Michael Harriot, writing for The Root, is on the case of poor situational awareness by the Massachusetts State Police:
In their efforts to inform the public that they were doing everything possible to manage the spontaneous combustion of several homes, the Massachusetts State Police inadvertently let a few organizations fighting to end police brutality, racism and the reign of Donald Trump, know that they are being watched.
On Friday, as homes throughout Massachusetts’ Merrimack Valley exploded from a gas line problem, the Massachusetts State Police sent out a tweet from its official account asking people to evacuate their homes if they lived in certain areas of the state. To show the locations, they included a screenshot of one of the MSP Watch Center’s computers with a map…
According to WBUR, the first bookmark, “MAAPB,” is Mass Action Against Police Brutality, a group whose stated goal is to “end police brutality and institutional racism,” which is clearly a threat to public safety and should be monitored. If MAAPB is successful in stopping police violence and racism, what the hell would the cops do on days when there weren’t any natural gas explosions?
COMBAT, another bookmarked site, is the Coalition to Organize and Mobilize Boston Against Trump, who say they are a “grassroots, intersectional coalition of students, artists, and workers organizing creatively to resist all forms of oppression.”
Mr. Harriot offers this not exactly mysterious explanation why the location of these groups are designated by the state police for monitoring:
Look, I don’t claim to be a criminologist or anything, but whenever you start using words like “intersectional,” “coalition” or “oppression,” you should expect the police to be watching. That’s what they do—oppress intersectional coalitions. It’s literally in the job description.
Another site, the Massachusetts Resistance Calendar was also saved. The site lists upcoming anti-Trump protests around the state.
Coincidence (says the rank and file GOP voter and various NYT and WaPo columnists)?
I don’t think so.
Consider:
A federal judge will decide whether the police department in Memphis, Tennessee, violated free speech rights of protesters by watching them and monitoring their social media accounts.
A four-day trial concluded Thursday in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that claims the Memphis Police Department engaged in improper surveillance of activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups. Activists testified they were intimidated by members of the department who kept a close eye on them using several methods, including following their movements and spying on their social media activity.
Police officers acknowledged that the department uses cameras and data analysis to identify and track crime in the city for public safety reasons. But the department denied that it was engaged in surveillance of people because of their activism and political beliefs.
And:
Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didn’t get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later.
My mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans, J. Edger Hoover’s largest target group, didn’t have to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States…
Predictive policing, also known as “Total Information Awareness,” is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to “preempt” crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur.
This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They aren’t. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow”—a de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment…
Predictive policing doesn’t just lead to racial and religious profiling—it relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color.
This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power.
One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts.
You’d think these progressive social justice groups were known for a history of widespread violence, and acts of terrorism:
White Americans have been in denial about the fact that the police intentionally go after Black men and other men of colour. But the research and statistics kept by state and federal agencies show this happens.
Last year, police killed 266 Black people at a rate of 6.66 kills per million people. That makes a Black person more than twice as likely to be killed by police as a White or Hispanic/Latino person.
Black people are also regularly left to die – even after police officers disarm the wounded citizen (or discover they had no weapon at all).
High-profile police killings ended the lives of Terence Crutcher, 40, Keith Scott, 43, and Tyre King, 13, among more than a dozen others in 2016. Scott’s killing led to massive protests in Charlotte, North Carolina. These were led by residents fed up with law enforcement’s lack of accountability and racist policing practices.
Black Lives Matter is committed to shining a spotlight on the arbitrary criminalisation of Black people in the US. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander exposes the intentional structuring of the US penal justice system based on the belief that African-Americans (especially men) are dangerous and suspicious, thus necessitating constant surveillance and containment.
The enduring belief in African American male criminality is symptomatic of the lingering race science legacy in the history of American anthropology and eugenics. These beliefs are deeply held and go back to the time of slavery when masters were in constant fear of “uprisings”.
The profound fear of Black criminality has through law, social norms and cultural practices of institutionalised racism obtained a kind of normalcy within national narratives around Blacks and crime in the US.
Oh right!
When it comes to violence and acts of terrorism, that’s the white supremacists’ schtick:
Over the last decade, 71% of domestic extremist related killings in the US were linked to right-wing extremists...
But let’s keep a sharp eye on BLM and the antifa.
They can be quite threatening to maintaining an apartheid police state:
Black people in America live in a police-state-within-a-state. The African American police state exercises its authority over the Black minority through an oppressive array of modern day lynchings by the police, increasing for-profit mass incarceration and the government sanctioned surveillance and assassination of Black leaders. The African American police state is unquestionably a modern day crime against humanity.
The first modern police forces in America were Slave Patrols and Night Watches, which were both designed to control the behaviors of African Americans…
A hallmark of twentieth century fascist police states, such as Italy under Mussolini or Franco’s Spain, is the lack of police accountability for their crimes. In spite of extremely egregious circumstances surrounding all lynchings and many police killings, police are rarely held liable.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee recently issued a report on human rights abuses in the United States which roundly condemned the epidemic of police brutality. It stated: “The Committee is concerned about the still high number of fatal shootings by police which has a disparate impact on African Americans”.