How St. Louis Police Robbed My Family of $1000 (and How I'm Trying to Get It Back)
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33339"><span class="small">Juan Thompson, The Intercept</span></a>
Wednesday, 08 April 2015 13:01
Thompson writes: "St. Ann is one of the more notorious cities in the county when it comes to traffic violations and, in my mother's case, the city's finest, quite simply, fucked up."
Journalist Juan Thompson and his mother. (photo: Juan Thompson)
How St. Louis Police Robbed My Family of $1000 (and How I'm Trying to Get It Back)
By Juan Thompson, The Intercept
08 April 15
n a late spring evening eight years ago, police pulled over my mother’s 1997 Oldsmobile Aurora, in the suburb of St. Ann, Missouri, as she raced to pick up a relative from St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport. “Do you know why I stopped you?” the officer asked. “No I don’t,” my mother answered. The police charged her with speeding, but she did not receive a mere ticket. Instead, an officer ran my mother’s name and told her that since she had failed to appear in court for driving without a license, there was a six-year-old warrant out for her arrest. “I just started crying. I couldn’t believe it,” my mother said. The police arrested her and hauled her off to St. Louis County Jail, where authorities eventually allowed her one phone call, which she placed to my stepfather. He said, shaking his head, “I was surprised because I knew she didn’t have no warrants.”
St. Ann is one of the more notorious cities in the county when it comes to traffic violations and, in my mother’s case, the city’s finest, quite simply, fucked up. As it was, my mother had no warrant; the police confused her with another woman who shared her name — sans the middle initial.
She would go on to spend two nights in jail, pay $1,000 in fines that she did not owe, and plead guilty to the crimes of the other woman. She paid a devastating price, financially and emotionally, for the racist and classist policing described in last month’s Justice Department report on the tumult in Missouri. The 102-page document details the physical and economic terror inflicted upon the poor and black residents of Ferguson, Missouri. The report echoed the torrent of criticism that residents have long lodged at the city’s overseers. But, as my mother’s experience helps illustrate, the injustices cataloged by the investigation are not confined to one tiny Midwestern suburb. Ferguson is emblematic of how municipalities in the St. Louis region, and across the country, operate as carceral, mob-like states that view and treat poor black people as cash cows.
In Ferguson, at least 16,000 individuals had arrest warrants last year compared with the town’s total population of just 21,000 residents. Those warrants fed what the DOJ called a “code-enforcement system … honed to produce more revenue.” In nearby City of St. Louis, the 75,000 outstanding arrest warrants are equivalent to about one quarter of the population, part of a county-wide problem of cash-strapped cities incentivized to “squeeze their residents with fines,” as TheWashington Postput it. One city, Pine Lawn, Missouri, recently had 23,000 open arrest warrants compared with the city’s population of just 3,275 residents; court fees and traffic tickets make up nearly 30 percent of its municipal revenue. “Getting tickets — and getting them fixed — are two actions that define living in the St. Louis area,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatchreported earlier this month.
Statistics alone cannot convey the financial and emotional toll individuals and their families pay as a result of predatory fines and selective policing. Those costs are far reaching — as my own family discovered in the wake of my mother’s arrest. They can also be deadly as Walter Scott’s brutal murder demonstrated.
The woman with whom my mother was mistaken bore, in her mugshot, a striking resemblance to my mother. They were both about the same height and weight, and also shared a similar caramel complexion. “She even looked like me!” my mother said with laughter that did little to conceal her unremitting anger. But at the time my mother phoned my stepfather, neither of them knew about the blunder, so he set off for Clayton, the tony suburb where the county jail sits, with the intention of bailing his partner out. It’s somewhat remarkable that Clayton is the site of the county jail. It’s as if the powers that be want to rub the wealth of predominately white Clayton in the faces of the poor black people who are disproportionately jailed there.
“I got there,” my stepfather said, and “they said she wasn’t there. They said they couldn’t find her.” My mother, who has 10 children, was lost. Lost because the county jail had not processed her. Lost because the county’s system was too inept to prevent or correct such a slip-up. Lost in just the latest example of how little black lives matter within the country’s criminal justice infrastructure. Late in the evening that first day, authorities shipped her off to the St. Louis city jail where her doppelgänger’s original warrant was issued. “They didn’t believe me when I told them they had the wrong person,” she said. Jail administrators were not much help to my stepfather during his frantic search: “One of them told me she probably ran off,” he said. “It was bad,” my mother said. “I fell asleep and woke up expecting it to be over but he [my stepfather] still hadn’t come yet.”
Meanwhile, the pain my mother sustained was twofold. She grieved at being falsely imprisoned and, later, for the emotional torture my stepfather and siblings experienced.
“When I was locked up I was crying, and this other woman in there told me, ‘Stop being a weak ass bitch,’” my mother remembered. “She told me if I didn’t stop crying for my kids she would snatch my wrist bracelet and walk out as me. So I stopped crying and tried to toughen up.” She found out later that the only man I had known as a father shed his own tears when he failed to locate her, which says a lot considering my stepfather belongs to the daft patriarchal old school that equates male tears with weakness. “That nigga was crying as he drove around looking for me with two BBQ dinners,” she said with a smile. My stepfather picked up two dinner plates for them that evening from one of St. Louis’s most iconic BBQ joints, Smokehouse BBQ. “She wanted BBQ that night and I was trying to surprise her,” he recalled.
After two days, with the help of a relative who worked for the city government, he found her at the city jail. Amazingly, she was still being mistaken for someone else, and so she was forced to pay $1,000 for the fines of the other woman. For my parents, as it is for most low-income people molested by our criminal justice system, $1,000 is a lot of money. “Shit. That was a $1,000 dollars out of my kids’ mouth,” my stepdad said, invoking my nine younger brothers and sisters. “That was grocery money.” The bogus fines my parents paid capture how the current system adversely impacts poor people, which is why, presumably, the woman to whom the fines actually belonged did not pay or show up to court. As fines escalate, jail morphs in to a debtors’ prison housing the underprivileged. The woman with whom my mother was confused told me during a very brief conversation, “I feel bad that that happened to her and to y’all.”
Although authorities eventually acknowledged the identity mix-up, my family’s money was never returned. My parents, like most in my old west-St. Louis neighborhood of Wells-Goodfellow, are hard-working, tenacious people — he a construction worker who finds jobs sporadically, and she a restaurant server. “The whole thing pissed me off and scared me,” my mother told me. When asked why she didn’t file a complaint with the police, the woman I still call Mommy asked me, in an irritated tone, “What the hell is wrong with you Juan? Who was I gonna complain to?”
As I was reporting this story, I discovered a trove of information that symbolizes how grossly incompetent our criminal justice system is when it swoops up poor people. Missouri court records show that my mother and the other woman were born in the same year. Court documents also indicate that clerks routinely misspelled the names of both women, which perhaps explains the mix-up. But judicial records fail to clarify why my mother was initially denied a phone call or why the police chose not to process her when she arrived at the city jail. Worse, to my surprise, my mother actually pleaded guilty to the traffic charge. “I just wanted to go home,” she told me.
My mother’s guilty plea, like a scarlet letter, remains with her. Judge Jed Rakoff, writing last year in TheNew York Review of Books, explained why certain people plead guilty to crimes they did not commit: “The typical person accused of a crime combines a troubled past with limited resources: he thus recognizes that, even if he is innocent, his chances of mounting an effective defense at trial may be modest at best.” In other words, a wealthier woman with resources and an attorney never would have experienced what my my mother did. Even more bluntly, the child of a white woman from Clayton would not have had to go to sleep at night, and awake in the morning, wondering just where his mother was.
When Mommy was disappeared by the police, I was away from home, but certainly no less furious. Her defeatist attitude and resignation about it all still stings eight years later. She is, by far, the strongest person I know. And yet that strength, which I grew up admiring, and which I have sought to replicate in adulthood, could not protect her when she encountered the police. Her strength was absent as she sat behind bars for two days, and it did not prevent St. Louis’s authorities from stealing her $1,000.
My mother’s gratuitous detention scarred her, and today she no longer drives in certain surrounding areas out of fear she will be stopped once more. And when I am her passenger, the anxiousness emanating from the driver’s seat is palpable and affecting. The arrest also impacted my four little sisters who, at that time, were all under the age of 10. The youngest, my baby sister, who we call Babe, was only a few months old. My stepfather couldn’t tell them where their mother was because he did not know himself. “When is Mommy coming home?” one of my sisters asked my stepfather. He told me, “Man, I just broke down inside. I didn’t know what to say.”
Recently I contacted the St. Louis Police and Circuit Attorney’s Office about the stolen money and, instead of answers, was given the inevitable runaround. They refused comment on this specific case because it goes against department policy, a spokesperson claimed. But I now have this platform — thanks in large part to my mother’s resilient parenting — and I assured the police spokesperson there would be no rest on my end until my family receives an apology and reimbursement. If I have to write about l’affaire Thompson repeatedly, and badger city officials with my voice frequently, then so be it. I’ve reached out to civil liberties lawyers about the next step.
Unless one actually lives through such turmoil, he or she cannot fully comprehend the horrible feeling of not knowing where his or her mother is. No child should have to endure that sort of painful uncertainty, but, of course, America has an extensive track record of ripping black parents from their children. The institution of slavery attempted to erode the black family, while apartheid Jim Crow murdered black parents and left their offspring parentless. And today, as America’s sordid history forecast, approximately 1.3 million black children are partially abandoned, as their parents sit behind bars.
The distinction between the vicious slave state then and the grisly police state tormenting black folk now is minimal. In fact, today’s police departments can trace their origins back to America’s first slave patrol squads. Like their predecessors, contemporary police are surveilling black bodies, while protecting an economic order that exploits black people. To fill their coffers, governments like the one in Ferguson dispatch police to prey on low-income people who, in the St. Louis region, are inordinately black; conversely, the 19th-century American economy was a violent enterprise built on the black backs of enslaved humans. The profitable cotton industry, boosted by black slave labor, “powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization,” according to Edward Baptist’s 2014 book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Further, during the slave era tortured black people had no legitimate legal recourse to seek their liberation. Fast forward to now: my parents and others do not have lawyers on retainers, available at a moment’s notice to do battle with imperious police officers and powerful prosecutors.
This sinister cycle of oppression, which affords poor people so little latitude, is actively destroying the lives of black people who are living in a perilous state of purgatory; unsure of when and where to drive, always on the lookout for a gang who will steal their money, along with their freedom, and lock them up before shuttling them off to various counties for additional abuse. Such transgenerational trauma shows no signs of subsiding.
Countless black St. Louisians have stories that are similar to the ordeal my mother suffered. To give you further proof of how deep the rot goes, consider the following, just from my family alone. Once, while riding with my grandmother, she was pulled over by police and arrested. She had outstanding warrants for failing to pay traffic tickets, but in what humane world would the state arrest a grandmother, in front of her grandchild no less, and leave him on the side of the road waiting for a ride? Six years ago, an aunt could not afford to pay some traffic ticket or another and so, instead of taking the risk of driving with a suspended license through the hellish surrounding counties to get to her job, she just quit.
To this day, she has yet to find steady employment. And she has never paid the initial ticket because she lost her means of transportation to her job after the revocation of her driver’s license. I only recently discovered that another relative, an uncle, is in jail right now for a traffic-related offense, even though he has already spent time in jail for the same violation. Strangely, however, the county is billing him for the time he spent in jail the first go-round. Naturally, said uncle, who struggles to pay his rent, is similarly unable to pay for his penal accommodations, thus back to jail he goes. And he too lost his job.
My family’s horror stories are far from unique. Cities with poor populations, and low tax revenue, make up the difference with fines. The Washington Post last September called such schemes “perverse”:
In recent years a state pool was established to distribute sales taxes more evenly, but existing towns were permitted to opt out. Most did, of course. Perversely, this means that the collection of poorer towns stacked up along the east-west byways are far more reliant on municipal court revenues. That means they face much stronger incentives to squeeze their residents with fines, despite the fact that the residents of these towns are the people who are least likely to have the money to pay those fines, the least likely to have an attorney to fight the fines on their behalf, and for whom the consequences of failing to pay the fines can be the most damaging.
In certain more sensible countries — e.g. Denmark, Finland and Sweden — authorities employ a sliding-scale system that allows citizens to pay fines based on their overall income. A similar practice would mitigate the unfairness of America’s present arrangement. Joe Pinsker, writing in The Atlantic, said, “Income-based fines could introduce fairness to a legal system that many have shown to be biased against the poor.” But until such reforms are implemented here, corrupt, financially strapped municipalities will continue to extort poor black people with what are essentially poverty violations — punishments for being poor. As such, Ferguson’s political economy is dependent upon police harassment, theft, and general mistreatment of the town’s poor black citizens. According to the DOJ report:
In a February 2011 report requested by the City Council at a Financial Planning Session and drafted by Ferguson’s Finance Director with contributions from Chief Jackson, the Finance Director reported on “efforts to increase efficiencies and maximize collection” by the municipal court. The report included an extensive comparison of Ferguson’s fines to those of surrounding municipalities and noted with approval that Ferguson’s fines are “at or near the top of the list….” While the report stated that this recommendation was because of a “large volume of non-compliance,” the recommendation was in fact emphasized as one of several ways that the code enforcement system had been honed to produce more revenue.
Moreover, the officials who run some of these towns and cities are not just mephitic racists exchanging lame emails about black people like the gang in Ferguson. Some St. Louis County communities — like the aforementioned Pine Lawn — are controlled by black political actors. Yet this fact does little to assuage the understandable concerns of many poor black folk that not only are civic institutions not on their side, but the same entities are actively targeting and robbing them. It should be noted that historically, the impoverished towns and cities where black people live are the direct consequences of centuries of socioeconomic abuse directed toward (and the state’s neglect of) America’s most marginalized and long-suffering demographic. “It’s a crime and a scandal,” my mother said of the whole thing.
Against this scandalous background, one can only conclude that the regimes of the St. Louis metropolitan region, and their enforcers represented by the police, are rackets, deliberately and explicitly robbing poor black families of their limited financial resources. Libertarian and conservative activists should rally to the side of local demonstrators because the idea of armed agents of the state acting as revenue collectors ought to frighten any American — black, brown or white. Ultimately, though, I fear W.E.B. Du Bois was correct when he wrote, “A system can never fail those it was never meant to protect.”
FOCUS | Indiana, Russia, France: Welcome to God-Watch
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Wednesday, 08 April 2015 11:45
Weissman writes: "Indiana tries to defend the 'religious freedom' of conservative Christians to discriminate against same-sex couples."
Indiana governor Mike Pence. (photo: Michael Conroy/AP)
Indiana, Russia, France: Welcome to God-Watch
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
08 April 15
ndiana tries to defend the “religious freedom” of conservative Christians to discriminate against same-sex couples. Russia similarly discriminates against gays in the name of religion, while its Orthodox Christianity plays an unexpectedly large role in the country’s growing nationalism. France has a legally mandated separation of church and state, or laicité, which contrary to its stated purpose ends up promoting both Islamic radicalism and the Christian Nationalism of Marine Le Pen’s Front National.
Three different cases, each with its own history, nuances, and self-justifications. But together they highlight some of the dangers of allowing the irrationality of religious faith to dominate the world in which we live.
Selling to Sinners
In Indiana and other of the disunited States, new “religious freedom” laws have claimed to protect the individual rights of believers who see same-sex marriage as a sin against their God. Why, these “good Christians” complain, must we sell wedding cakes or flowers to the offending couples?
As those of a certain age will recall, these right-wing Christians are following in the grand tradition of Atlanta’s ax-wielding Lester Maddox and other racial segregationists who demanded the freedom to deny black people service in bars, restaurants, hotels, and motels. Only this time the comeuppance came more swiftly, as tech industry and other corporations threatened to withdraw business from the states if discrimination were legally permitted or encouraged.
But let’s hold our hosannas. Hardline American Christians began their attack on freedom long before they made race their issue and they will find other issues beyond their homophobia, no matter that their antagonism to lesbians, gays, transgender people, and bisexuals is deep-seated and mean-spirited. They are also loony. Senator Tom Cotton thinks gays should be grateful that Indiana does not execute them. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly compares gay right activists to anti-Christian terrorists. Televangelist Pat Robertson insists they will force Christians to like anal sex and bestiality. Former Arkansas governor, preacher, and perennial presidential candidate Mike Huckabee warns that they “won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel.”
Poor victimized Christian wingnuts! What is their problem? Besides their rich sexual fantasies, they honestly believe that their God gives them the right – no, the divine obligation – to tell the rest of us what we can and cannot do. They have over the years used their Gospel to give a religious seal of approval to slavery, segregation, inequality, imperial war, and discrimination against women, blacks, gays, Jews, Catholics, and Muslims. They try to use the power of the state to impose their religious edicts on private lives and public space. They trample other peoples’ freedom of religion – and from religion. They override the Constitutional separation of church and state. And they constantly push the United States to become “a Christian nation.” Anything less they take as a denial of their religious freedom.
Growing up among so many of these people in the American South, I had to fight to fend off their interference, which included burning a cross on my parents’ lawn. Less than saintly myself, I often felt tempted to tell them to their face, “Take your effing religion and shove it.” But my southern manners and friendship with Christian liberals stopped me from saying any such thing.
The Gospel of Vladimir Putin
Russia has taken its Christian Nationalism to equally scary depths, though in a different way. Unlike in Indiana, the pressure for going religious does not appear to have come from the flock. While some 72% of Russians identify as Orthodox Christians, according to Pew Research no more than one-in-ten said they attend religious services at least once a month. But this obvious indifference has not stopped nationalist politicians from using religion to strengthen an autocratic state and justify its political agenda, which currently includes opposition to a woman’s right to choose abortion and discrimination against gays and homosexual marriage. Such abominations offend what Russian president Vladimir Putin has called “the traditional values which we inherited from our forefathers.”
More interesting is how Putin uses religion to legitimize his nationalist desire to bring back into his fold the 25 million ethnic Russians whom the collapse of the Soviet Union left behind in newly independent countries like Ukraine or the Baltic nations. “Millions of Russians went to sleep in one country and woke up in another,” said Putin in a speech last March. These orphans of history are a large part of why as early as February 2004 he called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “anational tragedy on a massive scale.”
This, as I argued last week, is the significance of Crimea. In a film broadcast on Russian state television, Putin proudly announced that he had sent military intelligence and elite navy marines – his little green men – into Crimea to disarm the 20,000 Ukrainian troops located there. He said that he decided to annex Crimea on February 22-23, 2014, just at the point that he helped Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych escape from the American-led coup in Kiev. “We are forced to begin the work to bring Crimea back into Russia,” he told his defense and special services chiefs.
Nothing I’ve seen contradicts any of Putin’s claims in the film, but his December address to his federal assembly puts those claims in context. “Crimea is where our people live, and the peninsula is of strategic importance for Russia as the spiritual source of the development of a multifaceted but solid Russian nation and a centralized Russian state,” he told his parliament in December. “It was in Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus or Korsun, as ancient Russian chroniclers called it, that Grand Prince Vladimir was baptized before bringing Christianity to Rus.”
Crimea and Sevastopol, he declared, “have invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.”
Consider how tightly this fits with the decidedly non-religious warning that Putin sent to the US and its allies even before the Americans unleashed their coup against Yanukovych. His messenger was the economist Sergey Glazyev, his point man on Ukraine, who addressed the same conference in Crimea at which Bill and Hillary Clinton gave their blessing to Ukraine’s proposed integration into the European Union. This was in September 2013.
As I described a year ago, Glazyev explicitly warned the international conferees that Russia would respond with economic counter-measures, as it had already begun to do. He then told Western media that EU integration would cause separatist movements to spring up in the Russian-speaking east and south of Ukraine, and that this could cause Russia to consider voiding the bilateral treaty that delineated the borders between the two countries. Russia, he said, would be legally entitled to support the breakaway regions.
Between Glazyev’s detailed warnings and Putin’s celebration of Crimea and Sevastopol as Russia’s Temple Mount, it is obvious that the Russian leader had long had his eye on Eastern Ukraine and the historic territory of Crimea. His foresight turned out to be strategically justified, even as it destabilized the region and added to the threat of nuclear war. Why, I wonder, do so many of Putin’s supporters in the West ignore all this and continue to deny his calculated, largely covert, and brilliantly executed intervention?
Even more perplexing is how President Obama and his allies processed Putin’s unmistakable intent. Did they fall asleep at the switch? Did they not care? Or did they consciously want to start a new Cold War? I’m still trying to document a solid answer, but the beginning of wisdom is to understand a simple fact of bureaucratic life. The decision to press ahead with a second Orange Revolution in Ukraine would almost certainly have come from the highest levels of Obama’s National Security Council, and not from neo-con underlings like Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland or the longtime president of the National Endowment of Democracy, Carl Gershman.
Baldly put, this is Obama’s Cold War, and sensible people everywhere should demand that he undo the damage before Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, or someone even more hawkish makes the conflict worse. If Obama can deal with a theocratic Iran, he can pull back from the brink with a nationalistic Russia, as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan managed to do with the Communist-led Soviet Union. The longer Obama waits and the more he and NATO pursue the present confrontation, the more Putin’s Christian Nationalism will dominate Russia and other countries he brings into its orbit.
The Illusions of Laicité
In the days following the January massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris, French leaders loudly celebrated “the Republican value of laicité,” a separation of church and state far more thorough-going than in the United States. No president here would ever end a speech, à la Obama, with “God bless you, and God bless the French Republic.”
Part of this comes from the French Constitution, which requires the state to remain “laique,” or secular. A 1905 law on the Separation of Church and State lays out how to keep the church – primarily the Catholic Church – out of the state’s business and, though less so, how to keep the state out of establishing a state religion or favoring one religion over another. The dominant culture reinforces all this, encouraging people to keep their religion in their private lives and out of the public square.
According to the ideal of laicité, the state treats all French citizens as equal, without any concern for their race or religion. In fact, no one knows with any precision how many Muslims or Jews live in France because census-takers are prohibited from asking.
The reality is less exalted. Laicité has always discriminated against newcomers, and today that primarily means Muslims. Under the 1905 law, local governments own all religious buildings, which works fine for Catholics, the vast majority of whom rarely attend the tens of thousands of churches the state maintains for them. Muslims have a problem. They must first find funding for new mosques and prayer rooms, and they have to get building permits, which few local governments are eager to grant.
This is laicité at work, and it encourages radicalization, said government minister Thierry Mandon, who is trying to deal with the problem. “There aren't enough mosques in France," he told iTele, France’s TV news channel. "There are still too many towns where the Muslim religion is practiced in conditions that are not decent."
"The more you let the Muslims of France pray in cellars and garages,” he said, “the more you hold a mirror up to discrimination that is the basis of anger and fertile ground for radicalization."
The overcrowding often causes Muslim worshippers to flow into the streets, which Marine Le Pen began protesting as far back as 2010, when she was still vice president of her father’s Front National. Likening the Muslims blocking traffic to an occupation of French territory, she signaled the new direction in which she is now leading the party. Bash Muslims. Defend France. And stand aside from the Nazis, whose Holocaust her father Jean-Marie has once again gone out of his way to minimize as merely a “detail” of history.
Laicité’s contribution to Marine Le Pen and the radicalization of Muslims gained strength from 2004, when President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center right and the center-left Socialists both supported a new law banning the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in French public schools. The ban included large Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps, and Sikh turbans, but the primary targets were Muslim girls wearing traditional hijabs, or scarves. The two main Republican parties subsequently extended the bans to prohibit Muslim women from wearing in public places their fuller scarves, or nijabs, and full body and face cloaks, or burkas. Few French Muslim girls or women wore these garments, and the mainstream parties were politicizing laicité to win back voters from the Front National. Sarkozy was competing for right-wing traditionalists long attracted to Christian Nationalism and its built-in bias against Muslims. The Socialists were looking to formerly left-wing workers who blamed the Muslims and other immigrants for the country’s economic woes.
This was the nasty truth. Even as a matter of policy, denying Muslim women the right to wear what they wanted or thought religiously necessary hardly helped keep the state secular in any way that made any sense to my admittedly American mind. French Muslims had a more pointed response. They took the bans as a purposeful poke in the eye, which further radicalized a small but significant minority. Equally important, the debates over the various bans created an enormous furor, which legitimized the Front National’s Christian Nationalism with its more extensive Muslim-bashing.
This support for religious extremism continues, as neither of the parties shows any indication of turning away. Sarkozy has supported these and more recent anti-Muslim measures to greatly enhance his chances of regaining the presidency in 2017, while the Socialists have dug themselves so deeply into their denial of freedom that they have nowhere else to go either politically or ideologically.
Quid Pro Quo?
Remember Mediapart, the French online media group created by Edwy Plenel, the former editor-in-chief of Le Monde? Back in November, they forced Marine le Pen and her father to admit that they had accepted “loans” from politically connected Russian banks to finance their campaign expenses. The loans enabled the Front National to run candidates in last month’s local election across France, which gives Marine Le Pen a strong grass-roots organization to wage regional elections in December and her 2017 campaign for president.
Now Mediapart has added a new twist, suggesting that Putin made the money available at least in part to thank the Le Pens for supporting his annexation of Crimea. Their evidence? A hack attack by a Russian data-leaking group called Anonymous International against Timur Prokopenko, deputy chief of the Kremlin’s internal policy department and former co-president of the youth wing of Putin’s United Russia party. The hackers claim to have accessed Prokopenko’s mobile phone and email account, and to have published some 40,000 of his SMS messages on their website Shaltay Boltay, which is the Russian name for Humpty Dumpty. Some of these leaked messages refer to Marine Le Pen.
“There seems little doubt about their authenticity,” wrote Mediapart. “Nikolay Molibog, the chief executive officer of newspaper and television company RBC, has already confirmed on his Facebook page that the messages are genuine.” Molibog was apparently referring only to messages between Prokopenko and himself.
My graduate school Russia is far too rusty to probe the website or Molibog’s Facebook page for myself, but my previous experience with Mediapart leads me accept their professional judgment. Readers will have to decide for themselves.
According to Mediapart, the SMS messages about Marine Le Pen started on March 10, 2014, six days before the referendum in Crimea. Prokopenko texted “Kostia,” whom Anonymous International identified as Konstantin Rykov, a former member of parliament for Putin’s United Russia. Prokopenko asks if Kostia can get Marine Le Pen to come to Crimea as an observer of the referendum. “We really need it,” he writes. “I told my boss you were in contact with her????”
“Yes,” replies Kostia, “I’ll try and find out tomorrow.”
The following day Kostia reported that Marine was busy campaigning in local elections, but had responded positively. “Today or tomorrow the Front National will officially adopt its position on Crimea,” writes Kostia. “We’ll know then if she is prepared (which is unlikely) to come to Crimea or if one of her deputies will come.”
“Oh, That’s great,” Prokopenko replies. “We can convince them …”
“About the funding no,” Kostia interjects.
“Thanks, very much,” says Prokopenko. “The ministry of foreign affairs will discuss it with her again.”
Kostia mentioned that Florian Philippot, the FN’s vice-president was thinking about coming. But Prokopenko returned to the question of money. “Has someone from the fund contacted you about the funding?” he asks.
“Yes, the vice-minister for foreign affairs will telephone,” Kostia replies.
“We also have the support of the Danish but I can’t discuss it with them,” says Prokopenko. “I don’t speak their language.”
The referendum was held, and Aymeric Chauprade, who was at the time Le Pen’s advisor on Foreign Affairs, turned up as an observer, though apparently not officially as a representative of the Front National. The following day, March 17, the two Russians exchanged texts once again.
“Marine Le Pen has officially recognized the results of the referendum in Crimea!” says one of them, probably Kostia.
“She hasn’t disappointed us ;)” says the other.
“The French need to be thanked in one manner or another,” says the first voice. “It’s important.”
“Yes, great!” says the other.
According to Mediapart, on April 14 Marine Le Pen went on a private visit to Moscow to meet with the chairman of the parliament, Sergey Naryshkin, a close Putin ally whom she had already met in June 2013. On April 18, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s funding association Cotelec received a 2 million euro loan from an offshoot of VEB Capital, a Russian state bank subsidiary. Aymeric Chauprade helped arrange the loan, which Jean-Marie used to advance funds to the FN’s candidates to the European parliament.
Then in September Marine received a 9 million euro loan from Moscow’s First Czech Russian Bank, which she used for the local elections last month. Was this the “thanks” that Prokopenko and Kostia discussed? Marine would not answer Mediapart’s question, but she later insisted that there was no quid pro quo.
Strangely enough, I’m prepared to believe her. As I think we’ll discover in the coming months, the Christian Nationalists of France and Russia will turn out to be much closer than that.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
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.
Taibbi writes: "Over the weekend, I picked up a new memoir by Bernie Kerik, the disgraced former corrections and police commissioner of New York City, who is now trying to reinvent himself as a prison reform advocate."
Matt Taibbi. (photo: Democracy Now!)
The Year's Most Disgusting Book
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
08 April 15
Former top cop Bernard Kerik's bleeding-heart prison memoir is a Matterhorn of hypocrisy
ver the weekend, I picked up a new memoir by Bernie Kerik, the disgraced former corrections and police commissioner of New York City, who is now trying to reinvent himself as a prison reform advocate.
There's no way to explain how awful the new Kerik book is without first comparing it to its opposite cousin in the annals of cop-turned-inmate autobiographies: Will, the amazing rise-and-fall-and-rise memoir of crypto-fascist Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy.
When I was in my early teens, some mischievous adult gave me Liddy's book, and it changed my life. I couldn't stand Liddy's politics – not many sane people can – but his life story was powerfully written, weirdly touching, inspirational. And the ending featured the kind of fantastical plot twist that only real life can provide.
Liddy, a lifelong law enforcement goon, spent his whole early adulthood crafting a tough guy persona to match his loony rightist-paranoia ethos, only to be tossed in post-middle age in federal prison, where all his paranoid fantasies suddenly become reality.
And he loved it there. If you believe the book, Liddy flourished as an inmate, finding himself as a person and hilariously leading prison revolts, executing Watergate-style break-ins into prison offices, lying in wait for shank-fights and becoming one of the most prolific jailhouse lawyers of all time.
In sum, and in advance of a comparison to Kerik's book, consider the following. G. Gordon Liddy as a civilian D.A., F.B.I. agent and White House spook was a merciless zero-tolerance law-and-order zealot, but when he himself got tossed in jail for leading the Watergate burglary, you didn't see him suddenly expressing surprise that prison is a brutal, vicious, unfair experience.
He didn't, in other words, emerge from prison a weeping, shuffling, conscience-stricken shell of himself, renouncing everything he ever stood for and begging for forgiveness. Liddy was a monster, but he at least had the decency to know what it meant to throw someone in prison before he himself had to do time.
Enter Bernie Kerik, who with this month's publication of Holy Shit: I Was Wrong About Everything For Like Thirty Straight Years (it's actually called From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey From Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #8488-054) will now go down as the most fugazi tough guy in the history of New York.
Kerik, like his longtime political patron Rudy Giuliani, had a stratospheric rise through local law enforcement ranks, but saw his career falter at the federal level.
He was a city cop in the Eighties, then made a brief jump to a federal narcotics task force before finally latching on to Giuliani, who made him Corrections Commissioner and then Police Commissioner during the nineties and early 2000s, the heyday of the stop-and-frisk crackdown on street crime.
Like Giuliani, he made a big impression on America during 9/11. He managed to leverage his work as police commissioner during the terrorist crisis into a key federal appointment in the Bush years.
Kerik, who throughout his public life affected the look of a preposterous caricature of a political strongman, with a shaved-skull-and-mustache combo that came across as a goofball mix of Mussolini and Anton LaVey, was the guy we sent to rebuild the police forces in occupied Iraq. The Iraqis must have thought we were nuts. It's a surprise he didn't force the IPs to wear leather jerkins.
When he returned, George Bush nominated him to head the Homeland Security department. But Kerik suddenly withdrew from consideration under an avalanche of corruption charges.
It was the usual stuff for a corrupt city hack – ties to organized crime, contractors working on the house in exchange for handouts, affairs, tax evasion, etc. Kerik denied it all, vowing to "battle" the accusations the way he'd fought the terrorists on 9/11.
But it was all true, of course, and he eventually got hit with a smorgasbord of tax and fraud charges and sent up for four years of federal time.
That experience provided most of the fodder for this book, which appears now in pop culture as a liberal-friendly call for a reform of the corrections system.
You will see Kerik doing the book-tour circuit in the upcoming weeks. He will be pushing for lots of objectively good things, like reduced or eliminated sentences for nonviolent offenders, restored rights for felons (including, significantly, the right to run for office), relaxed sentencing guidelines and a whole lot of feel-good religion about the excesses of the drug war.
Kerik's change of heart about prison is nothing new. In 2011, just a few short years after he had attempted to lie his way into one of the most powerful intelligence/enforcement positions in the entire world, Kerik had the balls to send a "white paper" to Eric Holder calling for a sweeping reform of the justice system, which he said was in "dire need" of repair.
By then, you see, Kerik had done time, and he must have figured Eric Holder would be just as surprised as he apparently was to learn that prison sucks.
Among the revelations in this incredible "white paper," a landmark in the annals of cluelessness and chutzpah, is that not all people in prison are bad:
I have learned that just because these men are here in prison, they are not all "bad" men. Some are… some had no clue they were even doing anything wrong. Most would give anything to turn back time to make it right.
You see, Mr. Attorney General, there are people in prison who are sorry! Who knew?
When the Justice Department blew him off, Kerik took his case to the airwaves, among other things giving interviews to Matt Lauer in which he revealed that prison sentences for minor nonviolent drug crimes were – wait for it – excessive!
"I was with men sentenced to 10 years in prison for five grams of cocaine," he said. "That's insane. That's insane."
Remember, this is a person who had not only worked in a federal drug task force but had been a key part of the zero-tolerance policies that needlessly created criminal records for hundreds of thousands of people during the "broken windows" period of New York's crime crackdown.
The idea that Kerik needed to get sent to prison to realize people were doing 10 years for selling sugar-pack-sized quantities of coke is… Well, it's either absurd or extraordinarily offensive. Where the hell did he think he was sending all of those people? Busch Gardens?
The world mostly responded to Kerik's 2013 protestations with a half-disgusted shiver (even Lauer seemed anxious to creep sideways away from Kerik during his interview), but that didn't cool Kerik's ardor for bringing America the ugly truth about incarceration.
The public must be informed! And by a formerly-credible white person! And so we get this latest work, a book-length recitation of the same ideas Kerik sent to the (probably) incredulous Eric Holder back in 2011.
This swindling, tax-evading, philandering slimeball, whose reptilian greed and ambition very nearly put the entire country in mortal danger (imagine the possibilities of someone with so much blackmail material in his past being put in charge of the Department of Homeland Security) actually has the gall to start off one of the early chapters by announcing to the reader what a wonderful, patriotic person he is:
I've been called arrogant, obnoxious and defiant by my critics. But I'm also fair, generous and sentimental, particularly when it comes to matters of the heart, my family, my wife and children, and my country…
The hallmark of any good memoir is honesty, and this book is totally devoid of it. A good book by Bernie Kerik would have been a no-holds barred account of the Sopranos-style corruption that Kerik knew all about from the inside, getting mob-connected Jersey contractors to renovate his Riverdale co-op and pay nine grand a month in rent. Or he could have provided fascinating insights into the inner workings of the Giuliani administration, or Iraq under L. Paul Bremer, the Republican Party, the defense contracting community, etc.
Instead, Jailer to Jailed spends most of its pages either pushing Kerik's saccharine observations about the unforgiving nature of the prison system, or hyping Kerik's pre-prison career accomplishments.
There's even a whole chapter about how awesome and prisoner-friendly Rikers Island became under his management, how he spread the word that just because someone is a suspect or a prisoner, you shouldn't "treat them like shit." Not only that, he worked hard to bring some feng shui to America's biggest jail:
We cleaned up Rikers and the other city jails, painting over the graffiti, much of it gang-related, putting in more lights and fans… I introduced crisper uniforms, lending a paramilitary pride to the officers…
It's a con job. One of the most enthusiastic jailers in recent memory is trying to use some obvious truths about the insane overreach of America's urban police system (a system he helped create) as currency to buy his way back to public life. And if people aren't careful, it'll work, and Bernie Kerik will end up being put in charge of some commission to rehabilitate America's prisons, and in short order he'll have someone else renovating his next co-op.
Gordon Liddy was strong enough for jail and strong enough to look himself in the mirror, which is why his book was so great. Bernie Kerik fails both tests. As commissioner he doled out about a million years in prison to (mostly poor) New Yorkers. but he himself couldn't do four without running to weep on Matt Lauer's shoulder. And a thousand lies later, he still wants to be taken seriously as a public voice. What a joke. Take your medicine and be quiet.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Wednesday, 08 April 2015 08:34
Ash writes: "There is a scandal involving a major American urban police department that is going almost entirely ignored."
'The tradition of violent racists infiltrating American police agencies has a rich history.' (photo: SF Gate)
Bullwhips Crackin' in Northern California
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
08 April 15
here is a scandal involving a major urban American police department that is going almost entirely ignored.
San Francisco evokes images of hippies, gay tolerance, and world class dining. It is viewed as the most liberal major American city. But there is another, darker side to San Francisco and the region that surrounds it.
It began with a federal investigation into allegations of corruption. Ultimately San Francisco police officers would be charged with stealing cash and other property from a wide range of suspects. One of the officers charged, Reynaldo Vargas, would later testify, “If I saw something I wanted, I took it.”
Vargas and other officers would also implicate a colleague who would emerge as a central player and focus of the investigation and subsequent trail: Sergeant Ian Furminger.
Furminger and Officer Edmond Robles were both convicted of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit theft, theft of more than $5,000 worth of property from a federally funded program, and another charge, conspiracy against civil rights.
From all appearances, it looked like a disturbing but otherwise fairly routine tale of cops gone bad in the big city. But there was another, far more explosive component contained in the evidence. Something that would put the entire department on trial.
As part of their investigation into corruption charges, the FBI had obtained copies of Furminger’s phone records including, most notably, his text messages. What was contained in the messages made the corruption problems pale in comparison:
“We got two blacks at my boys [sic] school and they are brother and sister! There cause dad works for the school district and I am watching them like hawks.”
In response to a text asking, “Do you celebrate quanza [sic] at your school?” Furminger wrote: “Yeah we burn the cross on the field! Then we celebrate Whitemas.”
“Its [sic] worth every penny to live here [Walnut Creek] away from the savages.”
“Those guys are pretty stupid! Ask some dumb ass questions you would expect from a black rookie! Sorry if they are your buddies!”
“The buffalo soldier was why the Indians Wouldnt [sic] shoot the niggers that found for the confederate They [sic] thought they were sacred buffalo and not human.”
“Gunther Furminger was a famous slave auctioneer.”
“My wife has 2 friends over that don't know each other the cool one says to me get me a drink nigger not knowing the other is married to one just happened right now LMFAO.”
“White power.”
In response to a text saying “Niggers should be spayed,” Furminger wrote, “I saw one an hour ago with 4 kids.”
“I am leaving it like it is, painting KKK on the sides and calling it a day!”
“Cross burning lowers blood pressure! I did the test myself!”
In response to a text saying “All niggers must fucking hang,” Furminger wrote, “Ask my 6 year old what he thinks about Obama.”
In response to a text saying “Just boarded train at Mission/16th,” Furminger wrote, “Ok, just watch out for BM’s [black males].”
In response to a text from another SFPD officer regarding the promotion of a black officer to sergeant, Furminger wrote: “Fuckin nigger.”
It’s Not Against the Law to Put an Animal Down
There was yet another exchange: Furminger comments to another SFPD officer, “I hate to tell you this but my wife friend [sic] is over with their kids and her husband is black! If [sic] is an Attorney but should I be worried?” The other officer responds, “Get ur pocket gun. Keep it available in case the monkey returns to his roots. Its [sic] not against the law to put an animal down.” To which Furminger responds, “Well said!”
The reality is that it really isn’t against the law to put an animal, or a human being defined as an animal, down as long as it is the law doing it.
As half the Police Department of the City of Cleveland, Ohio, defied the orders of their commanders chasing unarmed Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, firing 137 shots at them and ultimately executing them at point-blank range, surely they could not have seen Russell and Williams as human beings.
As 12-year-old Tamir Rice lay dying on the snow-covered playground, the officer who had just shot him and his partner refused to allow Tamir’s mother and sister come to him. They threatened Tamir’s mother, Samaria, with arrest and literally tackled 14-year-old Tajai to prevent her from getting to her dying brother’s side. The same remorse, the same concern, the same dignity they would have afforded an animal.
Jessie Hernandez was a beautiful 17-year-oldlesbian, hispanic girl. She was also joy-riding in a stolen car. Although no evidence exists to support their claims, the Denver police say that they feared for their lives and that is why they shot Jessie through the heart, both lungs, her liver, her pelvis, and her leg. As her body struggled for life, the police dragged her unconscious from the car, threw her face down on the ground, and handcuffed her. She was unarmed. An animal they had just put down.
In a scene from the 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning, an FBI agent asks a young African American boy for any shred of information that could shed light on what might have happened to missing civil rights workers Michael (Mickey) Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. The boy simply replies, “You should start with the sheriff’s office.” Indeed, all three men were abducted and murdered by Neshoba County, Mississippi, sheriff's deputies acting under “color of law.” Put down just as though they were animals.
The tradition of violent racists infiltrating American police agencies has a rich history. While 20th century southern law enforcement agencies attracted the most attention for harboring racist elements, racist and homophobic individuals are deeply embedded in law enforcement throughout the U.S. to this day.
San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr so far has set the number of officers engaging in racist or homophobic remarks at eight, including a captain. But that’s just what Suhr is prepared to talk about publicly. Suhr is calling for their resignations.
However, roughly one hundred miles northeast of San Francisco in the state’s capital, Sacramento, there is another case with equally troubling racial overtones. African American community civil rights activist Maile Hampton is charged by Sacramento Police with the crime of lynching. The logic they apply is that Hampton attempted to pull a fellow demonstrator from the grasp of a police officer. The charge stems from the language in a 1933 law that was originally intended to mitigate real lynchings by angry mobs who would forcibly remove detainees from police custody, often resulting vigilante-style murders.
Applying this law to demonstrators who are often demanding an end to racist police practices has become a favorite tactic of California police. An exacerbation of existing racial tensions, with intent, again under “color of law.”
FBI investigators rather stumbled into the original racist text messages by Ian Furminger as part of a corruption investigation. The sentiments expressed by Furminger and at least eight other SFPD officers are now in the public record.
It is certainly the tip – not the iceberg.
Marc Ash was formerly the founder and Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
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.
Galindez writes: "The effort by the people campaigning for Elizabeth Warren to run for president is having a positive impact, if only by pushing the rest of the Presidential candidates to become more progressive. If Warren does enter the race, we'll have a real debate on the issues important to millions of Americans."
Moumita Ahmed, left, and Emiljana Ulaj hold signs urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president. (photo: CNN)
Warren Says She Won't Run, What Now?
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
7 April 15
n St. Patrick’s Day, in Boston, “Hail to the Chief” filled the room as Elizabeth Warren made her way to the podium. The woman who introduced her stopped the music and said that was a song for 2017. Warren ignored the reference and delivered a round of jokes to the annual St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast. She was very good at poking fun at her colleagues, something that will come in handy when she addresses the Correspondents Dinner … Wait, she’s not running.
Okay, she said she won’t run – not once but twice this week. I am almost convinced. Think about it: If she doesn’t want to leave the door open to a run, then why not call MoveOn and tell them to move on. Why not issue a press release telling her supporters that while she is flattered, they should put their energy into getting another Democrat elected president?
John Cassidy, in a piece in the New Yorker, points out that MoveOn is not giving up and is organizing a major event in New York this month. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard professor who started a super PAC to try to pressure politicians on campaign finance reform, will give a “TED-style talk” on April 20th on why Warren should run for president. Lessig will be joined by former Obama administration official Van Jones and Zephyr Teachout, who ran for governor of New York. Brian Stewart, MoveOn’s media-relations director, played down the “Today” show interview, writing, “Sen. Warren has repeatedly made clear that she doesn’t plan to run – that’s why we’re running a draft campaign. We are calling on her to run because we believe our country will be better off if she does.”
In a local television piece in Boston, NECN asks why Warren is not calling off the draft movement.
One possible explanation is that Warren is keeping her options open. She could be positioning herself to be the fallback option if Hillary Clinton implodes. The email scandal is an example of what could happen to derail the Clinton campaign. Clinton’s approval ratings have been falling in recent weeks. While she is holding a 50% approval rating, the worrisome number is 48% view her in a negative light. That leaves very little margin of error. With a swing of only a couple of percentage points, she is in negative territory.
So let’s say we hit July and Clinton’s approval ratings slump while she is on the campaign trail and party leaders start to panic. What if it’s not just progressives who are encouraging Warren to get into the race? What if the big funders start calling for Warren to jump in to save the party? And what if the polls start showing Jeb Bush or another Republican like Scott Walker leading Clinton in the polls? The structure put in place by the Run Warren Run folks would make it a lot easier for Elizabeth Warren to jump in late and put together a formidable organization. Remember, the Run Warren Run staff and volunteers are already phone-banking and identifying Warren supporters. No other campaign has started to do that yet.
I don’t believe that Warren is planning to run at this point, but I do think she is keeping all options on the table. Maybe it is only for leverage to influence the debate. We already have Martin O’Malley sounding like he wants to win over the Warren supporters.
Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee said, "What we are trying to do is incentivize Hillary Clinton and anyone else who may chose to run for president to campaign on many of the economic populist issues that Elizabeth Warren and others have championed."
Warren herself told Rachel Maddow of MSNBC on Wednesday that she would press Clinton – and any other candidates – on issues like student loan debt and Wall Street reform.
Pay close attention to the interview above. The case Elizabeth Warren made for staying in the Senate was a case for what she could do in the White House. Congressional oversight does not have as much influence on government agencies as the executive oversight of the Presidency. If Warren were president, the secretary of labor, secretary of education, and the banking regulators would work for and could be hired and fired by her. She is right, however, that it is the issues that are most important.
So maybe that will be all there is to it. The threat of a Warren candidacy may influence Hillary enough to get her to address the issues that will motivate Warren supporters to support the former first lady. Or if the former secretary of state doesn’t heed the call, that door, only barely open right now, could swing wide open – and Elizabeth Warren might walk through and enter the race after all.
Whatever the answer is, the effort by the Run Warren Run folks is having a positive impact on the race. If the effect is only to influence the rest of the presidential candidates on the issues, then it is worth supporting. If in the end the effort succeeds, and Warren enters the race, then we have a real debate on the issues important to millions of Americans. We win either way.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
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.
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n a late spring evening eight years ago, police pulled over my mother’s 1997 Oldsmobile Aurora, in the suburb of St. Ann, Missouri, as she raced to pick up a relative from St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport. “Do you know why I stopped you?” the officer asked. “No I don’t,” my mother answered. The police charged her with speeding, but she did not receive a mere ticket. Instead, an officer ran my mother’s name and told her that since she had failed to appear in court for driving without a license, there was a six-year-old warrant out for her arrest. “I just started crying. I couldn’t believe it,” my mother said. The police arrested her and hauled her off to St. Louis County Jail, where authorities eventually allowed her one phone call, which she placed to my stepfather. He said, shaking his head, “I was surprised because I knew she didn’t have no warrants.”
ndiana tries to defend the “religious freedom” of conservative Christians to discriminate against same-sex couples. Russia similarly discriminates against gays in the name of religion, while its Orthodox Christianity plays an unexpectedly large role in the country’s growing nationalism. France has a legally mandated separation of church and state, or laicité, which contrary to its stated purpose ends up promoting both Islamic radicalism and the Christian Nationalism of Marine Le Pen’s Front National.
here is a scandal involving a major urban American police department that is going almost entirely ignored.
