The court ruled that an advocate who helped organize a Black Lives Matter rally could be sued for events that took place during that rally, even though he was not involved. The case arose after a police officer was injured during a protest in Baton Rouge in 2016 and filed a lawsuit against DeRay Mckesson, a national advocate who had amplified and joined the demonstration. Mckesson rejected liability, saying his actions were protected by the First Amendment, but the court ruled against him in Friday’s 6-1 opinion. 

The lone dissenter was the court’s only Black judge, Justice Piper Griffin. “The finding of a duty in this case will have a chilling effect on political protests in general as nothing prevents a bad actor from attending an otherwise peaceful protest and committing acts of violence,” wrote Griffin, who is a Democrat elected in a judicial district that contains parts of New Orleans. “The flow of political speech could hinge on which viewpoints had patrons with deeper pockets.” 

Mandie Landry, a Democratic lawmaker who was already vocal against efforts to target protesters in Louisiana, echoed Griffin’s worry that the ruling risks stifling political organizing. “It seems like this is designed to end protesting,” she told Bolts. “It’s designed to chill speech.” 

Landry, who is also a lawyer, says the court has applied an appallingly broad standard of negligence to protesters. “It almost seems like anyone who goes to, or is near, or talks about, or even reshares a graphic about a protest could potentially be sued under this,” she said. Jonathan Miller, chief program officer at the Public Rights Project, calls the ruling the latest example of a broader trend where “states seek to hold all involved in peaceful marches accountable for any violence that might occur, even if they do not start it, control it, or participate in it.” 

“It is an attempt to stop mobilizations in their tracks out of fear of personal liability or responsibility for all who participate in such mobilizations,” Miller told Bolts.

The lawsuit against Mckesson is one in a number of recent cases where cops and courts have ensnared Black Lives Matter supporters. Police investigated a  Utah senator in 2020 for allegedly donating money to a fund that Black Lives Matter protesters used to buy red paint that they spilled in front of the district attorney’s office. Also in 2020, police in Portsmouth, Virginia, filed charges against local Black leaders, including a state senator, who were present at a rally where people toppled a Confederate statue. The police also tried to sideline prosecutor Stephanie Morales, who is Black, though she eventually asserted control and dismissed the charges. 

“If that scares us and bothers us in this instance where it became national news because elected officials are charged, you got to think about the many times where people are being charged and lives are being ruined where nobody’s watching,” Morales told Bolts about the events in Portsmouth. 

Other states have pushed guilt-by-association for demonstrators since the protests of 2020, adopting new statutes that broaden who can be punished for what happens at a protest. In 2021, Florida passed a law championed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis that created new felony charges that can be used against people who are present at a rally that is deemed violent, even if they were not involved in any criminal action. In August 2020, Tennessee lawmakers made it a felony to camp overnight outside the state capitol after sustained protests earlier that summer. (In both states, a felony conviction also means losing the right to vote, sometimes for life, turning the electoral process into another legal minefield.) 

New Republican bills this year in Florida, Georgia, and now Louisiana, where the legislative session just began, could further ramp up the threats of criminal and civil penalties against protesters. 

“It’s an ever-present issue for us,” Chris Kaiser, advocacy director at the ACLU of Louisiana, who is monitoring the 2022 session, told Bolts about efforts to criminalize protests. “There are all these dots in our criminal code that can be connected in a demonstration setting that can land people in serious criminal trouble. That constellation of laws that is continually amended has a chilling effect on assembly and free speech.”

One such amendment in Louisiana is House Bill 150, adopted in 2020, which made it a crime of violence punishable with up to six months in jail to splash water at a police officer.

Landry was the only lawmaker, out of the 122 from both parties who voted on the bill, to oppose the measure. She says the bill had no purpose other than piling on a new criminal statute that risks being abused. “There’s already plenty of laws that say you can’t hurt someone and that you can’t attack a police officer,” she said. “To keep adding on extra penalties, extra situations, seems like it’s just designed to chill behavior, to further scare people, and to broaden the net.”

Louisiana lawmakers could escalate their targeting of protesters this spring with a measure that exposes people around demonstrations to the threat of being killed with impunity.

HB 101, filed by Republican Danny McCormick, would justify homicides committed by people under the guise of protecting property from being damaged “during a riot,” and critics stress that this is a term with a low threshold. “A riot is three people under Louisiana law,” Landry said. “That’s a wide open hole for someone to kill people, like teenagers and children who might be just trespassing or breaking into a car.” McCormick did not reply to a request for comment on the bill, which echoes laws passed in recent years that grant immunity to drivers who run over protesters who were blocking a public street. 

The lawsuit against Mckesson is now likely to return to federal courts; the U.S. Supreme Court had asked Louisiana’s high court to weigh in. 

Mckesson’s liability stands in stark contrast with the extremely limited liability that police face thanks to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that routinely shields them from civil lawsuits. 

In December 2016, just months after the Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge, police officers in Shreveport, Louisiana, on the other side of the state, pulled over a Black man named Gregory Tucker for minor traffic violations and proceeded to violently beat him. When Tucker tried suing the officers, federal courts shielded them by invoking qualified immunity (ultimately over the objections of Justice Sonia Sotomayor).

Louisiana Republicans blocked efforts to narrow qualified immunity in both 2020 and 2021, even after the state House passed a bill championed by Democratic Representative Edmond Jordan last year. Supporters are mounting another effort in this year’s session. Landry is cautiously optimistic that restricting qualified immunity is now drawing more support from Republicans, but she also notes that lawmakers are cracking down on the protesters who put qualified immunity on their legislative agenda in the first place.

“If you don’t have the right to protest something, what change can you make?” she asked. “How do you make change if laws are being passed to restrict voting and you can’t depend on the courts?” 

The post “Designed to End Protesting”: Louisiana Supreme Court Makes Protesters Guilty by Association appeared first on Bolts.

In February 2020, when California Assemblymember Sydney Kamlager introduced the CRISES Act (Assembly Bill 2054), to fund community-based emergency response programs, it didn’t make much of a splash. “It was a quiet bill,” Kamlager told The Appeal: Political Report.

Then, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis after a 911 call. As protests against police brutality unfurled across the country, similar programs were debated and passed from New York to Los Angeles. The Community Response Initiative to Strengthen Emergency Systems  Act suddenly seemed like an idea whose time had come, and California’s legislators took note. “At the end of the day, there were 21 co-authors, and almost 150 listed groups of supporters,” said Kamlager. “Everyone was excited about being able to say that California was moving forward in this space.”

Law enforcement unions registered no official opposition to the CRISES Act, and it passed the legislature easily. But at the end of September, Governor Gavin Newsom returned CRISES without his signature. “I was gobsmacked,” Kamlager recalled. “It is a bill that is incredibly in line with and in touch with the moment.”

The CRISES veto is a testament to the challenges of translating political will into policy, and the particular vexations of trying to enact criminal justice reform in a state where progressive bonafides mask regressive sentencing and policing laws and an unrivalled mass incarceration system. “What you’re seeing in the governor’s seemingly arbitrary decision to veto [the CRISES Act] is a very cautious nose to the wind of this still very potent tough-on-crime voter bloc,” said Jonathan Simon, law professor at University of California, Berkeley and an expert on criminal justice reform.

Kamlager reintroduced the CRISES Act as AB 118 for the 2021 legislative session. What happens this time around will depend on how activists, community groups, and reform-minded lawmakers navigate a changing legislature, embattled but still powerful law enforcement unions, and a governor whose record on criminal justice reform has been one of deep ambivalence.  

And it will give Californians another opportunity to confront the debate around whether alternatives to incarceration should originate within police departments—a compromise that seems to be acceptable to law enforcement itself, but one that activist groups have firmly resisted, maintaining that policing needs to be transformed rather than merely tweaked. 

—

Kamlager crafted the CRISES Act in partnership with Cat Brooks, co-founder of the Oakland-based Anti Police-Terror Project. The bill would establish a grant program for community groups to create emergency response teams that would respond to a wide range of calls instead of the police. These calls might involve intimate partner violence or a mental health crisis. They might come from someone leery of calling the police because of their immigration status, or terrified that they’ll be the one sent to jail. Or they might come from any Black or Latinxperson who knows that when the police are called, someone can end up dead.  “All of those groups still have the right to be able to call someone and ask for help when there’s an emergency, without the assumption that they’re criminals, and without the threat of an arrest,” Kamlager said.

The Anti Police-Terror Project weighed in on the language and scope of the bill throughout. To Brooks, it was crucial that CRISES fund existing community organizations. “That’s the thing about this conversation around alternatives to law enforcement, with the people that are kind of grasping their pearls—you can release the pearls, because we’ve been doing this,” she told the Political Report. “Just with no budget, with no resources, and we’ve been doing it quietly.”

One such example is Mental Health First, a pilot program that the Anti Police-Terror Project established in Oakland and Sacramento. “Our phones ring, and that lets me know that people who would otherwise not have an agency to call have someplace to call,” Brooks said. “A lot of Black and brown folks aren’t going to call 911, no matter how bad the crisis.” 

At Mental Health First, volunteers staff phone lines from sundown to sunup over the weekend prepared to respond to a wide range of calls, including mental health crises and domestic violence situations. They use de-escalation techniques and try to come up with “exit plans,” whether it’s helping callers get in touch with a friend or family member or even calling a ride-hailing service. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the program has been restricted to phone support, but once the vaccine becomes readily available, Brooks is hoping to have teams back out on the street. Though she acknowledges that it’s too early to speak about impact, especially given the disruption of the pandemic, she’s been heartened to receive calls from people across the country interested in creating programs like Mental Health First in their own communities.

“The volunteers that have shown up for MH First have been an amazing demonstration of what people want to do for their communities,” Brooks said. “Programs like MH First show people that there are alternatives—which is really our job as organizers. We can’t just say ‘don’t call the police.’ Our job is to create small replicable programs for issues that don’t require badges and guns.” Her hope is that CRISES could multiply “participant-led” programs like Mental Health First across the state.

Dennis Cuevas-Romero is a legislative advocate for the ACLU, which co-sponsored the bill alongside the Anti Police-Terror Project and a number of other activist groups. CRISES posed no direct budgetary threat to law enforcement, which Cuevas-Romero suspected may have had something to do with police unions’ lack of opposition to the bill. Still, he saw it as quietly radical in its premise: that a world with less policing is possible. “It’s clear that folks in California and across the nation want a reimagining of what is considered public safety,” he said. “The time has come. And the co-sponsors think that the CRISES Act is a first step in doing that.”

—

As the CRISES Act moved through the legislature, Newsom’s administration had one central demand: that the bill’s proposed grant program be housed under the Board of State and Community Corrections rather than the Office of Emergency Services. According to Kamlager, the administration’s position was that the emergency services office had been overwhelmed by responding to COVID-19 and the state’s worsening wildfire problem. (Newsom’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) 

The Board of State and Community Corrections is an independent agency that oversees and provides guidance to California’s courts, prisons, and jails.  It has 13 members, most of whom are required to be sheriffs, chief probation officers, judges, police chiefs, and Department of Corrections officials; only two seats exist for community service providers or advocates.

In other words, Newsom essentially wanted a program designed to limit the reach of law enforcement to be placed under the purview of law enforcement. To the creators of CRISES, that idea was a nonstarter. “Having this kind of bill housed in that department is really antithetical to the intent behind the bill,” Kamlager told The Political Report. 

“We don’t deal with policy that reaffirms or reinforces the relevance of policing as it exists today,” Brooks said. “The only type of reform that we engage in chips away at policing as we know it.”

Brooks and Kamlager were aware of what might happen if they didn’t agree to Newsom’s proposal. But for both women, the choice was clear. “We said hell no,” Brooks recounted. “Absolutely not.”

Brooks is on guard for reforms that ultimately serve to bolster the institution of policing. In September, she wrote a commentary that criticized law enforcement unions’ attempts to co-opt activist language like “reimagining public safety” in order to argue for investment in de-escalation programs for police. 

In the months following the uprising, police have indeed made a number of attempts to respond to protesters’ demands by instituting mental health units among their own ranks. To Brooks, such developments are pernicious because they divert public attention from genuinely transformative changes to the system. “A brief look at the impact of police unions on our communities clearly demonstrate[s] that they are the last entity that should be leading the path to reform,” she wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. 

—

The dispute over management of the CRISES Act’s grant program was emblematic of larger rifts between Newsom’s administration and the community groups on the frontlines of the movement to transform policing and incarceration in California.

Last summer, as the uprising for racial justice continued, Newsom spoke out. “We have a unique and special responsibility here in California to meet this historic moment head-on,” the governor said. “We will not sit back passively as a state.” But in the months since, he has charted a far less decisive course toward criminal justice reform than that speech suggested.

The lobbyists, lawmakers, advocates, and experts who spoke to the Political Report for this article described a governor who is reform-minded and speaks the language of systemic change, but has often been unwilling to take bold action in order to combat mass incarceration and over-policing. “Governor Newsom says a lot of great things, but we haven’t seen it reflected in his policy decisions,” Cuevas-Romero said.

Though Newsom did sign several criminal justice reform bills into law in the fall, the CRISES Act was far from the only casualty of the past legislative session. The governor also spurned bills that would have collected information about past officer misconduct and reduced the high costs of commissary items in jails and prisons.

As governor, Newsom possesses powers that go considerably beyond the decision to sign or veto bills that come across his desk; he can make a difference in whether a bill ever gets that far in the first place. Cuevas-Romero said that last year, the “biggest bill” concerning police was a measure that would have allowed a state agency to decertify cops who are fired for misconduct. “That bill didn’t even get a vote. If the governor and his administration wanted something, they could have engaged and put pressure, and that just didn’t happen,” he said. Without any signals of support from the administration, tenacious lobbying from law enforcement unions was enough to sink the bill, and several other reform measures expired in much the same manner.

In the eyes of Simon, the Berkeley law professor, Newsom’s desire to appear progressive has arguably outweighed his appetite to champion and enact legislation that reflects those values. Simon especially sees this contradiction reflected in Newsom’s treatment of capital punishment. The governor has called for the death penalty’s abolition, and he has imposed a statewide moratorium on executions, but advocates have long been urging California governors, including Newsom, to use their powers to commute the sentences of Californians on death row.

Simon also said that Newsom has failed to meaningfully reduce prison populations during the COVID-19 pandemic—a concrete reform that would have saved lives but could have been politically risky. He has also used his executive powers to stop dozens of people convicted of serious crimes from obtaining parole, against the recommendations of parole boards. 

The CRISES veto follows this pattern. “The politics of crime in California remains a potent force,” Simon told the Political Report. “Getting this kind of really promising bill through the California legislature wouldn’t have been obvious at all a few years ago, but the [tough-on-crime] coalition that was anchored by DAs and sheriffs and law enforcement, that really altered the state’s political leadership for decades, has not gone away completely.” And Newsom, Simon said, is “really, really worried about it.”

—

Newsom’s hesitance and unpredictability on criminal justice reform have created an atmosphere that advocates described as “frustrating,” “confusing,” and “mystifying.” But it hasn’t deterred them from engaging in the legislative battles they choose to fight.

“We can’t lose hope because we didn’t have a bunch of faith in the system to begin with,” Brooks told the Political Report. “We know that the bills we engage with are the more radical ones. They require more organizing and they have less opportunity of passing.” 

For that reason, the Anti-Police Terror Project’s strategy doesn’t start or stop with legislative cycles. Brooks told the Political Report that the group continued organizing around the CRISES Act between sessions. “There’s even more public support for these types of programs than there was a few months ago,” she noted. This time around, she hopes to run a stronger communications campaign and engage the public even more.

“We have to keep pushing,” Kamlager said. Though the assemblymember is open to re-evaluating the location of the grant program—as long as it isn’t housed under a law enforcement board—she is adamant that CRISES will be signed this time around.

“Communities know what’s going on in their world,” she said. “They know where the problems are and they know the solutions for those problems. And this will actually fund and grant opportunity for those communities to have a stake in how their own regulation and policing happens. Why not move towards that?”

This article has been updated to correct the description of a California bill proposed last year that would have enabled decertification of police who are fired for misconduct. This power would have rested with the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, not the state Department of Justice.

The post California Bill That Promotes Alternatives to Policing Is Back Despite Governor’s Veto appeared first on Bolts.

The jails in Erie County, New York, which have been run by Sheriff Timothy B. Howard since 2005, have been notorious for deplorable conditions that have led to dozens of deaths. But Howard, a Republican, is not seeking re-election this year, and criminal justice advocates are hopeful that this blue-leaning county, home to the city of Buffalo and nearly a million people, will elect a new sheriff to champion bold reforms and overhaul its jails.

The race was shaken up this week when local activist Myles Carter announced that he is running, eight months after he drew national attention when he was attacked by police. At a June protest against police violence in Buffalo, officers suddenly swarmed and tackled him from behind as he was being interviewed by a television news crew. The police arrested Carter, who is Black, and charged him with obstruction of government administration and disorderly conduct. According to the Erie County district attorney, the case was dismissed because the information the police provided did not support the charges.

“I’ve been exposed to the criminal justice system my entire life,” Carter told The Appeal: Political Report. He has had family members in jail and was in a detention facility himself after running away from an abusive foster home at age 12. Carter, who went on to graduate from college and start a home inspection company, added that he never forgot his upbringing. “When you come from poverty and your family is hurt and your community is hurt,” he said, “you just don’t feel complete when you’re in a space of success and everyone around you and everyone you care about is still down.”

Carter says he is running for sheriff to transform the office in ways that include banning solitary confinement, and keeping people with mental health issues from having unnecessary interactions with police, in part by routing mental health emergency calls to responders other than law enforcement.

But the field remains unsettled, and other candidates have until April 1 to officially enter the race. Until this week, advocates were unsure whether anyone would run on a bold reform agenda, and they are still anxiously awaiting new developments.

“What we need in that position is a really new approach to the sheriff’s department and to the incarceration of individuals in this county, because obviously what we have is not working,” Vicki Ross, executive director of the Western New York Peace Center and a longtime advocate of prisoners’ rights, told the Political Report. “People are dying,” she added. “People are killing themselves. People are getting medical maltreatment.”

Despite abundant evidence that Erie County jails under Sheriff Howard are unfit for human beings, efforts to remove him from office have proved fruitless. But Howard announced last month that he would not seek another term. Instead, he will seek the Republican and Conservative Party nominations for supervisor of Wales, a town of around 3,000 people in southeastern Erie County. That means voters will have a chance to elect a new sheriff in November, after a June primary that determines who is on the ballot. Candidates can qualify to run between Feb. 23 and April 1.

“The Erie County Sheriff’s Office has been a source of embarrassment for our community,” April Baskin, the Democratic chairperson of the county legislature—the state’s equivalent of a county board—said in an email to the Political Report. “With Sheriff Howard’s retirement, we have an opportunity for real reform. I am looking for a candidate who will rise to the challenge.”

—

In the last 16 years, at least 30 people have died after being detained in Erie County jails. According to the New York State Commission of Correction, these jails are among the “most problematic local correctional facilities” in the state. On average, one person dies every six months. Jean Dickson, a retired University of Buffalo librarian, has researched the many lawsuits that have arisen from prisoner deaths, injuries, and illnesses. She estimates that taxpayers spent approximately $4 million between 2005 and 2017 to defend or settle these cases.

People with manageable or no known medical conditions have died shortly after being admitted to Erie County jails. In 2019, Connell Burrell collapsed at the Erie County Holding Center in Buffalo. A slightly built 44-year-old man with Type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Burrell had served just 12 hours of a 15-day sentence on a disorderly conduct charge when he crumpled to the floor. He was eventually transported to Buffalo General Medical Center. Two days later, he was dead. In 2016, after experiencing  an apparent mental health crisis, 27-year-old India Cummings—who had no criminal history or previous contact with police, aside from minor vehicle and traffic infractions—was arrested and taken to the Erie County Holding Center. She died 20 days later.

Burrell and Cummings appear to have died from medical neglect, but many detainee deaths in Erie County are suicides. Speaking to Spectrum News in 2019, Howard said the proportion was around half. “We’re not a hospital,” he explained. “The person most responsible for a suicide is the person that commits the suicide.”

Sexual violations have also been pervasive in the jails. In recent months, two women detainees have alleged that an Erie County Holding Center sergeant—who once married a woman he met while she was incarcerated—made sexual advances toward prisoners. An internal investigation conducted by the sheriff’s office in 2018, but  recently uncovered by the Buffalo News, found that three officers had had inappropriate contact with women they met at the Erie County Correctional Facility in Alden. Two admitted to having sexual relationships with prisoners after their release; the third contacted a former prisoner on social media. Other recently surfaced allegations include officers spying on prisoners while they shower, sexual contact between prisoners and officers (prisoners cannot consent to sexual activity with corrections officers under New York State law), and rape.

According to the Buffalo News, five other Democratic candidates have announced they will enter the race; unlike Carter, they all have extensive backgrounds working for law enforcement agencies. One of them, Kimberly L. Beaty, a former Buffalo Police Department deputy commissioner, is also seeking to run on the Working Families Party line.

Another, Michael F. Reardon, works under Howard as his first deputy supervisor of compliance and was embroiled in a scandal over sex discrimination. A judge ultimately found that one of the allegations against Reardron—that he retaliated against an employee for complaining about harassment from other staff members—wasn’t proven.

Most of these candidates are seeking the endorsement of the county Democratic Party, which could help them navigate the primary process and clinch the nomination. (Carter has said he is not seeking the endorsement.) Jeremy Zellner, chairperson of the county party, has said he will keep the need to overhaul the jails in mind when considering endorsement requests. Zellner told the Buffalo News that “we need a clean break from the administration” of Howard, who “ran a jail that has brought us national shame,” and noted that Reardon is “an appointee” of Howard.

Carter has so far been the most outspoken about the need for reform. He told the Political Report that solitary confinement is a tool used to “diminish and demean and break people,” including his own brother, and says he would ban its use in county jails.  He wants to crack down on sexual assault, and he’s pledging to not make arrests for any marijuana-related offenses. To take a different approach to mental health, he said he intends to hire people who are “already trained” in crisis intervention and trauma-informed care, such as social workers and other professionals with medical experience. More broadly, Carter wants to ensure that people do not leave jail only to re-enter lives of poverty, homelessness, and isolation. He’s seen firsthand how poverty can ensnare people in the criminal legal system; his mother was arrested and jailed for stealing groceries for her seven kids, an event that landed him in foster care and eventually juvenile detention.

On the Republican/Conservative side, there are three prospective candidates, including Steve Felano, a gun rights advocate with no experience in law enforcement who is vowing not to enforce any laws he deems unconstitutional, including state gun laws and coronavirus-related restrictions. He also told the Buffalo News he would use the power of the sheriff’s office to investigate the “Cuomo regime.” Karen Healy-Case, who recently warned against letting “the defund the police mob” take over “our” sheriff’s office, has also vowed not to enforce state gun laws. Healy-Case is married to a judge whose court often handles criminal cases referred by the sheriff’s office. Another candidate, John Garcia, is a retired Buffalo police officer whose donors include a gun rights group called the 1791 Society and the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association. Howard is backing Garcia.

—

Criminal justice advocates say Erie County desperately needs a reform-minded sheriff who will work with the county government to transform the jails, not another Howard associate. After Democrats took control of the county legislature in 2017, they resurrected a Corrections Specialist Advisory Board that sat dormant when Republicans were in charge. The board meets regularly to discuss jail management and the treatment of detainees. It includes appointees from the sheriff’s office, the county executive’s office, the legislature, and various community groups.

Baskin, the county legislature chairperson, has been instrumental in efforts to hold the sheriff’s office accountable and says the next sheriff needs to seriously consider the recommendations of the advisory board. They would need to understand “that there are deep-seated problems” with the way the sheriff’s office has been run and “put in the work to address those problems,” she said.

Howard’s office has not backed its words with action, said George BaBa Eng, an outreach specialist at the Community Health Center of Buffalo who serves on the board as a representative of the advocacy group Prisoners Are People Too. Eng recalled a recent meeting attended by Erie County Jail Management Division superintendent Thomas Diina, whom he described as “Tim Howard with a smile.” Eng said Diina has “a level of diplomacy that Tim Howard does not possess,” but with “the same core of racist, ultraconservative values that denigrate the value of human life, of prisoners in particular, and Black, brown, and poor white prisoners, specifically.”

Without the cooperation of the sheriff’s office, the board’s power is limited. Eng said the board should be able “to make sure that [sheriff’s department employees] who violate the law, who violate policy and procedure, are held to account.”

Ann Venuto, a retired psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner and educator who serves on the advisory board with Eng, echoed his frustration. She said that without subpoena or disciplinary power, it’s difficult to compel the sheriff’s office to share information, and to know how much to trust the information they are willing to share.

Venuto would like the next sheriff to take a compassionate approach to substance use disorder and mental health issues. She said Erie County jails and society at large would benefit from the introduction of medication-assisted treatment programs, crisis intervention and trauma-informed care training for officers, and an emphasis on restorative justice as opposed to retribution. That would mean treating opioid use disorder via a combination of medications, counseling, and behavioral therapies, and training officers to help people with mental health or addiction issues get the treatment they need and avoid jail. Nearby counties like Monroe and Niagara have successfully implemented these types of reforms, Venuto noted.

Howard defended his refusal to apply for state funding for medication-assisted treatment in 2019. “Offering government resources to continue with an addiction does not strike me as the best approach,” he said, adding that we’ve gone from prevention efforts to “supplying drugs for the individual that has chosen to continue to live a life of drug addiction.” His office did not respond to the Political Report’s request for comment.

To Eng, the sheriff election is not a matter of “[choosing] a lesser evil. As human beings, I don’t think we have to settle for that.” People everywhere, he said, deserve not only an end to brutality but “the best that we’re capable of creating.”

Editor’s note: The reporter’s aunt, Nan Haynes, and father, John Lipsitz, represented plaintiffs  against Sheriff Timothy Howard in 2010 and 2006. Haynes was also a plaintiff in a 2017 lawsuit compelling Howard to properly document and report prisoner suicide attempts. John Lipsitz was cooperating counsel on the New York Civil Liberties Union’s 2014 lawsuit against the Erie County sheriff’s department for Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) violations.

The post BLM Activist Shakes Up Sheriff Race in County Known for Deadly Jails appeared first on Bolts.

This article is part of our national coverage of 2020 prosecutor elections.

To bolster his re-election bid, President Trump is deploying a “suburban strategy,” betting that voters who live outside of the country’s biggest cities will react warily to the Black Lives Matter protests happening since George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer in late May.

But these protests have popped up in small towns and in suburban or exurban counties as well. In DeKalb County, Illinois, a county of more than 100,000 people about 65 miles west of Chicago, large crowds have gathered to demand change in law enforcement and criminal justice practices.

Anna Wilhelmi, the Democratic nominee for state’s attorney in DeKalb County this fall, has attended the protests herself. “I held my sign high for all those black lives stolen and betrayed by cover ups,” she wrote on Facebook in June after one march. And she now thinks that the breadth of the local Black Lives Matter coalition may counter the president’s message.  

“It was amazing to see this sea of people, white people and Black protesters, all together marching through the streets of Sycamore,” Wilhelmi told me, describing the scene at one protest.

I talked to Wilhelmi last week about why she thinks that criminal justice reform, rather than the “law and order” outlook Trump called for, is more conducive to public safety. And I asked how she would use the vast discretion of the prosecutor’s office to advance accountability for law enforcement and also decrease incarceration, as neighboring Cook County has achieved.

Wilhelmi, a real estate attorney and former public defender and criminal defense attorney, explained her policy stances. They include maintaining a “do not call” list of police officers with a history of wrongdoing, supporting an end to cash bail, avoiding criminal convictions over drug possession, and ending life without parole sentences for minors. She also said she would advocate for strengthening funding for social services operating outside of law enforcement.

“When you invest in your community, you get so much more back,” she said.

Wilhelmi faces Republican State’s Attorney Rick Amato on Nov. 3 in this politically divided county that voted for Hillary Clinton by 3 percentage points in the 2016 presidential race.

The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

—

DeKalb County is about a two hour-drive from Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a police officer in August. What is your reaction to that shooting, and what do you draw from it in terms of systemwide issues that demand change?

That incident with Jacob Blake while he’s walking away is a really blatant example of police and of their attitudes towards Black people and other people of color. The other side of that is the reaction from other mostly white people trying to make excuses for this person being shot seven times in the back with his children in the backseat. It’s just so amazing to see that stark reality. 

There have been ongoing protests since George Floyd right in DeKalb County, which is amazing. We’ve got the youth out there in the streets. It shows how bad policing is right now as far as relating to the Black community and the BIPOC community. I am definitely wanting to accompany these youths and activists in this Black Lives Matter movement and I have participated in protests—not all of them because they were at first out there every day, but I have been participating.

A major story now in the presidential election is that President Trump appears to be betting that voters who live outside of cities will react negatively to the protests, and “backlash” against them, so to speak, in the name of “law and order.” Here you are running in a prosecutor’s race, in an exurban county. on a platform that emphasizes criminal justice reform. Does the president’s strategy match what you hear in DeKalb County? 

I think that there is backlash. But I also see, especially because of the videos rising so fast into the public of these police shootings and things, I see that there are people responding with kind of disgust, in a good way. There was a big protest in Sycamore, and there were a lot of white people that were protesting on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was amazing to see. It was amazing to see this sea of people, white people and Black protesters, all together marching through the streets of Sycamore. 

President Trump is repeating the expression “law and order” to capture what his message is. What do you make of that expression and its connection to criminal justice reform?

Those words have been used as a tool to suppress people and to violate people. President Trump, when he uses those words, he uses them as a knife, as a tool of division and oppression. But when I think of justice and fairness, that is the position that I’m running for: justice for everyone, and fairness for everyone. And that means keeping people safe. 

Can you say more about why you think emphasizing criminal justice reform policies would promote safety? An argument of “law and order” rhetoric is that safety requires more punitive practices; what makes you think otherwise?

There’s a few parts to this. When we correct the illegal behavior of law enforcement, we minimize their unjust acts towards people. And that builds trust in the community. When you are able to hold law enforcement accountable, the community who we are ultimately here to serve will be able to trust, will be able to count on the people who are supposed to serve them. That makes everyone safer. They can call who they are supposed to call if they’re in trouble. We need the police for those violent crimes; we need them to protect us in these violent situations. It hurts everybody, when we don’t have a just criminal legal system.

The second part of that question is about incarcerating people. When we incarcerate for nonviolent crimes—I’m not talking about violent crimes, those are a whole other thing that we need to address—we’re taking someone out of their support system, and we’re placing them in isolation for some significant period of time. They’re going to eventually come back out into the community. It’s very difficult to get a job. It’s difficult when your family has been destroyed. 

Prosecutorial discretion is huge. We can do deferred prosecution; we can do alternative dispositions; we can have diversion programs and treatment and focus on the individual. 

And of course the community has to do their part too, the city and the county as far as resources. That’s having to do with taking money from the police department and spreading it out into communities that don’t have money. In Evanston, they are taking money from taxes earned on marijuana legalization and using it for reparations and for Black families to be able to buy homes and things like that. When you invest in your community, you get so much more back.

Accountability for policing in DeKalb County

What do you think, in DeKalb’s criminal legal system in particular, relates to the demands of the protests you were discussing earlier?

Data from IDOT [Illinois Department of Transportation], in a study of 2017, showed that 37 percent of [traffic] stops by the DeKalb police were of Black people. [Note: The IDOT study of 2018 traffic stops showed a similar share, 38 percent. 14.5 percent of DeKalb city is Black.] You can’t just brush that under the rug, you have to pay attention to that data. We know what the stats are at least as far as self-reporting with the IDOT data, but we don’t have anything further: What’s happening in our [county] system? Why are 40 percent or 50 percent of people sitting in their courtrooms Black? 

You may be up on the case of Elonte McDowell in 2019. He’s alive, thank goodness. He was pulled over and he was choked by one of the [DeKalb] officers, and he was choked to the point that he passed out, and then he was tased. The state’s attorney elected to go to the grand jury. We all know as attorneys that they tend not to indict police officers. So this particular state attorney decided to take the information to a grand jury, and got a no bill, rather than appoint a special prosecutor. It was such an egregious act that people are not recovering from it. It’s trauma-inducing, it’s a continuing festering thing. 

So, if you had been in office, what would you have done in such a case that wasn’t done? Would you have appointed a special prosecutor? Would you have a policy of systematically appointing a special prosecutor in use of force cases?

If I have a conflict, then yes I would ask a judge to appoint a special prosecutor. We are still an independent office. I’m not just an arm of the police. But we work together as offices, and that could create an inherent conflict, so I would have to take a look at that, and if in fact that’s the case, then I would ask for a special prosecutor to be appointed. 

If I really wanted to prosecute, I would not go to a grand jury with a police officer case, where a police officer is the one who I perceive as having broken the law. 

Some community advocates in DeKalb have asked for stronger civilian oversight. Would you support a civilian oversight board in DeKalb that has the power to independently investigate police wrongdoing, including issue subpoenas?

Yeah, absolutely. Especially with some bite to it, with subpoena power. 

Nationwide advocates have also called on prosecutors to establish “do not call” lists, namely public lists of police officers with a history of wrongdoing that they will not call on or rely on in the course of prosecuting their cases. Some prosecutors have done this, and some candidates have said they would. If elected, would your office maintain such a list?

Yes. This type of disclosure is one of the many ways that prosecutors can hold police accountable for police misconduct. Frankly, the public should be aware of current and past misconduct allegations against officers.

Another demand voiced in protests in DeKalb, echoing national conversations, has been to move funds reserved for law enforcement be redirected to other public services. What public services outside of law enforcement in DeKalb do you think most need to be boosted, especially when it comes to improving public safety? And would you favor shifting some resources from law enforcement toward them?

I absolutely believe that we spend too much money in the police budget that doesn’t have to do with servicing our community. What about the parents who have an autistic child and have to call 911 if the child acts out and gets violent and breaks stuff? I would be concerned about calling up police when my autistic child is acting out, for concern that their life would be taken or that they would be hurt in some way, rather than having mental health professionals to call in that moment. 

Ideally, I think that resources should be used to expand services outside the law enforcement umbrella. This will help ensure that systemic racial and other biases that may exist within the department will not negatively affect the services provided by a qualified professional.  However, I think that within the department there should also be educated servicers that coordinate with services outside the department, to ensure that the intervention is done in the most safe and effective manner.

Prosecutorial discretion in charging and sentencing

I’d like to return to your earlier points about prosecutorial discretion and charging options. Drug possession typically triggers felony-level charges in Illinois. To what extent would you implement policies to curb that? For instance, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx set a presumption of no incarceration for drug possession cases, helping fuel a decline in prison admissions; and she has avoided felony-level charges in more drug cases. Would you pursue similar policies in DeKalb? And if so, would your goal for drug possession specifically be to avoid incarceration or will you want to avoid convictions as well? 

Absolutely: Not just avoiding incarceration but the felony label is huge. This is a medical issue when somebody is addicted to drugs. As far as possession, I could use deferred prosecution, send them into treatment; depending on how things would be set up in my office, we could do where you have a criminal charge placed and they go into treatment and then dismiss the charges. My goal would be to keep them out of the system and get them into treatment. 

Some of these proposals would still use the tools of prosecution. Some prosecutors, such as DA Rachael Rollins in Boston or candidate Jose Garza in Austin, have run on the idea that they won’t prosecute or charge simple drug possession because this is a matter for public health that the criminal legal system shouldn’t be involved in. What do you think of that approach? 

I am open to that. I haven’t delved into that, but I am open to that. 

Protesters in DeKalb have also called for the elimination of cash bail, which would mean no longer linking pretrial release to payment of financial conditions. This is an issue that the state legislature has already been discussing. Do you think that cash bail has any role to play in the criminal legal system? 

It’s discriminatory, and I don’t think there’s a purpose for it, and I am running on that: I do not believe there’s any condition where a cash bail would be something that would stop someone from fleeing or make somebody more safe. Mostly people go to court, they don’t want to be arrested for not showing up to court.

When you have a situation where a person rips off a bunch of senior citizens millions of dollars, and then they post a $30,000 bond and get out and they can assist in their own defense, they can go home, they can hang out with their family and not have restrictions. Whereas somebody with a misdemeanor charge or felony charge, can’t leave the jail because they can’t post $500 bond. They could be out and they could be at home and they could assist in their own defense and still come to court. It’s not effective. It’s effective in keeping poor people in custody: That’s what it’s effective at doing.

Is your goal to overall have fewer people in jail pretrial or is to remove the financial aspect of it? There are ways people are still kept in jail pretrial without any bail condition, because they’re ruled that they shouldn’t be released. 

I think that the impact would be to have less people in pretrial, to minimize how many people are being kept pretrial when they don’t need to be. But in violent cases, they shouldn’t be able to get out on $1,000. You’ve got to evaluate that case, and you’ve got to determine, especially in domestic violence cases, whether or not that person is dangerous to the victim and what you’re going to do to protect the situation. 

You mentioned aiming your policies toward changing approaches to nonviolent offenses. But many Illinois organizations also raise major concerns about the very lengthy sentences people serve for higher-level offenses: Thousands of people are serving virtual life sentences in Illinois, a state that has abolished parole for most cases. And 68 percent are Black, according to the Sentencing Project. Do you see these existing sentencing schemes as part of the problem of mass incarceration? Would you favor legislative proposals to scale back virtual life sentences? 

I definitely share concerns about lengthy and life sentences. Mandatory minimum sentencing is a problem, and the impact of that sentencing contributes to the mass incarceration problem we have today. Although laws look color blind on their face, the fact that 68 percent of those serving life sentences are Black reveals the disparate impact of these laws upon Black people. I would advocate to scale back what turns out to be in effect life sentences for people, and would agree that those types of sentences being served should be subject to review, except for the most heinous of crimes.  

Relatedly: 23 states and Washington D.C. have abolished life without parole sentences for minors, but Illinois has not done so. Would you ever seek such a sentence against a minor? 

No.

You’ve never worked as a prosecutor before, and you said last year that this is an asset that your candidacy would bring to the table. Why do you think that is?

I have criminal defense experience, and there’s a multitude of criminal defense attorneys who switch sides and become prosecutors because you’re doing the same thing except on the other side, in terms of procedure. But I bring so much more: I bring the idea that the criminal justice system is broken. We need to make it just. And who better to do that than someone who is educated on criminal justice reform, and knows the stats, and knows that mass incarceration is not OK, and knows that the Black community is being targeted by the police on a daily basis? We have to address these issues. 

The post Why a Suburban Illinois Prosecutor Candidate Is Drawing Inspiration From Protests appeared first on Bolts.

Over the weekend, seeing images of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer and its aftermath, I found myself repeatedly thinking back to an essay I read years ago, “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics.” The 2016 article questions the frequent demands that Black protesters engage in “appropriate” politics when they are calling for racial justice, and challenges us to think about why U.S. society tends to perceive some people as more violent than others regardless of what they do.

Juliet Hooker, the article’s author and a political theorist at Brown University, has studied Black political thought, the reception of protests, and racial justice. I reached out to discuss what her article can tell us about the protests of the last week and about the police’s response to them. 

In the course of our conversation, Hooker warned about the disparities in “who is prone to being viewed already as violent.” She argued that a “mistaken romantic recollection” of past activism makes people forget some of its radical aspects. And she made the case that U.S. society continually awaits images of Black people suffering to get mobilized, whether brutal scenes like George Floyd’s killing or the risks of joining rallies during a pandemic. “We require these images of Black death … to maybe move people to feel some sort of care and concern,” she said.

The Q&A’s transcript, which has been lightly edited and condensed, is available below. You can also listen to it below, or access it directly on SoundCloud and iTunes, where you can also subscribe to our content.

In your 2016 article, you suggest that, before we even discuss what forms of protest are justified or efficient, we need to first understand that there are disparities in who and what gets labeled “violent” to start with. You call this an “asymmetrical vulnerability” to being perceived as violent. How do you analyze the events of the past week in light of that idea?

I think that there are various ways in which we can think about that idea of who is prone to being viewed already as violent, and who is not, irrespective of their actions. What we’ve seen in the protests against the killing of George Floyd is that the actions by protesters, when there have been instances of looting or of property being burned, or Confederate statues being graffitied, etc, that these have been immediately viewed as violent and as aggressive acts that are outside of what is viewed as the norm for a civil protest, whereas the actions by the police are viewed as justified, even when we see instances such as police cars ramming into protesters who’re just standing there. There’ve been so many reports of police pepper-spraying protesters who were not doing anything or beating them with batons, etc. So these actions, which are clearly violent, aren’t viewed because they’re coming from agents of the state who are thought to have a monopoly on violence. One way to understand this in particular in these current protests is that they’re also harking back to racialized views of Black people, Black men in particular, as prone to violence, that begin during the period of slavery and that continue to this day, when you think about Ferguson and the Michael Brown shooting and this idea that white police officers always fall back on that there was this monstrous, scary Black man who was menacing them and that’s why they shot them irrespective of what the person is doing. 

What do you see as the social or linguistic processes that go into production of these perceptions? To the extent it’s a matter of language or media frames, how do different publics perceive these events differently, especially given media fragmentation and social media?

What we’re looking at now are, of course, these viral videos, and also the sort of live cable news coverage where you have reporters that are contemporaneously narrating what’s happening. One of the interesting things to think about here is that one of the solutions that has been put forward for excessive use of force by the police has been the use of body cameras. 

But I think what we see when we look at the videos is that there is no way to guarantee that people will see the same thing. People still look at these videos and see them through the lenses of their own racialized views of the world. When you think about, for example, the videos of Eric Garner, the one of George Floyd, many of those who are predisposed to defend the police are going to focus on, “Well, did they comply with police demands? Did they comply quickly enough?” Even in the cases in which people have been shot in the back, it’s like, “Well, they looked like they were running away, why didn’t they turn? Why didn’t they do X, Y and Z?” One of the things that we need to sit back and think about is that there is a level of interpretation that’s happening with any of these images, and that we are bringing everything that we know about the world to that interpretation. 

The media also plays a role in this. The way in which headlines or articles will, for example, talk about protesters as active agents, use the active voice to say they were looting, or they were rioting, or they were setting fires, as opposed to the way in which they describe the killing of unarmed Black people by the police. And it’ll be somebody like George Floyd died in police custody. Died. Who did it? Nobody is identified as the person who did it. The media reluctance, almost, to identify the police as anything but neutral is a problem for understanding what’s happening. Because one of the different things about these protests is that they’re protesting against the police. When the protest is against the police itself, how do we expect the police not to have a kind of emotional investment or kind of reaction to the protesters? So we interpret their actions as if they’re neutral, but they’re actually also a participant in this very thing that they’re then being told to manage.

Your essay also analyzes what you call expectations of respectability and exemplarity that African Americans looking to resist racial injustice are met with. “When other citizens and state institutions betray a lack of care and concern for black suffering, which in turn makes it impossible for those wrongs to be redressed, is it fair to ask blacks to enact ‘appropriate’ democratic politics?” How has this dynamic manifested itself in the Black Lives Matter movement?

When Black Lives Matter first emerged and had the protests in Ferguson and then the protest for the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, there were a lot of critiques from white observers but also some Black leaders from the civil rights generation, even President Obama. And there were a number of people who criticized them for not adhering to what they saw as the script of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. They weren’t the well-dressed, very disciplined protesters who did not engage in any kind violence no matter how much they were provoked or hurt by the police. There is a sense in which Black Lives Matter doesn’t live up to that frame. 

I think we have a mistaken romantic recollection and public memory of the civil rights movement that actually is shaping the way in which we respond to contemporary movements, but that is, in fact, misemembering what happened in the 1960s, which is that at the time people like MLK were called outside agitators. People responded to civil rights demonstrators and argued that they were creating conflict, that they were creating racial strife, that they were doing a lot of the things which we now accuse contemporary Black Lives Matter protesters of. I think you see the way in which this misreading of the history of Black protest, particularly the civil rights movement, is then applied as the standard against which they are judged, and judged to not be succeeding. You still have this sense of, “Well, why is there violence? Why can’t people just be nonviolent? Why do they have to riot? Why can’t they maintain the same kind of civil disobedience that the civil rights movement did?”

Could you say more about what you’re calling this script of the 1960s movement and its misreading? And you’ve also worked extensively on the history you can of Black political thought and on earlier figures such as Frederick Douglass, and he also had to navigate questions about the proper strategies to employ. How did the figures you have worked on think through some of these questions?

This is a really important point to keep in mind, which is that there has actually been a long tradition in Black politics of thinking about how to do protest, what is most effective. And one of the interesting things that we see is that from the very beginning there isn’t this kind of clear distinction between, let’s say, civil and uncivil forms of protests, between violence and non violence as two completely opposite things. 

For example, if you begin with slavery, abolitionists, Black abolitionists, Black fugitives, were literally committing a crime by running away. They were stealing themselves. It was illegal for a slave to flee. And so the idea that engaging in political action for the sake of Black freedom and Back life had to adhere to what was the law of the land could not work when the law was racist. 

Even in the 1960s, if you think about those protests as well, there are ways in which methods were employed by things like curfews, things like refusing to give permits to protests and people going ahead and protesting anyway, even though it was declared illegal. There is a way in which this has always been something that Black thinkers have had to grapple with, that you have to think about what is going to be effective. 

Here’s the issue: If you are asking people to engage in civil disobedience, the point of engaging in civil disobedience is to show that you respect the democratic norms of the society in which you live, but you think some things are unjust and need to be changed. But if you’re in a system where you are not afforded the same rights of citizenship even to this day, in which there have been, continue to be killing of Black people by the police with impunity, and there seems to be no way to address that either electorally, or through lawsuits, or through all the other forms of activism, then, saying that you shouldn’t protest violently—well it’s like, what other forms of redress are there? If the system is fundamentally unjust, then part of the critique is precisely that there needs to be radical transformation. If you think about the 1960s, what people were asking for wasn’t something minor. It was a major change in how a large part of the country was organized. And so we have to grapple with the fact that what racial justice requires is always going to be controversial and difficult and is not easily achieved through some of the more established forms of political activism.

On this point, earlier this spring we saw protests against shutdowns that in Michigan featured people with weapons coming to the Capitol. How do you analyze reactions to that?

I think that one important difference between the anti-lockdown protests is that they were mostly or almost universally white protesters. One of the key issues here is that one of the things that shapes the ability or the perception of Black protest is this inability to express Black anger. So if you think about the notion that anger at injustice is justified. But Black anger has been seen as dangerous. It has been seen as something to be feared. And so even when protesting injustice, and even when it’s something that you should be angry about, somehow there’s always an expectation that Black people can’t show anger because that will alienate white support, that will make them seem unreasonable, this is going to not create sympathy for your cause. 

Now, the interesting thing, of course, is that that same constraint isn’t necessarily placed on white protesters, as we saw with the anti lockdown protests. There are these guys who, it’s not simply anger, but who are actually showing up with guns and who are nevertheless treated with respect, who are not killed. The contrast between that and then the overreaction, the use of excessive force by the police to counter protests, peaceful protesters who are trying to protest these acts of state violence is really glaring. I think it comes back to this idea of who is allowed to show anger, in the case of the anti lockdown protesters, at perceived restraints on their rights. This goes back to the ways in which, in U.S. society, the notion of who has the right to be a full human being, to express anger, to have an expectation that your needs and your interest as a citizen will be at the forefront of the political agenda, that’s reflected in these very asymmetrical reactions to these protests, and also the fact that grievances that are driving them are so normatively different.

I want to ask you about one final idea from your 2016 essay: You write about an “economy of suffering.” The argument is that U.S. society requires of Black people that they suffer, and display their suffering, in order to get redress. Can you speak more on what you mean by “economy of suffering”?

What I mean by that is to say that the U.S. remains, to make a very obvious point, a society that’s shaped by racial hierarchy and racial inequality and racism. What happens in these situations in which you have these instances of clear racial harm and racial injustice, is that nevertheless it’s not seen as the responsibility of everyone in society necessarily to protest against police violence. So it becomes the task of Black people who are already the ones who are suffering police violence, to go out and put themselves in harm’s way, and put themselves in danger of further aggression by the police in order to try to end this problem. So there is loss upon loss. 

In the context of the pandemic, where protesting also is putting these folks who are out there demanding justice, possibly, at risk of infection, it’s as if we’re literally asking people to die for democracy, to die for the sake of making this a society that lives up to its stated commitments to equal rights for all. Part of what I’m trying to get at by talking about this economy of suffering is this idea that it’s those who are already vulnerable, those who are already suffering injustice who need to go and protest those injustices and seek change. 

But it also gets at another issue, which is the fact that we require these images of Black death—of some sort of seemingly incontrovertible moment, in the case of George Floyd that video of the officer who was literally standing on his neck—that is what we require in order to be mobilized. What is required are these scenes over and over again of Black pain, of Black death, of Black suffering, in order to maybe move people to feel some sort of care and concern for these forms of injustice, and that in itself is something that takes a toll on people. 

I also think that the pandemic has exposed some of the deep structural and racial inequalities within the United States. We have been in a situation in which over 100,000 people have died in the United States, and people have been dealing with these losses, both loss of life, loss of jobs for some, loss of human contact. The U.S. is at a moment, I think, where there’s a lot of folks who are wondering whether the system is working, and who is it working for. One question for me, thinking about where we go from here, is trying to think about what comes of this, where do people go, and whether it’s possible to really sustain a kind of broad, multiracial cross-class coalition that is really going to try to address questions of police violence and racial injustice.

The post How Unequal Perceptions of Protest and Violence Shape Black Lives Matter appeared first on Bolts.