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    If Trump wins the election, US protest movements could face serious crackdowns

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    This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
    The Knox county commission was questioning a property developer one evening in April three years ago when protesters quietly filed in to their auditorium and raised their fists in the air.A week earlier, police had shot and killed 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr in a bathroom at his high school after they found him with a gun. Protests erupted in Knoxville, the county seat and largest city in eastern Tennessee, and one the loudest voices speaking out was Constance Every, who had organized demonstrations in the city during the national outrage that followed George Floyd’s death less than a year earlier. Now, she was in the county commission chamber with about two dozen others, intending to press them for the release of police body-camera footage that captured Thompson’s death.As the protesters lined up near the meeting room’s back wall, Every, who was wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt, retrieved from her backpack a white T-shirt Thompson’s aunt gave her, which read: “Who do you call when the murderer wears a badge?” Then, she pulled out an electronic bullhorn, and sounded the siren.“Knox county, county commission, your meeting is over,” Every said through the bullhorn, as the protesters clustered around her. “’Cause what we’re not going to tolerate is that we got a kid who was murdered at Knox county schools, and y’all going to carry on like these children don’t deserve to have their rights and other factors. It is not OK, what you all are doing, whatsoever.”View image in fullscreenWithin seconds of the siren going off, sheriff’s deputies, both in uniform and in plainclothes, converged on Every, grabbing her and some of her group, and marching them outside. While many kept silent as they left, Every did not. “I have not broke any laws! I am exercising my right to peacefully assemble and use my freedom of speech, you fucking murderers!” she shouted.The disruption lasted just over 70 seconds. But for Every and the six others arrested in the commission chambers, it marked the beginning of a three-year legal saga, after the county prosecutor charged them with disrupting a lawful meeting – a misdemeanor for which Tennessee’s Republican leaders had just months earlier doubled the punishment.Since Floyd’s death in May 2020, Republican-led states have enacted laws expanding the definition of rioting to encompass protesters who stayed peaceful when others did not, protecting drivers who run over demonstrators that block roads and enhancing penalties against protesters who target oil and gas infrastructure and deface monuments. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), which tracks the legislation, has found that hundreds of proposals have been made by state and federal lawmakers nationwide, and more than two dozen signed into law.The push comes as the GOP’s standard bearer, Donald Trump, campaigns for the presidency on a platform that includes suppressing protests. He has vowed to deploy the national guard “where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order”, while simultaneously promising pardons for people convicted over the January 6 insurrection. As president, Trump reportedly encouraged the military to shoot protesters, and, this year, allies such as the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, have said the national guard should be used against college students demonstrating over Israel’s invasion of Gaza.If he returned to the White House, Trump could direct a militarized response to protests and pressure congressional Republicans to pass legislation that would impose nationwide penalties like those already in effect in Tennessee.Tennessee is a thoroughly red state where the GOP holds a supermajority in its general assembly. Last year lawmakers temporarily expelled two Black Democratic representatives who staged a noisy protest calling for gun control legislation in the state house chamber. In August 2020, Republicans passed a bill that increased penalties for blocking a street or sidewalk and created a new felony offense for protest encampments on state property, in addition to making disrupting a meeting a more severe category of misdemeanor.The Republican governor, Bill Lee, justified the legislation as necessary to prevent “lawlessness”, and in the years since, he has signed two more anti-protest bills, one of which made blocking roads a felony, and the other of which expanded the definition of aggravated rioting and created a mandatory minimum sentence for people convicted.View image in fullscreen“These laws that we are seeing in Tennessee are really representative of the kinds of tactics that we’re seeing nationwide in response to particular protest movements,” said Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at ICNL’s US program.To Amelia Parker, a Black Lives Matter activist who now serves on the Knoxville city council, it is not surprising that Every wound up being perhaps the first person to run afoul of such laws.“She’s one that authorities would want to make an example out of. They definitely would not want another Constance,” Parker said.An African American army veteran who is disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder from two tours in Afghanistan, Every became politically active after struggling to find services during a period of homelessness in Knoxville, the home town she returned to after leaving the military.“I’m not a sugar-coater, I’m not a person that’s going to come in and say, ‘with all due respect’. I’m not that,” Every said in an interview from her apartment, where a framed photograph of her speaking to protesters in a police station parking lot in the days after Floyd’s death hangs over the couch.“I’m going to come in and tell you straight to your face the failures, the problems, and more importantly, you holding this role as a political, elected body or member, that you should hold a lot of accountability for what’s happening.”Her leadership of the 2020 protests, which in Knoxville were generally peaceful, put her on the radar of local authorities, she believes. Tensions in the city escalated again following Thompson’s shooting on 12 April of the following year at Austin-East, a predominantly Black high school where, in the few months since the new year, four students had already died in shootings in its neighborhood.Officers went to the school that afternoon to find Thompson after his ex-girlfriend reported him for assaulting her earlier in the day and warned he was known to carry a gun, an investigation by Knoxville’s police department would find. In a lawsuit filed against the city and the four officers involved in his death, attorneys for Thompson’s mother and his best friend would write that he carried a pistol because his ex-girlfriend’s family had threatened him, and because the streets around the school were unsafe.The fours officers looking for Thompson found him in a bathroom stall with a gun. A struggle ensued, and after Thompson’s pistol went off and hit a garbage can, one of the officers fired twice, fatally wounding the teenager and injuring a school resource officer.Days later, the Knox county district attorney general, Charme Allen, said she would not prosecute the officers who encountered Thompson. The lawsuit filed by his mother and friend was dismissed by a federal judge, who found the officers had qualified immunity – the controversial doctrine that limits law enforcement officials’ liability for some lawsuits. Their attorney has appealed the decision.Every and other activists in Knoxville remember an atmosphere of distrust in the days after Thompson’s death, which was worsened by authorities’ decision to initially describe him as an “active shooter” and lead the public to believe the teenager was responsible for wounding the school resource officer, when he was in fact shot by one of their colleagues. They decided to hold protests to demand more details of what really happened, including the release of footage from the cameras the police were wearing on their uniforms.“We knew we had to double down and, as activists, that we had to really rally around each other and dig in on having fortitude to ensure we put a spotlight to this,” said Calvin Skinner, a Baptist minister who has collaborated on social justice work with Every, and was arrested at the county commission meeting.Days after Thompson’s death, Every, Skinner and others disrupted a school board meeting without issue. But when they went to the county commission meeting a week after the teen’s fatal wounding, they knew something was off. Dozens of sheriff’s deputies were waiting for them, and signs had been posted warning of the state’s law.In the past, disruptions had not been uncommon at the Knox county commission. Like many local governments, the body had just weathered a tense period as they dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic, during which protesters opposed to mask mandates would sometimes start shouting at them during meetings, recalled the former county commissioner Dasha Lundy. The same thing would happen when people grew upset over zoning decisions, she said, but, to her knowledge, nobody from either group was arrested.“I keep going back to the people who were not supportive of [mask mandates] and how they were interrupting our meetings, but they just so happened to be white folks,” said Lundy, who was the sole Black commissioner during her four years in office.“They just tell them, be quiet, do this, whatever. They interrupted the meeting too, but we don’t want to talk about that.”After Every began talking, the commission’s then chair, Larsen Jay, a Republican, gaveled the meeting into a 10-minute recess. When it resumed, he called the disruption “clearly a staged set-up for one purpose: to draw attention, to draw in police reaction, and to make this commission put in a very bad position”. He then added that anyone who wanted to speak could sign up for their public forum.The seven protesters who were removed from the commission chambers were jailed for a few hours, then released and charged with disrupting a meeting. That was one of the offenses that the Tennessee general assembly had raised penalties for in their bill passed after Floyd’s death, upgrading it from a class B misdemeanor to class A, the most serious category that carries a maximum jail sentence of just under 12 months.View image in fullscreenThough the protesters were a multiracial group, Every believes their cause made them a target. “If we were talking about anything else than Black Lives Matter, [there] probably would have been a whole different approach,” she said.A spokeswoman for the Knox county sheriff, Tom Spangler, said he was unavailable to comment. A spokesman for Allen, the district attorney general, said she declined to comment, because the case was still “pending”.The arrest came as a surprise to Mary Winter, a white Ihop manager who had traveled from a Tennessee city nearly two hours west to attend the protest. She didn’t think she was in danger of breaking the law and had walked into the chamber holding Every’s phone, which was streaming the protest on Facebook. That video, as well as another recorded by the Knoxville News Sentinel, shows that Winter stayed silent until she was detained, but in an affidavit, the deputy who arrested her accused her of disrupting the meeting by “yelling and encouraging others to do the same”.“This sworn statement of this officer in my arrest affidavit, that was the basis for my being arrested. And it flat-out did not happen,” Winter said.Shortly before the trial started on 8 April, Winter opted to plead guilty in exchange for six months of unsupervised probation and paying court costs. She was already on probation for felony attempted murder after shooting her husband, with whom she said she was in an abusive relationship, and feared a conviction that would send her to jail. Two other protesters, Carrie Hopper and Kevin Andrews, also took plea deals.At the trial, attorneys for Every, Skinner and two co-defendants, Gavin Guinn and Aaron Valentine, attempted to convince the jury that prosecutors had failed to prove that they had “substantially” disrupted the meeting, as the statute demanded. Every testified that they never intended to halt the commission’s meeting, because that would defeat the purpose – rather, they wanted the lawmakers to use their power over the district attorney general’s budget to have the body-camera footage released. The video was made public two days after the protesters’ arrest.View image in fullscreenThe trial also answered the question of how the sheriff’s department was aware of Every’s plans: they had been monitoring her Facebook account.“We’ll check various activist groups, activist individuals, individuals who somebody calls to us about and says they have concerns. And one of those individuals was Ms Every,” testified John Sharp, a sergeant in the Knox county sheriff’s office’s narcotics division, one of the plainclothes officers that removed Skinner from the commission chambers.Both sides questioned Jay about why the mask mandate protesters were not arrested when they were disruptive. The commission chair replied: “I’m not aware that they got arrested” but “several of them were escorted out of the room after being disruptive. I don’t know what the result of their actions were afterwards.”“And you say [these two parties] disrupted your meeting in similar ways?” asked Mike Whalen, Skinner’s attorney.“Yes, basically shouting out and disrupting it from an auditory perspective,” the commissioner replied.The prosecution, led by the deputy district attorney, Sean McDermott, put Every’s use of the bullhorn, and the protesters gathering around her, at the center of their case.“Did any of the mask people pull a siren and announce that your meeting was over?” McDermott asked Jay. “No,” he replied.In his closing argument, McDermott said: “The group was acting as one. They were protecting the one with the bullhorn, surrounding her, making it more difficult, slowing law enforcement down, stopping the meeting.”After about six hours of deliberations, the jury found Every guilty, but acquitted the three other defendants. She was sentenced to nearly a year of probation. Her attorney, Andrew Beamer, has appealed the verdict.Even with the heightened penalties, it was unlikely that Every would have been sentenced to jail, Beamer said. But he believes the new law serves as a “shot across the bow of everybody, that they weren’t going to let you protest in this way.“I think that the state saying, ‘hey, we care about these protest laws, let’s charge people.’ I don’t think that was lost on the county here.” More

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    Former White House staffer says Trump called for leaker to be executed

    Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin has disclosed that Donald Trump repeatedly mused out loud about executing people at several meetings while she worked for him during his presidency.Griffin’s claim, which she made in a podcast recording with Mediaite released on Friday, is likely to add to concerns that a return for Trump to the Oval Office could be characterized primarily by political retribution.The former communications director for the Trump administration told the outlet she had been at a meeting at which he “straight up said a staffer who leaked … should be executed”, referring to an anonymously sourced report that the former president had gone into a secure bunker at the White House at the height of the racial justice protests prompted by a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd.“There were others where we talked about executing people,” Griffin said.In response to Griffin’s comments, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek: “As President Trump has said, the best revenge is the success and prosperity of all Americans.”Under the constitution, a president has no direct power to enforce capital punishment. But the president does have the power to appoint attorneys general who oversee key decisions concerning federal capital punishment.Rumors around Trump’s interest in summary executions have been making the rounds for years. As he geared up to run for a second presidency in November, Trump reportedly asked three people: “What do you think of firing squads?” And he has repeatedly backed expanding the use of the federal death penalty.According to Rolling Stone, Trump has also mused about bringing back hanging and the guillotine – all while televising their use – because it “would help put the fear of God into violent criminals”.A Trump spokesperson said at the time to Rolling Stone that “either these people are fabricating lies out of thin air” or the outlet is “allowing themselves to be duped by these morons”.But the Trump 2024 campaign has also said that if the former president returned to office, he was “going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their pain”.During the final three months of Trump’s first term, the US executed 13 federal prisoners by lethal injection – a significant acceleration in the use of the death penalty by the federal government.Prior to that, only three people had been executed since 1963. But under the Trump administration, the federal government allowed any method of execution that was legal in the state where the death penalty was being carried out.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTerre Haute federal prison in Indiana, where Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001, has used hanging, electrocution and lethal injection.Trump attorney general Bill Barr has said that if Trump had won a second term in 2020, there had been an “expectation” that use of the federal death penalty would continue at an accelerated pace.Griffin’s claim that Trump called for the execution of a White House staffer is loosely corroborated by Barr during an interview he gave to CNN in April in which he recalled that Trump had been “very mad” about the White House bunker leaker.Barr said he couldn’t remember whether Trump specifically called for someone to be executed and doubted it would ever have actually been carried out. But he also said he “wouldn’t dispute” that Trump had called for someone to be executed over the bunker leak.Griffin left the White House in December 2020, weeks after Trump lost the election to Joe Biden but refused to accept the legitimacy of the result. She is now a commentator for CNN and co-host of the NBC talkshow The View. More

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    Marjorie Taylor Greene’s George Floyd rant condemned by Congressional Black Caucus

    The Congressional Black Caucus has condemned Marjorie Taylor Greene after she accused Democrats of worshiping George Floyd, the 46-year old Black man who was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020.On Monday, Greene, a Republican representative of Georgia, went on an expletive-filled rant in which she accused Democrats including Jamie Raskin of Maryland of worshiping Floyd, whose death sparked global outrage and protests over police brutality.In a video posted on X, Greene can be seen speaking to a reporter, saying, “We have Jamie Raskin in there accusing us of worshiping Trump, worshiping a ‘convicted felon’.” The reporter interjected, saying that Trump was indeed convicted.In response, Greene said: “Well yeah, so was George Floyd. And everybody, and you all too, the media worships George Floyd. Democrats worship George Floyd. There were riots, burning down the fucking country over George Floyd and Raskin is in there, saying we worship him [Trump].“Excuse me, let me correct you and this is really important. I don’t worship. I worship God. God. And Jesus is my savior. I don’t worship President Trump and I’m really sick and tired of the bullshit antics I have to deal with,” Greene continued.Greene’s comments came after Raskin said that some Republicans “blindly worship” convicted felons in a congressional hearing on Covid-19, NBC reports. The hearing followed Trump’s conviction last week in which he was found guilty on 34 counts of fraud in a historic hush-money trial that involved adult film star Stormy Daniels.Following Greene’s comments, the Congressional Black Caucus condemned the Republican representative. “This is unhinged even for @RepMTG,” they wrote in an X post.“Her actions are unacceptable even by the lowest of Republican standards. George Floyd did not deserve to die, and a member of Congress should have the decency to acknowledge his humanity,” the Congressional Black Caucus continued.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFormer Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pleaded guilty in 2021 to civil rights charges in his killing of Floyd in May 2020. Chauvin was charged with two counts of depriving Floyd of his rights after he pinned his knee into Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds while Floyd was on the ground and handcuffed, unable to breathe.In addition to pleading guilty to civil rights charges, Chauvin was also convicted of second and third-degree murder and manslaughter. More

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    Supreme court rejects Chauvin’s appeal of George Floyd murder conviction

    The US supreme court rejected on Monday a conviction appeal for the former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd.The decision affirms Derek Chauvin’s conviction for second-degree murder and sentence of more than 20 years in prison.In October, Chauvin’s legal defense requested the highest court in their nation take up their client’s case, arguing he was denied a fair trial in 2021 because of prejudice in the pretrial due to publicity.They also argued juror misconduct, alleging that it was in the jurors’ best interest to find Chauvin guilty to avoid threats of violence from the public.The supreme court did not provide comment on its decision to refuse Chauvin’s appeal.Floyd, who was Black, was killed by police on 25 May 2020, igniting global protests calling for his murderers to be brought to justice and an end to police brutality and racism worldwide.Chauvin, a white officer, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes outside the convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill.A video captured by a bystander showed Floyd’s final moments as he called out for his mother and said, “I can’t breathe,” which became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.Three other former officers involved in Floyd’s murder – J Alexander Kueng, Tou Thao and Thomas Lane – received lesser state and federal sentences.Chauvin is separately appealing his conviction on federal civil rights charges. More

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    ‘It looked like Chauvin would get away with it’: Minnesota’s top attorney on how he won justice for George Floyd’s family

    When he recalls seeing Derek Chauvin in court for the first time, Keith Ellison references “the banality of evil”, a phrase coined by writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.“The point of the whole book is that Nazis were not these big, scary people that your imagination conjures,” Ellison, Minnesota’s top law enforcement official, says in a phone interview. “They’re ordinary, they’re plain, they’re very regular and they’re a lot less than you assume they would be and that’s how I felt about Derek Chauvin. He looked like a relatively small man – I bet he didn’t weigh 140lb. Here’s this guy who acted so monstrously: it’s just a man, not a very big one.”Chauvin, a white former police officer, was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man in Minneapolis, after kneeling on his neck for nine minutes. He was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison and has appealed his conviction.The prosecution was directed by Ellison, who led every meeting, assigned duties to the team and sat in court every day scribbling observations in old notebooks from his 12-year spell in the House of Representatives (he was the first Muslim elected to Congress). When those were full, a friend at a law firm gave him more.The notes were invaluable to prosecutors as the trial unfolded and served as raw material for Ellison’s recently published book, Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence, which offers a blow-by-blow account of the case and spotlights a culture in which the training manual often receives lip service and complaints about “bad cops” are too easily ignored. It asks what role prosecutors, defendants, heads of police unions, judges, activists, legislators, politicians and media figures can play in reforming a criminal justice system that fails people of color.The book begins on the day three years ago last week when Ellison, attorney general of Minnesota, was woken by his phone at 4.45am by an urgent message. He watched a mobile phone video that showed Floyd, trapped under Chauvin’s knee, shouting “Mamma! Mamma! I’m through!” and, repeatedly, “I can’t breathe!” Ellison could not believe how long the torment continued.The 59-year-old recalls: “Even though I have been working on police accountability and brutality issues for years, I was still shocked. I was still blown away by the inhumanity of what I saw.”The side of every police car in Minneapolis displays the words: “To protect with courage, to serve with compassion.” The first statement from the city police department about Floyd was entitled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” and made no mention of officers restraining him on the ground with a knee on his neck.The state attorney general comments: “I did not expect to see basically a whitewashing of what happened to George Floyd. It said he died of a medical emergency – sounds like a heart attack or a stroke. It does not sound like positional asphyxia with a knee on the neck and so I found that dumbfounding as well.”With America already traumatised by the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump’s divisive presidency in the summer of 2020, the killing ignited protests against police brutality and racial injustice. Ellison had expected the conscience of Minneapolis to be shocked but was not prepared for the demonstrations that took hold everywhere from Bogotá to Lisbon.“In cities all over the world you saw an outrage. When I thought about it, I understood it because nowhere in the world do people tolerate arbitrary government force. They always protest it no matter what.”America began a racial reckoning but, Ellison notes, around the world the issue transcended race. “In America everything is racialised but it’s not racialised in every country in which people were shot. There were protests in Lagos – everybody is Black in Lagos. People still recognised government abuse of power and state-sponsored violence and they protested it.”Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, tapped Ellison, who had spent 16 years as a criminal defence lawyer but served less than two as attorney general, to lead the prosecution when the Chauvin case came to trial. Ellison accepted but, even with video evidence and witnesses, did not take the outcome for granted.A murder conviction of a police officer for an on-duty death is uncommon. The officers accused of beating Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991 were acquitted, while Breonna Taylor, Mike Brown and Eric Garner’s cases never made it past the grand jury. “History was on Derek Chauvin’s side,” Ellison says. “It looked a lot more like Chauvin would get away with it than not.”The makeup of the jury was a key concern. “We grow up on TV shows like Dragnet or Hill Street Blues or Law and Order. We all are raised on a certain amount of media that reinforces this idea that you should trust the police.“And yet here on this video we see officers who don’t deserve to be trusted, don’t deserve to be believed, and so part of the job that we had assigned to us is to help people believe their eyes, trust their instincts, listen to their neighbors. The people who stopped on that street corner were as inclined to believe the police story as anyone but they couldn’t deny it because it was unfolding right in front of them. As we picked the jury, we wanted the jury to identify with that randomly selected group of people who assembled to object to the treatment that George Floyd was receiving.”Ellison succeeded in impaneling the most gender and racially diverse jury of his career. Fellow officers and even a police chief took the witness stand to testify against Chauvin, who did not testify on his own behalf.In April 2021, on the day of the verdict, several hundred people gathered outside the courthouse and 23 million people watched on live television. The jury found Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Ellison felt a rush of relief but took no joy at the sight of a man whose life had changed forever.On the faces of the Floyd family he saw “validation” and “vindication”, he recalls. “More than anything else, their brother was treated like human trash and the verdict said, no, he’s a human being worthy of respect like anyone. To them, it was extremely emotional – tears – and then they were surprisingly calm. They’re a very dignified family, very dignified people. They were clearly relieved: they didn’t know what the jury was going to decide.”In November that year, however, Ellison suffered a defeat. The residents of Minneapolis voted on a ballot proposal that would in effect replace the police department with a public safety department putting an emphasis on public health. The attorney general endorsed the measure but more than 56% of people voted against it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEllison explains: “Sadly, after the death of George Floyd, we experienced what you might describe as de-policing and a lot of officers quit and a lot of officers said we’re not going to engage criminal conduct.“Some of the folks who are inclined to commit crimes felt they had a freer hand and we saw crime statistics go up. Because of that, a lot of people were more concerned about their personal safety than they were about police accountability and that is one reason why the measure failed.”A second cause of rising crime, he argues, was a breakdown in trust between police and community. “People who commit crimes know this. They’re like, ‘Look, I know in this neighborhood people don’t call the police, therefore I’m freer to sell dope, carry guns, harm others, extort people.’ It is very important for the sake of public safety to hold police accountable on a consistent ongoing basis because, if you don’t, it will allow crime to thrive and grow, which is nobody’s benefit.”Centrist Democrats took the ballot result as a sign that the phrase “defund the police” had turned politically radioactive and become a gift to Republicans eager to portray them as soft on crime. Former president Barack Obama warned young progressives that it would turn off many voters.But Ellison, a former deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, believes that “defund the police” has been unfairly weaponised by a Republican party that, given its unwillingness to address gun violence, has no credibility on public safety.He points out that police misconduct lawsuits in Minneapolis and elsewhere in recent years have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars – money that could have been spent on hospitals, parks, public transport or schools. “It’s going to compensate victims of police misconduct. What if we just stop the misconduct?”The failure of the ballot measure in Minnesota hinted at a broader loss of momentum after that seemingly revolutionary summer. The Black Lives Matter signs that adorned many front gardens gradually gave way to Ukrainian flags as new causes took hold. Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Police shot and killed at least 1,096 people – a record – last year, according to a count by the Washington Post.But Ellison sees a mixed picture. “What I can tell you is that on the local level a lot of good things have happened. You’ve seen legislation passed in the state of Minnesota. The city of Minneapolis has taken a number of measures to try to improve things. We’ve hired some police leaders who are reform-minded. But quite honestly, it has been an uneven progress. The federal government hasn’t really done anything, which is really disappointing.”The ambivalence was highlighted earlier this year when Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, died after a traffic stop escalated into a beating by a group of Memphis police officers. The horrific killing reopened old wounds but Memphis police and county officials earned praise for a swift, unequivocal response. Five officers were fired and charged with second-degree murder. They pleaded not guilty.Ellison was impressed. “Quite honestly, I think that if George Floyd had not occurred, maybe we would still be stuck in this very ham-handed, fumbling-along approach, but the way that they did it signaled to the population that this was going to be handled in a proper way and it was going to be meaningful accountability.”Indeed, despite all he has seen of the worst in human nature, Ellison remains optimistic about the future. He reflects: “Look, it’s sad but it’s true: the people who killed George Floyd were a multiracial group. There was one Black officer, one Hmong officer and two white officers. But the people who stood up for George Floyd were a multiracial group too. There was a young white woman who was a firefighter, two young white teenagers, a 61-year-old African American man, a 17-year-old Black girl.“It was a mixed group and, if you look at the protests, they were multiracial. I’m not pessimistic. We can move forward but we’ve got to try to take stock of the lessons that are available to be learned and that’s why I wrote the book, because I want folks to really think about solving this problem.”
    Break the Wheel is published in the US by Twelve More

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    ‘I will never be against the second amendment’: Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike on rap, racism and gun control

    Interview‘I will never be against the second amendment’: Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike on rap, racism and gun controlAmmar Kalia After almost a decade of working alongside El-P, the rapper is releasing a solo single. He talks about the chaos and loss that inspired it, his friendship with Bernie Sanders and the ‘racist’ twisting of lyrics‘I definitely lead a non-politician life; I smoke weed and I go to strip clubs with my wife,” the rapper Killer Mike says with a laugh. “But I care about people and I have a duty to my community. I am not an angry old man – I am a participator.” As if to demonstrate at least some of that, he lights a blunt.As a musician and an activist, Killer Mike has long balanced pleasure and responsibility. Now 47, he first came to the world’s attention in the early 2000s, when he featured on several tracks with the Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast before launching a solo career.Since 2013, he has been half of Run the Jewels alongside the New York rapper El-P. Their music meanders between hedonism and social exposition, while their live shows are as notorious for their ecstatic mosh pits as they are for their lyrical reflections on police brutality, racism and social injustice.Michael Render, as he is legally known, is now releasing his first solo material in a decade, with the track Run testing the waters for a possible larger solo project. Over a fanfare of horns and a clattering mid-tempo beat, he entreats his Black listeners to persist amid the chaos. “All I know is keep going / you gotta run,” he raps, playing with the meanings of running from danger, running for office or simply moving forwards.“I say that ‘the race for freedom ain’t won / you gotta run’,” he tells me, “because as Black people in America we have to be resilient. We have overcome and we shall continue to do so.”On a video call from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, Render is by turns eloquent and mischievous as he talks about his history of political activism. He has been close to the leftwing senator Bernie Sanders ever since they shared a meal at the Atlanta soul food restaurant Busy Bee Cafe in 2015, and he backed Sanders’ presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. Their unlikely friendship has spawned hundreds of memes, with Sanders, for example, shaping his hands into the Run the Jewels symbol of a gun pointed at a closed fist, or asking Render if he should call him “Mike or Killer Mike?”. “It was just a conversation between two angry radical guys, one 74 and white, one 40 and Black, finding common ground,” Render has said of that first encounter.His emotive speeches at Sanders rallies are almost as famous as his music. Addressing the roaring crowd in North Carolina in 2019, he said: “When you go to that [voting] booth next year, I need you to carry the memory of this room. Black, white, straight, gay, male, female, we are together. We are united. We will not wait four more years.”His impassioned words in the wake of police killings in the US have also gone viral. In 2015, during a show in Ferguson, Missouri, a fan-filmed video showed Render raging at the grand jury who had acquitted the officer who had killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, then pleading for the safety of his four children, who range in age from 15 to 27. In the riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he told the public to fortify their homes and to “plot, plan, strategise, mobilise and organise” to dismantle the systemic structures of racism. “It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth,” he said. “It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, and chiefs and deputy chiefs.”It must be exhausting having to publicly advocate for basic rights year after year, I tell him. “It’s a continuation of the work,” he says calmly. “My grandmother did the work of taking care of our neighbours without publicity, and my grandfather did, too – he would go fishing and always give half of his catch to other people, for instance. I don’t see it as making me better. I don’t see it as being driven by celebrity guilt either. I was told by my elders to make sure that the people who are suffering in my community are relieved by me. These are the principles that I operate with.”He believes that Sanders shares his desire for social justice. “I will always speak to him because I believe he gives a fuck beyond his own personal chequebook. I honestly believe he is a continuation of great thinkers like [former slave and abolitionist] Frederick Douglass and [trade unionist] Eugene V Debs – a continuation of people who fought their ass off for the betterment of the salt-of-the-earth, everyday American.“Part of my responsibility is to make sure that people who are doing the work on a weekly and daily basis have a platform to push an agenda that’s helpful. No matter if you’re a Black person working a blue-collar job, or if you’re one of the educated elite bourgeoisie, you have a responsibility to push the line.”Sometimes, however, he pushes the line in a direction that many will find objectionable. In 2018, during nationwide protests after the deadliest high school shooting in US history, he gave an interview to the National Rifle Association supporting the second amendment right to bear arms. “You’re a lackey of the progressive movement,” he told leftwingers in favour of gun control, “because you’ve never disagreed with the people who tell you what to do.” He later apologised for the interview’s timing, but his stance on gun ownership remains unchanged. “I will never be against the second amendment,” he says. “There’s no way that someone who represents a community that are only 60-odd years out of an apartheid should be willing to give a weapon back to the government, as the police choke you to death in the street and people just watch and film.”The son of a policeman and a florist, Render is not without sympathy for the police. He has said his father told him and his five sisters not to follow in his footsteps because the job was “too dangerous”. Still, Render believes police reform is necessary and possible. “I have not seen a will to get rid of police as much as I’ve seen a want for police to be from the communities they’re policing and to be fair, rather than abusers of power,” he says. “We should be supporting the Police Athletic Leagues that deal with our young boys in particular before any trouble happens, more than we should be giving the police more rifles and bulletproof vests. The connection with the community is key.”These leagues are local organisations founded by precincts to mentor young people and hopefully keep them off the streets. Render wasn’t a member as he grew up in the majority-Black Adamsville neighbourhood of Atlanta, but he managed to find his own community connections. “All my heroes and villains were based on character, not colour, as everyone looked like me in my home town,” he says. “I grew up with a real sense of confidence that I could do well, that even if there’s a few more speed bumps for me, I cannot and will not be denied what’s due to me.”Render studied at the prestigious, historically Black Morehouse college before he was spotted rapping by the Outkast member Big Boi. He offered Render a collaboration on their 2000 track Snappin’ & Trappin’, launching his career and leading him to drop out of college after just one year. “Even though I won a Grammy, my grandma still complained that I didn’t bring her a degree,” Render says. “Dropping out is one of my biggest regrets, but I’ve been given everything I’ve ever wanted in terms of being able to have a rap career, so I need to make it better for the people around me and the people that come after me.”“Making things better” includes fighting the use of rap in criminal trials, as US prosecutors have used lyrics by artists such as 6ix9ine, Drakeo the Ruler and Tay-K to try to show that defendants had violent interests or gang affiliations. Alongside Jay-Z and Kelly Rowland, Render recently supported the New York Senate rap music on trial bill, which aims to ban the practice.Having written an op-ed for the Vox website in 2015 about the police’s “well-documented history of antagonism towards rappers”, Render is now watching one of the artists featured on Run, Young Thug, fight racketeering charges alongside 27 others. Prosecutors claim that Young Thug’s rap collective, YSL, is a criminal gang with ties to the national Bloods organisation, and are attempting to use Thug’s lyrics and social media posts against him. “I can’t comment on the charges,” Render says, “but Thug is a victim of a policy being used in a racist way and all of our first amendment rights could be endangered if they attempt to use his words against him. Let Black art live, otherwise we’re going to see a proliferation of rappers no matter what sex, age or ethnicity dragged into the court.”As well as Young Thug, the extended version of Run contains an opening monologue from the comic Dave Chappelle. In his introduction, he compares the Black experience to the Normandy landings. “Ain’t no rhyme or reason why it’s not you on the ground, but as long as it’s not, you have to keep moving,” Chappelle says. “You’re just as heroic as those people who stormed the beach.”“Chaos abounds around you; the people that you know and love are often taken from you or left forever scarred,” Render agrees. “It creates bonds and camaraderie that last your entire life.” He seems untroubled by the furore over Chappelle’s jokes about transgender people, which led to Netflix employees walking out in protest at the company hosting his standup specials. For Render, freedom of expression trumps everything. “If comedians are not allowed to talk shit about everybody, freedom of speech is in trouble,” he says. “When they cannot express themselves, there’s going to be a real problem with everyone else being able to do so as well.”The last time Render spoke to the Guardian, just after the killing of George Floyd, he declared that Black people might feel that “nobody gives a shit” about them. Two years on, after the global protests for Black Lives Matter, does he feel more optimistic? “Not much has changed for Black people since 1619,” he says – the year that the first enslaved Africans arrived in North America. What progress there is has come “only because we push to get the rights and freedoms we deserve, or that have already been promised to us in the Bill of Rights or the United States constitution. If I work hard in making sure fairness and equity are given to my community and the communities that are like mine, only then can things get better. But the work doesn’t stop.”Might he one day go into politics full-time, instead of just supporting others? He briefly ran as an independent candidate in the 2015 elections for Georgia’s 55th district and says Chappelle recently tried to convince him to run for state governor.“I politely declined,” he adds. Later, maybe? “I will run for office the day that I’m unbribable. When I get rich for real, when no amount of money can corrupt me, maybe.”Killer Mike’s new solo single and video, Run, is out on 4 JulyTopicsRun the JewelsThe G2 interviewOutkastHip-hopGeorge FloydBernie SandersUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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    Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justice

    Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justiceMarc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster’s brilliant book considers the history of communications technology in a racist society Nearly all the books I have read about the internet have deepened my fears about the net effect of social media on the health of our body politic. For example, I thought three facts from the congressman Ro Khanna’s recent book, Dignity in a Digital Age, were enough to scare anyone concerned about the future of democracy.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreKhanna reported that an internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”; he revealed that before 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles”; and he pointed to a United Nations report that Facebook played a “determining role” in events in Myanmar that led to the murder of at least 25,000 Rohingya Muslims and the displacement of 700,000 others.Seen and Unseen, a brilliant new book by Marc Lamont Hill, a Black professor, and Todd Brewster, a white journalist, certainly doesn’t ignore those dangers. But the authors’ focus is overwhelmingly on the positive effects of Twitter and Black Twitter, which they argue have democratized access to information, and the power of the smartphone to provide the incontrovertible video evidence needed to prosecute the murderers of men like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.The book is a brisk, smart, short history of the effects of new communication technologies, from the photographs of the 19th century to the movies and television of the 20th and the internet of our own time.It includes terrific mini-portraits of many of the heroes and several of the villains of the Black-and-white battle which has dominated so much of American history, including the great Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who turns out to be the most photographed American of the 19th century, and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr, whose novel The Clansman was the basis for the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.There is a great section about the impact of The Birth of the Nation, which single-handedly revived the Ku Klux Klan and did more to rewrite the history of Reconstruction than any other book or movie. Its director, DW Griffith, was frank about wanting to give white southerners “a way of striking back”.“One could not find the sufferings of our family and our friends – the dreadful poverty and hardships during the war and for many years after – in the Yankee-written histories we read in school,” Griffith wrote. “From all this was born a burning determination to tell … our side of the story to the world.”As the authors note: “His movie did that spectacularly.”The book also reminds us that this was the first movie shown in the White House and the host, Woodrow Wilson, was a friend and Johns Hopkins classmate of Thomas Dixon Jr. Wilson, of course, was also the president who allowed the segregation of the federal government.But what makes this volume especially valuable is the authors’ capacity to see the good and the bad in almost everything.WEB Du Bois said The Birth of the Nation represented “the Negro” either “as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful but doddering idiot”. James Baldwin called it “an elaborate justification of mass murder”.And yet the film was so egregious it also had a tremendous positive effect – it “did more to advance the NAACP”, which had been founded six years earlier, “than anything else to that date. In essence it jump-started the movement for civil rights.” At that time, that term did not yet have any meaning.Du Bois and the NAACP hoped to hit back “in kind” with a movie called Lincoln’s Dream but were stymied by “the lack of enthusiasm” of white capital.In our own time, Hill and Brewster identify the unique power of the video of the murder of George Floyd, which “resonated with whites because the cruelty inflicted on him was so undeniable, so elemental … and so protracted (nine minutes 29 seconds) that it could be neither ignored nor dismissed”.For Black people of course it was much more personal: as they watched “the last breaths being squeezed from Floyd’s body, they could see themselves in his suffering; or an uncle, or a sister, or even a long-departed ancestor”.A beautiful mini-biography of James Baldwin includes many of his most pungent observations, including, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And, “To be a Negro in this country, and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time”.A Lynching at Port Jervis review: timely history of New York race hateRead moreIt turns out that “one of the most frequently cited BLM counterpublic voices is Baldwin’s”. He is “the movement’s literary touchstone, conscience, and pinup” as well as its “most tweeted literary authority”.That is the most positive contribution of Twitter – and particularly Black Twitter – I have ever heard of.The authors write that Baldwin “was impatient with America because he saw it as trapped in its own history”, and wanted America to admit “that it owed its very existence to an ideology of white supremacy”.There was a time in my life when I considered that an exaggeration. But once you have acknowledged that ours is a nation that was literally founded on genocide and slavery, Baldwin’s judgment becomes an indisputable truth.
    Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice is published in the US by Atria Books
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    ‘No progress’ since George Floyd: US police killing three people a day

    ‘No progress’ since George Floyd: US police killing three people a day As Joe Biden pushes to ‘fund the police’, data from Mapping Police Violence shows high rates of deaths at the hands of law enforcement persistPolice officers in America continue to kill people at an alarming rate, according to a data analysis that has raised concerns about the Biden administration’s push to expand police investments amid growing concerns about crime.Law enforcement in the US have killed 249 people this year as of 24 March, averaging about three deaths a day and mirroring the deadly force trends of recent years, according to Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group. The data, experts say, suggests in the nearly two years since George Floyd’s murder, the US has made little progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and that the 2020 promises of systemic reforms have fallen short.In a rare move, Los Angeles ex-deputy is charged in 2019 fatal shootingRead morePolice have killed roughly 1,100 people each year since 2013. In 2021, officers killed 1,136 people – one of the deadliest years on record, Mapping Police Violence reported. The organization tracks deaths recorded by police, governments and the media, including cases where people were fatally shot, beaten, restrained, and Tasered. The Washington Post has reported similar trends, and found that 2021 broke the record for fatal shootings by officers since the newspaper started its database tracking in 2015.“The shocking regularity of killings suggests that nothing substantive has really changed to disrupt the nationwide dynamic of police violence,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard, which evaluates departments. “It demonstrates that we’re not doing enough, and if anything, it appears to be getting slightly worse year over year.”Advocates argue that the persistent rate of killings was a critical reason the US should not be expanding its police forces.Police killings are proceeding at almost exactly the same pace as previous years. No progress has been made in reducing deadly police violence nationwide. Another ~870 people will be killed by police by year’s end unless there are massive systemic changes. https://t.co/G3YiCYZoEi pic.twitter.com/bvhQvZJKWV— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) March 26, 2022
    Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said to “fund the police”, released a budget proposal earlier this week for $30bn in law enforcement and crime prevention efforts, including funding to put “more police officers on the beat”. The proposal, which called for the expansion of “accountable, community policing”, sparked immediate criticisms from racial justice groups. The Movement for Black Lives noted that the White House was proposing only $367m to support police reform and said Biden’s budget “shows a blatant disregard for his promises to Black people, masked as an effort to decrease crime”.Michael Gwin, a White House spokesperson, said in an email that Biden had been “consistent in his opposition to defunding the police and in his support for additional funding for community policing”, and “remains committed to advancing long-overdue police reforms”.“The president, along with the overwhelming majority of Americans, knows that we can and must have a criminal justice system that both protects public safety and upholds our founding ideals of equal treatment under the law. In fact, those two goals go hand-in-hand. That approach is at the core of the president’s comprehensive plan to combat crime by getting guns off the streets, and by investing in community-oriented policing and proven community anti-violence programs,” he added.During the national uprisings after Floyd’s murder, “defund the police” became a central rallying cry, with advocates arguing reform efforts had failed to prevent killings and misconduct. Cities could save lives by reducing police budgets, limiting potentially deadly encounters with civilians, and reinvesting funds into community programs that address root causes of crime, activists have said.Some cities initially responded with modest cuts to police budgets, in some cases removing officers from schools, traffic enforcement and other divisions, and investing in alternatives. But over the last year, an uptick in gun violence and homicides has prompted a backlash to the idea of defunding (even as the current crime rate remains significantly lower than decades prior). With intense media coverage of crime, officials have been pressured to abandon reforms, prioritize harsh punishments and invest more in police. Cities that made small cuts have largely restored and expanded law enforcement budgets.“To invest more into a system that we all know is broken is really a slap in the face to everyone who marched in summer 2020,” said Chris Harris, director of policy at the Austin Justice Coalition in Texas. “It reflects just a real lack of solutions to the problems that we face. It’s just more of the same – even if it’s exactly the thing that we know continues to hurt and kill people.”Graphic on killings by police in the US each year, showing 249 people have been killed so far in 2022, and 1,136 people were killed in 2021.Harris said it was disappointing to see calls for police expansion at the federal level, given the George Floyd Act, the national reform measure proposed after the protests, did not succeed. He said he was not surprised that the killings by police continue apace: “We fail to deal with the underlying issues that often drive police interactions in our communities, partly because we’re funding this law enforcement response rather than the upfront supports and services that could help people.”Gwin noted that the White House was exploring possible executive action to pass reforms after Republicans blocked negotiations over legislation.Sinyangwe pointed to a data analysis in Los Angeles, which showed that in recent years, one-third of incidents in which Los Angeles police department (LAPD) officers used force involved an unhoused person: “Instead of using force against homeless people, we should be investing in services and creating unarmed civilian responses to these issues.”But in LA, where housing and outreach efforts have fallen short, there has been an escalating law enforcement crackdown on street encampments. And LAPD is on track to get a large budget boost, despite a sharp increase in killings by officers in 2021.Proponents of police budget increases argue that law enforcement is the solution to violence, but Sinyangwe noted that fewer than 5% of arrests nationally are for serious violent crimes. And research has shown that when police forces expand, there are more arrests for low-level offenses, he said. And many high-profile killings by police have involved stops for alleged low-level crimes.Kaitlyn Dey, an organizer in Portland, Oregon, said it was frustrating to see officials push a narrative that cities need to “re-fund the police” when municipalities have largely failed to defund law enforcement in the first place.“We have to start chipping away at how many officers there are, what kind of equipment they have – that is going to reduce [police] violence, because they’re not going to be able to enact it if you take away their resources,” she said.There are documented solutions that could reduce killings, said Alex S Vitale, sociology professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on policing. He noted estimates suggesting that 25% to 50% of people killed by police were having a mental health crisis.“If we would develop non-police mental health crisis teams, and improve community-based mental health services, we could save hundreds of lives a year,” he said.Vitale, author of The End of Policing, pointed to a program in Denver that sends mental health clinicians and paramedics to respond to certain 911 calls, which is now dramatically expanding after a successful pilot. Health experts have responded to thousands of emergency calls since 2020, and have never had to call police for backup, the Denver Post reported.“While the media has mobilized crime panics to try and shut down talk of reducing our reliance on policing, organizations across the country are doing grassroots work in communities to demand these alternatives,” he said.TopicsUS policingUS politicsJoe BidenGeorge FloydnewsReuse this content More