https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d8OaroaLUc
Friday, August 21, 2020
LAWSUITS SHOW THE HIGH COST OF NYPD ABUSE IN THE BRONX
New York City routinely settles cases involving police brutality, and the same officers’ names appear again and again.
Jennifer Kelley, Amman Ahmad, Michael Forte, David Acevedo
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/19/nypd-bronx-police-settlements/
SHAKEIMA GONZALEZ was tired. Tired of being a victim, tired of being harassed, tired of fearing for her life. She’d had enough. And so, in the fall of 2019, the 33-year-old Bronx resident sued her neighborhood bullies — who happened to be New York City police officers.
A year and a half earlier, on a spring afternoon, she was walking along Morris Avenue in the Fordham area on her way to pick up her son from school. Two narcotics officers suddenly approached, demanding to see her hands. When Gonzalez complied, they cuffed her, frisked her, and put her into a waiting police van. She remembers panicking to the point of hyperventilating because no one would tell her what was happening. Several months pregnant, she was dizzy and dehydrated by the time they unloaded her at the 46th Precinct, but officers ignored her when she pleaded for medical attention. Instead, she was subjected to a full-body cavity search. “I didn’t even know what that was and had to have an officer explain it to me,” she said in an interview this spring.
Hours passed before Gonzalez learned the charges were for possession and sale of a controlled substance — a “handshake” transaction that an undercover officer alleged to have spotted minutes before the arrest occurred. Given that she neither did drugs nor sold them, she was shocked when police sent her to Central Booking, where she would remain for two more days “caged like an animal,” she said. Four months and numerous court appearances later, the criminal case against her was dismissed. “It was terrifying,” she recalled. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”
While killings by police attract significant public attention, a steady tide of nonfatal but abusive police encounters, often involving the same officers year after year, pile up in state and federal court dockets. They reveal disdain for fundamental civil liberties and cost millions of public dollars. The Bronx is full of people with no charges against them who the city has paid because they’ve been abused by police. The anger spilling into the streets in protests against police brutality this summer is grounded in a history of poisoned encounters and deep impunity.
An examination of settlements against the NYPD in the Bronx reveals a pattern of routine violence and harassment: false arrests, warrantless searches, frequent use of strip searches, denial of medical attention, physical abuse, lewd conduct, and arrests without probable cause. In almost all cases, the criminal charges precipitating the arrests were dropped.
The detectives named in Gonzalez’s still-pending lawsuit against the city, Jodi Brown and Irie Humphrey, have racked up a taxpayer tab of at least $1.3 million in city payouts. The lawsuit was Brown’s fourth in 2019, and Humphrey’s third between May and November 2019. In fact, Brown is one of New York’s most frequently sued cops, the subject of at least 30 lawsuits.
He’s hardly alone. Month in, month out, year after year, the city settles cases involving routine police brutality and misconduct over incidents that never become major news. The same officers’ names appear again and again. In the Bronx, city data shows that nearly 190 cops were named in at least five lawsuits between 2015 and 2019, and 11 others have been the subject of over 10 civil claims each. The settlement amounts aren’t headline-grabbing — $9,000 here, $40,000 there — but they add up.
Public records show that New York City paid out more than $30 million in 2019 to plaintiffs in the Bronx who filed their cases alleging police misconduct between 2015 and 2019. That’s 45 percent of the approximately $67 million city taxpayers shelled out to cover such complaints against cops citywide that year. Overall, for lawsuits filed between the latter half of 2015 and first half of 2020, taxpayers paid out nearly nearly $250 million to people in all five boroughs.
These figures don’t even account for the full magnitude of the cost of allegations of mistreatment by the NYPD, thanks to the opaque way the city reports these numbers. New York City’s Law Department releases the data in increments that show settlements for claims filed in a given five-year period. Earlier claims may also have settled during that time, but they don’t show up in the data. The data also does not include settlements reached without going to court. According to the Comptroller’s Office, the city paid $21.8 million in prelitigation settlements on police misconduct claims in fiscal year 2019 alone.
These are the findings of an investigation by Lehman College journalism students, including the authors of this piece, who spent the spring digging through public records of the New York state court system, data released under a Freedom of Information Act request, a database of federal lawsuits constructed by the Legal Aid Society, and calling plaintiffs and attorneys. The investigation focused on the Bronx, but similar cases play out in each of the boroughs.
“The NYPD has a robust civil lawsuit monitoring program that includes a serious legal review of an officers’ litigation history,” Sgt. Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokesperson, wrote in an email. “Not all lawsuits filed for money have legal merit. The ones that do can be valuable tools we use to improve officer performance and enhance training or policy where necessary.”
For advocates, however, the repeat payouts show a complete lack of consequences. “It’s no surprise that so many of them are repeatedly accused of excessive force or covering up a false arrest. The first time they do it, they’re not held accountable, so they do it again,” said Darius Charney, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
ON THE MORNING of May 29, 2015, NYPD officers smashed through the front door of an apartment in the Fordham neighborhood in the West Bronx. Charging into the first bedroom, they trained guns and flashlights on its shocked occupant — a frail woman in her mid-50s — and ordered her to “get the fuck on the floor.”
That woman, Luz Arbelaez, had lived on that floor for 23 years. It was where she’d raised four children after fleeing political violence in Colombia, and it was where she’d done her best to keep them out of trouble despite the gang activity plaguing their neighborhood. Now grown, three of her kids had recently moved back home to care for their mother after she was hit by a car earlier in the year. None of this, however, mattered to the officers growing impatient as Arbelaez struggled to get out of bed. According to a complaint the family filed in court, one of the officers grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into the living room and exclaimed, “Make way for the drug addict!”
In another bedroom, her daughter Deborah was ordered out of bed wearing nothing but a T-shirt, Deborah said in the complaint. Two officers made rude, leering comments while she scrambled to find her underwear. Then she was handcuffed next to her mother in the living room, sobbing uncontrollably.
According to the complaint, Luz’s sons Sebastian and Pablo were similarly accosted, cuffed, and shoved face-down on the floor while detectives ransacked their room, demanding to know where the drugs were hidden. After their bedroom was tossed and the curtains torn down, both young men were aggressively strip-searched in front of a bare window. While the family sat for two hours in the front room enduring ridicule and threats, Sebastian and Pablo’s clothing was yanked from the closet and bureaus, dumped in a pile, and doused with bleach and cornstarch. When Luz began to show signs of medical distress, shaking and appearing faint, Sebastian pleaded with officers to get his mother’s seizure medication. Luz was only allowed to take the pills after she began to shake so violently, she started falling off the couch.
Police said the raid was based on a tip about drug dealing in the apartment, but in the end, according to court documents, it turned up nothing. Yet Luz, Sebastian, and Pablo were all arrested and marched into a waiting police van. Unsecured and still handcuffed, the family says they were jostled and thrown about as the vehicle was driven to the location of other raids before arriving at the 48th Precinct, where Luz was searched and spent several hours in a cell; her sons were sent to Central Booking. They spent approximately 20 hours in custody.
All of the charges were eventually dismissed. There was no evidence of illegal activity found in the family’s apartment. Four years later, this past January, the city of New York agreed to settle the Arbelaezes’ civil rights lawsuit, although the family says most of the money was eaten up by legal fees.
Attorney Marc Cannan, who represented the family through two years of litigation and delays, called their experience “horrific,” describing it as one of the most shocking cases he’s handled due to the “sheer nastiness” of the cops’ behavior. Sebastian Arbelaez, now 32, said he still startles awake around 5 a.m. every morning, instinctively listening for the sounds of cops creeping into his building. “When you live in a neighborhood like mine and hear your door being kicked down at some crazy hour, you just assume it must be criminals breaking in,” he said, “not the police, who are supposed to be protecting you from that kind of stuff.”
But similar incidents have played out in many other settlements. In another 2015 raid, officers handcuffed Dahiana Capellan in her underwear and went through her phone, laughing and making lewd remarks. They found a gun in another bedroom in the apartment and arrested her; she spent nearly 43 hours in custody before being released on bail. After a few months, the case was dismissed, and two years later the city of New York paid her $40,000. Ryan Coleman, who settled with the city for $9,000 in December 2017, was denied his seizure medicine when officers arrested him after he recorded a plainclothes police officer speeding in the wrong direction on a Bronx street. He was held for approximately 32 hours before a judge released him. About an hour after his release, he had a seizure.
In many of these cases, the city admits no wrongdoing on the part of the police — a standard feature of such settlements.
AS MUCH AS the city is spending to pay out victims of police abuse, City Hall sees the situation as an improvement.
“Over the last several years, we’ve seen a reduction in the number of lawsuits brought against officers,” said Law Department spokesperson Nicholas Paolucci. According to Paolucci, some of the downward trend in civil claims since 2017 is a result of the department’s partnership with the NYPD on litigation matters in recent years, which has led to “improved fact-finding, filing more motions to dismiss,” and lower settlement amounts, he added.
But police reform advocates say the city still has a significant problem. “We are hemorrhaging money from the cost of these lawsuits,” said civil rights attorney Juan Cartagena, president of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. “We’re talking multiple millions spent every year on police misconduct, and a lot of it’s the same cops repeating the same offenses — and no one’s doing anything about it.”
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Early on in his administration, Mayor Bill de Blasio made it a mission to get a handle on the onslaught of suits against the NYPD. In 2015, he promised to allocate additional funding to the Law Department to defend police officers against “frivolous” lawsuits. The city’s budget for fiscal year 2016 included $3.2 million in funding for this purpose, enough to hire 40 more people, tasked with fending off meritless claims and helping the unit take more cases to trial.
Attorney Samuel DePaola, who is representing Shakeima Gonzalez and has handled dozens of other similar cases, finds the city’s claim about frivolous lawsuits laughable. A former assistant district attorney in the Kings County District Attorney’s Office from 2011 to 2014, DePaola said it’s the city that chooses to settle with his clients before they go to trial, adding that he’d be happy to meet them in court. “I’ll take my chances going up against the work of these officers any day of the week,” he said.
Attorneys who battle the Law Department say that the city’s lawyers are often in the dark about what really happened in a case. They too have to wait for discovery materials from the NYPD, which often reveal officers’ underlying conduct to be more egregious than they initially anticipated.
For DePaola, turning over those stones again and again has revealed some root causes of misbehavior within the police force’s ranks. There is an incentive to be aggressive with arrests, he said, because the most “active” officers are also the most rewarded. “They’re getting raises basically based on the amount of arrests they make, regardless of whether they are ‘good arrests,’” he said. “These officers have so little supervision, no oversight, no accountability — it’s their own heart of darkness in the NYPD. They do whatever they want.”
Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project, said that there is a culture of covering up for bad behavior. “If it’s known that a particular officer at a precinct has five lawsuits pending, they’re not going to stage an intervention. What they’re going to do is assign his next bad arrest to a different officer,” she said.
Transparency about police behavior is key to accountability, Wong said, and New York took a step in that direction in June when Gov. Andrew Cuomo repealed 50-a, a law that had shielded police officers’ disciplinary records from examination. The NYPD police union has fought the repeal in court, and a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order preventing the city from releasing information. ProPublica, however, recently published a cache of city-dwellers’ complaints to the Civilian Complaint Review Board obtained thanks to the repeal. The accounts of abuse by officers echo many found in lawsuits against the city.
Charney, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, was lead counsel in the landmark 2013 class-action suit that successfully challenged stop-and-frisk, the NYPD’s policy of aggressively stopping and searching young, mostly Black and brown men. He said that it is frustrating that there hasn’t been more progress under de Blasio, given that his time in office has directly coincided with federal monitoring of the NYPD’s court-ordered reform process. “We’re just not seeing meaningful change of policing on the street,” he said.
The idea that the city ended stop-and-frisk and turned a corner is an unfortunate misconception, according to Cartagena from LatinoJustice. He said the practice still happens in the Bronx, along with a host of other discriminatory policing practices that lead to settlements each year.
“It’s almost as if the cost of doing business is racial profiling and that it’s a cost the city is willing to tolerate,” Cartagena said. “They seem to think that the money we pay out in damages, as taxpayers, is worth it. But what they’re not accounting for is the other cost: a loss of confidence in the police and an erosion in police-community relations.”
That’s precisely how Shakeima Gonzalez feels. In fact, her terror of local cops has steadily grown since taking them to court. Last October, just weeks after she filed her lawsuit alleging a false arrest, it happened again — different officers, same deal. While running midday errands, Gonzalez said she was stopped, frisked, assaulted, whisked into a police vehicle, and eventually shipped to Central Booking without being informed of her rights or the crime she’d allegedly committed. This time, the District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute her.
And this time, Gonzalez didn’t wait a year to file suit; as of this month, she and DePaola, her attorney, have two cases against NYPD officers entering the discovery phase in the Bronx Supreme Court. Gonzalez said her weariness with the situation has hardened into anger, strengthening her will to fight back — and not only for her own sake, she added. “I just feel like with what happened to me and what I still see happening around the neighborhood, someone is going to die.”
HOW NORTHERN CALIFORNIA’S POLICE INTELLIGENCE CENTER TRACKED PROTESTS
The center sent daily emails listing upcoming protests to thousands of local police and circulated inflammatory online posts.
Micah Lee
August 17 2020, 10:20 a
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/17/blueleaks-california-ncric-black-lives-matter-protesters/
ALMOST TWO WEEKS AFTER a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd while he was handcuffed face down in the street, a hacker began exfiltrating 19 gigabytes of documents from the poorly secured Northern California Regional Intelligence Center website. The NCRIC (pronounced “nick-rick”) fusion center shares information between federal agencies, local police departments across northern California, and private industry partners, including Silicon Valley companies. It also provides local cops with analytical and technical support services such as monitoring social media or helping break into locked smartphones, and it hosts events and law enforcement-related courses.
The hacked data from NCRIC, provided to transparency collective DDoSecrets by a source identifying with the hacktivist collective Anonymous, was part of a larger breach of 251 police websites across the country known as BlueLeaks. German authorities, acting on behalf of the U.S. government, seized the server DDoSecrets was using to distribute the BlueLeaks data, though the data itself is still publicly available on the internet using the peer-to-peer file sharing technology BitTorrent. (Note: I’m a member of the DDoSecrets advisory board.)
The NCRIC documents, from a 13-day period between George Floyd’s killing on May 25 and the evening of June 6, when the latest information was exfiltrated (judging from time stamps found in the leaked material), provide an unprecedented window into the internal workings and priorities of Northern California’s police intelligence agency during the recent waves of anti-police brutality protests.
One way that NCRIC shares information is by sending bulk emails to its partners. Since the protests began, these have included vague, fear-inducing memos from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI about the threat of violent civil unrest, as well as more specific information, including emails sent at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. every day to more than 14,000 police officers across Northern California with updated lists of Black Lives Matter protests. During the 13-day period covered in the hacked files, over half of the bulk emails NCRIC sent were related to monitoring and policing the largely peaceful protests.
Local police and other partners send information back to NCRIC by submitting “Suspicious Activity Reports.” Of the 21 civil unrest-related “suspicious activities” during this period, most were local police posting information about upcoming protests, screenshots of tweets and Instagram posts about looting and rioting, as well as two instances of people threatening to shoot and kill Black Lives Matter protesters.
Another way local police interface with NCRIC is by requesting support. Of the 20 civil unrest-related support requests during this period, most were providing information about upcoming protests to be added to the daily protest emails as well as requesting help monitoring social networks for information about the protests. Two of the requests asked for help identifying threats against white female teenagers who were facing doxxing or harassment after making racist statements and using anti-Black racial slurs.
Daily Lists of Black Lives Matter Protests
Notably, a substantial portion of the intelligence on Black Lives Matter protests flowed through NCRIC’s Terrorism Liaison Officer program, whose purpose is to keep the intelligence center’s members “engaged & knowledgeable about current terrorist tactics, techniques & trends, regional crime trends & threats, and Officer safety information.” The terror-info program became a clearinghouse for information on upcoming demonstrations.
The weekend after Floyd’s killing, when Black Lives Matter protests were erupting throughout the country, NCRIC’s TLO sent an email to its 14,406 subscribers — mostly local police officers across Northern California — with a PDF containing a list of upcoming protests, their times, locations, and sometimes links to more information. “We will be providing a list of local protests twice daily at 1000 and 1800, until further notice,” the email said. “This information is for Situational Awareness only. Agencies may use this information for planning/staffing purposes or as they see fit,” adding, “Some of these events involve criminal activities such as planned looting, vandalism and threats of violence.”
Between May 31 and June 6, NCRIC sent these emails out every morning, and again with an updated list every evening.
Events 060620 18005 pages
June 5’s evening email listed 46 protest events scheduled for June 6 in San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Oakland, and other Bay Area cities, as well as 36 other events scheduled for the following days. For example, the “Noe Valley Police Violence Protest With Social Distancing” was scheduled for June 6 at 11 a.m., and the “SF Kids Peace March” was scheduled for June 7 at 2 p.m. While the vast majority of the events were Black Lives Matter protests, some had different topics, such as a “6 Feet and Grieving COVID 19 remembrance” event in Oakland.
“The fact that fusion centers are sending out lists of protests and other activities that are protected by the First Amendment is constitutionally suspect,” Vasudha Talla, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, told The Intercept. “They may try to justify it by attaching text alluding to the potentiality of certain criminal activity, but it’s clear from the documents that you showed me that there is no reasonable suspicions attached to any of these events.” She added, “Really what we have here is overbroad collection and dissemination of people’s protected First Amendment activity, and it’s untethered to any basis in the law.”
Mike Sena, NCRIC’s executive director, told The Intercept that the fusion center no longer distributes daily lists of protests. “During that period of time we had just had an attack on the Ronald Dellums Federal Building,” he said, referring to the May 29 killing of Dave Patrick Underwood, a private security officer guarding the federal building in Oakland. Steven Carrillo, a far-right extremist and member of the so-called Boogaloo movement, who “came to Oakland to kill cops” according to the FBI, was charged on June 11 in the murder of Underwood. When asked at what point NCRIC stopped distributing lists of protests, Sena said, “I believe it was after the suspects were taken into custody, from that attack. At least the known suspects were taken into custody. We don’t have that going on anymore.”
Sena also claimed that NCRIC was keeping track of Black Lives Matters protests in order to make sure that they remained safe. “We weren’t keeping track of the protests themselves, but we were identifying where we were gonna have gatherings of people,” he said. “That’s our concern is, we want to make sure the events are safe. And if there are any threats that come up that may be associated with any of those events that we’re able to get that threat data to whatever agency may have protection responsibilities.”
Talla disagreed. “At the end of the day what you have is federal agencies, not only DHS but the FBI, monitoring people’s constitutionally protected activities without any reasonable suspicion,” she said. “Even though the agencies may include in some of these documents a disclaimer that they are not targeting First Amendment activities as such, if you actually look at what they’re doing, it’s clear that there is no criminal activity that they can point to to justify the overbroad collection and monitoring of protests. They have no basis to do that.”
Beginning with the second protest list that was emailed out, the footer of each PDF says: “This document is not subject to the California Information Practices Act and contains information that may be exempt from public release under exemptions provided by the California Public Records Act,” and “This information is not to be released to the public, the media, or other personnel who do not have a valid ‘right and need-to-know’ without approval of the NCRIC.”
Sena claimed that the reason these documents were exempt from public records requests, and were not supposed to be released to the public or the media, is because they could be used as a target list by someone who wanted to attack the protesters.
“Simply attaching a tagline to a document saying ‘This is exempt from the California Public Records Act’ does not make it exempt from the California Public Records Act in and of itself,” Talla said. “The document you sent me can’t be characterized as criminal intelligence because there’s no articulation of any criminal activity associated with these activities, these protests, marches, demonstrations. Really, what is confidential about this document? There’s nothing.”
Federal Fearmongering
Days after the Floyd killing, someone in the FBI’s Los Angeles division noticed a tweet from the Long Beach Anarchist Collective that read, “see a blue lives matter flag, destroy a blue lives matter flag challenge”:
At the time, this tweet had four retweets and 26 likes. In response, the FBI analyst typed up a Situational Information Report describing the tweet, as well as the other tweet that it referenced, with the title, “Civil Unrest in Response to Death of George Floyd Threatens Law Enforcement Supporters’ Safety, as of May 2020.”
Sir La 20200529 2 Ufouo4 pages
NCRIC got a copy of this document and forwarded it to its more than 14,000 subscribers. This is far from the only fearmongering memo from the federal government that NCRIC forwarded to thousands of local cops; DHS and FBI consistently fed local cops a diet of scary-protester anecdotes and internet rumors, potentially frightening them into believing their lives were in danger during protests and thus helping feed the often brutal and violent response to peaceful protests.
Another document from the multi-agency National Explosives Task Force that NCRIC distributed claimed “a variety of incendiary and explosive devices were used against civilian and law enforcement targets in civil unrest demonstrations” with photos of Molotov cocktails and fireworks. NCRIC also distributed an FBI Situation Report which described cherry-picked messages posted by unnamed social media users, including an Instagram user who allegedly posted about a “purge” planned for June 6, saying that “anyone stopped by police should follow the only rule, to kill law enforcement first, then continue destroying property.” Without any context, there’s no way of knowing how many followers this account had, or if it was run by an internet troll.
FBI Situation Report from June 6, 2020.
Screenshot: The Intercept
NCRIC also forwarded a series of “Intelligence Notes” from the Department of Homeland Security to its members:
One document from May 29 claimed that the ongoing unrest related to the killings of Floyd and Breanna Taylor — a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was shot eight times by Louisville, Kentucky, police officers as they were breaking into her apartment late at night without announcing themselves — “could motivate some domestic terrorist actors to engage in violence against law enforcement and others protesting lawfully.”
Another document from May 30 stated, “We anticipate armed individuals will continue to infiltrate the protest movement. We assess with high confidence during the period of darkness from 30 to 31 May the violent protest movements will grow and [domestic violent extremists] and others will seek to take over government facilities and attack law enforcement.”
A document from May 31 described protesters monitoring and disrupting law enforcement communications. Police in Portland “reported that they assessed that well-coordinated groups had potentially compromised law enforcement radio communications,” and police in Minneapolis “were forced to switch to cell phones for tactical communications after learning their communications were being monitored by individuals using publicly available police scanner apps.” Police scanner apps, which allow anyone to listen in on police radio communications, have seen record downloads since Floyd’s killing. The document also states that “unidentified individuals” in the Chicago area saturated police radio channels with music.
Another May 31 document states, “We have also noted several incidents of potential violent opportunists traveling to protests with milk or other liquids in anticipation of mitigating the effects of pepper spray or other crowd control agents.”
A document from June 1 states, “As the protests persist, we assess that organized violent opportunists—including suspected anarchist extremists—could increasingly perpetrate nationwide targeting of law enforcement and critical infrastructure.” It went on to say that an NYPD official “had strong evidence that suspected anarchist groups had planned to incite violence at protests, including by using encrypted communications.” Using encrypted communications is not only perfectly legal, but an important measure that individuals can take to protect their personal cybersecurity. The document also warns of “Foreign Influence Activity,” stating, “Russian state media outlets particularly emphasized themes alleging excessive police brutality, police attacks against journalists, and claims of systematic racism.”
Prioritizing Spying on Protests
NCRIC’s tracking of BLM protests sometimes interfered with work targeting actual criminal suspects. Shortly after 5 p.m. on May 29, an FBI analyst submitted a support request to the NCRIC website. “FBI San Francisco is concern [sic] about possible criminal activity; including mass causality attacks, vandalism and destruction of property, violence towards law enforcement and participants, and ideologically motivated attacks; near or about constitutionally protected activities in Oakland in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis,” he wrote. He requested NCRIC provide [Real-Time and Open Source Analysis] “and appropriate analytic resources.”
On June 1, the day after NCRIC began distributing lists of protests, NCRIC sent a bulk email to its subscribers saying that it was “actively monitoring potential planned criminal acts, acts of violence, and civil unrest” and asking for help. “Please submit upcoming events or concerns related to planned events by logging into ncric.org, clicking on the ‘Request Support’ tab, and submitting a ‘Request for Investigative or Equipment Support.’”
The following day, NCRIC sent another bulk email announcing that an upcoming class would need to be postponed. “Due to operational needs necessitated by the protests in our [area of responsibility], the Chasing Phones class scheduled for June 3-4, 2020 has been rescheduled for June 17-18, 2020.”
According to a flyer, the Chasing Phones class “will explore the methods of exploiting a suspect’s cellular phone, phone company records, and third-party data sources records” and “will increase law enforcement officers’ awareness and appreciation of the evidence and intelligence located in a mobile device and provides students with the tools and training to prepare search warrants to legally obtain that evidence.” At the time the NCRIC data was exfiltrated, the class was scheduled to happen over Zoom, and 356 people had registered for it. But this training would have to wait; monitoring protests was higher priority.
Chasing Cell Phones, June 3 4, 20201 page
Black Lives Matter Protests as “Suspicious Activity”
Local police connected to NCRIC used the intelligence hub to repeatedly flag BLM-related protests, vigils, and cultural events as suspicious. On May 31, a sergeant in the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office posted a Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, requesting “intel if any is observed regarding violent civil/criminal unrest in the county of San Mateo, specifically the cities of Redwood City, San Mateo and East Palo Alto,” adding, “It is believed that protests will occur this coming week in these cities – want intel as to #’s of participants and any illegal activities being transpired.”
Later that same day, another officer from San Mateo Sheriff’s Office posted another SAR about a local protest. “Peninsula Progressive Action Group holding a vigil/protest for George Floyd,” he wrote, referring to a local Bay Area progressive citizens group. “Requesting NCRIC intelligence gathering/monitoring of social media, etc. Although the event is promoted as peaceful, similar events in the region devolved into violence. Unknown attendance at this point. Agitators are known to promote suburban targets next.”
The next day, PPAG posted to its website that the planned vigil in San Carlos was postponed over to safety concerns, citing “right-wing extremists groups that are using events, particularly evening events, as an excuse to instigate violence and cause damage.” Even though the vigil was canceled, “about 100 people” showed up anyway with masks and signs, according to a follow-up post.
On the night of June 2, 20-year-old San Jose hip-hop artist Simon Vertugo tweeted about an upcoming event called “The Black American Experience,” a “discussion on the Black experience and how we can take steps to prevent future civil injustice, police brutality and reform our judicial system,” to be held in a few days at the Olympic Black Power statue at San Jose State University.
After an officer with the university police department saw this tweet, he logged into NCRIC’s website and posted a SAR under the category “Radicalization/Extremism” with the event image from the tweet. “Possible meeting spot for protest activity at SJSU,” he wrote. “Has been seen on Twitter under the name @simonvertugo. Date is 6/6/20 at 1300 hours. Has been retweeted about 300 times. No data on possible attendance.”
Vertugo felt this was an example of police overreach. “Truthfully I think the university cops were completely overreacting to a speech being held on a college campus,” Vertugo told The Intercept. “Nobody was inciting any riots, no plans of breaking windows, destroying property. It was just a speech held by some Black kid and his peers. I think it’s a huge joke what they choose to focus on.” Nearly 300 people showed up at the speaking event.
Officers from San Benito County Sheriff’s Office and Novato Police Department also posted SARs of local protests they heard about. Local cops from across the region logged into NCRIC to request support related to upcoming protests in their cities, sometimes asking for social media monitoring. These police departments all posted support requests about Black Lives Matter protests to NCRIC:
Walnut Creek Police Department
Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety
Antioch Police Department
Fremont Police Department
Napa Police Department
Healdsburg Police Department
Palo Alto Police Department
Golden Gate Bridge Patrol
Contra Costa College District
A sergeant with the Oakland Police Department posted a support request asking for “analysts to monitor open source media to track crimes that are about to occur or have just occurred during the protest.” And an officer with the San Francisco Police Department posted an equipment request to NCRIC asking for surveillance cameras in “high volume locations.” “We have several more planned demo’s this week and these cameras would greatly enhance our situational awareness and public safety during these incidents,” she wrote.
Police were also paying close attention to any social media posts that mention looting, rioting, or violence against law enforcement. One SAR describes a Twitter user who tweeted, “Are we having a protest in Napa I low key wanna layout a cop.” Another describes a Twitter thread mentioning looting Target stores in Walnut Creek, Emeryville, and Bayfair. Another describes receiving a “threat via social media” threatening to loot stores at Sun Valley Mall in Concord. And another included a photograph of a phone displaying instructions for a “San Mateo County Looting Night” with a “hit list” of corporate chains.
On May 31, a paramedic at a gas station that rents U-Hauls in Napa said he “observed an estimated two dozen people dressed in black (hoodies, masks, shirts pants) in their twenties most white as far as he could tell, several of which were wearing masks,” with “another half dozen people wearing the same clothing” in the store, and he overheard them asking if they could rent vans for one day and leave them in San Francisco. He considered this suspicious behavior, so he called his off-duty friend in the fire department and said “they looked like a ‘ANTIF[A] or Black Bloc’ group.” His friend called the department’s Homeland Security operations officer, who posted this secondhand information as a SAR to NCRIC’s website.
And on June 2, a hardware store employee called the Novato Police Department to report that a woman “purchased all their helmets, hard hats, hammers, bolt cutters and goggles,” and that she mentioned the goggles were for tear gas. The Navato police officer posted this as a SAR, with a description of the woman and her vehicle.
Threats Against Protesters’ Lives
The large majority of civil unrest-related suspicious activity reports during this period were about Black Lives Matter protests, but a few were about people who believe that Black lives don’t matter.
A middle-aged white man called a California Constituent Affairs employee on June 2 and described his plans to shoot and kill protesters, according to a June 3 SAR posted by an officer with the California Highway Patrol. “The subject said he will shoot and kill protesters he perceives as a threat,” the employee described. “He believes all protesters are thugs, and says this has nothing to do with race. The subject said he has multiple firearms, including an AK 47 and he has no problem blowing off their heads if they get near his house, start a fire, or begin looting in his city. He said he will take actions into his own hands because politicians are not doing anything about it. He added that all his friends and neighbors have guns and are not afraid to use them. The subject made it very clear that protesters are not welcomed in his neighborhood and threatened to kill protesters.”
In another instance, the FBI’s threat operations center found a tweet that said, “Everyone please be careful out there! I don’t know if this person is genuine or fucking with me but I’d rather be safe than sorry! Apparently his businesses were looted and he is now threatening to shoot protesters.” It included a screenshot of a direct message conversation in which the alleged San Francisco business owner wrote, “I will start shootings tomorrow,” and “Anyone from this bullshit [enters] my store I’m gonna [shoot] them.”
On June 3, an officer at West Valley-Mission Community College Police Department posted a SAR that included a video from Snapchat, writing, “Subject has been reported as to have made a video of himself on [Snapchat] wearing a KKK style hood and [making] a white power hand gesture with the slogan ‘Burn crosses not buildings’ likely in response to the ongoing riots related to the George Floyd protests.”
Protecting Racist Teenagers From Online Harassment
“For ‘Black out Tuesday’, a 16 year old female changed her social media profile picture to all blue, in support of law enforcement, instead of all black, in support of Black Lives Matter,” a detective with the Walnut Creek Police Department typed into a Cyber Security Assessment request to NCRIC on June 4. “The family has been receiving death threats/property threats on social media, by phone and text.” He requested that they “search/review social media to obtain potential threats to family, as well as the identities of persons making such threats.”
The attached documents — a Microsoft Word document and a series of emails between Walnut Creek police officers — show much more than changing her avatar to blue to support law enforcement. They include screenshots of the teenager’s TikTok videos where she wrote messages like, “Tbh the kkk should come back. Oh and I wanna move to Georgia bc they have segregated proms,” and “I don’t talk to niggers.”
On June 6, a lieutenant with the Moraga Police Department posted a similar request to NCRIC. “The Moraga Police Department became aware of a video clip circulating on social media that depicts 3 Campolindo High School female teenagers using racist and offensive language, including the N-word,” he wrote. “We are requesting open source internet checks and overall social media monitoring analysis for the presence of threats, especially threats of violence or retaliation to occur in the Town of Moraga.”
When asked if it’s their policy to provide proactive protection to racists, the Walnut Creek and Moraga Police Departments did not respond to a request for comment.
“Any time there’s a potential threat where they’ll harm somebody, or someone’s indicating that they’ll harm somebody, we do support local agencies with those types of requests,” Sena, NCRIC’s executive director, said. “And we can’t base our support based on what the person says, or their ideologies. We have to treat everyone in the public the same, and our goal is to protect lives.”
Cyber Attacks Against Law Enforcement
In addition to sending bulk emails to thousands of local police, NCRIC sometimes sends bulk emails to its list of over 3,700 industry partners.
One June 2 mailing included a prescient warning from the FBI’s Cyber Division: “Due to ongoing civil unrest, hacktivist groups are actively threatening and endorsing cyber attacks against law enforcement and state government networks,” the FBI wrote. “Groups such as ‘Anonymous’ are actively leveraging societal and political unrest to encourage global cyber action against law enforcement and government computer networks, outward facing web pages, and social media accounts.”
Four days after NCRIC sent this email, the BlueLeaks hacktivist — who identified with Anonymous — began exfiltrating data from NCRIC’s server.
Another document from the multi-agency National Explosives Task Force that NCRIC distributed claimed “a variety of incendiary and explosive devices were used against civilian and law enforcement targets in civil unrest demonstrations” with photos of Molotov cocktails and fireworks. NCRIC also distributed an FBI Situation Report which described cherry-picked messages posted by unnamed social media users, including an Instagram user who allegedly posted about a “purge” planned for June 6, saying that “anyone stopped by police should follow the only rule, to kill law enforcement first, then continue destroying property.” Without any context, there’s no way of knowing how many followers this account had, or if it was run by an internet troll.
FBI Situation Report from June 6, 2020.
Screenshot: The Intercept
NCRIC also forwarded a series of “Intelligence Notes” from the Department of Homeland Security to its members:
One document from May 29 claimed that the ongoing unrest related to the killings of Floyd and Breanna Taylor — a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was shot eight times by Louisville, Kentucky, police officers as they were breaking into her apartment late at night without announcing themselves — “could motivate some domestic terrorist actors to engage in violence against law enforcement and others protesting lawfully.”
Another document from May 30 stated, “We anticipate armed individuals will continue to infiltrate the protest movement. We assess with high confidence during the period of darkness from 30 to 31 May the violent protest movements will grow and [domestic violent extremists] and others will seek to take over government facilities and attack law enforcement.”
A document from May 31 described protesters monitoring and disrupting law enforcement communications. Police in Portland “reported that they assessed that well-coordinated groups had potentially compromised law enforcement radio communications,” and police in Minneapolis “were forced to switch to cell phones for tactical communications after learning their communications were being monitored by individuals using publicly available police scanner apps.” Police scanner apps, which allow anyone to listen in on police radio communications, have seen record downloads since Floyd’s killing. The document also states that “unidentified individuals” in the Chicago area saturated police radio channels with music.
Another May 31 document states, “We have also noted several incidents of potential violent opportunists traveling to protests with milk or other liquids in anticipation of mitigating the effects of pepper spray or other crowd control agents.”
A document from June 1 states, “As the protests persist, we assess that organized violent opportunists—including suspected anarchist extremists—could increasingly perpetrate nationwide targeting of law enforcement and critical infrastructure.” It went on to say that an NYPD official “had strong evidence that suspected anarchist groups had planned to incite violence at protests, including by using encrypted communications.” Using encrypted communications is not only perfectly legal, but an important measure that individuals can take to protect their personal cybersecurity. The document also warns of “Foreign Influence Activity,” stating, “Russian state media outlets particularly emphasized themes alleging excessive police brutality, police attacks against journalists, and claims of systematic racism.”
Prioritizing Spying on Protests
NCRIC’s tracking of BLM protests sometimes interfered with work targeting actual criminal suspects. Shortly after 5 p.m. on May 29, an FBI analyst submitted a support request to the NCRIC website. “FBI San Francisco is concern [sic] about possible criminal activity; including mass causality attacks, vandalism and destruction of property, violence towards law enforcement and participants, and ideologically motivated attacks; near or about constitutionally protected activities in Oakland in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis,” he wrote. He requested NCRIC provide [Real-Time and Open Source Analysis] “and appropriate analytic resources.”
On June 1, the day after NCRIC began distributing lists of protests, NCRIC sent a bulk email to its subscribers saying that it was “actively monitoring potential planned criminal acts, acts of violence, and civil unrest” and asking for help. “Please submit upcoming events or concerns related to planned events by logging into ncric.org, clicking on the ‘Request Support’ tab, and submitting a ‘Request for Investigative or Equipment Support.’”
The following day, NCRIC sent another bulk email announcing that an upcoming class would need to be postponed. “Due to operational needs necessitated by the protests in our [area of responsibility], the Chasing Phones class scheduled for June 3-4, 2020 has been rescheduled for June 17-18, 2020.”
According to a flyer, the Chasing Phones class “will explore the methods of exploiting a suspect’s cellular phone, phone company records, and third-party data sources records” and “will increase law enforcement officers’ awareness and appreciation of the evidence and intelligence located in a mobile device and provides students with the tools and training to prepare search warrants to legally obtain that evidence.” At the time the NCRIC data was exfiltrated, the class was scheduled to happen over Zoom, and 356 people had registered for it. But this training would have to wait; monitoring protests was higher priority.
Chasing Cell Phones, June 3 4, 20201 page
Black Lives Matter Protests as “Suspicious Activity”
Local police connected to NCRIC used the intelligence hub to repeatedly flag BLM-related protests, vigils, and cultural events as suspicious. On May 31, a sergeant in the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office posted a Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, requesting “intel if any is observed regarding violent civil/criminal unrest in the county of San Mateo, specifically the cities of Redwood City, San Mateo and East Palo Alto,” adding, “It is believed that protests will occur this coming week in these cities – want intel as to #’s of participants and any illegal activities being transpired.”
Later that same day, another officer from San Mateo Sheriff’s Office posted another SAR about a local protest. “Peninsula Progressive Action Group holding a vigil/protest for George Floyd,” he wrote, referring to a local Bay Area progressive citizens group. “Requesting NCRIC intelligence gathering/monitoring of social media, etc. Although the event is promoted as peaceful, similar events in the region devolved into violence. Unknown attendance at this point. Agitators are known to promote suburban targets next.”
The next day, PPAG posted to its website that the planned vigil in San Carlos was postponed over to safety concerns, citing “right-wing extremists groups that are using events, particularly evening events, as an excuse to instigate violence and cause damage.” Even though the vigil was canceled, “about 100 people” showed up anyway with masks and signs, according to a follow-up post.
On the night of June 2, 20-year-old San Jose hip-hop artist Simon Vertugo tweeted about an upcoming event called “The Black American Experience,” a “discussion on the Black experience and how we can take steps to prevent future civil injustice, police brutality and reform our judicial system,” to be held in a few days at the Olympic Black Power statue at San Jose State University.
After an officer with the university police department saw this tweet, he logged into NCRIC’s website and posted a SAR under the category “Radicalization/Extremism” with the event image from the tweet. “Possible meeting spot for protest activity at SJSU,” he wrote. “Has been seen on Twitter under the name @simonvertugo. Date is 6/6/20 at 1300 hours. Has been retweeted about 300 times. No data on possible attendance.”
Vertugo felt this was an example of police overreach. “Truthfully I think the university cops were completely overreacting to a speech being held on a college campus,” Vertugo told The Intercept. “Nobody was inciting any riots, no plans of breaking windows, destroying property. It was just a speech held by some Black kid and his peers. I think it’s a huge joke what they choose to focus on.” Nearly 300 people showed up at the speaking event.
Officers from San Benito County Sheriff’s Office and Novato Police Department also posted SARs of local protests they heard about. Local cops from across the region logged into NCRIC to request support related to upcoming protests in their cities, sometimes asking for social media monitoring. These police departments all posted support requests about Black Lives Matter protests to NCRIC:
Walnut Creek Police Department
Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety
Antioch Police Department
Fremont Police Department
Napa Police Department
Healdsburg Police Department
Palo Alto Police Department
Golden Gate Bridge Patrol
Contra Costa College District
A sergeant with the Oakland Police Department posted a support request asking for “analysts to monitor open source media to track crimes that are about to occur or have just occurred during the protest.” And an officer with the San Francisco Police Department posted an equipment request to NCRIC asking for surveillance cameras in “high volume locations.” “We have several more planned demo’s this week and these cameras would greatly enhance our situational awareness and public safety during these incidents,” she wrote.
Police were also paying close attention to any social media posts that mention looting, rioting, or violence against law enforcement. One SAR describes a Twitter user who tweeted, “Are we having a protest in Napa I low key wanna layout a cop.” Another describes a Twitter thread mentioning looting Target stores in Walnut Creek, Emeryville, and Bayfair. Another describes receiving a “threat via social media” threatening to loot stores at Sun Valley Mall in Concord. And another included a photograph of a phone displaying instructions for a “San Mateo County Looting Night” with a “hit list” of corporate chains.
On May 31, a paramedic at a gas station that rents U-Hauls in Napa said he “observed an estimated two dozen people dressed in black (hoodies, masks, shirts pants) in their twenties most white as far as he could tell, several of which were wearing masks,” with “another half dozen people wearing the same clothing” in the store, and he overheard them asking if they could rent vans for one day and leave them in San Francisco. He considered this suspicious behavior, so he called his off-duty friend in the fire department and said “they looked like a ‘ANTIF[A] or Black Bloc’ group.” His friend called the department’s Homeland Security operations officer, who posted this secondhand information as a SAR to NCRIC’s website.
And on June 2, a hardware store employee called the Novato Police Department to report that a woman “purchased all their helmets, hard hats, hammers, bolt cutters and goggles,” and that she mentioned the goggles were for tear gas. The Navato police officer posted this as a SAR, with a description of the woman and her vehicle.
Threats Against Protesters’ Lives
The large majority of civil unrest-related suspicious activity reports during this period were about Black Lives Matter protests, but a few were about people who believe that Black lives don’t matter.
A middle-aged white man called a California Constituent Affairs employee on June 2 and described his plans to shoot and kill protesters, according to a June 3 SAR posted by an officer with the California Highway Patrol. “The subject said he will shoot and kill protesters he perceives as a threat,” the employee described. “He believes all protesters are thugs, and says this has nothing to do with race. The subject said he has multiple firearms, including an AK 47 and he has no problem blowing off their heads if they get near his house, start a fire, or begin looting in his city. He said he will take actions into his own hands because politicians are not doing anything about it. He added that all his friends and neighbors have guns and are not afraid to use them. The subject made it very clear that protesters are not welcomed in his neighborhood and threatened to kill protesters.”
In another instance, the FBI’s threat operations center found a tweet that said, “Everyone please be careful out there! I don’t know if this person is genuine or fucking with me but I’d rather be safe than sorry! Apparently his businesses were looted and he is now threatening to shoot protesters.” It included a screenshot of a direct message conversation in which the alleged San Francisco business owner wrote, “I will start shootings tomorrow,” and “Anyone from this bullshit [enters] my store I’m gonna [shoot] them.”
On June 3, an officer at West Valley-Mission Community College Police Department posted a SAR that included a video from Snapchat, writing, “Subject has been reported as to have made a video of himself on [Snapchat] wearing a KKK style hood and [making] a white power hand gesture with the slogan ‘Burn crosses not buildings’ likely in response to the ongoing riots related to the George Floyd protests.”
Protecting Racist Teenagers From Online Harassment
“For ‘Black out Tuesday’, a 16 year old female changed her social media profile picture to all blue, in support of law enforcement, instead of all black, in support of Black Lives Matter,” a detective with the Walnut Creek Police Department typed into a Cyber Security Assessment request to NCRIC on June 4. “The family has been receiving death threats/property threats on social media, by phone and text.” He requested that they “search/review social media to obtain potential threats to family, as well as the identities of persons making such threats.”
The attached documents — a Microsoft Word document and a series of emails between Walnut Creek police officers — show much more than changing her avatar to blue to support law enforcement. They include screenshots of the teenager’s TikTok videos where she wrote messages like, “Tbh the kkk should come back. Oh and I wanna move to Georgia bc they have segregated proms,” and “I don’t talk to niggers.”
On June 6, a lieutenant with the Moraga Police Department posted a similar request to NCRIC. “The Moraga Police Department became aware of a video clip circulating on social media that depicts 3 Campolindo High School female teenagers using racist and offensive language, including the N-word,” he wrote. “We are requesting open source internet checks and overall social media monitoring analysis for the presence of threats, especially threats of violence or retaliation to occur in the Town of Moraga.”
When asked if it’s their policy to provide proactive protection to racists, the Walnut Creek and Moraga Police Departments did not respond to a request for comment.
“Any time there’s a potential threat where they’ll harm somebody, or someone’s indicating that they’ll harm somebody, we do support local agencies with those types of requests,” Sena, NCRIC’s executive director, said. “And we can’t base our support based on what the person says, or their ideologies. We have to treat everyone in the public the same, and our goal is to protect lives.”
Cyber Attacks Against Law Enforcement
In addition to sending bulk emails to thousands of local police, NCRIC sometimes sends bulk emails to its list of over 3,700 industry partners.
One June 2 mailing included a prescient warning from the FBI’s Cyber Division: “Due to ongoing civil unrest, hacktivist groups are actively threatening and endorsing cyber attacks against law enforcement and state government networks,” the FBI wrote. “Groups such as ‘Anonymous’ are actively leveraging societal and political unrest to encourage global cyber action against law enforcement and government computer networks, outward facing web pages, and social media accounts.”
Four days after NCRIC sent this email, the BlueLeaks hacktivist — who identified with Anonymous — began exfiltrating data from NCRIC’s server.
INSIDE THE PRISON WHERE CALIFORNIA’S CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK EXPLODED
For Donald O’Brien, life at the California Institution for Men seemed a step closer to freedom. Then came the coronavirus.
John Thomason
August 15 2020, 7:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/california-institution-men-coronavirus-prison-outbreak/
DONALD O’BRIEN WAS EXCITED when he got the news that his transfer had been cleared — as excited as any incarcerated person can be about staying in prison, he might clarify. Late last year he learned that he’d be moving from a maximum security facility near the U.S.-Mexico border to the California Institution for Men, a primarily minimum security prison about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. He hoped it would be his last stop before freedom.
O’Brien, 56, had just been denied parole, and he hoped the transfer to less secure housing would look good when he goes before the board again. But more than that, he just needed to pass the time. Having spent all but a couple years of his adult life imprisoned, he knew that a change of scenery would make a difference. And while Chino looks nothing like coastal Santa Monica, where he grew up, something in the air made it feel more like home.
O’Brien and I began writing letters to each other five years ago and have kept in touch ever since. I didn’t contact him as a journalist; we were both just looking for pen pals. At that time, O’Brien was 12 years into a sentence he’d received under California’s controversial “three strikes” law, following a burglary conviction. Had he been sentenced for that offense alone, he’d have been on his way home by then. But because it was his third felony, California law dictated that he spend at least 25 years behind bars, and possibly the rest of his life. So even then, he was looking to pass the time.
Last year, California’s piecemeal criminal justice reform measures started to give nonviolent offenders like O’Brien a much earlier shot at parole. I wrote him a letter of support for his hearing. While we were both disappointed by the denial, the move to CIM felt like a good omen.
“This place is like a park,” he wrote to me after arriving in March, “a lot of trees and over 30 cats running around.” For the first time in decades, O’Brien could see the outside world in motion when he gazed through the prison fence, watching traffic roll by on Chino’s Central Avenue. He marveled at makes and models that didn’t even exist the last time he’d seen cars on the road. What had happened, he wondered, to all the Camaros?
There was only one downside to CIM: sleeping in a large open hall with over 100 other men. “Really no privacy at all,” he wrote to me. “That is the only downfall.”
The sense of wonder and freedom was soon eclipsed by dread. Two days before O’Brien dated his letter to me, two CIM staff members had tested positive for Covid-19. There were few precautionary measures being taken inside the facility at the time, and nobody bothered to tell the inmates that the novel coronavirus had already breached the prison’s walls, according to O’Brien. But, as an avid reader of the news, he already knew what was coming. “It won’t be long before we are quarantined,” he wrote to me.
By the time O’Brien’s dorm was put under a quarantine in late April, CIM was undergoing a full-blown outbreak. One incarcerated person had died, and more than two-thirds of the 87 people held there who had received tests so far had tested positive. Now, according to a New York Times database, more than 1,200 cases have been connected to the facility, which had a population of about 3,500 at the beginning of the outbreak. Nineteen people incarcerated there have died. That death toll is higher than that of any other California facility besides San Quentin State Prison — and San Quentin’s outbreak was imported from CIM.
CIM was patient zero for the pandemic in California’s prisons. The facility was at 120 percent of its official capacity when its outbreak began, and about 200 particularly vulnerable inmates were transferred to other institutions in late May. But because they were only tested weeks before the transfer, they brought the virus with them. As a result, San Quentin went from being virtually virus-free to having more than a third of its population test positive. Twenty-five people incarcerated there have since died.
CIM’s response to its own ballooning Covid-19 count has primarily entailed limiting inmate movement, ending outside visitation, placing infected dorms under quarantine, and isolating some of the sickest people, as well as those who test positive. But these measures have failed to contain the virus. This failure is due largely to the institution’s fundamental design: Most of the facility’s inmates live in large, open dormitories that typically hold 140-200 people in bunk beds separated by only a few feet. Just a handful of centralized sinks, showers, and toilets are shared between them. By the prison’s own accounting, CIM was overcrowded for much of the pandemic. It wasn’t until June, after the ill-fated transfers to San Quentin, that the facility’s official capacity dipped below 100 percent. Even now, consistently maintaining 6 feet between the dorms’ occupied bunks is impossible.
Internal policy has played a role too. Though inmates are forbidden from leaving quarantined dorms, CIM has elected to transfer coronavirus-positive people who have recovered from their symptoms into both quarantined and “clean” dorms. Because inmates are not typically retested after once testing positive, these frequent transfers have the potential to introduce or reintroduce the virus into new dorms. Furthermore, the non-profit Prison Law Office discovered that in one dorm elderly inmates with disabilities and severe preexisting medical conditions have been housed alongside people with active Covid-19 infections, ostensibly because there was no other accessible housing available. Incarcerated people who spoke with me and other news outlets have also faulted the facility’s failure to implement universal mask-wearing until at least the end of April, as well as its reliance on twice-daily temperature checks to identify new positive cases, in lieu of comprehensive testing.
In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, insisted that the department has been “strongly committed to responding to this public health emergency and to protecting both staff and the incarcerated population.” Among other measures, the response cited CIM’s construction of temporary housing to relieve overcrowding and increase treatment space for positive cases, its use of town hall meetings and posters to “educate” CIM’s population about Covid-19, its provision of personal sanitation supplies, and the regular screening of each housing unit by nursing staff.
But CDCR’s confidence in the thoroughness of CIM’s response does not appear to be shared by prisoners who still have to spend every day and night in a single open hall with 100 other people. When they hear announcements reminding them to engage in social distancing, while sitting on bunks 3 or 4 feet apart from each other, they can’t help but question the commitment of prison officials.
“I think they’re trying to ride this out,” O’Brien told me in July. “Whoever doesn’t make it doesn’t make it.”
AS AN OLDER man with preexisting medical conditions that make him acutely vulnerable to the virus, O’Brien is typical of CIM’s population — half of the people held there at the onset of the outbreak were 50 or older, and the same portion were considered medically high-risk. It could be argued that O’Brien’s vulnerability was actually caused by his tenure in California prisons: Within one month of arriving at Pleasant Valley State Prison in November 2005, O’Brien was diagnosed with valley fever, an airborne infection caused by fungal spores found in soil. While valley fever is not unusual in the inland part of central California where Pleasant Valley is located, infection rates within the prison at this time were 400 times higher than they were in the community next door, according to a 2015 investigation by Mother Jones. O’Brien says he and others were exposed due to a major state construction project adjacent to the prison, a claim echoed by prison officials at the time. Regardless of its cause, O’Brien survived his infection and the bout of pneumonia that accompanied it, but it left him with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and permanent scarring on his left lung.
Nearly 15 years later, O’Brien stared down another pandemic at CIM. Though the first two cases at the facility were staffers, the virus soon spread. The first positive inmate was identified on April 4, along with 11 more staff. By the end of the month, the virus had arrived in O’Brien’s dorm. One man, gasping for breath, was isolated, and the entire dorm was placed under quarantine. Guards told the inmates that “one of their visitors” had infected the dorm, according to O’Brien, even though outside visitation hadn’t been permitted in well over a month and the first positive cases at the facility were staff members.
As a result of quarantine, the dorm’s residents lost much of the relative freedom that their reduced custody status entailed. With no visitors allowed, they are reliant on exorbitantly expensive phone calls for contact with friends and family. They can no longer access their jobs, religious services, self-help groups, the dining hall, and recreation in the large yard with its basketball courts, baseball field, and track. Instead, if they want to get outside, dozens of men now share three tables, two benches, a handful of pull-up bars, and not much else in the dorm’s enclosed 1,650-square-foot yard. O’Brien walks as much as he can in the limited space, and alternates sitting between sun and shade. Given the 100-degree heat that’s come with summer, he feels lucky that his yard actually has a few trees.
The irony of being asked to engage in social distancing while being trapped in such close quarters was not lost on O’Brien or any of the nearly 100 other men who sleep in the same large hall. When meals are delivered, they have no choice but to eat them on their beds. The food now is often uncooked, or cold by the time it reaches the dorm, O’Brien said. (After first hearing this, I bought him a package of food items he can prepare himself while quarantined.)
“We’re still sleeping 3 feet apart from each other, but they’re encouraging social distancing,” James Menefield, who was housed in O’Brien’s dorm until this month, told me by phone. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Though CDCR claims that all CIM staff and inmates were provided with masks on April 7, Menefield and O’Brien don’t recall receiving theirs until weeks later. For at least the first two weeks in April, according to Menefield, inmates who donned DIY masks for their own safety were sometimes threatened with discipline by guards — despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially recommended universal mask-wearing at the beginning of the month.
Darrell Harris, a trained respiratory therapist incarcerated at CIM, had been telling other inmates to wear masks even before it became government policy. But, according to an account he gave the health news website Stat, a corrections officer confiscated his mask on April 1. (Face coverings are usually prohibited in prisons.) Harris appealed the disciplinary action, ultimately requesting that a judge order the facility to return his mask, require CIM corrections officers to wear masks and gloves, and provide cleaning supplies to inmates.
According to Stat, CIM adopted most of Harris’s requests as its best practices by the end of the month. However, while the CDCR spokesperson told me that CIM provides “ongoing distributions” of personal cleaning supplies (including “hospital-grade disinfectant”), Menefield and O’Brien said that they have received no such supplies, except for 8-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer and bars of soap.
The three masks provided to each incarcerated person at CIM are made from the pants legs of the orange jumpsuits inmates wear during transfers, according to O’Brien. The CDCR spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny this, noting only that the masks are “made of two layers of 100 percent cotton twill.”
While the prison dithered over the measures it would take to contain the virus in April, cases continued to rise sharply. The first person incarcerated at CIM to die of the virus passed away on April 19. Still, prison staff did not regularly wear masks through early May, despite the new guidelines, according to inmates interviewed by Stat. Menefield corroborated this account.
“For a month and a half, staff were wearing masks in a discretionary manner,” he said, adding that only about a quarter of staff he observed at any given time during this period were following the guidance. (In response to questions about staff compliance, the CDCR spokesperson pointed to an April 15 memo “requiring the use of face coverings with notification that non-compliance would result in progressive discipline.”)
O’Brien, on the other hand, wore his mask religiously from the moment he received it. “I am not taking any chances,” he wrote to me the day after CIM’s first Covid-19 death. “I sleep wearing one.”
O’Brien estimates that 98 percent of inmates wear their masks regularly, and he says compliance among staff is now widespread as well (though he added that it sometimes takes the presence of their superiors to motivate some staff to comply.) Still, he pointed out, inmates can’t really wear their masks while they shower — which they do eight men at a time, with 2 feet between stalls. The reality of 100 men all eating meals on their beds poses additional challenges for containing the airborne virus.
In late April, 25 elderly and high-risk inmates were transferred out of O’Brien’s dorm and into individual single-bed cells in another building. The move was, in part, meant to finally enable social distancing in the dorm. But though the move got the dorm’s population to just under 100, it wasn’t nearly enough to create 6 feet of space between each occupied bunk.
“For every four bunks, there’s an empty bunk,” Menefield told me, “but in between those four bunks that are occupied, there’s only 3 feet of living space.”
THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE testing of people incarcerated at CIM was conducted on May 6, more than a month after the first positive case. Of the eight dorms clustered together on O’Brien’s yard, six came back with at least one positive. One of the two that did not was O’Brien’s.
The relief was short-lived. Within two weeks of the test, people who had been living in dorms with positive cases were being transferred into the two dorms that were considered clean — including people who had tested positive and subsequently been isolated for two weeks. Because people who tested positive once were not retested, residents of the “clean” dorms worried that the transfers could be introducing the virus into new areas of the prison.
Whether the virus was introduced through these transfers or from some other source — like staff, who were not tested by their employer until late May, and were instead asked to seek their own tests and self-report — every dorm at CIM had been infected by the end of May, and new positive cases popped up again in O’Brien’s dorm shortly after the transfers. One of these was his bunkmate. The dorm has never gone two weeks without a positive case. It’s entering its fourth month of quarantine.
The prison administers twice-daily temperature checks, to isolate potential vectors of the virus, but Menefield said that his own experience calls into question their effectiveness. On the evening of June 7, his body temperature clocked in at 101 F. He says he was instructed to return to his bunk, take Tylenol, and return for another check in an hour. By then, his temperature had normalized and he was again cleared to return to his bunk.
That night, however, prison staff shook him awake and told him to report for another temperature check. This time the reading was 103 F. A doctor ordered that Menefield be given a Covid-19 test and transferred to an isolated unit. Four days later, his results came back positive. Menefield thinks the gap between his first reading and his isolation could have put many other residents in danger.
“For seven hours after presenting with a fever, I was allowed to be around other inmates,” he told me. “Every inmate in that immediate area — within 10 bunks of me — has [since] tested positive.”
O’Brien, for his part, has not broken a fever or had any unusual respiratory difficulty since the outbreak began. He did, however, experience extreme fatigue and mild body aches in late June and spent the better part of the week doing little besides sleeping. His temperature checks came back normal, so, in the fog of sickness, he wrote it off as a depressive episode. (O’Brien has a history of bipolar disorder and depression.) He recovered after about five days. Later, when I asked him if he might have had an undetected case of Covid-19, he thought for a second and said, “It could be, I don’t know.” He added that he’d never had an illness that felt the same way. Whatever the experience was, O’Brien endured it in close proximity to dozens of other inmates.
Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coronavirus@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.
With only three widespread Covid-19 tests administered since the facility’s first cases appeared in March — the most recent occurred on August 6 — it’s entirely unclear the extent to which asymptomatic or partially symptomatic transmission has gone unchecked at CIM. Another potential blind spot is CIM’s decision not to retest people who have tested positive in the past. Since July, even the temperature checks have largely been limited to inmates who have only ever tested negative, according to O’Brien.
A round of testing in July revealed 13 additional positive cases in his dorm, including his new bunkmate, who had arrived in June to replace the first bunkmate who left after catching the virus. O’Brien says this new bunkmate was exhibiting symptoms for weeks prior to being tested — constantly coughing and sweating profusely — but he was not isolated until his results came back positive. Once the 13 positive cases were moved out, 15 formerly positive people were moved into the dorm to replace them. Another test in early August, too, resulted in seven new positive cases being shuffled out of O’Brien’s dorm.
The result of the facility’s piecemeal and largely unexplained mitigation measures has been the festering of low-level paranoia in the dorms. O’Brien avoids the many inmates who cough and sneeze regularly, and he eyes the formerly positive cases that get moved into his dorm with suspicion. “They’re not completely healed,” he told me. “I don’t know if you’re ever completely healed.”
Suspicion of prison authorities is even more acute. More than once, O’Brien has told me that he thinks the corrections department’s goal is to expose everyone to the virus. Menefield was slightly more circumspect. “Given all of these facts, either staff were grossly incompetent in handling this crisis, or they did this intentionally,” he told me.
CIM’s internal coronavirus policies have received relatively little publicity, but CDCR’s transfer of hundreds of inmates from CIM to other facilities without timely testing in late May was widely condemned after it caused the outbreak at San Quentin. One California legislator called it “the worst prison health screw-up in state history.” As a result, CDCR’s chief medical director was demoted to an advisory role in early July.
O’Brien points to this ousting as acknowledgment that the system is not taking appropriate measures to keep him and thousands of others incarcerated at CIM safe. But it has changed little about the day-to-day operation of the facility. The paranoia caused by the ongoing outbreak has been blunted by the continuing banality of a regimented daily life spent between the crowded dormitory and the spartan yard. The summer heat makes the air in the dorm even more stifling than usual: It’s cooled only by fans, not air conditioning, and the exhaust vent on O’Brien’s side of the building is broken. So when things start to get unbearable just after noon, he puts his head under a faucet and goes out into the yard to sit in the shade of one of the trees. He’s not as hopeful as he was when he first arrived at CIM, but he can still see the cars zooming by on Central Avenue, reminding him of what it might be like to be free — and to be able to finally prioritize his own safety the way he sees fit. He’s learned in prison that nobody else will.
August 15 2020, 7:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/california-institution-men-coronavirus-prison-outbreak/
DONALD O’BRIEN WAS EXCITED when he got the news that his transfer had been cleared — as excited as any incarcerated person can be about staying in prison, he might clarify. Late last year he learned that he’d be moving from a maximum security facility near the U.S.-Mexico border to the California Institution for Men, a primarily minimum security prison about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. He hoped it would be his last stop before freedom.
O’Brien, 56, had just been denied parole, and he hoped the transfer to less secure housing would look good when he goes before the board again. But more than that, he just needed to pass the time. Having spent all but a couple years of his adult life imprisoned, he knew that a change of scenery would make a difference. And while Chino looks nothing like coastal Santa Monica, where he grew up, something in the air made it feel more like home.
O’Brien and I began writing letters to each other five years ago and have kept in touch ever since. I didn’t contact him as a journalist; we were both just looking for pen pals. At that time, O’Brien was 12 years into a sentence he’d received under California’s controversial “three strikes” law, following a burglary conviction. Had he been sentenced for that offense alone, he’d have been on his way home by then. But because it was his third felony, California law dictated that he spend at least 25 years behind bars, and possibly the rest of his life. So even then, he was looking to pass the time.
Last year, California’s piecemeal criminal justice reform measures started to give nonviolent offenders like O’Brien a much earlier shot at parole. I wrote him a letter of support for his hearing. While we were both disappointed by the denial, the move to CIM felt like a good omen.
“This place is like a park,” he wrote to me after arriving in March, “a lot of trees and over 30 cats running around.” For the first time in decades, O’Brien could see the outside world in motion when he gazed through the prison fence, watching traffic roll by on Chino’s Central Avenue. He marveled at makes and models that didn’t even exist the last time he’d seen cars on the road. What had happened, he wondered, to all the Camaros?
There was only one downside to CIM: sleeping in a large open hall with over 100 other men. “Really no privacy at all,” he wrote to me. “That is the only downfall.”
The sense of wonder and freedom was soon eclipsed by dread. Two days before O’Brien dated his letter to me, two CIM staff members had tested positive for Covid-19. There were few precautionary measures being taken inside the facility at the time, and nobody bothered to tell the inmates that the novel coronavirus had already breached the prison’s walls, according to O’Brien. But, as an avid reader of the news, he already knew what was coming. “It won’t be long before we are quarantined,” he wrote to me.
By the time O’Brien’s dorm was put under a quarantine in late April, CIM was undergoing a full-blown outbreak. One incarcerated person had died, and more than two-thirds of the 87 people held there who had received tests so far had tested positive. Now, according to a New York Times database, more than 1,200 cases have been connected to the facility, which had a population of about 3,500 at the beginning of the outbreak. Nineteen people incarcerated there have died. That death toll is higher than that of any other California facility besides San Quentin State Prison — and San Quentin’s outbreak was imported from CIM.
CIM was patient zero for the pandemic in California’s prisons. The facility was at 120 percent of its official capacity when its outbreak began, and about 200 particularly vulnerable inmates were transferred to other institutions in late May. But because they were only tested weeks before the transfer, they brought the virus with them. As a result, San Quentin went from being virtually virus-free to having more than a third of its population test positive. Twenty-five people incarcerated there have since died.
CIM’s response to its own ballooning Covid-19 count has primarily entailed limiting inmate movement, ending outside visitation, placing infected dorms under quarantine, and isolating some of the sickest people, as well as those who test positive. But these measures have failed to contain the virus. This failure is due largely to the institution’s fundamental design: Most of the facility’s inmates live in large, open dormitories that typically hold 140-200 people in bunk beds separated by only a few feet. Just a handful of centralized sinks, showers, and toilets are shared between them. By the prison’s own accounting, CIM was overcrowded for much of the pandemic. It wasn’t until June, after the ill-fated transfers to San Quentin, that the facility’s official capacity dipped below 100 percent. Even now, consistently maintaining 6 feet between the dorms’ occupied bunks is impossible.
Internal policy has played a role too. Though inmates are forbidden from leaving quarantined dorms, CIM has elected to transfer coronavirus-positive people who have recovered from their symptoms into both quarantined and “clean” dorms. Because inmates are not typically retested after once testing positive, these frequent transfers have the potential to introduce or reintroduce the virus into new dorms. Furthermore, the non-profit Prison Law Office discovered that in one dorm elderly inmates with disabilities and severe preexisting medical conditions have been housed alongside people with active Covid-19 infections, ostensibly because there was no other accessible housing available. Incarcerated people who spoke with me and other news outlets have also faulted the facility’s failure to implement universal mask-wearing until at least the end of April, as well as its reliance on twice-daily temperature checks to identify new positive cases, in lieu of comprehensive testing.
In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, insisted that the department has been “strongly committed to responding to this public health emergency and to protecting both staff and the incarcerated population.” Among other measures, the response cited CIM’s construction of temporary housing to relieve overcrowding and increase treatment space for positive cases, its use of town hall meetings and posters to “educate” CIM’s population about Covid-19, its provision of personal sanitation supplies, and the regular screening of each housing unit by nursing staff.
But CDCR’s confidence in the thoroughness of CIM’s response does not appear to be shared by prisoners who still have to spend every day and night in a single open hall with 100 other people. When they hear announcements reminding them to engage in social distancing, while sitting on bunks 3 or 4 feet apart from each other, they can’t help but question the commitment of prison officials.
“I think they’re trying to ride this out,” O’Brien told me in July. “Whoever doesn’t make it doesn’t make it.”
AS AN OLDER man with preexisting medical conditions that make him acutely vulnerable to the virus, O’Brien is typical of CIM’s population — half of the people held there at the onset of the outbreak were 50 or older, and the same portion were considered medically high-risk. It could be argued that O’Brien’s vulnerability was actually caused by his tenure in California prisons: Within one month of arriving at Pleasant Valley State Prison in November 2005, O’Brien was diagnosed with valley fever, an airborne infection caused by fungal spores found in soil. While valley fever is not unusual in the inland part of central California where Pleasant Valley is located, infection rates within the prison at this time were 400 times higher than they were in the community next door, according to a 2015 investigation by Mother Jones. O’Brien says he and others were exposed due to a major state construction project adjacent to the prison, a claim echoed by prison officials at the time. Regardless of its cause, O’Brien survived his infection and the bout of pneumonia that accompanied it, but it left him with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and permanent scarring on his left lung.
Nearly 15 years later, O’Brien stared down another pandemic at CIM. Though the first two cases at the facility were staffers, the virus soon spread. The first positive inmate was identified on April 4, along with 11 more staff. By the end of the month, the virus had arrived in O’Brien’s dorm. One man, gasping for breath, was isolated, and the entire dorm was placed under quarantine. Guards told the inmates that “one of their visitors” had infected the dorm, according to O’Brien, even though outside visitation hadn’t been permitted in well over a month and the first positive cases at the facility were staff members.
As a result of quarantine, the dorm’s residents lost much of the relative freedom that their reduced custody status entailed. With no visitors allowed, they are reliant on exorbitantly expensive phone calls for contact with friends and family. They can no longer access their jobs, religious services, self-help groups, the dining hall, and recreation in the large yard with its basketball courts, baseball field, and track. Instead, if they want to get outside, dozens of men now share three tables, two benches, a handful of pull-up bars, and not much else in the dorm’s enclosed 1,650-square-foot yard. O’Brien walks as much as he can in the limited space, and alternates sitting between sun and shade. Given the 100-degree heat that’s come with summer, he feels lucky that his yard actually has a few trees.
The irony of being asked to engage in social distancing while being trapped in such close quarters was not lost on O’Brien or any of the nearly 100 other men who sleep in the same large hall. When meals are delivered, they have no choice but to eat them on their beds. The food now is often uncooked, or cold by the time it reaches the dorm, O’Brien said. (After first hearing this, I bought him a package of food items he can prepare himself while quarantined.)
“We’re still sleeping 3 feet apart from each other, but they’re encouraging social distancing,” James Menefield, who was housed in O’Brien’s dorm until this month, told me by phone. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Though CDCR claims that all CIM staff and inmates were provided with masks on April 7, Menefield and O’Brien don’t recall receiving theirs until weeks later. For at least the first two weeks in April, according to Menefield, inmates who donned DIY masks for their own safety were sometimes threatened with discipline by guards — despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially recommended universal mask-wearing at the beginning of the month.
Darrell Harris, a trained respiratory therapist incarcerated at CIM, had been telling other inmates to wear masks even before it became government policy. But, according to an account he gave the health news website Stat, a corrections officer confiscated his mask on April 1. (Face coverings are usually prohibited in prisons.) Harris appealed the disciplinary action, ultimately requesting that a judge order the facility to return his mask, require CIM corrections officers to wear masks and gloves, and provide cleaning supplies to inmates.
According to Stat, CIM adopted most of Harris’s requests as its best practices by the end of the month. However, while the CDCR spokesperson told me that CIM provides “ongoing distributions” of personal cleaning supplies (including “hospital-grade disinfectant”), Menefield and O’Brien said that they have received no such supplies, except for 8-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer and bars of soap.
The three masks provided to each incarcerated person at CIM are made from the pants legs of the orange jumpsuits inmates wear during transfers, according to O’Brien. The CDCR spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny this, noting only that the masks are “made of two layers of 100 percent cotton twill.”
While the prison dithered over the measures it would take to contain the virus in April, cases continued to rise sharply. The first person incarcerated at CIM to die of the virus passed away on April 19. Still, prison staff did not regularly wear masks through early May, despite the new guidelines, according to inmates interviewed by Stat. Menefield corroborated this account.
“For a month and a half, staff were wearing masks in a discretionary manner,” he said, adding that only about a quarter of staff he observed at any given time during this period were following the guidance. (In response to questions about staff compliance, the CDCR spokesperson pointed to an April 15 memo “requiring the use of face coverings with notification that non-compliance would result in progressive discipline.”)
O’Brien, on the other hand, wore his mask religiously from the moment he received it. “I am not taking any chances,” he wrote to me the day after CIM’s first Covid-19 death. “I sleep wearing one.”
O’Brien estimates that 98 percent of inmates wear their masks regularly, and he says compliance among staff is now widespread as well (though he added that it sometimes takes the presence of their superiors to motivate some staff to comply.) Still, he pointed out, inmates can’t really wear their masks while they shower — which they do eight men at a time, with 2 feet between stalls. The reality of 100 men all eating meals on their beds poses additional challenges for containing the airborne virus.
In late April, 25 elderly and high-risk inmates were transferred out of O’Brien’s dorm and into individual single-bed cells in another building. The move was, in part, meant to finally enable social distancing in the dorm. But though the move got the dorm’s population to just under 100, it wasn’t nearly enough to create 6 feet of space between each occupied bunk.
“For every four bunks, there’s an empty bunk,” Menefield told me, “but in between those four bunks that are occupied, there’s only 3 feet of living space.”
THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE testing of people incarcerated at CIM was conducted on May 6, more than a month after the first positive case. Of the eight dorms clustered together on O’Brien’s yard, six came back with at least one positive. One of the two that did not was O’Brien’s.
The relief was short-lived. Within two weeks of the test, people who had been living in dorms with positive cases were being transferred into the two dorms that were considered clean — including people who had tested positive and subsequently been isolated for two weeks. Because people who tested positive once were not retested, residents of the “clean” dorms worried that the transfers could be introducing the virus into new areas of the prison.
Whether the virus was introduced through these transfers or from some other source — like staff, who were not tested by their employer until late May, and were instead asked to seek their own tests and self-report — every dorm at CIM had been infected by the end of May, and new positive cases popped up again in O’Brien’s dorm shortly after the transfers. One of these was his bunkmate. The dorm has never gone two weeks without a positive case. It’s entering its fourth month of quarantine.
The prison administers twice-daily temperature checks, to isolate potential vectors of the virus, but Menefield said that his own experience calls into question their effectiveness. On the evening of June 7, his body temperature clocked in at 101 F. He says he was instructed to return to his bunk, take Tylenol, and return for another check in an hour. By then, his temperature had normalized and he was again cleared to return to his bunk.
That night, however, prison staff shook him awake and told him to report for another temperature check. This time the reading was 103 F. A doctor ordered that Menefield be given a Covid-19 test and transferred to an isolated unit. Four days later, his results came back positive. Menefield thinks the gap between his first reading and his isolation could have put many other residents in danger.
“For seven hours after presenting with a fever, I was allowed to be around other inmates,” he told me. “Every inmate in that immediate area — within 10 bunks of me — has [since] tested positive.”
O’Brien, for his part, has not broken a fever or had any unusual respiratory difficulty since the outbreak began. He did, however, experience extreme fatigue and mild body aches in late June and spent the better part of the week doing little besides sleeping. His temperature checks came back normal, so, in the fog of sickness, he wrote it off as a depressive episode. (O’Brien has a history of bipolar disorder and depression.) He recovered after about five days. Later, when I asked him if he might have had an undetected case of Covid-19, he thought for a second and said, “It could be, I don’t know.” He added that he’d never had an illness that felt the same way. Whatever the experience was, O’Brien endured it in close proximity to dozens of other inmates.
Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coronavirus@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.
With only three widespread Covid-19 tests administered since the facility’s first cases appeared in March — the most recent occurred on August 6 — it’s entirely unclear the extent to which asymptomatic or partially symptomatic transmission has gone unchecked at CIM. Another potential blind spot is CIM’s decision not to retest people who have tested positive in the past. Since July, even the temperature checks have largely been limited to inmates who have only ever tested negative, according to O’Brien.
A round of testing in July revealed 13 additional positive cases in his dorm, including his new bunkmate, who had arrived in June to replace the first bunkmate who left after catching the virus. O’Brien says this new bunkmate was exhibiting symptoms for weeks prior to being tested — constantly coughing and sweating profusely — but he was not isolated until his results came back positive. Once the 13 positive cases were moved out, 15 formerly positive people were moved into the dorm to replace them. Another test in early August, too, resulted in seven new positive cases being shuffled out of O’Brien’s dorm.
The result of the facility’s piecemeal and largely unexplained mitigation measures has been the festering of low-level paranoia in the dorms. O’Brien avoids the many inmates who cough and sneeze regularly, and he eyes the formerly positive cases that get moved into his dorm with suspicion. “They’re not completely healed,” he told me. “I don’t know if you’re ever completely healed.”
Suspicion of prison authorities is even more acute. More than once, O’Brien has told me that he thinks the corrections department’s goal is to expose everyone to the virus. Menefield was slightly more circumspect. “Given all of these facts, either staff were grossly incompetent in handling this crisis, or they did this intentionally,” he told me.
CIM’s internal coronavirus policies have received relatively little publicity, but CDCR’s transfer of hundreds of inmates from CIM to other facilities without timely testing in late May was widely condemned after it caused the outbreak at San Quentin. One California legislator called it “the worst prison health screw-up in state history.” As a result, CDCR’s chief medical director was demoted to an advisory role in early July.
O’Brien points to this ousting as acknowledgment that the system is not taking appropriate measures to keep him and thousands of others incarcerated at CIM safe. But it has changed little about the day-to-day operation of the facility. The paranoia caused by the ongoing outbreak has been blunted by the continuing banality of a regimented daily life spent between the crowded dormitory and the spartan yard. The summer heat makes the air in the dorm even more stifling than usual: It’s cooled only by fans, not air conditioning, and the exhaust vent on O’Brien’s side of the building is broken. So when things start to get unbearable just after noon, he puts his head under a faucet and goes out into the yard to sit in the shade of one of the trees. He’s not as hopeful as he was when he first arrived at CIM, but he can still see the cars zooming by on Central Avenue, reminding him of what it might be like to be free — and to be able to finally prioritize his own safety the way he sees fit. He’s learned in prison that nobody else will.
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