“Helping To Serve As A Check On Abuse”: New ACLU Cellphone App Automatically Preserves Video Of Police Encounters
The ACLU in California today released a free smart-phone app that allows people to send cellphone videos of police encounters to the ACLU, automatically—and the ACLU will preserve the video footage, even if the cops seize the phone and delete the video or destroy the phone. The app, “Mobile Justice CA,” works for both iPhones and Android users. It’s available at Apple’s App Store and at Google Play.
The app features a large red “Record” button in the middle of the screen. When it’s pressed, the video is recorded on the phone and a duplicate copy is transmitted simultaneously to the ACLU server. When the “stop” button is pressed, a “Report” screen appears, where information about the location of the incident and the people involved can also be transmitted to the ACLU. The video and the information are treated as a request for legal assistance and reviewed by staff members. No action is taken by the ACLU, however, unless an explicit request is made, and the reports are treated as confidential and privileged legal communications. The videos, however, may be shared by the ACLU with the news media, community organizations or the general public to help call attention to police abuse.
The app is available in English and Spanish. It includes a “Know Your Rights” page.
The value of the Mobile Justice app was dramatized this month in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate, where a bystander taped cops detaining people in her neighborhood. A second person was recording her, and in that video, a lawman rushes at the first woman, grabs her cell phone, and smashes it on the floor. The second video ended up on YouTube. (South Gate police later said the officer was not a local cop but rather a deputy US marshal.)
Meanwhile in Texas, a proposed law would make it a crime for ordinary people to videotape police actions—on the grounds that it was “interference” with police activity. In California, on the other hand, the state senate this month approved legislation providing clear legal protection to people who videotape police activity without interfering with investigations.
“People who historically have had very little power in the face of law enforcement now have this tool to reclaim their power and dignity,” said Patrisse Cullors, director of the Truth and Reinvestment Campaign at the Ella Baker Center, which is working with the ACLU of California to support the launch of the Mobile Justice CA app. “Our vision is that this app will ultimately help community members connect and organize to respond to incidents of law enforcement violence, and then share their experiences and knowledge with others.”
The Mobile Justice CA app complies with California law. ACLU affiliates in other states have developed other versions for use in those states: residents of New York should use the “Stop and Frisk Watch” app; in New Jersey, it’s the “Police Tape” app; in Oregon and Missouri it’s the “Mobile Justice” app. These work in different ways: with the New York app, shaking the phone stops the filming; the New Jersey app does not transmit the video automatically—the user must choose to send it to the ACLU-NJ for backup storage. Not all of them are available on all platforms and not all are available in Spanish, as the California app is. However, video submitted from anywhere via the California app will be stored and available to those who submitted it, an ACLU SoCal official said.
“This app will help serve as a check on abuse,” said Hector Villagra, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU SoCal), where the app was developed. It will “allow ordinary citizens to record and document any interaction with law enforcement,” he said, including “police officers, sheriff’s deputies, border patrol, or other officials.”
By: Jon Wiener, The Nation, May 1, 2015
“An Immoral Worldview Common Among Republicans”: Police Violence Is Putting The Lie To The Tea Party Conservatism
As with so much else in modern America, the experience of Ferguson and Baltimore has turned police brutality into a partisan issue. With a few rare exceptions, Democrats and progressives tend to fall on the side of the victims of discriminatory and violent behavior by police, while conservatives tend to go to bat for the authorities.
The primary reason for this is racism: conservative whites tend to see urban minorities as either subhuman or guilty of cultural sins that are supposed to explain their endemic poverty. In that context, any police violence is excused as the necessary quelling by any means of an aggressively violent population unable to fit into civil society and unworthy of the civil rights afforded to non-minorities. It’s an immoral worldview, but extremely common among base Republicans.
The other reason is discrimination against the poor in general. Conservatives wrongly assume that the wealthy are society’s job creators, and the poor are simply moochers who eat off the generous fruits of the holders of capital. The military defends the righteous and free producers in America against the socialist and Communist freeloaders outside the U.S., while the police vigilantly defend property rights and social order against the ever-dangerous fifth column of parasites from within. That Objectivist viewpoint is just as factually wrong and immoral as the racist one, but it’s also far more acceptable within polite society largely because it’s so convenient to the wealthy elite and their enablers.
The problem, of course, is that these views run directly counter to supposed conservative stances on liberty and the 2nd Amendment. Republicans claim to be the defenders of freedom against big government tyranny. More disturbingly, they insist that deadly arsenals be permitted in every American home and even on the streets–primarily as a defense against the potential for infringement on civil rights by a totalitarian state.
But where we see the government most actively and destructively impinging on the rights of its citizens, not only are conservatives mostly silent on the abuses but they stridently stand on the side of the unaccountable state enforcers.
The reason is obvious, of course: the only government tyranny conservatives truly fear is one in which the poor–and particularly the non-white poor–have the ability to constrain their property rights. Cliven Bundy becomes a hero for threatening to shoot law enforcement that holds him accountable for stealing water and land, even as killer cops are lauded for killing unarmed black men for no legitimate reason. Welfare via taxation is seen as a greater evil than corporate malfeasance.
Conservatives can’t be upfront and honest about their immoral beliefs because only about 30% of the American population shares them, and it’s not OK to say most of these things in polite society. That’s why they’re so angry, why they feel oppressed, and why they “want their country back.”
But honesty here is necessary. We can’t move forward as a society without honest conversation, and if conservatives refuse to be openly honest about what they believe, it falls on us to provide that honesty for them.
But most of all, it’s time to stop pretending that Republicans care about liberty or government abuse of power. They really care about keeping poor people and minorities from having access to the same quality of life they purport to enjoy, and they’ll use every lever of tyranny to keep it way–whether through the ballot box or the ammo box.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 2, 2015
“I’m Glad The Train Didn’t Stop”: So Much For Rand Paul’s Minority Outreach
There’s an interesting Eli Stokels piece at Politico up today about Rand Paul’s less-than-sympathetic initial reaction to the trajectory of the Baltimore protests, which Team Paul folk are frantically suggesting was just a “gaffe,” even as most observers believe he’s bending to the inevitable pressures of running for president as a Republican:
On Tuesday, as Baltimore burned in the wake of the latest episode surrounding the alleged use of deadly excessive force, Paul’s response was notably off-key. “I came through the train on Baltimore last night,” Paul told host Laura Ingraham. “I’m glad the train didn’t stop.”
The senator’s breezy response came just before he blamed the violent uprising there on “the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society.” He also expressed his sympathy for “the plight of police,” all without speaking to the circumstances surrounding the troubling death of Freddie Gray in the custody of Baltimore Police.
His camp now acknowledges the lost chance.
“We recognize how it may have sounded to some people,” said Elroy Sailor, a senior adviser to Paul who has helped orchestrate more than two years of sustained outreach by Paul to the African-American community. “We’re listening and learning every day and we learned from this. We’re also leading this conversation.”
As if. Sailor’s implying that Paul “owns” the criminal justice reform debate. But even if you buy that, it doesn’t mean Paul is even on the same page as African-Americans when it comes to police reform, a parallel but hardly identical issue.
Stokels notes the Baltimore “gaffe” was by no mean unprecedented.
The day after his early April campaign launch, as attention focused on South Carolina — where a video showed a local police officer shoot an unarmed black man as he tried to flee — Paul took the stage in New Hampshire and said, “Today we sit atop a powder keg.” He was talking, though, about the national debt.
Asked later that day about the shooting of Walter Scott — after he didn’t weigh in on his own — Paul steered clear of addressing the outrage from many African-Americans, instead noting that “98, 99 percent of police are are doing their job on a day-to-day basis and aren’t doing things like this.” The following day, at a campaign event just 20 miles from where Scott has been killed, Paul didn’t mention it at all.
You can he said/she said this thing to death, but in reality, Paul’s priorities right now are obvious. Nobody, I hope, seriously believes that a Rand Paul-led Republican Party is going to suddenly start attracting a large African-American vote. Perhaps his gestures could open the door to some future Republican leader making inroads, and maybe burnish his image among white swing voters. But Rand stands first and foremost for fiscal policies that would largely trash the social safety net and shirk the needs of urban communities, and for monetary policies that would likely plunge the country back into a major recession. He opposes absolutely every accomplishment of the Obama administration, with the possible partial exception of the opening to Cuba. And then there’s his own and his father’s history of association with racists and neo-Confederates.
So on the one hand you have a rather fantastic speculative future appeal to African-Americans, and on the other the present reality of a Republican nominating contest in which virtually no African-Americans are going to participate. What do you think matters most to Team Paul right now?
It’s true Paul’s alleged party-broadening powers are an important part of his electability argument to Republican voters, along with the idea that dope-smoking, NSA-hating kids will vote for him against HRC. But without any question, Republicans want the maximum of general election odds with the absolute minimum of compromise on issues–which is why Scott Walker’s Wisconsin record is so seductive to them. And with the foul odor of racial politics in the air, Paul will have to show his solidarity with conservative white voters appalled once again at the bad behavior of those people. If he doesn’t, I’ll be genuinely impressed, even as I downgrade Paul’s odds of winning the nomination another ten or twenty points.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 1, 2015
“Unrelenting Hostility Of The Washington Media Clique”: Playing By The Old ‘Clinton Rules’ — All Innuendo, Few Facts
As a professional matter, I’ve been halfway dreading Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. The 2016 Democratic nomination appears to be hers for the asking. Democrats enjoy a strong Electoral College advantage. And yet it’s hard to imagine how she can overcome the unrelenting hostility of the Washington media clique.
Try to imagine the New York Times and Washington Post teaming up with Fox News impresario Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. on an “exposé” of any other politician in Washington. Joe Conason wasn’t exaggerating much when he called it the “Hitler-Stalin Pact” of contemporary journalism.
The two newspapers agreed to “exclusive” arrangements with one Peter Schweizer, a right-wing operative and author of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. The book’s publisher is HarperCollins, a News Corp subsidiary like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc.
Basically, we’re in Ann Coulter country here. Schweizer’s not a journalist, but a controversialist for right-wing “think tanks.” A former consultant to Sarah Palin and ghostwriter for Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Glenn Beck, he makes his living vilifying Democrats. Media Matters has posted a long list of withdrawn or retracted stories under his byline.
Reporters for the British Sunday Times evaluated an earlier Schweizer book and found that “[f]acts that are checkable do not check out. Individuals credited for supplying information do not exist or cannot be tracked down. Requests to the author for help and clarification result in further confusion and contradiction.”
The New York Times, in contrast, praised the fellow’s “meticulous” reporting. All this in service of a front-page “blockbuster” by Jo Becker and Mike McIntire insinuating that as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton sold out the national interest, helping a Russian company to buy uranium mines in Wyoming from a Canadian corporation in exchange for a few million dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation, the family’s charitable enterprise.
That and a $500,000 speaking fee awarded by a Moscow bank to the Big Cheese, her husband, the former president — a guy who’s been averaging $7.5 million a year making speeches.
“Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown” the Times concedes early on.
Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. The insinuation couldn’t be any clearer than if they’d hinted that Vladimir Putin was Hillary’s lover.
The diligent reader must persevere almost to the bottom of the murkily narrated 4,400-word story to learn that the uranium transaction had to be signed off on by all nine federal agencies comprising the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, that none apparently dissented, and that the State Department’s man on the committee stated, “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter.”
Oh, and the Wyoming mines aren’t actually in operation, probably because the worldwide price of uranium has fallen following Japan’s Fukishima disaster. The Russians would probably sell them back, cheap.
No matter, it’s really all about what the Times calls “the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation.”
Besides Hillary and Putin, the story’s other suspicious character is Canadian mining executive and philanthropist Frank Giustra. Besides pledging half his income to good works such as the Clinton Health Access Initiative — bringing cheap HIV/AIDS drugs to 9.9 million people in Third World countries — Giustra’s other big sin was supposedly relying on Bill Clinton’s help to negotiate a multinational buyout of uranium mines in Kazakhstan.
Giustra has called the Times account arrant nonsense. He even provided a flight manifest to a Forbes reporter to prove that contrary to the newspaper, he didn’t take Bill Clinton with him to Kazakhstan at all. Moreover, as an extremely careful reader can determine, Giustra sold all of his Uranium One holdings in 2007 — two years before Hillary became Secretary of State — and so had nothing to gain from company’s 2010 transaction with the Russians.
Or from his charitable donations.
Giustra’s second suspect act was setting up something called the Canadian Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership. That too seems to have confused the scandal-hunting reporters and their supporters on the Washington Post editorial page. See, even if there’s no evidence of a quid pro quo, the Post thundered, the Clinton Foundation had promised transparency while Hillary was in office.
“However, the Times said the contributions of some connected to the Uranium One deal were not disclosed. The newspaper unearthed them in Canadian tax records. This lapse is exactly the sleight of hand that creates suspicion… What were the Clintons hiding?”
Basically, as it turns out, the fact that Canada is a sovereign country whose laws prohibit such disclosures.
Look, there’s a reason articles like the Times’ big exposé are stultifyingly dull and require the skills of a contract lawyer to parse. Murky sentences and jumbled chronologies signify that the “Clinton rules” are back: all innuendo and guilt by association. All ominous rhetorical questions, but rarely straightforward answers.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, April 29, 2015
“False Prophets Trolling For Votes”: People Like Mike Huckabee Are Engaging In A Huge Act Of Bad Faith
When I read about Mike Huckabee’s speech to the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference yesterday, his big talking point sounded very familiar to me. It was the big talking point of a speech I gave in an oratory contest in the 8th grade. By the 9th grade I was embarrassed by it as a product of juvenile ignorance.
Mike Huckabee rallied a crowd of Hispanic evangelicals on Wednesday night, pushing back in the debate over religious freedom just one day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments to determine whether states have the right to ban same-sex marriage.
“I respect the courts, but the Supreme Court is only that — the supreme of the courts. It is not the supreme being. It cannot overrule God,” he said. “When it comes to prayer, when it comes to life, and when it comes to the sanctity of marriage, the court cannot change what God has created.”
No, I wasn’t talking about marriage back then, but school prayer. But it doesn’t really matter, though, the principle Huck is defending is that of a “higher law” that is binding on those who recognize it. As a matter of individual conscience, that is indeed defensible, but as a principle of civil society, it is more or less self-refuting.
When Martin Luther King appealed to a “higher law” in defying Jim Crow, he wasn’t asserting some universal right to pick and choose the laws one would obey; he was, for one thing, drawing attention to a constitutional anomaly; for another, he hoped (successfully, as it turned out) to awaken a similar recognition in the hearts and minds of a majority of the American people; and above all, he was willing to pay the price for civil disobedience. And then there is the little matter that the laws he was protesting had a huge, dramatic, impossible-to-ignore personal impact on him and his family and most of his friends, beyond the offense to the “higher law.”
In claiming to emulate King’s prophetic stance, people like Huck and the other signatories of yesterday’s Pledge of Solidarity to Defend Marriage are engaging in a huge act of bad faith. They are not pointing to a constitutional anomaly, but are instead arguing for a radical reinterpretation of the Constitution that sneaks in conceptions of divine and natural law that happen to justify their particular policies. They are not appealing to the consciences of the majority, but claiming those are irrelevant. And most of all, it’s insanely laughable that they imagine themselves as self-sacrificing heroes like those of the civil rights movement; they struggle constantly to come up with a single way in which same-sex marriage actually affects them.
Beyond the phony civil rights parallels, what’s most annoying about the new “religious liberty” line is that it purports to represent a defense of freedom of conscience when it is actually an assertion that the “higher law” should trump the civil law for all of us. The Pledge of Solidary in Defense of Marriage is very clear about that:
We affirm that marriage and family have been inscribed by the Divine Architect into the order of Creation. Marriage is ontologically between one man and one woman, ordered toward the union of the spouses, open to children and formative of family. Family is the first vital cell of society, the first government, and the first mediating institution of our social order. The future of a free and healthy society passes through marriage and the family.
Marriage as existing solely between one man and one woman precedes civil government…..
Marriage is the preeminent and the most fundamental of all human social institutions. Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they manufacture a right to marry for those who are incapable of marriage. Society begins with marriage and the family.
So no, these people are not asking to be left alone with their beliefs, and their demands go far beyond the tender consciences of Bakers and Florists of Conscience who cannot tolerate the idea of two people they regard as rebels against God pledging love to each other. They are basically saying they have no obligation to obey any of the laws promulgated by a society (or what Richard John Neuhaus’ in his famous essay justifying revolution on exactly these same grounds called a “regime”) that has forfeited its legitimacy.
“Higher law” appeals are perverse coming from someone running for President of the United States. If Huck wants to stand in the courthouse door and defy a Supreme Court decision declaring marriage equality a constitutional right, he should let his freak flag fly and suffer the legal consequences of following his conscience. Using such arguments to troll for the votes of people upset by social change isn’t in the spirit of Martin Luther King, but is entirely consistent with the thinking and behavior of the scofflaws on the other side of the firehoses at Selma claiming a God-given inalienable right to discriminate.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 30, 2015
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