On October 25, members of the the Albany community gathered to learn more about the targeting of African-American males in federal and state drug sweeps in Albany, NY and discuss and strategize about how to end mass incarceration. Alice Green, director of The Center For Law and Justice, presented the findings of her organization’s report, What Have We Done?: Mass Incarceration and the Targeting of Albany’s Black Males by Federal, State, and Local Authorities.  Michael Figura, a legal fellow at the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, drew connections between law enforcement tactics targeting of African-American and Latino communities in the drug war and the targeting of Muslims and political activists. Lynne Jackson, of Project Salam, highlighted some of the many uses of entrapment and preemptive prosecution against Muslims in the “war on terror.”

The remainder, and majority, of the event focused on a discussion among the attendees, moderated by Mark Bobb-Semple, about how to build a movement to stop the New Jim Crow and law enforcement targeting of other communities. Family members of those convicted in the Albany sweeps reflected on the damage done by mass incarceration and proposed a return to 60′s style protests. Other attendees noted that the success of the civil rights movement was due in large part to the diversity of tactics and philosophies exemplified by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. One audience member noted that the discussion helped him to understand how the government unjustly prosecuted Muslims, and that he was able to see parallels with the incarceration of African-Americans. A number of those present pointed out that policing practices had a large impact on who ultimately becomes incarcerated. The discussion provided the building blocks of a movement that fights for the end of mass incarceration and biased policing and law enforcement.

Residents of Albany, and cities and towns across the country have influence and control over local law enforcement practices through their local and state legislatures.  By building a strong coalition, an engaged people can pass restrictions to ensure that their communities are treated fairly, constitutionally and justly.  As local efforts in Berkeley, California and New York City have shown, a strong coalition can assert control over law enforcement practices and assure fair and equal treatment.

11/6, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian (UK), Discovering a truly exciting Obama and five other items to note on election day

11/6, John P. Houston, Chicago Tribune, Evanston police chief asks for review of his department’s handling of race relations

11/5, Tom P. Taylor, Bloomberg, Supreme Court Ponders Whether Lawyers, Reporters Can Challenge U.S. Wiretapping

11/5, Anna Salem, ACLU, Civil Liberties in the Digital Age: Weekly Highlights

11/5, Ramesh Ponnuru, Huffington Post, Why Drones Stayed Out Of Sight In The 2012 Campaign – Bloomberg

11/5, Alan Gomez, USA Today, Feds delay review of Obama immigration program

Alabama’s Beason-Hammon Act (HB 56) was passed in June 2011 and requires public school administrators to question the immigration status of all new Kindergarten through 12^th grade students. The 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down HB 56 two months ago; declaring it unconstitutional. The unconstitutionality of HB56 directly stems from the court case, Plyer vs. Doe, that mandates every state to provide an education to all children regardless of their immigration status. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who filed the lawsuit against HB 56, stated that, “Section 28 interferes with that basic right. The legislature and the governor have claimed that Section 28 will not have any impact on enrollment, yet the Department of Justice is reporting that Alabama’s own data shows a significant and measurable decline in Latino students’ school attendance. Alabamians have a right to see the data for themselves, to know the impact this law is having.”

This same circuit struck down HB 87, which was Georgia’s proposal to criminalize “the transporting and harboring” of undocumented people. This decision fights the idea that individual states are able to make their own individual immigration regulations and ignore federal authority. However, this is only one circuit. The effects of bypassing federal authority have been harmful to not only individuals but also whole families. HB 56 is modeled after Arizona law and grants government officials (including law enforcement) to demand “papers” during routine activities. The law encourages racial profiling and abuse against all Latinos in Alabama and mocks human rights. After the law took effect in Alabama, the Southern Poverty Law Center open a hotline for those affected to report about their lives. According to the SPLC, “Almost 1,000 calls poured in during its first weekend of operation….They illustrate the devastating impact HB 56 has had on Alabama Latinos, regardless of their immigration status. The stories also illustrate that HB 56 has unleashed a kind of vigilantism, leading some Alabamians to believe they can cheat, harass and intimidate Latinos with impunity.” During the time HB 56 was active thirteen percent of Latino children withdrew from school and in turn the local economies are suffering because the parents of the children were afraid the provocation of the immigration status of their children would in turn lead to their own arrests or provocation by the police. HB 56 fosters fear and punished innocent victims and is a total civil liberties violation. There cannot be compromise with laws of hate and injustice.

Last night, the Berkeley City Council unanimously approved a historic measure ending Berkeley’s cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, mere weeks after enacting groundbreaking reforms protecting privacy and dissent in the face of federally-coordinated domestic surveillance and intelligence collection efforts.

Responding to sustained pressure from the Coalition for a Safe Berkeley, the City Council declared last night that:

“The Berkeley Police Department will follow its normal rules and procedures irrespective of the immigration status with whom it comes into contact. The Berkeley Police Department will not honor requests by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, to detain a Berkeley jail inmate for suspected violations of the federal civil immigration law.”

The decision resulted from sustained controversy in Berkeley, and across the nation, over federal policy initiatives that co-opt local police and distract them from their core public safety mission, such as the Secure Communities Initiative (S-Comm).

Almost exactly one year ago, Santa Clara County rejected S-comm, implementing a policy that severely restricted the Santa Clara Sheriff’s compliance with detainer requests. After mobilizing for the past two years to champion broad law enforcement reforms to protect civil rights undermined by federal programs, the Coalition for a Safe Berkeley (covered by Bay Area media sources including the SF Bay Guardian, Berkeley Daily Planet, ABC News, and CBS News) has secured the support of its City Council on a series of important policy reforms.

The City Council enacted many of the Coalition’s proposed reforms, on September 18, particularly relating to intelligence collection by the Berkeley Police Department. Those reforms also addressed: (1) dissemination of intelligence information to the Northern California regional fusion center (mere weeks before the US Senate released a report sharply critical of fusion centers for wasteful spending and abuses of constitutional rights), (2) responses to mutual aid requests from nearby police agencies when suppressing  First Amendment activity (such as the crackdown on Occupy Oakland nearly exactly a year ago), and (3) transparency into proposed purchases of military equipment (like an armored personnel carrier whose attempted purchase by the police department the Coalition eventually blocked).

While the Council supported many of the Coalition’s reform proposals in September, it continued the vote on the Coalition’s proposed civil detainer policy (responding to S-Comm) until this week’s Council meeting. In the wake of the Coalition’s further victory last night,  Manuel De Paz from East Bay Sanctuary Covenant said:

“This…policy…protects the rights of immigrants and follows the Constitution….[it] gives faith and hope nationwide to those who struggle day by day for social justice. When a coalition like the Coalition for a Safe Berkeley finds common ground, values, and puts aside the differences and personal interests, and persists, everything can be achieved and there’s no battle that can’t be won.”

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The Center For Law and Justice in Albany, recently released a report entitled What Have We Done?: Mass Incarceration and the Targeting of Albany’s Black Males by Federal, State, and Local Authorities.  The report highlights how the New Jim Crow lives in Albany and points to the County’s dubious distinction as one of the most racially-disparate sentencing jurisdictions in the state. Further, the report highlights how federal and state prosecutors have used conspiracy and enterprise corruption charges to target young black men for lengthy prison sentences despite the non-violent nature of the crimes of which they are accused.

On Thursday, October 25 at 6pm, The Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Center for Law and Justice will hold a community forum at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Albany that marks the release of the Center’s new report. The Center for Law and Justice will call for New York State to address the impact of mass incarceration on communities of color, through a truth and reconciliation process and rally communities in Albany and New York to oppose “The New Jim Crow.” The event will bring together communities targeted in the war on drugs with those targeted for their religious and political beliefs, and start a dialogue about collaborative solutions to resolve these pressing problems.

African-American and Latino communities targeted in the war on drugs and the New Jim Crow have much in common with other groups targeted by law enforcement. Federal and state law enforcement have long used informants and entrapment, vague laws that criminalize lawful activity, and biased policing to arrest and charge people in the so-called drug war.  Whether it’s buy and bust operations on the streets of low income communities, holding out a hip-hop video as evidence of criminality or stopping and frisking almost 700,000 people on the streets of New York City (90% of whom are minorities), these tactics are familiar to communities targeted in the drug war.

Federal, state and local law enforcement also deploys these same tools when it targets Muslim communities, ostensibly as a part of the “war on terrorism.” This week, a 19-year-old citizen of Bangledeshi descent revealed that the NYPD  had been paying him $1,000 a month to “bait Muslims into saying inflammatory things” through a method the the department tellingly named “create or capture.”  The Albany area is no stranger to these types of tactics. Federal authorities sent Yassin Aref, the imam of Masjid-As-Salam in Albany to prison for 15 years for witnessing a loan. In Newburgh, an FBI informant roped four poor and desperate African-American Muslim men into a fake terrorist plot by offering them larges sums of money.

Activist groups are also no strangers to this type of infiltration and targeting through vague laws. Last week it was revealed that police in Boston spied on peace and justice groups and labeled them criminals and extremists simply for meeting to discuss their views. The NDAA now opens the potential for the government to target and threaten activists and journalists who connect with revolutionary activists around the world with indefinite detention.

The law enforcement purveyors of these tactics hold a dangerous worldview.  A NYPD practice of stopping and frisking almost exclusively people of color, and imprisoning them disproportionately can only be grounded in a view that members of these communities are presumptively criminal. Similarly, a policy of spying on Muslims solely for their religious beliefs (as the NYPD did when it surveilled the website for the MSA of University at Albany) emerges from a perspective that believes Islam is inherently dangerous.  Also fundamentally wrongheaded is a unfounded labeling of peaceful activists as criminals.  An effective response to these tactics and views is one that brings all affected communities together, recognizing that the collective criminalization must be stopped.

Current News

10/18, Frank Rich, The New York Review of Books, The Election—II

10/18, Jennifer Peltz and Colleen Long, NBC Latino, NY stop-and-frisk debate gains political spotlight

10/18, New York Times, Should Industry Face More Cybersecurity Mandates?

10/18, Jason Leopold, TruthOut, Sold Into “a Piece of Hell:” A Death of Innocence at Gitmo

10/17, Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post, The Big Chill: How Obama Is Operating in Unprecedented Secrecy — While Attacking the Secret-Tellers

10/17, Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times, Judge in 9/11 terror case expected to protect secret information

• 10/17, Adam Klasfeld, Courthouse News Service, Before Debate, Experts Spar on Secrecy
• 10/17, Paul Grondahl, Times Union, ‘New Jim Crow’ or public safety?
• 10/17, RT, NDAA critic stranded in Hawaii after turning up on no-fly list
• 10/17, Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post, The Big Chill: How Obama Is Operating in Unprecedented Secrecy — While Attacking the Secret-Tellers
• 10/17, Michael Kelly, Business Insider, Two Supreme Court Cases About Dogs May Profoundly Impact Americans’ Privacy
• 10/17, Jason Leopold, TruthOut, Truthout Files FOIA Lawsuit Against Department of Justice/FBI for Occupy Wall Street Documents
• 10/16, Kevin Gosztola, Fire Dog Lake, Ex-Government Official Says CIA Scapegoating Whistleblower John Kiriakou to Protect One of Its Own Torturers

NYPD misconduct has been inescapable in the news in recent weeks. The beating of a man sleeping inside a Jewish youth center and the unprovoked lethal shooting of an unarmed national guardsman on the side of the highway are only two recent examples of NPYD officers abusing their authority and harming the public. These shocking incidents of violence make only more clear the urgent need for meaningful oversight over the NYPD and legislative action protecting residents from unlawful police stops. Communities United For Police Reform (CPR) has demanded that the city council pass the Community Safety Act, which would appoint an Inspector General to address systemic problems with the NYPD, allow residents to hold officers accountable in the courts for profiling, require officers to identify and explain themselves  and obtain documented consent when performing searches.

On Wednesday, October 10, supporters of the Community Safety Act filled the New York City Council chambers to capacity, making sure the the voices of New Yorkers affected by biased policing were heard.  The majority of the council members at the hearing spoke out forcefully in favor of the bills, including councilpersons Jumaane Williams, Brad Lander, Letitia James, Helen Foster and Robert Jackson.  While the NYPD failed to even send a representative to engage the bills, Mayor Bloomberg sent his counsel, Michael Best to outline the administration’s opposition to the bills.  The administration argued that the bills unlawfully curtailed the mayor’s power over the police department and were preempted by state law.  However, Brad Lander, who has advocated for NYPD reform in the press,  quickly rattled off an extensive list of municipal codes in New York that have similar regulations of local departments. Letitia James pointed out that Mayor Bloomberg had already signed a less comprehensive bill on racial profiling and it was absurd to now claim that similar legislation was an improper curtailment of the mayor’s power.  Throughout the hearing, members of the council discussed the lived experience of residing in communities turned into police states by biased stop and frisk enforcement. Council Chair Peter Vallone attempted to dismiss and and silence these discussion as improper speechmaking, prompting  Helen foster and others to vocally defend the right to share the stories of their communities.

Members and representatives of a diverse range of community and legal organizations, many a part of Communities United for Police Reform, testified about the necessity of passing the Community Safety Act.  Picture the Homeless member, Raul Rodriguez, testified about the devastating personal consequences of an illegal stop and frisk, an encounter which cost him his job and residence. Ramzi Kassem, of CUNY Law School’s CLEAR Project, outlined how the NYPD’s programs of stop and frisk and Muslim spying stem from similar illegitimate theories that criminalize entire communities based on lawful behavior and identity. Numerous other coalition representatives discussed the far-reaching legal, social and personal consequences of biased policing and outlined the need for change.

Two upcoming hearings will provide a forum for community members to voice their experience with biased policing and their views on the Community Safety Act.  The first hearing will be at Brooklyn College on October 23rd and the second will be in Queens at York College on October 24th. For the latest on the movement to pass the Community Safety Act and change the NYPD, search twitter for #ChangetheNYPD, #CommunitySafetyAct and #StopandFrisk, or the Communities United for Police Reform website.

• 10/16, Stephen Lendman, Sabbah Report, Intensified Warrantless Spying in America
• 10/16, Basil Katz, Huffington Post, NYPD Defends Stop-And-Frisk In ‘Operation Clean Halls’ Bronx Housing Case
• 10/16, Katie Rogers, Raw Story, Facebook users raise privacy concerns as company tweaks security settings
• 10/16, Agence France-Presse, Raw Story, Google privacy policy ‘breaks E.U. laws’
• 10/16, G.W. Schulz, Wired, As Drone Debate Rages, Police Move on to Million-Dollar Spy Planes
• 10/15, Michael Catalini, National Journal, Reid to Bring Cybersecurity Bill to Floor in Nov.
• 10/15, Wall Street Journal, NJ bill would require surveillance notification

Fresh off the release of a disturbing audio recording in which plainclothes officers active in the NYPD’s notorious “stop-and-frisk” (‘SNF’) program are caught accosting an innocent Harlem teenager, the Center For Constitutional Rights has launched a host of new features on its StopandFrisk.org website. As a follow up to its groundbreaking July 2012 report, ‘Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact’, the new features include an interactive map that houses audio clips from victims of SNF and an infographic that illustrates the impact of stop and frisk on communities in New York.

Along with the harrowing stories of abuse, intimidation, and fear that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers face every year at the hands of the NYPD, the interactive map boasts a user-friendly interface where parties can obtain district-specific information regarding the prevalence of SNF including racial statistics compromising the stops and community organizations active in the precinct. The audio testimonies provide an intimate view into the world of SNF from the perspective of the victim. In one particularly evocative account, a grandmother from Queens’ 104th precinct recalls the time her grandson was tackled off of his bike from behind and cuffed by the NYPD. The police pursued her grandson after he failed to stop when officers shouted from afar…. the only catch, he was deaf.

On Wednesday, October 10th, the New York City Council hosted a racially fraught meeting in which anti-SNF activists and aligned legislators argued passionately for the passage of the Community Safety Act, a suite of proposed measures that would address the misuse and discriminatory nature of SNF. If passed, it is expected that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg will veto the measures. At the meeting, his mayoral counselor Michael Best provided the first insight into the administration’s justification, “These proposed bills are preempted by state law and would be invalid if enacted.” While proponents of the measures continued to try to persuade City council otherwise, also on that same day, a federal appeals court denied the city’s request to review a judge’s decision to grant class-action status in a lawsuit challenging stop and frisk. A trial in that case is slated for March.

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