Cops Gun Down Unarmed Journalist's Career

By Greg Palast, Reader Supported News

05 August 15

LA Times fires Ted Rall – evidence blows up in newspaper’s face

ed Rall is a lying, fantasist scum bag.

Or maybe, just maybe, the LA Times, complicit with the Los Angeles police, have slandered and slimed America’s toughest critic of police violence.

These cartoons (1 of 4) by longtime LA Times cartoonist Ted Rall appear to have cost him his job.
(art: Ted Rall/LA Times)

The story: On July 27, the LA Times fired their long-time columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall for fabricating a story of police misconduct. The LA Times’ evidence? A tape recording provided by the LAPD. Problem was, the tape was muffled – possibly tampered with.

When audio experts cleaned the garbage interference on the tape – uh, oh! – the LAPD and LA Times accusations fell to pieces.

These cartoons (2 of 4) by longtime LA Times cartoonist Ted Rall appear to have cost him his job.
(art: Ted Rall/LA Times)

The details: On May 11, Ted Rall wrote his umpteenth column in the LA Times, LAPD's Crosswalk Crackdown: Don't Police Have Something Better to do? about gang violence: the gang is the LAPD. This was Rall’s lightest jab of all, a satirical remembrance of when, 14 years earlier, a cop put him in handcuffs for a simple jaywalking ticket.

Unbeknownst to Rall, the jaywalker-stalker cop had recorded this big bust. The LAPD dropped the tape on the Times.

These cartoons (3 of 4) by longtime LA Times cartoonist Ted Rall appear to have cost him his job.
(art: Ted Rall/LA Times)

The police source said the recording and other info proved Rall was lying. That the tape proved that Rall had never been handcuffed – nor, as Rall wrote in his column, was there a group of onlookers complaining about the cop’s overkill.

In other words, ‘they’ said and the Timesaccepted that Rall just made up the whole handcuff-and-crowd thing to smear the LAPD. On that basis, LA Times editor Nick Goldberg printed and signed a big-splash editorial saying, in effect, Rall had committed the unpardonable sin of fabricating a story – and Rall was fired. 

These cartoons (4 of 4) by longtime LA Times cartoonist Ted Rall appear to have cost him his job.
(art: Ted Rall/LA Times)

This, of course, would end Rall’s career as a syndicated newspaper columnist and cartoonist. 

And I was going to have to fire Rall too. Rall is a journalism fellow of the Palast Investigative Fund, the not-for-profit foundation that backs our work.  If the charges were true, I wouldn’t hesitate to fire Rall’s lying ass – but only after I break his pen and cut off his fingers.

I demanded a copy of the recording for our audio experts to review – and asked Rall to do the same.

Oh, mama! To my surprise – and Rall’s glee – the crowd that he had allegedly fantasized about suddenly came alive – with three women shouting, “Why’d you handcuff him?” and “Take off his handcuffs!”– the handcuffs that were supposedly fabricated by Rall.  (One woman helpfully suggested to the officer, “Don’t forget to ride his ***hole!”)

Listen to it yourself, or read the true transcript.  Check this against the LAPD’s incomplete transcript.

As an investigative reporter, I was astonished that the LA Times did not even bother to do an independent analysis of the tape. Rall told me that a Times reporter, Paul Pringle, told him the Timessimply accepted the recording transcript as truthful because it came from the LAPD. 

And the LAPD hates hates hates Rall. 

I can’t blame them, given Rall’s reports and caustic drawings – the truth hurts. The LA police union wrote that it “applauds [the] LA Times firing of cartoonist Rall,” whose drawings drew blood from the police force infamous for its gang-style beating of the handcuffed Rodney King.

Rall said that reporter Pringle told him that, to bolster their case against Rall, the LAPD source said that the arresting cop, Will Durr, never used handcuffs in petty violation stops. However, by coincidence, a news report about that very same cop, Durr, handcuffing a driver on a routine traffic stop appeared in … The LA Times.

Oops!

My calls to the Times’“investigative reporter” Pringle went unanswered. LA Times opinion editor Nicolas Goldberg, whom I know and have long respected, said he was not authorized not go on record to defend his paper. The smell of panic in the Times’ executive suite is getting stronger.

So I called the LAPD. Did they drop the garbled tape and false transcript on their critic? Oddly, spokesman Officer Mike Lopez, who knew the story well, could not confirm the LAPD was the source. Then was it stolen from official police files? 

Would the LAPD conduct an internal affairs investigation of the theft or misuse of confidential police files?

Ironically, the LA Times is the biggest metropolitan daily in the USA with the guts to print Rall – and even pick up a Palast story or two. Clearly, the heat from The Heat is on. I really do hope that, in light of this new information, the paper will do the right thing and retract their statement. 

Whatever the original justification for the Times’ printed attack, to let it stand uncorrected now, in light of the new uncontroverted evidence, would violate core standards of journalistic ethics.

As for the Palast Fund, with the evidence now in hand, we will fight this attack on our journalist.

And, if the Times won’t carry Rall’s reports, GregPalast.com will. Sign up here and get his reports and ’toons free of charge.   

The issue: Killing, not jaywalking

Why am I supporting Rall? Because this is not about jaywalking. This is about killing. Police killings. And the ability of journalists to report just the facts, ma’am, free of fear of retribution by the police or media executives.

Rall’s career was gunned down by a phony transcript of a recording of a bust. 

This follows close on the shooting death of an unarmed 29-year-old homeless veteran by an LAPD officer on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Brendon Glenn was known as a sometimes surly, but ultimately harmless, alcoholic. Near midnight on May 6, after he appeared to accost a local resident, two cops wrestled Glenn to the ground. 

The original statement by the LA chief of police, Charlie Beck, stated that “an altercation occurred between the two officers and the suspect. During that physical altercation, an officer-involved shooting occurred.” But security camera tape would later reveal that just wasn’t true.

In fact, film from a local store camera revealed that, for reasons unknown, one cop stepped away from his partner who had Glenn on the ground, then turned and fired two mortal shots into the homeless man.

An associate of the Palast investigations team, investigative reporter and former CBS news anchor Bree Walker, has been reviewing the case.

What Walker and every other newsperson has to worry about now is, will reporting the full story of police violence result in a slander and smear campaign against the investigating reporter? 

The police believe they have silenced Rall, that his public pillorying by the Times “serves as an example” – a warning to troublesome journalists.  Rall, to their dismay, is proving more of an example of undeterred courage.

We can only hope that, given the new evidence, the Times restores not just Rall’s reputation, but its own.

Ted Rall’s new book-length comic, Snowden, will be released on August 25.  Pre-order it from Amazon, B&N & others – or make a tax-deductible donation and get a copy signed by Ted. 100% of proceeds will go to Rall’s defense.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Exploding the Myth of Sanctuary Cities

By Ruben Navarrette Jr., The Daily Beast

05 August 15

Congress is all set to crack down on “sanctuary cities” where illegal immigrants are supposedly free to roam. These cities do not exist in reality.

ecently, less than 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, I had lunch with two friends—a police supervisor with 25 years’ experience, and a retired border patrol supervisor who spent three decades on the job.

We marveled that so many folks could—because of shameless politicians and a careless media—get so riled up over a concept that doesn’t really exist. 

“There are people out there who think there are cities where federal officials are not enforcing immigration law,” I said. “Basically, they think, ‘If I can get to one of these places, I’ll be home free.’ Can you believe it?”

They both shook their heads.

Conservatives have a new chew toy in the immigration debate: so-called sanctuary cities. 

The House of Representatives recently voted to cut funding for cities and counties that duck federal immigration law. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, called the vote “a start to the conversation on immigration.”

The conversation we need is the one that McCarthy, and other Republicans, are desperate to avoid: going after employers who hire the undocumented.

Instead, they rail against sanctuary cities. 

Supposedly, there are about 300 U.S. cities that give illegal immigrants a free pass from immigration officials. 

If you’re wondering what magical power local officials have to cripple a $60 billion-per-year bureaucratic behemoth like the Department of Homeland Security, hold the thought.

Some ordinances might bar local officers from cooperating with immigration agents at traffic stops. Others might bar federal authorities from ascertaining the immigration status of those booked. Others might prohibit the release to federal officials of any suspect who could be an illegal immigrant. The issue of sanctuary cities surfaces whenever an illegal immigrant commits a horrendous crime in a place with ordinances like these on the books.

San Francisco is one such city. And the murder on July 1 of 31-year-old Kate Steinle in front of her father, allegedly by illegal immigrant Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, was horrendous. 

The case against Lopez-Sanchez, who admitted to a local television station that he killed Steinle but claimed it was an accident, may be open and shut. 

But the larger case that conservatives are building against San Francisco—and other so-called sanctuary cities—is more complicated. The major unknown is whether local officials helped keep Lopez-Sanchez in the United States—despite the fact that he had been deported five times.

And now that Kate Steinle is a martyr for the cause of outlawing sanctuary cities, the whole case is overlaid with a thick and syrupy layer of politics.

The trouble with the case is that, in localities across America, when you look at how local, state and federal law enforcement agencies work together every day to preserve public safety and enforce immigration statutes, what the right-wingers are all worked up about is more of a theory than a reality.

In the immigration debate, sanctuary cities are unicorns, mermaids, and Bigfoot all wrapped into one. 

You see, sanctuary cities ain’t what they used to be—or more accurately, what they were supposed to be. It was way back in 1989 that the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors voted to bar local officials, including police, from helping federal authorities with immigration investigations or arrests unless such help was required by federal or state law or a warrant was issued by a judge.

The rationale for the policy was that if an illegal immigrant was arrested on a non-immigration offense, and there was no federal warrant, local authorities could use their discretion to decide whether to alert their neighborhood office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

But, in the last 26 years, San Francisco’s sanctuary policy has been repeatedly modified and become less lenient. These days, local law enforcement will hand over to federal immigration agents undocumented immigrants who haven’t even gone before a judge.

Also, in the last six and a half years, the Obama administration has been quite aggressive in roping in local police and sheriff departments into the enforcement of federal immigration law, using tools like Secure Communities. Under that program, which was only recently discontinued, local police would run the fingerprints of suspected illegal immigrants through a federal database to determine their status.

Now the administration is pushing the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which asks local law enforcement to notify ICE when it releases what local authorities suspect is an illegal immigrant—something that the Sheriff’s Department in San Francisco, which runs the jail, apparently failed to do. 

So it’s not true that the Obama administration is giving away the store on immigration enforcement. Sanctuary cities don’t provide much sanctuary. Those are lies told by Republicans, and apparently accepted as fact by Democrats. 

Even Republicans who are supposedly more reasonable on immigration issues wind up getting fooled. In a recent interview with Yahoo News, Jeb Bush said of the American people: “They see here in San Francisco, a sanctuary city, where a person who had been deported five times commits a violent crime—he should have been in prison to begin with—and was released, and this city does not cooperate with ICE. They see this stuff and they’re legitimately angry.”

Even Democrats who once supported sanctuary policies—such as Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California and Dick Durbin of Illinois—seem ready to support a crackdown. 

All the while, local officials delude themselves into thinking that they can influence federal policy—in this case, U.S. immigration policy. They can’t, and they don’t.

Words on a page certainly don’t mean anything at 3 a.m. when an illegal immigrant is pulled over for drunk driving, and police call Border Patrol to the scene. These declarations are especially meaningless to a federal agency like ICE, which is busy filling a yearly quota of 400,000 immigrant removals. And the Obama administration didn't rack up more than 2 million deportations in six and a half years by deferring to meaningless declarations by local officials.

Authorities in San Francisco are reportedly gearing up to cancel its sanctuary city policy, even if it may not have been all that it was cracked up to be. There have been media reports that, even under the old policy, San Francisco police officers would hand over to ICE suspects who were thought to be in the country illegally—all before processing them into the system.

I’ve heard similar stories about other police departments. Where I live, a police officer who writes a ticket for running a stop sign will call the Border Patrol to the scene, if the officer suspects the driver is here illegally.

My lunch companions confirmed it. The local cop said that, in his department, ICE agents go out on calls with police officers and maintain a presence at the station house.

So while radio host Sean Hannity recently told his audience that we live in a “sanctuary country,” implying that no immigration laws of any kind are being enforced anywhere at any time by any one, that’s crazy.

One last time: There is no enforcement-free zone where illegal immigrants can hide from the long arm of federal immigration officials. ICE agents don’t bow to cities and counties. They don’t play games. They are open for business, 24/7. They never close.