Robbie Goldstein is challenging incumbent Rep. Stephen Lynch, the most conservative member of the Massachusetts delegation.
Rachel M. Cohen
August 16 2020, 6:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/16/boston-stephen-lynch-robbie-goldstein-democrat-primary/
WITH JUST OVER two weeks left until the Massachusetts Democratic primary, progressives across the country are focused on the high-profile primaries of Sen. Ed Markey, who is fending off a challenge from Rep. Joe Kennedy, and Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, who is running against House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal.
Elsewhere in the state, other progressive challengers are struggling to attract similar attention. In the crowded House race to replace Kennedy, two progressives appear tied for third behind two more conservative Democrats. And in the Boston-area 8th Congressional District, Robbie Goldstein, a 36-year-old primary care physician, is scrambling to get his name out and convince voters he’s not running a long-shot bid.
On Wednesday, Goldstein’s campaign released a poll claiming he trailed just 7 percentage points behind nine-term moderate incumbent Rep. Stephen Lynch. Conducted last weekend by Lincoln Park Strategies, the poll found that 29 percent of likely voters remain undecided. However, Lynch held a clear advantage when it came to name recognition, with roughly 70 percent of voters knowing who he was, compared to 40 percent recognizing Goldstein. Still, the pollsters concluded Goldstein “has a real chance to win” because among undecideds, 42 percent said they’d prefer to vote for a more progressive candidate, 71 percent said they’d prefer a pro-choice candidate, and 73 percent said they’d prefer a candidate who backs Medicare for All.
Goldstein’s case against Lynch rests on substantive policy differences, including Medicare for All and reproductive rights. The incumbent opposes single-payer health care, and while Lynch has criticized federal efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and “draconian” state-level abortion restrictions, he himself identifies as pro-life and believes ending pregnancies should be “legal and rare.”
Goldstein’s campaign argues that this race presents a viable opportunity to bring another progressive to Congress, even if Lynch is not as influential as other incumbents who’ve been toppled, like Reps. Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel. “I am constantly confounded by progressives’ infatuation with claiming these big headline victories instead of just winning and building power,” said Karen Clawson Cosmas, Goldstein’s campaign manager. “We can replace a do-nothing moderate Democrat with someone who is actually a champion of the issues of the progressive wing of the party.”
Lynch has long been the most conservative member of the Massachusetts delegation, though he argues that’s all relative for their deep blue state. “Calling me the least liberal member from Massachusetts is like calling me the slowest Kenyan in the Boston Marathon,” Lynch quipped a decade ago in the Boston Globe.
Goldstein is hoping for a surge in the final weeks — similar to what Cori Bush saw recently in St. Louis, and Jamaal Bowman in New York — though Goldstein trails them both in fundraising and major endorsements, and he has far less name recognition than Bush, a Ferguson activist who ran for Congress in 2018 and was featured in a documentary alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By the end of June, Goldstein had raised just $292,000, next to Lynch’s $660,000, though Goldstein did raise more in June than in the previous five months combined.
To some extent Goldstein is banking on complacency from his opponent. In the last quarter Lynch raised just $45,000, and has spent no money to date on TV or Facebook ads. Also, unlike some of his Massachusetts colleagues running for reelection, Lynch has had no members of Congress campaigning on his behalf. Goldstein says this is a reflection of his opponent “not having any friends left in Washington.”
Goldstein, meanwhile, is backed by left-wing groups like Indivisible, Our Revolution, Progressive Massachusetts, and even the Boston Teachers Union. Justice Democrats, which endorsed Morse, has stayed out of this primary, after having considered backing another progressive physician, Mohammad Dar, who entered the race almost a year before Goldstein did, but dropped out early due to personal reasons.
Lynch’s campaign spokesperson, Scott Ferson, said they are confident about the representative’s standing in the district and resources available left to campaign. “We have a voter engagement plan in place, and he’s not fundraising just to stockpile money,” Ferson said. “He’s doing things in a way that fits this race.”
LYNCH, WHO GREW up poor in South Boston public housing and spent two decades as an ironworker, was first elected to Congress in 2001. He represents a district that over the last two decades has grown both more diverse and more gentrified. Following the 2010 Census, Lynch’s district boundaries were redrawn, and while Joe Biden won every city and town in the 8th Congressional District on Super Tuesday, Goldstein says there’s a real path to victory, since Warren and Bernie Sanders racked up more votes in the district overall than Biden.
An Irish Catholic proud of his ties to blue-collar workers, Lynch has voiced concerns about the party drifting too far left and is critical of the term “socialism,” which he warns could scare off older voters. Ferson argues that Lynch remains “well-in-tune” with his district and has handily defeated candidates who have run to his left in the past. In 2018, Lynch was challenged by Brianna Wu, a software engineer who ran on Medicare for All and tackling income inequality, and beat her with 71 percent of the vote.
The sharpest contrast between the two candidates revolves around health care. Ironically one of Lynch’s biggest vulnerabilities is that he was just one of 45 House Democrats to vote against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and of those Democrats, only three remain in Congress. Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the three, lost his primary in March to progressive challenger Marie Newman.
At the time, Lynch explained he voted no because he felt the final version gave too much power to the insurance industry and would lead to spiking prices, and he opposed how the bill taxed union health care plans and eliminated opportunities for state public options.
“I don’t think [Lynch] is as conservative as Lipinski, but I do think the thing that sticks with people here is him having voted against the Affordable Care Act, given how much activism there was around that,” said Jonathan Cohn, a leader with Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide advocacy group. “People remember that.”
Lynch, for his part, has criticized Goldstein for trying to “rip out the ACA root and branch” and says he’s proud of the work done to repeal the tax on union health care plans. Goldstein “wants to dismantle the ACA and get rid of it, so if you ask me who really supports the ACA, that’s Stephen,” said Ferson, Lynch’s spokesperson.
Lynch, who has long self-described as an anti-abortion Democrat, notably began moving left in 2013, when he ran against Ed Markey for the Senate seat left open when John Kerry became secretary of state. As a state legislator in Massachusetts, Lynch tried to ban abortions after 24 weeks, and in Congress he voted to support the “partial-birth abortion” ban. But in 2013, Lynch made clear that while he was pro-life and wanted abortions to remain “rare,” he would seek to protect Roe v. Wade and vote against any Supreme Court nominee who wanted to overturn the decision.
He’s moved even further left in recent years. In 2019, he wrote a Boston Globe op-ed condemning states for their new abortion restrictions and Congress for trying to defund Planned Parenthood. “If these recent developments define the ‘pro-life’ movement, you can count me out,” he wrote. Lynch received 100 percent ratings from NARAL Pro-Choice America for the last five years, but neither NARAL nor Planned Parenthood is endorsing in the primary.
Goldstein, who has also been endorsed by local chapters of the Sunrise Movement, is campaigning on being more aggressive on climate change than the incumbent. Lynch was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, though has said the 10-year timetable outlined in the resolution to transition completely off fossil fuels is “unrealistic.” Lynch originally was a strong supporter of the Keystone Pipeline, but reversed his position on that in 2013. In a recent primary debate, Lynch urged viewers to look at his ratings from the League of Conservation Voters, where he has a “lifetime score” of 95 percent.
Goldstein has repeatedly blasted Lynch for once calling climate change an “elitist” issue, a charge based on a 2017 CommonWealth magazine article, though the full quote and context is not included in the piece. Lynch has denied using that descriptor.
While Lynch’s campaign disputes that he used that exact word, Ferson, his spokesperson, linked the sentiment to Lynch’s background as an ironworker and the congressman’s belief that lawmakers shouldn’t be “cavalier” when discussing job loss associated with transitioning off fossil fuels. “I think it’s in the context of who do we need to include when we’re having those discussions,” said Ferson. “And he supports the Green New Deal in part because it’s so focused on creating new jobs.”
Shawn Zeller, the author of the CommonWealth article who now works as an editor at CQ Roll Call, told The Intercept that Lynch had made the reference in the context of his support for Tim Ryan for House speaker. “Trump had just won the presidency and Lynch was among those who felt Pelosi was leading the party too far left,” Zeller wrote in an email. “In an interview with me, he mentioned climate change as an example and said he preferred Democrats focus on lunch bucket issues to help the working class.”
On issues of immigration, there are differences between the candidates too. Over the objections of President Barack Obama in 2015, Lynch voted to tighten vetting standards for refugees from Iraq and Syria, and in 2018 he voted in favor of a resolution lauding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even when 133 House Democrats just voted “present.” While Lynch has condemned President Donald Trump’s child separation policy and backed a 2019 resolution to establish standards of care at border facilities, some of his constituents say he’s moved too slowly, and been too quiet overall.
“He’s just not interested in engaging with constituents who are looking for someone with a sense of urgency,” said Tonya Tedesco, a Boston activist who organized trips to Lynch’s district offices last summer to press him on immigration. “We are in crisis mode and I do not know that he recognizes that.”
Friday, August 21, 2020
AUSTIN’S VOTE TO “REIMAGINE” POLICING PROMPTS THREATS FROM STATE OFFICIALS
After the city council approved $150 million in budget cuts, Texas leaders proposed capping tax revenue for cities that defund police.
Jordan Smith
August 19 2020, 1:50 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/19/austin-police-department-budget-cuts/
AHEAD OF THE Austin City Council’s budget meeting in mid-August, Kathy Mitchell, a longtime community organizer and grassroots lobbyist, “basically spent the week in a deep and broad anxiety,” she said. “I was just anxious for seven days.”
There was much at stake when the council members, mayor, and city manager met via Zoom on August 12 for a 14-hour hearing that included hundreds of city residents waiting for their minute to speak. For years, community groups had been agitating for change at the Austin Police Department. Those calls grew louder in late April after Austin police killed a man named Mike Ramos, and louder still in May, when the city, like so many others across the country, erupted in protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. The protests in Austin were at times met with violence from police; at least two people suffered life-threatening injuries after officers fired so-called less lethal munitions at their heads.
Mitchell, who had been working with city leaders to pass a block of police reforms, was optimistic but still uncertain as the budget session drew near. “Oh, man. I have a habit of never counting my votes until the day that people actually vote,” she said. In the end, the 10-member council voted unanimously to cut, “decouple,” and redistribute roughly $150 million of the APD’s $434 million budget. “There’s no question that this is a big moment in Austin,” Mitchell said.
Indeed, Mitchell and others say that what happened in Austin is a big moment for the rest of the country too, potentially providing a road map for other municipalities that have pledged to cut police funding or dismantle their departments in the wake of Floyd’s killing, but that have so far had more limited success.
The Austin council voted on a three-tiered package of cuts to APD. The first, totaling roughly $21 million, are direct, immediate budget cuts. The next three cadet classes have been canceled — unless and until the department can revamp its academy, which has been called out for instilling a warrior cop mentality that is out of step with public service. Vacant positions have been cut, overtime has been curtailed, various contracts (for things like office supplies) will be slashed, and funding for automatic license plate readers has been axed. The pot of funds is being reallocated to workforce development, housing for the homeless, and substance abuse treatment, as well as to address food insecurity and increase health care access.
The second pot of money, about $80 million, is the decoupling fund. Primarily civilian-led endeavors like the Austin crime lab (which under APD was so mired in scandal that it shuttered its operations in 2016), victim services, and the 911 call center will be removed from police control. City leaders are also aiming to change the way the police themselves are policed, by moving the APD’s Internal Affairs and Special Investigations Unit outside of the department. Details on how those transitions will happen, what revamped services will look like, and who will control them will be worked out in the coming months.
The third pot of money, roughly $49 million, is being put into a “reimagine safety” fund, with the goal of removing additional duties — like traffic enforcement and response to mental health crises — from police. That money will instead go “toward alternative forms of public safety and community support,” according to a document compiled by council members.
“This is all complex and complicated, and there are lots of variables to consider,” said Natasha Harper-Madison, who is the council’s only Black member and has been on the leading edge of the city’s efforts at reform. “I think people need to know that there is nothing that’s happened by way of council action that was simple, or easy, or without recognitions of the nuance here.”
“The Police Can’t Run the City”
To date, other cities that have vowed to reimagine public safety have mostly taken more modest steps or hit stumbling blocks. In New York, for example, a vote to cut $1 billion from the NYPD’s $6 billion budget has been criticized as budgetary sleight of hand, while the bulk of the $150 million cut from the Los Angeles police budget will come from reducing overtime. In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, budget cuts have not yet been identified and efforts to disband the police department have been stalled, likely until at least next year. While a majority of the Seattle City Council has endorsed a plan to defund police by 50 percent, the cuts have remained far below that and council members have taken some heat, including from Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County, for a ham-fisted approach that ostensibly forced the city’s first Black woman police chief, Carmen Best, to resign.
By comparison, Austin’s first effort toward a long-term redefinition of public safety has been more concrete. But it did not happen overnight, notes Scott Henson, a longtime criminal justice reformer and author of the influential blog Grits for Breakfast. Instead, the seeds for the changes voted on last week were planted years ago and have been doggedly tended to by a growing coalition of advocates across the city. In the wake of the Ramos and Floyd killings, he said, “we already had the coalition and the agenda” teed up for action.
Crucial to last week’s unanimous council vote, says Henson, was a fight that unfolded in 2017, when activists led by the Austin Justice Coalition decided to take on the local cop union, the Austin Police Association. Reformers wanted a seat at the table as the city negotiated a new contract with the union in order to ensure the adoption of meaningful oversight and transparency policies related to the disciplinary process. The union resisted, and in the end, the council voted down a roughly $83 million contract. Although the union dug in its heels, discontinued negotiations, and predicted that scores of officers would resign, that did not happen. Instead, everyone eventually sat back down and a contract with significant reforms was approved for far less money.
According to Chas Moore, founder and executive director of the Austin Justice Coalition, the whole episode showed the city’s elected officials that the sky would not fall if they challenged the union, which, as is widely the case, has long wielded tremendous political power, often to the detriment of meaningful reform. “I do think that kind of changed the culture of police power here in the city. Until that moment, police contracts in Austin, it was a rubber stamp process: They ask for everything and they get 99 percent of it,” Moore said. But “the world didn’t end after the police contract went to ‘no,’” he continued. “I think it allowed city council to really just understand, maybe we can trust in each other and the police can’t run the city.”
Although that lesson may have bolstered the council’s confidence during the budget session last week, not everyone was satisfied with the recent cuts. After the vote, Grassroots Leadership and Communities of Color United, which had called for a 50 percent reduction to the police budget, declared that “the budget passed today does not meet this moment.”
“‘Reimagining public safety’ does not mean simply reorganizing departments or taking the same functions that APD currently performs and moving them, complete with their current staff and culture, to a civilian department,” the groups said in a joint statement. “When we say ‘reimagine public safety,’ it’s a step beyond defunding the police. It means imagining a world where we don’t rely on cops, cages, and other punitive approaches to keep us safe.”
Moore understands the frustration, but he believes Austin has taken a powerful step toward that future. “Either we ask for the big thing and we don’t get nothing and then we’re stuck in the same place, or we can start chomping away at the elephant one bite at a time,” he said. “I think we took a pretty good chunk out when council took the vote last week.”
Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, state officials and other lawmakers from outside Austin were quick to decry the cuts and pledge legislative action against such “short-sighted efforts,” as a Dallas-area state senator put it. Gov. Greg Abbott pledged to have state police “stand in the gap” to protect the city, while George P. Bush, the elected state land commissioner, took to Twitter. He posted a video of a row of cars with broken windows in a parking garage downtown and implied that the vandalism had taken place the same night as the city council’s vote. “The need for police funding is as clear as ever,” he wrote. “This is a dangerous path to go down.”
The grandstanding was little more than transparent fearmongering. The city hasn’t cut any current positions, so there’s really no “gap” to stand in. Besides, the state police already play a big role in Austin, where they have jurisdiction over state property — including parking garages like the one where the vandalism Bush was decrying took place. State police said the vandalism actually happened on August 8, four days before the council vote, and was discovered during a routine patrol.
And state leaders have continued foaming at the mouth over the Austin council’s actions. On August 18, Abbott joined with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state House Speaker Dennis Bonnen to suggest capping tax revenue for cities that dare “defund” police — though they did not respond to questions from the Houston Chronicle about exactly what that meant. “What they have done in Austin should never happen in any city in the state, and we’re going to pass legislation to be sure it never happens again,” Patrick said.
Part of what is frustrating to Harper-Madison is that she hasn’t seen department or police union leadership do much to communicate with officers about what the current cuts actually mean — and what they don’t mean, including layoffs. After she mentioned this during a recent interview, her phone blew up. She had lengthy conversations — some prickly — with officers across the department. Ultimately, she said they were positive. And she’s encouraged them to speak up as the city moves forward with plans to transform its approach to public safety, which she says is both necessary and long overdue. “The way forward is we have to have better conversations. We have to have more substantive conversations. If there’s no substance, then what’s the point?” she asks. “We’re just using words, and taking up space, and sucking up air that somebody else could use.”
Moore is also ready to push forward. “I just hope we can try to break the barriers of everything that has been socialized within us so we can truly allow ourselves to imagine and get creative with things outside of boxes, outside of what the norm is, so we can come up with something pretty groovy,” he said. He notes that major shifts in U.S. history have been rife with uncertainty: abolishing slavery, women’s suffrage, desegregation. “We always had these assumptions that the most terrible thing was going to happen if we stopped doing the status quo,” he said. “Yes, there’s still oppression and people are still fighting … but because we’ve taken these big steps in history, it’s only made us better.”
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.”
”
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.
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