 2011 which leapt across borders toppling regimes, this moment of spiraling living costs could prove equally volatile.

All of this has created a highly unusual and tense context for the summit, with several extraordinary elements.

The most prominent figure at the summit is not even there.

For one thing, the most prominent figure at the summit is not even there: Alaa Abd El Fattah, Egypt’s highest-profile political prisoner, whose first name became synonymous with the 2011 pro-democracy revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that ended the three-decade rule of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Alaa’s words have been quoted in several speeches from the floor; his sister Sanaa Seif attended the summit’s first week and was surrounded by a press gaggle everywhere she went; and young delegates have been seen wearing #FreeAlaa T-shirts. On November 10, many delegates wore white, the color worn by Egypt’s prison inmates, and raised banners that said, “No climate justice without human rights. We have not yet been defeated” — an invocation of Alaa Abd El Fattah’s book, published earlier this year, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.” This has prompted the regime to respond with highly orchestrated, heavy-handed counter-demonstrations of its own.

The intense focus on Alaa’s case is taking place because the writer and technologist, behind bars for most of the past decade, chose to intensify his hunger strike to include a water strike, timed with the first day of the summit. In doing so, he was attempting to force the regime to choose between two options: free him and let him emigrate to the U.K. (he is a dual citizen), or let him die in the middle of the highest profile international event to take place in Egypt under Sisi’s rule. (It is worth recalling that the uprising that is still raging in Iran was sparked by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.)

Sisi appears to have tried a third option: On November 10, Alaa’s sister Mona Seif posted on Twitter that “we have just been informed by the prison officers ‘Medical intervention was taken with @alaa with the knowledge of judicial entities.’” This was interpreted to mean some kind of forced feeding, which is (yet another) violation of his rights, as Human Rights Watch has said. On Monday, November 14, Alaa’s mother finally received, outside the prison gates, a handwritten note from Alaa confirming that he is alive, has received medical attention, and has just started drinking water. The letter was dated two days earlier.

All the while, Egypt’s public prosecutor’s office has sent out a barrage of contradictory claims, absurdly boasting of Alaa’s good health, and stating that his family has been permitted to visit him as recently as November 7. In fact, since he intensified his hunger strike, Egyptian authorities have steadily refused to allow anyone to see Alaa and assess the state of his health for themselves: not his family, not his lawyer, not the British consulate. The regime continues to ignore and deny his status and rights as a British national.

The cloud of deflection and misinformation surrounding Alaa’s status points to the other way that this climate summit is different from the dozens that have come before: It is nearly impossible to get reliable information about the host country, about what is happening in the jails, in the streets, or with its many polluting extraction projects.

That’s because Egypt is a police state with an estimated 60,000 political prisoners behind bars and a media system tightly controlled by the regime. Because Egyptian civil society faces such extreme repression, most of the regime’s critics are not able to get into Sharm el-Sheikh, and many Egyptians who are there have been vetted by the regime. The critics who do manage to speak out are in extreme danger, and rights groups warn of a severe crackdown once the international attention recedes.

The Sisi regime is watching closely: The official COP27 mobile app, downloaded on thousands of phones, is being described by security experts as a “cyber weapon” with extraordinary surveillance capabilities; Sharm el-Sheikh’s 800 taxis were outfitted with video and audio surveillance, and people’s phones in major cities have been searched at random. There have been so many incidents of Egyptian security spying on delegates inside the summit, including by filming and photographing their electronic devices, that the German government reportedly lodged an official complaint. “We expect all participants in the U.N. climate conference to be able to work and negotiate under safe conditions,” Germany’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “This is not just true for the German but for all delegations, as well as representatives of civil society and the media.”

These tight controls mean that the summit is effectively taking place inside an informational bubble, one that the Sisi regime, with help from public relations company Hill+Knowlton, is attempting to paint green.

In an attempt to pierce that bubble, we teamed up a group of trusted journalists, lawyers, activists and scholars on the ground in Egypt to try to gather information that the regime has been trying to suppress.

Using personal and professional networks, this team has been collecting many testimonies and stories, about everything from Egypt’s new fossil fuel projects to arrests and surveillance of locals, to the continued human rights crisis in the regime’s jails. Most sources needed to be anonymous to avoid arrest, but we have been able to check claims for accuracy. Here is some of what we have found so far.

National Crackdowns

Since assuming office, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his regime have severely limited space for dissent. State repression increases markedly every year around the anniversary of the 2011 January 25 Revolution, but we have received reports that ahead of and during COP27, crackdowns have intensified across the country and in some areas amount to a full lockdown. From random police searches in major cities to arrests and the closure of schools and transportation, Egypt’s citizens are experiencing one of the harshest crackdowns in recent memory.

The following testimonial shared with us represents one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of stops that are occurring daily in the country:

A few days ago I was heading home after sending a msg to a friend that I’ll be joining a meeting in 15 mins. I hopped on an Uber scooter, and right after that a policeman in civilian clothing stopped us, he immediately took my phone and ID card. There were 4 men of different ages being picked up from the same spot. When I asked what the problem was, he asked me if I had ever joined a protest. They then took us into a police patrol vehicle, but wouldn’t tell us where they were taking us. The car moved around the neighborhood, going to different checkpoints, and at each checkpoint a new person would join us. After this tour ended, they drove us to an ad hoc national security checkpoint in downtown in the entrance of a random residential building. They kept us there, we were around 14 men of different ages. … Not knowing why we were there or how long we would stay, we were left without any info about when we would be going home or whether they would take us to a police station. I had deactivated my Facebook account for a while now because of these police stops that happens regularly. I was worried they could see what I had shared or worse see what my FB friends are sharing and go after them. After three and a half hours they called my name, gave me my phone and ID card back but told me that I should delete my posts on my Facebook. After I arrived home safely, I found that they managed to reactivate my Facebook account.

These kinds of accounts are difficult if not impossible to report on because, after a decade of repression, journalists fear reprisal. An Egyptian journalist shared with us:

I’ve been hearing imaginary doorbell ringing at the dead of night, thinking policemen in uniformed clothing are outside my apartment. I’ve considered leaving Cairo for the week even because of the reports of random and targeted arrests of people just like me, all because of the security frenzy brought by COP27 and an anonymous call for protests at the end of the week that I’m not even planning to join.

These fears are well-founded. In the past two weeks a number of Egyptian journalists have been detained, including Manal Agrama, Mohamed Mostafa Moussa, Amr Shnin, Mahmoud Saad Diab, and Ahmed Fayez. Fayez was reportedly detained for reporting in Arabic that Alaa had been subjected to a forced medical intervention.

We have also received reports from activists who fear continued crackdowns after international attention leaves Egypt:

I’m afraid that after the climate conference they will come for the rest of us. A few [activists] haven’t left Egypt and aren’t imprisoned, it won’t be about how active we are now or if we are of any importance, it’s simply that we are the only ones left to detain.

Even activists who have managed to leave are fearful of surveillance and repression abroad. An Egyptian living in Berlin shared:

In order for us Egyptians to protest in Berlin, we have to use tricks to hide our identity, fearing the Egyptian Embassy in Berlin which follows activists and reports them. We fear being arrested among arriving back to Egypt. Sometimes it feels like in order to participate in any political action concerning Egypt we just say goodbye to going back home. We left Egypt but the fear continues.

At COP27, international and domestic advocates have repeatedly raised the point that there can be no climate justice without an open civic space and respect for basic human rights. Since the beginning of the summit, we have heard from prisoner’s rights advocacy organizations about the atrocities of Egypt’s carceral institutions. Two new prisons, the Badr Prison Complex and Wadi Al-Natroun, have been touted by the regime as symbols of Egypt’s humane system, but the few reports that have made it out of these prisons tell the opposite story.

The #TillTheLastPrisoner campaign documented “at least 47 deaths in detention since the beginning of the year. These deaths speak to deteriorating conditions in places of detention despite calls for reform and progress.” One of these deaths occurred a few days before the COP27 opening. According to the campaign, “Alaa AlSalmi (47 years) died in detention in Badr 3 prison today. AlSalmi was serving a life sentence in case 610/2014 upon his arrest in 2014.” He was the second prisoner to die in less than a month inside the new Badr 3 prison facility. It is reported that he died after an extended hunger strike protesting the lack of basic rights including family visitation.

Environmental Coverups

Before international delegates arrived to Sharm el-Sheikh, Human Rights Watch warned that “the most sensitive environmental issues are those that point out the government’s failure to protect people’s rights against damage caused by corporate interests, including issues relating to water security, industrial pollution, and environmental harm from real estate, tourism development, and agribusiness.” These hot-button issues for the state have not been widely discussed at COP27. However, environmental and human rights researchers have shared cases with us where Egypt’s military and security forces have displaced communities and wreaked environmental havoc.

In Sinai, where COP27 is being held, security forces have for the past decade destroyed the communities and environments. According to Mohannad Sabry, a journalist, researcher, and author of “Sinai: Egypt’s Linchpin, Gaza’s Lifeline, and Israel’s Nightmare”:

Egypt’s decade long war on terror in North Sinai has bulldozed tens of thousands of green acres, hundreds of thousands of productive trees, comprising a local agricultural wealth built over decades by the local Bedouin community. This destruction of the agricultural wealth continues to this day across the region of North Sinai. Egypt’s war on terror has displaced close to 120,000 people from their villages and towns in North Sinai, the entire historic city of Rafah has been demolished, and as COP27 takes place in Sharm El-Sheikh, the military authorities evacuated dozens of families who returned to their destroyed homes in the villages of North Sinai in an attempt to rebuild their lives.

Underlining the intersections of militarism and climate justice, they add, “The impact of Egypt’s last decade of war on terror in North Sinai on women and children remains a blacked out catastrophe. The lives, well-being and education of thousands of children, and the health and safety of thousands of women, is currently in ruin after mass waves of forced evacuation and displacement without any containment plans by the state authorities. The environmental impact of a decade of military operations across the region, and the destruction of thousands of acres of green spaces, will extend for years if not decades to come, unless immediate plans of damage assessment and containment are launched.”

On Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, a researcher reports:

Since El-Sisi came to power he took special interest in the lakes in Northern Egypt. He considered the lakes a source of revenue and a resource of various elements and fish farming for export. Numerous projects were undertaken: deepening and trenching, enormous fish farming facilities. These projects were executed without any consideration of environmental servicing of the lakes. The Egyptian military’s full control over fishing and fisheries in North Sinai’s lakes and Mediterranean shores does not only strip the local communities of pursuing a source of living, but also hinders all kinds of environmental research, study, work and preservation efforts. This crisis has been evolving for over a decade and will continue into the future, with multiplying impacts extending into the future.

These testimonials provide a brief snapshot of the realities being covered up in a country where research and journalism are heavily criminalized, and where even posting about these topics can land a person in prison under the same charges as Alaa: spreading false news.

The clearest messages to emerge from this extraordinary summit is that political rights and climate progress are inextricably linked.

At the end of its first week, and with one more to go, the clearest messages to emerge from this extraordinary summit is that political rights and climate progress are inextricably linked. A future in which safety from the worst climate impacts is possible requires groups and individuals who are free enough to imagine that future and fight for it. Those who are most impacted must be empowered to lead the way. That can only happen if basic freedoms — to speak, to dissent, to protest, to strike — are defended, in Egypt and around the world.

Working with the Egypt Unsilenced Collective, we will continue to share these reports for the duration of COP27. You can follow the latest on Twitter at @NaomiAKlein.

The post The Hunger Striker vs. The Dictator appeared first on The Intercept.

A visionary technologist and searching intellectual, Abd El Fattah’s first name — along with the hashtag #FreeAlaa — have become synonymous with the 2011 pro-democracy revolution that turned Cairo’s Tahrir Square into a surging sea of young people that ended the three-decade rule of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak. Behind bars almost continuously for the past decade, Alaa is able to send and receive letters once a week. Earlier this year, a collection of his poetic and prophetic prison writings was published as the widely celebrated book, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.”

Alaa’s family and friends live for those weekly letters. Especially since April 2, when he started a hunger strike, ingesting only water and salt at first, and then just 100 calories a day (the body needs closer to 2,000). Alaa’s strike is a protest against his outrageous imprisonment for the crime of “spreading false news” — ostensibly because he shared a Facebook post about the torture of another prisoner. Everyone knows, however, that he is imprisoned to send a message to any future young revolutionaries who get democratic dreams in their heads. With his strike, Alaa is attempting to pressure his jailers to grant important concessions, including access to the British consulate. Alaa’s mother was born in England, so he was able to get British citizenship at the end of last year. His jailers have so far refused, and so Alaa continues to waste away. “He has become a skeleton with a lucid mind,” his sister Mona Seif said recently.

The longer the hunger strike wears on, the more precious those weekly letters become. For his family, they are nothing less than proof of life. Yet on the week he wrote about climate breakdown, the letter never made it to Alaa’s mother, a human rights defender and intellectual in her own right, Laila Soueif. Perhaps, he speculated in a subsequent correspondence to her, his jailer had “spilled his coffee over the letter.” More likely, it was deemed to touch on forbidden “high politics” — even though Alaa says he was careful not to so much as mention the Egyptian government, or even “the upcoming conference.”

That last bit is important. It’s a reference to the fact that in less than one month, beginning on November 6, Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh will play host to this year’s United Nations climate summit, known as COP27, just as other cities like Glasgow, Paris, and Durban have done in the past. Tens of thousands of delegates — world leaders, ministers, envoys, appointed bureaucrats, as well as climate activists, NGO observers, and journalists — will descend on the beach resort city, their chests bedecked in lanyards and color-coded badges.

Which is why that lost letter is significant. There is something unbearably moving about the thought of Alaa — despite the decade of indignities he and his family have suffered — sitting in his cell thinking about our warming world. There he is, slowly starving, yet still worrying about floods in Pakistan and extremism in India and crashing currency in the U.K. and Lula’s presidential candidacy in Brazil, all of which get a mention in his recent letters, shared with me by his family.

There is also, frankly, something shaming about it, something that might give pause to everyone headed to Sharm el-Sheikh. Because while Alaa thinks about the world, it’s not at all clear that the world that is about to arrive in Egypt for the climate summit is thinking much about Alaa. Or about the estimated 60,000 other political prisoners behind bars in Egypt where barbaric forms of torture reportedly take place on an “assembly line.” Or about the Egyptian human rights and environmental activists, as well as critical journalists and academics, who have been harassed, spied on, and barred from travel as part of what Human Rights Watch calls Egypt’s “general atmosphere of fear” and “relentless crackdown on civil society.”

The Egyptian regime is eager to celebrate its official climate “youth leaders,” holding them up as symbols of hope in the battle against warming (many double-talking governments like to use young people as climate props). But it’s hard not to think of the courageous youth leaders of the Arab Spring, many of them now prematurely aged by over a decade of state violence and harassment, systems that are lavishly bankrolled by military aid from Western powers, particularly the U.S. It’s almost as if those activists have just been substituted out for newer, less troublesome models.

“I’m the ghost of spring past,” Alaa wrote about himself in 2019.

That ghost will haunt the coming summit, sending a chill through its every high-minded word. The silent question it poses is stark: If international solidarity is too weak to save Alaa — an iconic symbol of a generation’s liberatory dreams — what hope do we have of saving a habitable home?

At What Point Do We Say “Enough”?

Mohammed Rafi Arefin, assistant professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, who has researched urban environmental politics in Egypt, points out that “every United Nations climate summit presents a complex calculus of costs and benefits.” On the negative side, there is the carbon spewed into the atmosphere as delegates travel there; the price of two weeks of hotels (steep for grassroots organizations); as well as the public relations bonanza enjoyed by the host government, which invariably positions itself as an eco-champion, never mind evidence to the contrary. We saw this when coal-addled Poland played host in 2018, and we saw it when France did the same in 2015, despite TotalEnergies’ oil rigs around the world.

Those are the negatives of the annual climate summit tradition. On the positive side of the ledger, there is the fact that for two weeks in November every year, the climate crisis makes global news, often providing media platforms for powerful voices on the front lines of climate disruption, from the Brazilian Amazon to Tuvalu. Another plus is the international networking and solidarity that takes place when local organizers in the host country stage counter-summits and “toxic tours” to reveal the reality behind their government’s green posturing. And of course there are the deals that get negotiated and funds that are pledged to the poorest and worst impacted. But these are nonbinding, and as Greta Thunberg so memorably put it, much of what has been pledged and announced has amounted to little more than “Blah, blah, blah.”

With the upcoming climate summit in Egypt, Arefin tells me, “The usual calculus has changed. The balance has tipped.” There are the perennial negatives (the carbon, the cost). But in addition, the host government — who will get the chance to preen green before the world — is not your standard double-talking liberal democracy. “It is,” he says, “the most repressive regime in the history of the modern Egyptian state.” Led by Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who seized power in a military coup in 2013 (and has held on to it through sham elections ever since), the regime is, according to human rights organizations, one of the most brutal and repressive in the world.

Of course, you’d never know it from the way Egypt is marketing itself ahead of the summit. A promotional video on the COP27 official website welcomes delegates to the “green city” of Sharm el-Sheik and shows young actors — including men with scruffy beards and necklaces clearly meant to look like environmental activists — enjoying nonplastic straws and biodegradable takeout containers as they take selfies on the beach, enjoy outdoor showers, learn how to scuba dive, and drive electric vehicles to the desert to ride camels.

This summit is going well beyond greenwashing a polluting state; it’s greenwashing a police state.

Watching the video, it struck me that Sisi has decided to use the summit to stage a new kind of reality show, one in which actors “play” activists who look remarkably like the actual activists who are suffering under torture in his rapidly expanding archipelago of prisons. So add that to the negative side of the ledger: This summit is going well beyond greenwashing a polluting state; it’s greenwashing a police state. And with fascism on the march from Italy to Brazil, that is no small matter.

Another factor that sits firmly on the negative side of the ledger: Unlike previous climate summits held in, say, South Africa or Scotland or Denmark or Japan, the Egyptian communities and organizations most impacted by environmental pollution and rising temperatures will be nowhere to be found in Sharm el-Sheikh. There will be no toxic tours, or lively counter-summits, where locals get to school international delegates about the truth behind their government’s PR facade. That’s because organizing events like this would land Egyptians in prison for spreading “false news” or for violating the protest ban — that is, if they aren’t already there.

International delegates can’t even read up much on current pollution and environmental despoliation in Egypt ahead of the summit in academic or NGO reports because of a draconian 2019 law that requires researchers to get government permission before releasing information considered “political.” (It’s not just prisoners who are gagged: The whole country is, and hundreds of websites are blocked, including the indispensable and perennially harassed Mada Masr.) Human Rights Watch reports that groups have been forced to rein in and scale back their research under these new constraints, and “one prominent Egyptian environmental group disbanded its research unit because it became impossible to work in the field.” Tellingly, not a single one of the environmentalists who spoke to Human Rights Watch about the censorship and repression was willing to use their real name because reprisals are so severe.

Arefin, who conducted extensive research on waste and flooding in Egyptian cities before this latest round of censorious laws, told me that he and other critical academics and journalists “are no longer able to do that work. There is a blockage of basic critical knowledge production. Egypt’s environmental harms now happen in the dark.” And those who break the rules and try to turn on the lights end up in dark cells — or worse.

Alaa’s sister Mona Seif, who has spent years lobbying for her brother’s release and for the release of other political prisoners, wrote recently on Twitter, “The reality most of those participating in #Cop27 are choosing to ignore, is … in countries like #Egypt your true allies, the ones who actually give a damn about the planet’s future are those languishing in prisons.”

So add that to the negative side as well: Unlike every other climate summit in recent memory, this one will have no authentic local partners. There will be some Egyptians at the summit claiming to represent “civil society.” And some of them do. The trouble is, however well-intentioned, they too are bit players in Sisi’s beachside green reality show; in a departure of usual U.N. rules, almost all have been vetted and approved by the government. That same Human Rights Watch report, published last month, explains that these groups have been invited to speak only on “welcome” topics.

What, for the regime, is welcome? “Trash collection, recycling, renewable energy, food security, and climate finance” — especially if that climate finance will line the pockets of Sisi’s regime, perhaps allowing it to put some solar panels on the 27 new prisons it has built since seizing power.

What topics are unwelcome? “The most sensitive environmental issues are those that point out the government’s failure to protect people’s rights against damage caused by corporate interests, including issues relating to water security, industrial pollution, and environmental harm from real estate, tourism development, and agribusiness,” according to the Human Rights Watch report. Also unwelcome: “the environmental impact of Egypt’s vast and opaque military business activity, such as destructive forms of quarrying, water bottling plants, and some cement factories are particularly sensitive, as are ‘national’ infrastructure projects such as a new administrative capital, many of which are associated with the president’s office or the military.” And definitely don’t talk about Coca-Cola’s plastic pollution and excessive water use — because Coke is one of the summit’s proud official sponsors.

The bottom line? If you want to pick up litter, recycle old Coke bottles, or tout “green hydrogen,” you can probably get a badge to come to Sharm el-Sheikh representing the most civil form of “civil society.” But if you want to talk about the health and climate impacts of Egypt’s coal-powered cement plants, or the paving over of some of the last green spaces in Cairo, you are more likely to get a visit from the secret police — or from the dystopian Social Solidarity Ministry. Oh, and if, as an Egyptian, you say something scathing about COP27 itself, or question Sisi’s credibility to speak on behalf of Africa’s poor and climate-vulnerable populations given the deepening hunger and desperation of his own people, despite all that North American and European aid, well, you had better hope you are outside of the country already.

So far, hosting the summit has proved nothing short of a bonanza for Sisi, a man Donald Trump reportedly referred to as “my favorite dictator.” There is the boon to coastal tourism, which crashed in recent years, and the regime is clearly hoping its videos of outdoor showers and camel rides will inspire more. But that’s just the beginning of the green gold rush. Late last month, British International Investment, which is backed by the U.K. government, giddily announced that it was “investing $100 million to support local start-ups” in Egypt. It is also the majority owner in Globeleq, which ahead of COP27 has announced a huge, $11 billion deal to build out green hydrogen production in Egypt. At the same time, the U.K.’s Development Finance Institution stressed its “commitment to strengthen its partnership with Egypt and increase climate finance to support the country’s green growth.”

This is the same government that appears to have barely lifted a finger to secure the release of Alaa, despite his British citizenship and his hunger strike. Unfortunately for him, Alaa’s fate was for months in the hands of one Liz Truss, who before becoming Britain’s spectacularly callous and inept prime minister, was its spectacularly callous and inept foreign secretary. She could have used some of those billions in investment and development aid to leverage the release of her fellow citizen but clearly had other concerns.

Germany’s moral failures are equally dismal. When Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock became the country’s first female foreign minister last December, she announced a new “values-based foreign policy” — one that would prioritize human rights and climate concerns. Germany is one of Egypt’s major donors and trading partners, so, like the U.K., it certainly has a card to play. But instead of pressure on human rights, Baerbock has provided Sisi with priceless propaganda opportunities, including co-hosting the “Petersberg Climate Dialogue” with him, where the ruthless dictator was able to rebrand himself a green leader.

And now that Germany’s reliance on Russian gas has both imploded and exploded, Egypt is eagerly positioning itself to provide replacement gas and hydrogen. Meanwhile, German giant Siemens Mobility has announced a “historic” multibillion-dollar contract to build electrified high-speed trains across Egypt.

The international injections of green cash are flowing just in time for Sisi’s troubled regime. Thanks to the tsunami of global crises (inflation, pandemic, food shortages, increased fuel prices, drought, debt) on top and its systemic mismanagement and corruption, Egypt is on the knife-edge of defaulting on its foreign debt — a volatile situation that could well destabilize Sisi’s iron rule, much as the last financial crisis created the conditions that unseated Mubarak. In this context, the climate summit is not merely a PR opportunity; it is also a green lifeline.

Though reluctant to give up on the process, most serious climate activists readily concede that these summits produce little by way of science-based climate action. Year after year since they began, emissions keep going up. What, then, is the point of supporting this year’s summit when the one thing it is set to absolutely accomplish is the further entrenchment and enrichment of a regime that, by any ethical standard, deserves pariah status?

As Arefin asks, “At what point do we say ‘enough’?”

Are Egyptians the Sacrifice Zone for Climate “Progress”?

For months, Egyptians in exile in Europe and the United States have been pleading with large green NGOs to put the carnage in their country’s prisons onto the agenda of the negotiations leading up to the summit. Yet it was never prioritized.

They were told that this is “Africa’s COP” (COP is U.N.-acronym-speak for “Conference of the Parties” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). That despite all the prior failures, this COP, the 27th so far, would finally get serious about “implementation” and “loss and damage” — more U.N.-speak for the hope that the wealthy, high-polluting countries will finally pay up what they owe to poor nations that, like Pakistan, have contributed next to nothing by way of carbon emissions yet are bearing the bulk of the soaring costs.

The clear implication has been that the summit is too serious and too important to be sidetracked by the supposedly small matter of the host country’s shocking human rights record. The terrorized lives, brutalized bodies and silenced truths have been treated, for the most part, as embarrassing collateral damage, an unfortunate price that needs paying in order to make climate progress.

The clear implication has been that the summit is too serious and too important to be sidetracked by the supposedly small matter of the host country’s shocking human rights record.

But is COP27 really going to champion climate justice? Is it going to bring green energy and clean transit and food sovereignty to the poor? Will the summit truly confront climate debt and reparations, as many are claiming? If only. The Egyptian people, like people throughout Africa, are historically low emitters who are nonetheless severely impacted by warming. Justice therefore demands that they should receive climate reparations from richer high emitters. The problem is that if those climate debts are paid without confronting the international financial and military networks that prop up brutal rulers like Sisi, the money will never reach the people. Instead it will go to secure more weapons, build more prisons, and finance more industrial boondoggles that displace and further immiserate those Egyptians most in need.

The case for climate reparations is obvious, writes Egyptian journalist, filmmaker, and novelist Omar Robert Hamilton, in a magisterial essay. “The harder question is how to design a system of reparations that does not entrench authoritarian state powers? This should be at the core of COP negotiations between Southern and Northern countries — only the ones doing the negotiating for the South tend to be authoritarian state powers whose short-term interests are even more graspingly fragile than those of oil executives.”

In short, despite the talk in climate circles of this being the “implementation” COP, the one focused on #JustandAmbitious policies, Egypt’s summit will likely achieve as little by way of real climate action as all the others before. But that does not mean it won’t achieve anything. Because when it comes to propping up a true torture regime, showering it with cash and image-cleansing photo ops, COP27 is already a lavish gift to a cop state.

The sacrifice zone mentality at the heart of the climate crisis is the idea that some places and some people can be unseen, discounted, and written off.

Alaa Abd El Fattah has long been a symbol of Egypt’s violently extinguished revolution. But as the summit approaches, he is becoming symbolic of something else too: the sacrifice zone mentality at the heart of the climate crisis. This is the idea that some places and some people can be unseen, discounted, and written off — all in the name of “progress” for supposedly more important goals. We’ve seen the mentality at work when front-line communities are poisoned to extract and refine fossil fuels. We’ve seen it when those same communities are sacrificed again in the name of getting a climate bill passed that does not protect them. And now we are seeing it in the context of an international climate summit, with the rights of the people living in the host country sacrificed and unseen in the name of the mirage of “real progress” in the negotiations.

If last year’s summit in Glasgow was about “blah, blah, blah,” this one’s meaning, even before it starts, is distinctly more ominous. This summit is about blood, blood, blood. The blood of the roughly 1,000 protesters massacred by Egyptian forces to secure power for its current ruler. The blood of those who continue to be assassinated. The blood of those beaten in the streets and tortured in prisons, frequently to death. The blood of people like Alaa.

There may still be time to change that sinister script, for the summit to become a searchlight that illuminates the many connections between surging authoritarianism and climate chaos around the world. Like the way fascist leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni stoke fear of refugees, including those fleeing climate breakdown, to fuel their rise, and how the European Union showers brutal leaders like Sisi with cash so that he continues to prevent Africans from reaching their shores. There is still time to use the extreme conditions under which the summit will take place to make the case that climate justice — whether inside countries or between them — is impossible without political freedoms. There is still power and leverage to be organized and exercised.

“Unlike me, you have not yet been defeated.” Alaa wrote those words in 2017. He had been invited to deliver a speech to RightsCon, the annual confab about human rights in the digital age sponsored by all the big tech companies. The conference was taking place in the United States, but because Alaa was behind bars in the notorious Tora Prison (it had been four years at that point), he sent a letter instead. It’s a brilliant text, about the imperative to protect the internet as a space of creativity, experimentation, and freedom. And it is also a challenge to those who are not (yet) behind bars, who have control over far more than their daily intake of calories, and who have the freedom to do things like travel to conferences to talk about justice and democracy and human rights. In the chasm between that freedom and Alaa’s captivity lies responsibility. A responsibility not just to be free but also to act free, to use freedom to its full transformational potential. Before it’s too late.

As tens of thousands of relatively free COP27 delegates prepare to fly to Sharm el-Sheikh, checking the average November temperatures (highs of 28 degrees Celsius, 82 degrees Fahrenheit), packing appropriately (light shirts, sandals, a bathing suit — because you never know), Alaa’s words about the responsibilities that come with being undefeated take on a burning new urgency. Given the guarantee that any Egyptians attending the summit cannot act with any freedom, how will the foreigners who are free to attend deploy their freedom? Their state of being not yet defeated?

How will the foreigners who are free to attend deploy their freedom?

Will they behave as if Egypt is merely a backdrop, not an actual country where people just like them have fought and died for the same freedoms they have, and against the same economic interests that are destabilizing our planetary and political climates? Or will they find ways to bring some of the gruesome truths of Egypt’s prisons into the green glitz of the conference center? Will they risk arrest, knowing that Egyptian security forces will treat them with kid gloves, not wanting their brutality-as-usual to tarnish the reality show? Will they search out the few remaining civil society organizations in Cairo — such as those who came together under copcivicspace.net — and see how they can help?

Alaa would be the first to say that what’s needed is neither pity nor charity. Rather, as a committed internationalist who stood in solidarity with many struggles, from Chiapas to Palestine, he called for comrades in a battle that has fronts in every nation. “We reach out to you,” he wrote in that RightsCon letter from prison, “not in search of powerful allies but because we confront the same global problems, and share universal values, and with a firm belief in the power of solidarity.”

Anti-democratic and fascistic forces are surging around the world. In country after country, freedoms are suddenly precarious or slipping away. And all of this is connected. Political tides move in waves across borders, for better and for worse — which is precisely why international solidarity can never be sacrificed in the name of expediency for some greater goal of “progress.” Egypt’s revolution was inspired by Tunisia’s, and in turn, “the spirit of Tahrir” spread around the world. It helped inspire other youth-led movements in Europe and North America, including Occupy Wall Street, which in turn helped birth new anti-capitalist and eco-socialist politics. In fact, you can draw a pretty straight line from Tahrir to Occupy, to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election to Congress and her championing of the Green New Deal.

But the other side inspires its allies too. As Alaa told RightsCon after Donald Trump was elected, people in the United States need to “fix your own democracy” because “a setback for human rights in a place where democracy has deep roots is certain to be used as an excuse for even worse violations in societies where rights are more fragile.”

It Takes Freedom to Make Them Do It

The slogan of the groups in Egypt attempting to strengthen these connections is “No climate justice without open civic space.” Another way of saying the same thing is: Where human rights are under attack, so too is the natural world. After all, the communities and organizations facing the most severe state repression and violence around the world — whether they live in the Philippines or Canada or Brazil or the United States — are overwhelmingly made up of Indigenous peoples trying to protect their territories from polluting extractive projects, many of which are also driving the climate crisis. Defending human rights, wherever we live, is therefore inextricable from defending a livable planet.

Moreover, the extent to which some governments are finally introducing meaningful climate legislation is also bound up with the political freedoms that are not yet eroded. The U.S. Senate and the Biden administration have been dragged kicking and screaming into passing the Inflation Reduction Act — flawed as it is — and into sinking (at least for now), Sen. Joe Manchin’s poisonous side deal on oil and gas permitting. This didn’t happen because they suddenly saw the climate light. It happened as a direct result of public pressure, investigative journalism, civil disobedience, sit-ins in legislative offices, lawsuits, and every other tool available in the nonviolent arsenal. And, ultimately, lawmakers got it together to pass the act because they feared what would happen when they faced voters in November if they came to them empty-handed. If U.S. politicians did not have to fear the public, because the public had a greater fear of them, none of this would have happened at all.

One thing is certain: We will not win the kind of change that the climate crisis demands without the freedom to demonstrate, sit in, shame political leaders, and tell the truth in public. If demonstrations are banned and inconvenient facts are criminalized as “false news,” as they systematically are in Sisi’s Egypt, then it’s game over. All of this should be obvious to everyone who is part of the climate movement, whatever age they are and whatever part of the movement they belong to. Without the strikes, the protests, the sit-ins, and the investigative research, we would be in far worse shape than we are. And any one of those activities are enough to land an Egyptian activist or journalist in a dark cell next to Alaa’s.

When news came that the next U.N. climate summit would be taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egyptian activists, inside the country and in exile, could have called on the climate movement to boycott. They chose not to, for a variety of reasons. But they did ask for solidarity. The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, for instance, called on the international community to use the summit “to shed more light on the crimes being committed in Egypt and urge the Egyptian authorities to change course.” There were high hopes that North American and European activists would push their governments to make their attendance and participation conditional on Egypt meeting basic human rights requirements. Including, at minimum, a broad amnesty for prisoners of conscience in jail for “crimes” like organizing a demo, or posting an unflattering statement about the regime, or receiving a foreign grant.

That kind of solidarity could have happened. Some of it could still happen. But, so far, with less than a month before the summit starts, the response from the global climate movement has been muted. Many groups have added their names to petitions; a handful of articles about on the human rights situation during the summit have appeared (including a very strong one about Alaa by Bill McKibben in the New Yorker); and climate activists in Germany, many of them Egyptian exiles, have held small protests with signs saying “No Cop27 Until Alaa is Free” and “No Greenwashing Egypt’s Prisons.” But we have seen nothing like the kind of the international pressure that would worry a regime as brazen as the one currently ruling Egypt.

When the ethics of allowing Sisi to host the global climate summit have come up, concern has mainly focused on its impact on international visitors. Will they be free to wave signs and stage protests outside the official conference venue, without being treated as Egyptians are? Will LGBTQ+ activists be safe? These are fair concerns. But it’s a bit like having an international feminist conference in Saudi Arabia and then complaining that visiting women aren’t free to wear shorts or rent cars — with barely a mention of the women who live under far worse conditions year-round. That, obviously, would be a profound failure of solidarity. But so is the fact that many delegates to the summit became irate when the hotels in Sharm el-Sheikh refused to honor cheaper hotel bookings and arbitrarily jacked up prices — but have so far expressed none of that same indignation over locked-up political prisoners.

Or consider that all of the major U.S. and European foundations will be in Sharm el-Sheikh, meeting with groups that they fund and others that they might consider funding — inside a country where taking any of that money to tell the truth about environmental despoliation in Egypt can cost you your life. As Human Rights Watch reports, “In 2014, President el-Sisi amended, by decree, the penal code to punish with life in prison or death sentence anyone requesting, receiving, or assisting the transfer of funds, whether from foreign sources or local organizations, with the aim of doing work that harms a ‘national interest’ or the country’s independence or undermining public security or safety.” The death sentence for getting a grant.

Nothing would serve Sisi more than to turn Sharm el-Sheik into a kind of nonprofit petting zoo, because then Egypt would look like something it most emphatically is not: a free and democratic society.

This is all a bit baffling. Why invite funders and green groups to Egypt when the regime has such obvious hostility toward the very concept of civil society? The truth — uncomfortable for all who will be in attendance — is that nothing would serve Sisi more than to turn Sharm el-Sheik into a kind of nonprofit petting zoo, where international climate activists and funders can spend two weeks shouting about north-south injustice and marching around in circles before the cameras, with a few state-approved local groups thrown in for authenticity’s sake. Why? Because then Egypt would look like something it most emphatically is not: a free and democratic society. A nice place to spend your next vacation. Or to sink some foreign investment. A good source for your natural gas. Or to entrust with a new International Monetary Fund loan.

By all accounts, the Egyptian government is frantically building a bubble in Sharm el-Sheikh where it will impersonate something that looks sort of like a democracy. The question civil society groups should be asking is not: “Will we be safe in the bubble?” It’s: “Why hold a summit in a country that needs to build a bubble in the first place?”

Once a Square, Now a Pavilion

In all the plans for next month’s Coca-Cola-sponsored climate summit, the most Orwellian detail in surely the announcement that this will be the first such gathering to have a “Children and Youth Pavilion” inside the official venue: a dedicated, 250 meter space that “will provide a convening place of talks, education, creativity, policy briefings, rest and relaxation, bringing together the voices of young people across the world.” This will allow youth to — get this — “speak truth to power.”

I have no doubt that many young people in that pavilion will deliver powerful speeches, as they did in Glasgow and at climate summits before. Young people have become true climate leaders, and they have injected desperately needed urgency and moral clarity into many official climate spaces. That same moral clarity is needed now.

One decade ago, Egyptians who were as young and younger than the climate strikers headed for COP27 didn’t have a state-sanctioned pavilion. They had a revolution. They flooded Tahrir Square demanding a different kind of country, one without the ever-present shadow of fear, one where teenagers didn’t disappear into police dungeons and reappear dead, their faces swollen and bloodied. That revolution overthrew a dictator who had ruled since before they were born. But then their dreams were crushed by political betrayals and violence. In one of his recent letters, Alaa wrote of how painful it is to share his cell with teenagers who were arrested when they were children. “They were underage when they were put in prison and are fighting to get out before they reach legal adulthood.”

One of the teens who helped take over the square in 2011 was Alaa’s extraordinary younger sister Sanaa Seif (he has two sisters, Mona and Sanaa). Just 17 at the time, Sanaa co-founded a revolutionary newspaper, Al Gornal, that published tens of thousands of copies and became a kind of voice of Tahrir. She also was an editor and camera person on the Oscar-nominated 2013 documentary film “The Square.” She has herself been imprisoned multiple times for speaking out against human rights abuses and for demanding her brother’s release. In an interview, she told me that she has a message for the young activists headed for that pavilion: “We tried. We did speak truth to power.” Now many are “spending so much of our twenties in prison. When you go, remember that you can be the voice of other young people… Please, let’s maintain that heritage. Please do actually speak truth power. It will have impact. Egyptian P.R.’s eyes are on you.”

But as the climate summit draws near, and Alaa’s hunger strike wears on, Sanaa is losing patience with the large green groups that have so far been silent. “Honestly I’m fed up with the hypocrisy of the climate movement,” she wrote on Twitter last week. “Outcries have been pouring from Egypt for months warning that this #COP27 will go far beyond greenwashing, that the ramifications on us will be horrible. Yet most are choosing to ignore the human rights situation.”

This, she pointed out, is why climate activism is often seen as an elite exercise, disconnected from people with urgent daily concerns — like getting their families members out of jail. “You’re guaranteeing that #ClimateAction remains an alien notion exclusive to the few who have the luxury to think beyond today,” she wrote. And besides, “mitigating climate change and fighting for human rights are interlinked struggles, they shouldn’t be separated. Especially since we’re dealing with a regime that is propped up by companies like BP and Eni. And really, how hard is it to raise both issues? #FreeThemAll #FreeAlaa.”

It isn’t hard — but it does take courage. With the lights flickering in so many democracies around the world, the message activists should bring to the climate summit, whether they travel to Egypt or engage from afar, is simple: Unless political freedoms are defended, there will be no meaningful climate action. Not in Egypt, nor anywhere else. These issues are intertwined, as are our fates.

The hour is late, but there is still just enough time to get this right. Human Rights Watch argues that the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, which sets the rules for these summits, should “develop human rights criteria that countries hosting future COPs must commit to meeting as part of the host agreement.” That’s too late for this summit, but it’s not too late for all of those who are concerned about climate justice to show solidarity with the revolutionaries who inspired millions around the world a decade ago when they toppled a tyrant. There might even be time to scare Sisi enough with the prospect of a green-hued PR nightmare by the Red Sea that he could decide to open the doors of some of his dungeons before all those cameras arrive. Because, as Alaa reminds us from the desperation of his cell, we have not yet been defeated.

On October 6, The Intercept hosted a live panel discussion on “Egypt’s Carceral Climate Summit” featuring many of the people quoted in this article, including: Sanaa and Mona Seif, sisters of political prisoner Alaa Abd El Fattah; celebrated Egyptian writers, journalists, and activists Omar Robert Hamilton and Sharif Abdel Kouddous; and author and founder of 350.org and Third Act Bill McKibben. The panel was co-moderated by Naomi Klein and Mohammed Rafi Arefin, assistant professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. The event was co-produced with UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice. Watch here.

The post Holding the COP27 Summit in Egypt’s Police State Creates a Moral Crisis for the Climate Movement appeared first on The Intercept.

Moments later, his body lay motionless in the middle of 71st Street, having been shot five times by Officer Dillan Halley.

In previous reporting for The Intercept, and in a collaborative project with Forensic Architecture titled “Six Durations of a Split Second,” we used video evidence to show that Augustus’s death was the result of aggressive policing rather than any criminal conduct on his part. The police stopped him because he appeared to be carrying a gun, but in a concealed carry state that alone is not a sufficient basis for an investigative stop. Augustus had committed no crime, and at no point did he remove his gun from its holster. It was actions by the police that produced the “split second” of perceived threat to which they responded with lethal force.

Now, by virtue of unedited body camera footage released in the context of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, it is possible to examine the sequence of police actions immediately after Halley killed Augustus: the moments when the official narrative of what just happened crystallizes. Viewed together with previously released footage, it deepens our understanding of how a demonstrably official false narrative of a police killing takes shape.

Narrative Construction

As officers cordoned off the crime scene with yellow caution tape, onlookers stopped on the sidewalk and sought to engage with the police. Augustus lay unattended on the ground. His gun was holstered, and his wallet with his Firearm Owners Identification card was in his hand. He had been attempting to show the card to Officer Quincy Jones when three other officers encircled him from behind. Without warning, Officer Megan Fleming grabbed his arm. Startled, Augustus reflexively bolted, stumbled into the street, at which point his hand came near his holstered gun: the “split second” that prompted Halley to shoot.

Halley fires his final shot at 5:30:43 p.m. At 5:30:53 p.m., Jones unfastens Augustus’s holster and removes his gun.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there is a great deal of police activity. At the same time, a crowd of community members — some curious, some outraged — rapidly forms. Footage from body cameras worn by various officers allows us to deconstruct the scene from multiple concurrent perspectives and thereby see more deeply into the reality of what happened.

Officer Dillan Halley [5:30:47 – 5:31:02 p.m.]

In the instant after Halley fires the fifth and final shot into Augustus’s body, the audio on his body camera activates. “Shots fired,” he shouts. “Shots fired at the police.”

When I first heard this, I was stunned by the brazenness with which Halley misrepresents what happened a moment earlier. Having now listened to it many times, it appears he doesn’t know what to say: He doesn’t know how to name what just happened. His voice dissolves into confusion: “Or police officer shoots.” And then, under his breath, a whispered “Fuck.”

Officer James Aimers [5:31:20 – 5:31:54 p.m.]

Having just arrived on the scene as the shooting occurred, James Aimers approaches Augustus laying in the middle of the street. He bends down and handcuffs the immobile Augustus. As he walks away, he takes out a bottle of hand sanitizer and vigorously cleans his hands.

Officer Dillan Halley [5:31:37 – 5:32:17 p.m.]

Megan Fleming seeks out Dillan Halley, who is on the sidewalk

“You OK? You OK?” Fleming asks, then answers for him. “Come here. You’re good, you’re good.”

“It was a gun?” Halley asks.

“Yes,” she replies.

“You get the gun?”

“Yes.”

Halley paces back and forth on the sidewalk. Fleming follows him. While talking, they are in constant, agitated motion.

“Breathe in,” she instructs him. “Through your nose.”

“Why did he have to pull a gun out on us?”

“Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. I feel like I wasn’t there for you,” Fleming says. “I was trying to grab him.”

“I had to. He was going to shoot us.”

“I know you did. He was going to shoot us. He was about to kill us.”

Halley continues to pace back and forth on the sidewalk.

“Come here.” Fleming says, trying to reel him in. “Look at me. You’re OK, you’re OK.”

“He pulled a gun on us.”

“I know he did,” she confirms. “I know he did. Look at me. You’re OK.”

What we observe here, as the officers contend with their shock and disorientation, is the birth of what will become the official narrative.

What we observe here, as the officers contend with their shock and disorientation, is the birth of what will become the official narrative. It is not initially, as it will soon become, an exercise in institutional damage control. Rather, it is born in a moment of narrative convulsion, as Halley and Fleming seek to manage the existential crisis into which their precipitous actions have plunged them. As if his next breath depends on it, Halley struggles to find the magic words to rationalize the act he has just committed, and Fleming, in a frantic call and response, validates those words.

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:31:07 – 5:33:32 p.m.]

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich is the first supervisor to appear on the scene. He arrives less than 30 seconds after the shooting and immediately encounters Halley and Fleming.

“You?” he asks Halley.

“He pulled a gun on me,” Halley replies.

“Was it only one? Just you? Who else shot?”

Fleming, breathing rapidly, interjects, “He grabbed me, and he cut me.”

A woman on the sidewalk questions Aldrich about what happened.

“He pulled a gun on a copper,” he responds impatiently. “If you pull a gun on a police officer, he’s got the right to defend himself, and he shoots back, OK?”

The woman then says something to the effect that Augustus may have had a concealed carry permit.

“Yeah,” Aldrich says in the same overbearing tone, “but if he pulls a gun on a police officer, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have the right to pull a gun.”

Thus the frantic effort by traumatized officers to rationalize the catastrophic event in which they just participated begins to morph — within little more than a minute of the last shot being fired — into the official narrative.

This process of narrative construction requires deafness to dissonant voices. When an eyewitness — a man in a red shirt with a knapsack who was walking a few strides behind the officers as their encounter with Augustus unfolded — vigorously tries to engage with Aldrich, he shoos the man away.

This process of narrative construction requires deafness to dissonant voices.

Community members stream toward the site of the shooting to find out what happened. Some question or challenge the police. Aldrich and other officers respond harshly, barking out commands. We can hear Fleming’s voice. “Get the hell out of here,” she yells. “Shut the fuck up.”

In response to one woman whose words are inaudible on the body camera footage, Aldrich yells, “Lady, everything you’re saying is on camera. If you want to go to jail, keep it up.”

After nightfall, the standoff between the community and the police will give way to a violent melee in the shopping center parking lot across from the site of the incident, as officers charge into the crowd with their batons raised. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, we can see in officers’ hostile, defensive responses to questions from residents the seeds of the disorder that will later ensue.

Officer Megan Fleming [5:33:01 – 5:33:33 p.m.]

When the audio on Fleming’s body camera activates, she is screaming at bystanders on the railroad tracks. “Get off the tracks! Get off the tracks!”

One of them says, “He didn’t do shit.”

“Really?” responds Fleming. She is standing over Augustus’s body. “That’s why I fucking got scratch marks all over me.” She is addressing not the onlookers but other officers standing nearby. She holds up her right forearm to show a reddish area. “He fucking tried to get away. Fuck. He fucking scratched the shit out of me. The fucker pulled a gun right at us.”

It will be a recurring theme for Fleming that Augustus assaulted her. It’s possible she was scratched as he sought to pull away after she grabbed him from behind. It is also possible the injury occurred when Halley grabbed her arm and pushed it out of the way in order to clear his line of fire. In any case, the detective’s supplemental report notes that the “abrasions” on her arm did not require medical treatment.

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:34:07 – 5:35:19 p.m.]

Less than five minutes after the incident, Aldrich responds to the growing crowd of onlookers by taking what appears to be an M4 carbine from the trunk of his vehicle and slinging it over his shoulder.

Officer Dillan Halley [5:33:40 – 5:41:01 p.m.]

Halley is wandering around the crime scene without any obvious purpose, as if disoriented.

A moment earlier, the man in the red shirt wearing a knapsack had vigorously pointed at him and Fleming and then at his own eyes as if to say, I saw what you did.

Fleming approaches Halley.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he says.

“I know you do,” she responds. “Come here.”

They rush over to a supervisor who has just arrived on the scene, Lt. Davina Ward.

“Lieutenant,” Fleming says, “my partner needs to get out of here now.”

“I’m a target,” says Halley.

“We’ve got to go,” Fleming insists. “He’s got to go.”

As if pursued, the two officers and the lieutenant run to Ward’s vehicle on the other side of the red tape.

“Get in the car,” Fleming instructs Halley, then says to Ward, “I’m going with him.”

As she drives away, Ward explains, “I can’t take you completely away, but I’ll take you away from here.”

“He pointed a gun at us,” Halley blurts out. “I had to.”

One of the officers — it is not clear who — releases a shudder of distress.

“Calm down, OK?” says Ward.

Having been unable to reach her commander on the radio, Ward uses her cellphone. “I’ve got the officers who did the shooting,” she reports. “I had to get away from the scene. They were coming after him.”

The panic of Halley and Fleming in the aftermath of the shooting has now entered the police narrative as something akin to a mob “coming after” the two officers.

Ward is unsure how far away from the scene she should go — neither Halley nor Fleming gave official statements about the shooting before fleeing the scene — so she pulls to a stop about half a mile away on a quiet residential street. There is a large vacant lot nearby. No one is visible on the sidewalk.

In a reassuring tone such as one might use with frightened children, Ward seeks to soothe the two officers in the backseat.

“It’s OK,” she says. “Listen. Listen. Listen. It’s OK. It’s OK. OK? I just need you to relax. You OK? …  Listen. Listen. Listen. You are OK. You are OK. You did nothing wrong. OK? I want to make sure you know that.”

They get out of the car. Fleming and Halley put their arms around each other’s shoulders. He is largely silent, while she resumes her breathless monologue.

“You’re OK, you’re OK, you’re OK,” Fleming says. “Dude, he had a fucking gun. He was gonna kill us. I thought I was gonna die. You did the right thing. You’re OK. I’m here, I’m not leaving you. You’re OK. You did the right thing. I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was not going home to my kids. I’m fucking pissed that I didn’t — Look at this.” She holds out her forearm. “I should have fucking had him. I fucking should have had him.”

At this point, Halley’s body camera catches Fleming’s anguished face. She can’t stop talking.

“You’re OK. Dude, he fucking — Look at this,” she says, showing him a reddish spot on her right forearm again. “Dude, I went behind that car and I thought I was gonna — You did the fucking — You saved everyone. You saved my fucking life. You know that, right? You did the right thing. I’m telling you right now, I thought we were going to die. Soon as Jones asked him if he had concealed carry —”

The story Fleming is frantically piecing together has several telling details, all of them false:

• Augustus took flight because Jones asked him whether he had a concealed carry permit, not because Fleming grabbed him from behind without warning.
• In his effort to escape, Augustus assaulted Fleming.
• When several of the officers dropped to the ground and took cover behind a police vehicle, they were responding to Augustus drawing his gun and preparing to shoot at them, not to the sound of gunfire from Halley’s weapon.

In the video footage from Halley’s body camera, none of these things actually happened. Yet on the basis of Halley and Fleming’s initial utterances, the Chicago Police Department released a statement later that day under Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s letterhead that described the incident as “an armed confrontation.”

Ward instructs Halley and Fleming to get back inside the car. Halley suggests that maybe they should relocate to “an alley or something. This is a lot of traffic right here.”

“The thing is,” Ward reassures him, “they don’t know you’re in this car.”

The officers’ fear is palpable. It’s as if they are in a war zone where they could at any moment and from any direction come under attack. How much did this fearful mindset, so vividly apparent after the shooting, contribute to the sequence of actions leading up to it?

Now back inside the vehicle, Halley says, “I couldn’t let him shoot around here.”

“Right, right,” replies Ward. “I’ve got you.”

As she pulls away from the curb, she asks, “He just walked up on you guys?”

“He walked right past us,” Fleming replies. “I said, ‘He’s got a gun.’ And then Jones, he tried to stop him. … That’s when he scratched the shit out of me. I had him but fucking didn’t get him.”

“That’s OK, that’s OK.”

Halley sobs.

“You all didn’t do anything wrong,” says Ward. “I want you all to know that.”

Officer James Aimers [5:32:10 – 5:47:31 p.m.]

Back at the site of the shooting, Aimers, having handcuffed Augustus and thoroughly cleaned his hands, is engaged in securing the crime scene with red tape. This operation is complicated by the fact that community members have gathered within the area he and other officers are trying to cordon off.

“He didn’t do shit,” says a man standing in the railroad tracks directly across from the crime scene. “He’s the fucking barber. He don’t gangbang. He don’t do nothing.”

Aimers and other officers are intent on herding community members behind the cordon they are in the process of establishing. As they install the tape, they yell at onlookers for being on the wrong side of it. They make no effort to identify civilian witnesses. The man in the red shirt with a knapsack again tries to engage with the police and again is shooed away.

By the time Aimers has finished securing the area with tape, the medics are on the scene. They are standing around Augustus’s body. From other camera perspectives, it’s apparent they arrived five minutes earlier, checked Augustus’ pulse, did some tests, and determined he had died.

“Shit,” Aimers says to Jones, who is standing nearby holding Augustus’s gun. “Who got him?”

Jones gestures toward his chest and says, “Camera running.”

“That’s right,” Aimers acknowledges. “No talking.”

Commander Gloria Hanna, the senior police official on the scene, approaches them. She is not in uniform. She asks Jones and Aimers what their beat numbers are. She is trying to figure out who to assign as the “paper car,” the reporting officers tasked with filling out the initial incident report. The paper car cannot have been involved in or witnessed the incident.

Aimers cautions her not to step on evidence scattered on the ground. This includes a pistol magazine and shell casings. Officers walk back and forth heedlessly through the area.

Jones stands beside the magazine laying on the ground. He has been told to stay there until someone relieves him of Augustus’s gun.

“Hey, do you have any hand sanitizer?” Aimers asks Jones. He has lost track of his own bottle. Jones does not.

Aimers offers Jones a bag to put the gun in. It’s not an evidence bag but a plastic bag in which he had some papers. Jones puts the gun in the bag and places it on the ground beside the magazine.

Discovering a new piece of evidence on the ground, Aimers observes, “There’s a credit card over here.” Then he immediately refocuses, “Oh, here it is.” He has found his hand sanitizer. He shares it with Jones. His search continues, though. “I don’t know where my gloves went. That’s what I was looking for.”

Aimers resumes vigorously cleaning his hands with sanitizer.

A supervisor is giving instructions to the officer who “has the paper.” Aimers joins the conversation.

“The handcuffs,” he interjects, “are mine.”

He and the reporting officer have a confused, increasingly testy exchange. Fully 15 minutes after the shooting, the reporting officer asks, “We shot him or we got shot?”

“I don’t think he got a round off,” replies Aimers.

“But I’m just saying,” the officer persists, “did we shoot him? Did the police shoot him?”

“Yeah, we were right here. Everybody was lined up right there. They went to stop him, and he went through the car.”

“Just calm down. I’ll ask your partner,” says the reporting officer, referring to Jones.

“I’m all right,” says Aimers sharply. “That’s not my partner.”

“I’m just trying to say, ’cause we got the paper: Which officer shot?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t know either,” says Aimers, adding, “We’re on camera, by the way.”

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:41:15 – 5:41:38 p.m.]

As Aldrich is helping rearrange the red tape so the ambulance can back in to remove Augustus’s body, a man from the barber shop approaches him.

“He works with me,” the man says.

“It doesn’t matter,” says Aldrich. “You’re beyond the red tape.”

“The sergeant told me to come talk with you.”

“OK, but you can’t come through the red crime scene tape. You can come talk to me, but you can’t come through the red tape. You gotta stay in the red tape.”

Aldrich then walks away without talking to the man.

Officer James Aimers [5:47:58 – 6:00:22 p.m.]

“Hey, Sarge,” Aimers calls out to Aldrich. He wants to know whether he should interview people in the stores on 71st Street near the site of the shooting. “We don’t want any of these people leaving, right?”

Aldrich, having just driven away an eyewitness to the shooting and a colleague of Augustus’s without taking statements or getting their contact information, appears uninterested.

Standing with the M4 across his chest, he asks Aimers, “Did you see it? I saw you come out of the spot.”

“I pulled up because I was gonna get ahead of him. Then he ran behind the car, and that’s when everything went off.”

Looking down at his own body camera, Aldrich asks, “Are you still on?”

“Yeah, I’m still on. I have to be on right now, right?”

Aldrich says he couldn’t see what happened from where he was parked. “I was wondering what you saw, because you pulled off.”

“I saw a bulge on the side, and then I saw them say, ‘Hey,” and I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to try to stop him,’ and so I went ahead. He dipped out and started freaking out. Then he dipped away, and then I saw him drop, with the gun in his hand.” He then says something to the effect that he thought Augustus had fired his gun, “but he didn’t. Luckily.”

Aimers then briefly enters three stores on 71st Street. Unlike the witnesses on the sidewalk who were shooed away by the police, it’s highly unlikely anyone inside the shops saw anything, but it’s not impossible. Someone might have been looking out the window or stepping out the door at the moment of the shooting.

In each store, Aimers asks whether anyone saw anything, whether there is surveillance video that might have captured the incident, and he collects people’s names. His questioning is perfunctory. At one point, he sums up the point of the exercise, “I have to get everybody’s name down to tell the detectives you didn’t see anything.”

One of the shopkeepers asks, “Did he make it?” Although Aimers was present when the medics indicated Augustus had died, he replies curtly, “I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.”

Talking with several men in a sandwich shop, he appears to assume they are reluctant to speak with him, as if it were a gang shooting rather than a police shooting and they fear retribution.

“So, none of you guys saw anything?” he says. “Want to talk to me in the back individually? I know nobody wants to, you know, narc on anybody. I got that.”

No one takes him up on his offer.

Among those present is Darren Coleman, a security guard who was standing beside Jones as the incident unfolded and later gave me a detailed description of how Augustus’s civil interaction with Jones was disrupted when Fleming grabbed him from behind without warning. He also described Halley as having been, in his view, “pumped, ready. It seemed like he had a point to prove.”

On the tape, Coleman begins to describe to Aimers what he witnessed. Aimers has only one question for him: Did he “see anything” in Augustus’s hands? No, says Coleman, his view was obscured by a car. Aimers shows no interest in anything else Coleman might be able to tell him about what happened.

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:44:40 – 5:44:50 p.m.]

Just before Aldrich turns off his body camera — some 14 minutes after the incident, and more than 10 minutes after Halley and Fleming fled the scene — he has an exchange with the two most senior police officials on the scene, Commander Hanna and a lieutenant.

“I guess Halley’s the only one who shot,” says Aldrich, “but he drew a gun out on Halley.”

“The guy did?” the commander asks.

“The guy drew the gun what?” asks the lieutenant.

“He drew a gun out on Halley. That’s what they’re saying.”

“On who?” the lieutenant asks.

While body camera footage makes it possible to isolate various police interactions, some of them occurring simultaneously, another perspective is required to fully comprehend what is happening in the wake of the shooting. It is provided by a stationary CPD surveillance camera on 71st Street that serves to reconstitute the full incident within a single frame.

From that perspective, what arrests the eye is a fixed point amid all the movement. While Halley and Fleming rehearse their shared narrative in a traumatized duet; while Aimers repeatedly cleans his hands after handcuffing Augustus; while Aldrich responds to community grief and anger by reaching for an assault rifle; and while officers confound the crime scene and drive away civilian witnesses: Augustus lies motionless on the ground.

Four minutes pass before an ambulance arrives. During that interval, no officer is moved to assess Augustus’s condition, to offer a comforting word, or to minister to him in any way. Is he dead or alive? It appears not to matter to the officers flooding the area. To observe the terrible isolation of the human being lying in the middle of the street, while the police are wholly preoccupied with their own welfare, is to confront the question that reverberates through our times and is yet to be answered by meaningful reform: Do Black lives matter?

Official Oversight

The 2021 report on the incident by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the oversight agency tasked with investigating police shootings, does not provide a fully satisfactory answer to that question. As was widely expected, COPA found “Halley’s use of deadly force was consistent with Chicago Police Department policy.” Although Augustus’s movements were ambiguous and could plausibly be interpreted in different ways (Was he perhaps trying to stabilize his holster while he ran?), COPA concluded that it was reasonable for Halley to have perceived an imminent threat.

We are thus left with the official finding that this gratuitous killing of a Black man by the police, at once tragic and absurd, was lawful and within policy. Given the prevailing paradigm embodied in the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1989 ruling in Graham v. Connor that great deference must be shown to an officer’s perceptions of risk and judgments within the temporal frame of the “split second,” that dispiriting conclusion was perhaps inevitable. It should not, however, be allowed to obscure the several ways in which the COPA report enlarges the analytic frame beyond the narrow focus on the split second.

The agency found that the officers had no legal basis to stop Augustus in the first place. And it found that Fleming had no reason to seek to physically restrain Augustus, who was being cooperative. It recommended that she receive a 60-day suspension.

Of equal importance is its analysis of police actions following the shooting. In order to prevent officers from colluding to construct a common narrative, CPD policy dictates that, following the discharge of a firearm, the officers involved are to refrain from discussing details of the incident with one another, and supervisors are to ensure that involved officers remain separated and do not communicate with one another.

COPA found that Ward, the senior supervisor at the scene in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, failed to separate Halley and Fleming and to restrict their communication with each other. It recommended a 30-day suspension.

By assessing police actions leading up to and following the moment of deadly force, the COPA report begins to shift the paradigm. It demonstrates, in effect, that the Supreme Court’s split-second logic in Graham v. Connor need not dictate the outcome of administrative disciplinary processes.

The report also does something else. The breadth and quality of the COPA investigation makes clear the need to overhaul the video release policy adopted at the height of the political maelstrom provoked by the police murder of Laquan McDonald. In that case, the city withheld video footage of the incident for 13 months, until forced to release it by a judicial order and a surging mass movement.

Among the first reforms adopted in the wake of the McDonald debacle, the current policy — touted at the time as the most progressive in the country — provides that “all video and audio recordings relating to” an incident in which use of force by a police officer results in death or great bodily harm shall be made public no more than 60 days after the incident.

In most instances, COPA implements the policy by posting videos and other materials deemed relevant on its website. Yet much of the video footage described above is, to this day, not available to the public on the COPA site, raising questions about the basis on which the agency is making editorial judgments as to relevance.

The time has now come, in light of experience, to overhaul the policy in two fundamental respects.

First, the 60-day timeline should be shortened to no more than a week, absent a compelling showing of why it is necessary to extend it. Second, COPA should not make editorial decisions as to “relevance.” Rather, all body camera footage of all officers at the scene (not only the officers directly involved in the incident), as well as all video from other sources, should be released in its entirety. As the COPA investigation of the Augustus killing shows, once analysis is no longer limited to a narrow focus on the split second, it is not possible to determine relevance until the full investigation is completed, a process that routinely takes a year and often longer.

At the most fundamental level, the principle — with respect to categories of information acknowledged to be public — should be to release it all, and let the public determine what is in the public interest.

Such an expansion of transparency would operationalize a central insight of the era after Laquan McDonald’s killing: In cases such as these, we are not dealing with discreet “cover-ups.” That is the wrong frame for understanding the phenomenon. What we are dealing with is standard operating procedure.

Conspiracy requires agreement, but there is no need to agree when everyone knows what they are expected to do.

For those acting within this gravitational field, lying is not an isolated act but a state of being. The police account of what happened and why it was justified begins to form instantly. The process by which it then hardens into the official narrative is fluid and dynamic — less a matter of deliberate conspiratorial deception than an expression of the institution’s fundamental orientation.

For the CPD at every level, the question is not: What happened? It is: How do we justify what happened? That orientation affects perception — what one sees and does not see — and it shapes interactions that in turn shape the narrative. At bedrock, the assumption is: It is justified because it happened.

This culture has proved difficult to capture in legal categories. A case in point is the failed prosecution of three officers charged with conspiring to protect Officer Jason Van Dyke after he killed Laquan McDonald. Van Dyke was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder. And there were grave political consequences for a number of officials — including former Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who withheld public information from the public in order to maintain a false narrative. Yet the officers charged with conspiring to cover up the McDonald murder were acquitted on all charges. While the judge in the case has been widely criticized, the paradox remains that the more pervasive the code of silence is as a culture, the more elusive it is as a matter of law. Conspiracy requires agreement, but there is no need to agree when everyone knows what they are expected to do.

Given the nature of the problem, there is no more effective antidote than robust transparency that honors the compelling public interest in access to information about what happens in the seconds and minutes and hours that follow the split second in which the police shoot someone.

Video clips referenced in this article:

Officer Dillan Halley [5:30:47 – 5:31:02]

Officer James Aimers [5:31:20 – 5:31:54]

Officer Dillan Halley [5:31:37 – 5:32:17]

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:31:07 – 5:33:32]

Officer Megan Fleming [5:33:01 – 5:33:33]

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:34:07 – 5:35:19]

Officer Dillan Halley [5:33:40 – 5:41:01]

Officer James Aimers [5:32:10 – 5:47:31]

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:41:15 – 5:41:38]

Officer James Aimers [5:47:58 – 6:00:22]

Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:44:40 – 5:44:50]

CPD surveillance camera

The post In the Aftermath of a Police Killing, the Justifications Begin Immediately appeared first on The Intercept.

Over the last few days, we have witnessed a shock-and-awe judicial coup, from stripping people of the right to terminate pregnancies (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), to weakening the sovereign right of Indigenous tribes to enforce the law on their lands (Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta), to interfering with the rights of states to regulate the carrying of firearms (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen), to enabling a return to Christian prayer in public schools (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District).

And now this: a decision that eviscerates the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate a major source of the carbon emissions destabilizing our planet. The EPA can still regulate CO2, but its capacity to regulate under the Clear Air Act is significantly reduced. It represents the culmination, as my colleague Sharon Lerner reports, of decades of “plotting against environmental regulations” by Koch Industries, and as The Lever has reported, this entire court has been shaped by the dark-money-bankrolled Judicial Crisis Network, which is is surely gearing up to toast the bountiful return on their patient investments this July 4 weekend.

History contains crossroads when a single set of decisions can alter the trajectory of a people — or even a planet. The Biden administration’s response to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 EPA ruling, hot on the heels of the other outrageous power grabs, is a moment like that. No juncture offers greater opportunity for courageous, transformational leadership, should such a thing be on offer anywhere in Washington, D.C.

Biden came to office promising an “all of government” approach to the climate crisis. It was a defining issue in the Democratic Party primaries and a winning issue for Biden in the general election. Why? Because voters are now fully engaged with the climate crisis — and they reliably are most engaged in the summer, when our warming world speaks loudest. But last fall, Biden let Sen. Joe Manchin push climate action way down his political agenda — and suddenly we stopped hearing much about it at all. I suppose the smartest guys in the room thought it was starting to smell like defeat. Thanks to great advice like that, Biden managed to demoralize much of his base, and some of his best appointees resigned.

With the court’s EPA ruling, Biden now has a chance to put climate back at the top of the agenda. He should seize it. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the dissent, “The court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision maker on climate policy.” she wrote. “I cannot think of many things more frightening.” A great many voters, if the stakes are clearly explained and kept top of mind through consistent messaging, will agree.

In fact, no issue gives the Democrats a platform for a more powerful or more unifying message than this Supreme Court ruling — both to radically reform the court and to communicate the dire urgency of the climate crisis and the need for bold policy. Moreover, by using the court’s EPA ruling to finally do more than send out opportunistic fundraising emails — and instead to draw the line and move to transform an obviously out-of-control, extremist court — Biden and the Democrats would be doing precisely what they have never done and what young climate activists have been pleading with them to do for years: Treat the climate emergency like an emergency.

The first rule of an emergency is that you do what it takes to end the emergency and get to safety. You don’t throw up your hands because the task is too hard. You certainly don’t let a gang of unelected, lifetime appointed political operatives — several of whom only have their seats because of trickery and lies — get in your way.

The first rule of an emergency is that you do what it takes to end the emergency and get to safety.

The Democrats’ base would take tremendous heart from seeing this kind of emergency footing response, but it would be most meaningful for young people, many of whom can vote. And those voices should not be discounted. This extremist court has positioned itself as an advocate for youth, children, and the unborn — from abortion to school prayer. Its willingness to light the future on fire for all kids alive today and yet to come puts the lie to this absurd claim. If the Democrats turn the EPA decision into a pivot point, not just for speeches and poems and yoga poses but for decisive action in defense of the future, it would upend the debate.

They should, moreover, connect the dots between the individual rulings and their underlying logic. For several of these justices, their casualness about climate apocalypse is inextricable from their Christian fundamentalist takes on abortion and prayer (and soon, given the chance, gay marriage and trans rights). They aren’t worried about the world burning because they think we are in the End Times and that their faith will protect them (and failing that, that their wealth and their guns will, which is the way Republicans enact the Rapture without divine intervention). Biden should get biblical on these theocrats and call them on flouting the duty to care for all of creation.

The rolling judicial coup coming from this court is by no means over. Next term, the Supreme Court will hear a redistricting case that could well make it far easier to concoct a legal pretense for overriding the popular vote in elections in favor of state-appointed electors — the very thing that Donald Trump attempted but failed to do, because enough people were afraid of ending up in jail. There is no reason to believe that a group of people whose very presence on the bench required grotesque abuses of democracy would somehow draw the line at thwarting it. The moment to stop them from getting the chance is right now.

Biden and the Democrats are currently careening toward a wave of defeats. But it’s not too late to get back on track. They have just been handed a winning platform: Use the Supreme Court’s attack on urgent carbon control as a catalyst to build a more meaningful democracy and take transformational climate action at the same time. If they decide to run with it, everybody on this planet wins. If they refuse, they deserve every loss coming their way.

The post The Supreme Court’s Shock-and-Awe Judicial Coup appeared first on The Intercept.

Nostalgia for empire is what seems to drive Vladimir Putin — that and a desire to overcome the shame of punishing economic shock therapy imposed on Russia at the end of the Cold War. Nostalgia for American “greatness” is part of what drives the movement Donald Trump still leads — that and a desire to overcome the shame of having to face the villainy of white supremacy that shaped the founding of the United States and mutilates it still. Nostalgia is also what animates the Canadian truckers who occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month, wielding their red-and-white flags like a conquering army, evoking a simpler time when their consciences were undisturbed by thoughts of the bodies of Indigenous children, whose remains are still being discovered on the grounds of those genocidal institutions that once dared to call themselves “schools.”

This is not the warm and cozy nostalgia of fuzzily remembered childhood pleasures; it’s an enraged and annihilating nostalgia that clings to false memories of past glories against all mitigating evidence.

All these nostalgia-based movements and figures share a longing for something else, something which may seem unrelated but is not. A nostalgia for a time when fossil fuels could be extracted from the earth without uneasy thoughts of mass extinction, or children demanding their right to a future, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, like the one just released yesterday, that reads, in the words of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, like an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” Putin, of course, leads a petrostate, one that has defiantly refused to diversify its economic dependence on oil and gas, despite the devastating effect of the commodity roller coaster on its people and despite the reality of climate change. Trump is obsessed with the easy money that fossil fuels offer and as president made climate denial a signature policy.

The Canadian truckers, for their part, not only chose idling 18-wheelers and smuggled jerry cans as their protest symbols, but the leadership of the movement is also deeply rooted in the extra-dirty oil of the Alberta tar sands. Before it was the “freedom convoy,” many of these same players staged the dress rehearsal known as United We Roll, a 2019 convoy that combined a zealous defense of oil pipelines, opposition to carbon pricing, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and explicit nostalgia for a white, Christian Canada.

Oil is a stand-in for a broader worldview.

Though petrodollars underwrite these players and forces, it’s critical to understand that oil is a stand-in for a broader worldview, a cosmology deeply entwined with Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, which ranked human as well as nonhuman life inside a rigid hierarchy, with white Christian men at the top. Oil, in this context, is the symbol of the extractivist mindset: not only a perceived God-given right to keep extracting fossil fuels, but also the right to keep taking whatever they want, leave poison behind, and never look back.

This is why the fast-moving climate crisis represents not just an economic threat to people invested in the extractive sectors but also a cosmological threat to the people invested in this worldview. Because climate change is the Earth telling us that nothing is free; that the age of (white, male) human “dominion” has ended; that there is no such thing as a one-way relationship comprised only of taking; that all actions have reactions. These centuries of digging and spewing are now unleashing forces that make even the sturdiest structures created by industrial societies — coastal cities, highways, oil rigs — look vulnerable and frail. And within the extractivist mindset, that is impossible to accept.

Given their common cosmologies, it should come as no surprise that Putin, Trump, and the “freedom convoys” are reaching toward one another across disparate geographies and wildly different circumstances. So Trump praises Canada’s “peaceful movement of patriotic truckers, workers, and families protesting for their most basic rights and liberties”; Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon cheer on Putin while the truckers sport their MAGA hats; Randy Hillier, a member of the Ontario Legislature who is one of the convoy’s loudest supporters, declares on Twitter that “Far more people have & will die from this shot [the Covid vaccines], than in the Russia/Ukraine war.” And how about the Ontario restaurant that last week put on its daily specials board the announcement that Putin “is not occupying Ukraine” but standing up to the Great Reset, the Satanists, and “fighting against the enslavement of humanity.”

These alliances seem deeply weird and unlikely at first. But look a little closer, and it’s clear that they are bound together by an attitude toward time, one that clings to an idealized version of the past and steadfastly refuses to face difficult truths about the future. They also share a delight in the exercise of raw power: the 18-wheeler vs. the pedestrian, the shouted manufactured reality vs. the cautious scientific report, the nuclear arsenal vs. the machine gun. This is the energy currently surging in many different spheres, starting wars, attacking seats of government, and defiantly destabilizing our planet’s life support systems. This is the ethos at the root of so many democratic crises, geopolitical crises, and the climate crisis: a violent clinging to a toxic past and a refusal to face a more entangled and interrelational future, one bounded by the limits of what people and planet can take. It is a pure expression of what the late bell hooks often described, with a playful wink, as “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” — because sometimes all the big guns are needed to describe our world accurately.

The most urgent political task at hand is to put enough pressure on Putin that he sees his criminal invasion of Ukraine as too great a risk to sustain. But that is only the barest of beginnings. “There is a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future on the planet,” said Hans-Otto Portner, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group that organized the landmark report released this week. If there is a uniting political task of our time, it is to provide a comprehensive response to this conflagration of toxic nostalgia. And within a modern world birthed in genocide and dispossession, that requires laying out a vision for a future where we have never been before.

The leadership of our various countries, with very few exceptions, are nowhere near meeting this challenge. Putin and Trump are backward-facing, nostalgic figures, and they have plenty of company on the hard right. Jair Bolsonaro was elected by playing on nostalgia for Brazil’s era of military rule, and the Philippines, alarmingly, is poised to elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as its next president, son of the late dictator who pillaged and terrorized his nation through much of the ’70s and ’80s. But this is not only a right-wing crisis. Many liberal standard bearers are deeply nostalgic figures too, offering as antidotes to surging fascism nothing but warmed-over neoliberalism, openly aligned with the predatory corporate interests — from Big Pharma to big banks — that have shredded living standards. Joe Biden was elected on the comforting promise of a return to pre-Trump normal, never mind that this was the same soil in which Trumpism grew. Justin Trudeau is the younger version of the same impulse: a shallow, attention-economy echo of his father, the late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In 2015, Trudeau Jr.’s first statement on the world stage was “Canada is back”; Biden’s, five years later, was “America is back, ready to lead the world.”

We will not defeat the forces of toxic nostalgia with these weak doses of marginally less toxic nostalgia. It’s not enough to be “back”; we are in desperate need of new. The good news is that we know what it looks like to fight the forces enabling imperial aggression, right-wing pseudo-populism, and climate breakdown at the same time. It looks very much like a Green New Deal, a framework to get off fossil fuels by investing in family-supporting unionized jobs doing meaningful work, like building green affordable homes and good schools, starting with the most systematically abandoned and polluted communities first. And that requires moving away from the fantasy of limitless growth and investing in the labor of care and repair.

The Green New Deal — or the Red, Black, and Green New Deal — is our best hope for building a sturdy multiracial working-class coalition, based on finding common ground across divides. It also happens to be the best way to cut off the petrodollars flowing to people like Putin, since green economies that have beat the addiction to endless growth don’t need imported oil and gas. And it’s also how we cut off the oxygen to the pseudo-populism of Trump/Carlson/Bannon, whose bases are expanding because they are far better at harnessing the rage directed at Davos elites than the Democrats, whose leaders, for the most part, are those elites.

Russia’s invasion underlines the urgency of this kind of green transformation, but it also throws up new challenges. Before Russia’s tanks started rolling, we were already hearing that the best way to stop Putin’s aggression is to ramp up fossil fuel production in North America. Within hours of the invasion, every planet-torching project that the climate justice movement had managed to block over the past decade was being frantically rushed back onto the table by right-wing politicians and industry-friendly pundits: every canceled oil pipeline, every nixed gas export terminal, every protected fracking field, every Arctic drilling dream. Since Putin’s war machine is funded with petrodollars, the solution we are told, is to drill, frack, and ship more of our own.

There is no such thing as a short-term fossil fuel play.

This is all a disaster capitalist charade of the kind of I have written about too many times before. First, China will keep buying Russian oil regardless of what happens in the Marcellus Shale or the Alberta tar sands. Second, the timelines are fantastical. There is no such thing as a short-term fossil fuel play. Every one of the projects being flogged as a solution to dependence on Russian fossil fuels would take years to have an impact and, in order for their sunk costs to make financial sense, the projects would need to stay in operation for decades, in defiance of the increasingly desperate warnings we are receiving from the scientific community.

But of course the push for new fossil projects in North America is not about helping Ukrainians or weakening Putin. The real reason all the old pipe dreams are being dusted off is far more crass: This war has made them vastly more profitable overnight. In the week that Russia invaded Ukraine, the European oil benchmark, Brent crude, reached $105 a barrel, a price not seen since 2014, and it is still hovering above $100 (that’s twice what it was at the end of 2020).

Banks and energy companies are desperate to make the most of this price rally, in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Alberta.

As surely as Putin is determined to reshape Eastern Europe’s post-Cold War map, this power play by the fossil fuel sector stands to reshape the energy map. The climate justice movement has won some very important battles over the last decade. It has succeeded in banning fracking in entire countries, states, and provinces; huge pipelines like Keystone XL have been blocked; so have many export terminals and various Arctic drilling forays. Indigenous leadership has played a central role in nearly every fight. And remarkably, as of this week, $40 trillion worth of endowment and pension funds at over 1,500 institutions have committed to some form of fossil fuel divestment, thanks to a decade of dogged divestment organizing.

But here is a secret our movements often keep even from themselves: Since the price of oil plummeted in 2015, we have been fighting an industry with one hand tied behind its back. That’s because the cheaper, easier-to-access oil and gas is mostly depleted in North America, so the pitched battles over new projects have primarily been over unconventional, costlier to extract sources: fossil fuels trapped in shale rock, or under the seabed in the deep ocean, or under Arctic ice, or the semi-solid sludge of the Alberta tar sands. Many of these new fossil fuel frontiers only became profitable after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, which sent oil prices soaring. Suddenly, it made economic sense to make those multibillion-dollar investments to extract oil from the deep ocean or to turn Alberta’s muddy bitumen into refined oil. The boom years were upon us, with the Financial Times describing the frenzy in tar sands as “north America’s biggest resources boom since the Klondike gold rush.”

However, when the price of oil collapsed in 2015, industry’s determination to keep growing at such a frenetic pace wavered. In some cases, investors weren’t sure they would earn their money back, which led some majors to pull back from the Arctic and the tar sands. And with profits and stock prices down, divestment organizers were suddenly able to make the case that fossil fuel stocks weren’t just immoral, they were a lousy investment, even on capitalism’s own terms.

Well, Putin’s actions have untied the hand behind Big Oil’s back and turned it into a fist.

This explains the recent wave of attacks on the climate movement and on the handful of Democratic politicians who have advanced science-based climate action. Rep. Tom Reed, a Republican from New York, claimed last week, “The United States has the energy resources to knock Russia out of the oil and gas market entirely, but we don’t use those resources because of President Biden’s partisan pandering to the environmental extremists of the Democratic party.”

The precise opposite is true. If governments, many of whom ran promising Green New Deal-like policies over the past decade and half, had actually implemented them, Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will still have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons. The underlying crisis we face is not that North American and Western European countries have failed to build out the fossil fuel infrastructure that would allow it to displace Russian oil and gas; it is that all of us — the U.S., Canada, Germany, Japan — are still consuming obscene and untenable amounts of oil and gas, and indeed of energy, period.

We know the way out of this crisis: Ramp up the infrastructure for renewables, power homes with wind and solar, electrify our transportation systems. And because all energy sources carry ecological costs, we must also reduce demand for energy overall, through greater efficiency, more mass transit, and less wasteful overconsumption. The climate justice movement has been saying this for decades now. The problem is not that political elites have spent too much time listening to so-called environmental extremists, it’s that they have hardly listened to us at all.

Now we find ourselves at a strange moment, when a great deal feels up for grabs. BP announced on Sunday that it will sell off its 20 percent stake in Russian oil giant Rosneft, and others are following its lead. That’s potentially good news for Ukraine, since pressure on this most critical sector will certainly get Putin’s attention. However, we should also be clear that it is likely only happening because BP is planning to take full advantage of the oil and gas frenzy, unleashed by higher prices, in North America and elsewhere. “BP remains confident in the flexibility and resilience of its financial frame,” it reassured market watchers in its press release announcing the Rosneft move.

It’s significant too that BP’s news came within hours of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announcing that his country will build two new import terminals to receive shipments of natural gas, further locking in dependence on fossil fuels in the middle of a climate emergency. The terminals had long been opposed by German environmentalists, yet now they are being pushed through under cover of war, presented as the only way of making up for the gas that Scholz had recently announced would not flow through Nord Stream 2, the newly built pipeline running under the Baltic Sea. That move turned a state-of-the-art piece of fossil fuel infrastructure into an “$11-billion hole in the ground,” in the words of The Globe and Mail’s European bureau chief, Eric Reguly.

Yet it’s not only fossil fuel projects that are being killed and revived. “We are doubling down on renewables,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announced ahead of Russia’s invasion. “This will increase Europe’s strategic independence on energy.”

Watching these geopolitical chess pieces fly across the board in a matter of days, along with the latest wave of dramatic sanctions against Russian banks and air travel, there are plenty of reasons for dread, including a repeat of measures that punish the poor for the crimes of the rich. But there are flashes of optimism too. What is heartening is less the substance of any individual move than their sheer speed and decisiveness. As in the early months of the pandemic, the response to Russia’s invasion should remind us that despite the complexity of our financial and energy systems, it turns out that they can still be transformed by the decisions of mere mortals.

If BP can walk away from a 20 percent stake in a Russian oil major, what investment cannot be abandoned if it is premised on the destruction of a habitable planet?

It’s worth pausing over some of the implications. If Germany can abandon an $11 billion pipeline because it’s suddenly seen as immoral (it always was), then all fossil fuel infrastructure that violates our right to a stable climate should also be up for debate. If BP can walk away from a 20 percent stake in a Russian oil major, what investment cannot be abandoned if it is premised on the destruction of a habitable planet? And if public money can be announced to build gas terminals in the blink of an eye, then it’s not too late to fight for far more solar and wind.

As Bill McKibben wrote in his excellent newsletter last week, Biden could help in this transformation, using powers only available during times of emergency, by invoking the Defense Production Act to build large numbers of electric heat pumps and shipping them to Europe to mitigate the pain of losing Russian gas. That is the creative spirit we need in this moment. Because if we are building new energy infrastructure — and we must — surely it should be the infrastructure of the future, not more toxic nostalgia.

There are many lessons we must take from the trembling moment we are living through. About the dangers of allowing nuclear weapons to proliferate unchecked. About the short-sightedness of shaming once great powers. About the grotesque double standards in Western media about which lands, and which lives, are treated as invadable and disposable. About which forced migrations are treated as crises for the people moving, and which are treated as crises for the countries they are moving to. About the willingness of everyday people to fight for lands — and about whose fights for self-determination and territorial integrity are celebrated as heroic, and whose are cast as terrorist. All of these are lessons we must learn from living through this moment of naked history.

And we must learn this one as well: It is still possible for humans to change the world we have built when life is on the line, and to do it quickly and dramatically. As we were two years ago when the pandemic was first declared, we are in yet another terrifying but highly malleable moment.

War is reshaping our world, but so too is the climate emergency. The question is: Will we harness wartime levels of urgency and action to catalyze climate action, making us all safer for decades to come, or will we allow war to add more fuel to a planet already on fire? That challenge was put most sharply recently by Svitlana Krakovska, a Ukrainian scientist who is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group that produced this week’s report. Even as her country was under the Kremlin’s attack, she reportedly told her scientific colleagues in a virtual meeting that “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots, fossil fuels, and our dependence on them.”

Once you’ve denied climate breakdown, denying pandemics, elections, or pretty much any form of objective reality is a light lift.

Russia’s outrages in Ukraine should remind us that the corrupting influence of oil and gas lies at the root of virtually every force that is destabilizing our planet. Putin’s smug swagger? Brought to you by oil, gas, and nukes. The trucks that occupied Ottawa for a month, harassing residents and filling the air with fumes and inspiring copycat convoys around the word? One of the occupation’s leaders showed up in court a few days ago wearing an “I ♥ Oil and Gas” sweatshirt. She knows who her sponsors are. Covid-denialism and surging conspiracy culture? Hey, once you have denied climate breakdown, denying pandemics, elections, or pretty much any form of objective reality is a light lift.

At this late stage in the debate, much of this is well understood. The climate justice movement has won all the arguments for transformational action. What we risk losing, in the fog of war, is our nerve. Because nothing changes the subject like extreme violence, even violence that is being actively subsidized by the soaring price of oil. To prevent that from happening, we could do far worse than to take inspiration from Krakovska, who apparently told her colleagues at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in that closed-door meeting, “We will not surrender in Ukraine. And we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate-resilient future.” Her words so moved her Russian counterpart, eye witnesses reported, that he broke ranks and apologized for the actions of his government — a brief glimpse of a world looking forward, not back.

The post Toxic Nostalgia, From Putin to Trump to the Trucker Convoys appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.K. High Court ruling that Julian Assange should be extradited to face trial in the United States — a decision that Amnesty International has called a “travesty of justice” — came as no surprise to me. It’s what the U.K. government always wanted. I know because the British deputy minister of foreign affairs told me.

Many pundits and politicians talk of the extradition proceedings against Assange as if they were an unforeseen legal outcome that came about as Assange’s situation unfolded. This is not true. My experience as the foreign minister of Ecuador — the South American country that granted Assange asylum — left me in no doubt that the U.K. wanted Assange’s extradition to the United States from the very beginning.

One encounter I had with Alan Duncan, the former British minister of state for Europe and the Americas, in October 2016 really let the cat out of the bag. At our meeting in the Dominican Republic, Duncan went on extensively about how loathsome Assange was. While I didn’t anticipate Duncan to profess his love for our asylee, I had expected a more professional diplomatic exchange. But the most important moment of the meeting was when I reiterated that Ecuador’s primary fear was the transfer of Assange to the United States, at which point Duncan turned to his staff and exclaimed something very close to, “Yes, well, good idea. How would we go about extraditing him to the Americans?”

His advisers squirmed in embarrassment. They had spent the last four years trying to reassure Ecuador that this was not what the U.K. was after. I responded that this was news indeed. I then wondered whether Duncan left the meeting feeling he had made a mess of it.

I was particularly surprised by Duncan’s candor because my June 2016 meeting with his predecessor, Hugo Swire, in Whitehall, had been quite different. It’s not that Swire wasn’t equally contemptuous of the irritating South American country that had granted Assange asylum; it is more that Swire actually knew the case well.

Swire stuck to the U.K.’s position: Nobody wanted to extradite Assange to the United States. The Ecuadorian government was “deluded” and “paranoid.” This had nothing to do with the issue of freedom of expression or even WikiLeaks. The case was all about accusations in Sweden against Assange. Ecuador should stop protecting a potential sex offender.

Events since have demonstrated that the British argument that Assange was “holed up” in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid facing sexual assault allegations in Sweden was deceitful. The case was always about Assange’s publishing activities as the head of WikiLeaks. In fact, my government had made it clear to both its British and Swedish counterparts that if Ecuador received guarantees of nonextradition from Sweden to the United States, Ecuador would have no problem with Assange traveling to Sweden to face questioning. Assange himself agreed to this. But Sweden refused to offer such guarantees, which obviously further heightened Ecuador’s suspicions that Assange was being persecuted.

Had Swire been telling the truth, the Swedish prosecutor’s decision not to press charges against Assange in May 2017 would have enabled Assange to walk free from the embassy. The remaining claim that he breached his bail by successfully applying for political asylum should have been easily resolved after the European arrest warrant was dropped. But the U.K. refused to let Assange slip away, and he remained in the Ecuadorian Embassy for two more years before a new Ecuadorian government, heavily leaned on by the Trump administration, consented to having him brutally removed in April 2019.

Maybe it was simply that Duncan’s hatred for Assange, whom he referred to as a “miserable little worm” in Parliament in March 2018, was too pure to be tempered in our meeting. Duncan’s published diaries certainly attest to the fact that Assange’s arrest became an overriding obsession and eventually a personal trophy. When the time came, Duncan watched Assange’s extraction from the embassy — which he refers to as Operation Pelican — on a live feed and later held “drinks in my office for all the Operation Pelican team.”

Duncan’s deeply felt disdain for what he called “the supposed human rights of Julian Assange” are probably part and parcel of his fervent allegiance to the Anglo-American security partnership. Duncan served on the U.K.’s Intelligence and Security Committee in 2015–2016. He is also a member of the secretive, transatlantic organization “Le Cercle,” an ultra conservative think tank with strong links to the intelligence community in Europe and the United States.

We can only speculate whether Duncan’s close relationship with whom he calls his “good friend and Oxford contemporary Ian Burnett,” the Lord Chief Justice who gave the green light to Assange’s extradition, interfered with the judicial process. But the extradition proceedings have been problematic from the beginning. A coalition of major human rights and press freedom organizations — including Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, and First Look Institute’s Press Freedom Defense Fund — have urged the U.S. Justice Department “to dismiss the indictment of Mr. Assange” on the grounds that it “threatens press freedom” and marks a precedent that “could effectively criminalize … common journalistic practices.” The top editors of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, and others have agreed with these experts.

The attempt to extradite Assange to the United States is a clear breakdown of the rule of law, which is continuing in the post-Trump era. The yearn to punish and send a warning to others has been given precedence over human rights, rule of law, and freedom of expression. The persecution must end now.

The post The U.K. Wanted to Extradite Julian Assange to the U.S. From the Start appeared first on The Intercept.

“You know the guy carrying the lectern out?” Grace would later ask a Texas police officer, in a video Grace recorded and posted online during a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border while he was on pretrial release.

“Yes, sir,” the officer responded.

“Look at the old man behind him,” Grace boasted. “That’s me.”

FBI agents arrested Grace at his home in Battle Ground, Washington, near the Oregon border, about three weeks after the Capitol riot.

According to a review of court records by The Intercept in collaboration with the Prosecution Project, Grace is one of 707 Americans charged in federal court in the District of Columbia with crimes related to the January 6 riot, during which five people died. As with 316 of those criminal defendants, or 45 percent of the total, Grace faces only misdemeanor charges for his part in a violent mob that overran barricades and killed and injured police officers at the Capitol as part of an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president.

After his arrest, Grace told FBI agents that he had lost track of his son, Jeremy, with whom he had traveled from Washington state, during the melee and that he entered the U.S. Capitol without him. He also denied to federal agents that he was a member of the Proud Boys, a far-right militant group that has been responsible for violence throughout the United States.

According to The Intercept’s analysis of federal court records, the Justice Department has charged at least 47 alleged members and affiliates of the Proud Boys with crimes related to the Capitol riot, including some with conspiring to obstruct a congressional proceeding. The Proud Boys represented the largest militant-group contingent during the insurrection; the far-right Oath Keepers made up the second-largest contingent, with 29 alleged Oath Keepers charged for their roles in the insurrection. The FBI appeared to be concerned in advance about possible violence from the Proud Boys on January 6, 2021, with at least one informant providing firsthand details about the group’s activities to the FBI.

Federal prosecutors allege that Grace made two false statements to FBI agents: when he said he wasn’t with his son in the Capitol and when he said he wasn’t a member of the Proud Boys. Grace’s son has since also been charged with misdemeanors related to the January 6 riot, after investigators found videos among deleted files on Grace’s phone showing father and son together inside the Capitol.

Months after Grace pleaded not guilty to the federal misdemeanor charges, Justice Department prosecutors alleged in court that he engaged in armed clashes in Texas and Oregon. Prosecutors asked a judge to force Grace to relinquish his guns while he awaits trial. “Grace’s recent escalation in which he twice brought a firearm to pre-planned confrontations with others and vowed to continue doing so establishes that the proposed amendment is reasonably necessary to protect the safety of the community,” Mona Sedky, a federal prosecutor, wrote in a court filing.

Left/Top: Protesters who claim to be members of the Proud Boys gather outside the U.S. Capitol. Right/Bottom: Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Photo: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images; Brent Stirton/Getty Images

Grace has complained in videos he’s posted to YouTube that the Justice Department is treating him unfairly. “How do you feel free thinking that I don’t deserve to carry my firearms?” Grace asked in one video.

But Grace is in fact benefiting from a long-running double standard in how the Justice Department prosecutes violent domestic extremists compared with extremists associated with international groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Since 9/11, for example, Muslims involved in bombing cases are often charged with using weapons of mass destruction, an anti-terrorism charge that comes with decades in prison, while anti-abortion extremists who’ve bombed reproductive health clinics have faced lesser explosives charges for similar crimes.

“There is no question that the FBI and federal prosecutors have treated white supremacist and far-right violence far more leniently than Muslims they accuse of supporting terrorism and even more leniently than nonviolent protesters opposing racism and police violence,” said Michael German, a former FBI undercover agent who investigated domestic extremists and is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.

“There is no question that the FBI and federal prosecutors have treated white supremacist and far-right violence far more leniently than Muslims they accuse of supporting terrorism.”

The felony charge of making false statements to federal agents is particularly emblematic of the double standard. The Justice Department gave Grace a pass on the charge, but federal prosecutors have not been as generous in similar cases involving alleged Islamist extremists.

A few months after prosecutors charged Grace for his role in the Capitol riot, for example, they filed criminal charges against an alleged ISIS sympathizer, Hannibal Kokayi, following an investigation that dates back to 2018. The FBI had investigated whether Kokayi was part of a group that was introducing others to ISIS propaganda and encouraging people to join the terrorist group in Syria.

The FBI interviewed Kokayi twice, first at Dulles International Airport in Virginia and later at his home, and in both interviews, Kokayi lied about supporting ISIS and about his knowledge of people who wanted to join the group. Federal prosecutors charged Kokayi with making false statements, a felony; he pleaded guilty and received a sentence of 24 months of probation.

In international terrorism prosecutions, Kokayi’s case isn’t an outlier, and in some cases, the penalties have been significantly more severe than what Kokayi received. In Florida, Robert Blake Jackson posted ISIS propaganda on Facebook and expressed an interest in joining the group. When the FBI questioned him, he lied about what he’d written on Facebook. He was sentenced to three years in prison. Alexander Samuel Smith, a North Carolina man who went by the name Amir Alexander, communicated online with an FBI informant who he believed was an ISIS supporter. Smith claimed that he could get cheap airline tickets through his girlfriend, who worked for an airline, and when the FBI asked Smith about this conversation, he lied about it. He received five years in prison.

Perhaps the most relevant and moving case involves a husband and wife in Texas, Mohommad and Sumaiya Ali, who were in contact with their two sons who’d joined ISIS in Syria. When FBI agents questioned the couple about their children, Mohommad and Sumaiya lied, saying they didn’t know that their sons were in Syria or with ISIS. Mohommad was sentenced to a year in prison and Sumaiya two and a half years for making false statements to FBI agents. Their rationale was likely the very same as Grace’s: He said he lied to the FBI to protect his son.

German points to recent activity in the Pacific Northwest as indicative of the double standard. The Proud Boys, which as an organization promotes misogynist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and antisemitic views, have been involved in violent clashes there, including an attack on the Oregon Capitol two weeks before the January 6 riot in Washington, D.C. But prosecutors have not aggressively gone after the Proud Boys and other violent right-wing extremists there, instead bringing nearly 100 cases against Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, including for serious felony charges such as assaulting a federal officer.

“It’s no wonder that far-right militants appear emboldened all across the country,” German noted, “as their public violence continues to be unpoliced.”

After the Capitol Riot

Grace’s life began to change after the Capitol riot, and he’s documented the changes in dozens of YouTube videos posted over the last eight months. Most have fewer than 100 views. They start on April 17, when Grace posted a video of himself pulling up to the parking lot of Daimler Trucks North America, his employer for 26 years. The video was filmed by someone sitting in the passenger seat next to Grace.

“How’s it going?” Grace said to a company employee as he drove up.

“Pretty good,” the employee said. “I can’t let you on-site.”

“What?” Grace asked, surprised.

“You’ve been banned.”

Grace said that he had been fired by his company after being indicted in Washington, D.C. “I’m not being supported by the union or Daimler, and I’ve been accused of a crime,” Grace said. “I am not convicted.”

He posted his next video a couple months later. Grace recorded it two days after the FBI arrested his son. “It’s absolutely amazing how much money they’re spending on myself and my son,” Grace said of the federal government. In the video, Grace is wearing a T-shirt showing the U.S. Capitol with the words “Our House” below it — the type of shirt that he’s now trying to sell online under his politically charged “Our House” apparel brand.

Grace said in this video that any good father would lie to protect his son, and he denied that he was a member of the Proud Boys. “So Proud Boys, no, I’m not one of you, and I’m not part of you, but I do have respect for you,” he said.

Grace admitted to Cotta that he falsely told FBI agents that he became separated from his son on January 6, 2021.

After his son’s arrest, Grace began to capture the attention of fringe internet personalities. In June, he sat for an interview with Todd Cotta, a California gun store owner who has a podcast called “Rebel Radio.” Grace admitted to Cotta that he falsely told FBI agents that he became separated from his son on January 6, 2021. “Because I wanted to protect my son, I said I separated myself from him,” Grace said. He also admitted to deleting data from his phone — which investigators later recovered and discovered were videos and photos showing him and his son together in the Capitol. Grace boasted around this time of doing an interview with Jake Beaird, a far-right activist who has livestreamed Proud Boys’ hooliganism and been kicked off some social media platforms.

The fringe media attention appeared to embolden Grace in his quest to become a right-wing YouTube celebrity. In brief video monologues that increased in frequency, he denied that there was any violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “Peaceful protest,” he said. “There was no insurrection.” He then claimed that the FBI broke a window at the Capitol and bused in violent antifascists. He railed against Black Lives Matter and antifascist groups and referred to “the left” as if it were an organized, monolithic force. He complained that some businesses in Oregon and Washington state were still requiring masks. “And that is the start of socialism, people,” Grace said. He also claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and that an audit in Arizona would prove it.

A Violent Summer

In July, Grace set off for the U.S.-Mexico border with Beaird, the Proud Boys videographer. Founded in 2016, the Proud Boys received international attention during the 2020 presidential debate, when Trump told the group’s members to “stand back and stand by.”

As Grace and Beaird traveled to the border, Grace uploaded videos. Reflecting his conspiratorial view that the United States is in the middle of a culture war as immigrants “flood” the country, Grace said he expected to record videos of immigrants crossing over into the United States illegally. But as he stood next to the border in one of his videos, Grace said, as if genuinely surprised: “Not a whole heck of a lot going on.”

In late July, local police approached Beaird and Grace as they filmed outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Texas. An officer asked what they were doing. “We’re filming because clearly there’s some crazy stuff going on here,” Beaird answered.

Beaird and Grace said they saw a bus pull up next to the building, and Grace recorded himself telling the local police officers that he believed it was part of a government conspiracy to distribute illegal immigrants throughout the United States. “You hear all the talk about the immigrants that are coming in and being dispersed across the U.S.,” Grace said.

In that conversation, Grace boasted to the officer about being at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and explained that he could be seen in the background of the infamous photograph of the man carrying Pelosi’s lectern through the rotunda. After checking their IDs, the police allowed Beaird and Grace to continue filming the federal building.

In a court filing, the Justice Department said that during this trip to Texas, Grace engaged in armed confrontations with people he believed were illegal immigrants.

Then, after attending a Trump rally in Phoenix, Grace returned with Beaird to the Pacific Northwest, where they joined the Proud Boys to provide what Grace described as “perimeter security” for Artur Pawlowski, a controversial Canadian minister who has promoted homophobia and resistance to mask mandates. Antifascist activists and Proud Boys clashed at the gathering as police in Portland looked on. Photographs from the event show Grace carrying a sidearm and holding a baton while in the bed of a truck surrounded by other white men dressed for battle. In video recorded by Beaird, Grace can be seen taking part in the assault of a man under a bridge in Portland.

Grace recorded a YouTube video afterward in which he admitted to participating in the Proud Boys event in Portland. “Looking forward to the next event I am able to embrace,” Grace said.

Three days after this violent clash, prosecutors in Washington, D.C., asked the court to order Grace to give up his weapons and alleged that Grace had falsely said he was not with his son in the U.S. Capitol and that he was not a member of the Proud Boys. Federal prosecutors referred in their court filing to the public photographs of Grace in Portland and the video Beaird recorded of the assault under the bridge there.

No Additional Charges

The Justice Department declined a request from The Intercept to explain why it has chosen not to prosecute Grace for making false statements when prosecutors have filed that felony charge against dozens of other alleged extremists for similar conduct. “We typically do not comment on cases, investigations, or charging decisions beyond what is stated or submitted to the court,” said Bill Miller, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. “We have no comment on this particular matter.”

Grace may be curious to hear prosecutors’ explanation as well. In his interview in June with Cotta, the California gun store owner, Grace said he was expecting to be charged with making false statements: “Now I have another charge that’s going to be coming on me for lying to the FBI —”

“Oh,” Cotta replied, interrupting.

“Which is a felony,” Grace finished.

“Oh, jeez,” Cotta said.

“Yeah,” Grace said.

But that didn’t happen. To date, Grace faces only misdemeanor charges, despite having admitted publicly to making false statements to federal agents. Now unemployed, Grace has been living out of a trailer, traveling from RV park to RV park in the Pacific Northwest as he uploaded videos to YouTube that espouse his conspiratorial, nativist view of the world.

“Am I concerned that I’m going to be put in jail or prison till my trial?” he asked in one recent video. “Well, if I said I wasn’t, thinking about it for a little bit, I’d be a liar, because I’m not stopping and they’re trying to stop me. Every week it’s something new, something different. But I’m not going to stop. I’m going to stand up. I’m going share.”

But Grace did stop. After The Intercept first contacted Grace and his public defender in October 2021 and asked questions about his case and the videos in which he admitted to criminal conduct, Grace’s YouTube channel went quiet.

The post Capitol Rioter Admits False Statements to FBI, but Prosecutors Haven’t Charged Him With a Felony appeared first on The Intercept.

Harmony is not her real name. Atlanta’s powers that be know who she is.

Phillip Spillane, a good friend of mine among the ambassadors, had called 911 to get paramedics to take her to Grady Hospital that Friday. He has made this call about once every two weeks, when the state of Harmony’s squalor becomes too much to bear for an observer with a soul.

I came upon them as paramedics were piling back into a Grady ambulance. I watched them drive away, an impassive expression on the face of the paramedic in the passenger seat as she watched Harmony, who remained on the sidewalk.

It was the same expression on the faces of most of the people walking by. I’ve seen it every time I’ve come downtown to Atlanta to talk with her. It’s not that passersby don’t notice her, but people make an immediate mental calculation about their ability to help someone in this kind of distress. The social reaction — the human reaction — left over is a carefully deliberate nonchalance meant to provide some dignity to a person in a state of public humiliation and to retain some dignity of their own on the scene of a moral catastrophe.

Of course, some people realize that they’re about to step in her shit and can’t keep from scowling.

This story starts with Harmony. It does not end with her.

Harmony wants to be seen. Her survival depends on being seen. Dangerous things happen to people out of sight, in her mind. She won’t go into Woodruff Park next to the Walgreens for fear of being attacked. But on the sidewalk, people will see her, and some will bring her food as an offering to their own conscience. The lights on Peachtree Street will keep her safe in the darkness, if one can call any of this safe.

Harmony called out to me by name. It shocked me.

In what universe would someone fighting to keep the black flies from airlifting her off the sidewalk, with all the cops and social workers and the musical dance number of homeless people around her, have the presence of mind to remember my name?

In that flash of casual lucidity, I saw all of her problems illuminated.

If Harmony had the wit to remember me, then, perversely, it meant that she might not be unwell enough to be committed involuntarily to a hospital for treatment. Hearing my own name pissed me off.

Harmony isn’t exactly unique; thousands of people in Georgia have mental illnesses and developmental disabilities and addictions, flitting into and out of the state’s care in between long bouts of homelessness. But Harmony is at the center of the Familiar Faces project, an official list of people with severe and persistent illnesses whom Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, and the state desperately want to get off the street and out of the county jail.

I would argue that no one currently experiencing homelessness in Fulton County, if not the state, requires more help than Harmony.

I would argue that no one currently experiencing homelessness in Fulton County, if not the state, requires more help than Harmony.

And yet despite millions in resources, much of which the state cannot figure out how to spend, Harmony remained unhoused at the foot of the iconic Coca-Cola sign above the Walgreens at Five Points — in the heart of Atlanta — as she has on and off for years, in a state of abject human degradation, with all of this misery taking place less than 100 yards from the very steps of Georgia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities headquarters.

The people who can help her can see her from their offices. They might walk by her on the way to lunch.

We spend less to treat mental illness than we should. As a result, Georgia is dead last in the 2021 national rankings for access to mental health care, as measured by the nonprofit advocacy group Mental Health America. Our miserable placement comes because poor and working-class people cannot afford routine mental health care — Georgia did not expand Medicaid, after all — and because we have about half the mental health providers as the national average.

Harmony has been the subject of intense discussions with the overseers of a federal consent order with Georgia that requires the state to prevent people with severe and persistent mental illnesses from falling into homelessness after being discharged from state facilities.

But a tug of war between the state, city, county, and others has made it difficult to figure out who should foot the bill for her care. Simple housing seems inadequate — she probably needs residential nursing assistance, since she can’t clean herself, and no one appears to be willing to provide housing without that care. The hospitals don’t want her because she doesn’t want to be there. Jail simply exacerbates her mental illness, with no easy alternative for police or social workers to use. And so she is left like an incontinent animal in the backyard, treated primarily as a sanitation problem.

I didn’t want to focus this story on Harmony. I don’t want to exploit the image of her crisis as some act of poverty porn without being able to help her. I have been wrestling with the question of consent, because it is hard to imagine someone living like this who is well enough to participate in the telling of their own story. I say this, though she has said she wants me to write. Frankly, I didn’t believe her until the day she called me over by name. It meant that her memory was relatively intact.

And that’s the problem. Because if she’s lucid enough to consent to my reporting, then she’s lucid enough to refuse treatment, which she does regularly. Harmony’s plight highlights the failures of Georgia’s health care systems — and that makes the story worth telling. The questions I hope to raise are whether we should accept that Harmony’s stated demand to be left alone should be enough, why it takes so long to act, and what our moral and legal choices look like.

Harmony is 38 and has been in and out of state hospitals for much of her life, she told me. She doesn’t like to stay there. She will, in fact, fight her way out.

Held at a Piedmont Healthcare facility in January, Harmony got mad when a guard asked her to stay in her room, according to court records. She pushed him, then started smashing computer equipment. Police charged her with a felony — the first after a long line of misdemeanors — for breaking a laptop. She spent 123 days in jail in Newton County before being convicted and sentenced to time served in May, with five years of probation and a required mental health evaluation.

She told the Newton County court that she was paranoid and schizophrenic, had a ninth-grade education, and was at the time prescribed a suite of psychiatric medications: Seroquel, Depakote, Geodon, Haldol, and Risperdal. She also said she was using drugs.

Judge Layla Zon accepted her guilty plea after a few questions to see if Harmony understood what she was agreeing to.

“I am also going to find on the record that the defendant appears to be competent based upon the time that I spent asking her questions,” Zon said. “She also appears to be coherent, very responsive appropriately to my questions. She is being medicated for the medical diagnosis that she has of paranoid schizophrenia. And that medication actually helps her understand the proceedings rather than impair her ability to understand the proceedings.”

After the plea, Harmony spoke up, according to the court transcript.

THE DEFENDANT: Can I ask you something?

THE COURT: Yes.

THE DEFENDANT: Can I ask you something? I know that you the judge and lawyer — judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: What was your question?

THE DEFENDANT: Judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: Judge, lawyer does what now?

THE DEFENDANT: I said judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: What about the case being dismissed? I don’t understand your question.

THE DEFENDANT: I said help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: You want the case to be dismissed?

THE DEFENDANT: I said, I’m telling you all four names, four names y’all said. I’m telling you four names: Judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: Okay.

THE DEFENDANT: I said that’s what I wanted to tell you.

THE COURT: You wanted to tell me to dismiss the case?

THE DEFENDANT: Huh-uh. I had wanted to tell you that.

DEPUTY: I’m sorry. Is she in court right now?

THE COURT: Yes.

THE DEFENDANT: Yeah, I’m in court.

THE COURT: But I can’t understand what she’s saying. Judge, lawyer, help —

THE DEFENDANT: I said I had wanted to tell you something. That’s all I wanted to tell you.

DEPUTY: She just wanted to tell you those words.

THE DEFENDANT: I had wanted to tell you something.

THE COURT: Okay. You wanted to tell me judge, lawyer, case dismissed?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

THE COURT: Okay. But you told me earlier that you wanted to plead guilty to the charges.

THE DEFENDANT: Yeah. I said — I just said that — really I took my time served. But I just said case dismissed. Other than saying time served, I said case dismissed.

THE COURT: Okay. Well, I can’t dismiss the charges because the State is going forward. The prosecution is moving forward with this case. And that’s why you have an option of pleading guilty or going to a jury trial. And you told me that you wished to plead guilty.

DEPUTY BELL: I think she was trying to tell you she knows those words.

THE DEFENDANT: I said, can I — can I ask you this? Can y’all give me time served?

DEPUTY BELL: She’s trying to tell you she knows those words.

THE COURT: I did give you time served. I sentenced you to five years on —

THE DEFENDANT: I thought Eddy Cossio —

THE COURT: I sentenced you to five years on probation and the jail time that I ordered that you have to serve I’m giving you credit for time served. Now, where do you —

THE DEFENDANT: Okay. Okay.

Harmony told the court she was homeless. The court instructed probation to send her to the Rainbow Community Shelter in Covington because her uncle would no longer take her in. (I have been unable to locate her uncle.) Three days later, the shelter kicked her out for misbehavior, and she found her way back to a downtown Atlanta street corner.

People with serious mental health problems in Georgia’s hinterlands almost always find their way to the streets of Atlanta. The most common service delivery strategy in “conservative” counties for homeless people or people who need drug treatment or women running from an abusive spouse is a bus ticket to Peachtree Street. It keeps taxes low and lets them brag about how much “cleaner” their communities are.

I spoke with Harmony’s probation officer in Newton County. Harmony never received the post-conviction psychiatric evaluation required by the court. She has never made a probation meeting. At first the officer was only marginally aware that Harmony was even on her caseload. Harmony did have an active warrant for her arrest for violating her probation, not that anyone — anyone — really wants her in jail. Because what’s the point? Unless it’s to force her or someone else to clean her, in ways that are likely to be traumatizing to all involved.

I dream of shit.

I stepped in Harmony’s waste as I walked over to her. I didn’t realize it at first, of course. I felt the squish on my shoe as I approached. Her shit was everywhere. I scraped my sole on the sidewalk without thinking, then realized what had happened. I tried to ignore it.

Harmony was nude from the waist down, covered with a blanket, as usual. Her thin top exposed a chest full of open sores. Some had healed and scarred over a bit since the last time we spoke. Her 300-pound frame was dusted in a light coating of her own feces. A cloud of black flies buzzed around her.

Harmony asked me for food, but I didn’t have time to run to Rosa’s Pizza for her preferred meal of a pepperoni slice. She then asked for pen and paper. I walked into Walgreens to buy some. The smell stayed with me. I couldn’t tell if I was imagining it or not. I wondered if I was radiating the smell of her waste as I picked up a notepad and some Sharpies.

I handed them to her, along with a bag of gummy bears, and she began to fill four pages with one-word lines:

Uplift

Withhold

Law

Government

Authority

Federal

Sever

Peace

Unite

Equal

I asked Harmony what they meant. She sort of shrugged and quietly said that this was her. She was describing herself. Perhaps. She was very quiet.

Harmony wanted fresh blankets. I said I wasn’t in a position to get some for her right then. She offered me some of her gummy bears. I politely refused. Harmony saw a white cardboard paper lollipop stick on the sidewalk. Wrapped in the soiled blankets, she wasn’t able to reach it. She asked me to give it to her, so I picked it up off the shit-smeared sidewalk and handed it over. She started cleaning out her right ear with it. And I left.

I went to lunch. I sat away from others, wondering if my shoe still smelled of her. I couldn’t go home. The entire interaction, punctuated by my own impotence at being able to resolve anything for her, left me vibrating with a kind of moral fury I didn’t want to dump in my own house. I went to a movie instead — the theaters remain mostly empty on Friday afternoons. I took a paper towel to my shoe in a sink, found a private spot in a dark corner, and wept where no one could see me.

I had spoken with that crew four days earlier as they were bundling a man I knew well into the back of an ambulance for the third time in a month. I stopped to chat. He’s one of a cast of characters better known downtown by nicknames like Ooo-wee or the Angry Man or Smiley. I know their real names. My friend has a history of passing out drunk on the sidewalk, as he has done for the better part of a decade. He perked up a bit when he saw me. We’ve been speaking for years about his need to stop drinking and get off the street. He was sober for a while a couple of years ago. I wish it had lasted longer.

I asked the EMTs what they would want the public to know.

A paramedic took out his phone and pulled up a calculator. “Every time an ambulance comes to take him to Grady, it costs $1,700,” he said. “That’s before he walks through the door.” They pick him up once a week. The state of homelessness and inebriation my friend lives in costs the public about $88,400 a year at minimum, he said. For that much money, four or five people could be provided permanently supportive housing.

They knew Harmony well. When I brought her up, they just shook their heads. They come to take her just as often — only she won’t go.

I asked Harmony that day if she was still OK with me writing a story about her, and she said yes. If someone offered her an apartment, I asked, would she take it? She said yes to that too. I asked her if she would go to a nursing home. She said no.

I dreamed that night about what a jail would do with Harmony. How would they clean her? Would they just hose her down like in a prison movie, or would they give her the dignity of cleaning herself? Could she take a shower? How would they clean the shower? I awoke with a start after dreaming about being trapped in a stopped-up public toilet stall with no toilet paper and people peering through the gaps in the door.

The next morning, paramedics arrived to take Harmony to Grady and then to a state hospital, come hell or high water. Harmony had finally drawn enough attention. She refused to go willingly, as usual. This time, they shot her full of the aggression-reducing antipsychotic Haldol and carted her away anyway.

But this story isn’t about Harmony.

It’s about all the things that have to be broken to leave someone in Harmony’s state, living in her own shit on an iconic Atlanta street corner for five months.

It’s about how we react to seeing someone like Harmony — the same someone, over and over — or to squalid tent encampments under a highway, or to someone clearly out of their wits begging people in cars at a stoplight. We ask ourselves what in the cherry-flavored fuck are we doing with our tax money, if this is what we get. How can we call this a “developed” country when this kind of dismal wretched misery greets us in public places? Who do we hold responsible for this failure?

And I’m not talking about reactionary libertarian sociopathy. I’m not entertaining amoral bastards who shout “Get a job!” from their SUV window and then call the cops to get rid of “undesirables” in their neighborhood, patting themselves on the back for how their hard work made them successful.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have schizophrenia. Schizophrenia cackles at Darwinist meritocracy.

I want people to understand why it takes so damned long for what we laughingly call “the system” to help someone like Harmony.

People experiencing chronic homelessness driven by mental illness have often been burned by the system. For someone wrestling with delusions, it can take dozens of contacts simply to convince them that a caseworker isn’t a figment of their imagination.

Even when a caseworker gets a client to say yes, they are met with a system that is underfunded, poorly coordinated, riven by competing interests, the last political priority of policymakers, and dependent on private housing providers that manifestly do not give a shit about keeping people off the street.

“Mental health is messy,” said Fulton County Commissioner Bob Ellis, in a hearing about establishing a diversion center — something homelessness strategists have been calling for for years. “It involves so many different layers, people want to get into whose role is it. That’s part of the reason stuff never gets done. It’s the state’s role, the county’s role, the city’s role, law enforcement’s role. It’s the family’s role because they need to take care of it. We can get caught in that trap as well.”

Harmony is unique. And yet there are at least 100 Harmonys on the streets of Atlanta.

The county knows each of them by name. There’s a list.

A few years ago, folks working on strategy around mental illness and jail wanted to better understand who the “highest utilizers” were. Who are the people who bounce in and out of jail most frequently? Who is taking a $1,700 ride to Grady once a week? From these questions arose a data project to identify and target them for intensive outreach and prioritized service.

Fulton County now calls this the Familiar Faces program. We used to call them frequent flyers. (I have to wonder if Delta Air Lines objected.) The top hundred make the list.

Kristin Schillig, who works for the Fulton County courts, is the keeper of that list. Schillig and I have been friends for years. We worked together on a judicial task force trying to get people with mental illnesses out of the county’s jail. I peppered her with familiar questions.

Familiar Faces cross-references Fulton County Jail data with Grady Hospital’s own high-utilizer tracking system, mental health data, and the Atlanta Jail. The federal government is funding the project now — $250,000 a year, for three years — to see if it can drive down costs and reduce the burden on the jail, she said. But she’s learning about where everything goes wrong.

“I think the story for me is that there are so many gaps in the system,” she said, exasperated. “Georgia is 51st in investment in mental health care. We’re working for nothing. This is, by far, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The traditional systems, they fall through every crack.”

The systems in place to catch high utilizers aren’t working yet. Of the 100 people identified by Familiar Faces, only two had previous contact with Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative, a pre-arrest diversion program, she said.

“We hear people don’t meet criteria a lot for various community, behavioral health, and housing programs,” she said. “Systems in place are so rigid. There needs to be more flexibility, some flexible funding streams are needed to fill the gaps. Also, establishing the Center for Diversion and Services is the key missing infrastructure gap to keep Familiar Faces out of jail. It’s an easy win.”

“We have a plan,” she said. “We’ve had other plans. We need action.”

Harmony’s arrests are absurd. Behold a selection of recent narratives from arrest reports:

Simple assault: “On the listed date and time Ofc. Moore and I were enroute to a call when a black female ran up to the patrol car and stating that she needed help and that she wanted to go to jail. [She] then put her hand in the window and tried to strike Ofc. Moore in the chest with a closed fist, but did not hit him. When Ofc. Moore was taking [her] into custody I went over to assist him and [she] kicked me in the leg stating that she wants to go to jail because she has not slept in a long time. Grady EMS unit 260 responded to the location because [she] was very irate and was talking out of her head.”

Larceny (other): “Victim … stated his two bags were taken with a few items but he confronted [her] because she was wearing some of his clothing items. [He] did not see who took his bags. He stated he left his two bags outside while he entered the Xpress Store and when he came out those bags were gone. Arrestee … admitted to going inside of the bag and putting clothing items on because her clothes displayed human feces on them.”

Public urination/defecation: “Officer Randall … was flagged down by citizens in the area of 236 Forsyth St. the Garnett Office Building. While there, Mr. B. Jones advised that the accused … continues to defecate and urinate on city sidewalks. Officer Randall and Brown have warned and arrested the accused in the past for the same violations. Today Officer Randall contacted the pre arrest diversion along with Grady which the accused … refused saying take me to jail. Officer Randall was left with no other resources because the accused behavior would not change.”

For every one of these encounters, there are probably a handful of police interactions in which cops didn’t bother to arrest Harmony. But they didn’t help her either, because there’s no place to take her except jail. For pre-arrest diversion to work, there has to be a place to divert someone.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney presented the Familiar Faces project to Fulton County commissioners earlier this month, hoping to convert part of the city jail to a diversion center, a place where people in crisis can be taken in lieu of arrest.

“When 911 is called and an officer responds to a gas station and there’s a gentleman there acting erratically … the only option we have right now is to take that person to jail,” McBurney said. “Now that’s not fair. There’s [the Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative], but it doesn’t work 24/7 unfortunately. … PAD is not a cure-all.”

Three out of four times when a cop rolls up on a high utilizer with rap sheets that are an inch thick — someone about to be charged with criminal trespass, public drunkenness — that person gets arrested because there’s no other option, he said.

“They stay longer, they cost more to take care of, and they come back sooner. They’re built-in recidivists.”

“They are superutilizers of our jail,” McBurney said. “They stay longer, they cost more to take care of, and they come back sooner. They’re built-in recidivists.”

It costs about $30,000 a year to keep someone in a jail cell. The example McBurney used from Harris County, Texas’s diversion center showed that the government saved $5.50 for every dollar it spent on its diversion center, simply by keeping people out of jail and the hospital.

People working on this problem in Fulton County have been talking about establishing a diversion center since 2018. I know this because I tried to get one set up at a county-owned property in Summerhill and was summarily castrated by neighborhood political blowback. Even now, with a proposal to build an alternative to jail in a jail, county commissioners are wrestling with how to do so without impeding other priorities — like jailing people.

“It really impacts what [the sheriff] is trying to do with bed space,” Commissioner Natalie Hall said to McBurney, challenging the idea at the text-messaged behest of Sheriff Patrick Labat.

Every single elected official speaking about the subject of the diversion center — a central component to the city and county’s pre-arrest diversion strategy — extolled the virtues of diversion. But I have to ask where the hell the City Council and Board of Commissioners have been for the last three years. None of this is new. It’s just everyone’s last political priority.

After years of inaction, I’m calling bullshit.

Elected leaders want to look like they care about homelessness and poverty while ignoring calls for actual action. In this case, the need to relieve overcrowding at the county jail is a more pressing political problem than a woman sleeping in her own waste on an Atlanta street corner.

“This conversation started way before I got here,” said Commissioner Khadijah Abdur-Rahman. “At some point, we have to move past the conversation. … Business owners every day have to watch a person with a behavioral issue remove their clothes or for whatever reason have an accident in front of them or in their shop.”

Here’s what it’s supposed to look like: A person with psychiatric trouble (or a bystander) reaches out to a government authority — the cops, the paramedics, the state — to get help. Psych paramedics come. If a person in trouble won’t go with them, a social worker comes in to enroll that person remotely in social services and find them some housing. It might be temporary, like a hotel room, but the contact leads quickly to permanent housing with a connection to social services.

We talk about housing first because that’s the policy the system has been designed around. People are not expected to get clean or become compliant with their medications or get a job before being given housing. The housing comes first to help with all the other problems.

When people are easy, this works. But people aren’t always easy. People in crisis, frankly, rarely are.

“At the highest level, maybe we need to make it less hard for people to access our systems,” said my friend Cathryn Marchman, executive director of Partners for Home, Atlanta’s homelessness nonprofit coordinator. “We have to make sure that the opening into these services can’t be this restrictive. More accessible, lower barrier for anyone who walks through the door — hospital, housing system, whatever kind of resource. My general beef is that nonprofits and service provision across the system has to stop cherry-picking who we serve.”

“We have to make sure that the opening into these services can’t be this restrictive.”

Social workers see the same people over and over again. It scrapes away empathy.

“It’s so hard with Grady because they are so overwhelmed,” Marchman said. “In a case like Harmony that is so extreme, I think systems often lose sight of …” She trailed off. “I think they just get jaded. We see behavior as manipulation, as less worthy for access. And certainly, far more difficult and challenging.”

Atlanta is not California. I spent a couple of weeks in Los Angeles a few months ago and San Francisco last year, and I can safely say that there is no equivalent to Skid Row or the Tenderloin in this state. Anyone making that comparison should be ignored.

That said, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Atlanta embarked on a massive, federally funded program to scoop up as many people experiencing homelessness as it could and house them. While quite successful, observers say the void has been filled with people on the street who are much harder to serve.

The Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities issued 765 housing vouchers for people with severe and persistent mental illnesses in fiscal year 2021, said Maxwell Ruppersburg, the department’s director of supportive housing. Only a few more than 200 people actually got housing, even with money in hand from the voucher, he said.

The state had a budget of about $27.3 million for supportive housing in 2020. It spent $11.9 million. This fiscal year, the state cut the supportive housing budget to $20.6 million. The state has spent $12.9 million. It would have spent the other $8 million if it could have found people to take the money.

Supportive housing costs $15,000 per year, give or take. That’s about 533 people left unserved.

“You hear about waiting lists with other programs,” Ruppersburg said. “We don’t typically have a waitlist. But we have more of a problem with folks receiving vouchers, and then they can’t secure housing. And so the vouchers expire. Ultimately, they get extensions, but at some point they do expire.”

The reason, simply enough, is that few landlords want to rent to someone they fear will trash their building. Housing has been tightening in the Atlanta metro area for the last decade. There’s no shortage of renters without severe psychiatric problems willing to pay full price for an apartment. And there’s no mechanism in the law to force a landlord to rent to someone.

The easy cases are covered, more or less, at least until the eviction moratorium lifts. But the moratorium made landlords far more cautious about whom they will rent to, constraining supply all around.

Georgia’s housing policy rests almost entirely on private accommodation, subject to neighbors waging war on Section 8 at zoning board meetings.

“There is an element of housing discrimination that’s occurring. First, we never know about it individually,” Ruppersburg said. “But it’s fair to believe that that’s happening at a systemic level.”

Some people need more than housing to get healthy.

The state has a legal standard for involuntary commitment, requiring someone to present “a substantial risk of imminent harm to self or others as manifested by recent overt acts or recent expressed threats of violence which present a probability of physical injury to self or to other persons” or appear “to be so unable to care for his/her own physical health and safety as to create an imminently life-endangering crisis.” Colloquially, people working with mental illness on the street refer to this as a 1013, for the form used to commit someone.

When a cop rolls up to a person showing signs of psychiatric distress, they can make an arrest. They can’t 1013 them. Only a doctor, licensed social worker, family or marriage counselor, advanced practice nurse, or physician’s assistant can sign the form. That means a cop has to wait for Grady or the state to send an ambulance. Every time a clinician signs the 1013, they put their professional career on the line to say someone is unwell enough to require crisis stabilization whether that person wants it or not.

The bar, plainly, is very high.

The state legal standard requires hospitalization to be the “least restrictive level of care available for the individual” in order to gain admittance to a state hospital for crisis stabilization.

A hospital can hold someone against their will for crisis stabilization only for five days at a time. After that, either the hospital must obtain a legal order for involuntary treatment or the patient must consent willingly to a longer-term stay; otherwise, the patient walks.

Harmony walks fairly often.

No one with clinical responsibility for Harmony’s care would speak to me on the record about her case, citing privacy laws. The question of admittance has been a bit moot for the last few months, in Harmony’s case, because Georgia Regional Hospital has substantially slowed down its intake of new patients.

“[The Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities], along with our health care peers, has been navigating workforce challenges for several months now,” Ruppersburg said. “Our workforce shortages are exacerbated by the additional demands of quarantine units, when needed as a result of the Delta variant, and the increase in demand for behavioral health crisis services nationwide.”

In August 2019, Georgia’s state psychiatric hospital averaged about 15 psychiatric care beds out of service. This August, it lost an average of 99 beds.

A legislative committee has been reviewing Georgia’s civil commitment rules. This spring, the Georgia Behavioral Health Reform and Innovation Commission suggested changes to the state’s legal standards.

“This unreasonably high bar forces families and caregivers to postpone intervention until it appears that tragedy is on the verge of striking, even when it is obvious to all that the individual is in crisis and heading swiftly and inevitably to that point,” the panel wrote. “Forcing people to get worse before they can get help defies copious research demonstrating that the longer severe mental illness remains untreated, the lower the person’s prospects for recovery are. Of course, it is rarely possible to intervene at the very moment that disaster is imminent. More typically, the waiting allows disaster to occur, causing needless human suffering and victimization, and often damning the individual to face serious criminal charges.”

The panel said no legal or constitutional imperative requires “imminence” as a standard. At least 20 states recognize psychiatric deterioration as a good enough reason to hospitalize someone without their consent.

“Under the current law, the potential harms recognized as important enough to warrant intervention are, by definition, those that involve serious physical injury or death,” the panel wrote. “Unfortunately, this disqualifies many individuals in mental health crisis who may not be facing obvious external dangers, but who are powerless due to loss of insight (ability to recognize their own illness and need for treatment) to volunteer for care and protect their minds from harm that could be irreparable in the absence of timely medical aid.”

The state famously warehoused patients for most of the last century in ways that led parents to threaten their children with a trip to Milledgeville if they misbehaved. Today Georgia is under a federal consent order that requires the state to provide housing to people with serious and persistent mental illnesses who meet criteria laid out in the court settlement.

That settlement order defines much of the state treatment that doesn’t start behind prison bars. (For every person with a serious mental illness in a Georgia state mental hospital, five are in prison.) Only recently has the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities begun to reach beyond the agreement to arrange for some new kinds of social services support.

“Some of the systems have been established. For example, they’ve increased the number of [Assertive Community Treatment] teams and intensive case management teams, and they’ve created a housing program for people with severe persistent mental illness,” said Susan Walker Goico, head of Atlanta Legal Aid’s Disability Integration Project.

Most treatment for mental illness doesn’t require hospitalization. There’s a strong legal and medical bias for treating mental health in the least restrictive way possible. At best, that would be in one’s own home on an outpatient basis. Less restrictive than that might be supportive housing or a group home with a therapist, nestled in a neighborhood.

We don’t have enough of any of this.

Whenever someone proposes a supportive care facility or a group home, NIMBYs lose their minds and assemble in force to block it.

“To me, the problem is that the individuals who could benefit from all of these great services have not been reached,” Goico said. “There has not been a real concerted effort to identify people who need supportive housing and connect them to housing and community services that they need. I’m talking about, you know, people who are coming out of prisons and jails, people who are cycling in and out of the emergency department, people who are coming out of Georgia Regional Hospital, public psych hospital, off campus. So, I mean, there are a lot of problems actually making the connection for these people to the services that were created.”

Here’s the thing: In Harmony’s case, as with most of the extreme cases around Atlanta, there’s no shortage of contact. The problem is that it’s often the wrong contact.

A constellation of observers and interested parties has orbited Harmony for the last five months. Tammy Hughes, the social impact director for Central Atlanta Progress, has been demanding action from the city and county. The Atlanta Police Department employs a team of police officers specializing in homeless intervention who have been responding to calls about Harmony. Fulton County’s behavioral health department has been trying to coordinate services with Grady Health System and state hospitals about Harmony’s case for months.

Harmony has a caseworker. Caroline Henderson, a care navigator at the Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative, has been regularly visiting Harmony on the street corner for months.

Moki Macias, the initiative’s executive director, like other service providers, politely declined to comment for this story, citing patient privacy.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Roughly 18 percent of all arrests made in the city of Atlanta are divertible, according to figures from PAD. Almost all still end in an arrest, though, because the cops cannot be bothered to engage the program, or there is an objection from the arrestee or a victim, or PAD is tied up with another case.

I helped design PAD while I was working for Central Atlanta Progress, and I’ve counted on its staff more than once to help someone with a tough problem over the years. I have, in fact, stood in Macias’s offices next to the Greyhound station downtown screaming at hospital administrators over the phone because they wouldn’t admit someone who presented herself to me for help. And I have also watched that same person refuse to go with a Grady EMT team after an initial intervention.

Roughly 18 percent of all arrests made in the city of Atlanta are divertible. Almost all still end in an arrest.

The work requires the patience of an anvil. I can’t do it. My fear is that PAD can’t do it either.

By that, I mean that while Atlanta has consistently increased funding for the initiative over the years, it has also consistently expanded PAD’s scope. With each expansion, the public officials responsible for mental health and public safety have laid more of the burden of ameliorating deep social and structural problems on Macias and her staff of 32 administrators, care navigators, and harm reduction specialists.

PAD workers are among the few who go under the bridges and into the woods and behind the gas stations to make actual human connections with people in profound distress. Most of the time, they are responding to a call from Atlanta 311 or police for assistance with a problem that needs a social worker more than a cop.

Between 3,000 and 4,000 people are experiencing homelessness in the city of Atlanta right now. About one-third of them have a serious and persistent mental illness. One-third of them have a serious drug problem. Often those two groups overlap. PAD will go out to about 40 new people on the street in a good month, enrolling a dozen or so into its care.

The city of Atlanta relies on outreach from a handful of caseworkers at Intown Collaborative Ministries to reach chronically homeless people as well. (I have served on that organization’s board since 2016.) The state supplements this outreach with 10 three-person teams through Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness.

“PATH has often been seen as the primary homeless outreach resource in Atlanta when other programs and funding exist for outreach to individuals experiencing homelessness, including individuals with severe mental illness,” Ruppersburg said. “PATH represents an integral part of a larger puzzle.”

PATH teams are also supposed to be in the field, building relationships and connecting people with mental illnesses to housing. In practice, that has diminished substantially since the beginning of the pandemic.

PATH contacted about 20 percent fewer people in fiscal year 2021 than the previous year and enrolled about 10 percent fewer people into case management services, according to figures provided by the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. Given the 31 percent increase in crisis contacts, those numbers suggest that we’re not imagining things when we look onto the street and find more despair than we used to.

“Each agency has different staffing patterns which may reduce the ability to provide active field work to encampments,” Ruppersburg said. “We have PATH agencies/teams where three-quarters of the staff has been out of office due to Covid during some period during the pandemic. PATH teams have always had collaborative relationships with stakeholders and community partners providing homeless outreach.”

Statewide, about 1,547 people receive psychiatric case management through PATH. Half of the state’s PATH teams serve metro Atlanta. That means PATH serves about six times as many people as the pre-arrest diversion program.

Consider that PAD is on track to increase its caseload by about 100 clients this year. That’s roughly the same number of clients that PATH teams lost in metro Atlanta over the same time.

Far too many people in positions of authority are pointing to PAD as a sign of their police reform credentials and the salvation of serious community problems, while PAD is scrambling to serve the unrelenting avalanche of need around us amid structures that do not work.

I got a call from a Chicago number Thursday night from a woman squatting at a boarded-up house owned by Morehouse College. She had told me a few days earlier that in the course of survival sex work she had been raped repeatedly at the property. I wrote about it. Morehouse responded by sending workers to throw the squatters’ food and clothing in the back of a truck and bulldozing the tent encampment across the street.

All pretensions aside about social justice at the school that Martin Luther King Jr. attended, Morehouse has been acquiring nearby properties for 20 years in a neighborhood that has tumbled into despair and neglect, the better I think for the college to buy up land cheaply. They are not playing nice here.

Morehouse hit the squatters after dark, impeding news cameras and complicating any kind of social services relief. PAD stops taking calls at 7 p.m. Atlanta’s largest shelter, the Gateway Center, stops intake midday, as does Atlanta Mission. Only the Salvation Army shelter might take someone without special dispensations from social services managers, and they restrict people to 10 days of care a year without enrollment in a program.

I made some phone calls and wrangled an after-hours bed at a women’s shelter. But in the time it took to drive across town, she had disappeared.

Such is the system that left Harmony on a street corner. Harmony’s needs are diverse and unusual. The woman I hoped to help Thursday had common problems. Anyone trying to escape a beating from a drunken spouse might run into the same situation I did Thursday night on a rough block in south Atlanta, with everything that works closed for business. A functional system would not depend on personal connections to find help. It would have flexibility. It would be able to adapt.

Now consider how this system will react when 25,000 more people show up looking for help.

I fear what happens as the eviction moratoriums end and the piles of furniture left on sidewalks grow. Atlanta’s poor have long faced housing insecurity. Roughly one out of six households in the city had an eviction filing on their record before the pandemic. In the month after the Supreme Court struck down the federal eviction moratorium in September, landlords in Atlanta’s five-county region filed more than 11,000 evictions, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. That’s actually fewer than the same month in 2019, but the pace is accelerating.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, landlords filed about 100,000 evictions during the pandemic, moratorium be damned. Some went through because tenants didn’t really know their rights or because they had violated lease agreements. But courts simply placed many evictions on hold.

Until now.

About 62 percent of Georgians believe they may be foreclosed on or evicted in the next two months for being behind on payments, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted last month. It is by far the highest percentage in the United States.

There aren’t actually enough marshals to process all of the evictions that are coming. People will be forced from their homes in fits and spurts. Many residents will look for relief from Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs, which has a $1 billion allocation for emergency rental assistance from the federal government.

Good luck.

After eight months with cash in hand, the department had spent about 9 percent of its money. The federal government is probably going to claw some of the remaining cash back.

Almost none of the people knocking on the Department of Community Affairs’ door have Harmony’s problems. They’ll have different problems. And when those problems don’t neatly fit into existing lanes for help, people will fall through the cracks. The sheer scale of need will turn those cracks into chasms. I can’t tell how many new faces will be competing with Atlanta’s familiar faces for help.

We need to get better at providing assistance to people in need, fast.

Illustrations: Matt Huynh for The Intercept

The post Atlanta’s Mental Health Problem — and Ours appeared first on The Intercept.

Four years ago, Republicans and Democrats linked arms with residents from both sides of the border to form a human chain across the bridge in a show of “unity,” yet in recent weeks Del Rio has become a theater for a dramatic show of violence and force, as mounted Border Patrol agents charged at Haitian migrants while twirling their reins like whips. Some 2,300 law enforcement officers, said Mayor Bruno Lozano, had been dispatched to Val Verde County, home to roughly 49,000 residents.

“I don’t feel it’s in anybody’s best interest to come in mass movement like that,” he said, adding that it creates security vulnerabilities elsewhere. “If this is going to continue to be our response, it’s not a good precedent.”

Outside a shelter operated by the Val Verde Humanitarian Border Coalition, a local man carrying a holstered firearm said he was providing security to protect Haitians from hostile residents and outsiders. When Rev. Al Sharpton attempted to hold a media event near the border wall in solidarity with the Haitian migrants, he was shouted down by men who accused him of spreading racism. Volunteers in Del Rio collected donations and set out refreshments and snacks — for state troopers.

“Overwhelmed” was the word repeatedly used by federal, state, and local officials to describe Border Patrol agents, who officials said were caught by surprise and unable to address the influx of Haitian migrants.

But the arrival of Haitians was anticipated, and much of the chaos that ensued seemed preventable with basic planning and logistics. But in the scramble to contain the media crisis, the U.S. employed tactics that set off a cascade of repression and violence on both sides of the border. By allowing the situation to reach critical levels, federal officials created conditions that made a militarized crackdown seem inevitable, making criminals out of people asserting their right to seek asylum.

Almost 30,000 migrants, mostly Haitians, “were encountered” in Del Rio after September 9, said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a briefing, and more than 12,000 will have their cases heard by an immigration judge. But more than 5,000 of those asylum-seekers have been deported to Haiti, just weeks after the U.S. extended and expanded temporary protected status to the country. As Mayorkas stated in May, “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“The arrival of vulnerable asylum-seekers is not a crisis,” said Wade McMullen, an attorney at RFK Human Rights who traveled to Del Rio. “The militarized response and lack of preparation — that’s the crisis.”

Days after Border Patrol agents on horseback charged at Haitian migrants, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made four requests of the mayor to authorize state troopers to enter the city property to arrest the Haitians for criminal trespassing, Lozano told me. “It would have caused mass chaos,” he said during an extensive interview. A spokesperson for Abbott did not answer questions about the governor’s request to conduct arrests. Lozano said he stalled, telling the governor he was staking his faith on the immigration system to process the asylum-seekers.

After a massive deployment involving the Coast Guard, Texas National Guard, state troopers including air and marine support, and Customs and Border Protection, on September 24 officials announced that Haitians were no longer under the bridge. After weeks of a growing encampment and worsening conditions, everyone had been cleared out in mere days.

The aggressive response in Del Rio underscores an immigration system that prioritizes the spectacle of force over an investment in the construction of systems needed to process asylum-seekers.

The aggressive response in Del Rio underscores an immigration system that prioritizes the spectacle of force over an investment in the construction of systems needed to process asylum-seekers to conform to obligations dictated by international and U.S. law. Officials left little doubt that the aggressive deployment was designed to send a message of deterrence to others who might also seek aslyum.

“What we start doing to Haitians tends to spill over to everyone else,” said Yael Schacher, an immigration historian and senior advocate with Refugees International. In the 1980s, after the U.S. had experimented with imposing detention on Haitians, the policy was expanded to Central Americans fleeing U.S.-backed wars.

County Judge Lewis Owens, the top administrator of Val Verde County, described the state and federal law enforcement deployment as “amazing.” “We want to lean on law enforcement to stop flow,” he said, adding, “that said, there has to be a process to ask for asylum.”

Warning Signs

Despite claims that border officials were caught off guard, signs of the impending arrival of a large number of asylum-seekers were not hard to find. In the Del Rio area, the number of encounters with migrants had increased in 2021 over the prior year, with the numbers spiking over 1,000 percent by May, according to Customs and Border Protection data.

In May, Lozano, a Democrat, met with congressional Republicans and appeared on Fox News, complaining about “illegals” in town and criticizing the Biden administration for a lack of response at the border. “Unfortunately, at the time it was only right-wing media groups like Fox that were telling the story,” he told me, adding that “the policy needs to be reformed so ports of entry have to take them in legally and not be criminally charged.”

Two months later, Border Patrol agents detained hundreds of people from various countries under the bridge in Del Rio. Meanwhile, a video that captured Mexican immigration officials brutalizing Haitian migrants who were headed north circulated online. The Spanish newspaper El País reported that Haitian claims for asylum in Mexico had reached a record high. By September, Mexico had received 19,000 petitions for asylum, higher than any other nationality, following a trend of Haitians transiting through Mexico that began two years ago. Even so, U.S. officials repeatedly claimed that the arrival of Haitians on the border was a surprise.

Given that the Biden administration has continued the Trump administration policy of closing the traditional route of asking for asylum at ports of entry, asylum-seekers took to the river, setting the stage for compelling video footage of large groups of immigrants turning themselves in at the border fence in Del Rio, exciting viewers of Fox and Newsmax. In early August, Jorge Ventura, a contributor to the right-wing Daily Caller interviewed Del Rio residents about the “crisis.”

Around this time, said Owens, the judge, county authorities were informed that “caravans” of some 25,000 people were expected to arrive on the border.

The longer the Haitians were under the bridge, the more currency was extracted from their presence.

Weeks later, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recorded a video at the bridge in Del Rio, using Haitians suffering miserable conditions as a prop to talk about border chaos. Gesturing toward a crowd of what he said was 10,503 people, Cruz claimed the number had increased tenfold in one week after the Biden administration announced a pause to deportation flights following a devastating earthquake in Haiti. According to Cruz’s version of events, the hundreds of Haitians who had been camped in Del Rio sent word to friends and family in South America who arrived in one week.

Texas state police later posted images of troopers and their vehicles positioned with Haitians in the background, a show of force meant to deter other migrants. By that time, 700 troopers had been deployed to the county, a number that ultimately grew to 1,000.

The longer the Haitians were under the bridge, the more currency was extracted from their presence. An editorial in the newspaper Zocalo stated, “Someone has made a business from the issue of the migration crisis in the border state of Coahuila.”

Left/Top: Haitian migrants cross the Rio Grande at dawn from Del Rio, Texas, to Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 21, 2021. Right/Bottom: An exhausted Haitian father cradles his son in Ciudad Acuña, across from Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 19, 2021. Credit:Photos: Left/Top: Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images; Right/Bottom: John Moore/Getty Images

About 1,000 Haitians arrived in Del Rio in early September. When Lozano visited the camp on September 13, the number had doubled to more than 2,000. The local CBP port director called Lozano and said, “’Mayor, this is it, it’s happening now. There’s 30 buses coming this way.”

The worsening situation was apparent even to diners of La Cabañita, a taqueria along Acuña’s main tourist drag, where the television is permanently tuned to a live feed from the international bridge. A restaurant manager said he first noticed the growing crowd two weeks before state and federal agents flooded the region.

On September 15, with nearly 4,000 people under the bridge, Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz informed the mayor that construction of necessary infrastructure to process people would take 10-14 more days. “And I said, in a more colorful tone, ‘You don’t have 10 to 14 days,’” Lozano told me. “You had plenty of frickin’ time to fix this out.” Two days later, the number of people had increased to 14,000. Ortiz told a reporter he expected to clear the camp within a week.

“It’s not a lack of resources but a lack of priorities of screening asylum-seekers.”

“I don’t believe these capacity arguments anymore. It’s not a lack of resources but a lack of priorities of screening asylum-seekers,” said Schacher. “What I wish, is that people would be honest and say, ‘We are deliberately not devoting resources to asylum-seekers to send a deterrent message.’”

With the equivalent of a third of the population of Del Rio living under the bridge, Lozano posted a video stating that the local processing center was at capacity and asked: What was the Border Patrol supposed to do with the 20,000 who were projected to arrive?

The answer to Lozano’s question soon became clear. After the deplorable conditions made national headlines, immigration officials removed thousands of people from the camp within days. Deportation flights to Haiti began almost immediately. During one night, nearly 3,000 people were bused out. U.S. officials shut down the border and mobilized air support, the Coast Guard, state troopers, and the deployment of an additional 600 CBP agents and officers to the area.

Shortly before the camp was cleared, Owens posted a video describing the situation as “bat-shit crazy” and blaming the Biden administration for the arrival of the migrants, saying, “I’m going to go ahead and throw rocks at [Biden] because it’s his fault.”

When I asked about the lack of preparation or readiness, Owens said that county officials knew 45 days earlier that the projected caravans would arrive on the Acuña-Del Rio border. “What I’ve been told is that nobody expected it,” said Owens. Why there was no response or preparation? “I don’t have an answer,” he said, “I’m not going to throw rocks at Border Patrol.”

U.S. Border Patrol referred requests for comment to Customs and Border Protection, which referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security. Those questions went unanswered.

For his part, the massive government response within 48 hours left Lozano speechless. “Makes you wonder,” he said. “I don’t know how they explain it.”

For McMullen, the attorney at RFK Human Rights, the situation represents “a lack of transparency.” “They said they are overwhelmed,” he said. “Either that’s a lie or they don’t know how to treat migrants. It’s either gross incompetence or blatant lies.”

Fleeing From Texas

As word of the U.S. deportations spread through the camp, thousands of Haitians who had waited under the international bridge for processing fled back across the river to Mexico and took refuge in Parque Braulio Fernández Aguirre, a large park along the riverbank. U.S. authorities had closed the port of entry, and with the bridge closed, commerce ground to a halt between the U.S. and Acuña, home to at least 50 factories, many of which ship goods across the river. The U.S. told Mexican authorities that the bridge would be reopened once the Haitians were removed from the park. Meanwhile, the business community in Acuña demanded that Mexican officials do whatever was necessary to appease the Americans and reopen the bridge.

Mexican immigration authorities, backed by local police, rode through the city in caravans waging nightly raids. Agents abducted people from hotels, apartments, and even off the street. Haitians were loaded into buses and sent to Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, and Villahermosa in the Yucatán. The operations were reminiscent of the tactics regularly used by security forces a decade ago under President Felipe Calderón during Mexico’s “drug war,” when agents routinely grabbed people off the street and during traffic stops.

Andrés Ramírez, director of Mexico’s commission for refugees said in an interview with El Diario that Haitians should not be returned to Haiti because the country has been “absolutely devastated” by recent disasters, including an earthquake and presidential assassination. Less than a week later, the Mexican government announced the start of deportation flights to Haiti, which it termed “humanitarian returns.”

Thirty-year-old Jean was among those who joined the exodus from Del Rio. “It feels like a humiliation,” Jean told me. “I came from far for help and they rejected us.” Two of his friends had been deported to Haiti from the U.S.

When I met Jean, he had recently left Aguirre Park and moved to the Fandango, a nightclub with a massive courtyard that had been converted to a shelter. The relocation was not his choice. “They told us that they couldn’t reopen the bridge until we were gone,” he said.

We met at nightfall when hundreds of families and single men were settling into the Fandango. Tents had sprung up inside atop the old dance floor and along an enormous elegant bar. Volunteers unfurled more tents outside where armed soldiers with the Guardia Nacional roamed around. In the middle of the courtyard, children soon found spaces to play, and women rummaged through huge bags of donated clothes.

Left/Top: A member of the Mexican National Guard monitors a shelter for migrants in Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 24, 2021. Right/Bottom: A child plays on a mattress as migrants stack up water bottle packages at a shelter in Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 24, 2021. Photos: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept

Jean wore a bright smile on his weathered face and said he had traveled to the U.S. from Chile through Panama’s treacherous Darién Gap, through Guatemala along the Atlantic coast and into Tampico before arriving in Acuña and crossing into Del Rio. Five years ago he had fled Haiti, embarking on long journey that included studying Spanish in the Dominican Republic, where he also learned English. He then migrated to Chile where he worked in the hotel and tourism industry and became a bodybuilder.

Nearby, Rev. Marco Rivera, the pastor of World Harvest Church Mexico, checked in on new arrivals. Rivera had intervened at the park to persuade people to move to the refuge, telling them it had been established for them. But they had reason to be distrustful of Mexican officials and were reluctant to leave.

“They were promised certain things and they broke their promises,” Rivera told me while he toured the Fandango. “For example, that they were safe there at the camp. Then about three days ago, at 3 o’clock in the morning, they came with cars and three buses; they filled them up and sent them away.” The next day Rivera combed the city for Haitians who had gone into hiding, to try and persuade them off the streets into the shelter where they wouldn’t be alone.

The chaotic response by the U.S. resulted in confusion and misinformation that left Gaby and her partner DeYoung feeling deceived. “They said pregnant women could stay,” said Gaby, who is six months pregnant. But with the announcement of deportation flights, such exemptions to rapid expulsion went unstated. Some 44 percent of Haitians deported this week were women and children. “I am not certain of anything,” she said, adding that she has been too stressed to even think about baby names.

Seated next to her, James, a tall man with dreadlocks piled high on his head retorted, “Name the baby Del Rio.” His suggestion stirred withering laughs from others nearby. To describe how he felt, James pulled up a meme of two images: an 1830 engraving of the slave trade depicting a man gripping a whip, next to the photo of Border Patrol agents on horseback chasing people who hail from the first country in the hemisphere that successfully revolted against slavery.

The next day the shelter courtyard looked like a tailgate party. Mexican families from the city to the small farm communities had piled up food and clothes to share with the Haitians. A Mexican toddler queued up to kick a soccer ball while a Haitian boy played defense.

Two sisters, Susana and Leticia Reyes, served dishes of pureed potatoes, salad, and chicken from their van. The meals represented the combined efforts of five family members plus a cousin in San Jose, California, who sent the funds to cover the ingredients. They were also motivated to help after watching the treatment of the Haitians. “We had never seen raids like the ones done to Haitians,” said Susana. “We thought it was a type of persecution.” For two years they had noticed Venezuelans, Cubans, and Haitians living in Acuña, but they had not heard about any raids.

Across the courtyard, Yesenia Castro and her family and friends had traveled to Acuña from a nearby rural community with their van loaded down with meals prepared by seven families. They too were moved by the plight of the Haitians, saying they had all experienced tough times when a meal was nothing more than a tortilla with beans. And they were motivated by indignation over ads warning Mexicans that it was a crime to give the Haitians a ride.

Left/Top: Christela, 28, left, a Haitian migrant, does the hair of volunteer Celia Guerra, 52, as Veloude, 28, right, fixes Celia’s hair at a migrant shelter in Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 25, 2021. Right/Bottom: A Texas DPS helicopter is seen overhead from Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 25, 2021. Photos: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept

The fate of the Haitian asylum-seekers remained uncertain, and fear was pervasive. Jean and others were anxious about an impending visit by immigration officials that could result in their removal to the Guatemalan border. Twenty-eight-year-old Christela decided to pass the anxious moments by weaving an intricate and beautiful braid for one of the volunteers who had donated food. She didn’t want to think about the possibility of deportation, and she feared the bandits who were known for violence. The journey to Texas had been marked by fear and trauma; thieves robbed migrants and raped women. But for a few minutes, surrounded by people admiring her handiwork, she experienced an unfamiliar feeling: She felt content.

Two days after the camp was cleared, after thousands of Haitians had been deported to Haiti or bused from Acuña, two Haitians, one in red shorts and a red hat and another wearing a gray polo shirt, waded into the Rio Grande and turned themselves over to the Border Patrol as state troopers looked on, a military utility truck cruised by, and a CBP helicopter hovered closely.

The post U.S. Border Authorities Failed to Prepare for Influx of Haitian Migrants Despite Weeks of Warnings appeared first on The Intercept.

Of the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia — and of course, Osama bin Laden was a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families.

Immediately after the attacks, the Bush administration downplayed the Saudi connection and suppressed evidence that might link powerful Saudis to the funding of Islamic extremism and terrorism. The Bush White House didn’t want to upset its relationship with one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, which was also an American ally with enormous political influence in Washington, and much of what the FBI discovered about possible Saudi links to the attacks remains secret even today.

“What are they hiding? What is the big secret?” Terry Strada, whose husband was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, asked in an interview. “We’ve been operating on lies for 20 years. I’ve always just wanted to know the truth: Who was behind this, and how did it happen?”

Many U.S. officials have insisted over the last two decades that the American government is not really hiding any conclusive evidence of Saudi involvement, and it is quite possible that successive presidents, along with the intelligence community, have closed ranks simply to avoid revealing classified information. And it’s plausible that officials want to avoid exposing details that might be politically embarrassing for both Washington and the Saudis yet don’t prove that the Saudi royal family, the Saudi government, or other powerful Saudi individuals played any role in providing funding or assistance for the September 11 attacks. But the refusal to be open and transparent about such a fundamental issue has fed suspicions.

Two decades later, however, glimpses of material that have become public provide mounting evidence that senior Saudi officials, including one diplomat in the Saudi Embassy in Washington, may in fact have indirectly provided assistance for two of the Al Qaeda hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were the first of the hijackers to arrive in the United States in 2000 and lived for about a year and a half in San Diego beforehand.

The CIA had identified both Mihdhar and Hazmi as Al Qaeda operatives by early 2000, based partly on Mihdhar’s participation in an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, and the agency was tracking the pair’s international movements. But the CIA did not pass on that information to officials at the FBI or other domestic agencies at the time, and the two plotters were not placed on any watch lists that might have prevented them from entering the United States weeks later. It was not until weeks before the September 11 attacks that the FBI learned that Mihdhar and Hazmi had entered the country and began a belated and unsuccessful search for them, even as both men were living openly in San Diego, according to multiple government reviews.

While no smoking gun has emerged, the evidence indicates that the two hijackers had received logistical and financial support from a handful of people inside the United States with connections to Saudi Arabia, including a man in California whose family received tens of thousands of dollars from the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

The ongoing scrutiny of the Saudis’ role has been driven by a massive lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan brought by families of the victims, who maintain that senior Saudi officials were complicit in the attacks. The families were blocked for 15 years from even bringing their claims because of the “sovereign immunity” protection for foreign governments in court. In 2016, Congress overrode a veto by President Barak Obama to clear the way for the lawsuit by approving the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.

Lawyers for the families have now collected some 11,000 still-secret pages of internal documents from the U.S. government and have deposed numerous Saudi witnesses to determine what they knew of the hijackers’ plot, bolstering what they say is a trail of connections leading back to Riyadh.

“Our view has always been that there were agents of the Saudi government acting in coordination with one another … to provide a critical support network for the first hijackers,” Sean P. Carter, one of the lawyers representing the victims’ families, said in an interview. “There are a lot of contact points between the bad actors here.”

“Our view has always been that there were agents of the Saudi government acting in coordination with one another … to provide a critical support network for the first hijackers.”

Carter said that a verdict against the Saudis, finding them financially liable in the attacks, could result in “many billions of dollars” in damages. But he added that bringing out the truth would be just as important. “This is the only vehicle the families have to correct the historical record and achieve some sort of accountability on behalf of their loved ones,” he said. “That’s a huge piece of it.”

One of the most explosive pieces of evidence against the Saudis emerged only by accident. It came in a court filing by the Trump administration last year that was intended, ironically, to support the government’s arguments for keeping the FBI’s Saudi records sealed as state secrets. The Justice Department’s public filing, first reported by Yahoo News, redacted numerous sections on national security grounds but inadvertently disclosed the name of a former official in the Saudi Embassy in Washington — “Jarrah” — or Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, who worked as a senior diplomat until about 2000 under Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was then the long-serving Saudi ambassador to the United States. The document, citing a 2012 internal FBI summary, indicated that Jarrah was believed to have “tasked” two other Saudi men living in southern California “with assisting the hijackers” in San Diego, Mihdhar and Hazmi, who spoke little English.

The accidental disclosure, reaching inside the Saudi Embassy in Washington, could prove critical for the victims’ families in establishing that Saudi Arabia bears some responsibility for the attacks.

There has long been scrutiny on the two Saudi men who helped the hijackers in southern California — Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy, both of whom have left the United States. Bayoumi, a Saudi expatriate who was on the payroll of a Saudi defense contractor, befriended the two hijackers in San Diego soon after their arrival in 2000 and worked with them step by step to settle into their new lives. He helped them open bank accounts, apply for Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, find a place to live in San Diego, and even receive flying lessons.

Bayoumi later told the FBI that he had met the two men by chance at a restaurant in Los Angeles and agreed to help them as simple hospitality toward fellow Saudis. But the FBI was skeptical of his account, according to documents that have since become public.

The second man, Thumairy, was a diplomat in the Saudi consulate’s office in Los Angeles at the time. The FBI found extensive phone contacts between Thumairy and Bayoumi, and agents suspected that Thumairy also worked to help Mihdhar and Hazmi after their arrival.

Osama Basnan, a Saudi living in San Diego, may have also played a role with Bayoumi. Basnan’s wife received tens of thousands of dollars in checks from the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Saudis insisted that Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, sent the money as part of a charitable effort to help with medical bills for Basnan’s wife, who was ill at the time. But FBI investigators believed that a chunk of the money ended up with Bayoumi.

Other possible connections also led back to Prince Bandar, according to a 28-page section of a joint congressional inquiry in 2002, which was kept secret until its partial release in 2016. One intriguing piece of evidence came when an Al Qaeda operative was captured with the unlisted number for a Colorado company that managed Prince Bandar’s estate in Aspen.

The 28 pages, kept secret through the Bush administration and most of Obama’s, laid out a panoply of other connections between the hijackers and people inside or connected to the Saudi government, raising as many questions as they answered. Former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who was co-chair of the joint congressional review that produced the report, had pushed for years for it to be declassified. He said at the time that the release of the partially redacted document “suggests a strong linkage between those terrorists and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Saudi charities, and other Saudi stakeholders” and represented “the removal of the cork at the end of the bottle.”

But many thousands of pages of government files on the possible Saudi connections remain bottled up, even as families of the victims have pushed in court for greater access to them as part of their lawsuit against the Saudis. And Prince Bandar himself reportedly refused to answer questions from lawyers for the victims’ families as part of the recent depositions of Saudi officials in their lawsuit. For years, Saudi Arabia has strenuously rejected charges that its officials had any knowledge of or involvement with the 9/11 terror plot.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return messages seeking comment on the lawsuit or the ongoing questions about the royal kingdom’s possible involvement in the attacks.

Because of Saudi Arabia’s status as a critical Middle East ally, successive presidents have walked a diplomatic tightrope with Riyadh for two decades, selling billions in arms to the kingdom even in the face of human rights abuses and the ongoing questions about connections to the September 11 attacks. The alliance was tested again three years ago by another brutal act of violence — the killing and dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist. While the Trump administration drew wide criticism for failing to take any action over the assassination, the Biden administration publicly released an intelligence report earlier this year laying responsibility for the murder directly at the feet of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and issued financial sanctions against some of those Saudi operatives thought to have been involved. But Biden stopped short of taking action against the royal prince himself because of concerns about the damage it might cause to the partnership.

The final report of the 9/11 Commission in 2004, after a 20-month investigation, acknowledged that “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of Al Qaeda funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” Some of the more intriguing financial connections between Saudis and the hijackers were consigned to unexplained footnotes.

But some commissioners now doubt the report’s conclusions about the lack of Saudi involvement. “I don’t think we know all the answers. We got what the FBI had,” Jamie Gorelick said in an interview. “There were a number of trails that went dead on us, and it has been my assumption that funds from people in Saudi Arabia — not necessarily the government — flowed into the United States to help the hijackers,” she added. “They must have had some help, a network of support.”

Indeed, the possible Saudi connections had generated intense scrutiny from investigators at the 9/11 Commission and debate over the final conclusions. Staffers believed that they had found a close Saudi connection to the hijackers in San Diego, but Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the commission, and Dieter Snell, a top aide, had doubts and rewrote that section of the final report before it went to the printers, removing the most damning material against the Saudis, according to “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission,” a 2008 book by Philip Shenon, who covered the commission for the New York Times.

For years after the commission report, a team of FBI agents continued pursuing possible connections between the Saudis and the hijackers and built more evidence, but the Justice Department closed down the investigation without charges. In 2015, a federal commission revisited the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and findings, but on the question of complicity by the Saudis or anyone else, it arrived at the same place — even in light of potentially significant new material gathered by the FBI in its investigation. “This new information is not sufficient to change the 9/11 Commission’s original findings regarding the presence of witting assistance to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar,” the review concluded.

Most of the FBI files on the possible links still remain secret, even though the investigation has been closed. The Justice Department told the judges hearing the families’ lawsuit in August that the FBI would review the classified documents to determine what additional files could be disclosed publicly, and Biden signed an executive order last week formally authorizing that review process. But some victims’ family members say they are not optimistic that the review will produce much of value after fighting for 20 years — through four different presidential administrations — to find out what role Saudi officials might have played in the 9/11 plot. Some 1,700 survivors have been so upset by the ongoing blockage of the internal information in the case that they signed a letter to Biden last month asking him not to attend memorial events this week commemorating the anniversary.

“I want to know why the Department of Justice is protecting the Saudi kingdom.”

The possible Saudi connection overlaps with another lingering mystery from 9/11: How was it that even with the system “blinking red” at the CIA over intelligence indicating a possible attack, the CIA failed to communicate with the FBI about what it had learned about the Malaysia meeting and the fact that two of the would-be hijackers were in the United States?

The explanation that communication failures and turf issues between the CIA and the FBI were to blame has never satisfied former intelligence officials like Daniel J. Jones, who led the six-year Senate intelligence staff investigation in the aftermath of 9/11 into the CIA’s use of torture against Al Qaeda detainees.

“It has never made sense to me how the CIA requested surveillance of the meeting in Malaysia — this is after the embassy bombings and when there was a belief another attack was coming — yet nobody at the CIA officially relayed this information to the FBI, even after the CIA tracked two of the operatives to Los Angeles,” he told The Intercept.

Richard A. Clarke, counterterrorism director at the National Security Council in both the Clinton and Bush White Houses, has theorized that one explanation may come from Saudi Arabia: With the CIA prevented from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, it might have turned to a friendly foreign intelligence service — the Saudis — to track the movements of the two San Diego hijackers using Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy.

“Nothing in the joint congressional investigation, the 9/11 Commission’s work or the CIA Inspector General’s investigation explains why the CIA hid its knowledge about these two al-Qaeda operatives,” Clarke wrote after the partial release of the 28 pages on the Saudis’ possible involvement in 2016.

But a “false flag operation that went wrong” just might explain it, Clarke said. By this theory, the CIA — rather than going to the FBI for help — might have gotten the Saudi intelligence to have Bayoumi ingratiate himself with the two would-be hijackers in Southern California in 2000 and track their movements to determine why they had come to America. And in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA and the Saudis “would have good reason to hide it,” he said.

The lingering questions beg for answers, families of 9/11 victims say.

Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband was killed in the attacks, said in an interview that the families are fighting not just the Saudis, but their own government, which she said appears more intent on protecting an important foreign ally than aiding the victims’ families.

“We’re fed up. We want accountability and transparency,” Breitweiser said. “I want to know why the Department of Justice is protecting the Saudi kingdom. I’m being robbed of justice for the murder of my husband. It’s just a cover-up, I’m sorry to say.”

The post 9/11 and the Saudi Connection appeared first on The Intercept.

The question came via video call in late June, and I was, at that very moment, pickled in my non-air-conditioned home, gripped by a heatwave that would, before the week was done, kill about 500 people in British Columbia, Canada, and cook perhaps a billion marine creatures on scorching shorelines. Over the years, I have faced many such “why should I care” questions, and I usually try to reach for some kind of moral argument about our responsibility to fellow humans even when we aren’t immediately impacted. But because I was far too hot and angry for high-mindedness, what I had to say instead was “Give it a minute.”

What I meant was that when it comes to making a political calculus about what people will and will not accept by way of climate policy, it’s never wise to count out the Earth as a key actor. Our planet has a way of inserting itself into these calculations, rapidly changing the views of those who imagined themselves to be safe.

That has certainly been the case in Germany ahead of federal elections coming up in September. In June, the Green Party was sliding in the polls, under heavy attack as killjoys for carbon-pricing plans that would threaten beloved vacations in Mallorca (in response to the backlash, the party backed off those tough policies). Less than a month later, the political landscape looks very different. German officials expect the death toll from July’s floods to climb to well over 200 people, with many more injured and core infrastructure swept away. Climate change is now at the center of the German election debate, and the Greens are under attack from the climate left for going soft.

When I published “This Changes Everything” way back in 2014, I included a quote from Sivan Kartha, senior scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute: “What’s politically realistic today may have very little to do with what’s politically realistic after another few Hurricane Katrinas and another few Superstorm Sandys and another few Typhoon Bophas hit us.”

Sure enough, we have experienced another few of those storms, and then a few more. Recent flooding in Henan, China, is being described as the heaviest in 1,000 years, displacing some 200,000 people. It’s a good bet that it won’t be another thousand years before this kind of disaster strikes again. And then there is the fire and smoke, summer after suffocating summer. California. Oregon. British Columbia. Siberia. Little wonder, then, that a new Economist/YouGov poll finds that for the first time since it began the survey in 2009, U.S. respondents now rank climate change as their second most important political issue — topped only by health care. Climate even beat out “the economy,” while crime, gun control, abortion, and education all trailed far behind.

This kind of issue ranking is, of course, absurd. The fact that anyone thinks the stability of the planetary systems that support all life can be pried apart from “the economy” or “health” — or much of anything at all — is a symptom of the mechanistic hubris that got us into this mess. If our climate collapses, so does everything else, and that should be the beginning of all discussions on the topic. Still, the poll reflects the reality that something dramatic is changing in public perception: a dropping away of the fantasy of safety in the wealthier parts of the world, as well as the beginnings of cracks in the faith that money and technology will find solutions just in the nick of time.

Climate inaction in the rich world was never really about denial. Belgians and Germans knew climate change was real; they just thought poorer countries would bear the brunt of it. And up until recently, they were right. A few years ago, a well-known meteorologist in Belgium told me that her biggest challenge in communicating the urgency of the climate crisis was that her viewers actively looked forward to having a warmer climate, which they imagined as something closer to the Burgundy region of France. Similarly, Oregon and Washington state, just a couple of years ago, were coping with skyrocketing housing costs as throngs of Californians moved north. Many believed the predictions that the Pacific Northwest would be a big climate winner, with some mapping suggesting that the region would be protected from the drought, heat waves, and fires that were tormenting the southwestern U.S. — while a little more heat and a little less rain would make Washington’s and Oregon’s chilly, wet climates more like California in its glory days. It seemed not just safer but, to many flush with tech cash, also like a smart real estate move.

Well, it turns out that a planet going haywire doesn’t behave in linear ways that are easy for real estate agents or ultrarich doomsday preppers to predict. Yes, a warmer world means California’s temperatures become more like Mexico’s, and Oregon’s a little more like California’s. But it’s also true that everywhere turns upside down. The Pacific Northwest isn’t adapted to the kind of heat that is commonplace in Southern California and Nevada, and the lack of air conditioning is the least of it. Salmon — our region’s keystone species — need cool water to survive, and young salmon grow up in bodies of fresh water that this summer have warmed up like hot tubs. Scientists fear that many of the young fish will not make it.

If salmon populations collapse, that will trigger a cascade of loss reaching well beyond the commercial fishery. These animals are sacred to every Indigenous culture in the region; they are critical food to iconic (and vulnerable) marine mammals including orcas and Steller sea lions; and they are integral to the health of temperate rainforests, not only to the bears and eagles who feed on them but also to the carbon-sequestering trees they fertilize.

As for the idea that Californians should move north to escape fire, that dream has obviously gone up in flames. Last summer, deadly wildfires forced evacuations just east of Portland, Oregon, and as I write, smoke from the state’s Bootleg fire is contributing to the plume that blotted out the sun as far away as New York City. So, no, Oregon is not safe. New York is not safe. Germany is not safe. Nowhere that imagined itself safe is safe.

That was the message from a coalition of nations on the front lines of climate disruption. Responding to the German floods, the Climate Vulnerable Forum issued a statement, signed by Mohamed Nasheed, former president of the Maldives.

On behalf of the climate vulnerable countries I would like to express solidarity and offer my support and prayers to the people of Germany as they suffer the impacts of these catastrophic floods. While not all are affected equally, this tragic event is a reminder that in the climate emergency no-one is safe, whether they live on a small island nation like mine or a developed Western European state.

The subtext, of course, was that safety has long been a distant dream for people living in low-lying islands like the Maldives, and that record-breaking heat and floods have been stealing lives, from Pakistan to Mozambique to Haiti, for a good while now. Moreover, if rich countries like Germany and the U.S. had heeded the calls coming from countries like the Maldives (whose government held a desperate underwater cabinet meeting in 2009 in an attempt to raise the alarm about sea level rise ahead of a United Nations climate summit), much of the pain now locked in might have been avoided. The truth is that our planet and its people have sounded a symphony of alarms in past decades; the powerful simply chose not to heed them.

Why? It comes back to those stories so many of us in the rich world have been telling ourselves about our relative safety. That when the climate crisis hit, it would be others (read: Black, brown, Indigenous, foreign) who would bear the risks. And if that turned out to be a bad bet, and the crisis came to our communities, then we would simply move somewhere more protected. To Oregon or British Columbia or the Great Lakes or maybe, if things get really dire, Alaska or the Yukon. In other words, we would do precisely what North American, European, and Australian governments ruthlessly punish and vilify migrants on our borders (including climate migrants) for doing: attempting to get to safety. As water scientist Peter Gleick recently wrote, we are seeing the emergence of “two classes of refugees: those with the freedom and financial resources to try, for a while at least, to flee from growing threats in advance, and those who will be left behind to suffer the consequences in the form of illness, death and destruction.”

In this summer of fires and floods, it appears to be dawning on many that even this sinister form of climate apartheid is likely an illusion for all but the ultrarich. As Nasheed said, and as the New York Times echoed in an ominous headline overlaid on a photograph of a burning building: “No one is safe.” We are all trapped in this crisis — whether under that relentless pall of smoke, or in a heat that hits like a physical wall, or under rains and winds that will not stop. Even in the United States, built on the foundational lie of the frontier, the climate crisis can no longer be fobbed off on some faraway place or to some far-off future time. We are fresh out of “out theres” — whether spatially or temporally.

Except, of course, for Jeff Bezos, the man who just in case we missed his cartoonish pluri-planetary frontier fantasy, wore a cowboy hat and boots for the joyride and came back gushing about how he had seen the future, and it was toxic space dumps. “We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space and keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is,” he said moments after touchdown.

This, right there, is the crux of our crisis: the persistent fantasy, despite all reason and evidence, that there are no hard limits to capital’s capacity to keep turning life into profit, that there will always be a new frontier to keep the lucrative game going. As Justine Calma wrote in The Verge, “Sticking unwanted stuff in a place that’s seemingly out of sight, out of mind is a tired idea. It’s the same old mindset that has dumped industrial waste on colonized peoples and neighborhoods of color for centuries.” And it’s the same old mindset that convinced residents of Germany and the United States that climate breakdown wasn’t an urgent crisis — until it broke all over them.

If it were only Bezos who thought like this, we could ground him, tax him, and be done with it. But he is only the crassest manifestation of a logic that pervades our ruling class: from Sen. Ted Cruz jetting off to the five-star Ritz-Carlton in Cancún, Mexico, while Texas froze to Peter Thiel planning his luxury bunker in New Zealand. And so long as the rich and powerful continue to believe that there is an “out there” to absorb their messes, they are going to fiercely protect the business-as-usual machine that will keep the rest of us burning down here.

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“He waited until Cortez got in the darkness,” Antoine Bufford said. “You couldn’t see nothing there. Nothing.”

The 4-foot-9-inch space between 535 and 533 Bates Avenue is remarkably dark. Like a black hole, or a tunnel with no light at the end of it, the narrow grassy space runs about 32 feet before it dead-ends into a wood fence. That is where 24-year-old Cortez Bufford, chased by a man with a gun, couldn’t run any farther on that Thursday night around 9:30 p.m.

Eight shots were fired. Five, possibly six, of them hit Bufford’s body, front and back, from his left fingertip to the right thigh and upper back. Three shots to his face and head, one in each cheek, and the fatal shot to the upper left forehead.

“It was like he was target practice,” his father recalled thinking, as he looked over his son’s body at the family’s funeral home to “see everything that they had did to him.”

Wearing a yellow Missouri Tigers T-shirt, Bufford had been out that night with a good friend from his neighborhood, Terell Phillips. “Just a regular day,” Phillips said. “We was just chilling.”

“It was like he was target practice.”

In the course of the evening, they stopped at a BP gas station in the rental car his friend was driving for gas, a juice drink, and cigarettes.

The BP sits across the street from a vacant lot, close to the Mississippi River, right by a highway overpass. Threatened with closure by the city, it had been hanging on two years after being hit with a public nuisance notice for its high number of 911 calls, more than 800 calls for service in the last five years alone. Just two nights before Bufford’s death, a 14-year-old boy had been shot there multiple times during an argument.

When danger came, Bufford was standing behind the store, perhaps to smoke a cigarette away from flammables. He wouldn’t have wanted to stink up his friend’s nice rental car, his mother Tammy Bufford speculated. Or maybe he was taking a leak, as reports suggest, though no evidence of public urination was found.

Top/Left: A police car passes by 533 and 535 Bates Avenue, driving toward the BP gas station on May 17, 2021, in St. Louis. Bottom/Right: The BP gas station on Bates Avenue, seen on May 17, 2021, in St. Louis. Credit: Photos: Michael B. Thomas for The Intercept

“Hey man, stop pissing in public,” said a man in a white Chevy Tahoe. He was riding with another man. They pulled up alongside Bufford, according to reports. “Put your junk away.”

Bufford grinned and adjusted his gray sweatpants, but when one of the men opened the door of the Tahoe to approach him, his eyes widened and fear spread across his face, according to a video statement by one of the men.

That’s when Bufford fled.

Within seconds, the man chasing him pulled out a gun, video outside the gas station shows. Bufford, running for his life, collided at one point with the Tahoe driven by the other man. Bufford fell to the ground.

“They hit him with the truck. He got up and kept running,” Phillips said.

Bufford ran in between two homes on Bates but couldn’t clear the fence. He scuffled with the man who was after him, scratching him in the process, and broke free again. He ran across the street into another gangway until, unable to jump the fence, he couldn’t run anymore.

“I heard the first shot. It was a pause,” Phillips said in an interview. “Then after that, it was like Boom! Pause. Then it was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom … they just killed him.”

The medical examiner who performed Bufford’s autopsy ruled the manner of his death a homicide. That’s what forensic pathologists write, as a matter of course, when one human being dies at the hands of another human being. That part is no mystery. Bufford’s shooter has always been known to police. Because he is the police. Or, as reports refer to him, Officer #1.

In those reports, Bufford is “the suspect,” and what began as a “pedestrian check” swiftly turned deadly.

Two people, a white police officer and a Black man, each carrying a strong internal narrative about the other, are both reportedly, and legally, carrying guns.

They both carry something else, too: trauma.

“How do you fear for your life if he’s running away from you?”

In the blackness of the gangway, their fears collide. As space and focus narrow, it is hard to discern who, exactly, is in control of their actions anymore and who is captive of a neurological train of events with lethal momentum — an incident mired in political and sociological implications, where perspective dictates who plays the roles of the victim and the offender.

Law enforcement officers like Officer #1 are taught to preempt. To shoot first. To make it out alive in a society flooded with guns. In the close space between the two houses, there was no cover for either of them.

“They call it the old fatal tunnel, basically,” Officer #1 said in a video interview with force investigators about a month after the shooting. He fidgeted his fingers, as though uncomfortable about what he had just said. Experts in close-quarter combat often refer to such situations as the “fatal funnel.”

What happened in the gangway was also a kind of perceptual tunnel. Despite the implausibility of Officer #1’s ability to see within this space, his “tunnel vision” certainly took over, distorting reality by making him believe that Bufford was shooting at him, he would later claim. And within our current mode of aggressive policing, this space between perception and reality can produce, and will continue to produce, tragic, absurd — and avoidable — outcomes.

“How do you fear for your life if he’s running away from you?” Tammy Bufford, Cortez’s mother, asks. “At what point was there a threat? At what point was there a threat?”

Your Son Was Murdered

For a year and a half, the Bufford case has been suspended in the purgatory of unresolved police shooting cases. No charges filed. No determination made. Left in darkness, in a city with the highest rate of police killings in the country.

“That police officer needs to go to jail,” said Tammy Bufford. “You took an oath to protect and serve the community. You did not take an oath to be judge, jury, and executioner.”

Many fatal police shooting investigations around the country can take years to conclude, but the Bufford case is joined by more than 20 others in St. Louis — including seven in 2019 alone, Bufford’s among them — that have yet to receive a determination on filing criminal charges from Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner or, as the Riverfront Times and The Trace reported earlier this year, a review of any kind from the Civilian Oversight Board.

This inaction comes nearly seven years after a system was established to probe these cases, following the killings of Michael Brown by nearby Ferguson police and Kajieme Powell and VonDerritt Myers Jr. by St. Louis police. A byproduct of this flurry of reforms is a convoluted process, in which added layers of review can leave a case to crumble in the pipeline of investigations.

In 2014, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department created the Force Investigation Unit, or FIU, tasked with focusing solely on criminal investigations of police shootings. (Previously, there was just a review by Internal Affairs for policy violations.) Shortly thereafter, the Circuit Attorney’s Office entered into an agreement with the police department to review these investigations for criminal charges. After a ruling, the cases are supposed to head back to Internal Affairs and another internal board for policy and training review and, finally, to the police chief. Then, and only then, can the Civilian Oversight Board, established as the third prong of review for police shootings in 2015, receive the investigation.

This stands in contrast to how police shootings are investigated in many other large cities, as well as best practices from organizations like the Police Executive Research Forum, which recommends that the administrative and criminal reviews of shootings happen simultaneously.

“If you ask one entity, they’ll say it’s the other entity,” said Civilian Oversight Board Commissioner Kimberley Taylor-Riley, who reports that she has yet to receive a single police shooting case, not even shootings that are unquestionably closed.

This bureaucratic limbo is compounded by the fact that the Deadly Force Review Board, which reviews cases before they go to the oversight board, has not been convened in over two years. A new report released by Taylor-Riley this month points to Gardner’s office as the bottleneck.

Since taking office in 2017, Gardner has charged officers in at least three shootings: a nonfatal case from 2018 in which an officer shot an unarmed carjacking suspect in the back, a nonfatal 2019 case in which off-duty officers got into an altercation with a man at a bar, and another 2019 shooting in which an officer killed another officer in a game of Russian roulette.

“I don’t believe police can investigate themselves, and I have prosecuted police officers during my tenure and will hold them accountable just like anyone else,” Gardner said while campaigning for reelection in 2020. Otherwise put, as she told the Missouri Independent and Reveal, she cannot rely on investigations conducted by an officer’s “friends.”

Yet Gardner’s reluctance to make determinations in cases brings the investigative process to a standstill. Most cases remain indefinitely open when charges are not brought against an officer. This results in a backlog of cases. Despite there being an attorney and investigator within Gardner’s office to review these cases, there is no timeline to conclude them.

In a post-George Floyd reality (Bufford’s police killing preceded Floyd’s by five months), St. Louis elected Mayor Tishaura Jones, a progressive figure who quickly issued an executive order directing the SLMPD to share years of Internal Affairs data and other records with the oversight board. But ensuring civilian review of fatal police shootings, which activists have been calling for since the 1980s, may not be so simple. New legislation to streamline the review process would need to be passed by the Board of Aldermen. Despite a swing to the left, the board is still led by Lewis Reed, who has been criticized for proposing “stunt” police reforms that have done little to enact structural change. (Recently released records show that Gardner is facing state Supreme Court disciplinary proceedings for her handling of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens’s criminal investigation.)

And so the vast majority of these cases, like Bufford’s, remain in the dark, unable to move forward.

“We look at the news, and it’s constantly still happening to young Black kids and brown kids,” said Antoine Bufford, who protests with family members in marches for Black lives. “It’s just not going to stop.”

With the city silent on the Bufford case, police investigators have not reached out to the family with updates. Not since they were first called in.

That’s when they sat across from Lt. John Green, the commander of the FIU, a veteran homicide investigator. They remember the lieutenant telling them something rather peculiar for someone in his position, something that would constitute a rupture in the code of silence: Your son was murdered.

“I don’t know if he would agree with it again, but he said it,” Antoine Bufford insisted in an interview for this story last December, on the anniversary of his son’s death. Tammy Bufford, who was present during the police meeting, heard the same thing.

In fact, today, Green does not agree with it. He denies making the utterance at all: “I didn’t say that their son was murdered. I said he was killed. I said he was shot. … No, I don’t know where they got that from.”

Green declined to address any specific questions about the Bufford case, deferring to Gardner: “It’s her shop. She can do whatever she wants to do. … We’re not going to surpass her. That’s not good business.”

But, Green mentioned, he has inquired about the status of the Bufford case since delivering his findings to Gardner’s office.

“We’ve asked several times,” he said. “The ball is in her court. I can’t push her to do anything. She doesn’t work for the police department. She’s an elected official. We just have to wait.”

Baby Child

The youngest in a tight-knit family, Cortez Bufford spent all 24 years of his life in South City St. Louis, where he loved playing basketball in the backyard. They had a full court.

He was still living at home when he died.

“This is our baby child,” Antoine Bufford said of his son. “Can’t get rid of that last one.”

Cortez always loved fast cars. “I don’t think he knew how to drive slow,” said Monisha Merrill, his sister. His last car was a 1994 Firebird, which Antoine is trying to fix.

A “dork” with glasses who got teased in grade school, Cortez took his first job — apart from his neighborhood lemonade and hot dog stand operation — as a dishwasher at the Old Spaghetti Factory. He loved working there, his parents remember, and was upset with them when he had to quit to take a big family vacation to New Orleans. Photo ops with alligators during a swamp tour cheered him up, but it was a sore spot for years.

He would eat ice cream and watch movies with his nieces and nephews and house-sit for his sister, Ericka Freeman, who described him as her sidekick who “always went for what was right.”

Cortez later took warehouse jobs at FedEx and UPS, earning employee accolades for his forklift operation skills. But he lost his job of several years after failing a drug test for smoking weed, his father said.

One of his last jobs was working at Henry’s Funeral and Cremation Service, a business his cousin Brandon opened in late 2017. It was there that his parents would view his body for the first time and his homegoing service would be held.

The Buffords, like many Black families, had “the talk” with Cortez when he was young — the one about the police, what his rights were, and the potential dangers ahead. He didn’t have any trouble with law enforcement until April 2014, four months before Michael Brown’s police killing in Ferguson. Driving the speed limit, and after making a legal U-turn, Bufford was pulled over. One officer demanded that he get out of the car. After Bufford protested and asked why he was being detained, two officers pulled him out of the car using an “armbar” technique, a painful attack on the elbow joint. Eventually nine officers came to the scene.

The encounter received national attention due to a viral dashcam video of his beating and arrest. The video shows two of the officers kicking, stomping, and tasing Bufford as he screams. Then, almost two minutes into the beating, an officer says, “Hold up, hold up y’all, hold up, hold up. Everybody hold up. We’re red right now, so if you guys are worried about cameras, just wait,” before shutting off the video.

Only after the officers subdued him did they realize that Cortez had a gun. He wasn’t old enough to be carrying it. He was arrested and charged, but after the public fallout, the case was dropped.

The Buffords were in Chicago visiting family when they got the call that their son was hurt. When they returned to St. Louis, he was in bad shape. They observed gashes across his head and taser marks on his body. They took Cortez back to the doctor to get his hand recast. Physically, he survived, but “mentally, he was crushed,” Tammy Bufford said.

In 2015, Bufford filed a lawsuit against several officers, earning a $20,000 settlement. He had won, but, the family remembers, his lawyer warned him that he would be a target in the future.

In the four years that followed, Bufford was pulled over, stopped while walking, and harassed, his parents say. While there are no publicly accessible records or complaints documenting these events, there are reports of two arrests, one in 2017 for apparently not leaving a MetroLink station when asked and “pulling his arms back” (resisting arrest, trespassing, and marijuana possession) and one about three weeks before his death.

In that case, police reported that Bufford was driving a stolen car, an allegation not supported by the charges. When they tried to apprehend him, “the defendant began to flee on foot,” court records show. The officers caught up with him and made the arrest, putting a felony drug charge on his record.

Top/Left: Ericka Freeman, sister of Cortez Bufford, poses for a portrait on May 16, 2021, in St. Louis. Bottom/Right: Monisha Merrill, sister of Cortez Bufford, poses for a portrait at the Bufford home on May 16, 2021, in St. Louis. Credit: Photos: Michael B. Thomas for The Intercept

Quite Rational Fear

Dr. C.C. Cassell, a licensed clinical psychologist in California who specializes in trauma, has worked extensively with survivors of community violence, sexual violence, and combat veterans who have experienced war-related trauma.

Cassell is acquainted with the Bufford family, though she never knew Cortez. In 2020, she helped the Buffords file a sunshine law request with the SLMPD. Then she brought the case to the Invisible Institute and The Intercept for further investigation.

Cassell recalls how the hypervigilance of her veteran patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder often manifests itself by carrying guns. Not one gun, but multiple guns hidden throughout their homes, with at least one on their person at all times.

“Having these weapons made them feel safe,” Cassell remembers. “They felt naked without them. For me, the surprising part was how familiar this behavior was.”

It reminded her of the Black men she knew, who did not carry weapons with an intent or desire to harm anyone, but simply because they never felt safe anywhere: “Even in their own homes. … Having a weapon was the only way they could regain a sense of safety, albeit a fragile one.”

Undoubtedly, Bufford was a trauma survivor. According to Cassell, the way he reportedly turned away from the police vehicle when he first saw it, which Officer #1 later described as “kind of suspicious” — that action alone, from a psychological standpoint, foregrounds his desire to avoid police interaction.

“What protections do we as U.S. citizens have when the very individuals who are employed to protect us pose a threat to our lives?”

Phillips had seen Bufford’s fear of the police play out before. “Every time he seen them, I mean, like, every time he seen them, he just wanted to get away.”

Cassell says Bufford’s flight from police is “quite possibly a survival instinct driven by quite rational fear.” This leaves her to wonder: “What protections do we as U.S. citizens have when the very individuals who are employed to protect us pose a threat to our lives?”

Building on her deep experience working with trauma survivors, Cassell now focuses on helping people of color cope with race-related trauma.

“The concept of PTSD is meant to capture the aftereffects of trauma, hence the name ‘post’-traumatic stress disorder,” Cassell notes. “However, Black people in this country are facing continuous traumatic stress.”

Both Bufford and Phillips experienced such trauma. For Phillips, disturbingly, Bufford isn’t the first friend of his who has died from police gunfire after running down a St. Louis gangway: “When it’s constantly happening, I’m not going to say you get immune to it, but you don’t go through what you would go through if this was your first childhood friend.”

Cassell says it is “a sad reality” that Black men are often not given the opportunity to learn how to understand their ongoing trauma, “despite how pervasive this problem is.”

In Bufford’s case, Cassell could not diagnose him, but she does have a deep knowledge of his history and is struck by a pattern: He had no record of violence. Even during his previously documented police encounters, including one in which he was severely injured, he never attempted to use a weapon.

Also, notably, during his struggle to escape Officer #1 in the first gangway, when the officer pointed his gun at him “to protect myself,” Bufford did not pull the weapon then either, according to reports.

“What he wanted to do was get away,” said Phillips, who has his own problematic history with law enforcement, from a resisting arrest charge to drug and weapon convictions. Phillips insists that Bufford would not have pulled a gun on an officer: “He wanted to go home.”

Cowboys

Officer #1 and his partner that night, Officer #2, were part of the Mobile Reserve Unit, a crew of roving tactical officers that responds to hotspots. “Looking for trouble,” as one news article described it.

The unit has been around for more than 60 years. When MRU debuted in 1959, a writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described it as “the new shock-unit troop organized to back up district officers in the ceaseless war against crime.” Reports from its early years suggest a history of unconstitutional practices: In its first five months of existence, MRU officers questioned more than 28,000 people, the Associated Press reported. Over the years, the unit has worked alongside the SWAT team.

“They’re sort of the cowboys of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department,” said Rich McNelley, a former public defender whose cases at times involved MRU officers in the early 2000s.

The MRU has “historically been known as the jump-out squad,” said activist John Chasnoff, who has worked on policing issues in St. Louis for more than two decades. “There’s been many complaints over the years of them suddenly descending on people, harassing people, holding guns to their head, and other heavy-handed tactics.”

The fact that the unit has for decades also functioned as the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s SWAT team — for which they receive highly militarized training — is, “structurally, a big mistake,” Chasnoff said. An analysis by his group, the Coalition Against Police Crimes & Repression, found that in at least eight shootings between 2013 and 2018, the officers involved were either current or future members of the MRU and SWAT teams.

The mobile officers are not assigned to a district. They can go anywhere in the city, a style of hotspot policing that appears to have changed little over the years. A review by a risk assessment firm published last December found that the SLMPD lacks a coordinated crime plan, as the targeting of crime hotspots results in officers flooding already overpoliced and under-resourced neighborhoods. Operating like a blunt tool on violent crime, SLMPD’s “broken windows”-style policing within the MRU creates “significant blind spots,” according to the risk assessment report.

It Was Very Dark

When mobile officers roamed the area near the BP the night Bufford was killed, several of their in-car video cameras were rolling. For Officer #1 and Officer #2, their car video was never pulled. Investigative reports do not say whether it ever existed.

The only police shooting video saved on December 12, 2019, came from a different part of the city earlier in the day where a white man was robbing a White Castle. He pointed a gun at officers before running away, the video shows. Police then shot the man. In the knee. He survived.

In Bufford’s case, investigators retrieved scraps of dispatch tape that depict the killing and its aftermath. The audio quickly escalates into chaos, after the police-citizen encounter has already turned into a pursuit.

Within about a minute: “Got shots fired! Shots fired, shots fired!”

The dispatcher asks if it’s the officer or suspect who is down.

“We need EMS urgent!” an officer says.

“For an officer or suspect?”

“For the suspect. The officer’s OK,” one of them says.

“EMS is responding. District One’s en route. Are all mobile officers accounted for?”

“Everybody is OK.”

“That’s good,” the dispatcher responds.

But what happened in the gangway, in between these frantic dispatches, only Officer #1 survived to say.

While there are no known eyewitnesses, there are earwitness accounts from people in nearby homes and businesses. Their accounts of the verbal commands they heard Officer #1 give differ. Where they align, however, is that at no point did Officer #1 identify himself as a police officer, tell Bufford he was under arrest, or tell him that he had committed a crime.

Even if there had been eyewitnesses, the gangway was too dark to see anything, according to Officer #2.

“How was the lighting in the gangway?” police investigators asked.

“It was very dark,” Officer #2 said in a video interview.

“Did you have to use your flashlight to see down?”

“Yes, I did.”

“When you first got to the gangway, did you have your flashlight on?

“No, I did not.”

“How far could you see?”

“I could not see in the gangway” Officer #2 said. “It was very dark.”

The investigators asked Officer #1 the same.

“It was dark back there,” Green, the lieutenant, said. “Did you have any light or anything?”

“No, I did not have a chance to retrieve my flashlight … because the fact that he had a firearm was more important for me to have control with both my hands free,” Officer #1 answered.

Later in the interview, another investigator returned to the point.

“I noticed it was pretty dark,” he said. “How was your vision in that?”

Officer #1, along with his attorney, seemed to register the point of emphasis.

“I could see,” he said, nodding. “I could see.”

The FIU report documents the lighting conditions as being “during the hours of darkness” yet notes that “commercial grade streetlamps” were on at the time of the shooting. The report also mentions the existence of a neighbor’s doorbell camera that captured video of the gangway just after the shooting for several minutes. The video was turned over to the Circuit Attorney’s Office, according to the FIU investigation. The footage is reportedly not “very good quality,” which itself might testify to the poor lighting conditions. In response to records requests, the SLMPD said it didn’t have a copy of the video, and the Circuit Attorney’s Office denied the request, saying it is still investigating the case.

Whatever Officer #1 claims to have seen in the darkness, including Bufford looking at him “eye to eye,” what he says he thought happened in the gangway did not, in fact, occur.

He remembers Bufford shooting at him. He didn’t.

“To my mind, I thought he did shoot at me,” Officer #1 told investigators. “In my mind, I thought he was shooting at me too.”

The sequence of it was weird, he said: “I remember pop-pop [pause] pop-pop. … It wasn’t a smooth pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.” Then, he reiterated: “I do, I believe that he was shooting at me.”

“Do you think he fired first, or did you fire first?” the investigator asked.

“I think we were both about the same time,” Officer #1 chuckled.

Bufford’s six gunshot wounds, front and back, tell their own story, though it is nearly impossible to determine the sequence of shots.

“Most of the time you can’t reliably order the sequence of the gunshot wounds based on medical evidence,” said Dr. James Filkins, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy in this case. With respect to the question of whether Bufford was facing or had his back to the officer, based on the medical evidence, according to Filkins, “either scenario is possible.”

The first gunshot identified in the medical examiner’s report was the fatal one to the head. Some of the other wounds, the one in the right thigh and the two in his face, are consistent with Officer #1’s account. But it’s the gunshot to Bufford’s back that complicates his story. Based on the resting position of Bufford’s body — according to interviews and handwritten renderings of the scene, he was on his stomach, meaning that he would have fallen forward — a shot to the back complicates Officer #1’s statement that Bufford was facing him when he fired his police weapon at him.

Another complication to Officer #1’s narrative is the shell casings from his gun. While Officer #1 reports shooting from the mouth of the gangway, many of the casings were found toward the middle of the pathway, indicating that he may have been closer than he claimed.

Manbag

When Officer #1 attempted to stop Bufford behind the gas station, he noticed his “manbag” under his jacket.

“That right there kind of indicated in my mind that he might be carrying something,” Officer #1 said.

Video shows that Officer #1 pulled out his gun and pointed it at Bufford, after Bufford took off running. But he told investigators that he didn’t pull his gun out until after he saw Bufford’s weapon, an account contradicted by the footage. When Bufford and the Tahoe collided, on the front right passenger side of the vehicle, both Officer #1 and Officer #2 say in their video interviews, they first saw an extended magazine of a gun protruding from Bufford’s shoulder bag.

The two officers were only officially interviewed about a month after the incident, allowing ample opportunity to collect themselves, as well as potentially align and inoculate their accounts from criminal implications. And, due to Fifth Amendment protections, officers cannot be compelled to make any statements in the criminal investigation, or else their testimony is off-limits in court. In cities such as Philadelphia and Phoenix, however, officers have to give statements in an administrative investigation within hours of a shooting to determine if it was within policy, which happens alongside the criminal investigation.

But not in St. Louis: “Whenever he’s ready to be interviewed, that’s when I can interview him,” Green said. “There’s nothing you can do about that. I have to wait until he makes a statement.”

Officer #2’s statement is nearly identical to Officer #1’s account, but it is doubtful that he could have seen Bufford’s gun, on the opposite side of the Tahoe from the driver’s seat, when it — if it — became visible from his bag when he fell to the ground. Video from inside the BP station, which reportedly shows Bufford making a purchase, does not indicate that a gun was visible at any point. Also, two other officers who pulled up as Bufford ran away and collided with the vehicle did not say they saw a gun in statements made to investigators less than 24 hours later.

After the shooting, Officer #2 approached the gangway and rolled Bufford over, allegedly finding a gun underneath his torso, according to his interview. Officer #2 either threw or kicked it out of the way, he can’t remember.

The crime scene evaluation does not indicate how Bufford’s arms were lying when he hit the ground. It is not documented whether the satchel was already opened or if investigators had to unzip it themselves. It is also unknown whether Bufford was holding the gun as he fell, if he dropped the gun, or if the gun was still in his shoulder bag when he was shot.

Photos show a grisly scene, with unexplained blood smears on Bufford’s box of cigarettes, the reported gun he was carrying, and ambiguous blood impressions on Officer #2’s police uniform shirt and shoe. Prescription drugs appear sprinkled about the ground. According to Filkins, the forensic pathologist who reviewed Bufford’s autopsy for this story, Bufford had a “therapeutic level” of prescription Tylenol and codeine in his system, as well as marijuana, but “not a significantly high level.”

The detail that Bufford had a gun beneath him, however, corroborated by another responding officer, cements Bufford as a suspect in the police version of events, the “guy with a gun,” the “bad guy,” described in dispatch audio. Woven into the tight choreography of codes and signals, this narrative begins to take shape.

That Bufford was a “bad guy” is certainly the impression police left with lifelong Bates Avenue resident Randy Prater, former owner of the Tin Cup bar across the street from the incident. Prater is listed as a witness, though he didn’t see or hear anything take place. In an interview for this story, Prater said he heard that Bufford was “robbing a place.”

But when someone’s body has been riddled with bullets, it can be hard not to recognize their victimhood. The communications supervisor almost slipped up on the police radio herself: “If you guys didn’t hear, the victim — er, oh, not a victim — suspect is remaining on the scene,” she said.

Later, when Police Commissioner John Hayden came to the scene, where the TV news had set up, he sidestepped the Buffords, who were pleading to see their son, they say. Hayden wouldn’t stop to talk to them.

“The officer fired,” Hayden told reporters, and the people of St. Louis, on the news that night. “The officer’s not sure whether or not the suspect fired.”

By the time paramedics took Bufford’s body away, the winter grass was soaked with blood.

You Could Have Killed Me

Officer #1 has a name: Lucas Roethlisberger. He is in his mid-30s, married with kids, originally from Nashville. A strong runner, Roethlisberger was a cross-country and track standout in high school and college, and he is a Saint Louis University alum.

A 13-year veteran of the SLMPD force, he holds the department’s highest honor, the Medal of Valor, and colleagues picked him as their Officer of the Year in 2010.

“We have a great department,” Roethlisberger told the St. Louis Fox affiliate in 2012. “Leadership, integrity … you live with it right in your chest, where your badge is.”

Roethlisberger earned these distinctions only a few years into his career after nearly dying from an on-duty shooting. A bullet ripped through the carotid artery in his neck. He was in a coma, had two strokes, and went through nine months of rehabilitation.

“He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t write, couldn’t feed himself,” his wife Courtney told the TV news. For weeks, she slept by his side on a cot in his hospital room.

In 2010, Roethlisberger and a partner stopped a car for traveling with its headlights off. When Roethlisberger tried to search Kim Cobb, a Black driver, he pulled a gun on the officers, shooting Roethlisberger in the neck. He fired again, hitting Roethlisberger’s bullet-resistant vest and his right arm. Roethlisberger’s partner was hit in the leg and returned fire, shooting Cobb in the back.

Cobb had no record, other than a marijuana possession arrest, and he was under the influence of marijuana the night he shot the officers, his attorney said.

Both officers survived. Cobb pleaded guilty to the assaults. His attorney proposed a sentence of 18 years. Cobb got four life sentences instead.

Circuit Court Judge Dennis Schaumann, in explaining his decision to the court, had his own theory for why Cobb shot his gun. “The officers were wearing blue, and no other reason,” Schaumann said. “This is happening too much in society. It’s got to stop.”

During his victim impact statement, a “palpably angry” Roethlisberger spoke with “clipped words,” a journalist reported.

“You are a coward,” Roethlisberger told Cobb. “I have kids, for God’s sakes. You could have killed me.”

Schaumann had more to say, scolding Cobb: “In this life, Mr. Cobb, we all have to make choices, and you made a horrible choice, first of all, by carrying a gun and second of all, for using it.”

Staring down Cobb, Courtney Roethlisberger asked him: “Was it worth it?”

After the hearing, Roethlisberger told reporters: “We got justice.”

On A Mission

In the years since Cobb’s sentencing, Roethlisberger has stayed out of the news, despite shooting at another Black man on St. Louis’s North Side.

A separate FIU investigation from January 2018 indicates that Roethlisberger fired at — and missed — Tremayne Silas after he allegedly pointed an assault rifle at him, according to Roethlisberger. After Silas fled his car during an attempted traffic stop, admittedly carrying a gun, Roethlisberger alone chased him on foot as other officers chased the car’s passenger and tried to cut Silas off. Roethlisberger told investigators that Silas pointed the gun at him before jumping a backyard fence. In an interview with investigators, Silas denied ever pointing his gun at officers and said that officers tased and “kicked the shit out of” him after he had surrendered. Civilian video footage obtained by investigators, which captured only part of the incident, shows Silas running away from Roethlisberger. The incident, which also took place at night in a residential area, was never publicly reported.

Even after Roethlisberger killed Bufford almost two years later, local reporters didn’t pick up on the fact that he was the shooter. His name appears in public records about the case, but he wasn’t otherwise identified as Bufford’s killer.

His public-facing reputation still intact, Roethlisberger’s interactions with Black citizens have remained fraught. He is one of 343 officers named in an ongoing federal lawsuit for “kettling” — a controversial law enforcement tactic that prevents people from dispersing — during the 2017 protests that followed SLMPD officer Jason Stockley’s acquittal for the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, a Black man.

Roethlisberger has also received two citizen complaints that the department released. The first came from Colette Taylor-Moore in 2016, who said Roethlisberger called her teenage son off her mother’s front porch, harassing and threatening him with tasing if he didn’t come to him.

“He had a chip on his shoulder, an arrogance, like, ‘You can’t tell me anything.'”

“He was just on a mission,” Taylor-Moore remembers. “He had a chip on his shoulder, an arrogance, like, ‘You can’t tell me anything.’ He was brash, if you will. I would have understood his attitude more if he were being taunted or disrespected, but there was no need for any of that.”

The SLMPD would not release the outcome of Taylor-Moore’s complaint, but she reports that nothing happened in the case, except a call from someone who sounded high-ranking and explained that Roethlisberger had been investigating a disturbance on the block.

“That was not the truth,” Taylor-Moore said. “There was no one else there.”

In the complaint, Taylor-Moore says that Roethlisberger also harassed three other young men walking down that block, as her son later observed.

In a second citizen complaint filed by LaVictor Wallace in 2017, Roethlisberger was one of several officers accused of ripping out dreadlocks from the man’s head, after kicking in his girlfriend’s front door and forcing him to dress in her clothing.

“I was called a ‘bitch,’ so they said they’re going to dress me like one and gave me my girlfriend clothes,” Wallace wrote in the complaint. “I was beat and charged with a gun and drugs and they knew that I was innocent.”

The criminal charges stemming from Wallace’s arrest did not hold up in court. His complaint against Roethlisberger was withdrawn pending resolution of his criminal case, according to Civilian Oversight Board records. It does not appear that it was refiled. Roethlisberger did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Wallace did not respond to requests for comment.

Cream of Wheat

The morning before Bufford died, his dad made him breakfast. Oatmeal, turkey sausage, cream of wheat, toast.

“I’m up every morning fixing him breakfast,” Antoine Bufford says, speaking in the present tense, as though Cortez is still there beside him. “That’s what I do every morning for him, seven days a week, make sure he has his breakfast.”

They ate together. Antoine Bufford was leaving that day to visit Cortez’s brother in Texas. He tried one last time to get his son to come with him, to leave town.

“You should go,” he pushed. A fresh start, he said. It’s not safe here, he warned.

“I’ve just got some things I need to do,” Cortez told him.

His son didn’t want to leave home. But when Bufford gets to thinking about it, he feels that he should have made him leave.

“You’re his father,” he tells himself. “Don’t let him make those kinds of decisions, even though he’s grown.”

But Cortez didn’t want to be forced out. He would try to reason with his parents. “Why do I have to uproot my life?” he said. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

Just Put Him in Handcuffs

“Please stop! PLEASE stop!”

That’s what Roethlisberger said he remembers shouting as he chased Bufford into the gangway. Bufford turned around and faced him, Roethlisberger told investigators.

“At that time, I’m making a quick reaction in my mind that I need a back-up. I need the back-up. And then before I know it, that I’m backing up, I see him pulling the firearm from the bag and then turning over towards me and then at — ” Roethlisberger’s voice cracks with emotion in his police video interview.

He tries to start again: “And then at that time — ”

Another voice crack. Roethlisberger sits in silence with investigators for more than 30 seconds as he tries to regain his composure.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Then another 15 seconds or so pass before he resumes.

“So, I know he’s pointing the gun at me. The first thing, I pull out my gun. I’m left-handed, grab hold of the gun. I run. I’m aiming with my sights, and I’m backing up, and I said, ‘Drop the gun! Drop the gun!’ as loud as I could. And then, fearing for my life, shot a round, and I’m just backin’ up, shooting, backing up, backing up, because there was no cover at all.”

The fatal tunnel.

Roethlisberger backed up all the way to the corner of one of the Bates houses, but he still had his gun pointing at Bufford when he saw his partner in the Tahoe pull up. He kept holding down the position “because he could start shooting at us,” Roethlisberger said.

Officer #2 — his name is Martinous Walls — was the first to come to the gangway. Other officers soon followed. He had originally tried to cut off Bufford’s path by driving close to the other side of the wood fence. After hearing the shots fired, he looped back around to Bates.

“Luke, where are you?” Walls called into the darkness from the Tahoe.

“I’m over here,” Roethlisberger said.

When Walls hopped out and walked the length of the gangway, all the way to the end, he found Bufford’s lifeless body. He could tell he wasn’t breathing and figured there wasn’t anything he could do to render aid other than call EMS, Walls later told investigators in a video interview. Walls did not respond to requests for comment.

Two other responding officers showed up to the gangway.

“What should I do?” Walls asked.

“Just put him in handcuffs,” one of the officers said.

Roethlisberger offered to do it himself: “If you’re going to put handcuffs on him, then I’m going to put handcuffs on him.”

“No, no, no,” the officer told him, pushing him away, according to Roethlisberger’s video interview. “Back up.”

Shortly after his lieutenant came to the scene, Roethlisberger retreated to the Tahoe. Then, when EMS arrived, he was shepherded to the ambulance so the paramedics could take his vitals. To make sure he was OK, Roethlisberger remembers. He took off his duty belt and uniform shirt. And his bulletproof vest.

While paramedics evaluated him, his lawyer had quickly arrived to counsel him, beating force investigators to the scene. Then he had to go back to police headquarters to take a drug test and breathalyzer, before being relieved of his duties, Roethlisberger says.

“I went back home,” he concluded his statement.

It was time to take the investigators’ questions.

“When he pulled out the gun, was that something you were expecting?”

Roethlisberger told them he was hoping it wasn’t going to happen like that, but the situation was getting serious. Worse and worse, he said, and Bufford just wouldn’t give up.

In response to a request for comment, the SLMPD emailed the following statement: “As to your request regarding the case involving the two officers mentioned, the department does not speak on prior or pending litigation.”

Trigger Point

“We all carry out our prejudices,” said Alexa James, a police trauma specialist and CEO of Chicago’s chapter of the National Alliance for Mental Illness. “Fear is protective in many ways. It keeps us from things that have harmed us historically. But fear also reduces our opportunities to grow and expand and be uncomfortable.”

James has served on the Police Accountability Task Force in Chicago, created in 2015, in the wake of the dashcam video release of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times front and back by former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who was convicted for murder in 2018. In an interview for this story, James spoke in general terms about police mental health issues and trauma, though she did not review the Bufford case specifically.

Trauma changes the way we relate to other people. “Every single interaction you have and every experience you have, it colors the way that your lens of the world is. Period. End of story. It changes your perspective,” James said.

But trauma does not equal traumatized, nor does it lead to violence or reactivity, James explains. Individuals have different capacities for resilience: “We never know the trigger point of somebody, right? What is going to harm somebody and what is going to build resilience.”

Historically, police mental health services have not been well funded, but late in 2020, James became the new “senior advisor of wellness” to the Chicago Police Department, where she had previously provided trainings of officers for more than a decade. She also helped change the department’s policy for its Traumatic Incident Stress Management Program, where on-duty cops are referred after certain incidents.

“When you put two groups of people together that both feel really impacted by not having ownership and power and control, it gets really messy.”

“That cumulative trauma without any space in between to really debrief and process is not going to allow their brains to operate effectively because they’re in crisis mode,” James said. “They’re in fight or flight.”

A public safety issue itself, unaddressed trauma in officers is dangerous for both the individuals they engage with and themselves. Moreover, the collective trauma of officers interacts with that of communities they police, or overpolice.

“When you put two groups of people together that both feel really impacted by not having ownership and power and control, it gets really messy,” James said, noting also the significant equity issues for communities of color. “One group is starting with a deficit.”

In St. Louis, the police chief and then-mayor put out a joint statement in mid-2020, expressing support for the hiring of mental and behavioral health specialists to assist their officers. They added that de-escalation training, implicit bias training, and racial equity training had been mandatory since 2014 at the SLMPD and that officers are taught to use the least amount of force possible to bring an incident under control while protecting life. The use of deadly force, they wrote, is a last resort.

“The reverence of human life is paramount,” the statement reads. “The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department strives to serve the community by protecting life, preventing crime, and maintaining a peaceful culture through respecting the humanity, dignity and constitutional rights of every person.”

To that end, the department mandates that whenever possible, officers must identify themselves as police and state their intention to shoot — neither of which happened in the Bufford case.

In his video interview with investigators, Roethlisberger indicated that he had undergone some type of counseling after the shooting, saying that he had spoken to his “shrink” about what happened.

You Better Not Shoot Him!

Today, there is one streetlight near the gangway where Bufford was slain, but it only sheds light on the pavement directly below it, not on the space between the two houses on Bates. At night, that space remains inky black and impenetrable to the eye.

“Can I see him? Let me identify him. Let me make sure that’s my son,” Tammy Bufford pleaded with officers on the night of December 12, 2019. She tried to cross over the police tape. They kept her away.

No one confirmed to the Buffords that the man killed by police was indeed Cortez until inadvertently, a day later, a detective called her, seeking information: “Do you have any witnesses? he asked. Do you have anything?”

“First of all, I don’t have anything because you haven’t even verified whether or not it’s my son,” she told them. “So, you’re calling me on the phone talking about ‘let me verify some information,’ instead of saying, ‘Is that my son? Can I see him?’”

It wasn’t until Lt. John Green stepped in and asked Antoine Bufford to come to the station that police confirmed that Cortez was dead. The Buffords weren’t allowed to identify him at the morgue, they say. Instead, they had to wait even longer for the morgue to transport the body to the family funeral home. But Tammy and Antoine Bufford didn’t have to see their son to know what had happened to him.

Right after the shooting, Phillips came to their door. He told them: “The police just killed Cortez.”

Investigators never spoke to him on scene, even though they interviewed other earwitnesses. No one, not the police, not the Circuit Attorney’s Office, has ever reached out to Phillips, he said.

When he saw Roethlisberger, gun drawn, chasing a Black man, he didn’t realize at first that it was Cortez. Nonetheless, Phillips yelled out to try to stop what was about to happen: “Don’t shoot him!”

The last thing he saw was the two men disappearing into the darkness.

The post A Police Killing in St. Louis Remains Shrouded in Darkness appeared first on The Intercept.

Before the deadline, volunteers usually show up with trailers and pickup trucks to help with the move. They load up bicycles, coolers, and cats, as well as clothing stuffed in suitcases, plastic laundry baskets, and garbage bags. Then they drive around this scrappy city in the Sacramento Valley looking for a new place to set up camp — only to have police show up a few days or weeks later and repeat the whole wrenching eviction again.

In April, Chico’s anti-homelessness sweeps drew a harsh rebuke from a federal judge, who accused the city of willfully violating the law by flouting its legal obligation to provide viable shelter alternatives to its unhoused residents. Even in California, where the lack of affordable housing has reached epidemic levels in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chico — an outdoorsy college town — stands out for the ruthlessness with which its city government and police have turned on unhoused residents. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California recently condemned the city for failing “to address the needs of its unhoused population while simultaneously passing ordinances that criminalize everyday behavior unhoused people undertake to survive.”

Adding a dystopian layer to this story: According to a survey by the Butte Countywide Homeless Continuum of Care, about a quarter of Chico’s unsheltered residents lost their homes in the 2018 Camp Fire which burned the neighboring town of Paradise to the ground, taking the lives of 85 people. For this reason, Chico’s war on the unhoused may be providing a grim glimpse into an eco-authoritarian future, in which the poor victims of climate change-fueled disasters are treated like human refuse by those whose wealth has protected them, at least in the short term, from the worst impacts of planetary warming.

A Brutal Crackdown

Two and half years ago, when this region was hit by the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, few would have predicted that Chico would be the scene of this kind of repression. The city, in fact, made national headlines for the warm welcome it offered to the thousands of evacuees who fled the ferocious firestorm that had engulfed the town of Paradise. Multiple shelters were set up, and the parking lot of the Chico Walmart was transformed into a sprawling campground and soup kitchen, with residents donating tents and sleeping bags, volunteers serving hot food, and Chico State students organizing team sports and other activities for the Paradise kids. Many opened their homes and spare bedrooms to strangers. The outpouring of neighborly love and mutual aid was such a bright spot amid the fire’s destruction that it made the New York Times. Mark Stemen, a professor of geography at California State University in Chico, memorably put it to me like this: “A tsunami of fire and terror rolled down the hill from Paradise. But that tsunami was buffeted by a blanket of love and comfort” when evacuees arrived, by the thousands, in his home city.

When I first wrote about Chico for The Intercept, it was on the occasion of introducing a Chico Green New Deal, a landmark plan championed by the city’s then vice mayor, Alex Brown, developed in consultation with Cal State climate experts, and supported by the local chapter of the Sunrise Movement. Like its national inspiration, Chico’s framework married rapid decarbonization targets with plans for more affordable housing; a safe and sustainable food system; investments in “clean, 21st century” public transit; and green job creation, including projects earmarked for the poorest residents.

The experiment was urgent. Chico had just seen its population increase by around 20,000 immediately after the fire — in a city of roughly 100,000. Its city manager, Mark Orme, described the impact of the fire as “15-20 years of population growth overnight.” Adding further complexity was the fact that Chico had long failed to provide anything like adequate affordable housing for its residents, pushing many into the city’s parks and streets. Which is part of the reason why Butte County, home to both Chico and Paradise, had declared a housing “state of emergency” one month before the Camp Fire happened, a disaster that displaced an additional 50,000 people at its peak.

If affordable housing and transit solutions weren’t rolled out quickly, it was already clear that Chico would have trouble sustaining that initial wave of post-fire solidarity. In an interview at the time, Brown noted that a major lesson from the Camp Fire was that, in our era of climate disruption, “one of the things we can expect is displacement”: people being forced to move from one community to another. Which is why investing in affordable housing was included in Chico’s climate plan. For Brown, the Camp Fire’s impact on both Paradise and Chico showed the pressing need to build “communities that are more resilient to these shifts. … We can demonstrate what a Green New Deal looks like at the local level.”

That was November 2019. Today, Chico, with its brutal crackdown on unhoused people in the grips of a deadly pandemic and in the midst of serial wildfire disasters, does not demonstrate community “resilience.” It demonstrates something else entirely: what it looks like when the climate crisis slams headlong into a high-end real estate bubble and social infrastructure starved by decades of austerity. It also shows what happens when locally developed climate justice plans are denied the federal and state financing that they need to rapidly turn into a lived reality — precisely the gap that a new package of Green New Deal legislation introduced to the House and Senate is seeking to fill.

Chico demonstrates what it looks like when the climate crisis slams headlong into a high-end real estate bubble and social infrastructure starved by decades of austerity.

The combination of factors that has created this crisis in Chico is far from unique to Northern California. After decades of defunding social programs, coupled with wild overfunding of police, a great many communities across the country find themselves stretched too thin to absorb a major shock, particularly when it comes to housing and mental health supports. And without these other tools, every challenge quickly turns into a matter of “public safety.”

Since I reported from Chico a year and a half ago, this story has taken a series of grim turns. The city council, then dominated by cautious Democrats, was slow to act on Brown’s Green New Deal plans (“the political will was a little bit on the lackluster side” are her diplomatic words). Meanwhile, with Donald Trump still in the White House and Republicans blocking climate spending in the Senate, there was no way to get federal green financing quickly, particularly for affordable housing.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, throwing many more people in Butte County (as elsewhere) into various states of economic and social distress. Stemen told me local activists were all geared up to hold a big rally calling for a “Green New Decade.” He said, “We had banners and signs and sunflowers and were ready to rock.” Then lockdown happened, and the signs just sat in his yard, for months. Brown recalled that once the pandemic was declared, “there wasn’t much room for a conversation about planning for the future, when we were dealing with these immediate crises.” In late August and early September 2020, another wildfire struck the region, incinerating two towns and displacing yet more people in the county. The city opened up some hotel rooms to older people who were particularly vulnerable to Covid-19, but there were not nearly enough rooms for everyone who needed shelter.

Throughout this two-and-a-half-year period of shock after shock, housing costs in Chico have continued to soar. First it was in response to the uptick in demand from Paradise evacuees and people working on post-disaster reconstruction, which saw a spike in rents and made Chico among the hottest housing markets in the country. Today the boom continues, but now it is in response to a pandemic-fueled influx of Bay Area professionals and retirees looking to telecommute or chill out in a more affordable, low-key community. According to the California Association of Realtors, the price of a single-family house in Butte County increased by a staggering 16.1 percent last year, with Chico at the center of the frenzy. A headline at a local ABC affiliate summed up the market’s current trajectory: “Up, up, up.”

In a part of the state steeped in gold rush lore (Paradise crowns a “Miss Gold Nugget” as part of its annual Gold Nugget Days), local property developers and construction companies are welcoming high-end real estate as their modern-day bonanza. “They’re coming with cash, and they’re ready to go,” Katy Thoma, president of the Chico Chamber of Commerce, said of the big city migrants. Existing houses are flipping, and new ones are going up — but according to Brown, the city is “prioritizing luxury condos and five-bedroom, single family homes, with the Bay Area transplants in mind.”

This is not only a problem for Chico’s low- and middle-income residents who are getting priced out of their community. It’s a climate problem as well: Many of those Bay Area transplants will become part of the state’s growing fleet of “supercommuters” who drive hours to get to meetings at their company headquarters, adding to California’s transportation-related emissions, which in 2019 made up 40 percent of its total. And those emissions were rising.

Chico’s failure to provide homes that its residents can afford well predates the Camp Fire. According to a report commissioned by the city, between 2014 and 2019, Chico added 2,724 housing units geared for those with “above moderate income” — almost double its planned allocation. Meanwhile, it added just 15 units of housing for very low-income earners in that same period, just 1.5 percent of its planned allocation. In large part, this is because of zoning rules that favor single-family homes over apartment buildings. And it’s also because huge profit margins just aren’t there in affordable multi-unit housing. For instance, a plan to build six stories of affordable housing was recently approved in Chico — only to have the land put up for sale for $5 million. “There’s a lot of factors pushing up the cost of housing,” local housing rights advocates wrote. “One we can see here is the exaggerated claims of speculative landowners.”

After the Paradise fire, there was a profound sense of solidarity among the 27,000 people who lived in that wooded town. According to the public narrative, the community had suffered together and would rebuild together. Jessie Mercer, a local artist, put form to that hope when she collected 18,000 keys from homes, churches, businesses, and cars that had burned in Paradise and welded them into a giant phoenix that she unveiled on the fire’s one-year anniversary, an image that went around the world. That would be Paradise, many believed: a triumphant phoenix rising from the ashes.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. On the contrary, the fates of fire survivors have bifurcated sharply. Paradise’s middle-class fire victims have, for the most part, been able to move out of emergency mode and rebuild their lives. Despite warnings about ongoing wildfire vulnerability, hundreds of families have returned to Paradise — many to freshly built homes more spacious than the ones taken by fire, thanks to insurance payouts. Others have sold their land to eager developers and settled in less fire-prone areas nearby, including in Chico.

But Paradise previously had a large population of low-income residents as well, who lived for the most part in rented apartments and mobile home parks, overwhelmingly without home insurance. After being evicted from the Walmart parking lot to make way for Thanksgiving shoppers, many never did find stable homes. Instead, they moved through Chico’s shelters, and eventually its parks and waterways, their lives intermingling with those of Chico’s other unhoused individuals and families, all of them shut out of the city’s booming real estate market.

When Covid-19 hit, the city council instructed police to leave those urban campers alone, because moving risked increasing the virus’s spread. But the city failed to provide many camps with basic sanitation facilities, let alone create a sanctioned camping area, as many other cities have done. In the midst of this, a needle exchange program was introduced to help address high rates of hepatitis C. At the same time, local housing rights activists report that the police, prevented from evicting urban campers and many ideologically opposed to harm-reduction strategies for drug users, seemed to be on strike, refusing to enforce basic laws like keeping dogs on leashes.

Left/Top: A new suburban development of single-family homes is seen on the outskirts of Chico, Calif., on May 4, 2021. Right/Bottom: Luxury apartments for California State University, Chico, students are seen in Chico, Calif., on May 4, 2021.

This led to a head-on collision with many of Chico’s middle-class residents, for whom a walk, run, or a bike ride in the park provided the only sanctioned forms of recreation during long stretches of the pandemic. As frustrations over pets, garbage, and needles mixed with more generalized lockdown rage, the mood in Chico’s parks rapidly deteriorated.

It was in this context, ahead of the 2020 elections, that a local deep-pocketed political action committee called Citizens for a Safe Chico declared war on the encampments, painting the entire unhoused population of Chico as violent, drug-addled “vagrants” and “transients” (despite evidence that the overwhelming majority had been living in the county for years). With a budget of a quarter of a million dollars, Citizens for a Safe Chico spent the pandemic churning out sensational videos interviewing irate business owners and purporting to show the city going to hell. Some attracted tens of thousands of views. According to filings obtained by The Intercept, most of the PAC’s top individual and business donors have ties to the real estate, construction, or development industries.

The campaign was an unqualified success. On the same day that the country voted to unseat Trump, Chico’s city council, previously dominated by Democrats, flipped Trumpian right, with only two progressives left. Brown kept her seat but lost her job as vice mayor. The position is now held by Kasey Reynolds, owner of Shubert’s, a local ice cream and candy shop, who handed out samples during her campaign calling for a “Sweet & Safe Chico.” Her three-pronged “recipe” was: balance the budget, “support the police department,” and “suppress criminal vagrancy,” a plan that earned her the nickname “ice cream fascist.” (She strongly objects to the label.) In January 2021, the new council’s first act was to order local police to sweep the parks of campers. And then to do it again. And again.

Hardening Buildings and Hearts

The majority of those being evicted from their camps are not wildfire victims; most are survivors of more private, slower-moving disasters, including medical debt, domestic violence, and serious mental illness. Some, who lost housing to Chico’s post-disaster rent hikes, have been impacted by the wildfire indirectly. Others, however, have followed a far more direct line from the flames to the streets. A survey conducted on the eve of the pandemic lockdown found that 23 percent of unsheltered people in Butte County had become homeless in the Camp Fire, which is hardly surprising given that it incinerated 18,000 structures.

These are people like Jamie Jamison, whose home was destroyed in that fire, and who had been camping by a creek in Chico during the sweeps. “Everybody is struggling and we just try to grab our end of the rope and keep pulling you know,” Jamison told a local reporter. “We need food, we need medicine. … Financial aid or assistance from the government because this is a catastrophe.” Twenty-three-year-old Alexzander Hall, another Camp Fire survivor, was also uprooted in the sweeps. “We’re homeless. We’re not a disease,” Hall said. “You can’t just get rid of us and then expect us to be gone. That’s not the way it works. We’re people. We’re trying to survive. We’re like anybody else. Everybody is one paycheck away.” River Lebert, who has been living in Butte County for 25 years, longs to go back home to Paradise but told the Chico Enterprise-Record he never got a case worker to help and “I slipped through the cracks. … I’m still recovering from it.”

Many of these Paradise survivors received donated clothing, tents, and sleeping bags from Chico residents after the Camp Fire — only to have the Chico police threaten to throw those very items into dumpsters after the initial wave of empathy faded away. It’s a situation that raises troubling questions. Fire prevention specialists speak about the need to “harden” buildings against flames, everything from removing vegetation too close to external walls to replacing wooden roofs with clay or tile. But in Chico, it seems that some hearts are hardening too, an ominous sign for future disasters.

Left/Top: Community organizer Addison Winslow poses for a portrait at the Comanche Creek Greenway on May 4, 2021, in Chico, Calif. Right/Bottom: Tona Petersen, who was displaced from Paradise after the Camp Fire, poses for a portrait at the Comanche Creek Greenway on May 4, 2021, in Chico, Calif. Credit: Photos: Salgu Wissmath for The Intercept

When I asked local housing rights activist Addison Winslow how the community’s attitudes toward the unhoused could shift so quickly, he told me that one of Safe Chico’s talking points is that the city’s unsheltered population has suffered from something they call “toxic compassion.” The idea is that by attempting to help, a “culture” of drug dependence and camping by choice is being “enabled.” According to this logic, if camping is banned and clean needles aren’t available, then people will find shelter beds and get the mental health and addiction treatments they need. It’s a domestic version of the discourse of “deterrence” at the southern border: the idea that treating people with some modicum of humanity encourages them to take risky journeys. Cruelty, therefore, is the greater compassion.

Just like at the border, Chico’s crackdown, alongside its failure to provide services and affordable housing, is having fatal results. Makeshift memorials and a mural have cropped up around town to commemorate the lives lost. Local housing rights activists estimate that close to 20 unsheltered people in their small city have died in less than a year. Some on the streets, others in hospital or temporary shelters.

One, a 30-year-old man who survived the Paradise fire, died in a hail of police bullets. Since the fire, Stephen Vest had struggled with homelessness, addiction, and mental health challenges. According to friends, he attempted to get help several times, but Chico’s social services were overloaded. Last October, he experienced some sort of psychotic break and was brandishing a knife in a Petco. Three police officers showed up and tried to subdue him with a Taser. Then they shot him 11 times.

It would be far too causal to claim that Vest was a delayed victim of the wildfire, two years after the fact. A web of factors clearly contributed to his death. But the events are not unrelated either. As Laura Cootsona, executive director of the nonprofit Jesus Center told The Guardian, “Natural disasters are a new ticket to homelessness, particularly in California. It always disproportionately hits those who are already on the edge, who are paying too much for housing.”

Some lose their homes to climate crisis-intensified fires or floods; some lose them in the aftermath those events, to climate gentrification.

Criminalizing People

Chico’s war on unhoused people has gotten so extreme that several of its victims are now suing the city for its “methodical encampment eviction and property confiscation efforts,” winning a temporary injunction against the sweeps. Last week, a federal judge in Sacramento extended the ban, arguing that the city’s monthslong campaign to clear unhoused people from parks and other public lands violated legal precedent and possibly the Constitution. At the heart of his ruling is a 2018 case, Martin v. City of Boise, in which a Ninth Circuit panel ruled that local governments cannot prevent unhoused people from camping or sleeping on public property if they are not providing viable alternatives, like suitable shelter beds, or a sanctioned camping area. (In addition to a shortage of beds, some unhoused people say they can’t use traditional shelters due to tight curfews that can conflict with paid work, or policies that separate couples from each other, or health concerns.)

The ordinances Chico City Council passed to crack down on people sleeping in parks and sitting or lying on the streets, Senior U.S. District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. said, were “in violation of Martin v. Boise,” noting, “You can’t justify the ordinances that are violating the United States Constitution.”

Declaring himself “stunned where we are right now,” the Republican appointee, who has been serving as a judge in California courts for 25 years, told the city’s lawyer: “You can’t do what you’re doing. You’re criminalizing people … because they don’t have a place to live.” He instructed the parties to come together and find a shelter solution within the law. Undaunted, the council immediately voted down a motion to explore sites for sanctioned camping.

That motion was introduced by Councilmember Scott Huber, one of two opponents of the sweeps. Huber said that the end goal of the crackdown is not actually to encourage people to use shelters but rather to make life so unbearable for unsheltered people that they “just finally get so tired or so sick that they leave town, or worse.” This aligns with the ACLU’s assessment: “Rather than expand shelter capacity and services, Chico City Council is actively working to dismantle existing resources and thwarting efforts to create new ones.”

Winslow, the local housing justice organizer, told me that it all comes back to the booming housing market and the hope of turning Chico into “a luxury enclave” for big city professionals looking for a lifestyle upgrade; Chico’s unhoused poor, routinely smeared as criminal “vagrants,” are simply getting in the way.

This process of removal has harrowing historical echoes for one group of residents: members of the federally recognized Mechoopda Indian Tribe, whose traditional territories include the parks and creeks in what is now called the city of Chico. When thousands of settlers flooded into California in search of gold in the mid-1800s, it was Indigenous tribes, including the Mechoopda, who were seen as the greatest barrier to overnight riches. Under the official policy of removal, bands of white militias raided Indigenous villages and massacred indiscriminately, often trading body parts for cash rewards. Several noted historians have argued that these blood-soaked decades in California clearly meet the international definition of genocide, since the often stated goal was extermination of the “red devils.”

One particularly potent tool for removing Indigenous people in this period was simply labeling them as “vagrants.” Historian James Rawls explains that under California’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, “Any white person … could declare Indians who were simply strolling about, who were not gainfully employed, to be vagrants, and take that charge before a justice of the peace, and a justice of the peace would then have those Indians seized and sold at public auction. And the person who bought them would have their labor for four months without compensation.”

When I asked Ali Meders-Knight, a prominent Mechoopda tribal member and traditional ecological educator, what she made of the new council’s crusade against the latest group of people to be labeled “vagrants,” she was irate, and not only because she said that Indigenous people are overrepresented among the unhoused. Referring to the police, uprooting under city orders Chico’s poorest and most vulnerable residents from camps lining creeks in public parks, she said: “You did that to my ancestors. You ripped them from those creeks. This was the hub of the Indian killings.” The echoes with earlier eras of removal are, she said, impossible to ignore. “I have heard people say [of Chico’s homeless], ‘Load them up in trains and ship them to the desert.’ The language is almost the same. There is a historical story here. And it didn’t start with the Camp Fire. It started in 1850.”

Katy Thoma, the Chico Chamber of Commerce president, seems determined to make Meders-Knight’s case for her. In February, she gave an unusually blunt interview to local reporter Natalie Hanson, who has been doggedly covering the housing crisis for the Chico Enterprise-Record: “Every single day, we were having to step over people to get into our office in the day. … From an operational standpoint, it’s not OK for them to be sleeping in front of somebody’s doorway and affecting their (the business owner’s) ability to conduct business.” When the body of an unsheltered person was found near the Chamber, Thoma said, it was “very traumatizing.” Recalling this remark, Meders-Knight’s voice shook with rage: “You’re traumatized?” she said. “Learn something about our historical trauma.”

Thoma’s attitude does not represent all of Chico, of course, which has a large progressive community, much of which is solidly working class. Many recognize that the far greater trauma is losing one’s home and being continuously uprooted and harassed by police — on top of navigating a pandemic and very possibly having survived one of the region’s wildfires (not to mention the many more intimate traumas that have marked so many unsheltered people’s lives).

After a corpse was found outside her house, Chico resident Heather Bonea wrote a wrenching Facebook post reflecting on what had happened to her city: “A man died outside my home yesterday. Less than 50 feet from my door, he lay down in the night under the eaves of a church with nothing more than some heavy boots and a blanket. He never woke up. He died in the early hours of the morning and lay there until the afternoon before anyone noticed. … It is 1,000 kinds of wrong. But, dammit, I could have brought him an effing sleeping bag. There is nothing right about letting someone die alone on the cold concrete. At some point, we have to come to terms with the atrocities we commit, whether they be through ignorance, negligence, avoidance, or violence.”

It’s reactions like this that convince Alex Brown there is still hope Chico could choose a different path. The city that welcomed its soot-covered neighbors from Paradise with that “blanket of love” is still there, underneath the get-tough rhetoric. She says Chicoans voted for promises of cleanliness and safety, but now that they are seeing the human cost of trying to achieve those goals through force, many are “having a harder time looking away.” Yes, most want Chico’s parks and waterways to be clean, but that desire coexists with support for affordable homes and mental health programs for the hundreds currently falling through the cracks.

So Much for May Flowers

The challenge in Chico, as in so many other communities, is that people are beaten down by serial disasters: wave after wave of Covid-19, fire after fire, layoff after layoff. Jessie Mercer, who made that phoenix sculpture out of keys for the fire’s one-year anniversary, described the community at the two-year mark not as a mythical bird rising from the ashes but as “soul tired.” And there is no reason to assume that the pressures are going to let up any time soon. After a hot spring and deep into a drought, much of the Northwest is bracing for yet another catastrophic wildfire season.

“Here we go again,” Mark Stemen, the Chico State geography professor, emailed me last week, after the National Weather Service issued a “Red Flag Warning” for a region that includes Chico and Paradise. Low humidity and powerful winds had combined to create “critical fire weather conditions.” Stemen said he couldn’t remember getting a red flag warning “this early in the year.” The email’s subject line was “so much for May flowers.”

In a context this incendiary, both ecologically and socially, what is needed is not one-off aid from the government, Stemen told me, but intelligent policies designed to sustain social solidarities after the initial shock of a disaster. He stresses that Chico’s current divisions are the result of overlapping system failures: the failure to treat climate change as a true crisis and radically lower emissions accordingly, and the failure to support communities like Chico that are on the front lines of climate crisis-induced migration.

“We need to fireproof the homes and thin the trees around the forested communities,” he said, referring to the changes required to “harden” buildings in fire-prone towns like Paradise. “But what about the valley towns, the destination of climate refugees? We can’t harden our hearts to combat compassion fatigue. How do we increase our community’s compassion stamina?”

Compassion stamina. That’s a helpful way of thinking about the goal of public policy in our era of serial shocks. What that would mean for starters, Stemen said, is major investments in affordable housing, as well as in mental health to cope with the trauma of more frequent disasters. He also said there needs to be reliable financing for the kind of mutual aid efforts that tend to burn bright during the peak of a crisis and then burn out, in part because they are under-resourced. “What if government could lend support while letting the community maintain some self-determination?”

“We can’t harden our hearts to combat compassion fatigue. How do we increase our community’s compassion stamina?”

Addison Winslow, who was a part of Chico’s mutual aid organizing after the Camp Fire and has been working closely with the city’s unsheltered community, told me that it all comes down to building out more affordable housing of all kinds, fast — public, non-market, apartments, tiny homes — while removing the many zoning and regulatory barriers that favor single-family homes over multi-unit structures. And since we know that neither Covid-19 nor the Camp Fire will be Northern California’s last disasters, he argues that it makes sense to “overbuild housing” so that communities have some shock absorbers when the next wave of displacement, inevitably, hits. Right now, he said, “We aren’t preparing cities to take in the people that we will need to, given the fact that climate change is already pushing people around. People are going to want to have bikeable and walkable communities with affordable housing. We have to prepare.”

That’s a warning that extends far beyond Chico. Wildfires, hurricanes, sea level rise, and crop failure are already driving migration globally, some of it between nations but much of it within them. Projecting the impact of climate disruption on migration is necessarily inexact, since so much depends on how much global emissions are reduced in the coming decade. But even under best-case emission scenarios, sea level rise and coastal flooding alone will likely force many millions to move. Figuring out how to absorb sudden influxes of new neighbors with decency and hospitality — whether they are fleeing hurricanes in Honduras or fires in Paradise — is a central challenge of our age. Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on green housing, told me that “there is going to be another Great Migration. So where are people going to move to? What are the conditions in which moving is less traumatizing?”

It some ways, the question boils down to this: What kinds of public policies will support more people living on less land without turning on each other — and how can those policies simultaneously dramatically lower emissions so that the habitable space for humanity does not contract well beyond survivability? To put it another way: How do we rapidly decrease carbon emissions and economic and social stresses all at the same time?

Genuine Systematic Changes

Attempts to answer these questions are at the center of the flurry of renewed and revamped Green New Deal bills and resolutions introduced by members of the so-called Squad, all designed to push President Joe Biden to significantly increase his green infrastructure investments, rely less on market mechanisms like tax credits and more on direct granting to communities and expand his definition of infrastructure to include the kinds of social supports that encourage solidarity and discourage criminalization.

There is New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s “Care for All Agenda,” a resolution introduced with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, that would make major investments in mental health supports as well as all forms of social care and support. Bowman wrote of the resolution that “care investments are a crucial part of transformative climate action. … In fact, care jobs should be thought of as green jobs: they are already relatively low-carbon, and are becoming even more essential as we cope with the health impacts of climate change.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders also just reintroduced their Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which calls for well over $100 billion to be spent rebuilding and reimagining the country’s long-neglected government-owned buildings, transforming them into hubs for decarbonization and job creation. Though mostly focused on revamping existing housing stock, it would also clear the way for new public housing to be built in communities like Chico where the need is severe. The Climate and Community Project released a report alongside the bill, stating, “We need a massive federal investment that would finally provide American public housing communities with healthy, comfortable, energy-efficient homes — fighting racism, unemployment, the housing crisis, and the climate emergency at the same time and in the same places, and building out badly needed green community infrastructure.” Once again, the goal is to push Biden to significantly increase the portion of his infrastructure budget devoted to public housing.

Most relevant for Chico, perhaps, is the bill just introduced by first-term Rep. Cori Bush and co-sponsored by Ocasio-Cortez: the Green New Deal for Cities, Counties, States, Tribes, and Territories. The plan would direct $1 trillion in financing over four years to local governments with their own Green New Deal plans. The bill prioritizes affordable housing of all kinds, including transitional housing while upgrades are taking place, and it requires that participating governments take steps to prevent rising housing costs including through “rent control, rent stabilization, and other methods to prevent gentrification and stabilize property values.” It also specifically says that the financing cannot go to policing.

All of this is precisely the opposite of what has been happening in Chico, which has allowed housing costs to soar and looked to police to manage the fallout.

“We introduced the Green New Deal for Cities as a core piece of our efforts to legislate in defense of Black lives,” Bush told me. And she stressed that the crises it seeks to address impact all communities, including majority-white towns like Paradise and Chico. “This legislation, which makes massive investments in environmental justice, climate infrastructure, and housing are exactly designed for towns like Chico, California that need urgent federal support in the face of climate catastrophe. … Every city and town needs a Green New Deal to provide massive investments in climate and environmental justice rather than ineffective solutions to public safety that further criminalize and perpetuate harm on our most vulnerable communities.”

Would a program like that have made a difference in Chico? Would it have helped it to sustain that spirit of solidarity and mutual aid that was so powerful in the early weeks and months after the Camp Fire? I put those questions to Alex Brown. Her response was that it would have changed everything. “The money is really what I think local communities are starving for in order to make these genuine systematic changes.” Her Chico Green New Deal initiative stalled out, Brown recalled, “because of the lack of financing available to move those initiatives forward” — while her opponents hammered away at the claim that green infrastructure represents an impossible expense. But, she said, Bush’s plan would supply “the funding necessary, and all it requires of us is a little bit of innovation. … It lets us use our imaginations, use what we know about our community and our challenges and assets to make something happen.”

With so much moving at the federal level, and the courts pushing back against the hard-line approach to Chico’s housing crisis, Brown holds out hope that the vision she put forward in 2019 could get a second chance. The local Sunrise chapter has spent the spring holding demonstrations calling for green jobs and clean energy. “We’ve got no shortage of work to do to address the climate crisis and design a better society that works for all of us,” Sunrise organizer Amanda Reilly said. “Some of the work ahead includes building smart power grids, training and constructing buildings to achieve maximum efficiency, decarbonizing our transportation and agricultural sectors, cleaning up hazardous waste sites and habitat restoration.”

A few of these initiatives are already underway. One of the most exciting climate-related projects in Chico is led by Ali Meders-Knight. She has been working with state and federal agencies to reintroduce traditional Indigenous land stewardship practices, including native plant species that are fire and drought adapted, as well as the practice of “cultural fire”: careful, controlled burns that prevent excessive dry vegetation from building up and wildfires from burning out of control. She has trained more than 100 students, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, in various forms of traditional ecological knowledge as part of a certification program with Chico State.

The trouble, as Stemen points out, is that you can have all kinds of ecological work programs, but unless some of those workers are also building and retrofitting a whole lot of inexpensive green housing, “there won’t be anywhere for those young workers to live.”

The stakes in figuring this out are high. “This is only going to get worse over time,” Brown said. “The more natural disasters that you have — especially in areas like Paradise that were home to some of our lower income communities — the less access to resources that people have, and it’s going to start crumbling even more. So if we don’t prioritize wellbeing, which is the critical message behind the Green New Deal, then it’s going to get darker. And these problems are only going to become more glaring.”

It’s a test for the small but growing city of Chico — and for the country as a whole. Because this is a progressive community in a Democratic state run by a governor who has positioned himself as a climate leader in a country now led by a president who campaigned on fighting climate change and creating good green jobs. If Chico can’t forge a path out of fire that seriously battles carbon pollution and spiraling poverty, while beginning to repair historical harm, it’s hard to see who can.

This piece drew on forthcoming research on post-Camp Fire displacement by Jacquelyn Chase, professor of geography and planning, and Peter Hansen, information technology consultant, both at California State University, Chico.

Correction: May 19, 2021
A previous version of this story included two photos of painted murals by the artist Christian Garcia that were incorrectly attributed. The photos have been removed and replaced with an image of a mural completed by Ali Meders-Knight.

The post A Climate Dystopia in Northern California appeared first on The Intercept.

On March 29 in Little Village, a predominantly Latino neighborhood on the West Side, police pursued and fatally shot 13-year-old Adam Toledo in what the police department has described as an “armed confrontation.”

In the days since, details have trickled out in a manner that has done little to dispel the climate of distrust that now attends police shootings. On the contrary, the incident has reawakened the collective civic trauma inflicted by the 2014 police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

In contrast to the administration of her predecessor Rahm Emanuel, which withheld dashcam video of McDonald’s murder from the public for 13 months and then suffered an irremediable collapse of credibility when it was finally released, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration has said it will make relevant video footage public as soon as the Toledo family has had an opportunity to view it.

In anticipation of protests and possible civil unrest after the video footage is released, the Chicago Police Department has informed officers that days off will be canceled and that they will move to 12-hour shifts.

At an April 5 news conference, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said that “one of his greatest fears,” now realized, “has been a deadly encounter between one of our officers and a juvenile.” He then gave voice to the inevitable refrain on such occasions: “Our officers must make split-second decisions when it comes to the use of deadly force, and that is a heavy burden.”

Brown described the incident. “At approximately 2:36 a.m.,” he said, “ShotSpotter detected eight gunshots” at a particular location in Little Village. ShotSpotter, he explained, “is a gun detection system that operates through a series of sensors to identify potential gunshots” and “alerts officers in real time to the location of gunfire.”

Officers received the notification at 2:37 a.m. and reached the scene in less than a minute. When they arrived, Brown recounted, “they observed two males in a nearby alley. Both males fled. One was armed with a handgun. A foot pursuit ensued, which resulted in a confrontation in the alley.” An officer shot once, fatally striking Toledo in the chest. “A gun was recovered.”

In her remarks at the news conference, Lightfoot spoke forcefully of the urgent need for CPD to develop a new policy on foot pursuits. Although there is much we don’t yet know about the incident, she said, “one issue that is clear is that a foot chase was involved.”

The mayor went on to describe the problem. “Foot pursuits present a significant safety issue, officer safety, but also community safety for the pursued and bystanders,” she said. “And CPD engages in hundreds of foot pursuits annually and many every single day. Police get a call, they see a potential suspect, their adrenaline is pumping, and oftentimes they get separated from their partner, so they’re running on their own through a dense, often dark, urban environment. And to add to that the person being pursued often has a firearm or is suspected to and so does the officer.”

This combination of factors “creates a dangerous environment for all involved — the officer, the person being pursued, and any bystanders,” she said. “So now we cannot and will not push the foot pursuit policy reform off for another day.”

She might have added that foot pursuits most often take place in Black and Latino neighborhoods and that the frantic, adrenaline-saturated dynamics she evoked generate a mode of attention in which threat assessment is likely to be shaped by implicit bias. At such moments, “split-second decision” is a misnomer, for it is the sheer unthinking momentum of the interaction rather than a deliberate decision that results in the use of deadly force.

Does ShotSpotter Increase Danger of Police Shootings?

A good place to begin the reform process Lightfoot has called for would be a critical assessment of ShotSpotter. An ongoing investigation by the MacArthur Justice Center of Northwestern University Law School has yielded evidence that this high-tech tool is wasteful, alienating for community members, and generates intolerable risks of avoidable harms.

Once we know more about what happened on March 29, it may well prove to be the case that ShotSpotter worked as intended. That makes the Toledo incident a powerful occasion for assessing the hypothesis that this technology, as used by CPD, creates an unacceptable risk of producing “split-second” situations — situations that would not otherwise occur — in which officers respond to perceived threats with deadly force.

On their website, ShotSpotter claims 97 percent accuracy. That figure is not, however, the result of rigorous research. In a 2017, a ShotSpotter forensic analyst testified in an attempted murder case in San Francisco. When asked about the company’s guarantee of accuracy, he stated, “Our guarantee was put together by our sales and marketing department, not our engineers.”

Gunshot detection systems increase demands for police resources but do not result in reductions in violent crimes or increases in the number of confirmed shootings.

Remarkably, there are no independent, peer-reviewed studies of ShotSpotter efficacy. There are, however, two prominent studies that conclude gunshot detection systems increase demands for police resources but do not result in reductions in violent crimes or increases in the number of confirmed shootings. (Both studies were published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology; one focused on ShotSpotter in St. Louis, the other on a comparable gunshot detection system in Philadelphia.) For these reasons, a number of cities, San Antonio and Charlotte among them, have canceled their contracts with ShotSpotter.

The team at the MacArthur Justice Center has analyzed data on ShotSpotter alerts in Chicago over a six-month period, from July 2019 through December 2019. The fundamental problem with the ShotSpotter technology is that it detects loud noises, gunshots among them. In a dense urban environment, this produces a high percentage of “false positives”: i.e., alerts that may or may not have been prompted by gunfire but lead the police to find no evidence of a gun crime or any other criminal activity. There are different ways of calculating false positives. Taking a conservative approach, the percentage of ShotSpotter alerts that resulted in no case report being filed was 85.35 percent.

The percentage of alerts that resulted in no case report being filed is not only evidence of unreliability but also a measure of waste. During the six-month period analyzed by the MacArthur Justice Center, there were 9,961 ShotSpotter alerts. Of these, 8,502 did not result in a case report. In other words, on 8,502 calls for service initiated by ShotSpotter police were called out to a specific location to investigate and found nothing worth reporting.

ShotSpotter is operative only in low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and is coupled with software, also sold by ShotSpotter, that guides deployment decisions. The inevitable rejoinder will be: That’s where the crime is. Here, we encounter the circular logic of predictive policing by which supposedly scientific methods yield racist results, as overpolicing of communities of color drives an “evidence-based” dynamic that produces more overpolicing and attendant harms.

Those harms include the impact on targeted communities of the excess ShotSpotter-initiated calls for service that prove fruitless. Such interactions between police and community members are not only wasteful, they are also likely to be alienating after the fashion of blanket stop-and-frisk policies.

“Only people in the Black and Hispanic neighborhoods surveilled by ShotSpotter have to contend with the burden of thousands of unnecessary and potentially dangerous police deployments,” said Jonathan Manes, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center. “CPD’s use of ShotSpotter trades on a veneer of objectivity, but, like many high-tech strategies, the system ends up reinforcing racial disparities in policing.”

ShotSpotter dramatically increases the number of unnecessary police-community interactions and thereby increases the probability of bad outcomes that would not otherwise occur.

The large number of excess calls for service increases the probability of catastrophic encounters between police and community members. Again and again, incidents of police violence have arisen from relatively trivial occasions (e.g., a woman driving a car with a broken tail light, a man selling loose cigarettes, a child playing with a toy gun in a playground, et cetera). In view of the potential for any police encounter to derail, the first order of business is to reduce the number of unnecessary interactions. ShotSpotter does the opposite: It dramatically increases the number of such interactions and thereby increases the probability of bad outcomes that would not otherwise occur. This is all the more concerning in view of the aggressive manner in which officers, responding to what they believe may be gunfire, are likely to approach those they find at the location to which a ShotSpotter alert directs them.

Taken together, these findings are “shocking,” said Manes. “The ShotSpotter system in Chicago prompts thousands of deployments by police hunting for gunfire in vain. The system puts police on high alert, telling them that shots were just fired, but more than 85 percent of the time they don’t turn up evidence of any crime, let alone gun crime. These dead-end searches for gunfire happen nearly 50 times on an average day in Chicago. Each deployment is a powder keg situation for residents who just happen to be in the vicinity of a false alert.”

We don’t yet know what happened on the night police killed Adam Toledo. Perhaps officers arrived on the scene, found themselves under grave threat, and fired in self-defense. But it’s also possible that they rushed to the location of the alert and jumped out of their vehicle; that witnessing this, two individuals in a nearby alley ran away; that the officers pursued them and were carried to the fateful split second in which one of them shot the 13-year-old not by an immediate threat but by the blind momentum of the encounter.

Whether or not that happened on March 29, it’s all too easy to imagine it happening. In a society where there are more guns than people and in a state that permits concealed carry, it is arguably inevitable that there will be such outcomes, in view of the large number of excess police-community interactions prompted by “false positive” ShotSpotter alerts.

In response to a request for comment, spokesperson Sam Klepper stated, “ShotSpotter’s accuracy rate for detecting gunshots is 97% across the US for the last two years. This includes a false positive rate of 0.5%. Results are reviewed with agencies annually. We have more than 110 cities using ShotSpotter and extremely high customer satisfaction and renewal rates.”

This problematic technology is also extremely expensive. Chicago’s contract with ShotSpotter, which expires and is up for renewal in August, cost $30 million over three years. Then there is the cumulative cost of all the fruitless deployments in response to excess ShotSpotter calls for service. Above all, there is the incalculable cost of deaths at the hands of the police that could have been avoided.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing dated March 29, 2021 — the day Toledo was killed — ShotSpotter noted among risk factors for investors:

We may be adversely affected by ongoing social unrest, protests against racial inequality, protests against police brutality and movements such as “Defund the Police” or increases in such unrest that may occur in the future. These events may directly or indirectly affect police agency budgets and funding available to current and potential customers. Participants in these events may also attempt to create the perception that our solutions are contributing to the “problem,” which may adversely affect the Company, its business and results of operations, including its revenues, earnings and cash flows from operations.

ShotSpotter has reason to be concerned.

The post Chicago Awaits Video of Police Killing of 13-Year-Old Boy appeared first on The Intercept.

The bank of cameras that camped outside Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail was the sort of media frenzy you would expect to await a prime minister caught in an embezzlement scandal, or perhaps a Bollywood star caught in the wrong bed. Instead, the cameras were waiting for Disha Ravi, a nature-loving 22-year-old vegan climate activist who against all odds has found herself ensnared in an Orwellian legal saga that includes accusations of sedition, incitement, and involvement in an international conspiracy whose elements include (but are not limited to): Indian farmers in revolt, the global pop star Rihanna, supposed plots against yoga and chai, Sikh separatism, and Greta Thunberg.

If you think that sounds far-fetched, well, so did the judge who released Ravi after nine days in jail under police interrogation. Judge Dharmender Rana was supposed to rule on whether Ravi, one of the founders of the Indian chapter of Fridays For Future, the youth climate group started by Thunberg, should continue to be denied bail. He ruled that there was no reason for bail to be denied, which cleared the way for Ravi’s return to her home in Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore) that night.

But the judge also felt the need to go much further, to issue a scathing 18-page ruling on the underlying case that has gripped Indian media for weeks, issuing his own personal verdict on the various explanations provided by the Delhi police for why Ravi had been apprehended in the first place. The police’s evidence against the young climate activist is, he wrote, “scanty and sketchy,” and there is not “even an iota” of proof to support the claims of sedition, incitement, or conspiracy that have been leveled against her and at least two other young activists.

Though the international conspiracy case appears to be falling apart, Ravi’s arrest has spotlighted a different kind of collusion, this one between the increasingly oppressive and anti-democratic Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Silicon Valley companies whose tools and platforms have become the primary means for government forces to incite hatred against vulnerable minorities and critics — and for police to ensnare peaceful activists like Ravi in a high-tech digital web.

The case against Ravi and her “co-conspirators” hinges entirely on routine uses of well-known digital tools: WhatsApp groups, a collectively edited Google Doc, a private Zoom meeting, and several high-profile tweets, all of which have been weaponized into key pieces of alleged evidence in a state-sponsored and media-amplified activist hunt. At the same time, these very tools have been used in a coordinated pro-government messaging campaign to turn public sentiment against the young activists and the movement of farmers they came together to support, often in clear violation of the guardrails social media companies claim to have erected to prevent violent incitement on their platforms.

In a nation where online hatred has tipped with chilling frequency into real-world pogroms targeting women and minorities, human rights advocates are warning that India is on the knife edge of terrible violence, perhaps even the kind of genocidal bloodshed that social media aided and abetted against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

“The silence of these companies speaks volumes. They have to take a stand, and they have to do it now.”

Through it all, the giants of Silicon Valley have stayed conspicuously silent, their famed devotion to free expression, as well as their newfound commitment to battling hate speech and conspiracy theories, is, in India, nowhere to be found. In its place is a growing and chilling complicity with Modi’s information war, a collaboration that is poised to be locked in under a draconian new digital media law that will make it illegal for tech companies to refuse to cooperate with government requests to take down offending material or to breach the privacy of tech users. Complicity in human rights abuses, it seems, is the price of retaining access to the largest market of digital media users outside China.

After some early resistance from the company, Twitter accounts critical of the Modi government have disappeared in the hundreds without explanation; government officials engaging in bald incitement and overt hate speech on Twitter and Facebook have been permitted to continue in clear violation of the companies’ policies; and Delhi police boast that they are getting plenty of helpful cooperation from Google as they dig through the private communications of peaceful climate activists like Ravi.

“The silence of these companies speaks volumes,” a digital rights activist told me, requesting anonymity out of fear of retribution. “They have to take a stand, and they have to do it now.”

Referred to in the Indian press variously as the “toolkit case,” the “Greta toolkit,” and the “toolkit conspiracy,” the police’s ongoing investigation of Ravi, along with fellow activists Nikita Jacob and Shantanu Muluk, centers on the contents of a social media guide that Thunberg tweeted to her nearly 5 million followers in early February. When Ravi was arrested, the Delhi police declared that she “is an Editor of the Toolkit Google Doc & key conspirator in document’s formulation & dissemination. She started WhatsApp Group & collaborated to make the Toolkit doc. She worked closely with them to draft the Doc.”

The kit was nothing more than a Google Doc put together by an ad hoc collection of activists in India and the diaspora designed to generate support for the movement of farmers that has been staging enormous and relentless protests for months.

The farmers oppose a set of new agricultural laws that Modi’s government rushed through under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic. At the heart of the protests is the belief that by doing away with longtime price protections for crops and opening up the agricultural sector to more private investment, small farmers will face a “death warrant,” and India’s fertile lands will fall into the hands of a few large corporate players.

Many nonfarmers have looked for ways to help, both in India and in the global South Asian diaspora, as well as more broadly. The youth-led climate movement felt a particular responsibility to step up. As Ravi said in court, she supports the farmers “because they are our future, and we all need to eat.” And she has also pointed to a climate connection. Drought, heat waves, and flooding have all grown more intense in recent years, and India’s farmers are on the front lines of these climate impacts, often losing their crops and livelihoods, experiences Ravi knows about firsthand from witnessing her farmer grandparents struggle with weather extremes.

Much like countless such documents of the digital organizing age, the toolkit at the center of this controversy contains a buffet of familiar suggestions for how people can express their solidarity with India’s farmers, mainly on social media. “Tweet your support to the Indian Farmers. Use hashtag #FarmersProtest #StandWithFarmers”; take a picture or a video of yourself saying you support the farmers; sign a petition; write to your representative; participate in a “tweetstorm” or “digital strike”; attend one of the protests in person, whether inside India or at an Indian embassy in your country; learn more by attending a Zoom information session. An early version of the document (soon deleted) talked about challenging India’s peace-and-love, or “yoga & chai,” public image.

By arresting and imprisoning Ravi for an alleged role as an editor of the toolkit, she is in essence being criminalized for making India look bad in front of the world.

Pretty much every major activist campaign generates clicktivist how-to guides exactly like this one. Most mid-sized nongovernmental organizations have someone whose job it is to draft such documents and send them to potential supporters and “influencers.” If they are illegal, then contemporary activism itself is illegal. By arresting and imprisoning Ravi for an alleged role as an editor of the toolkit, she is in essence being criminalized for making India look bad in front of the world. Under that definition, all international human rights work would need to be shut down, since that work rarely presents governments in a flattering light.

This point was made forcefully by the judge who ruled on Ravi’s bail: “Citizens are conscience keepers of government in any democratic Nation. They cannot be put behind the bars simply because they choose to disagree with the state policies,” he wrote. As for sharing the toolkit with Thunberg, “the freedom of speech and expression includes the right to seek a global audience.”

This seems obvious. Yet somehow this most benign of documents has been latched onto by multiple government officials as something far more nefarious. General VK Singh, Modi’s minister of state for road transport and highways, wrote in a Facebook post that the toolkit “revealed the real designs of a conspiracy at an international level against India. Need to investigate the parties which are pulling the strings of this evil machinery. Instructions were laid out clearly as to the ‘how’, ‘when’ and ‘what’. Conspiracies at this scale often get exposed.”

The Delhi police quickly took its cue and set out to find evidence of this international conspiracy to “defame the country” and undermine the government, using a draconian colonial-era sedition law. But it didn’t stop there. The toolkit also stands accused of being part of a secret plot to break India apart and form a Sikh state called Khalistan (more sedition), because a Vancouver-based Indo-Canadian who helped put it together has expressed some sympathy for the idea of an independent Sikh homeland (not a crime and nowhere mentioned in the toolkit). And remarkably, for one Google Doc that the police claim was mainly written in Canada, this same toolkit stands accused of inciting and possibly plotting violence at a large farmers’ “tractor rally” in Delhi on January 26.

For weeks, these claims have gone viral online, much of it under coordinated hashtag campaigns spearheaded by India’s Ministry of External Affairs and faithfully echoed by top Bollywood and cricket stars. Anil Vij, a government minister in the state of Haryana, tweeted in Hindi that “Whoever has seeds of anti-nationalism in their mind has to be destroyed from the roots, be it #Disha_Ravi or anyone else.” Challenged as an obvious example of hate speech by a powerful figure, Twitter claimed that the post did not violate its policies and left it up.

Indian print and broadcast media has relentlessly echoed the preposterous charges of sedition, with well over 100 stories about Ravi and the toolkit appearing in the Times of India alone. Television news shows have run crime-stopper-style exposés of the international toolkit “conspiracy.” Not surprisingly, the rage has spilled out into the streets, with photos of Thunberg and Rihanna (who also tweeted in support of the farmers) burned at nationalist rallies.

Modi himself has even weighed in, speaking of enemies who have “stooped so low that they are not sparing even Indian tea” — widely taken as a reference to the deleted “yoga & chai” line.

And then, earlier this week, the whole frothy mess seem to fall flat. Rana, in his order releasing Ravi, wrote that “perusal of the said ‘Toolkit’ reveals that any call for any kind of violence is conspicuously absent.” The claim that the kit was a secessionist plot was also entirely unproven, he wrote, an elaborate guilt-by-association inference.

As for the charge that disseminating critical information about India’s treatment of farmers and human rights defenders to prominent activists like Thunberg constitutes “sedition,” the judge was particularly harsh. “The offence of sedition cannot be invoked to minister to the wounded vanity of the governments.”

The case is ongoing, but the ruling represents a major blow to the government and a vindication for the farmer’s movement and the solidarity campaigns supporting them. However, it is hardly a victory. Even if the toolkit case loses steam as a result of the judge’s slap-down, it is just one of hundreds of campaigns that the Indian government is waging to hunt down activists, organizers, and journalists. Labor organizer Nodeep Kaur, one year older than Ravi, was also jailed for her support of the farmers. Just released on bail, Kaur claimed in court that she had been badly beaten while in police custody. Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers remain behind bars and some of those arrested have disappeared.

The real threat that the toolkit represented to Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was always, at root, about the power of the farmers’ movement.

The real threat that the toolkit represented to Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, was always, at root, about the power of the farmers’ movement. Modi’s political project represents a powerful merger of unleashed Hindu chauvinism with highly concentrated corporate power. The farmers challenge that dual project, both in their insistence that food should stay outside market logics and in the movement’s proven ability to build power across the religious, ethnic, and geographic divisions that are the lifeblood of Modi’s rise to power.

Ravinder Kaur, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and the author of “Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India,” writes that the farmers are “perhaps the largest mass mobilisation in post-colonial India’s history, one that spans rural and urban populations, and conjoins the revolt against deregulated capitalism to the struggle for civil liberties.” For Modi’s powerful merger of transnational capital with a hypernationalistic state, “the anti-farm law mobilisation poses the most sustained and direct challenge to this alliance yet.”

Protests by farmers in and around Delhi have been met with water cannons, tear gas, and mass arrests. But they keep coming, too big to defeat with force alone. That is why the Modi government has been so determined to find ways to undermine the movement and suppress its message, repeatedly blocking the internet ahead of protests and successfully pressuring Twitter to cancel over a thousand pro-farmer accounts. It is also why Modi has sought to muddy the waters with tales of devious toolkits and international conspiracies.

An open letter signed by dozens of Indian environmental activists after Ravi’s arrest made this point: “[T]he current actions of the Central Government are diversionary tactics to distract people from real issues like the ever-rising cost of fuel and essential items, the widespread unemployment and distress caused due to the lockdown without a plan, and the alarming state of the environment.”

The Modi government is attempting to drag the public debate away from terrain where it is obviously weak and move it to the ground on which every ethnonationalist project thrives.

It is this quest for a political diversion, in other words, that helps explain how a simple solidarity campaign has been recast as a secret plot to break India apart and incite violence from abroad. The Modi government is attempting to drag the public debate away from terrain where it is glaringly weak — meeting people’s basic needs during an economic crisis and pandemic — and move it to the ground on which every ethnonationalist project thrives: us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, patriots versus seditious traitors.

In this familiar maneuver, Ravi and the broader youth climate movement were simply collateral damage.

Yet the damage done is considerable, and not only because the interrogations are ongoing and Ravi’s return to jail remains distinctly possible. As the joint letter from Indian environmental advocates states, her arrest and imprisonment have already served a purpose: “The Government’s heavy-handedness are clearly focused on terrorising and traumatising these brave young people for speaking truth to power, and amounts to teaching them a lesson.”

The still wider damage is in the chill the entire toolkit controversy has placed over political dissent in India — with the silent complicity of the tech companies that once touted their powers to open up closed societies and spread democracy around the world. As one headline put it, “Disha Ravi arrest puts privacy of all Google India users in doubt.”

Indeed, public debate has been so deeply compromised that many activists in India are going underground, deleting their own social media accounts to protect themselves. Even digital rights advocates are wary of being quoted on the record. Asking not to be named, a legal researcher described a dangerous convergence between a government adept at information war and social media companies built on maximizing engagement to mine their users’ data: “All of this stems from a stronger weaponization of social media platforms by the status quo, something that was not present earlier. This is further aggravated by the tendency of these companies to prioritise more viral, extremist content, which allows them to monetise user attention, ultimately benefitting their profit motives.”

Since her arrest, the entrails of Ravi’s private digital life have been laid out for all to see, picked over by a voracious and salacious national media. Televised panels and newspapers obsessed over her private text messages to Thunberg as well as other communications among activists who were doing nothing but editing an online pamphlet. Police, meanwhile, have repeatedly insisted that Ravi’s decision to delete a WhatsApp group was proof that she had committed a crime, rather than a rational response to government attempts to turn peaceful digital organizing into a weapon directed at young activists.

Ravi’s lawyers have asked the court to order the police to stop leaking her private communications to the press — information they seemingly have as result of seized phones and computers. Wanting still more private information for their investigation, the Delhi police have also made demands of several major tech companies. They have asked Zoom to disclose the list of attendees of a private activist meeting which they say relates to the toolkit; police have made several requests to Google for information about how the toolkit was posted and shared. And according to news reports, police have asked Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Twitter for toolkit-related information as well. It is unclear which companies have complied and to what extent. The police have touted Google’s cooperation publicly, but Google and Facebook did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Zoom and Twitter referred to their corporate policies, which state that they will comply with relevant national laws.

The entrails of Ravi’s private digital life have been laid out for all to see, picked over by a voracious and salacious national media.

Which may be why the Modi government has chosen this moment to introduce a new set of regulations that would give it levels of control over digital media so draconian they come close to China’s great firewall. On February 24, the day after Ravi’s release from jail, Reuters reported on the Modi government’s planned “Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code.” The new rules will require media companies to take down content that affects “the sovereignty and integrity of India” within 36 hours of a government order — a definition so broad that it could easily include slights against yoga and chai. The new code also states that digital media companies must cooperate with government and police requests for information about their users within 72 hours. That includes requests to trace down the originating source of “mischievous information” on platforms and perhaps even encrypted messaging apps.

The new code is being introduced in the name of protecting India’s diverse society and blocking vulgar content. “A publisher shall take into consideration India’s multi-racial and multi-religious context and exercise due caution and discretion when featuring the activities, beliefs, practices, or views of any racial or religious group,” the draft rules state.

In practice, however, the BJP has one of the most sophisticated troll armies on the planet, and its own politicians have been the most vociferous and aggressive promotors of hate speech directed at vulnerable minorities and critics of all kinds. To cite just one example of many, several BJP politicians actively participated in a misinformation campaign claiming that Muslims were deliberately spreading Covid-19 as part of a “Corona Jihad.” What a code like this would do is enshrine in law the double digital vulnerability experienced by Ravi and other activists: They would be unprotected from online mobs revved up by a Hindu nationalist state, and they would be unprotected from that same state when it sought to invade their digital privacy for any reason it chose.

The “lethal” new code is “aimed at killing the independence of India’s digital news media. This attempt to arm bureaucrats with the power to tell the media what can and can’t be published has no basis in law.”

Apar Gupta, executive director of the digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation, expressed particular concern about parts of the new code that may allow government officials to track down the originators of messages on platforms like WhatsApp. This, he told the Associated Press, “undermines user rights and can lead to self-censorship if users fear that their conversations are no longer private.”

Harsha Walia, executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and author of “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism,” puts the dire situation in India like this: “The latest proposed regulations requiring social media companies to assist Indian law enforcement is yet another outrageous and undemocratic attempt by the fascist Hindutva Modi government to suppress dissent, solidify the surveillance state, and escalate state violence.” She told me that this latest move by the Modi government needs to be understood as part of much broader pattern of sophisticated information warfare waged by the Indian state. “Three weeks ago, the Indian government shut down the internet in parts of Delhi to suppress information about the farmers protest; social media accounts of journalists and activists at the farmers protest and in the Sikh diaspora were suspended; and Big Tech cooperated with Indian police in a number of baseless but chilling sedition cases. In the past four years, the Indian government has ordered over 400 internet shutdowns, and the Indian occupation of Kashmir is marked by a prolonged communications siege.”

The new code, which will impact all digital media, including streaming and news sites, is set to take effect within the next three months. A few digital media producers in India are pushing back. Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, tweeted last Thursday that the “lethal” new code is “aimed at killing the independence of India’s digital news media. This attempt to arm bureaucrats with the power to tell the media what can and can’t be published has no basis in law.”

Do not expect portraits of courage from Silicon Valley, however. Many U.S. tech executives regret early decisions, made under public and worker pressure, to refuse to cooperate with China’s apparatus of mass surveillance and censorship — an ethical choice, but one that cost companies like Google access to a staggeringly large, lucrative market. These companies appear unwilling to make the same kind of calculation again. As the Wall Street Journal reported last August, “India has more Facebook and WhatsApp users than any other country, and Facebook has chosen it as the market in which to introduce payments, encryption and initiatives to tie its products together in new ways that [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg has said will occupy Facebook for the next decade.”

For tech companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Zoom, India under Modi has turned into a harsh moment of truth. In North America and Europe, these companies are going to great lengths to show that they can be trusted to regulate hate speech and harmful conspiracies on their platforms while protecting the freedom to speak, debate, and disagree that is integral to any healthy society. But in India, where helping governments hunt and imprison peaceful activists and amplify hate appears to be the price of access to a huge and growing market, “all of those arguments have gone out the window,” one activist told me. And for a simple reason: “They are profiting from this harm.”

Naomi Klein’s latest book is “How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other,” just published by Simon & Schuster. 

The post India Targets Climate Activists With the Help of Big Tech appeared first on The Intercept.

Far from being a joking homage to Pinochet — putschist, tyrant, torturer, mass murderer, puppet of the CIA, and hater of all things socialist, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 — the fetishized totem of the Hoppean Snake has dire significance for U.S. paramilitaries. When Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, armed Trumpists, and the like wear T-shirts that offer “free helicopter rides,” they are referencing a program of extermination.

Following Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état, which ended the short-lived and turbulent administration of Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende, an avowed Marxist, thousands of Allende’s supporters were killed, tens of thousands of perceived enemies of the putschist regime were tortured, and thousands of others were disappeared, often after being flown in a military helicopter and toppled from the sky. Sometimes this free helicopter ride included splitting open the guts of kidnapped victims while they were still alive so that their bodies wouldn’t float when dumped in the sea.

“The Hoppean Snake is utilizing Cold War-era anti-communist imagery of a once-hidden history of right-wing brutality and terror that utilized U.S. military hardware,” said Portland-based investigative photojournalist Jeff Schwilk, who has documented the iconography of the alt-right since 2016. “Pinochet specifically hearkens to the heyday of U.S.-backed death squads in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Suharto in Indonesia to the Contras in Nicaragua. It is a direct threat of the intention of deadly mass violence and future death squads targeting the left in the United States and anyone else deemed an enemy. It reveals the true nature of this ideology.”

On January 27, the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorism advisory bulletin warning of the ongoing threat from far-right domestic extremists. The January 6 assault on the Capitol was said to be mere prologue, with “DVEs” — domestic violent extremists — now “emboldened … to target elected officials and government facilities.” The Homeland Security bulletin further warned of threats “against critical infrastructure, including the electric, telecommunications and healthcare sectors.”

In the wake of Allende’s election in 1970, right-wing elements in Chile formed a paramilitary group called Patria y Libertad, or Fatherland and Liberty. Patria y Libertad was not too different in spirit from the militias now common on the right in the U.S., though it had foreign funding and training, courtesy of the CIA. The group engaged in arsons, assassinations, and disruptions of infrastructure — exactly what the Department of Homeland Security warns we should expect from violent domestic extremists today.

Alt-right memes depicting the Hoppean Snake.

I first came across the image of the Hoppean Snake while editing Schwilk’s 2020 book of essays and photography, “Unflattering Photos of Fascists: Authoritarianism in Trump’s America.” Schwilk’s intention was to find a modicum of humor in the costumed display and ostentation of the alt-right, and in the Hoppean Snake, there is something at first glance that’s comedic: the smiling crayon-colored reptile and the plunging stick figures, the deluded implication of a communist threat in U.S. politics (Who are these commies? I ask myself. The corporate capitalist dollar-drenched Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer?), all of it suggestive of ignorant, harmless folk propaganda. But this imagery, and the history it evokes, is far from harmless.

The origin of the name, when Schwilk first related it, seemed to strain belief. Prior to his entrance into the limelight of the epic realm of far-right struggle, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a German-born immigrant to the United States, was a mostly forgotten libertarian economist who served out his days in the dungeons of academia at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Hoppe’s claim to fame in the small world of libertarian economics was as second-stringer and all-around gopher to his hero and intimate friend, Ludwig von Mises, who was considered, alongside Friedrich August von Hayek, one of the leading lights of the so-called Austrian school of economics. The Austrian school posited that there was no such thing as society except as a concatenation of individual choices in the marketplace. The individual was all; society was a mere afterthought of the many atomized creatures in it, and any attempt to aggregate the interests of the clashing atoms — say, in the form of democratic decision-making via universal suffrage — was a form of oppressive statist intervention. Hoppe’s contribution to the Austrian school was his 2001 book, “Democracy: The God That Failed,” whose title basically was the message.

“The Hoppean Snake is utilizing Cold War-era anti-communist imagery of a once-hidden history of right-wing brutality and terror that utilized U.S. military hardware.”

That the snake is “Hoppean” begins to make a kind of conspiratorial sense when you consider the career of Mises’s intellectual brother, Hayek, who died in 1992. Hayek was a big fan of Pinochet, visiting Chile in 1975 to meet with the dictator to celebrate and advise on the dismantling of the country’s programs of social welfare, the massive privatization of public goods, and the deregulation of corporate interests. Along with Milton Friedman, Hayek was among the ambassadors of neoliberalism in fascist Chile described by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine.” As historian Greg Grandin writes, “Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a ‘transitional period,’ only so long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation.” The concern of the libertarians — Hayek, Friedman, and their ilk — was the liberty of business to make more money but not at all the humans who were being murdered and tortured to further the great project of corporate freedom.

A meme depicts a snake wearing Pinochet’s military cap and reading the book “Democracy: The God That Failed” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

What garnered Hoppe the far right’s honor of associating him with Pinochet’s homicidal regime, however, was not the introduction of neoliberalism in Chile but specifically his musings about the democratic god that failed. Hoppe contends that the “physical removal” of undesirable citizens will be required in a putative libertarian “compact.” “There can be no tolerance,” he writes, “toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They — the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism — will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.”

When I wrote Hoppe to ask, as I put it in an email, about his name “being associated with a meme that celebrates mass murder,” he replied, “Your question — and insinuation — indicates that you are completely ignorant regarding my person and intellectual work. Even by the low intellectual standards of most contemporary journalists and journalism, then, [it] strikes me as scandalous and impudent.  As even a cursory study of my website would reveal, for more than 40 years I have been an intellectual champion of private property right, free markets, freedom of contract and association, and peace.”

When I pressed him about the tying of his ideas to the snake meme, he wrote back, “What do I know?  There are lots of crazy people out there!” Perhaps he should communicate this to the extremists who have adopted him as an avatar for a doctrine of terror.

The post What the Far-Right Fascination With Pinochet’s Death Squads Should Tell Us appeared first on The Intercept.