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Homelessness and the Desecration of Democracy in Denver, Colorado

2020-08-07T15:27:42Z

Denver Municipal Code § 38-86.2 — known locally as the ‘urban camping ban,’ enacted by the City Council in 2012 (in a vote of 9-4) — makes it unlawful for any person to sleep on public property with a blanket or “any form of cover or protection from the elements other than clothing.” But there are hundreds of people living in Denver who have nowhere else to sleep, and must nevertheless sleep and shelter themselves, who are therefore made criminals by the municipal code and treated as such by the police (a July 17, 2020, count found 1,328 people living in tents in Denver).

Such an inhumane law has resulted in some organized political resistance, of course. In 2019 volunteers coordinating through an organization called Denver Homelessness Out Loud managed to get a referendum (Initiative 300, the “Right to Survive” Initiative) on the ballot, bypassing the council in favour of direct democracy. If accepted by voters, the initiative would have made it legal in Denver “to rest and shelter oneself from the elements in a non-obstructive manner in outdoor public spaces.” The potential protection of such an essential freedom was apparently too much for Denver’s business community which launched a campaign, endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce, to oppose the measure. That campaign spent $2.4 million to try to convince Denver voters that acts of survival by some of the already least advantaged citizens should remain criminal acts (compare to the $0.1 million spent by supporters of the measure). That campaign was successful, and on election day the Right to Survive initiative was rejected by voters 81%-19%.

If democracy, the “rule of the people,” means anything of substance, then it can’t mean mere majoritarianism and instead must refer to a society which, in the words of Kevin Carson, tries to “maximize the agency of individual people, and their degree of perceived control over the decisions that affect their daily lives.” I’d go farther and say that any worthwhile version of democracy is one guided by something like a Rawlsian difference principle whereby social and economic institutions work “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”

An examination of any actually-existing democratic society will make it clear that by those standards democracy is a lie. The United States of America is both the revolutionary birthplace of liberal democracy with its dreams of republican equality as well as one of the world’s foremost engines of inequality. American politics is dominated by two political parties which in their rivalry never imagine a world outside of a struggle over the spoils of capitalism. The two American parties, appropriately called the Republican Party and Democratic Party, mirror the double lie of democracy itself: the promised “rule of the people,” a fair society in which we have a say over our own circumstances, is a false promise; but so too is its less lofty illusion as “rule of the majority.” Would-be cynics hold their lanterns up to democracy and declare that it is in fact nothing more than mob rule, a majority of wolves caucusing with a few sheep over lunch plans. But in practice even this cynical view is optimistic and democracies tend instead toward oligarchy, the rule of the few on behalf of a privileged class.

The case of Denver’s Right to Survive initiative being rejected by an overwhelming 81% of voters might seem like a counter-example to the charge of oligarchy. I’ll concede that any electoral system that allows Denver’s wealthy residents to decide the fate of the homeless is like polling the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah to decide how strangers should be treated; it immediately puts the lie to any pretensions of a just rule of the people. But even in this egregious case of democratic-process-as-mob-violence, the oligarchic tendency of democracy is visible in the background. Looking at the election numbers shows that less than half of active, registered voters in Denver cast a ballot on the issue. The defeat of the initiative was the result of a hateful minority, whipped up by a campaign funded by business owners, to preserve oppressive legislation originally enacted by nine city council members.

Eight years (and counting) of the urban camping ban has not reduced homelessness in Denver, but it has exposed some of Denver’s most disadvantaged residents to increased stress, danger, and police harassment. More recently, amidst a nation-wide rebellion against murderous police and a pandemic-fueled recession, Colorado’s capital has been rocked by protests and shifting homeless encampments as city police sweep one location after another. In June Colorado Governor and millionaire Jared Polis opted not to renew an emergency moratorium on evictions. After protests against police in Aurora (Denver’s most populous suburb), the governor also re-opened an investigation into the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain, an unarmed black man who was attacked and killed by police while walking near his home. The officers involved in McClain’s death remain at large, and protests are ongoing as I’m writing this.

By July the state capitol building and other state property in Denver were marked by substantial vandalism and encroached by growing tent cities. In response to questions about these scenes during a press conference, Governor Polis pressured the city to grant authority for his state troopers to help enforce the urban camping ban and likewise encouraged city police “to come onto our property and remove tents.” The city immediately granted the requested authority and a few days later state troopers effected a sweep of the homeless camp in front of the capitol building.

During the press conference, the governor offered these words to emphasize the importance of more aggressive policing:

It’s not just a building. It’s a big part of our Republic. It’s who we are. It’s our state Capitol. It’s symbolic. It’s important. And frankly, when it is desecrated, we all are desecrated and democracy is desecrated.

Governor Polis reveals here the actual content of democracy: sacrosanct symbols of state power elevated above struggling human life. If ever there can be a society in which individuals have a real say over the management of their own affairs and in which our economic and political institutions benefit the worst off the most, it begins with the desecration of this present democracy. “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

On 'Supporting' Riots and Looting

2020-06-09T16:47:30Z

Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not a pious event.

— Alfredo M. Bonanno

I’ve come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already ablaze!

— Jesus

My engagement with political protest has been limited to a few instances of peaceful protest and light civil disobedience. I was arrested during the Occupy movement while protesting the criminalization of homelessness and the corresponding murder of homeless men by police (see “When Police Kill the Homeless”). If I had to draw a single lesson from that experience to share with novice protesters, it would be to reject the naive notion that civil disobedience requires submitting to arrest. Even more overwhelming to the authorities than mass arrest is mass protest successfully avoiding arrest to re-convene in locations not controlled by police. Everybody already knows about the abuses of the criminal justice system, and many simply don’t care. Your arrest will not change their mind. There is no social contract to uphold. There is no one with a conscience left to whom Thoreauvian tactics could hope to appeal. Be water.

As the past two weeks of protest sparked by the murder of George Floyd has demonstrated, vandalism and confrontations with police are a much more effective means than mere noncooperation for winning reforms. It might be tempting to discount the contributions of riots to the success of the current protests and attribute it instead to pre-existing favour for police reforms. However, as reflected in recent Civiqs.com surveys (see snapshot of graph), public support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased sharply after rioting began in Minneapolis (see also “How Public Opinion Has Moved on Black Lives Matter” in The New York Times).

As time goes on, especially if property damage continues, protesters can expect a decline in popular support along with some backlash from white nationalist groups and pacifying political concessions in the form of ineffectual or never-implemented reforms. But regardless of how the current unrest eventually winds down, these riots have already made important gains which would be difficult to overestimate: the new baseline action for future protests is now burning down police precinct headquarters, and the new baseline demand is defunding or abolishing police departments (see “How Much Do We Need The Police?” which is one of many interviews with the author of The End of Policing now being published in mainstream media.)

So is “supporting” riots — unruly protest, vandalism, and looting — against police brutality justified? I use quotation marks around the word because my thoughts here are not about supporting protesters with food, drink, a place to rest, comfort and companionship, bail funds, legal counsel, or anything of that sort (but see "Here’s Where You Can Donate to Help Protests Against Police Brutality"). Instead it is about the much more pressing (🙄) issue of how to tell people like your facebook friends that you think the riots are justified without backing yourself into some moral corner where you are inadvertently praising circumstances where innocent people are being hurt or robbed.

The first thing is to establish the context within which we are using the words riot and looting. Everything in this essay is directly inspired by the black liberation protests against police violence in the United States, especially the Ferguson unrest in 2014 and the George Floyd protests of 2020, including clashes with police and commercial property damage that occurred during those protests. The connotation of riot and associated looting meant here is that which takes place during those and similar uprisings. Looting in the classical sense is stealing from a civilian population during an armed conflict, and that is specifically not what is being discussed here. It is possible that political and vigilante violence committed during times of civil unrest may try to disguise or justify itself as riots, but such massacres are not what I mean by riot (see for example, the Tulsa race “riot”). Also not discussed here are sports riots, though those are an interesting corner case worthy of a future essay.

In short, it is possible to recognize riots and looting as justified reaction to racist policing and class society without supporting every act that occurs during or under cover of riots. Not only that, such a stance is probably the only defensible position. To deny that riots are justified is to elevate the relatively minor crimes that flourish during riots above the incomparably greater crimes of the police and prevailing politico-economic norms (see “On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson”). But to pretend that riots and looting are completely blameless is to ignore the pain of real victims of property damage and opportunist assaults; it is to mistake looting as an end rather than a means and to mistake a mob mentality for autonomy.

In general it is unrealistic to expect revolutionary rigor from riotous anger as it is directed by police away from legitimate targets and seized upon by opportunists to commit their petty crimes of selfishness. But while the process at times is unnecessarily disordered, including actions that deserve no apology, it should not cause us to forget that the dis-ordering of current society is necessary.

Riots, people standing up against abusive police, are raw politics: when all of the safety valves and obfuscations of the superstructure fail, riots are the final recourse of a population facing intolerable oppression. Smashing storefront windows and other vandalism carried out during political protest is a non-violent way to illustrate the vulnerability of the existing regime (see “You are not the Target Audience” by William Gillis). Those boarded up retail shops currently visible in almost every major US city are proof that business as usual does not need to continue, a point especially underscored in riots taking place during pandemic quarantines which have revealed the pointlessness of so much of the work and rent that shackles many of us for a lifetime (see “66 Days” by Joshua Clover).

The act of looting itself is a challenge to the white supremacy historically intertwined with American conceptions of property and policing (see “In Defense of Looting” by Vicky Osterweil). More practically, and at the same time more theoretically, looting simultaneously satisfies material needs and breaks the spell of an economic system ruled by commodities in which we are all trapped. A necessity obtained for free is invaluable to anybody, but probably nobody knows better than a looter that a luxury obtained for free is worthless.

People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. […] Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take […]

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. (See “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” by Guy Debord.)

SWAT Team Fife

2018-06-07T17:26:54Z

SWAT hand signals (thanks u/ikebu)

In The Andy Griffith Show, the town of Mayberry has two cops: the cool, competent Sheriff Taylor who refuses to carry a gun, and the excitable, cowardly Deputy Fife who is so jumpy that he is not allowed to keep his service revolver loaded and yet still manages to prematurely fire it in stressful situations.

American policing has decidedly settled on the model of Fife — sans the precaution of keeping sidearms unloaded during non-emergencies. As yet another reminder that giving firearms to police officers does not impart to them a corresponding bravery or levelheadedness, here is a recent headline I would have missed if I were not a member of some running discussion boards:

“Woman with Airsoft Gun Delays Rock’n’Roll Marathon After Bizarre Kidnapping,” Times of San Diego (3 June 2018)

Police responded to a distraught woman in a parking garage who was holding an airsoft gun to her head. The first officer to arrive was so eager to kill the woman that he discharged his weapon early and shot himself in the leg. Another officer successfully opened fire, but missed the subject who then threw her toy gun off the parking structure and was taken into custody. (Despite the headline, other news agencies have reported that this incident was unrelated to an earlier kidnapping report.)

Unfortunately, well-armed cops literally shaking in fear as they confront with deadly force members of marginalized groups and emotionally exhausted individuals is standard operating procedure for American police. Just last week four police officers, after receiving reports that she may be suicidal, performed a “wellness” check on Chelsea Manning by breaking into her apartment with guns and a taser drawn (she was not home, but The Intercept has published a security camera video of the incident). The homicidal response of American police to any sort of emergency is so well known that it is often weaponized by petty or political enemies as another recent headline reminds us: “The home of Parkland survivor David Hogg was swatted this morning”.

Iconic, in my mind, of the sharp contrast between the armament amassed by police and their near total lack of courage and sympathy when faced with someone in need is the 2012 case of Milton Hall. Accused of stealing a cup of coffee from a Michigan gas station, Hall (a 49-year-old homeless black man) drew a small Swiss Army type pocket knife to keep the responding police officers at bay. Police immediately escalated the situation. Dash cam and witness cellphone video show that eight police officers (including a K9 unit) formed a semi-circle around Hall. Six of the officers had firearms, both handguns and rifles, trained on Hall who was squatting in a defensive position with the small knife in his hand. At one point, the K9 handler backed up and Hall seemed to relax and took a step toward the police officers. All six officers opened fire, discharging 46 rounds in a few seconds and killing Hall. (I describe the death of Milton Hall and three other homeless men murdered by police in my essay “When Police Kill the Homeless”.)

One indicator of the depth of the cowardice, barbarity, and impunity with which police kill is the shear number of family pets shot by police in America every year. Most police shootings in most departments involve dogs, but nobody keeps track of how many are killed by police nation wide. The Puppycide Database Project has collected data on over 2,900 dogs shot by police so far. In headline after headline the shootings are unprovoked, a function of police being armed, undisciplined, unaccountable, frightened, and predisposed to violence. A 2014 article titled “Can Police Stop Killing Dogs?” in POLICE magazine quotes a Department of Justice specialist, in what I hope is an overly high estimate, that as many as “25 to 30 pet dogs are killed each day by law enforcement officers.” That’s each day.

But one of the most infuriating behaviors of American police is the readiness with which so many officers arrive on a scene, heart pumping with fear, to quickly shoot an unarmed human suspect — disproportionately so if the suspect is a racial minority. In the case of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black kid who was innocuously playing with an airsoft gun at a park near his home, “quickly” meant less than two seconds after officers drove up to him. But in cases of actual danger, when people need protection from armed perpetrators, cops decked out in tactical gear too often become suddenly preoccupied with their own safety.

When I was a freshman in high school, a nearby school became the site a mass shooting. The two perpetrators planted propane bombs in the cafeteria set to detonate during lunch — when around 500 students would be in the room — and then positioned themselves in their cars with semiautomatic weapons and shotguns to shoot fleeing survivors. When the bombs failed to explode, the two improvised and became pioneers of the modern shooting rampage. According to the Columbine Review Commission report (all parenthetical page numbers refer to this document), “six officers from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office had arrived on the scene within minutes after the attack had begun” in addition to four Denver police officers (including three SWAT team members). (38) As the killing spree continued inside the school for about 40 minutes before the shooters committed suicide, the police outside the school — with their superior and growing numbers, firepower, armor, radios, and training — did almost nothing to intervene or put themselves in danger.

At one point early in the shooting, the Denver SWAT members on scene witnessed one of the shooters stick the barrel of his gun out a door and fire several rounds. “Two of the Denver officers fired at the doorway, but it is not known why the Denver officers, who were fully equipped with high-powered weaponry and body armor, took no further action.” (33, note 80)

Even after receiving a description of the shooters, and while unarmed students and teachers did what they could to rescue each other, the armed police continued in their cowardice. “It was reported that at least one student who had managed to escape from the school (and who had carried out a fellow student with him) told the police outside the school that there were only two gunmen and urged that the police go in after them to prevent further killing. But instead of entering the school, the police first began to set up a security perimeter around the school so that the gunmen could not escape.” (60, note 152)

The worst of the carnage took place in the library about fifteen minutes into the shooting, where for almost eight minutes dispatchers knew where the killers were and police continued to safely tend to their security perimeter outside. “At that point, Patti Nielson dropped the telephone — leaving the line open — and sought refuge under a desk. Dispatchers could hear the ensuing carnage as the perpetrators in a seven-and-one-half minute killing spree taunted and executed nine more students, while sparing others.” (30)

In fact, no attempt to enter the school was made by police until 12:06pm, about the same time the shooting ended. That initial entry resulted in two staff members being escorted safely from the school. A second attempt by SWAT to enter the school, this time near the library where the perpetrators were already dead, did not go as smoothly. As officers approached the door they were spooked by a reflection of themselves in a window, which they shot before retreating (in order to “reassess the situation”). (43, note 103)

Police did not enter again until an hour after the shooting had ended. “Regrettably, wounded students remained in the library awaiting rescue during the period of time police had postponed entering the school’s west side.” (44) As victims bled to death in the school, SWAT teams moved very slowly and cautiously through the hallways. “The sheriff’s report implied that the officers faced too many unknown hazards for them to move more quickly, but in an interview with a law enforcement trade journal, Williams later stated that the officers ‘went in with superior weapons. We had HK MP5’s (automatic sub-machine guns), assault rifles, gas guns, shotguns, as well as sidearms. We entered with Army helmets with Kevlar, ballistic tactical jackets with steel plates in the front and ballistic shields.’ Despite such weaponry and armor, the record reflected that a burned carpet, spent and unlit ordnance, unfired bullets and broken glass had deterred officers from conducting a swifter search”. (53, note 132)

It took an hour and a half for police to reach the science room where students and teachers were performing first aid on victims — whom the police commenced to rough up. “Teacher Alan Cram characterized the SWAT officers as ‘very abusive;’ they would not listen to him as he tried to tell them” the whereabouts of a wounded teacher. (53) It took police over three hours after the shooting stopped to make it to the library where most of the victims were. In the Columbine episode of the television series Zero Hour, Randy Brown, the father of one of the students who knew the shooters, described the scene outside the library as he understood it:

One of the things the police don’t want you to know about that day is that on April 20th, while the executions are taking place, while these innocent children are being murdered in the library, the outside library door is propped open. And the policemen that are standing by their cars on the lawn outside are listening to these children being murdered. And they listen, and they listen, and they never rescue them. And they let them be murdered.

Yet it took less than two seconds to shoot and mortally wound Tamir Rice for playing with a toy gun.

I don’t mean to imply that cowardice or violence should be at the root of a criticism of policing in general, but the inverse relationship that seems to hold between the degree to which police are armed and the heroics of their actions is a tragic phenomenon which goes along with the transparency of American police in fulfilling their class roles.

My Local Megachurch Hosted a Gigantic Funeral for a Cop

2018-02-05T14:29:59Z

Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

— Jesus
Luke 9:60

Flatirons Community Church is the largest church in Colorado with close to 20,000 members, most of whom attend one of the weekly services at the church’s main campus in the town of Lafayette.

The other day Flatirons hosted the funeral for a sheriff’s deputy who was shot and killed while responding to a call in the Denver area. It was an extraordinary memorial service attended by thousands of law enforcement officers and citizens and preceded by a massive procession of hundreds of police and fire fighting vehicles. Miles of highway and city streets were closed to traffic as saluting spectators lined them with American and “thin blue line” flags.

Almost nobody in attendance worked directly with or ever met the deceased. But clearly what he stood for as a law enforcement officer meant something to these people, something that reverberated to the core of their own identities. The pomp of police worship became an opportunity for frightened [white] people to reassure themselves that the world is bad but they will prevail.

To someone more familiar with the New Testament than white evangelical American Christianity, it might seem somewhat contradictory for a nominally Christian church to put itself at the center of this ritual, especially at a time when the violence, racism, and corruption of American law enforcement has become so well documented that not even the most colorblind and self-absorbed liberal can feign ignorance to the white supremacist implications carried with the praise and defense of its institutions.

But white self-described ‘born-again’ Christians are by far the most adamant minority behind the rise of Trumpism in this country. Even during its regular services, giving reassurance to those blinded by ideology is what Flatirons and churches like it do. It is what they are for. In their auditoriums, “Christianity” is no longer about propertyless cynics proclaiming the radical transformation of society and becomes instead a counseling service for broken people who are desperate for ways to cope with their anxieties, alienation, and dysfunctional relationships without ever having to question the decaying foundations of their society.

I’ve personally attended several services at Flatirons and have listened to recordings of additional sermons by Lead Pastor Jim Burgen on the website. Despite frequently pronouncing what "Jesus says" or what "Jesus wants", very little attention is ever given by Burgen to the actual sayings of Jesus as recorded in any of the gospels. It’s easy to get the idea that neither Burgen nor his audience have much interest in what Jesus meant by his cryptic sayings. But the lessons at Flatirons do from time to time give an apt illustration of one or another of Jesus’s teachings. Most recently: what it looks like for the dead to bury the dead.

Report Back: Denver March in Support of the Baltimore Uprising (4/29)

2015-05-14T22:28:32Z

On the afternoon of May 1st I attended the annual May Day demonstration in Denver. I think it was a larger turnout than last year. But after about a minute I remembered how much I hate things like being in a group of people I don’t (but should) know, standing around “protesting” with signs and slogans, and generally being in a city. So I right away walked back to Union Station and got the next bus home.

As I walked away from the demonstrators the only police I noticed were some officers staged around the corner of the capitol building largely out of sight so as not to incite any conflict. This was in contrast to the method employed by the Denver Police Department (DPD) across the street from the capitol during a protest demonstration I attended only a few days earlier. That protest, on the Wednesday prior to May Day, was a march organized by the Denver Community Defense Committee (and others) in support of the rioters in Baltimore and of the protest movement sparked by the murdered students of Ayotzinapa.

My sister met me downtown and attended the march with me, so it was way more fun than when I try to do protesting by myself. We gathered in front of the detention center and courthouse (where I was once detained, and where I was tried and convicted for my role in the Occupy Denver camp almost exactly three years ago). Many cars honked in support as they drove by. Some organizers with permanent markers moved through the crowd making sure everyone who wanted it had the jail support phone number written on their bodies. A member of the ISO was handing out free copies of the latest Socialist Worker. Free copies. When the Trotskyists are giving away their newspapers you know Full Communism can’t be far off.

From Denver to Baltimore to Ayotzinapa: We Do Mind Dying (photo by Jason Metter)

Once around 100 people had gathered, we moved into eastbound Colfax Ave leaving only one lane open for traffic. Even then we got honks of support from motorists. The police materialized from behind the protesters, moving west up the eastbound side. We turned to face them. I got pressed into service holding one of the banners at the front of the group (via a classic “would you hold this for a second?” move by its previous handler). A line of police on motorcycles drove up to the protest, stopping suddenly only inches from those of us in front so as to prevent us from marching forward down the street. After a brief standoff we moved to the sidewalk and walked past the line of motorcycles.

For the next couple of blocks the police carelessly and intentionally swooped their heavy motorcycles close to marching protesters in an attempt to keep them on the sidewalk. Many other police vehicles carrying officers in crowd-control gear including a DPD SWAT team riding on an SUV had also responded to the gathering. We lost our motorcycle escort briefly at Civic Center Park where Colfax bends away from the sidewalk, so when we turned right onto Broadway we were in the shoulder of the street again.

The motorcycles quickly caught up and resumed trying to herd us off of the street. One sped right up beside me, almost right into me, and shouted to MOVE TO THE SIDEWALK! I was looking forward at that moment and was startled by his maneuver and the only thing I could think to say in response was, “be careful.” He repeated, this time in a quieter tone, his command for me to move to the sidewalk. I replied, “ok, but while we are in the street, be careful with your bike.” At that point we were approaching two big tour buses parked on the shoulder of Broadway; he drove off up ahead to find someone else to yell at while I decided to go around the buses on the sidewalk in order to avoid being squeezed between them and the police. I also took the opportunity to abandon my job as a banner holder. I think the other guy was better off without me anyway.

Just as I passed the second bus, the police attacked. I heard a scuffle in the street on the other side of the buses. I jogged back to see several police arresting a protester wearing a backpack. Luckily, as the police were walking him away he managed to toss his backpack in the street where another protester grabbed it before any of the cops could.

Photo of the arrest. He had already thrown his backpack to safety at this point. The sign in the back reads "Jesus Loves Coffee Not Cops," a reference to the weekly Coffee Not Cops meeting in Denver. (Photo from Occupy Denver’s Facebook page)

While I was watching, one of the green-clad tactical guys armed with one of those large riot revolvers that shoot 40mm cannisters shoved the guy next to me and then pointed his weapon at my chest and told me to get back. I didn’t know if he was loaded with impact rounds or tear gas, but at that range I assumed anything would be ‘more or less lethal’, so I backed up then returned to the sidewalk.

That’s when I realized it was not an isolated arrest. Several people between and beside the buses had been pepper sprayed, some tackled on the pavement, and were being bound while other police in crowd-control gear were pepper spraying onlookers. My sister and I both got only a very light misting which caused a bit of coughing and brief eye burning… but I saw several people take multiple full sprays directly to the face.

Eager cop sprays protesters from behind motorcycles (photo from Occupy Denver’s Facebook page)

Denver police arrest a man while pepper spraying photographers (photo by Jason Metter — see his Facebook album)

Police spraying a small group of people on the sidewalk. The sign on the ground reads "Christians Against Killer Cops" (photo from Occupy Denver’s Facebook page)

The group spent quite a bit of time in Civic Center Park recovering and flushing eyes with water and milk. The police made a few excursions into the park to grab and arrest a few more protesters. I don’t know why some people were targeted, but I’m assuming they were grabbing people they could identify as having been in the street earlier so they could charge them with minor traffic offenses and remove them from the protest (there were forensics officers video recording the entire march).

Once everyone had more-or-less recovered we continued our march to the 16th Street Mall and around downtown Denver before people began dispersing. After the attack on Broadway, my priority for the rest of the march was to make sure neither myself nor my sister got arrested. That meant leaving the group at one point as it headed down an alley-less street toward police where I feared a kettle and possible mass arrest. Fortunately the group was able to turn, and we caught back up to them on the mall a little before everyone dispersed.

In total 11 people were arrested. Most were charged with misdemeanors, but there were also at least two felony assault on police charges. Two protesters that I know of were hospitalized while in custody for the injuries they sustained during their arrests.

Videos

There are several videos of the march available online, especially of the police attacking protesters on Broadway, including some footage posted to Vimeo by Unicorn Riot. The videographer during much of that footage is next to me, so it actually provides something near to my point-of-view during the first bit of the protest.

Unicorn Riot’s video shows much of what I saw

David Long captured video of several of the arrests which I did not witness myself:

Arrests During the Denver-Baltimore Solidarity March (4/29)

Finally, the DAM Collective posted several videos to YouTube, including this one which shows the general mood of both protesters and police before and during the attack:

This video gives the general flavour of the first part of the march

Why Did They Attack?

The attack on Broadway surprised me, and the apparently unprovoked aggression struck me as unusual even by DPD standards. I am not the most experienced street protester (refer to the list of things I hate in the first paragraph), but most unpermitted marches I’ve seen are controlled by police by blocking intersections in order to force the group to halt or turn until everyone gets tired and goes home (or, if the police had time to prepare, until most protesters are kettled and arrested).

But this attack occurred in the middle of a block, after we had been walking for only a few minutes, and when a good portion of the protesters were on the sidewalk. There was a rumor that the attack was precipitated by a protester jumping onto or knocking over a police motorcycle. And after the march the Denver Post reported, quoting a police spokesperson, that the trigger for the attack was when “An officer got knocked of[f] his motorcycle as he was basically patrolling.”

However, on May 1st Jesse Benn posted a clear video to YouTube showing the incident which incited the attack by police. In the video, a police officer on a motorcycle is seen riding very close to a bicyclist who was riding along with protesters. The cyclist can be seen defensively sticking his elbow out as he is crowded by the motorcycle, at which point the officer, who is trying to balance at a very slow speed, manages to drop his bike. In response that officer and the tactical team are seen to immediately rush the protesters.

Slow motion video of police officer dropping his motorcycle and then attacking protesters

(May 14: the video is no longer public at this time. I’m guessing it was made private at the request of the legal defense of the protesters involved. I am hoping Benn will make the video public again once all criminal cases have been dropped or completed.)

Benn was arrested after recording the incident in the video above. His wife, who was also documenting the action with her phone, was forced up against a bus with a police baton to her throat. Her phone was confiscated and is apparently lost — presumably destroyed by the DPD. The couple was interviewed as part of a CBS4 report a few days after the protest which is available online as “Pregnant Woman’s Phone Taken During Police Protest That Ends In Arrests” (May 4, 2015).

On May 22nd, Michael Moore, the bicyclist in question, posted to his Facebook page that all three charges filed against him had been dismissed (assault on a peace officer, criminal mischief, and resisting arrest). According to a report at NotMyTribe.com, Moore spent two days in jail after his arrest.

So the aggression on the part of DPD seems to have been largely unprovoked. Perhaps the situation in Baltimore and the fact that there was another Denver-Baltimore solidarity demonstration the night before contributed to tensions which had the police officers on edge. It may be worth noting that Civic Center Park was also the scene of Denver’s October 2011 Mini-Uprising, which itself involved an officer being pushed off of his motorcycle by a protester.

But whatever the reason for their actions at this particular demonstration, the fact that police so often confront political protests at all is a curious phenomenon. Surely everyone involved — protesters, police officers, police commanders, municipal administrators — knows that police presence and police aggression merely extend the duration of demonstrations, cause injuries, and amplify (many times over) the impact on traffic and business.

During Wednesday’s march the DPD was able to use one officer’s embarrassing motorcycle slip as an excuse, but police will sometimes go to great lengths including undercover provocateurs to stir up trouble and elicit violent confrontations with protesters. While individual police officers may benefit from [overtime] pay, everybody else (including the municipal treasury, especially after any resulting civil suits are paid) may incur very steep costs. So what’s the reason such expensive crowd-control methods have evolved and persist?

In Chapter 8 of his book, Our Enemies in Blue, Kristian Williams provides a description of the various crowd control methods favored through the history of modern policing. During the middle of the 20th century, into the 1970s, police adhered to a strategy of “Escalated Force” (as opposed to previous strategies of “Maximum Force”), the implementation of which Williams describes in the following passage:

Dispersal operations are not designed to uphold the law or to protect public safety; often the police action itself will represent the most serious violation of the law and constitute the greatest threat to the safety of the community. Instead of the law or public safety, the police are concerned with establishing control, maintaining power. (p. 184)

Williams goes on to note that after the failure of police to control the 1999 Seattle protests there has been a return to the haphazard (but also increasingly disciplined/militarized) use of force to control protests:

Riot gear, tear gas, mass arrests, and widespread violence have again become common features of demonstrations. While police violence has always been a possibility, it has lately come to resemble an open threat. Some of this is surely deliberate. The threat of violence is an effective tool for suppressing the attendance at a gathering, especially among portions of the population who are more routinely subject to police attack. It also serves to criminalize dissent. When members of the public see the police in riot gear, it is easy to assume that the crowd they are monitoring is dangerous, or even criminal. But some of the police reliance on force is the product of desperation. They simply don’t know what to do, and while they figure it out, the old-fashioned, straightforward head-knocking approach seems like a safe bet. (p. 193)

And indeed things make more sense if police (especially riot police) are thought of as producers of fear and discipline rather than as producers of peace. For at least a brief time during a political protest, the protesters themselves perform the difficult police task of intelligence gathering by making themselves visible as dissenters on the streets. This provides a good opportunity for police to dissuade further dissent by putting on an intimidating display of paramilitary force as a sort of counter-protest, recording the faces of those present as a convenient means of surveillance, as well as visiting physical pain and the promise of future punishment at the hands of the criminal justice system upon a sample of protesters.

Attacking protesters also provides police with an opportunity to target known activists and organizers in attempts to disrupt the activities of already-known subversive groups. For example, one of the arrested protesters on Wednesday was Dave Strano, a well-known anarchist organizer in Denver. Strano was charged with several misdemeanors including interference and resisting arrest. As described in a weblog post by the Denver Anarchist Black Cross,

Dave was assaulted and received injuries by the police, including a gash to his head, a broken clavicle and a twisted knee. He was take to the hospital where he was left shackled to the bed covered in pepper spray, and they refused to provide him with crutches after 8 hours. His friends were able to to bring crutches to the jail so that he could walk when he was finally released.

Dave Strano after his release

Strano was bonded out the day after the solidarity march, but soon after he was released the district attorney’s office decided to charge him with an additional felony. Denver police then waited until he was driving with his children before pulling him over and arresting him a second time for the same protest, all apparently in an attempt to intimidate Strano and his family.

Of course, even powerful police forces are not completely autonomous. They must avoid too much public and political scrutiny if they wish to continue existing in their current forms — and existing is what police forces do best. Police, then, must balance meting out discipline at political protests with avoiding too many expenses and too much scrutiny-inducing controversy.

So the police response to any given political protest is difficult to predict. Some times, such as during May Day this year, they will remain discreet in order to keep things calm. Other times they will start hitting and pepper spraying after a demonstration has marched only a few blocks.

For the same reasons, police always urgently couch their violence in the rhetoric of ensuring “health and safety” — their survival depends on the public believing (or at least having the option to believe) they perform such a beneficial function rather than being seen as merely class enforcers. As an example during our Baltimore solidarity march in April, after the police responded in force and, unprovoked, went out of their way to inflict pain on whichever protesters they could get their hands on with pepper spray, beatings, and arrests, their PR department tweeted that “Anti-Police Protestors [sic] are now marching on the 16th St Mall. Denver Police are protecting them and ensuring public safety.”

UPDATE: Anti-Police Protestors are now marching on the 16th St Mall. Denver Police are protecting them and ensuring public safety.
— Denver Police Dept. (@DenverPolice) April 30, 2015

The way police describe themselves as those who “protect and serve” while providing “health and safety” is part of the same language of counterinsurgency which has become standardized over the past 50 years or so of uprisings — most recently in Ferguson and Baltimore — which seeks to valorize both the police and “peaceful protesters” while blaming the impoverished “thugs” who stand up to state violence for their own condition and discrediting those who sympathize with the oppressed as “outside agitators” and “white anarchists”.

On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson

2014-12-07T13:41:11Z

“In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.”

— Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle

Background: The Killing of Michael Brown

As far as I know, none of the following facts are disputed. On August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson City Police Department confronted Michael Brown, 18, and his acquaintance^[1] Dorian Johnson, 22, from his vehicle because they were walking in the middle of a residential street. The officer ordered them to move to the sidewalk. Instead of simply complying, Brown argued with the officer through the window of the police SUV. A scuffle ensued, Brown, who was unarmed, hit Wilson in the face with his hand, and according to Wilson’s testimony, made a grab for the officer’s firearm. In response, Wilson fired 2 shots at Brown who ran down the street for about 150 feet before turning around to face the officer (some witnesses reported he had turned around in surrender). Meanwhile Wilson had exited his vehicle and pursued on foot, firing at least 10 more times. Less than 90 seconds after initially contacting the jaywalker, Wilson had hit Brown with at least 6 bullets, including a fatal shot to his head.^[2]

Johnson later explained that Brown was in the midst of a some sort of mystical crises on the day he died. He had an earlier preminition that his stepmother and grandmother would be delivered from their illnesses through his prayer, and was experiencing what seemed like supernatural phenomena including that he was being protected from cars as he walked in the street. This state of mind may help explain both why Brown was walking in the middle of road and why he made the courageous but suicidal decision to turn and face the officer who was firing at him.^[3]

A grand jury was convened after the shooting, and it found the evidence to be insufficient to provide probable cause for bringing criminal charges against officer Wilson. He was never arrested in connection with the killing.

Both the shooting and the grand jury decision have been met with significant social unrest in Ferguson and in cities around the country including protest marches, riots, looting, and destruction of retail storefront property.

The sentiment behind some of the protesters' demands for “justice for Mike Brown” and the bewildered response of spectating [white] Americans trying to make sense of why the black residents of Ferguson (sometimes just “thugs”) would destroy “their own” neighborhoods both reveal something of the mystified nature of capitalism and the myths which sustain it.

Myths the Size of Camels

Frederich Engels used the term ‘false consciousness’ to describe beliefs about the world which obfuscate its actual workings and mislead people into accepting the current social structures as “natural” or even inevitable. And it was Karl Marx, an often unemployed theorist living under industrial capitalism, who taught us the importance of the economic basis in understanding the nature, ends, and ideologies of the dominate political structures in all times and places. But it was Jesus of Nazareth, a propertyless Jewish peasant subsisting under imperial Rome, who taught us how to see and see through the moral judgments which flow from such false consciousness, a morality which serves to protect and create the exploiting classes.

Among the sayings of Jesus which have been preserved, there are a handful of colorful and memorable quips employing exaggerated contrasts to illustrate the hypocritical judgments made by the dominant political and religious ideologies and leaders of his time. One of the most famous is his rhetorical question to those who fixate on the speck of sawdust in their brother’s eye, but don’t even notice the log sticking out of their own eye.^[4] Another is, “You blind leaders! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!”^[5]

What Jesus' sayings help to reveal, although it is counterintuitive, is that the most successful and stubborn ideas which make up a false consciousness do not operate on subtle misconceptions or minor deceptions. They are always complete reversals resulting in total hypocrisies.

Jesus' cynicism can be applied generally to see how the hypocrisy is borne out today (and a few specific examples of such reversals from Ferguson will be demonstrated in the next sections). Every stable mode of production has its own obfuscating myths which are accepted by a sufficient number of both the exploiting and exploited classes to maintain widespread complacency. And so in liberalism we can expect to find those myths which hide the horrors of capitalism from the citizens of republics:

Private Property, a ruthless process and legal institution which deprives millions of property, requiring armies of police and soldiers to maintain, is seen as a provider of prosperity and stability. The Rule of Law, which so impartially allows the rich and the starving poor to depend on the purchase of commodities for survival, is seen as an egalitarian force. Above all Progressivism — by which the current social organization is seen to be fundamentally good and always improving through the democratic mechanisms of elections, petition, and scientific enlightenment — condemns as criminal any attempt by the oppressed to assert their dignity or make actual improvements to their conditions.

‘Justice for Mike Brown’

If the pig who shot Mike Brown ever sees the courtroom
You’ll have mostly the looters to thank for it

— Pat The Bunny
"I Was A Teenage Anarchist"

Returning to the death of Michael Brown: arming oneself then confronting, fighting with, pursuing, and finally shooting to death an unarmed young man is behavior which should require significant extenuating circumstances to excuse. Even if Wilson were not a police officer, his actions would likely warrant a criminal trial to determine the facts more fully. But Wilson is a police officer who has been entrusted by the public (whom he is ostensibly protecting) with weapons, training, and legal authority. If anything, while acknowledging his work will tend to place him into conflicts, he should be held to a higher standard of behavior and legal culpability than an ordinary citizen in handling those confrontations. Instead, in accordance with the law, he has been granted extra leniency and the case against him will not even be examined in open court.

Given all of that, and not even considering pre-existing systemic injustices or the patterns of police abuse, it is plain why there is such widespread belief that an injustice was committed against Michael Brown and the Ferguson community. ‘Justice for Mike Brown’ has become a slogan for protests, and is taken as a demand by journalists looking to provide a motive for protesters. But what would such ‘justice’ look like? All too often the slogan is simply a demand that Darren Wilson be more fully subjected to the same criminal justice system which produced him. In such cases it is actually a demand of ‘justice for Darren Wilson’.

It’s a demand that reveals two divergent but both conservative reactions. The first, the ‘peaceful protesters,’ believe the justice system provides its own adequate channels of reform and view protest, insofar as it is legal or at least peaceful, as legitimate democratic petition of the government. The second, sharing the logic of a lynch mob, believes itself to be an extralegal corrective to a justice system gone so far astray that its own means of reform are no longer effective. Both accept at face value the necessity of the justice system as it promises to function.

On one of the riotous nights following the grand jury decision, CNN described a crowd of protesters who overturned and burned a police cruiser and then chanted across the street toward the lines of riot police and national guardsmen, “We are not your enemy. We just want justice.”^[6] The demand for justice, referring to criminal justice, shows how fully even some of the vandalizing protesters in Ferguson have internalized the liberal myths which legitimate capitalism and its political superstructures. Except to the grieving friends and family of Michael Brown who can’t be blamed for seeking whatever peace and closure they can find from a legal system which purports to provide it, the question of justice in the case of Darren Wilson is a symptom, a speck of dust, a gnat. Yet the Ferguson community leaders and many protesters strain at him while swallowing the murderous political system they believe can bring them justice.

Vandalism, even in the cause of liberalism, is clearly seen as a threat to the authorities and the image of control they’d like to maintain (hence the frenzied calls for peace among political leaders at all levels). But the split between the strictly peaceful and the extra-legal protesters also provides an opportunity to control the scope of debate during times of social unrest. For example, note what the highest ranking office of liberalism in the world has to say about rioting. During the 1992 LA Riots, President Bush acknowledged that while Americans have reason to be frustrated with the law, they should not actually unleash those frustrations on the legal system itself:

“In this highly controversial court case, a verdict was handed down by a California jury. To Americans of all races who were shocked by the verdict, let me say this: You must understand that our system of justice provides for the peaceful, orderly means of addressing this frustration. We must respect the process of law whether or not we agree with the outcome. There’s a difference between frustration with the law and direct assaults upon our legal system.” ^[7]

— George Bush

Similarly, president Obama in his address to the nation after the Ferguson grand jury decision pleaded for frustrations to be channeled “constructively”:

“First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law. And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make. […] But what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. […] What we need to do is to understand them and figure out how do we make more progress. […] That won’t be done by throwing bottles. That won’t be done by smashing car windows. […] So, to those in Ferguson, there are ways of channeling your concerns constructively and there are ways of channeling your concerns destructively.”^[8]

— Barack Obama

Riots provide several benefits for the working class at the expense of the owning class. As such, there is an ideological benefit in dissuading those who can be persuaded by liberalism from rioting. The liberal kit outlined by Obama — foundation on a Rule of Law, Progress, the sanctity of Property, and proper Democratic channels — is so ingrained in the minds of Americans that such appeals may work at an almost instinctive level. But even if they are ineffective in that, appeals to the law serve at least two important roles in maintaining order:

By constantly making a distinction between lawful and non-lawful protest, the debate becomes centered on the morality and efficacy of extralegal reform. This has the effect of pushing radical change to the periphery, and completely out of view of most protesters and spectators.
By creating a sense of urgency in maintaining peaceful protests, politicians can induce protesters to police each other.

A darker theoretical speculation can be drawn about the role of murderous policing itself, including the double-standard seen in the indictment process. By deviating so obviously from the promise of justice the system purports, prosecutors and police have succeeded in prompting people to take to the streets in support of the criminal justice system.

Why Are They Looting Their Own Neighborhoods?

Meanwhile, much of the American populace suffers from a similar but different aspect of the liberal mystification. They read the reports of looting and see the pictures on TV of shops on fire, and they just can’t seem to figure out why those black people would destroy “their own” neighborhoods. As if the shopping centers in any American neighborhood, much less a black neighborhood, are collectively-owned cooperatives or in any way belong to the community rather than to petite bourgeois owners.

These Americans are so ensconced in liberal mythology that they are utterly unable to make sense of the world that confronts them on their cable news programs every night. It seems perfectly natural to think of people — especially the dark skinned and uneducated — as automatons who should spend their lives working and obeying (or begging and obeying), but any disruption of peace and order is a startling transgression. ‘Peace and order’ is paramount; it implies the ability to peaceably and orderly employ, tax, fine, and blame the poor… in Ferguson and everywhere.

As it is with gnats and camels, so it is with looting and capital. Businesses have stolen more from the working class — and most extensively from the black working class — than any practical amount of looting could ever recover. Yet the political leaders, news journalists, and the average American worker will strain all of their moral indignation at the tiny acts of re-appropriation like when a looter makes off with food or a television, but will swallow without question the entire impoverishing, alienating system of wage work which leaves so many with so little.

The wealth of the United States of America, from a British colony to an imperialist superpower, is the result of over four centuries of indentured servitude, chattel slavery, genocide, debt peonage, subjugation of women, plundering wars, and a system of wage labour which has no end in sight, all legally sanctioned and enforced by the established police forces. And what Americans cannot understand, the thing that is beyond acceptance, is when a liquor store is looted.

The Virtue of Rioting

Of course not all events that occur during times of rebellion are necessarily good. There is nothing useful or dignifying in opportunistic violence against individuals or theft of personal property committed under cover of social unrest, and such acts are properly crimes. It is also important to recognize that spontaneous uprisings like Ferguson are not organized revolutions in which targets are prioritized, goods are seized and distributed according to need, and capital is taken over to be run collectively — or whatever revolution might look like.

As much as some of us may wish to see such activity, and while some spontaneous rebellions have historically lead to more directed revolutionary efforts, it is not even possible without more preparations than currently exist. The national guard in Missouri is happy to guard only the highest value centers of capital during a couple of nights of light looting of consumer goods. But if any protesters had attempted to actually take control of and operate their own workplaces, it would have been SWAT raids, live rounds, and whatever carnage was deemed necessary to return property to its lawfully exploiting owners.

But why loot and riot at all? Earlier in this essay I claimed that riots provide benefits to the working class. What are they? Most obvious is the material benefits inherent in the act of looting. In addition to material gain, looting brings a flavour of what a post-capitalist economy will feel like. On every other day of their life, a looter’s needs rule over them in the form of money and commodities. For a few brief days during a riot, commodities are subordinated to the form of mere goods which satisfy needs.

Secondly, riots win political concessions. They signal to the ruling class that it is squeezing a tad tightly and needs to let up in order to keep its grip. The unrest in Ferguson has directly prompted the federal government to begin investigating the Ferguson Police Department for possible civil rights abuses,^[9] and President Obama has asked congress for $75 million to fund 50,000 body cameras to help reduce murder and other abuse by America’s police officers.^[10] Other reforms may follow, none of which would have happened if protesters in Ferguson and elsewhere had not forced the issue.

But most importantly, riots and the reactions to riots reveal the hypocrisy Jesus saw so clearly. The public judgment of rioters lays bare the false morality of the dominate ideology. Covert domination — including economic exploitation and racism — can be swallowed and transmitted to new generations without being noticed. But overt domination is noticed and generates its own resistance. It is when domination is exposed and individuals are freed of their false consciousness that Jesus' “kingdom of heaven,” the Wobblies' “new world in the shell of the old,” and the Marxist’s “whithering away” of classes is possible. There are Christians who don’t understand a word of what Jesus said, but who nevertheless believe with all of their strength that his words have the power to save their souls. I don’t think they are wrong.

Informant: The Brandon Darby Documentary

2014-04-26T16:44:15Z

Yesterday the ‘NATO 3’ — the three loudmouthed activists who were charged as terrorists after being encouraged by undercover police officers to pour gasoline into empty bottles during the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago — were sentenced to several [more] years of prison.

The NATO 3 case is very similar to a case during the 2008 Republican National Convention when a couple of young activists were arrested and sent to prison after creating some Molotov cocktails which they intended to use to damage empty police cars. In that case, the suspects were betrayed by an FBI informant who was a member of their activist group and acted as their mentor.

That informant, the infamous Brandon Darby, is the subject of an excellent documentary by Jamie Meltzer called Informant (2013). In his review of the film, DJ Pangburn calls it an “unnecessary film” and a “failure of a documentary” charging that it merely provides Darby with a platform from which to spout his narratives. As Panburn puts it, “it’s Brandon Darby’s world, and we all are just living in it.”

Kris Hermes, in his review, makes the same complaint, Meltzer allows Darby too much control of the film’s narrative: “it’s almost as if Darby decided one day to call up his friend Jamie Meltzer to let him know about a great movie idea.” Allowing him a voice in yet another documentary, Hermes asserts, merely fortifies Darby’s cult of personality

And they’re right, the film is largely a mouthpiece for Darby (although it also provides context and tells the story through entertaining re-enactments and interviews). But that’s also what makes the film so valuable — not to mention just plain interesting. We could all benefit from learning how to avoid the Brandon Darbys of the world, and understanding his motivations can be helpful toward that end. There are also important lessons all activists should learn from the entire Darby saga. The insights in both Pangburn and Hermes reviews are examples in themselves of how useful the documentary is.

The story of Informant begins with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when Darby sets out from Austin to rescue his friend in New Orleans. Darby becomes an early member of the Common Ground Collective (CGC), an anarchist relief organization. Despite the efforts of law enforcement, the CGC was successful at providing basic aid, emergency clinics, and all sorts of other help to distressed residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and other parts of New Orleans.

After a trip to Venezuela, disillusioned with his plans of becoming a revolutionary (including dreams of overthrowing the U.S. government and elaborate prison breaks), Darby had apparently become bored with helping people and thought he would feel more important if he became a crusader against terrorism. He told the FBI that his friend and anti-Israel activist, Riad Hamad, was planning on using the charity he ran to fund Palestinian suicide bombers. This lead the FBI and IRS to raid Hamad’s home in search for evidence of tax fraud. A few days later, Hamad’s body was found floating in a lake, dead of an apparent suicide.

Darby had found a new purpose for his life. At the request of the FBI he then set himself up as a mentor to several young activists, including David McKay and Bradley Crowder, and worked to get them imprisoned. After the 2008 RNC incident, Darby made a career going around speaking to Tea Party conventions about how he had managed to stop a militant plot to blow up delegates and Republicans.

The best way to describe Darby’s underlying psychology is the phrase used by Pangburn in his review: “an opportunist with a hero complex.”

Lessons

Other than being on guard against charismatic, borderline-sociopathic opportunists with hero complexes, I think there are two important lessons pointed out by Informant.

The first is the danger of machismo to young male activists. One reason Darby was able to exert so much influence over McKay and Crowder is that they looked up to him as an experienced and macho activists, and he chided them for not being manly enough. Would-be revolutionaries talking about the importance of manliness should be a major red flag to anarchists. As Thomas Hintze noted in his review of Informant for Waging Nonviolence, “The macho culture created by activists in different spheres made it impossible to hold Darby accountable for his actions. It may have even given him impunity.”

Second, during all of his verbal thrashing around to find rationalizations for his own actions, Darby actually hits on some good points. One is that there is only a thin line between being a revolutionary and being a gangster, between being a freedom fighter and being a terrorist. Anybody with romantic ideas of revolution would be wise to spend some effort working through those distinctions and tensions.

Watch

Informant is available to stream on both Netflix and Amazon, as well as your favorite BitTorrent index.

There is a more balanced documentary about Bradley Crowder and David McKay, 'Better this World' (2011), which is also worth watching. It is available for streaming on Netflix and BitTorrent.

As an antidote to Darby’s reality distortion field, I also recommend reading Lisa Fithian’s (often first-hand) account of events: “FBI Informant Brandon Darby: Sexism, Egos, and Lies”

When Police Kill the Homeless

2014-04-16T14:03:07Z

Homo sacer

In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men.

— Giorgio Agamben
Homo Sacer

Homer sacer (“the accursed/sacred man”) is an obscure figure from ancient Roman law whom anyone can kill without committing a crime, but who may not be sacrificed: an outlaw. Homo sacer thus inhabits the threshold of the political realm by being included within the law only by being abandoned by both profane and divine law. In his extensive study of this archaic figure, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben sees remnants of the original foundation of the Western political sphere in which political life (Aristotle’s bios) is constituted by excluding the ‘bare life’ (zoe) of the home.

The other limit of the political sphere is the mirrored figure of homo sacer: the sovereign whose inclusion in the law consists of the exclusive ability to suspend the law by declaring a state of emergency (the “sovereign exception”). Insofar as subjects are exposed to legal homicide (such as extra-judicial executions) under the state of exception, sovereign power produces bare life. “The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere.” (83)

In his book Citizens Without Shelter, Leonard Feldman presents a theory in which the homeless body is seen as an example of homo sacer. Through readings of U.S. case law on anti-homeless ordinances (those municipal codes which forbid begging, public feeding, sitting on sidewalks, sleeping outdoors, etc.) he shows that the courts have constructed homeless life as bare life. The homeless life, even when lived in the very center of the city, is included by the law only through its exclusion from political life.

Homeless life shares similar ambivalence as the sacred life of homo sacer: private and public, disgust and august, reviled and romanticized, criminal and victim, excluded and included. In recognizing homeless life as sacred life, Feldman has done well in following Agamben’s directive: “We must learn to recognize this structure of the ban in the political relations and public spaces in which we still live. In the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every internality and more external than every extraneousness.” (111)

Even anti-authoritarian or pacifist utopians might concede the benefit of a professional peacekeeping organization whose members, authorized in the use of violence, are dedicated to defending victims and seeking out and providing comfort to the hurting. But in the parlance of actually existing cities, `peace officer' is synonymous with `police officer,' who is often dedicated to enforcing the interests of the strong against the weak and to making cities into safe, clean spaces for bios — for capitalists and their worker-shoppers — by excluding bare life (and relegating the activities of bare life as much as possible to the sphere of the home).

If the production of homeless life within the cities of global capitalism can be seen as an instance of (or at least an approximation to) the production of bare life by sovereign power, then the sovereign counterpart to the sacred life of the homeless is the professional policeman (who shares the same, if mirrored, ambivalences as the homeless: respected and reviled, defender and criminal, public and private, human and animal, etc.).

In a quotable line from his Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell emphasized the role professional police play in maintaining property and class relations when he called the policeman the “natural enemy” of the worker. But a more diametric contrast would be between the policeman and the unemployed [non]worker: those unwilling or unable (or just too unlucky) to fit into capitalist society, including the ill and homeless.

In downtowns throughout the world, the homeless beg outside of skyscrapers which are guarded by police and full of financial workers allocating and reinvesting immense concentrations of wealth. Visible on these homeless bodies, refugees with no camp (or whose camp is the streets in the business district of the city), living without homes in the hearts of cities which have banned homeless life, is not only the ancient foundation of political life itself but also the extreme contradictions which characterize life under global capitalism today.

The interactions between the police and the homeless sometimes show the relation between homeless life and sacred life as more than mere approximation. When the police kill the homeless, they often do so with impunity. Below, I highlight four recent examples of police in the United States needlessly killing homeless men in plain sight of the public and video cameras. In all four cases it is undisputed that the police directly ended the life of the victim, and in three cases the state (local) jurisdiction determined that no crime was committed while carrying out the killing (in the other case, it was a jury which made that determination). Each of the cases reached national attention in part due to street protests following the announcements that officers would not be charged with criminal homicide.

In some of the cases below, the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are still conducting their own review of the incidents. Even if those investigations reveal violations of constitutional or federal law, however, it seems unlikely that the individual police officers who carried out the killings will be indicted for homicide by the federal government.

In the footnotes I provide at least one link to video of each incident. Most of these videos, and other videos of each incident, are available from several locations on the Internet.

Marvin Booker

On July 9, 2010, five Denver Sheriff’s deputies held, beat, and shocked Marvin Booker to death in the waiting area of Denver’s Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center. Booker, a 56-year-old homeless street preacher, was being held on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia. The incident was witnessed by tens of people and captured on several surveillance cameras.^[1]

Just as sacred life is excluded from legal sanctions against homicide, “The coroner ruled that Booker’s death was caused by homicide, meaning he died at the hands of others. But the deputies were cleared by a criminal investigation which found they had not broken any laws.”^[2]

In 2012, the FBI announced that it would investigate the slaying, but it’s been two years and no report has been released yet.^[3] In November, 2014, a federal civil suit found the deputies to have used excessive force. The City of Denver paid a record $6 million to Booker’s family.^[4]

Kelly Thomas

On July 5, 2011, officers in Fullerton, California, confronted Kelly Thomas, an unarmed homeless man whom they incorrectly suspected of breaking into cars. Thomas became impatient with the policemen’s questions and did not immediately comply with all of their demands. A digital recording device carried by the police captured one of the officers, Manny Ramos, calmly make the following statement to Thomas after putting on some white latex gloves, “You see my fists? They are getting ready to fuck you up.”^[5]

Two officers then began striking Thomas with their batons and tackled him to the ground. Once on the ground, backup officers arrived who helped to restrain, shock, and beat him. Thomas began apologizing repeatedly, complained he couldn’t breathe, called for help, begged for mercy, screamed in pain, and cried out “Dad! Help me, Dad! They’re killing me, Dad” before losing consciousness.

When paramedics arrived, they were directed to treat an officer’s minor injury while Thomas lay dying in his own blood on the street.^[6] In the eyes of the police officers at the scene, the bare, biological life of Kelly Thomas was excluded not only from the protections of law, but from also from medicine. Five days after the beating, Thomas was removed from life support and died.

An unusual element of this case is that (after significant public protest) three of the six officers involved were actually charged with crimes: officer Ramos was charged with murder in the second degree, and the other two officers were charged with involuntary manslaughter. A jury found the first two officers (including Ramos) not guilty, and the charges against the third officer were dropped.

The city of Fullerton agreed to pay Thomas' mother $1 million in order to avoid civil litigation.^[7]

Milton Hall

On the morning of July 1, 2012, members of the Saginaw Police Department in Michigan responded in force to an aggressive man suspected of stealing a cup of coffee and being impolite to the owner of a convenience store.^[8] The police confronted Milton Hall, a 49-year-old black man, in a parking lot. Hall was armed with a three-inch folding pocket knife — hardly a deadly weapon. The confrontation was witnessed by passing motorists and captured on video by both police dashboard cameras and a witness’s cellphone camera.^[9]

The dashboard cam videos were shown during a news conference and are available on the MLive website.^[10] The videos show that eight police officers (including a K9 unit) formed a semi-circle around Hall. Six of the officers had firearms, both pistols and rifles, trained on Hall who was squatting in a defensive position with the small knife in his hand. At one point, the K9 handler backed up, apparently deciding not to sic the dog on Hall. In response, Hall seemed to relax, took a few steps backward and then two steps to his right. But when Hall appeared to take a step back toward the police line, all six officers opened fire, discharging 46 rounds in a few seconds and killing Hall.

A video obtained and broadcast by CNN was captured by a witness across the street and shows the incident from a different angle and with audio.^[11]

An investigation by the Saginaw County Prosecutor’s Office and the Michigan State Police into whether the shooting was justified concluded that “Criminal charges aren’t warranted.”^[12] The Department of Justice and the FBI then conducted their own investigation and likewise determined that “this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to lead to a federal criminal prosecution of the police officers involved.”^[13]

Milton Hall’s mother, Jewel Hall, described the shooting as “a firing squad dressed in police uniforms.”^[11] It is worth noting, however, that while the police presented themselves to Milton Hall as executioners and ended his life with an extreme degree of overkill reminiscent of a firing squad, the killing was not carried out according to any legal ritual or due process. Like homo sacer, Milton Hall’s homeless life was exposed to death by being excluded from both legal prohibitions against homicide and from sacrificial rites.

James M. Boyd

Jewel Hall is a retired public school teacher and community organizer in the Albuquerque, NM, area. In a tragic coincidence, at the time her son was killed by police in Saginaw, she was working to get the federal government to investigate an alarming pattern of shootings and use of force by the Albuquerque Police Department. In 2011 she wrote an opinion piece for the Albuquerque Journal urging “a full investigation by the Department of Justice.”⁠^[14] A year and a half after her son’s death, a similar shooting unfolded on the outskirts of her hometown in which police with a K9 unit shot an uncooperative homeless man to death.^[15]

On March 26, 2014, members of the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) approached and attempted to frisk 38-year-old James M. Boyd based on the suspicion that he was camping without a permit in the Sandia foothills just east of town — he was suspected, in other words, of getting his zoe all mixed up with the city’s bios. Boyd, who was homeless with no private place where he could legally sleep, refused to cooperate. The situation escalated into an hours-long standoff including a tactical team and a State Police liaison. Home video aired by KRQE News 12 shows six regular uniformed officers holding Boyd at gunpoint even before the APD Crisis Intervention Team arrived.^[16]

Boyd remained defiant. He armed himself with two small knives, and at one point he warned the officers that “I would have the right to kill you right now because you’re trying to take me over. Don’t get stupid with me.”⁠^[16]

The APD has released video footage from the helmet camera of one of the officers on scene which clearly shows how the standoff came to an end.^[17] Boyd, who had apparently had enough of the negotiations, began gathering up his belongings to leave the scene. One of the officers called out, “Do it!” and a flashbang grenade detonated a few feet in front of Boyd. Simultaneously a dog was released which appeared to bite Boyd’s hand, and both the dog’s handler and an officer with a rifle moved toward him. Boyd dropped his bags and put his arms up to his side (while still holding at least one knife.)

Boyd then turned to walk away, which is when two officers with rifles fired six live rounds at his back, striking him at least once. Boyd fell forward to the ground. Mortally wounded and lying prone, he was apparently unable to move his hands. The officers demanded that he drop the knife that was still clutched in his left hand. Boyd replied, “Please don’t hurt me. I can’t move.” Instead of moving to render aid, officers repeatedly ordered him to drop the knife while firing three beanbag rounds into his back from a shotgun. After some deliberation, officers then released the dog a second time. Boyd was unresponsive as the dog chewed at and pulled on his leg. Officers finally moved in, stepped on one of his hands, removed the knife from his other hand, and handcuffed him.

Boyd died from his gunshot wounds in the hospital the next day. At a news conference several days later, APD Chief Gordon Eden announced that the officer-involved shooting was justified.^[16]

In January of 2015, in an exceptional move which brings a challenge to the sovereignty of the police, Bernalillo County District Attorney has brought murder charges against the two officers who shot Boyd.^[18] The charges came in the wake of almost six months of large protests across the nation after district attorneys in several jurisdictions failed to indict police officers who shot and killed unarmed black men. Whether the charges will result in a criminal trial depends on the outcome of the preliminary hearing which will be held in a few months — at which point the charges may be downgraded or dropped.

Department of Justice Investigation

At the time of Boyd’s shooting, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice was already investigating the APD for its large number of shootings (37 since 2010) and apparent pattern of other uses of excessive force during arrests. After the video of Boyd’s death was released, and after hundreds of riotous protesters demanded reform to the police department,^[19] Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry wrote a letter to the DoJ requesting that they expedite their investigation.^[20] The DoJ complied, and on April 10, 2014, about 17 months after the investigation began, it released its findings in the form of a 46-page letter to the mayor.

The findings did not address the Boyd shooting because it is still under criminal investigation. It did, however, refer to Chief Eden’s comments at the press conference as evidence “that more work is needed to change the culture of APD.” (4)

According to the findings letter, the DoJ found “that the department engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force during the course of arrests and other detentions in violation of the Fourth Amendment” stemming “from systemic deficiencies in oversight, training, and policy.” The report also noted that “A significant amount of the force we reviewed was used against persons with mental illness and in crisis.” (9-10)

Those and similar findings from the DoJ investigation reveal how members of the Albuquerque Police Department routinely constitute themselves as little sovereigns acting in de facto states of exception by suspending the constitutional rights of their victims, especially those subjects with mental illness and in crisis who misfit within and are excluded from the political life of the city.

As a final illustration of how both police (who are excepted from the normal prohibitions of the law) and homeless (who are excepted from the normal protections of the law) share in what Agamben calls the “relation of exception,” here is an account from the DoJ findings letter of an incident in which police confronted an angry 75-year-old homeless man named “Ben” who depends upon a cane to walk:

The incident happened in September 2012 after officers responded to a bus station because Ben refused to leave. When officers arrived, they offered to take Ben to a homeless shelter and also called a Crisis Intervention Team officer to assist. Ben sat on a bench and told officers that he was not going to leave peacefully and that he was angry with the bus company for refusing to let him board. After officers tried to convince him to leave for about an hour, Ben threatened bus company employees and reached for his cane. Officers ordered him to put his cane down, but he refused. As Ben was trying to stand up using his cane (presumably for support), the CIT-trained officer shot Ben in the abdomen with his Taser. He did so even though the threat from Ben was minimal: Ben had trouble walking on his own, a sergeant and three officers were standing around him, and there were no indications that bystanders were near Ben. The sergeant on the scene found the Taser use reasonable, as did other supervisors. One supervisor praised the officers' conduct as “exceptional.” (18, emphasis added)

References and Notes

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Feldman, Leonard C. Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library, [1938] 2008. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79h/

U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. “Re: Albuquerque Police Department.” Findings Letter. April 10, 2014. http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/documents/apd_findings_4-10-14.pdf

1. YouTube video ID: vG7Mjt_j8Cs. Footage from the surveillance cameras is available elsewhere on the web, including the Denver Post website

2. Tom McGhee, “No discipline for deputies in Marvin Booker’s death at Denver jail,” The Denver Post, May 9, 2011.

3. Tom McGhee, “FBI looking into Marvin Booker’s 2010 death at Denver jail,” The Denver Post, February 21, 2013.

4. Noelle Phillips, “Denver to pay $6 million in Marvin Booker jail death settlement,” The Denver Post, November 26, 2014.

5. YouTube video ID: KU0Imk2Bstg. Witnesses with a cellphone also captured video

6. Eileen Frere, “Kelly Thomas Trial: Forensic Expert, Paramedic Testify,” ABC7 Eyewitness News, December 4, 2013.

7. Richard Winton, “Homeless man’s mother settles with Fullerton over his death,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2012.

8. David Ariosto, “Prosecutors: Police won’t face criminal charges in Michigan death,” CNN, September 13, 2012.

9. YouTube video ID: YC3OAMi9kjY. The cellphone video obtained by CNN is also available on LiveLeak: “Saginaw Police Shoots Homeless Man (Milton Hall) 46 time in 5 Seconds.”

10. Bob Johnson, “Video: Police cruiser footage shows events that led to Milton Hall police shooting,” MLive, September 13, 2012.

11. Jason Carroll and Sheila Steffen, “Video captures Michigan man’s shooting by police,” CNN, August 17, 2012.

12. Bob Johnson, “Saginaw officers who shot and killed Milton Hall won’t face federal charges,” MLive, February 25, 2014.

13. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Announces Results of Investigation into the Death of Milton Hall,” February 25, 2014.

14. Jewel Hall, “APD Protects a Culture Out of Control,” Albuquerque Journal, November 23, 2011.

15. I’m not the only one to notice the connections between the Hall and Boyd shootings: “Michigan police shooting similar to ABQ case,” Albuquerque Journal, April 8, 2014.

16. Chris McKee, “APD: Officer involved shooting was justified,” KRQE News 13, March 21, 2014.

17. YouTube video ID: dgRkkLyZMKM. A slightly edited version of the helmet camera video (as released by KRQE) is available on LiveLeak: “Police helmet camera captures fatal shooting of James Boyd armed with a knife as he’s turning away” (though the YouTube video has better audio)

18. “Officers in Boyd shooting charged with murder,” KRQE News 13, January 12, 2015

19. Elizabeth Barber, “Albuquerque protest over police shootings turns to `mayhem' (+video),” The Christian Science Monitor, March 31, 2014.

20. Anna Velasquez, “Mayor asks DOJ to fast-track review of APD,” KOAT Albuquerque, April 2, 2014.