Police, prison and abolition

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Trump Reverses Trend Away From the Death Penalty
By John Kiriakou - June 19, 2025 0


[Source: the-sun.com]

Executive orders will ensure more executions
If you were wondering about changes in the use of the death penalty at either the state or federal level since Donald Trump reassumed the presidency, well, wonder no more. On his very first day as president, Trump signed an executive order directing the Attorney General “to seek the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” This includes two specific circumstances—when the victim is a law enforcement officer or when the murder is committed “by an alien illegally present in this country.”

Trump’s executive order does not stop there. It goes on to “encourage state attorneys general and district attorneys to bring state capital charges for all capital crimes with special attention to” crimes against law enforcement officers or by undocumented migrants. Oddly, it instructs the Attorney General to rehouse death row inmates “in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes.” And finally, it instructs the Attorney General to ensure that states have “a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injections.”

Joe Biden, in the waning days of his presidency, commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row and, indeed, not only were no executions carried out by the federal government during his presidency, he had instructed Attorney General Merrick Garland to stop using pentobarbital to execute prisoners, saying that there was “significant uncertainly about whether the use of the drug is humane.” Trump has reversed all of that.

The trend over the past decade has been away from the death penalty at the state level. While 27 states still have a death penalty on the books, states like Pennsylvania, California, Colorado and Oregon have open-ended moratoriums on the death penalty, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has asked the state legislature to ban the punishment. The request has broad bipartisan support. Furthermore, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire and North Carolina have not executed a prisoner in more than a decade.

That position is not universal across the country, however. In March, Brad Sigmon, a 67-year-old double murderer, was executed by firing squad in South Carolina. State authorities actually allowed him to choose his method of execution. Besides the firing squad, the other choices were lethal injection or the electric chair. So at 6:05 p.m. on March 7, three state corrections officers who volunteered for the job fired simultaneously at a target placed over Sigmon’s heart. He was killed instantly. And the execution continued a trend of 49 consecutive years with no South Carolina governor ever granting clemency.


Protests outside the execution of South Carolina inmate Brad Sigmon on March 7 in Columbia, South Carolina. [Source: cnn.com]

In Alabama, Republican Governor Kay Ivey issued the first commutation of a death sentence in the state in 26 years when she converted the death sentence of Robin “Rocky” Dion Myers, 63, to life without parole. She said that she “didn’t buy” his protestations of innocence. But police never found a murder weapon, any physical evidence, or any DNA tying him to the crime. Although the jury found him guilty, they asked the judge to spare his life. The judge sentenced him to death anyway. And by the way, the victim of the crime lived for several hours after being stabbed, and the victim’s cousin also was a witness to the crime. They lived across the street from Myers, but never said that he was the person who committed the crime.


Robin “Rocky” Dion Myers [Source: al.com]

Louisiana and Arizona last year seemed to hedge their bets in the presidential election by approving something called nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution, since Joe Biden would not let them have pentobarbital (sedative barbiturate capabe of killing inmates). Nitrogen hypoxia is pumped through a mask over the prisoner’s face, depriving him of oxygen. His lungs fill with nitrogen and he chokes to death.

The method is now approved for use in Mississippi, in addition to Louisiana and Arizona.


Kenneth Eugene Smith [Source: apnews.com]

Alabama executed a prisoner, Kenneth Eugene Smith, using nitrogen hypoxia in January. Eyewitnesses said that he held his breath for as long as he could, then began “to shake and writhe on the gurney for at least two minutes” before dying. Governor Ivey said that was exactly what the state expected to happen. But witnesses said afterward that it was nothing less than human experimentation.

And what about Trump’s demand that death row prisoners be housed in the worst possible conditions? That is unconstitutional on its face. But with that said, such facilities are quite common. Just in a most recent example, the Justice Department found in November that the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta had “abysmal conditions” that were both “illegal and unconstitutional.”


Kay Ivey [Source: annistonstar.com]

These conditions, which have not been corrected, include out-of-control violence, with seven prisoners stabbed in one 24-hour period while Justice Department officials were in the facility doing their study. Other objectionable conditions included minors being held in solitary confinement, rats and cockroaches running freely in the food preparation areas and cells, rampant violence by guards, and substandard medical care.


[Source: fox5atlanta.com]

Perhaps Trump will send his prisoners to Alabama’s Walker County Jail, where a prisoner was recently found dead in his cell in solitary confinement with a body temperature of 72 degrees.

Anthony Mitchell froze to death in his cell when guards held him naked for two weeks in a feces-and-trash-filled cell called “the freezer” because they could—and did—open it to the winter weather outside. A lawsuit compared Mitchell’s cell to a dog kennel.


Anthony Mitchell [Source: meaww.com]

We are headed into a tough four years with Donald Trump. There are some great organizations out there fighting the death penalty, like the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the Death Penalty Information Center, the Innocence Project, the American Civil Liberties Union, Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights and many others.

We must all work together, along with state and federal legislators, to put this abomination behind us.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... h-penalty/

We must work to destroy the extant state.

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‘We need groceries, not gun-slinging police’: Baltimore cops execute beloved Arabber ‘BJ’ Abdullah
July 6, 2025 Joy B. and Lev Koufax


The northwest Baltimore community marched demanding justice for BJ Abdullah and an end to racist police terror. SLL photos.

In the wake of Bilal “BJ” Abdullah’s execution at the hands of the Baltimore Police Department, organizers with the Baltimore People’s Power Assembly spoke with members of the community who knew BJ and had spent their entire lives in the neighborhood where the cops executed Bilal. PPA Organizer Joy B grew up just around the corner from the Upton metro station, where the deadly police shooting occurred.

Abdullah was 36 years old and well-known in the community due to his profession as an “Arabber,” or fruit and vegetable vendor. The Black neighborhoods of Northwest Baltimore are infamous for being food deserts, with little access to fresh produce due to the lack of supermarkets in Sandtown-Winchester, Upton, and Reservoir Hill. Arrabers like BJ are some of these communities’ only thread to fresh produce.

Commonly known in the neighborhood as “the fruit man,” BJ was well-liked in the community directly around the metro station where he was killed. The Upton neighborhood has long suffered from neo-Jim Crow policies like redlining, white flight, and racist police terror. The people who live in the neighborhood understand this reality. They know that instead of corruption, poverty, and police murder, this country’s resources should be invested in health care, education, and jobs.


PPA organizer Joy B discusses the issues in the community with Upton street vendors.
Issues in the community

Joy B. and Lev Koufax spoke to two street vendors and community leaders in Upton at length about the issues in the community, including the police killing of BJ. One of the men we spoke to was named Twin, the other Archie. Both are lifelong Baltimoreans and were on the block when the cops fired 38 shots, killing BJ.

Both men lamented the death of BJ as part of a bigger problem of complete disinvestment in the community, except for a foreign occupier police department. Mr. Archie spoke to the need for large-scale investment in the neighborhood’s historic Avenue Market. The market served as the commercial and social hub of a thriving Black community from the late 19th to the mid-20th Century. Due to capitalist disinvestment in Black business and social programs, the conditions in the neighborhood have deteriorated into poverty, crime, and widespread drug addiction.

Mr. Archie commented on this, saying, “Now that the Avenue has seen a winding down in investment, it’s not an entrepreneurial strip. It’s a drug strip. It’s what I call a Skidrow strip. Yes, back in the day, the Avenue was the Avenue. … but now there is like a dark cloud on the Avenue. Whatever is here within walking distance is all we can utilize because a lot of people don’t have the luxury of transportation.”

Mr. Archie emphasized that if the community is going to get back on its feet, then the market needs to be reconstructed and renovated, and the profits from that new market should be invested back into the Black community. Mr. Archie expanded on this, wondering why money paid in taxes isn’t invested back to the people:

“When you have so much money allocated in the government’s [budget], what are you doing with it?” He went on, “I’m looking to the ones that are spiritual witnesses in high places, who have the money and the allocations to change this mess!”

Capitalist greed

As seen with the killing of BJ, the capitalist’s response to the social problems that its own greed created is not compassion, or health care, or social investment – its response is pure brutal, racist apartheid. Instead of the required change and investment that Mr. Archie is talking about, the city and state governments confront social problems in the Black community with the end of a gun.

Mr. Twin knew BJ personally and also spoke to the issues highlighted by Mr. Archie. He spoke more specifically about the consistent racist conduct of the Baltimore police over the years and how this conduct always targets the Black community:

“[The cops] come through here any kind of way they want. Do what they want. They don’t do that downtown, down in the Harbor, Fells Point, or Canton. Those neighborhoods have the resources we don’t have.”

The neighborhoods Mr. Twin references as being the places where the police don’t treat the community poorly – Harbor East, Fells Point, and Canton – are all predominantly white and wealthy.

Mr. Twin also echoed Mr. Archie’s disgust at the lack of community engagement and investment from the government that employs brutal racist police instead of medical care, education, grocery stores, and union jobs. Mr. Twin specifically said, speaking about several Baltimore police and government officials, “They need to come through here! They need to see what is happening every day!”

Under this country’s capitalist system, the business-backed elected officials do not have the interests of the people at heart. As Mr. Twin is saying, this is why they refuse to really be in the communities that they supposedly represent. Instead of genuine engagement, the Black community is met with the murder of its beloved community figures, just like Bilal “BJ” Abdullah.

BJ Abdullah wasn’t a monster or a fiend. He was a person. He was a family man. He was a man of generosity, devotion, and faith. BJ’s humanity, and the humanity of all those under the gun of racist police terror – shouldn’t have to be stated, but in a system that constantly dehumanizes the Black community – it must be.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... -abdullah/

I should like to know the circumstances of this murder and lying excuses of the cops. 'A-rabs', as we called them when I was a kid in the early 60s were ubiquitous with their colorful wagons and small horses, some selling fruit, veggies or fresh caught seafood on ice, others collecting junk for resale to antique dealers. I never saw the racist cops of those days give one a hard time. And they were of the few black faces to be seen in my white 'ethnic' neighborhood prior to the 70s.

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Trump's Concentration Camps Are Not New to the U.S.

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 16 Jul 2025



Outrage over ICE raids rings hollow while 2 million languish in prisons. America has always had concentration camps. We just reserve our anger for the ones with TV cameras.

Donald Trump is perhaps unique among modern presidents in his determination to fulfill his very retrograde vision for the United States. He goes beyond the cajoling and arm twisting that other presidents were known for, and dispenses with precedent, the Congress and the law itself in order to realize a key part of his vision, getting as many Global South immigrants out of the U.S. as he possibly can.

He was quite serious about enacting a mass deportation policy. Immigrants attempting to follow the law and legalize their status are set upon in courtrooms by masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and are taken to detention facilities. Farm workers, construction workers and others are also hunted down in the businesses that employ them. Inevitably, U.S. citizens and other legal residents are also snatched up by ICE. The administration is demanding 3,000 arrests per day, an unrealistic number, and consequently, any attempt to reach it is a recipe for abuse and illegal acts.

In New York City, a youth baseball coach intervened when ICE agents questioned children in his charge. In Los Angeles, a phalanx of ICE officers descended on MacArthur Park in a search for new victims. No warrants are produced and Tom Homan, the official carrying out the effort, claims that the constitutional right to due process is now null and void.

In Florida, immigrants have been detained in a facility which is literally called Alligator Alcatraz. They are denied contact with family and attorneys and held in unsanitary conditions, served inedible food, and left without contact with the outside world.

Governor Ron DeSantis and the Department of Homeland Security play a convenient game of pointing fingers at one another as both avoid accountability regarding conditions in the facility and haven't relented even as members of Congress condemned its very existence during a recent tour.

Inevitably, a term has reemerged that has come to epitomize the inhumane treatment of marginalized people by those who are more powerful and willing to oppress and exploit them for their own nefarious ends. Suddenly, everyone in opposition to the mass deportation plan is speaking of “concentration camps.” The cruelty cannot be ignored, and the meaning of this terminology should not become the focus of debate. But there is a danger in practicing U.S. exceptionalism by selectively forgetting that concentration camps are not new in this country.

The U.S. holds 2 million people behind bars, more than any other country, and has led with that dubious distinction for decades. Those people are held in horrendous conditions. In a Virginia prison, men set themselves on fire in a desperate effort to relieve their plight.

Prisoners provide slave labor for states and for corporations. Prisons have no air conditioning in extreme heat and lag in providing medical care. The U.S. also has the most draconian sentences in the world and police forces across the country who kill indiscriminately and keep prisons full of people who are a profit center for others.

Concentration camps existed as indigenous people were forced from their homes in the Trail of Tears and during other atrocities. Their lands were stolen to make way for a slavery based plantation economy, which was replete with conditions such as torture, starvation, and inhumane working conditions that, today, would be akin to those in concentration camps. Japanese Americans were held in camps against their will during World War II.

The current moment is one that requires telling the truth about U.S. history. Exceptionalist rhetoric claiming that Trump has brought the nation to a new and unprecedented low point is dangerous nonsense.

The damage Trump has done will outlive his presidency. When he departs, his successor will probably enjoy a political honeymoon, regardless of the actions taken by that person. Relief that the orange man is gone will likely encourage the tendency for wishful thinking and selective amnesia, making the next concentration camp all the more likely to be created.

If people are so upset about governmental cruelty, they can start by dismantling the mass incarceration state that exists throughout the country. That would be excellent preparation for closing down Alligator Alcatraz. But there is little interest in doing so. There is full support, however, for keeping thousands of other Black and Brown people locked away in the carceral state. They exist in the background and most people in the country want them to stay that way. Outrage is reserved only when the oppression is more visible and is carried out by the villain of the day.

https://blackagendareport.com/trumps-co ... not-new-us

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Standing together against ICE and police brutality in Baltimore
August 4, 2025 Penny Pinotti



The phrase “juntos somos más fuertes,” meaning “together we are stronger,” encapsulates the message of the Peoples Power Assembly’s car caravan held on July 12.

The caravan of approximately 17 vehicles traversed Baltimore’s deeply segregated city, passing through predominantly Black neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester and predominantly Latine neighborhoods like Highlandtown.

The cars in the caravan led chants and played protest songs in both Spanish and English. As the cars drove past, residents of Baltimore peered out their windows and stopped on the sidewalks to wave or raise a fist in solidarity.

The chants of the caravan echoed the sentiments of the talks given at the parking lot before the procession: With solidarity, we can stand up to the violence used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and police that terrorize our community.

The struggles of the Black and Brown communities are not separate; the police brutality against the Black community and the violence that ICE uses to abduct and deport members of the migrant community are the same tactics.

The speech from an organizer with the Peoples Power Assembly that kicked off the event is presented here:

I want to thank you all for coming out and showing up for the community. Today, I will be providing a brief update on Kilmar Ábrego García as well as speaking about the other racist actions the government has taken against the Latinx community.

As you may know, Kilmar Ábrego García was wrongfully arrested by ICE and deported to CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador that is notorious for human rights violations. His deportation was hasty and did not allow time for any sort of due process. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government needed to facilitate Mr. Ábrego Garcia’s release from CECOT and his return to the States, the Trump administration claimed it had no power to do so.

However, the federal government magically found the authority to bring Kilmar back to the U.S. in June so they could put him on trial for alleged human trafficking, based on a traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022. Mr. Ábrego Garcia pleaded not guilty to these charges.

An assistant director of ICE, Thomas Giles, testified that if Kilmar is released on bond from Tennessee, he will be detained by ICE and deported to a third country: either Mexico or South Sudan. Ábrego Garcia’s legal team is asking for a 72-hour notice before deportation if he is released from jail and detained by ICE. Right now, we are awaiting the Judge’s ruling.

Let’s be clear: ICE arrested and deported Kilmar to what is essentially a torture facility because of his skin color, and they have him awaiting a criminal trial now to cover up their mistakes. We need to act and make our voices heard for Kilmar and for the members of our community targeted.

Speaking of deportations to South Sudan, ICE deported eight men there: seven of the men are from Cuba, Laos, Myanmar, and Mexico, while only one is from South Sudan. These men were held in a shipping container in Djibouti before being sent to South Sudan, where they are now in the custody of the government in South Sudan.

As seen by the mass arrests and deportations by ICE, Kilmar’s story is not an exception. ICE is targeting people based on skin color and has arrested citizens and people with residency. The racist arrests and deportations are not stopping; this “Big Beautiful Bill,” which should be called the “Big BS Bill,” expands funding for immigration enforcement to $170 billion.

This includes $45 billion to build new detention facilities, like the facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” $47 billion for “border wall construction,” and increases ICE’s yearly budget to $30 billion. Trump has also promised 10,000 new ICE agents, making a total of 30,000 ICE agents. That makes one ICE agent per 11,000 people in this country.

The new detention facilities planned will be like the inhumane facility known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is a concentration camp made of tents in the Florida Everglades and is not fit for human beings. This horrific facility has already flooded, serves spoiled food, has fluorescent lights on 24/7, and lacks water for bathing. We need to continue to be out in the streets and keep our voices loud until our community members are no longer abducted and sent to inhumane camps to wait for deportation.

I don’t know if you guys have seen the new music video Bad Bunny released on the 4th of July, but the video ended with a black screen and the phrase, “juntos somos más fuertes,” meaning, “together we are stronger.”

This phrase is true. I know what’s happening now is demoralizing, but we need to remember that together, we are strong and have the power to fight for our community. We need to keep talking about what’s happening. Do not let Kilmar be forgotten. We must keep raising our voices until these racist attacks on community members end.

To get our energy going for our demo today, we’re going to do a classic chant where we say, “el pueblo unido, jamás será vencido, ” which roughly translates to “the people united will never be defeated.”

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... baltimore/

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ESSAY: Attica Then and Now! Acklyn R. Lynch, 1971
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 06 Aug 2025


“The men at Attica were prepared to die for the democratic principles not only enunciated in their Manifesto, but experienced in their revolt…”

Since 2021, The Black Agenda Review has reprinted historical statements, manifestos, and commentaries by and on Black political prisoners in the United States to commemorate Black August. We began this tradition with the publication of “Honor Fallen Black Freedom Fighters,” two statements on Black August written by San Quentin inmates that first appeared in the radical prisoner-support journal, Arm the Spirit in 1979. Since then we have reprinted: The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform, 1971; an essay and petition on the massacre at Attica published in the The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service; William L. Patterson’s essay “Racial Genocide: The Case of the Martinsville Seven”; Assata Shakur’s commentary “Women in Prison: How We Are;” a 1976 statement from the Marion Political Collecive; and “For George,” a letter by the Seventh of August Movment commemorating George Jackson. Last year we reprinted Safiya Bukhari’s 1995 essay “On the Question of Political Prisoners,” which originally appeared in the magazine Crossroad: A New Afrikan Captured Combatant Newsletter, published by Chicago’s Spear and Shield Publications.

This year, we offer “Attica then and Now!,” an essay on the Attica uprising written in 1971 by Acklyn R. Lynch, the legendary Trinidadian Black Studies professor and author of Nightmare Overhanging Darkly : Essays on African American Culture and Resistance (Third World Press, 1993). At the time, Lynch was a professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the essay was first published in a special issue of DRUM , the UMass Black student literary journal , dedicated to Black prisoners.

In “Attica then and Now!,” Lynch clears aside much of the noise and smoke around Attica and returns to the demands made by the prisoners themselves, as articulated in The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto. For Lynch, the Manifesto is a revolutionary treatise that continues the intellectual and political legacies Malcolm X and George Jackson. It provides a radical challenge to the facile notions of democratic rights and traditions that are supposedly at the foundations of United States society. It demonstrated that the prisoners themselves were not only the most acute observers of the nature of the system of mass incarceration, but also of the society that produced that system of mass incarceration. And finally, Lynch recognized that the Attica inmates had regained their humanity through rebellion– and that freedom can only be obtained through revolt.

To mark Black August, Professor Acklyn R. Lynch’s “Attica Then and Now!” is reprinted below.

ATTICA THEN AND NOW!
Acklyn R. Lynch
The dramatic events at Attica have compelled us to examine fundamental aspects of social justice in the political matrix of this society. People around the world have expressed alarm at democracy's response to a confrontation, which challenged and perhaps undermined its tenets of justice and equality. There was no resiliency in the decision-making process to encourage a continuation of the dialogue or to prevent a polarization of forces. This allowed reaction to set in and madness to prevail. The anguished cries of those who were murdered, maimed or brutalized have been heard throughout the world. Their voices echo the context of exploitation that thousands (or even millions) of ordinary people, conscious of their oppression, have brought before the bar of humanity.

During the weeks following the massacre at Attica, people have written extensively on the collapse of the state and federal apparatus in the decision-making process. Even the appointment of investigating bodies, which will attempt to legitimize and justify the actions of the political leadership, will be compelled to highlight some inconsistencies in the final solution executed by the state. Speeches have been made about the dehumanizing aspects of prison life, the indisputable clarity of the inmates in their expressions of unity and collective struggle, and the history of betrayal which prisoners have experienced from officials in the legal and penal institutions, thereby compelling prisoners to question the integrity of negotiators and administrators. These issues have been debated hard and long, but in the rhetorical frenzy, we have forgotten to go back precisely to the character of the demands made by the prisoners at Attica.

This essay will deal explicitly with those demands, for it is in their very essence, their very nature, that the challenge to fundamental aspects of our "so called" democratic tradition projected an incompatible situation. The men at Attica genuinely believed that the society and perhaps Commissioner Russell Oswald were serious about the question of penal reform, even though they might have been aggrieved at the murder of George Jackson at San Quentin. Their Manifesto of Demands tore at the very fabric of the social structure and demanded that democratic rights become a vibrant and living part of the institutional structure so that there could be a radical transformation of their dehumanized reality.

In the preamble to the Manifesto the inmates heightened the facade of the rehabilitative process to which they have been submitted, by comparing it with "the ancient stupidity of pouring water on a drowning man in as much as they are treated for their hostilities by their program administrators with the latter's hostility as medication." The ineffectiveness of this rehabilitative process is not only dramatized by the high percentage of recidivism, but by the compelling story of Haywood Patterson in [the] Scottsboro Boys Trial as he emphasizes the neuroses and demonic tendencies of prison authorities, who have become victims of it in precisely the same sense as the prisoners.

In the preamble, the men at Attica emphasized that they have been denied not only due process of the law and other Constitutional Rights, but more importantly, as they seek to expand intellectually so that they might be in touch with social movements and world trends, they are systematically cut off from the pursuit of knowledge and "remanded to isolation status whenever they insist on their human rights to the wisdom of awareness." It is at this level that prison authorities are terrified by the growing political consciousness, sensitivity and keen perceptions of today's Black prisoners, who have come to understand that they are the most abused victims of an unrighteous social order. The Elliot Barclays , the Herbert X. Blydens , the Richard Clarkes etc, have become the architects, builders and broadcasters of a social ethic that has moved beyond the traditional liberal posture of penal reformist.

The demands were updated expressions of the arguments presented by Black prisoners in the decade of the sixties from Malcolm X to George Jackson. The demands were Constitutional, political, economic, social and cultural. They indicate a thorough grasp not only of the context of exploitation, but the effective conditions for substantive reform in the rehabilitative process.

The Manifesto emphasized the rights of legal representation at parole board hearings and the attendant procedural safeguards at parole revocation hearings. It called for improved and adequate medical attention and public health practices at a time when the society itself is attempting to come to grips with a national health crisis and inadequate facilities. It demanded that economic exploitation be stopped, but at the same time it recommended that opportunities for rehabilitation through preparation for entry into the productive processes of the industrial sector should be programmatically designed "by allowing those industries outside who desire to enter for the purpose of employment placement." They have recognized that working conditions in prisons did not develop working incentives parallel to the many jobs in the outside society, and "a paroled prisoner therefore faced many contradictions of the job that added to his difficulty of adjusting." This is a progressive reformist position, which the penal system should consider seriously, for it will inject a new dynamic in the rehabilitative process. It is certainly interesting that men, whom the reactionary elements consider to be revolutionary activists, provide a reformist alternative that will enhance social progress.

The Manifesto demanded the Constitutional right to peaceful dissent, and "an end to political persecution, racial persecution, and the denial of prisoners' rights to subscribe to political papers, books or any other educational and current media chronicles that are forwarded through the U.S. Mail." These are fundamental rights, which if abridged will only serve to undermine the rehabilitative process, for it is only with the free exchange of ideas in the market-place that men can grow with maturity to understand the precepts of social intercourse, and thereby validate democratic definitions.

The Manifesto expressed a high level of social awareness as it demanded an end to the unhealthy conditions of surroundings "reinforced by the escalating practice of physical brutality perpetrated on inmates." It called for "one set of rules governing all prisoners in the state of New York" rather than the totalitarian system which empowered each warden with ultimate authority for running the institution "as he sees fit."

The Manifesto expressed the architect's determination to challenge the present system of dehumanization, brutality and injustice. The men at Attica were prepared to die for the democratic principles not only enunciated in their Manifesto, but experienced in their revolt as they raised their level of consciousness and dignity to a spiritual plateau where individualism, fear and cowardice did not prevail, but rather the contours of collective integrity, effective unity of purpose and action, and a clear understanding that death is a reflection of a noble life. This was buttressed by their convictions that the human spirit will not yield to corrosive and destructive forces, but it will inscribe the truth of their struggle on the pages of history with blood, sweat and tears. Elliot Barclay, L.D., one of the brothers who was murdered at Attica reminded the negotiators that we should take seriously what has happened at Attica for the inmates' lives have been the fullest expression of the vital sinews of a revolutionary tradition.

Acklyn R. Lynch, “Attica Then and Now!” DRUM, 3 no. 1 (Fall 1971)

https://blackagendareport.com/essay-att ... lynch-1971

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Washington DC Wakes Up Packed With Federal Agents and National Guards
August 15, 2025


National Guard members in Washington DC, U.S., Aug. 14, 2025. Photo: X/@DeptofDefense.

Previously, Trump declared a ‘Public Safety Emergency’ in this city, something local authorities dispute.

Since Wednesday night, hundreds of federal agents and National Guard members have been patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., after President Donald Trump placed the city’s police under federal control.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set up checkpoints in several areas of the city and increased patrols in shifts covering 24 hours a day.

On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said 19 agencies were part of a task force created by Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Agents made 45 arrests for first- and second-degree assault, along with detentions for “distribution of illegal drugs and narcotics that have now been removed from the streets,” Leavitt said, adding that authorities also detained 29 undocumented immigrants, “many of whom had final deportation orders.”

On Monday, Trump declared a “Public Safety Emergency” to fight what he called a “crime wave” in Washington, D.C., something local authorities dispute.

He announced the activation of about 800 National Guard troops as part of a campaign to “restore public order” in the capital, invoking a clause of the Home Rule Act, which has governed Washington’s autonomy since 1973.

The U.S. president also warned he would dismantle homeless encampments and crack down on “juvenile offenders who terrorize the capital.”

On Wednesday, Trump said he would seek to extend federal control over law enforcement in the capital, arguing that the 30 days stipulated in the law “are not enough” to “fight crime” in the city.

A coalition of organizations defending the rights of homeless people in Washington denounced the “illegal and inhumane imprisonment and internment” of these individuals by the Trump administration, saying such operations were set to begin Friday morning.

They emphasized that there are currently very limited shelter spaces in the city for the roughly 900 people who sleep outdoors in Washington, where social services remain limited.

“Criminalizing homelessness does not solve the problem, wastes money and strips homeless residents of Washington, D.C., of their rights and dignity,” the coalition said in a statement that also offered guidance on handling interactions with law enforcement.

https://orinocotribune.com/washington-d ... al-guards/

******

DEA Director Cole Named Washington Police Chief Amid Federal Takeover


National Guard personnel in Washington DC, U.S. Aug. 14, 2025. X/ @CBS6Albany

August 15, 2025 Hour: 8:49 am

The Metropolitan Police Department must obtain his approval before issuing any order.
On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Drug Enforcement Administration Director Terry Cole as commissioner of the Washington, D.C., Police Department.

Earlier this week, on Monday, President Donald Trump had tapped Bondi to oversee the federal takeover of the capital’s police force, where personnel from agencies including the FBI, the DEA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are patrolling the streets around the clock.

Cole, who will take office immediately, will have the powers and duties conferred on the chief of police of the District of Columbia. The Metropolitan Police Department must obtain Cole’s approval before issuing any order.

Trump assumed control of the Washington police on Monday when he announced the activation of about 800 National Guard troops as part of a campaign to “restore public order.” He invoked a clause of the Home Rule Act, which has governed Washington’s autonomy since 1973.


Trump also authorized police to ask residents about their immigration status and to assist federal agents in immigration enforcement. According to the attorney general, the city’s security crisis is “exacerbated by sanctuary city policies and illegal immigration.”

On Wednesday, Trump said he would seek to extend federal control over law enforcement in the capital, arguing that the 30 days allowed under the law “are not enough” to “fight crime.”

On July 24, Cole was sworn in as head of the DEA, an agency for which he had worked 22 years in Colombia, Afghanistan, Mexico and the Middle East. In 2023, he was named Virginia’s public safety chief by the state’s governor, until Trump appointed him to lead the DEA.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/dea-dire ... -takeover/

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Clutching at Pearls, the World’s Largest Criminal Enterprise, the US, Cracks Down on Crime
Jon Jeter 20 Aug 2025


The latest liberal discourse on crime offers useless panaceas to analyze the causes of violence and pathologizes communities while absolving the state of its role in creating these conditions.

In the June 2, 2025 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, the celebrated writer Malcolm Gladwell published a remarkable article entitled: “What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime.” It begins thusly:

Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell Street Express, a fast-food joint in West Pullman, on the far South Side of Chicago. Her son stayed in the car. Hood went inside. Maxwell is a no-frills place—takeout-style, no indoor seating. It’s open twenty-four hours a day. Hood asked for a special order—without realizing that at Maxwell, a busy place, special orders are frowned upon. The man behind her in line got upset; she was slowing things down. His name was Jeremy Brown. On the street, they called him the Knock-Out King. Brown began to gesticulate, his arms rising and falling in exasperation. He argued with Hood, growing more agitated. Then he cocked his fist, leaned back to bring the full weight of his body into the motion, and punched her in the head.

When the argument had started, Hood texted her son, asking him to come inside. Now he was at the door, slight and tentative in a white hoodie. He saw Brown punch his mother a second time. The boy pulled out a revolver and shot Brown in the back. Brown ran from the restaurant. The boy pursued him, still firing. Brown died on the street—one of a dozen men killed by gunfire in Chicago that weekend.”

As is the case with so many macabre events today, the video of the confrontation that led to Brown’s slaying went viral. Prosecutors initially charged Carlishia Hood with Brown’s murder but later dropped the charges.

Gladwell’s retelling of the fatal encounter at Maxwell Street Express serves as the introduction to his stellar appraisal of a new book, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, by a University of Chicago economist, Jens Ludwig. In characterizing Ludwig’s work, Gladwell’s review posits that homicides accrue either from “instrumental” violence—planned attacks such as a mass shooter, a mob hit, or perhaps a bank robbery gone awry—or more typically from spontaneous or “expressive” violence in which an argument between two ego-driven actors escalates into something far more serious. Citing FBI statistics, Ludwig claims that 77 percent of all homicides are representative of expressive violence, while instrumental violence accounts for only 23 percent. Writes Gladwell:

The central argument of ‘Unforgiving Places’ is that Americans, in their attempts to curb crime, have made a fundamental conceptual error. We’ve assumed that the problem is instrumental violence—and have fashioned our criminal-justice system around that assumption. But the real problem is expressive violence. The ongoing bloodshed in America’s streets is just Maxwell Street Express, over and over again.

And the solution? Better gardening, according to Gladwell, who writes:

Last summer, I was given a tour of a low-income neighborhood in Philadelphia by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Its program Transforming Vacant Lots has led a concerted effort to clean up thousands of vacant lots scattered across the city. The approach is simple: clear the weeds, pick up the trash, plant a lawn, put up a post-and-rail fence. The initiative works on over twelve thousand lots, and the results are striking. What once looked like a struggling neighborhood now resembles, at a glance, a middle-class one.

What’s remarkable, though, isn’t just the aesthetics. It’s that the neighborhoods where these lots have been turned into green spaces have seen a twenty-nine-per-cent drop in gun violence. Twenty-nine per cent! The people haven’t changed. The pathologies haven’t changed. The same police force still patrols the neighborhood. The only new variable is that someone comes by to mow the lawn once or twice a month. As economists like to say: How do you model that?

In tandem with the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, President Trump’s federal takeover this month of local police in Washington D.C. has renewed the national discussion on crime, its causes and solutions. But as evidenced by Gladwell’s jejune review, these public discourses fail to interrogate crime in the context of a white settler society that is itself the ultimate expression of crimes against humanity, and is sustained, in the main, by transferring responsibility for its own trespasses from the colonizer to the colonized.

While the built environment does indeed play a role in crime rates, the notion that what is essentially an apartheid state can reduce its crime rates through gardening is the height of Orientalism, the term coined almost 50 years ago by the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said to describe the white settlers’ attempts to alibi his crimes and misdemeanors by essentially redefining crime.

Nearly 1,400 people did not die in Katrina’s deluge because they were looters, or “bestial” as the African American columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described the swarthy hordes seeking shelter in the New Orleans Superdome, but because the state abandoned large swaths of the city inhabited mostly by the descendants of Louisiana’s enslaved populations, emergency responders ignored Black survivors or police shot them as they sought higher ground. Similarly, the crime rate in the nation’s capital has declined significantly, but it satiates Trump’s white supremacist electoral base to portray the erstwhile Chocolate City as crime-ridden. In neighboring Maryland, state lawmakers are cracking down on a juvenile crime wave that does not exist.

A reliably silly writer who has made a fortune comforting white liberals with narratives that let them off the hook—he once described white police who shoot unarmed African Americans as suffering from a temporary form of autism—Gladwell has also argued, absurdly, that poor Blacks in New Orleans who were displaced by Katrina’s floodwaters were largely better off because the catastrophe afforded them an opportunity to reinvent themselves.

In the same fashion, he lauded Ludwig’s book which attributes homicides such as the one at Maxwell Street Express to the inferior emotional intelligence and problem-solving acumen of the participants, all of whom were African American, though Gladwell never mentions their race. He writes:

Neither had the cognitive space to consider that they were caught in a misunderstanding. They were in binary mode: I’m right, so you must be wrong. From there, things escalated:

Hood says to her son, who’s standing behind Brown, “Get in the car.”

Brown seems to think that comment is directed at him—another misreading of the situation.“WHO?!?” he says. “Get in the CAR?!?”

Hood says something that’s hard to make out from the video.

Brown says, ‘Hey lady, lady, lady, lady. GET YOUR FOOD. GET YOUR FOOD. If you say one more thing, I’m going to KNOCK YOU OUT.’ You can see his right fist, clenching and unclenching, over and over.

She says something that is again hard to make out on the video.

He says, ‘Oh my God I SAID if you say one more thing, I’m going to knock you out.’

At which point he punches her—hard.

An honest and more scholarly exploration of the fatal shooting might consider the environs that produced them. Sociologists correlate high homicide rates to high unemployment and poverty rates; known historically as the Black Belt, Chicago’s predominantly African American South side is home to both. Characterized by disinvestment schemes such as tax increment financing districts which divert property tax money from the neighborhoods to white elephant projects that benefit the wealthy, southside Chicago was also home to the late police commander, Jon Burge, whose detectives extracted confessions from more than 100 people, mostly Black, by shocking them with cattle prods, smothering them with plastic typewriter covers and pointing guns in their mouths while pretending to play Russian roulette.

Criminologists have for decades known that trauma is often passed down from one generation to another, and the vast majority of convicted murderers experienced or witnessed physical or sexual violence as children. While no one could go wrong by planting a few gladioluses and petunias in a community garden, the magic bullet for lowering violent crime rates is investing in communities like West Pullman where Brown was slain.

This is not to gaslight violent crime. A number of African Americans have taken to social media in the past week to cheer on the arrival of the National Guard in Washington D.C. on the grounds that increased police presence will abate violence that affects Black children.

But illustrative of his race-baiting motives, Trump has assigned the National Guard mostly to neighborhoods in the district’s northwest while violent crime occurs typically in African American neighborhoods on the city’s east side. Moreover, neither the police nor the National Guard are tasked with stopping crime but stimulating it as a means of exerting social control; their only mandate is to prevent the violence in the slums, favelas and townships from spilling over into white neighborhoods.

In his book, Street Corner Society, the sociologist William Foote Whyte ascribed the formation of youth gangs and the proliferation of crime to an urban social structure that alienated the working class. The book, published in 1943, was an instant bestseller, perhaps because it focused on Italian youths–rather than African Americans– living in a Boston neighborhood nearly 90 years ago.

https://blackagendareport.com/clutching ... down-crime

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Attica: when prisoners revolted
Black August challenges those who seek justice to remember a revolutionary chapter in the struggle within US prisons

August 22, 2025 by Natalia Marques


Attica prison uprising. Image: Midhun Puthu Pattu

Each August marks the annual commemoration of a month honoring the legacy of Black prisoners kept behind bars for political activism. Black August is a month to honor the history of struggles for Black liberation, in defiance of racial, colonial, and imperialist oppression, both inside and outside prison walls.

The 1971 Attica prison revolt, in which incarcerated people rose up in a struggle against oppression and inhumane conditions, and subsequently repressed by state forces with horrifying brutality, is honored each year during Black August.

On September 9, 1971, Attica prisoners took over a part of the prison in an event notable in its mass participation.Out of roughly 2,200 men imprisoned at Attica, 1,281 seized control of the facility.

“​​We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace, that means every one of us here, has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States,” said 21-year old prisoner Elliott James “L.D.” Barkley in a statement to the press. Barkley would later be killed when state forces recaptured the prison, days before he was scheduled to be released.

Prisoners held control for four days, during which officials conceded to 28 of the prisoners’ demands but rejected calls for the warden’s removal and full amnesty for those incarcerated.

On September 13, 1971, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller sent state troopers armed with rifles and pistols to retake Attica from the prisoners. The four-day uprising ended in a hail of blood and gunfire that left 39 dead, among them 10 prison staff. Four more had already died earlier during the uprising.

With 43 men dead, the vast majority from the violence of state repression, the Attica prison uprising is still the deadliest prison uprising in US history.

Reform and revolution
For some involved in the Attica revolt, their motivations extended beyond simply struggling for better conditions. The year following the Attica uprising, prisoner Joseph Little told a government panel, “I’m not for no penitentiary reform. I’m for abolishing the whole concept of penitentiary reform.”

The conditions in New York State prisons were also reflected in the very demands of the prisoners, presented to New York State officials amid the revolt on September 11, 1971. They included “a change in medical staff and medical policy and procedure,” with prisoners claiming that medical personnel were making “mistakes” affecting their patients. Prisoners also called for an end to the “escalating practice of physical brutality” and more food and more access to drinking water during meals.

Prisoners also called for radical changes to the power structure within the prisons, making a bold argument for the self-determination and dignity of each prisoner. The very first demand was “the constitutional rights of legal representation at the time of all parole board hearings.” Prisoners also highlighted the political and free speech repression taking place within the prison, calling for “an end to the segregation of prisoners from the mainline population because of their political beliefs,” claiming that “Some of the men in segregation units are confined there solely for political reasons and their segregation from other inmates is indefinite.”

Revolt amid worldwide struggle
What other factors drove more than 1,000 prisoners to risk their very lives in open rebellion? The Attica revolt took place during a time of heightened struggle and consciousness in the United States, as well as globally. The influence of the Black Panther Party (BPP) was reaching its all time high. The Black liberation movement more broadly was a formidable political force, led by organizations like the BPP, the Republic of New Afrika, and numerous local groups, the movement was not only demanding civil rights but also self-determination and community control.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw an uptick in radical organizing across diverse sectors of society, with white and multiracial students, antiwar, feminist, and countercultural movements. Mass opposition to the Vietnam War was at its height, with groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the broader student antiwar movement challenging US militarism. Some groups, like the Weather Underground, turned to underground actions against the state. Others focused on solidarity with Black liberation and Third World movements. Women’s liberation groups, and Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Indigenous activists expanded the terrain of struggle beyond campuses.

Globally, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the collapse of Western colonial empire, especially on the African continent. In Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, armed liberation wars against Portuguese colonial rule were at their height, led by movements like the MPLA (Angola), FRELIMO (Mozambique), and PAIGC (Guinea-Bissau). Anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa intensified, with the ANC and Pan Africanist Congress continuing underground organizing. Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) also saw guerilla activity against white settler rule. Countries like Congo, which became independent in 1960, were navigating neocolonial intervention, often by the US and former European colonizers.

The political context of the time had imbued the people of the US with heightened mass consciousness, a phenomenon which did not exclude those behind prison walls. By the time of the Attica uprising, numerous smaller prison revolts had already occurred. In 1970 alone, multiple uprisings shook the New York City jail system, including at the Manhattan House of Detention, the Brooklyn House of Detention, the Queens facilities at Kew Gardens and Long Island City, and the Adolescent Remand Shelter on Rikers Island.

At the Manhattan House of Detention, prisoners held five guards hostage for eight hours until state officials pledged to hear their grievances and assured them there would be no retaliation. Yet despite those assurances, authorities singled out leaders, transferring them to state prisons where they were beaten, confined for months in solitary, and charged with new crimes. Meanwhile, at Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York, incarcerated people waged sustained confrontations with officials between November 2, 1970, and June 9, 1971. Prisoners who took part in the Auburn riot were later dispersed to various New York facilities, including Attica.

50 years later
During negotiations at the height of the Attica revolt, then Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald accepted most of the prisoner demands. But over 50 years later, many of the same injustices and inhumane conditions persist in New York State prisons and US prisons more broadly.

Some of the demands agreed to during the heat of struggle never materialized, including paying prison workers a minimum wage, providing fresh produce to prisoners daily, and permitting access to outside dentists and doctors.

Notably, the brutality in New York’s prison system persists. Earlier this year, NYS prison guards went on an unauthorized strike, following some of their own ranks being charged for the brutal beating of Black prisoner Robert Brooks by white officers.

Shocking body camera footage of Brooks’ death showed multiple guards at Marcy Correctional Facility in upstate New York participating in the beating while the prisoner was handcuffed and bleeding. The video captures a chilling disregard for Brooks’ life. One officer shoved an object into his mouth as another gripped his throat, before several guards launched a brutal assault. At one point, two officers tried to lift Brooks by his shirt and throw him out of a window.

At the heart of their strike was the anger of prisons guards at the HALT (Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement) Act, which limited the right of prison authorities to torture inmates with impunity by reducing the use of solitary confinement. The strike ended in March, after which the state fired over 2,000 prison guards after failing to return to work after a deal was reached between the guards and the state of New York.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/08/22/ ... -revolted/

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Trump turns notorious Angola prison into ICE detention facility

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says the administration chose Louisiana’s infamous former slave plantation prison as a scare tactic to push migrants into “self-deporting”

September 04, 2025 by Natalia Marques


DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announces the detention of immigrants on the grounds of the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Photo via @KristiNoem/X)

ICE is opening a new immigrant detention center within the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary “Angola”, which became operational on Wednesday. Officials confirmed on September 3 that 51 male immigrant detainees had already been transferred to Angola, with plans to exceed 200 by month’s end. The immigrant detention facility within Angola can hold up to 400. According to the governor, those held there will be kept “completely isolated” from the general prison population, under the control of ICE contractors.

In remarks to the press made on Wednesday, September 3, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the Trump administration deliberately picked one of Louisiana’s most infamous prisons to cage immigrant detainees as a scare tactic to push undocumented immigrants into “self-deporting.”

“Angola prison is legendary, but that’s a message that these individuals that are gonna be here, that are illegal criminals, need to understand,” Noem told press in front of the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, speaking behind a podium bearing the sign “Louisiana Lockup Angola”.

Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola prison is the nation’s largest maximum-security lockup. It sits on the grounds of the former Angola slave plantation, from which it takes its name.

As Noem described, Angola does indeed have a “legendary” reputation, one which includes human rights abuses and slave-like conditions. In September 2024, prisoners launched a class-action lawsuit over Angola’s brutal forced farm labor. The prison’s mostly Black inmates are still compelled to pick cotton in the same fields once worked by enslaved people – often under sweltering, dangerous heat.

“If you don’t think that they belong in somewhere like this,” said Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana at the news conference on Wednesday, referring to the immigrants to be detained at Angola – “you’ve got a problem.”

Prisoners forced to work farm labor at Angola have raised the alarm about their grueling labor conditions. “It is the only job that you are forced to have a gun pointed at you,” Patrick Jones said in a testimony in a federal courtroom back in April of this year. “You are forced to be talked to like you are less than a human being.”

Trump expands mass deportation machine with new ICE prisons and raids
The conversion of Angola prison into an immigration detention site is part of a major goal of the Trump administration: an aggressive expansion of the deportation system through both state-run and privately operated facilities, as Trump seeks to meet mass deportation goals. In 2024, Trump made a central campaign pledge to launch the largest mass deportation operation in US history, vowing to remove an estimated 15 to 20 million people.

In May, the Trump administration set an aggressive new goal for immigration enforcement arrests: Axios reported that during a May 21 meeting, Trump advisor Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pressed federal immigration agents to ramp up enforcement, setting a target of 3,000 arrests per day.

Since then, the Trump administration has ramped up militarized ICE raids, igniting mass protest and opposition across the country as immigrant workers are violently ripped from their families and communities.

In addition to suppressing protest, the Trump administration is also scrambling to find a way to detain the influx of immigrant arrestees. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4, allocates USD 45 billion for mass detention of immigrants, spurring the administration’s attempts to open new ICE facilities throughout the US. This includes several proposed facilities in Colorado, including a proposal to detain immigrants in a private prison in the state which has drawn grassroots opposition. Immigrant rights, Indigenous, and environmental activists have also united in the movement to oppose Trump’s newly-opened ICE detention center in the Florida Everglades, titled by his administration as “Alligator Alcatraz” in a reference to the potential danger the local wildlife might pose to the safety of immigrant detainees.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/09/04/ ... -facility/

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Baltimore City Council hearing in response to community outrage over three police killings
September 17, 2025 Kat Davis



“Mental health should not be a death sentence,” words said by Zeke Cohen, City Council President, at the second crisis response meeting held at City Hall.

This was a continuum meeting called last month on police accountability for three deaths caused by Baltimore police — Bilal BJ Abduallah, Phtorcarcha Brooks and Dontae Melton Jr.

BJ Abduallah was known in the neighborhood as a beloved Arabber martyred by police gunfire.

Throughout the long three hours taken up by city officials to point fingers at different agencies. A lot of discrepancies were uncovered with disappointment of the community, such as $10 million allocated by the courts to be spent merely on advertising for 988, an already-lacking system in place.

The 988 number is a suicide hotline and prevention number which is supposed to be used to divert 911 mental health calls. Less than 1% of calls were diverted.

That system was not effective when it came to Ms. Brooks; she was a 70-year-old woman who had a history of mental health issues. Police have been to her home about 20 times before her last interaction with police.

After kicking Ms. Brooks’ door down, police entered to allegedly take her to the hospital. Ambushed and confused, Ms. Brooks saw that her home was breached. She held a knife for defense as the BPD tried to detain her. An officer attempted to deploy a taser to no avail. The officer then fired his gun, which struck Ms. Brooks twice.

In a heartfelt speech, Ms. Brooks’ brother talked about how the system failed their family. They suffer the trauma of their family member being talked about as a number and statistic.

Dontae Melton Jr.’s death was skirted around and purposely not directly addressed. The full body cam footage and the ruling of his death were released on the same day of the hearing. Melton was seen in the footage approaching the officer, asking for help.

Officer Gerard Petitiford radioed in, “I have a gentleman pulling on my doors asking for help but he doesn’t look like he needs help.” Melton’s feet and hands were shackled. Ten police officers stood around for 50 minutes as Melton passed away, with the fire department less than 3 minutes away and Mercy Hospital 2 minutes away.

The police department vows to train 100% of officers in CIT to improve safety for mental crisis encounters. Currently, 23% of BPD have had this training. In other publications, Police Commissioner Richard Worley has said that, because of the understaffing of police officers, they allowed officers to volunteer to take training. Blaming the failure of officers on the faulty CAD system, which has failed five times before already.

Ms. Bailey, one of the citizens who testified, said it best: “What I realized sitting here for three hours is that I’ll never get a solution.”

Members of the council and the mayor are complicit when it comes to the healing of Baltimoreans. The mayor complied when BPD pleaded for an increase in the police budget in June, a week before officers killed three members of the community.

Almost everyone who testified that night said the community does not need more policing as a solution to healing. Testimony from Alec Summerfield for PPA (People’s Power Assembly) emphasized health care, not handcuffs. A separate department develops Community Mental Health Navigators, who would be hired to work at outposts across the city. Navigators will have the following roles.

Conduct community outreach / relationally organize to advertise their services.
Screen for anxiety, depression, and stress.
Identify and manage risk as part of a treatment team, including an on-call licensed supervisor.
Provide mental health referrals and broader social service referrals, as needed.
Educate about mental health.
This issue at hand is systemic; it cannot be changed with those who succumb to the imperialist system. The CIT training is supposed to be a step to reform policing, though the language of the program suggests otherwise.

Safety cannot be achieved if the officers who arrive at the scene are trained to take people to jail. CIT has existed from 1988, yet so many people have died by police during mental health crises. Dontae Melton’s story resembles Oral Nunis’s, a father worried about finances who threatened to jump out his second-story home in 2020. Upon arrival, an officer with cuffs in his hands ordered Nunis to comply. This led to Nunis’ death because of “legal restraint,” while the three officers met no repercussions.

The AP has reported over 1,036 deaths after being subdued by police from 2012 to 2021. Not counting the countless cases purposely hidden and filed incorrectly. It shouldn’t take a 40-hour training to humanize the community the police swore to serve. Out of 1,036 deaths, only 28 cases had some accountability of officers’ charges. A lot of these cases end up with the police getting acquitted in federal jury trials.

We cannot move forward with qualified immunity in the U.S. if we expect to have accountability. The book is constantly being thrown at the marginalized and the poor, but almost always, the police and those with authority skip over the repercussions of the law.

The court filing of Barnes v. Felix is an important case of the use of force. Ashtian Barnes was murdered by Harris County police officer Roberto Felix Jr. Barnes was pulled over for outstanding tolls in a rental car. Barnes, afraid for his life, drove off, resulting in Officer Felix firing into Barnes’ vehicle. The Supreme Court, 9-0, rejected the “moment of threat” doctrine used by some lower courts to allow excessive police force. The unanimous 9–0 decision means officers must be trained with non-lethal tools to prevent situations from escalating to “use of force.”

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... -killings/