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      Atlanta approves funding to build ‘Cop City’ despite fierce opposition

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      The Atlanta city council early on Tuesday approved funding for the construction of a proposed police and firefighter training center, rejecting the pleas of hundreds of activists who spoke for hours in fierce opposition to the project they decry as “Cop City”.Some Cop City opponents have faced unprecedented arrests during which police have accused them under a state domestic terrorism statute, prompting a legal challenge which argues that the protesters are being unduly targeted over their constitutionally protected free speech.Tuesday’s 11-4 vote just after 5am is a significant victory for Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, who has made the $90m project a large part of his first term in office, despite significant pushback to the effort. The city council also passed a resolution requesting two seats on the governing board of a foundation dedicated to raising funds for Atlanta police.The decentralized “Stop Cop City” movement has galvanized protesters from across the country, especially in the wake of the January fatal police shooting of Manuel Paez Terán, a 26-year-old environmental activist known as “Tortuguita” who had been camping in the woods near the site of the proposed project in DeKalb county.For about 14 hours, residents again and again took to the podium to denounce the project, saying it would be a gross misuse of public funds to build the huge facility in a large urban forest in a poor, majority-Black area.“We’re here pleading our case to a government that has been unresponsive, if not hostile, to an unprecedented movement in our city council’s history,” said Matthew Johnson, the executive director of Beloved Community Ministries, a local social justice non-profit. “We’re here to stop environmental racism and the militarization of the police … We need to go back to meeting the basic needs rather than using police as the sole solution to all of our social problems.”The training center was approved by the city council in September 2021 but required an additional vote for more funding. City officials say the new 85-acre (34-hectare) campus would replace inadequate training facilities and would help address difficulties in hiring and retaining police officers that worsened after nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice three years ago.But opponents, who have been joined by activists from around the country, say they fear it will lead to greater militarization of the police and that its construction will exacerbate environmental damage. Protesters had been camping at the site since at least last year, and police said they had caused damage and attacked law enforcement officers and others.The highly scrutinized vote on Tuesday also comes in the wake of the arrests last week of three organizers who lead the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has provided bail money and helped find attorneys for arrested protesters.Prosecutors have accused the three activists of money laundering and charity fraud, saying they used some of the money to fund violent acts of “forest defenders”. Warrants cite reimbursements for expenses including “gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, (Covid-19) rapid tests, media, yard signs”. But the charges have alarmed human rights groups and prompted both of Georgia’s Democratic senators to issue statements over the weekend expressing their concerns.The Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock tweeted that bail funds held important roles during the civil rights movement and said that the images of the heavily armed police officers raiding the home where the activists lived “reinforce the very suspicions that help to animate the current conflict – namely, concerns Georgians have about over-policing, the quelling of dissent in a democracy, and the militarization of our police”. 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

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      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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      DeSantis’s $13.5m police program lures officers with violent records to Florida

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      Numerous police officers lured to new jobs in Florida with cash from Governor Ron DeSantis’s flagship law enforcement relocation program have histories of excessive violence or have been arrested for crimes including kidnapping and murder since signing up, a study of state documents has found.DeSantis, who is expected to launch his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this week, has spent more than $13.5m to date on the recruitment bonus program, which he touted in 2021 as an incentive to officers in other states frustrated by Covid-19 vaccination mandates.“This will go a long way to ensuring we can have the best and the brightest filling our law enforcement ranks,” Florida’s Republican attorney general, Ashley Moody, said in April last year as DeSantis announced one-time $5,000 bonuses for new recruits.However, among the almost 600 officers who moved to Florida and received the bonus – or were recruited in state – are a sizable number who either arrived with a range of complaints against them, or have since accrued criminal charges, the online media outlet Daily Dot has discovered.They include a former trainee deputy with the Escambia county sheriff’s office charged with murdering her husband; an officer with the Miramar police department fired for domestic battery and kidnapping; and a former member of the New York police department (NYPD) who was hired by the Palm Beach police department having once been accused of an improper sexual proposition.That officer, named by the Daily Dot as Daniel Meblin, was also part of a $160,000 settlement by the NYPD for violence at a 2020 protest against the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in which officers were accused of beating Black males without provocation.A Palm Beach police spokesperson told the Daily Dot that Meblin – who had complaints against him including abuse of authority and sexually propositioning a teenager – had disclosed his background during the hiring process, according to the NYPD watchdog 50-a.org.He has been an “exemplary” officer since he was hired in October 2022, the same month he left the NYPD, the spokesperson said, while denying a request to allow Meblin to be interviewed.The Daily Dot compiled its report from state records it obtained from the Florida department of economic opportunity through a Freedom of Information Act request. The undated document lists payments of more than $8.8m split between 1,310 newly hired officers, with most receiving $6,693.44 from the signing-on and additional bonuses.In a press release earlier this month, DeSantis announced the program had since grown to more than 2,000 officers, with a parallel rise in cost to more than $13.5m.“To date, 595 law enforcement recruits from 49 states and US territories have relocated to Florida, including more than 215 recruits from California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania,” the statement said.For its report, the Daily Dot matched information from the 50-a and NYPD databases, as well as published media reports, to officers’ names listed by the state.It says it uncovered “an exodus” of officers to Florida law enforcement agencies from the NYPD in the wake of a backlash against the department for its brutal handling of racial justice protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Among them were at least two dozen officers whose names matched those on the NYPD’s civilian complaint review board database, including some who, according to those complaints, “unlawfully pepper sprayed, assaulted, and pointed their firearms at suspects, as well as used chokeholds and offensive language regarding race and ethnicity”.A civil rights lawsuit filed in 2018 against former NYPD sergeant Haitham Hussameldin alleged the officer used physical violence against a teenager on her way to school. Hussameldin, now employed by Florida’s Manapalan police department, accrued six formal complaints, including “multiple allegations of abuse of authority and overuse of physical force” in New York, the Daily Dot said. All the complaints were withdrawn or unsubstantiated.Another former New York officer now employed in Florida was involved in two deaths, one of which led to a $100,000 civil settlement, the Daily Dot reported. And in October 2022, the Apopka police department hired as an officer Justin Burgos, 19, the son of a retired NYPD deputy inspector, who a year earlier was charged with reckless endangerment, reckless driving and obstruction of governmental administration for driving his car into protesters in Manhattan calling for the firing of an officer accused of beating a Black suspect.None of the police agencies contacted for comment responded, other than the Palm Beach department, the Daily Dot reported. DeSantis’s office did not return a request for comment from the Guardian. More

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      in Elections

      DC officer leaked information to Proud Boys leader, indictment alleges

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      A Washington DC police officer was arrested on Friday on charges that he lied about leaking confidential information to Proud Boys extremist group leader Enrique Tarrio and obstructed an investigation after group members destroyed a Black Lives Matter banner in the nation’s capital.An indictment alleges that Metropolitan police department lieutenant Shane Lamond, 47, of Stafford, Virginia, warned Tarrio, then national chairman of the far-right group, that law enforcement had an arrest warrant for him related to the banner’s destruction.Tarrio was arrested in Washington two days before Proud Boys members joined the mob in storming the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Earlier this month, Tarrio and three other leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy charges for what prosecutors said was a plot to keep the then president, Donald Trump, in the White House after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.A federal grand jury in Washington indicted Lamond on one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements.The indictment accuses Lamond of lying to and misleading federal investigators.Lamond is expected in court on Friday and is on administrative leave.Lamond, who supervised the intelligence branch of the police department’s Homeland Security Bureau, was responsible for monitoring groups like the Proud Boys.His attorney, Mark Schamel, didn’t immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment.Schamel has previously said that Lamond’s job was to communicate with a variety of groups protesting in Washington, and his conduct with Tarrio was never inappropriate and said his client “doesn’t share any of the indefensible positions” of extremist groups.The Metropolitan police department said it would do an internal review after the federal case against Lamond is resolved.Lamond’s name repeatedly came up in the Capitol riot trial of Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders.Messages introduced at Tarrio’s trial appeared to show a close rapport between the two men, with Lamond texting “hey brother”.Tarrio’s lawyers had wanted to call Lamond as a witness, but were stymied by the investigation into Lamond.Lamond used the Telegram messaging platform to give Tarrio information about law enforcement activity around July 2020, according to prosecutors.In December 2020, Lamond told Tarrio about where competing antifascist activists were expected to be.Jurors who convicted Tarrio heard testimony that Lamond frequently provided the Proud Boys leader with internal information about law enforcement operations before Proud Boys stormed the Capitol. More

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      Ilhan Omar condemns US’s failure to act since George Floyd: ‘A broken system’

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      Congresswoman Ilhan Omar condemned the United States’ failure to curb police violence, saying in an interview with the Guardian that brutality against Black Americans had escalated since George Floyd’s murder.“Regardless of the heightened scrutiny and spotlight on state-sanctioned violence on to Black bodies, it still continues to happen at the same rate, if not higher,” the Democratic representative said on Tuesday. “We are not in a good place.”Omar spoke by phone from Minnesota on Tuesday after a United Nations human rights group visited her district as part of a two-week tour of US cities focused on police killings and racism in the US criminal legal system. The UN experts heard emotional testimony in Minneapolis from families of people killed by police and formerly incarcerated people who were subject to solitary confinement as youth and continue to suffer from the trauma.On Wednesday, Omar is also proposing a House resolution condemning police brutality worldwide, calling for reallocating funding in the US toward mental health programs, counseling and violence prevention; ending the use of militarized equipment and police tactics in the US and abroad; and prohibiting the sales of arms, ammunition and “less-lethal” equipment to countries with documented human rights violations.“The United States has always professed these values of human rights and rarely subjects itself in the scrutiny of these systems that we support internationally,” said Omar, the deputy chair of the congressional progressive caucus, who has championed criminal justice reforms. The representative, a frequent target of Republicans and rightwing media, has previously introduced legislation to criminalize violence against protesters, investigate police misuse of force and to restrict the use of no-knock warrants.Floyd’s murder and the 2021 police killing of Daunte Wright, the 20-year-old who was pulled over for having an expired tag and hanging air freshener, both occurred in Omar’s district. At the State of the Union address this year, the congresswoman brought as her guest the father of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old who was asleep on a couch when Minneapolis police barged into the apartment in a pre-dawn raid and killed him within seconds.As Minneapolis braces for the third anniversary of Floyd’s murder this month, advocates’ data analysis has shown that police in the US continue to kill more than three people a day, and that 2022 was the deadliest year on record since experts first started doing nationwide tracking in 2013.“It’s dangerous to continue to make the same mistakes and invest in systems that are not only broken, but do not serve the needs of the community,” said Omar, criticizing the “tough on crime” rhetoric that has increased in recent years as lawmakers roll back reforms and seek to expand police powers. “We know what will work and what is needed. Research and data points to all these other interventions being much more meaningful in reducing crime than what we see when we continue to invest just in policing.”She said non-policing efforts can be more effective, pointing toward a $500,000 US justice department grant for a Minnesota gun violence prevention program that provides trauma recovery services to victims through hospitals, in an effort to break cycles of shootings. “We’ve seen the drastic changes that are experienced by the few people served by the gun violence prevention programs that are funded.”Mothers whose sons were killed by police in Minnesota testified on Tuesday about the horrors of law enforcement instantly using deadly force on their loved ones in crisis, then aggressively defending the killings.The formerly incarcerated witnesses talked to the UN about being locked alone in small cells for hours or days on end, their cries for help ignored. A recent new investigation found that solitary confinement of children continued to be a widespread practice in Minnesota.“The inhumanity of the human rights violations … is baffling,” Omar said. “We have staggering numbers of people who are dying in our prisons and who are living in the most inhumane conditions. We have staggering levels of people struggling with mental health who are being denied access to healthcare that they deserve. We’re seeing people who are being driven to insanity because we seem to lack the compassion of understanding that human beings need interaction.”She noted that some in solitary are deprived of all human contact, blankets and a proper place to sleep, amounting to “torture”. In recent weeks, there have been reports of deaths in US jails, including a man in Indiana with schizophrenia who was left naked in solitary for weeks, and a man with mental illness who was found covered in bedbugs.“The fact we’re allowing young, developing brains with so much potential … to be confined in solitary is just horrendous,” Omar said, adding that the US prison system remained focused on punishment and not on preparing people to return home: “These are things that shouldn’t be happening anywhere in the world, and certainly shouldn’t be happening in the United States.”The UN experts, part of a human rights panel formed after Floyd’s murder, are also visiting Washington DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. In LA, the group toured the county jail system, which has been condemned for its squalid and “barbaric” conditions. The panel will present a report on its findings to the UN later this year. More

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      Jayland Walker shooting: officers won’t face charges in death of Black motorist

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      Eight police officers who fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, following a car and foot chase will not face criminal charges in his death because a grand jury declined to indict them, Ohio’s attorney general announced Monday.Walker’s death last June sparked protests in Akron after police released body camera footage showing him dying in a hail of gunfire. Police said he had refused to stop when they tried to pull him over for minor equipment and traffic violations, though they haven’t specified further. Police say Walker fired a shot from his car 40 seconds into the pursuit.Officers chased the car on a freeway and city streets until Walker bailed from the still-moving vehicle, ignored officers’ commands and ran into a parking lot where he was killed while wearing a ski mask, body cam video showed. Authorities said he represented a “deadly threat”. A handgun, a loaded magazine and a wedding ring were found on the driver’s seat of his car.Walker took at least one shot from his vehicle at police and then after jumping out of his car he ignored commands to stop and show his hands, Yost said. “There is no doubt he did in fact shoot at police officers,” Attorney General Dave Yost of Ohio said.Walker reached for his waistband as officers were chasing and raised his hand, Yost said. The officers, not knowing he left his gun in the car, believed he was firing again at them, Yost said.Yost said it is critical to remember that Walker had fired at police, and that he “shot first”.Walker’s family called it a brutal and senseless shooting of a man who was unarmed at the time and whose fiancee recently died. Police union officials said the officers thought there was an immediate threat of serious harm and that their actions were in line with their training and protocols.The blurry body camera footage did not clearly show what authorities say was a threatening gesture Walker made before he was shot. Police chased him for about 10 seconds before officers fired from multiple directions, a burst of shots that lasts 6 or 7 seconds.The eight officers, whose names have been withheld from the public, initially were placed on leave, but they returned to administrative duties three and a half months after the shooting.A county medical examiner said Walker was shot at least 40 times. The autopsy also said no illegal drugs or alcohol were detected in his body.City leaders have been meeting with community leaders, church groups, activists and business owners ahead of the grand jury meeting while also preparing for potential protests.Walker’s death received widespread attention from activists, including from the family of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr. The NAACP and an attorney for Walker’s family called on the justice department to open a federal civil rights investigation.President Joe Biden responded during a trip to Ohio last summer by saying the DoJ was monitoring the case.Separately, another grand jury has refused to indict a former northern Virginia police officer after he fatally shot an unarmed shoplifting suspect outside a busy shopping mall in February.Authorities presented the case to a grand jury for an indictment against Wesley Shifflett, who shot and killed Timothy McCree Johnson outside Tysons Corner Center on 22 February.The shooting occurred after Shifflett and another Fairfax county police officer chased Johnson on foot from the mall after receiving a report from security guards that Johnson had stolen sunglasses from a Nordstrom department store.Dimly lit body camera video shows the chase and the shooting. The officer is heard saying “Get on the ground” and later saying “stop reaching” as shots are fired. After the shooting, Shifflett tells another officer that he saw Johnson “continually reaching in his waistband”.A search of the grounds after the shooting turned up no weapons.Shifflett was fired last month for what Fairfax county police chief Kevin Davis called “a failure to live up to the expectations of our agency, in particular use of force policies”.A lawyer for Johnson’s family likened the shooting to an execution. Johnson’s mother, Melissa Johnson, said officers shot her son when all they knew at the time was “that he was Black and male and had allegedly triggered an alarm from a store for some sunglasses”. More

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      ‘Black labor v white wealth’: can a progressive win Chicago’s mayoral election?

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      Brandon Johnson was in his element at Kenwood Academy high school.The bespectacled former social studies teacher and candidate for Chicago mayor sat at a table next to his opponent, former Chicago public schools CEO Paul Vallas, during a recent afternoon debate. In an exhausting series of mayoral debates, Johnson had a home field advantage at Kenwood, where his son attends school.Johnson is a member of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and its former deputy political director. The CTU has thrown its support behind Johnson while Chicago’s cop union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has endorsed the tough-on-crime Vallas. The moderators at Kenwood opened with a question about whether the mayoral race was a proxy war between the Fraternal Order of Police and CTU.Johnson, who now serves as a Cook county commissioner, has joked in the past that he didn’t become a pastor like his father or sister because they weren’t unionized. But it’s clear that his family’s work in the church has shaped his commanding presence in secular spaces – as it did that day.“This is about Black labor versus white wealth. That’s what this battle is about,” Johnson responded. “This is about providing community access to the very public accommodations which Black people fought for, especially after emancipation. It’s what the descendants of slaves in this room are fighting for: public education, public transportation, affordable housing, healthcare and access to jobs.”The Chicago mayoral election is one of the most heated city battles in the country and could serve as a litmus test for police reform policies at a time when the topic of crime and public safety is central to both voters and politicians. Recent mayoral races in the liberal strongholds of New York City and Los Angeles have produced mixed results. In New York, ex-cop Eric Adams claimed victory with a centrist message while the reform-minded former congresswoman Karen Bass won the Los Angeles mayoral race on a progressive platform, though some Black Lives Matter activists criticized her recent decision to reappoint a controversial chief of police.In 2019, Chicagoans had elected Lori Lightfoot based on her message of transparency and reform. Instead, her tenure was marred by a botched police raid as well as drawn-out battles with both the CTU and the FOP.Turnout for the February primary was sluggish, with less than 33% of Chicago voters casting a ballot. Much of the recent mayoral primary map in February broke down along racial barriers: in the primaries García took Hispanic voters on the West Side, Black voters on the South and West sides remained loyal to the sitting mayor, Lori Lightfoot, while Vallas won over white voters in north-west Chicago. Johnson, meanwhile, commanded white progressives on the North Side.But Johnson’s progressive policies on dealing with crime, which fired up his base in the primary, could leave him vulnerable in the general election. Vallas has seized upon Johnson’s past support of the defund the police movement and Democrats across the country are closely watching to see if that could prove Johnson’s undoing.A finely tuned machineJohnson likes to boast that he started his campaign polling at just 2.3%. But he carries himself like a veteran politician, not an underdog. Johnson is charming, if guarded, and his affable middle school teacher demeanor turns pugnacious in debates and in spin rooms with reporters.With the help of progressive campaign operatives with Bernie Sanders on their résumés, Johnson is now a finely tuned machine picking up support from both leftist and moderate Democrats. He has been anointed by kingmakers like the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, who memorably turned around the prospects of Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and Congressman Danny Davis, the Illinois representative whose protege and former chief of staff lost his county commissioner seat to Johnson in 2018.He also nabbed the endorsement of the renowned political activist the Rev Jesse Jackson, who delivered a speech with Johnson from his Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood earlier this month. It’s clear that Johnson would like to model himself after Jackson. He’s taken pains to characterize his campaign as a continuation of the civil rights movement, repeatedly noting that the 4 April runoff election marks the date of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.When asked by the Guardian which historical or political figure Johnson might liken himself to behind the scenes at the event, Jackson threw up his arms gesturing at himself.“I’m just saying,” Johnson said with a laugh, looking at Jackson. “There is no President Barack Obama without Reverend Jesse Jackson. He changed the rules of the game. There’s a lot of history of progressive ideology and liberation from the city of Chicago.”Johnson also regularly hosted a radio show in Chicago helmed by Santita Jackson, the reverend’s daughter. It’s on that show that one can find a more honest expression of Johnson’s progressive views than on the campaign trail. It was where he made remarks about the defund police movement as an “actual, real political goal”.Johnson has since walked back that statement, saying: “It was a political goal. I never said it was mine.” He recently reversed plans to reduce the city’s nearly $2bn police budget, telling an audience of Chicago business leaders he wouldn’t “reduce the CPD budget by one penny”.‘Turning stress into action’Several prominent figures, including Jackson and late Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis have used the phrase “educational apartheid” to describe the dearth of resources and school closures in Chicago’s Black and brown neighborhoods. Johnson also shared those beliefs with his mentor and colleague, Tara Stamps, who shaped his early career as an educator.Stamps said she met Johnson in 2007 when she interviewed him for his first job in education as a middle school social studies teacher at Jenner elementary, a school serving mostly Black students from the embattled Cabrini-Green housing projects. She described the then 31-year-old Johnson as chubbier with long dreadlocks, a warm personality and a great smile.The apartheid message was not lost on Johnson’s students either, who connected their experiences in CPS with the history of Soweto, Johnson said in a July episode of the Santita Jackson Show. After reading an excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, they wrote a play called Black to the Future and collaborated with their art teacher to transform their classroom’s doorway into Mandela’s prison.Johnson and Stamps felt that charter schools were exacerbating segregation. Now, that philosophy underpins his campaign against Vallas, whom he has attacked for promoting charter schools.“These are ideas that Brandon and I shared early,” Stamps said. “We understood the history of Chicago public schools and at the time when we were working together, it did feel like it was an apartheid system because you have a school system that was just separating children based on who was able to receive the best public education, who would not receive the best public education and who then would go to charters.”A conversation with a civil rights-era organizer led Johnson further. During an October 2012 forum with the socialist organization Solidarity, Johnson spoke about meeting Grady Jordan, a former CPS teacher and founder of the Teacher’s Union Black Caucus who marched in the October 1963 “Freedom Day” protests against segregation in CPS. Over greens and soul food one day at a West Side diner, Jordan called on Johnson to take up his fight.“Black teachers fought hard, this is a direct retaliation to what we built in the 60s and the 70s,” Johnson recalled Jordan saying. “They’re trying to kill you. What are you going to do about it, son?”Chicago’s mayor had taken over the public school system in 1995, giving the administration power over school construction and union negotiations. In 2000, Black teachers made up 40% of CPS educators. By 2018, that number declined by nearly half to 21% of teachers, while Black students made up 37% of the student population, Chalkbeat Chicago reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It shook me, like being awakened from a nightmare,” Johnson said during the 2012 forum. “Towards the end of the summer, after having dealt with that conversation, I began to pay attention to these leftists left in charge of this union, and I mean that as a compliment.”Johnson in turn helped form the activist mindset of other young teachers like Asif Wilson. The two met around 2009 when Wilson, now an assistant professor in curriculum and instruction at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was a new teacher in CPS. They protested against school closures in 2013 and participated in a hunger strike to reopen Dyett high school.“That brought us together not only to think about what does it mean to be a teacher in the context of school closure and to protect myself, protect my students, protect my families, and be there for each other, but then what does it also mean to organize and understand the contours and the context of school closure, as well as neoliberal assaults on Black and brown families?” Wilson said.“He was helping me to understand as a union representative, but also then turning the anger, the frustration, the stress into action.”That activism morphed into political power with the Chicago Teachers Union, whose endorsement helped vault Johnson ahead of Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García, a progressive rival who was once considered a frontrunner in the primaries.‘They want to feel safe’While education has shaped much of Johnson’s career, it’s the city’s urgent desire for public safety that could decide this election.Residents in Little Village, a Mexican enclave on the West Side where Johnson held a recent rally, are concerned about gentrification and rising property taxes, but crime remains top of mind, said Enrique Mendoza, a Johnson supporter. Local street vendors have called for more police patrols after repeated attacks from armed robbers. That could give Vallas, who has claimed that hundreds of police officers will return to Chicago’s depleted force under his watch, an advantage. García still won Hispanic voters on the West Side during the primary, but the runner-up in many of those wards was Vallas, not Johnson.“The older generations, it doesn’t matter if they’re Latino, what race they are, they want to feel safe,” said Mendoza. “Their immediate go-to is always police, right? They want the person with the plan who’s catering to those needs.”Public safety is also front and center in Johnson’s own neighborhood. Originally from Elgin, a town just west of Chicago, Johnson has made the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side his home with his wife and three children. His son attends Kenwood, 14 miles from Austin, since he plays the violin and there are no high schools on the West Side offering orchestra, according to Johnson.Austin represents a microcosm of the issues facing many Black Chicagoans. The exodus of Black residents from Chicago is evident in the neighborhood, which has seen a 32% drop over the last 20 years. Despite being the second most populous community in the city, the area is a food desert with little access to grocery stores selling fresh produce. The life expectancy of residents living just over the border in the suburb of Oak Park is 10 years longer. As Johnson himself has noted throughout the mayoral race, Austin is also plagued by community violence.“It seems like, especially for Blacks in Austin, that it’s only a matter of time before we’re ‘extinct’,” said Vernon Cole, owner of the Austin shoe shine and repair shop, Shine King. Cole supported Lightfoot in the primaries but now has a sign for Johnson, one of his loyal customers, in his window.When asked whether he could see a Chicago where police and teachers come together, Johnson rattled off a list of his supporters. They included childcare workers, crossing guards, teachers, county government workers and transportation operators.“Do we know if there are police officers not voting for me?” he asked when questioned about support from police officers.“Working people have surrounded this candidacy because they know that I express and represent their values because they are our values,” Johnson said. “I’m not here if we’re not united.”‘There’s enough for everyone’At Shine King, customer the Rev Michael Stinson said he was just hoping for a unified Chicago. A pastor on the West Side, Stinson sees the city’s divisions as a major challenge for the next mayor.“I don’t know how far we’re going to make it with the police being against the teachers, it’s just not a world-class city,” Stinson said. “We need more programs and jobs to occupy our youth and children. I’m a preacher, so just getting back to God in my sense.”Whether or not Johnson can use his own religious zeal and charisma to motivate voters to get to the polls will become the deciding factor on 4 April.“Let me tell you what’s going to happen: we’re going to a place that is full of milk and honey,” he said at a March event. “The Black labor that has built the wealth of white folks, we get to distribute that any way we please.“And the way we’re going to do it, we’re going to make sure whether you live in Jefferson Park or Morgan Park, whether you live in Garfield Park or whether you live in Humboldt Park, there’s enough for everyone in the city of Chicago.” More

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      The politics of crime: what Chicago’s mayoral race reveals about the US

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      The politics of crime: what Chicago’s mayoral race reveals about the USElection could serve as a bellwether for how voters think about public safety as they choose between duelling approachesThere are few issues besides keeping a clean alley that most Chicagoans agree on. Yet, last week, a majority of the city’s voters ousted the incumbent mayor, Lori Lightfoot, in the city’s mayoral primary.With just under 17% of the vote, Lightfoot became the first mayor to fail to advance to the runoff election since Jane Byrne lost the 1983 primary. But the recent election was not a stunning rebuke of Lightfoot, who commanded third place with a loyal base of mostly Black voters on the city’s South and West Sides, but a demand for a radically different approach toward combating crime amid pandemic recovery, with one candidate focused on law and order and the other hoping to boost the social safety net.In Wisconsin’s supreme court race, a super-rich beer family calls the shotsRead moreIn one month, the general election could serve as a bellwether for how Democratic voters across the nation think about crime – a topic that became deeply politicized during an uptick in violence after the onset of Covid-19 and the widespread call for police reform after George Floyd’s murder. Chicago is the third largest city in the US, and its nearly 3 million residents are deeply segregated and break down into almost equal thirds white, Black and Hispanic. What may appear on the surface to be a reliable Democratic stronghold actually encompasses a wide spectrum of moderate liberals, progressives and even some Trump supporters, the latter concentrated among cops, firefighters and other public workers living on the far Northwest Side.At a time when places like New York City and Washington DC are reassessing their approach to public safety issues and rebuilding their communities, Chicago’s election in April could inform how some of the biggest cities move forward.When Lightfoot ascended to power in 2019, the political outsider made history as the first Black, openly gay mayor of Chicago and dominated all 50 of the city’s wards with the optimistic message that she would “bring in the light”.But Lightfoot’s campaign promises of transparency foundered once she took office, particularly when it came to public safety. After Chicago police wrongfully raided the home of a Black woman, Anjanette Young, in 2019 and forced her to stand naked until a female officer arrived, Lightfoot claimed she knew nothing about the incident until local news broke the story. Her own lawyers tried to prevent the local TV station from airing the video of the botched raid and Lightfoot herself later admitted that she was aware of the raid before the news broke. When five alderwomen introduced an ordinance in 2021 banning no-knock raids – building on the momentum of the Breonna Taylor case – Lightfoot opposed the bill and argued it could hamper the police’s ability to respond quickly.At the same time, Lightfoot engaged in a legal battle with the city’s cop union, the Fraternal Order of Police, over a vaccine mandate for public workers. Police expressed their frustration over burnout and multiple canceled days off by literally turning their backs on Lightfoot in 2021.In February’s primary, Lightfoot attempted to thread the needle by marketing herself as a moderate candidate. But many voters bolted in one of two other directions: to the most progressive and conservative options. Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson, the Cook county commissioner, going head-to-head on 4 April represent dueling philosophies of criminal justice.Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago public schools who came in ninth place in his last run for mayor in 2019, ripped a page from the Republican playbook with a law-and-order message. On election night, he placed crime at the forefront of his campaign, declaring public safety a “civil right”. He also received an endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police, along with its Trump-supporting president, John Catanzara, and has pledged to fill Chicago’s 1,700 police vacancies.Johnson’s résumé as a former teacher and Chicago Teachers Union deputy political director puts him at immediate odds with Vallas, whom critics say set the stage for the closure of 50 Chicago public schools predominantly in Black and Brown neighborhoods under former mayor Rahm Emanuel. Johnson’s progressive approach toward criminal justice would include a mental health hotline and eliminating no-knock warrants. He also committed to ending the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, which the city’s own inspector general found “rarely leads to evidence of a gun-related crime”. In a televised debate, both Lightfoot and Vallas supported keeping the acoustic gunshot detection tool used by police.Johnson and Vallas agree on some policy issues including changing the Chicago police department’s patrol plan to allocate more police officers during high crime hours. Both have vouched for boosting the number of detectives so that CPD can solve more murders, though Johnson has dodged the question of whether he would reduce CPD’s nearly $2bn budget. But on most issues they represent very different directions for the city.“What we have in this runoff is the tale of two cities in Chicago,” said Constance Mixon, a political science professor and director of the urban studies program at Elmhurst University. “It is a tale of progressives and Brandon Johnson, but it’s also a tale of more conservative voters, particularly in white ethnic neighborhoods on the far north-west and south-west sides of the city … Paul Vallas’s message of crime resonated with them.”Like other cities across the US, violent crime escalated during the pandemic in Chicago. While homicides had been on a steady decline since 2016, they shot up from 500 in 2019 to 776 in 2020. Homicides dropped in 2022, but still rival the rate Chicago saw in the 1990s.“Things like theft and burglary have been trending down for the last two or three decades and the last couple of years is no different. Even overall violence hasn’t increased that much,” said David Olson, a criminal justice professor and co-director of Loyola University’s Center for Criminal Justice Research. “The challenge politically are the crimes that have increased are the ones that are the most serious and the most visible in terms of coverage by the media and attention by people. And rightfully so, given the fact that homicide is the most serious offense.”For years, crime had disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities on the South and West Sides of the city. But since the pandemic started it has increased in those areas, as well as predominantly white and wealthy neighborhoods – spurring fresh outrage and new attention to the issue. Carjackings in Lincoln Square, robberies on the Gold Coast, and kidnappings in Wrigleyville have rattled residents and dominated local headlines.“Wealthier, whiter parts of the city have been safer for many, many years and the violence has persisted on the South and West sides in plain sight without the kind of attention and response that the issue is getting now,” said Roseanna Ander, founding executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Chicago Education Lab. Leaders should recognize that public safety strategies should look at persistent problems throughout the entire city, rather than making one part of Chicago safer at the expense of other parts of the city, Ander added.While the post-pandemic rise in crime has frustrated white Chicagoans, Black Chicagoans who have long dealt with the city’s crime problems have left in droves over the past decade. Recent census data showed Chicago’s Black population has dropped by nearly 10% since 2010. Political strategist Delmarie Cobb attributes that exodus to two factors: crime and schools.She asked the police to help her husband. They killed him insteadRead more“Those two issues are front and center for Black people, whereas white people may just be experiencing crime for the first time, but they’re OK with the schools,” Cobb said. “With the tough-on-crime candidates, they’re often who get all the attention and support because those people who are experiencing crime for the first time at this level, they want somebody who can do it quickly.”How the two mayoral candidates communicate their message on crime to Black voters will prove crucial. In the primary, Johnson garnered support from white progressives on the North Side but in order to beat Vallas, he’ll have to court Hispanics on the West Side who voted for his progressive rival, Congressman Jesús G “Chuy” García, and Black voters who backed Lightfoot on the South Side. Vallas is already trying to shore up support from Black politicians, racking up key endorsements from the former Illinois secretary of state Jesse White and Lightfoot’s ally Alderman Walter Burnett. Toni Preckwinkle, Lightfoot’s rival in the 2019 election, and US congressman Danny Davis, who represents much of the South and West Sides, endorsed Johnson.Johnson may have trouble taking the middle road in the general election. Though his policies on criminal justice reform fired up a progressive base in the primary, Johnson has tried to distance himself from past comments on defunding the police. When it comes to filling police vacancies, Johnson told Block Club Chicago that hiring more officers wouldn’t solve the city’s crime problem, instead saying that funding could be reallocated by shifting officers’ roles and hiring additional emergency service responders.During one primary debate, Lightfoot questioned how Johnson would boost the number of detectives without increasing the police budget.“He says he wants to promote detectives,” Lightfoot said. “When you promote detectives then you’ve got to backfill the patrol officers and if he’s not willing to commit to not defunding the police, he’s gonna have less officers on the street and our communities are gonna be less safe.”It is possible that Johnson could reallocate funding rather than increasing CPD’s budget, counters Craig Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and director of the school’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project.“Within a fixed budget, you can put less of your officers in the kind of stop-and-frisk mode, street policing mode and more in investigating mode,” he said. “That’s not necessarily going to cost you more money.”For Vallas, the endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police will either become his winning advantage or his achilles heel. The group welcomed Florida’s conservative governor Ron DeSantis for a speech in February while its president, Catanzara, has landed in the news for defending January 6 rioters and comparing Lightfoot’s vaccine mandate to the Nazi Germany.More than the endorsements, however, voters may choose based on their visceral feelings about what’s needed to reduce crime, Olson said.“For a lot of people, their gut feeling is, well, if we just had more police, that would address the problem, and it’s more complicated than that,” he said.“So if one candidate presents this blunt: ‘We just need more police’, that may swing some folks. If another approaches with: ‘We’ve got to address the root causes, this is a long-term problem that needs a long-term solution’, that might resonate because they see that as perhaps being a more realistic understanding.”TopicsChicagoUS crimeUS policingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More