FILM / Jonah Raskin : Reviewing 'Fruitvale' and Remembering the Panthers

Reviewing Coogler's Fruitvale Station
and reflecting on the Black Panthers

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / August 12, 2013

The only Oakland, California, African-Americans I’ve ever known belonged to the Black Panther Party founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966. In my mind, Oakland and the Panthers are as one. I can’t think of the city -- its streets, churches, and parks -- without thinking of Panthers. And I can’t think of the Panthers without also thinking of the city.

Of course, I know that Oakland’s history includes much more than the Panther past. I know, too, that Oakland has continued to be a place of rebellion and defiance without the Panthers. The Occupy Movement rocked the city and the city rocked the movement. Violence has long stalked the city and its residents.

Not surprisingly, no Panthers appear in Ryan Coogler’s 85-minute feature film, Fruitvale Station, which recounts the life and the death of Oscar Grant III, the 22-year-old Oakland African-American who was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer on January 1, 2009.

The slaying of Grant would not have surprised Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who are, of course, dead and who were well aware of police brutality in their own time, and saw the police as an occupying army in black neighborhoods. I doubt that Bobby Seale and Dave Hilliard, two living Panthers, would be surprised, either, by the murder of Oscar Grant.

The avant-garde American writer, Gertrude Stein, noted apropos Oakland, “There is no there there.” Unfortunately, there is a there there, and, now as in the past, it’s the there of violence and death.

The release of Coogler’s movie, Fruitvale Station, coincided with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges on July 13, 2013. The movie was released July 28, 2013.

News about the trial and the verdict gave the film a boost at the box office and reminded audiences that white officers of the law have been murdering young black men for years and have gotten away with murder, too.

Oscar Grant III might have joined the Panthers had he been alive in 1967 or 1968. Newton and Seale might have tried to recruit him. After all, he’d been to prison -- he served time at San Quentin -- and he had street smarts. The film depicts him as a well-meaning young man who tries and fails to get his life together.

He’s a fuck-up but he’s not evil. Unable to keep a job, or to tell the truth consistently to friends and family members, he’d like to do the right thing and doesn’t. In the film, he deals marijuana, lies to the mother of his daughter, drives around Oakland in an old car, and hangs out with the boys in the ‘hood.

He doesn’t set his sights much further than tomorrow and he doesn’t look much further than the street around the next corner. His worldview is limited; he doesn’t seem to know his own personal history, the history of Oakland, its African-Americans, or the Black Panther Party.

His family members and his friends care about him and try to help him. They rally around him. They’d like to save his life and bring him back to life after he’s shot and killed.

The film offers a steady stream of images in which Grant and his friends hug one another, high-five one another, and talk the rhetoric of togetherness. They don’t have much tangible togetherness beneath the surface. They don’t go to church together, don’t have a clubhouse, don’t have anything at all that resembles the Black Panther Party, and don’t know a single older person who embodies the legacy of the Panthers.

Bobby Seale, left, and Huey Newton at Black Panther headquarters in Oakland. Image from Babylon Falling.

I didn’t take my eyes off the screen in the theater where I saw the film, but I found Oscar and his friends sad and even pathetic. I don’t doubt that the film accurately reflects Grant’s life. Ryan Coogler had the cooperation of the lawyer for Grant’s family. What I don’t know for sure is how typical or representative a figure Grant was and is.

I suspect that he is rather typical and that a great many young African-American men in Oakland share his sweetness and his anger, his desire to be something better than he is, and who, like him, lack the ability to get out of the traps in which they find themselves.

There’s something fatalist about the film. From the start, you know that he’ll be shot and killed on January 1, 2009; the film begins with documentary footage of his murder. You watch and you know that nothing will prevent that act from taking place.

The movie moves depressingly through Grant’s last day, and, because it’s depressing I can’t really recommend it. At the same time, I wouldn’t say stay away. If you want to see a movie made by a living African-American filmmaker about a dead African-American then by all means see the picture.

The director hasn’t aimed to make a big statement or to offer a plea for change. That speaks well for him. He mostly lets the story tell itself. But he hasn’t lifted his sights as a filmmaker beyond Grant’s individual life and beyond the lives of those in his immediate circle. That struck me as a lapse in filmmaking. It left me with a sense of disappointment.

I didn’t want slogans or sloganeering. I didn’t want Panthers to suddenly appear in the movie and to analyze and explain the situation. That would have been unreal. But I would have liked some acknowledgement that once upon a time in the West the Panthers made a difference.

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled. It does seem to reflect the feelings of young people in Oakland today: their sense of injustice and powerlessness, too. The world is fucked up and there isn’t much to be done about it now, except go to movies like Fruitvale Station and go about one’s life.

The same week that I saw the film, I also saw at exhibit at Mills College in Oakland that focused on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the space was allocated to the posters of Emory Douglas, which had many of the slogans from the heyday of the Panthers such as, “All power to the people” and “We shall survive without a doubt.”

I thought that I could hear those slogans echoing in the distance, and I knew that I would never hear them again in my own lifetime.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emiritus at Sonoma State University. Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Anthony Cristofani : Cops 'Peacefully Evacuate' Occupy LA

Protester busted by LA cops at Occupy Los Angeles encampment outside City Hall. Photo by Lucy Nicholson / AFP / Getty Images.
The 'peaceful evacuation' of Occupy Los Angeles

'Evacuation' is what kindly firefighters do when buildings are in danger of collapsing. This was an attack on people exercising their first amendment rights to assembly and speech in a public space.

By Anthony Cristofani / The Rag Blog / December 21, 2011

LOS ANGELES -- I used to read stories of revolutionaries in Chiapas, Northern Ireland, Spain, and elsewhere, and think: if we were able to start something revolutionary in the USA, would I have the courage to stand my ground against the inevitable crackdown of the police state, once we started to escalate?

It turns out I didn’t have to wait for the USA to become truly revolutionary to experience that moment.

Truth be told, I didn’t need to see my brothers and sisters kidnapped and manhandled before my eyes to feel an overwhelming sense of anger and sorrow at the specter of what my country has become. I did three years between San Quentin and DVI Tracy prison in California. Living three years in the waste heap where the 1% spits out the human byproducts of its ingenious socialize-the-risks-and-privatize-the-profits enterprise, I already had that.

But I watched these people who had become a family -- nah, scratch that. Family sounds too quaint for what we’re doing. Who had become a people at last. I watched them radicalize in a matter of days. As Rebel Alliance (from Star Wars) leader Princess Leia says to an Imperial general: the tighter you squeeze your fist, the more we slip through your fingers.

The rebel alliance is forming, and the more they crush us, the more rebel we get. Indeed, some of the liberal-democratic Democratic party patsies that annoyed me the most have become close comrades, just by virtue of the attack (let’s not mince words here).

But even for me -- who went to what Lenin called a training ground for revolutionaries (prison) -- something changes when you see the people you live with in your home dragged violently away, or chased into traps where they are kidnapped and safely stored away from our increasingly privatized "public" spaces.

Perhaps what made it poignant is that, although it was our home, it was truly our home, not my home in any way. That felt better than any apartment, cell, dorm, overcrowded ex-gymnasium full of triple-stacked bunks and 400 inmates, or house I’ve lived in. To be living Woody Guthrie’s ”This Land is Your Land," instead of just singing the non-commie verses with my hand over my heart in grade school.

Perhaps we need to see each other suffer before our deepest and longest love comes to the forefront of our scattered American hearts. Perhaps watching people, whose commitment to democracy you could only guess at based on their listserve posts or handmade signs, stay behind in the freezing cold for hours and hours, knowing they are about to be attacked, finally allows you to put aside your mistrust and feel the force of an actual movement, which knows itself viscerally to be on the right side of history now.

Perhaps our government is making the same mistake as so many empires past -- pushing people until they feel enough solidarity to feel like The People again.

LA cops line up before moving on protesters Nov. 30, 2011. Photo by AFP / Getty Images.
I suppose I should get to some details. I’m hesitant, though, because even internally there were voices indignantly clamoring for "evidence" of police brutality. I am suspicious and do a quick privilege check when I or anyone around me seems loathe to believe their country could be oppressive in this way.

But the stories in the mainstream media the next day revealed just such an aversion to believing that we the people could live in the kind of police state that serves as the bad guy in our spy movies and bad Tom Clancy novels. The L.A. Times glowed about how “peaceful” the "evacuation" was.

Evacuation? Evacuation is what kindly firefighters do when buildings are in danger of collapsing. This was an attack on people exercising their first amendment rights to assembly and speech in a public space.

To be fair to the media, it’s hard to properly cover an incursion of a paramilitary force (complete with Department of Homeland Security patches on some of the uniforms, which I saw with my own eyes) when the city ad hoc creates a "media pool" allowing only a handful of trustily patsy media sources in to witness. Even then, the cops patiently waited until the media was gone before the violence.

While my partner was being arrested along with other friends and members of our newfound community of rich and poor, artistic and artisan, sober and using, educated and uneducated, I was out in the street with another mass of demonstrators.

We had finally overcome the conservative forces within Occupy that think obeying every order by the cops, no matter how unjust or illegal, will win us widespread public support. So we marched into the street chanting, “Whose streets?! Our streets!,” exercising what for many of us was a new understanding of public space as ours, not theirs.

It’s sad it’s come to this, that our elected representatives, their enforcers, and the 1% who they serve, are no longer us. These are the conditions for revolution, and that is what we are witnessing -- first stirrings of revolution in perhaps the most counterrevolutionary industrialized nation.

The cops shoved batons into chests of those in the front row. Those from communities always and everywhere targeted by the LAPD and their Drug War chanted things like, “Oink, oink, bang, bang, everyday the same thang." Those who come from communities where you never see cops and when you do they’re there to help, you gave flowers and (embarrassingly) chanted “You are part of the 99%."

Meanwhile the police, in one of many ad hoc legal decisions, decided we were now all guilty of unlawful assembly and would be arrested. As in the park, those who were not willing to take such risks were escorted into a separate area where... they were arrested anyway.

Dastardly. Many escaped. Many didn’t. Those of us not about to follow an unjust order stayed, and when the cops moved in, we fled through Japantown, cops organizing on radios and meeting us head on at various crossings.

Demonstrators at Occupy LA. Photo from Mail Online.
Each time we would sprint right or left, into a shopping center or parking garage, running, laughing, chanting, “Ain’t no power like the power of the people ‘cause the power of the people don’t stop," and generally experiencing our common bonds like never before.

By now it was 4 a.m. and the cops had succeeded in dividing us into smaller groups. No media, no mob = safe to attack. Some were beaten as they were chased down steps. Others were beaten when they ran down the wrong dead end.

The frightening aspect of all this aggression and illegality is that there is video. We’re not dummies, and many of us were livestreaming or recording on phones, and we put them up on YouTube, sent them to mainstream media outlets, and generally tried to spread the word.

Did that change the story? Not much. Soon our videos began to be deleted from YouTube (wait -- I thought Cuba was the country that censored media). Perhaps it’s the United States of American insistence on high-quality video footage. We don’t like those new Godard films with the unprofessional looking camerawork. But I suspect it’s something more sinister than that.

And this isn’t even to speak of the horrendous and illegal treatment of our people in the jails. Many were held on buses, in tight zipcuffs, for hours, begging to use a bathroom. People were denied medical treatment. Most were not booked for at least three hours after being arrested, some were held without booking up to nine hours.

Protesters with no prior arrests and no other complications should be released on their own recognizance when they show their identification. Occupiers were held for 48 hours, and only those who were able to contact the Bail Commissioner were considered for OR. These are all choices made by the LAPD to teach us a lesson.

In the days after, the LAPD and their cronies have stepped up the violence. One friend was mercilessly beaten for riding his bike along a march route. So were those who stepped in to protest.

As in New York City, the cops have taken to attacking people with cameras first. The arrests have become arbitrary along with the laws. One person was arrested for walking the City Hall steps with a sign at midnight. The next day the same person wasn’t. Suddenly a largely white and middle class group is being treated like our brothers and sisters on Skid Row. Big mistake. Before, half of us thought those people were treated like that because they’re misbehaving. Now we know, and the veil of Maya is lifted forever from the face of authority in the USA.

You had us where you wanted us -- safely unradicalized and believing that the people in jail deserved to be there. Then we went and lived with them. Now we know. My friend Carolyn used to write and talk mostly about being more polite to each other, involving the cops in our struggle, and making sure we appeal to every single person in the USA with our message.

She got out of jail quoting revolutionary rappers and talking like Mike Davis. And there are many more like her now. Big mistake.

[Anthony Cristofani is a writer, musician, and PhD candidate based in Los Angeles.]

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Peter L. Myers : Pepper Spray Gazette (Numbers Don't Lie)

Lt. John Pike, who was photographed pepper spraying passive protesters at U.C. Davis, is shown here doing the deed in Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World." Graphic by Brady Hall / Pepper Spraying Cop / Tumblr.
Pepper Spray Gazette:
Numbers don't lie!

By Peter L. Myers / The Rag Blog / December 20, 2011

2011 will be remembered for historic world-wide uprisings against despotism and against the astronomical, obscene growth of income and wealth inequality. It will also be remembered for assaults against unarmed protesters with tear gas and pepper spray and, in some nations, with live ammunition. In the U.S., the main achievement of the Occupy movements has been to put wealth/income disparity in the public consciousness:

• The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.
• The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
• From 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.
• Of the 100 highest paid chief executives in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their companies paid in federal corporate income tax.

-- Nicholas D. Kristof, “America’s Primal Scream,” The New York Times, October 15, 2011

• “Between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent... during the same period the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.”

-- Paul Krugman, “The Social Contract,” The New York Times, September 22, 2011

It is immoral that immense wealth is increasingly concentrated in a tiny layer while:

• One in five children in America is at risk for hunger and lives in poverty. (Share our Strength; MSNBC)
• A record number of Americans -- nearly one in two -- have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income. (MSNBC)

Second, the “1%” and their corporations are stifling political democracy:

• Corporate lobbyists control Congress. This is no leftist paranoia: Jack Abramoff boasted on NBC that he had literally controlled at least 100 Congressional offices by buying off the staff.
• Almost half of Congress members are millionaires themselves.
• Tax laws are written so that billionaires like Ronald Lauder have their wealth protected.
  -- David Kocieniewski, "But Nobody Pays That: A Family's Billions, Artfully Sheltered," The New York Times, November 27, 2011
• Corporate influence on campaign finance and the media stifles public discourse and the political process.

The chief demand of the Occupy movements is to create and expand political, social, and economic democracy and a society at the service of human needs. We will end Occupy when Wall Street stops occupying our Congress and ripping off the poor, working, and middle classes. Please join the worldwide movement for freedom and an end to despotism and injustice.

[Peter L. Myers is a semi-retired professor of anthropology and alcohol/drug studies, and a text author and editor. He was active in the early civil rights and student movements. Send comments and additions to nyprof@gmail.com.]

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CARTOON / Joshua Brown : Life During Wartime: March of History

Political cartoon by Joshua Brown / The Rag Blog / September 18, 2011.
[Joshua Brown is the executive director of the Center for Media and Learning/American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York and is a professor of history at CUNY. Find more political cartoons by Joshua Brown on The Rag Blog.]

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Mike Davis : Protest in the Driver's Seat

Image from the Schumin Web.
Chevy to the levee:
Protest in the driver's seat

This is the ultimate American way: protesting in a car (or on a bike) while obeying the law. The possibilities for serene family tourism are endless and mind-boggling.

By Mike Davis / The Rag Blog / November 23, 2011

The sickening repercussion of hardwood against a protestor’s skull is the soundtrack to too much of American history.

If you think being a heavyweight boxer or an NFL wide receiver is an invitation to brain damage, try being an anti-capitalist.

Especially when you face an unholy alliance of arrogant bankers, sneering stockbrokers, and "liberal" Democratic mayors, as in L.A., Portland, Seattle, and Atlanta. Or when your civil liberties exist purely at the sufferance of a billionaire municipal autocrat with Louis XIV tendencies like Bloomberg.

Few events in a young activist’s life are as memorably disturbing as the first time you look into cop’s eyes a few anxious inches from your face and find only robotic murderous hatred staring back at you.

In my day this dehumanizing fury had usually been programmed somewhere in Vietnam’s Central Highlands or Mekong Delta. Today it was likely implanted in a place called Fallujah or Kandahar.

No doubt it is an important rite of passage to a fuller humanity to become, at least for a few terrifying moments, just another body to be beaten.

But -- ouch -- I’m not very brave and don’t like being clubbed, pummeled, tightly handcuffed, or dragged by my hair (one reason, I suppose, why I’ve always worn a crew cut).

I prefer to lock myself safely in my car and drive to protest, carefully obeying speed limits and traffic signs. Perhaps humming a crackled version of "drove my Chevy to the levee" or singing a few rousing verses from "O, Canada."

Indeed it was Canadian autoworkers during a brutal Ford strike in fall 1945 who first turned the class struggle into a drive-in.

At the end of World War II, the Ford complex in Windsor, Ontario, was the largest factory in Canada (about 15,000 workers) and Ford management counted on provincial Tories to break the strike with unprecedented police violence.

After days of being harassed by Ontario cops and less-than–heroic Mounties (actually Canada’s FBI), the autoworkers borrowed an idea from an earlier UAW protest in Detroit and simply parked 2,000 family Fords around the Ford plant.

The Tories’ only answer to the great auto blockade was a briefly-mulled-over plan to use army tanks to crash through the strikers’ cars. An armored regiment was put on alert. Then Ford and their political allies blinked.

Good idea?

Darn right.

Independent owner-operator truckers have used the same tactic on numerous occasions in the last 40 years, beginning with the oil price crisis in the 1970s.

They’ve shut down interstates and blockaded city halls, while their sound systems blasted out "Convoy," C. W. McCall’s great anthem of 18-wheel rebellion.

‘Cause we got a great big convoy rockin’ thru the night,
yeah, we got a great big convoy, ain’t she a beautiful sight?
Come on and join our convoy, ain’t nothin’ gonna get in our way.
We gonna roll this truckin’ convoy ‘cross the USA

No need, of course, to use Fords. As Dinah Shore used to sing, "See the USA in Your Chevrolet" -- or a Toyota, VW, a slope-nosed Kenworth "Anteater," or, more correctly, your Schwinn retro-city bike. Just keep the convoy rollin’.

Indeed, the next stage of protest could be considered a nostalgic analogy to an old-fashioned family Sunday drive.

Cruise slowly by the Stock Exchange ("Look, kids, here’s where the dudes who stole our house work") or keep circling and ogling your local police headquarters ("Awesome architecture -- let’s stop and wave").

Or, best of all, "That’s Lloyd Bankfein’s home. Now whatyathinkofthat?"

“He’s president of Goldman Sachs. He got paid $58 million in 2007, so he must really work harder than anyone else on earth.”

"Let's honk the horn and say howdy to good ole Lloyd."

Remember, safety first, so don’t drive like that little old lady from Pasadena.

Stay at the exact speed limit, or, better, at the legal minimum. Always set a good example for the 2,000 similarly inclined leisure drivers behind you. They may also want to slow down and sightsee.

This is the ultimate American way: protesting in a car (or on a bike) while obeying the law. The possibilities for serene family tourism are endless and mind-boggling.

Wow, perhaps even apocalyptic.

But, out of respect to Bill McKibben and the anti-global warming movement, please carpool to shut down Wall Street.

[Mike Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. An urban theorist, historian, and social activist, Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire. Read more articles by Mike Davis on The Rag Blog.]

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David Van Os : 'Non-Lethal Projectiles' in Oakland

Police officers with "non-lethal ordnance" after an early morning raid on Occupy Oakland's tent city, Oakland, CA, Oct.25, 2011. Photo by Stephen Lam / Reuters.

Military zone in Oakland:
Riot cops use 'non-lethal projectiles'
to attack occupiers' encampment

Scott Olsen, who served two tours of duty in Iraq, was struck in the head with what the City of Oakland glibly referred to as a 'projectile,' fracturing his skull.

By David Van Os / The Rag Blog / October 27, 2011

UPDATE: See Oakland Mayor Jean Quan's remarkable conciliatory statement about Wednesday's police action, Below.

On Tuesday, October 25, in Oakland, California, a member of Veterans for Peace who was peacefully standing with Occupy Oakland demonstrators was shot in the head by Oakland police and is in a hospital in serious condition with a fractured skull.

The nationwide organizations Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War support the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. In several of the Occupy locations members of VFP and IVAW have stationed themselves at the front of demonstrations to defuse potential conflicts with local police. The VFP and IVAW members urge calm on all sides and talk to the police about how the police officers are part of the 99%, while entreating the demonstrators to conduct themselves peacefully.

The veterans were doing that in Oakland Tuesday in an effort to calm the tense situation as armed Oakland police, dressed in riot gear, were preparing to attack the peaceful Occupy Oakland encampment while the demonstrators were refusing to leave.

The police opened fire with so-called “non-lethal ordnance." Scott Olsen, who served two tours of duty in Iraq, was struck in the head with what the City of Oakland glibly referred to as a 'projectile." The “non-lethal projectile” fractured Olsen’s skull. He is reportedly in serious but stable condition.. Olsen was wearing a shirt conspicuously identifying him as a Veteran for Peace.

[The Huffington Post reported Thursday night that Scott Olsen's condition had been updated to fair and that he is now breathing on his own. His roommate, Keith Shannon, reported that Olsen "needs surgery to relieve the pressure on his brain and it will happen in a day or two." Olsen remains sedated.]

This event is reminiscent of the incident that galvanized resistance to the Vietnam War in 1970 when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the war at Kent State University and killed four young Americans who wanted a peaceful world.

In the aftermath of the Kent State massacre, college and university students all over America poured out in massive demonstrations that occupied and shut down college and university campuses everywhere. I was one of those student demonstrators at the University of Texas in Austin, where 10,000 of us packed the Main Mall and South Mall shoulder to shoulder the next morning after the news of the Kent State shootings raced quickly throughout the community -- before the age of cell phones, text messages, desktop computers, or the Internet.

It is also reminiscent of the U.S. government’s brutal attack in 1932 on the “Bonus Army” of 10,000 World War I veterans who were peacefully encamped in Washington, D.C., seeking payment of the bonuses they were promised for their faithful service in the Great War, which they needed to help them survive the desperate economic situation of the Great Depression.

Veterans for Peace and the Iraq Veterans Against the War plan to conduct a mass demonstration outside the Oakland Police Department today. The radio news story I heard this morning stated that Veterans for Peace is asking people to go to the Occupy locations in their own cities today and stand in solidarity with Scott Olsen and his fellow veterans.

These courageous veterans are standing in solidarity with all of us in the 99% against the greed and abuse we suffer at the hands of the immoral, anti-democratic economic-political system symbolized by its nerve center on Wall Street.

Whether or not your economic and family responsibilities permit you to attend the Occupy demonstration in your city, please join me in saluting Veterans for Peace and Iraqi Veterans Against the War for their leadership in our national community. If you can’t physically attend your city’s demonstration, at least drive by and give the Occupy demonstration some loud honks of support.

Please spread this message. Quickly, the time is now.

[David Van Os is a populist Texas democrat and a civil rights attorney now living in Austin. He is a former candidate for Attorney General of Texas and for the Texas Supreme Court. To receive his Notes of a Texas Patriot -- circulated whenever he gets the urge (and published on The Rag Blog whenever we get the urge) -- contact him at david@texas-patriot.com. Read more articles by David Van Os on The Rag Blog.]

UPDATE: Statement by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan on Tuesday night's police action against Occupy Oakland protesters:

[Oakland Mayor Jean Quan's rather remarkable statement below marks a watershed for the burgeoning American Occupy movements. Cast against the backdrop of Wednesday's fully-militarized Oakland City Center, Quan's effusively conciliatory remarks can only be interpreted as an admission that turning downtown Oakland into a war zone to roll up a tent-city encampment did not work.

It should be noted that adherence to nonviolent discipline on the part of the Occupy Oakland organizers and all the protesters that participated throughout the day was a critically important factor in forcing the City of Oakland's hand. Brute-force police oppression of the Occupy movement has taken its best shot. It is possible that nonviolent resistance has prevailed. -- Marc Ash / Reader Supported News.]

We support the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement: we have high levels of unemployment and we have high levels of foreclosure that makes Oakland part of the 99% too. We are a progressive city and tolerant of many opinions. We may not always agree, but we all have a right to be heard.

I want to thank everyone for the peaceful demonstration at Frank Ogawa Park tonight, and thank the city employees who worked hard to clean up the plaza so that all activities can continue including Occupy Wall Street. We have decided to have a minimal police presence at the plaza for the short term and build a community effort to improve communications and dialogue with the demonstrators.

99% of our officers stayed professional during difficult and dangerous circumstances as did some of the demonstrators who dissuaded other protestors from vandalizing downtown and for helping to keep the demonstrations peaceful. For the most part, demonstrations over the past two weeks have been peaceful. We hope they continue to be so.

I want to express our deepest concern for all of those who were injured last night, and we are committed to ensuring this does not happen again. Investigations of certain incidents are underway and I will personally monitor them.

We understand and recognize the impact this event has had on the community and acknowledge what has happened. We cannot change the past, but we are committed to doing better.

Most of us are part of the 99%, and understand the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. We are committed to honoring their free speech right.

Finally, we understand the demonstrators want to meet with me and Chief Jordan. We welcome open dialogue with representatives of Occupy Wall Street members, and we are willing to meet with them as soon as possible.

-- Mayor Jean Quan, Oakland, California

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Jordan Flaherty : The Battle for New Orleans Continues

New Orleans after Katrina. Image from Slate.
Six years after Katrina:
The battle for New Orleans continues

Political power has shifted to whites, but blacks have not given up their struggle for a voice -- and justice.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 29, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- As this weekend’s storm has reminded us, hurricanes can be a threat to U.S. cities on the East Coast as well the Gulf. But the vast changes that have taken place in New Orleans since Katrina have had little to do with weather, and everything to do with political struggles.

Six years after the federal levees failed and 80 percent of the city was flooded, New Orleans has lost 80,000 jobs and 110,000 residents. It is a whiter and wealthier city, with tourist areas well maintained while communities like the Lower Ninth Ward remain devastated. Beyond the statistics, it is still a much contested city.

Politics continues to shape how the changes to New Orleans are viewed. For some, the city is a crime scene of corporate profiteering and the mass displacement of African Americans and working poor; but for others it’s an example of bold public sector reforms, taken in the aftermath of a natural disaster, that have led the way for other cities.

In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans saw the rise of a new class of citizens. They self-identify as YURPs -- Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals -- and they work in architecture, urban planning, education, and related fields.

While the city was still mostly empty, they spoke of a freedom to experiment, unfettered by the barriers of bureaucratic red tape and public comment. Working with local and national political and business leaders, they made rapid changes in the city’s education system, public housing, health care, and nonprofit sector.

Along the way, the face of elected government changed in the city and state. Among the offices that switched from black to white were mayor, police chief, district attorney, and representatives on the school board and city council, which both switched to white majorities for the first time in a generation. Louisiana also transformed from a state with several statewide elected Democrats, to having only one -- Senator Mary Landrieu.

While black community leaders have said that the displacement after the storm has robbed African Americans of their civic representation, another narrative has also taken shape. Many in the media and business elite have said that a new political class -- which happens to be mostly white -- is reshaping the politics of the city into a post-racial era.

“Our efforts are changing old ways of thinking,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, shortly after he was elected in 2010. After accusing his critics of being stuck in the past, Landrieu -- who was the first mayor in modern memory elected with the support of a majority of both black and white voters -- added that "We're going to rediscipline ourselves in this city."

The changes in the public sector have been widespread. Shortly after the storm, the entire staff of the public school system was fired. Their union, which had been the largest union in the city, ceased to be recognized. With many parents, students and teachers driven out of the city by Katrina and unable to have a say in the decision, the state took over the city’s schools and began shifting them over to charters.

“The reorganization of the public schools has created a separate but unequal tiered system of schools that steers a minority of students, including virtually all of the city’s white students, into a set of selective, higher-performing schools and most of the city’s students of color into a set of lower-performing schools,” writes lawyer and activist Bill Quigley, in a report prepared with fellow Loyola law professor Davida Finger.

Photo from Getty Images / The Root.
In many ways, the changes in New Orleans' school system, initiated almost six years ago, foreshadowed a battle that has played out more conspicuously this year in Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey, and other states where teachers and their unions were assailed by both Republican governors and liberal reformers such as the filmmakers behind Waiting for Superman.

Similarly, the battle of New Orleans public housing -- which was torn down and replaced by new units built in public-private partnerships that house a small percentage of the former residents -- prefigured national battles over government’s role in solving problems related to poverty.

The anger at the changes in New Orleans’ black community is palpable. It comes out at city council meetings, on local black talk radio station WBOK , and in protests. “Since New Orleans was declared a blank slate, we are the social experimental lab of the world,” says Endesha Juakali, a housing rights activist. However, despite the changes, grassroots resistance continues. “For those of us that lived and are still living the disaster, moving on is not an option,” adds Juakali.

Resistance to the dominant agenda has also led to reform of the city’s criminal justice system. But this reform is very different from the others, with leadership coming from African-American residents at the grassroots, including those most affected by both crime and policing.

In the aftermath of Katrina, media images famously depicted poor New Orleanians as criminal and dangerous. In fact, at one point it was announced that rescue efforts were put on hold because of the violence. In response, the second-in-charge of the New Orleans Police Department reportedly told officers to shoot looters, and the governor announced that she had given the National Guard orders to shoot to kill.

Over the following days, police shot and killed several civilians. A police sniper wounded a young African American named Henry Glover, and other officers took and burned his body behind a levee. A 45-year-old grandfather named Danny Brumfield, Sr. was shot in the back in front of his family outside the New Orleans convention center. Two black families -- the Madisons and Bartholomews -- walking across New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge fell under a hail of gunfire from a group of officers.

“We had more incidents of police misconduct than civilian misconduct,” says former District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who pursued charges against officers but had the charges thrown out by a judge. “All these stories of looting, it pales next to what the police did.”

District Attorney Jordan, who angered many in the political establishment when he brought charges against officers and was forced to resign soon after, was not the only one who failed to bring accountability for the post-Katrina violence. In fact, every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed.

For years, family members of the victims pressured the media, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and Eddie Jordan’s replacement in the DA’s office, Leon Cannizzaro. “The media didn’t want to give me the time of day,” says William Tanner, who saw officers take away Glover’s body. “They called me a raving idiot.”

Finally after more than three years of protests, press conferences, and lobbying, the Justice Department launched aggressive investigations of the Glover, Brumfield, and Danziger cases in early 2009. In recent months, three officers were convicted in the Glover killing (although one conviction was overturned), two were convicted in beating a man to death just before the storm, and 10 officers either plead guilty or were convicted in the Danziger killing and cover-up.

In the Danziger case, the jury found that officers had not only killed two civilians and wounded four, but also engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy that involved planted evidence, invented witnesses, and secret meetings.

The Justice Department has at least seven more open investigations on New Orleans police killings, and has indicated its plans for more formal oversight of the NOPD, as well as the city jail. In this area, New Orleans is also leading the way -- in a remarkable change from Justice Department policy during the Bush Administration, the DOJ is also looking at oversight of police departments in Newark, Denver, and Seattle.

In the national struggle against law enforcement violence, there is much to be learned from the victims of New Orleans police violence who led a remarkable struggle against a wall of official silence, and now have begun to win justice. “This is an opening,” explains New Orleans police accountability activist Malcolm Suber. “We have to push for a much more democratic system of policing in the city.”

In the closing arguments of the Danziger trial, DOJ prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein fought back against the defense claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.”

The jury apparently agreed with her, convicting the officers on all 25 counts.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was first published at The Root. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

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Jordan Flaherty : Historic NOPD Verdict Reveals Post-Katrina Cops Run Amuck

Rev. Raymond Brown pumps his fist outside New Orleans Federal Court Friday in celebration of conviction of cops involved in the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge shootings. Photo by Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune
From heroes to villains:
NOPD verdict reveals post-Katrina
history of police violence, cover-up

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- In an historic verdict with national implications, five New Orleans police officers were convicted on Friday of civil rights violations for killing unarmed African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and could face life in prison when sentenced later this year. The case, involving a grisly encounter on the Danziger Bridge, was the most high profile of a number of prosecutions that seek to hold police accountable for violence in the storm’s wake.

The officers’ conviction on all 25 counts (on two counts, the jury found the men guilty but with partial disagreements on the nature of the crime, which could slightly affect sentencing) comes nearly six years after the city was devastated by floodwaters and government inaction. The verdict helps rewrite the history of what happened in the chaotic days after the levees broke. And the story of how these convictions happened is important for anyone around the U.S. seeking to combat law enforcement violence.

The results of this trial also have national implications for those seeking federal support in challenges to police abuses in other cities. New Orleans is one of four major cities in which the Department of Justice has stepped in to look at police departments. Any success here has far-reaching implications for federal investigations in Denver, Seattle, Newark, and other cities.

The Danziger Bridge case begins with Hurricane Katrina. As images of desperate survivors played on television, people around the world felt sympathy for people waiting for rescue after the storm. But then images of families trapped on rooftops were replaced by stories of armed gangs and criminals roaming the streets.

News reports famously described white people as “finding” food while depicting black people as “looting.” Then-Chief of Police Eddie Compass told Oprah Winfrey that “little babies (are) getting raped” in the Superdome. Then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced she had sent in troops with orders to shoot to kill, and the second in charge of the police department reportedly told officers to fire at will on looters.

Evidence suggests that the NOPD acted on these instructions. On Sept. 2, just days after the storm, a black man named Henry Glover was shot by a police sniper as he walked through a parking lot. When a good Samaritan tried to help Glover get medical help, he was beaten by officers, who burned Glover’s body and left it behind a levee.

The next day, a 45-year-old named Danny Brumfield, Sr., was killed by officers in front of scores of witnesses outside the New Orleans convention center when he ran after a police car to demand that they stop and provide aid.

The following morning, two families were crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge, which connects Gentilly and New Orleans East, two mostly middle-to-upper-class African American neighborhoods. Without warning, a Budget rental truck carrying police officers arrived and cops jumped out. The officers did not identify themselves, and began firing before their vehicle had even stopped.

Officers had heard a radio call about shootings in the area, and according to prosecutors, they were seeking revenge. James Brisette, a 17-year-old called studious and nerdy by his friends, was shot nearly a dozen times and died at the scene. Many of the bullets hit him as he lay on the ground bleeding.

Four other people were wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, a 38-year-old mother who had her arm shot off of her body, and her 17-year old daughter Lesha, who was shot while crawling on top of her mother’s body, trying to shield her from bullets. Lesha’s cousin Jose was shot point-blank in the stomach and nearly died. He needed a colostomy bag for years afterwards.

Lance Madison, left, whose brother, Ronald, was shot and killed on the Danziger bridge by New Orleans Police Sept. 5, 2005, gets a hug from prosecutor Cindy Chung outside the Federal Court building Friday. Lead prosecutor Barbara "Bobbi" Bernstein is on the right. Photo by Matthew Hinton / The Times-Picayune.
Further up the bridge, officers chased down Ronald Madison, a mentally-challenged man, who was traveling with his brother Lance. Ronald was shot in the back by one officer and then stomped and kicked to death by another. Lance was arrested and charged with firing at officers, and spent weeks behind bars.

At the time, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that officers “sent up a cheer” when word came over police radios that suspects had been shot and killed.

A cursory investigation by the NOPD justified the shooting, and it appeared that the matter was closed. In fact, for years every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed to find any fault in this or other officer-involved shootings from the days after the storm.

Eddie Jordan, the city’s first black district attorney, pursued charges against the officers in late 2006. When the cops went to turn themselves in, they were greeted by a crowd of hundreds of officers who cheered for them and called them heroes. Before the case could make it to trial, it was dismissed by a judge with close ties to the defense lawyers, and soon after that Jordan was forced to resign.

After the dismissal of Jordan’s charges, the story of police violence after Katrina remained untold. Jordan believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up.

"They were looking for heroes,” he says.

They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police; they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.

Other elected officials, like the city coroner, went along with the police version of events. For example, the coroner’s office never flagged Henry Glover’s body, found burned in a car, as a potential homicide.

But the Madisons, the Bartholomews, and the Glovers, along with family members of other police violence victims, refused to be silent. They continued to speak out at press conferences, rallies, and directly to reporters. They worked with organizations like Safe Streets Strong Communities, which was founded by criminal justice activists in the days after Katrina, and Community United for Change, which was formed in response to police abuses.

Monique Harden, a community activist and co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, helped to bring testimony about these issues to the United Nations. Another post-Katrina organization, People's Hurricane Relief Fund, presented the charges to an international tribunal.

Activists worked to not only raise awareness of specific issues of police violence, but to say that these problems are structural and that any solution must get at the root causes.

“This is about an entire system that was completely broken and in crisis,” says former Safe Streets co-director Rosana Cruz.

Everyone’s job in the criminal justice system depends on there being a lot of crime in the city. The district attorney’s office doesn’t work on getting the city safer, they work on getting convictions at any cost. As long as that’s the case, we’re not going to have safety.

Former District Attorney Jordan feels that investigators should pursue charges up to the very top of the department, including Warren Riley, who was promoted to police chief shortly after Hurricane Katrina and served in that role until 2010.

“Riley, by his own admission, never even read the report on Danziger,” Jordan points out. “It’s so outrageous, it’s unspeakable. It’s one of the worst things that anyone can do. It’s hard to understand why he’s not on trial as well.”

“Fish starts rotting at the head,” adds Jordan. “This was all done in the backdrop of police opposition at the very top. It’s not surprising that there was a cover-up. You just have to wonder how far that cover-up went.”

In 2008, journalist A.C. Thompson did what New Orleans media had failed to do, and seriously investigated the accusations of police violence. His reporting, published on ProPublica and in The Nation, spelled out the shocking details of Glover’s killing and pointed toward police coordination with white vigilantes in widespread violence. It brought national attention to the stories that had been ignored. Activists took advantage of the exposure and lobbied the Congressional Black Caucus and the Justice Department for an investigation.

Demonstrators protest Danziger Bridge killings in 2010 New Orleans march. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
In early 2009, a newly empowered civil rights division of the Justice Department decided to look into the cases. Federal agents interviewed witnesses who had never been talked to, reconstructed crime scenes, and even confiscated NOPD computers. They found evidence that the Danziger officers had radically rewritten their version of what happened on the bridge that day.

When FBI agents confronted officers involved in the Danziger case, five officers pleaded guilty and agreed to testify about the conspiracy to cover up what happened. They revealed that officers had planted evidence, invented witnesses, arrested innocent people, and held secret meetings where they worked to line up their stories.

Before last week’s verdict, the Justice Department had already won four previous police violence convictions, including of the officers who shot Glover and burned his body, as well as of two officers who killed Raymond Robair, a pre-Katrina case in which officers beat a man to death and claimed (with the support of the city coroner) he had sustained his injuries from falling down. About half a dozen other investigations are ongoing.

The Justice Department is also looking at federal oversight of the NOPD, a process by which they can dictate vast changes from hiring and firing to training and policy writing.

The Danziger trial has been the most high-profile aspect of the federal intervention in New Orleans, and this verdict will have far-reaching implications for how the effectiveness of federal intervention is perceived. The convictions and guilty pleas in the case reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy that reaches up to sergeants and lieutenants. Marlon Defillo, the second-in-charge of the NOPD, was recently forced to retire because of his role in helping cover up the Glover killing.

Most important, the verdict has helped shift the narrative of what happened in those days after Katrina.

The defense team for the Danziger officers was steadfast in describing their clients as heroes. Attorney Paul Fleming described the cops as “proactive,” saying, “They go out and get things done. They go out and get the bad guys.”

Police attorneys in the Glover and Danziger trials also sought to use the so-called “Katrina defense,” arguing that the exceptional circumstances following the storm justified extra-legal actions on the part of officers. With these convictions, the juries have definitively refuted this excuse.

In her closing arguments, Bobbi Bernstein, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, fought back against the claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.”

Officers went out with a mission to deliver “their own kind of post-apocalyptic justice,” she added. “The law is what it is because this is not a police state.”

In comments immediately after the verdict, family members of those killed on the bridge expressed gratitude for those who had helped them reach this point, but stressed that their pain continued.

Speaking outside the courthouse after the verdict, Sherrel Johnson, the mother of James Brisette, said that the officers, “took the twinkle out of my eye, the song out of my voice, and blew out my candle,” when they killed her son.

Jacqueline Madison Brown, the sister of Ronald Madison, told assembled press, “Ronald Madison brought great love to our family. Shooting him down was like shooting an innocent child.” Commenting on officers who had testified for the prosecution in exchange for lesser charges, she added, “We regret that they did not have the courage and strength to come forward sooner.”

Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, but was convicted of leading the conspiracy, could receive a maximum of 120 years. Sentencing is scheduled for December, but will likely be delayed.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times ,Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was first published at ColorLines. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog, including previous reporting on the Danziger Bridge incident and post-Katrina police violence.]

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Jordan Flaherty : Cop Corruption on Trial in New Orleans

Trial of cops connected to the post-Katrina Danziger Bridge killings has gripped New Orleans.
New Orleans cops:
Danziger bridge trial
brings corruption front and center

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- In New Orleans’ federal courthouse, five police officers are currently facing charges of killing unarmed Black civilians and conspiring for more than four years to cover-up their crime. The trial, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, has gripped the city, and daily coverage in local media has focused attention on a deeply troubled department that still has a long way to go before it can regain the trust of residents.

The charges stem from an incident on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina. Police officers, who apparently had misheard a distress call on their radios, piled into a Budget rental truck and sped to the scene. When they arrived, they came out shooting.

James Brisette, a 17-year-old described by friends as nerdy and studious, and Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old man with the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, were killed. Four others were seriously wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, 38, who had her arm shot off of her body, and Jose Holmes, 19, who was shot point blank in his stomach. Susan’s son, Leonard Bartholomew, 14, was shot at by officers, badly beaten, and arrested. Ronald Madison’s brother, Lance, was arrested by officers under false charges that were later dropped.

Witnesses for the government include survivors of the harrowing ordeal on the bridge, as well as several officers who have plead guilty to lesser offenses in exchange for their testimony. They have described shocking scenes of violence -- one officer is accused of kicking and stomping Madison to death after he had already been shot seven times -- and a wide ranging cover-up. “When the shooting stopped, these men realized they had a problem,” said federal prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein during opening arguments. “They lied because they knew they had committed a crime.”

The New Orleans police department has developed a reputation as one of the most violent and corrupt in the nation, and the revelations in this case have stoked anger and outrage, especially in New Orleans’ African-American community.

“This case shows the total dysfunction of the New Orleans Police Department,” says Malcolm Suber, a longtime activist against police brutality and project director with the New Orleans chapter of the American Friends Service Committee. “It shows they were just going wild after the storm.”

Suber and other activists have called for the DOJ to launch a wide-ranging investigation into a pattern of abuse they say goes back decades. “What Danziger represents is for the first time there’s been acknowledgment that this police department is rotten to the core,” says Suber.

Lance Madison is surrounded by State Police and New Orleans police SWAT members on Sept. 4, 2005 at the Danziger Bridge. Madison was accused of shooting at police but charges were later dropped. Photo by Alex Brandon / Times-Picayune.
A department with a troubled history

Like most southern police departments, NOPD was explicitly segregationist for much of the 20th century. The first Black New Orleans police officer was not hired until 1950 and it was several more years before Black officers were allowed to carry a gun or arrest whites.

In 1980, the city was rocked by protests when Sherry Singleton, a 26-year old African-American mother, was shot by police while she was naked in a bathtub, in front of her four year old child. Police said she was armed, but a neighbor testified that she heard her pleading, “please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.”

The issue of police violence continued to dominate in the 1990s. Revelations of corruption in the force inspired both mass protest and Department of Justice investigations. Federal involvement combined with aggressive actions on the part of a new mayor and police chief led to 200 officers fired and criminal charges brought against more than 60 cops.

Two NOPD officers received the death penalty for killing civilians. One of those officers, Len Davis, was caught on a federal wiretap ordering the assassination of a woman who had complained about police brutality. As officers were being fired and disciplined, the city’s murder and violent crime rates dropped dramatically, and the prosecution of corrupt officers was widely seen as making the city safer.

Advocates say that the changes begun in the 90s were cut short when Mayor C. Ray Nagin became mayor, at around the same time that the Clinton presidency ended and the Bush administration began. Both Bush and Nagin seemed uninterested in continuing to prosecute police, and New Orleans slipped back into being the nation’s murder capital, as well as the capital of police violence.


New Orleans Dentist Romell Madison -- referred to in the sign -- has served as a spokesperson for the Danziger Bridge victims and their families. His brother Ronald Madison, who suffered from mental disabilities, was killed by police, and his brother Lance was cleared of charges of attempted murder. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
Renewed outrage brings energy for change

The revelations of post-Katrina police violence have brought in a new era of outrage. Political and civic leaders, across boundaries of color and class, have called for systemic change in the NOPD. “The public has a right to know what really happened,” says Anthony Radosti, vice president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, which plays the role of an unofficial watchdog over the NOPD. “The police department failed in their mission,” adds Radosti, a 23-year veteran of the NOPD.

Ronal Serpas, who was hired by Mayor Landrieu to run the department in 2010, admits that the department has a long way to go. “Chief Serpas has always acknowledged that he inherited a fundamentally flawed department,” explains NOPD spokesperson Remi Braden. “He has done a lot, but there is much more to be done.”

Federal agents are looking into at least nine cases of police killings from the past several years, but that is just one aspect of their involvement. In March, the DOJ released a 58-page report that describes a department facing problems that “are serious, systemic, wide-ranging, and deeply rooted.” The report highlighted a range of areas in which it found “patterns or practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law.”

The bad news keeps coming out of the NOPD. In just the past two weeks, since the Danziger trial began, scandal has reached the very top of the department. The NOPD’s second in charge, Marlon Defillo, was found in an investigation overseen by the state police to have neglected his duty to investigate police violence, in effect helping to hinder official investigations.

Three police commanders -- the position under Defillo, and third in the overall NOPD hierarchy -- have also been the subject of internal investigation. One commander was accused of directing officers to specifically target young Black men for questioning during the city’s Essence Festival, one of the nation’s largest Black tourism events.

Criminal justice activists have demanded more federal investigations and a wider scope. “This represents a real opportunity for New Orleans to raise some fundamental questions about the nature of police and what they do,” says organizer Malcolm Suber. “But unless we talk about the entire system, this will repeat again.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This is an expanded version of an article originally published by theLoop21.com. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog, including previous reporting on the Danziger Bridge incident and post-Katrina police violence.]

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Jordan Flaherty : Murder Trial Begins for Danziger Bridge Cops

Crime scene: New Orleans' Danziger Bridge was the site of police shootings. Photo by Lucas Jackson / Reuters.
New Orleans cops go on trial:
Shot unarmed African-Americans in cold blood

Did New Orleans media contribute to police violence after hurricane Katrina?

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- Opening arguments begin today in what observers have called the most important trial New Orleans has seen in a generation. It is a shocking case of police brutality that has already redefined this city’s relationship to its police department, and radically rewritten the official narrative of what happened in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.

Five police officers are facing charges of shooting unarmed African-Americans in cold blood, killing two and wounding four, and then conspiring to hide evidence. Five officers who participated in the conspiracy have already pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against their fellow officers.

The shootings occurred on September 4, 2005, as two families were fleeing Katrina’s floodwaters, crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge to get to dry land. Officers, who apparently heard a radio report about shootings in the area, drove up, leapt out of their vehicle, and began firing.

Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged man, was shot in the back at least five times, then reportedly stomped and kicked by an officer until he was dead. His brother Lance Madison was arrested on false charges. James Brissette, a high school student, was shot seven times, and died at the scene. Susan Bartholomew, 38, was wounded so badly her arm was shot off of her body. Jose Holmes Jr. was shot several times, then as he lay bleeding an officer stood over him and fired point blank at his stomach. Two other relatives of Bartholomew were also badly wounded.

Danziger is one of at least nine recent incidents involving the NOPD being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, several of which happened in the days after the city was flooded. Officers have recently been convicted by federal prosecutors in two other high-profile trials.

In April, two officers were found guilty in the beating death of Raymond Robair, a handyman from the Treme neighborhood. In December, a jury convicted three officers and acquitted two in killing Henry Glover, a 31-year-old from New Orleans’ West Bank neighborhood, and burning his body.

New Orleans police arrest a man after Sept. 4, 2005, police shootings on the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans. Photo by Alex Brandon / The Times Picayune.

From survivors to looters

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people around the world felt sympathy for New Orleans. They saw images of residents trapped on rooftops by floodwaters, needing rescue by boat and helicopter. But then stories began to come out about looters and gangs among the survivors, and the official response shifted from humanitarian aid to military operation.

Then-Governor Kathleen Blanco sent in National Guard troops, announcing. “They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.” Warren Riley, at that time the second in charge of the police department, reportedly ordered officers to “take the city back and shoot looters.”

In the following days, several civilians -- almost all of them African American -- were killed under suspicious circumstances in incidents involving police and white vigilantes. For years, family members and advocates called for official investigations and were rebuffed.

“Right after the hurricane there were individuals and organizations trying to talk about what happened on Danziger,” says Dana Kaplan, executive director of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), a legal and advocacy organization based in New Orleans. “But their voices were marginalized.”

There is evidence that local media could have done a better job. Alex Brandon, a photographer for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper who later went on to work for Associated Press, testified in the Henry Glover trial that he knew details about the police killings that he didn’t reveal. “He saw things and heard things that proved to be useful in a criminal investigation. He didn't report them as news," wrote Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry after the Glover trial concluded.

Former Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who led an initial investigation of the Danziger officers, believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up. “They were looking for heroes,” he says. “They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police, they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.”

Family members and advocates tried to get the stories of police violence out through protests, press conferences, and other means. Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, an organization dedicated to justice in reconstruction, held a tribunal in 2006 where they presented accusations of police violence -- among other charges -- to a panel of international judges, including members of parliament from seven countries. Activists even brought charges to the United Nations, filing a shadow report in February 2008 with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva.

But it was not until late 2008 that a journalist named AC Thompson did what the local media failed to do, and investigated these stories in detail. “It’s unfortunate that it took a national publication to really dig to the root,” says Kaplan, referring to Thompson’s work. “In New Orleans the criminal justice system has been so corrupt for so long that things that should be shocking didn’t seem to be raising the kind of broad community outrage that they should have.”

In 2009, after years of pressure from activists and the national attention brought on by AC Thompson’s reporting, the U.S. Justice Department decided to look into the accusations of police violence. This has led to one of the most wide-ranging investigations of a police department in recent U.S. history. Dozens of officers are facing lengthy prison terms, and corruption charges have reached to the very top of the department.

The Danziger trial is expected to last two months. Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Robert Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences if convicted. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, is charged only in the conspiracy and could receive a maximum of 120 years. Justice Department investigations of other incidents are continuing, and it is likely that some form of federal oversight of the department will be announced in coming months.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was originally published by Truthout. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

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