US Marshals rush a protester outside the Hatfield Courthouse.Rian Dundon, from Protest City

The summer of 2020 was hot, explosively so in Portland. Following the murder of George Floyd, few cities erupted as furiously and as long as Portland did. Knowing that protesters on both sides weren’t necessarily keen on the media—particularly photographers—Rian Dundon immersed himself in the thick of the action with an unobtrusive point-and-shoot digital camera. For 100 days he showed up to cover the demonstrations. 

Amid the back and forth melees between protesters and law enforcement, Dundon occasionally found himself at the receiving end of punishment from police, despite his press credentials. He was pepper-sprayed and thrown on top of an exploding gas canister and pepper sprayed at close-range. His photos offer a ground-level view of the chaos, enveloping the viewer in teargas-filled air and disorienting mayhem. 

Dundon not only captures the big picture, but brings us uncomfortably close with protesters, counterprotesters, and cops. With an unforgiving flash, he captures the neck tattoos of Black Lives Matter supporters and Proud Boys, the weapons and protective gear of the dueling factions, the toppled statues and bruised bodies, even his fellow observers—he captures it all.

What began as a pair of zines collecting this crucial work is now Protest City, from Oregon State University Press. The new book is dense and dizzying in a way that’s appropriate for the subject matter. It works on different levels, with raw documentation and vivid reporting that drag you headlong into the fray. Dundon’s photos make you feel, elicit emotion, make you wince. 

In addition to the vivid details noted above, the book’s nearly 200 pages include quiet photos of mundane scenes lesser photographers might pass on, but that, within this larger body of work, provide cladding for an already firm structure. Images of graffiti and half-caught glimpses, illuminated by Dundon’s harsh flash, do as good of a job as possible at escorting us personally to the barricades. It’s immersive, one of the best photo books focused on protests I’ve seen in a long time. And I say that as someone who has seen a lot of protest photos—and find most of them dull, at best. 

All photos by Rian Dundon, from Protest City, Oregon State University Press.

Wil Sands

This project was reported with support from the Pulitzer Center.

The video camera pans across an empty front porch. A light breeze rustles the leaves of the trees lining the driveway. An empty bird feeder swings gently from a branch. Suddenly there’s a loud explosion and a distant echo, followed by another and another in rapid succession—a Pennsylvania pastoral obliterated in an instant by sounds of war. A resigned, elderly voice narrates the blasts. “This is what makes this house completely unsellable,” he says. “It makes this house worthless.”

The voice belongs to David Laurie. The explosions are the work of Combined Systems Incorporated, a manufacturer of so-called “less lethal” munitions that sits due west of David and Sandy Laurie’s house in rural Jamestown, Pennsylvania, about 100 yards away and just a little below. Over the years the Lauries have taken it upon themselves to document the experience of living by a tear gas factory, the constant booms, the clouds of tear gas caught up in the eastward breezes.

“Who would buy this place in their right mind,” David’s narration continues, “putting up with this day after day, month after month, for years?” This is what it’s like when the domestic suppression industry moves in next door.

 

David Laurie cut me off. “I don’t care. You do not have my permission to talk to my lawyer. I want it to be very clear—I’m not consenting to anyone talking to you about our case.” Then he hung up. His former lawyer, Robert C. Martin, had warned me I might run into some trouble with Laurie. “I’ve never been fired, rehired, and fired again like with Mr. Laurie,” Martin said. “He’s a grumpy old man, but I guess who can blame him? I mean, living through what the Lauries have had to deal with all these years with CSI next door.”

I disregarded Laurie’s injunction and reached out to his new lawyer via email to set up an interview with the couple. In March 2021, I drove up to the Lauries’ home. David met me at the side door. His wispy gray hair was combed over his bald scalp, and his brow was pulled downward by what I would soon realize was a permanent frown. At 83, Laurie was a little unsteady on his feet but he could still stand tall when the need arose.

The Lauries’ 150-year-old farmhouse was neatly maintained. Nothing was out of place among the baby-blue carpets, leather recliners, and dark wood furniture—nor was there a speck of dust to be found. Sandy had left a full plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies on both the kitchen and dining room tables.

Over a glass of iced tea and a cookie, David recounted how his family had ended up in Jamestown. They’d bought the property in 1978. As a commercial pilot for the now-defunct TWA and Ryan Airlines, he’d been on the road for decades. He and Sandy were looking for a rural corner of the country in which to raise their two young sons, John and Tom. “It was an entirely different place back then…It was definitely very quiet. This piece next door had a small lake on it and the kids would go catch fish and throw them back in.” David detailed how he and his wife laboriously rebuilt and renovated the farmhouse. He added a “drinking porch,” and Sandy cultivated an abundant vegetable garden in the backyard. The boys spent their childhood playing in the hay fields, wetlands, and woods that made up the 42-acre property.

In 1995, CSI built the company’s new headquarters in Jamestown, and the Lauries’ nightmare began. The pond where John and Tom Laurie fished as kids was replaced by CSI’s manufacturing plant and a firing range. The peace and quiet the Lauries had prized was now interrupted by loud and repeated explosions, by ominous smoke floating in their direction.

Michael Brunn and Jacob Kravel founded Combined Systems Incorporated in 1981. The two Israeli American engineers built their less-lethal weapons company on the multiple patents for future weapons systems they had already developed. In 2005, Kravel told a reporter from the Manufacturer & Business Association’s magazine, “Growth in the company is due to the development of new products, not necessarily 9/11.” CSI initially catered to the US military, federal law enforcement agencies, and some state and local police departments; since 2002 the company has received more than $75 million in federal contracts and grants. However, CSI quickly grew to be a global leader in the less-lethal weapons industry, contracting with security agencies in Israel, Chile, Colombia, Bahrain, Egypt, and Hong Kong (to name a few).

By fall 2020, the company listed more than 130 less lethal products on its website. There were launchers, flash bang grenades, tear gas grenades, tear gas shells, smoke grenades, munitions for breaching barricades, wooden bullets—in all, the sort of crowd-control weaponry that police used on Americans during the George Floyd uprisings of last year. (During a protest in Washington, DC, I was struck by a tear gas canister and lost much of my vision in one eye.) All of these products were manufactured in Jamestown and were tested before shipment to clients. Many of CSI’s products were specifically designed to be loud and cause disorientation. This was particularly true for the company’s line of flash bangs. CSI described its Model 7290 Steel Body Flash Bang as “an ATF-controlled Class-C explosive device that emits a bright light and thunderous noise to distract potentially dangerous individuals.”

An hour’s drive north of Pittsburgh, Mercer County used to be solidly unionized, a stronghold of the United Steelworkers of America. But by 2018, 15 percent of Jamestown’s 648 residents lived below the poverty line. The large industrial manufacturers had long since left the region and the local school district was now the town’s largest employer, followed by a small paint manufacturer. Laurie figures the area’s depressed economy, its negligible property taxes, its lack of zoning regulations, and its strategic location near various interstate highways must have made Jamestown an attractive proposition to CSI’s management and investors.

Laurie claimed CSI’s management was never transparent about its intentions for the Jamestown site. In public meetings before construction, Michael Brunn played down the size of the future facility and argued there would be relatively little disturbance to the company’s few neighbors. “We won’t set up shop where we’re not wanted,” Brunn said in an August 2, 1995, article in the Mercer County Herald. “It wouldn’t make sense. We are not going to force ourselves down anyone’s throat, that is for sure.”

“They assured everybody that the only thing they were ever going to do was they were going to have one old man who was going to test their stuff with a shotgun twice a week and UPS was going to come and take a small package away, and that was going to be the extent of their manufacturing,” Laurie said. “That was hogwash.” Laurie seethed with resentment as he flattened a white linen placemat in front of him. “When they moved in and started shooting tear gas all over our woods, I went next door and confronted Richard Edge”—CSI’s chief operating officer—“and I said, ‘You’re firing over our property and I want you to stop,’” Laurie paused. “And he said, ‘WE ARE NOT!’”

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When CSI didn’t respond to his repeated complaints, Laurie approached local management about buying his property. He argued that for a relatively small investment CSI could buy out its closest neighbor and create a buffer zone between the manufacturing and testing site and the next-closest neighbor. Laurie said management scoffed at the offer. That was when he started keeping notes on the company’s activities, recording and measuring the decibel levels of the explosions, videoing incidents of tear gas drifting onto his property, and documenting CSI’s multiple building fires.

 

“There’s a reason it is banned in warfare. Living next door, you have a very real experience of what other people go through.”




“And it just shouldn’t be used. Period.”




“On anybody, for any reason.”




 

David Laurie empties a box of spent munitions he says he collected from the forest on his property. Representatives of CSI deny the company has fired anything onto its neighbor's property.

In 2006, CSI reached a formal agreement with the Greene Township board of supervisors. The board granted the manufacturer the right to test munitions at any time from 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Monday through Saturday. With 72 hours’ notice, CSI could blow up its products outside of these agreed hours. Laurie said the agreement was signed without any public hearing or consultation. In 2007, the Lauries hired a surveyor to check out their property, but he couldn’t finish the job. Laurie recalled the voice message he’d received from the surveyor: “Mr. Laurie you have to come out here because your place is just littered with all of this plastic stuff they have been shooting at your property, and we got chased out of here because of the tear gas, and I won’t come back here unless they agree not to be shooting over where we are working.” That is when Laurie discovered the hundreds of munitions, both live and spent, that littered his woods.

Laurie couldn’t take it anymore. Official CSI testing activity logs show the company was testing on a daily basis, both indoors and outdoors. Often the company would do multiple outdoor test-firing sessions on a single day. In December 2014, Laurie met with a lawyer and persuaded nine of his neighbors to file a lawsuit against CSI. The group lawsuit was short-lived. By 2016 the Lauries and another family were the only plaintiffs. Laurie suspected his neighbors had been bought off, but Sandy Laurie said it was more likely they felt powerless against CSI. “I think that people in an area like this, they figure that the company is so large what can they do? So they just don’t bother and don’t do anything about it.” Laurie wouldn’t be bullied. He wanted CSI to pay for the psychological torture he claimed CSI had inflicted on his family, and he wanted a reimbursement for the depreciation of his property due to CSI’s operations.

CSI hired Timothy Bonner to lead its defense. In 2020, Bonner, a Republican, was elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature. He has since co-sponsored a bill that deregulates firearms and protects firearms manufacturers from liability for injuries or deaths caused by their products. In court documents filed by CSI, Bonner argued that all of the company’s operations were within the law. He claimed CSI discontinued outdoor testing of tear gas and other irritants in 2010. He wrapped CSI in the American flag, arguing that the company’s products were essential to the national defense and that the plant brought good jobs to a region in need. Bonner said the plaintiffs knew about the company’s plans before the manufacturing site was built and didn’t complain then. Finally CSI’s defense was anchored in Bonner’s reasoning that testing was limited to 59 seconds a day and was no more a nuisance than the sound of gunshots by local hunters in nearby forests.

 

For six years the case languished in legal to-and-fros, changes of attorneys, and a judge recusal. David Laurie’s son Tom put his life on hold to come home and support his parents. The case had taken its toll on all of them. “You go outside to enjoy a summer day and you hear huge blasts and smells and things like that,” Tom said. “Inside its the same thing. Birthdays, Christmases, holidays of any kind—it’s just nonstop interference. It’s debilitating in a sense. Whatever joy other people are experiencing during those times—I don’t want to say it’s better, but it’s definitely not tainted by what we’re experiencing. That’s what probably sticks with me the most. It is tainted, like bad water. It’s drinkable but…”

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The case is set to go to trial next March. (Bonner has recused himself.) While David Laurie was overjoyed that his family would finally get their day in court, he was less enthusiastic about the possible outcomes. After two decades of battle with CSI, he recognized the enormous challenge of winning against the weapons manufacturer. His retirement had been spent fighting the company. His savings were depleted, and he knows no one will ever want to buy the family home.

When I asked the Lauries how CSI had altered their view of the world, Tom responded without hesitation: “It just proves to me that there’s probably better, safer, healthier ways to take care of crowd control or whatever the issue is, other than this stuff. There’s a reason it is banned in warfare. Living next door, you have a very real experience of what other people go through. And it just shouldn’t be used. Period. On anybody, for any reason.”

David Laurie interrupted his son: “I had an AR-15, and I sold it. It just seemed to me that it was something to use that was just evil. So I sold it.” All of the family members agreed they’d never go see fireworks again.

Bill Hudson/AP

In 1963, Walter Gadsden, 15 years old, was attacked by a police dog during a protest on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. The moment was captured by Bill Hudson of the Associated Press. His photograph was later said to have brought the world to the side of the civil rights movement—a grand claim but not an unreasonable one, given both the photo’s mass circulation and the meanings ascribed to it by white audiences.

Gadsden was a “frail Negro,” in one description; full of “saintly calm,” in the words of Diane McWhorter, paraphrasing the photographer’s editor. The writer Paul Hemphill, in his memoir of growing up in Birmingham, saw a “thin well-dressed boy seeming to be leaning into the dog, his arms limp at his side, calmly staring straight ahead as though to say, ‘Take me, here I am.’” Hudson’s photo offered a drama of wholesome nonresistance, with Gadsden in the role of a martyred innocent.

But something was obscured in that narrative, as Martin Berger argues in Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography. The white gaze skipped right over the signs of Gadsden’s resistance—the hand on the cop’s arm, the left knee thrust into the dog’s chest. These details did not fit with the prevailing picture of the struggle for civil rights. What white people saw instead was Black passivity. In Gadsden they saw a vulnerable boy who, like Black people throughout the South, was in need of white help. The photo may have drawn sympathetic white liberals to the cause of racial justice, but it did so, Berger writes, on terms that allowed them to feel secure and magnanimous, as if they were “bestowing rights” on Black people.

In May 2020, people again took to the streets, this time in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Many things had changed since the day Hudson trained his lens on Gadsden. The Black Lives Matter movement enjoyed broader support than the civil rights movement did in its time, and the media documenting the uprising was no longer so monochromatically white.

But were things really all that different? I looked at front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post during the hectic early days of the protests and saw several familiar tropes, marshaled in familiar ways. The visual portrayal of the uprising was operating within the same boundaries established by well-meaning but ultimately self-interested white liberals during the civil rights era. Now as then, it seemed, the principal concern was to channel and validate white response to Black rebellion in the streets.

 

The Martyr

 

A Black person at the mercy of a white person or the state was a familiar image during the civil rights movement. Think of the photos of lunch counter sit-ins where white people screamed Black people down, or the photos of water hoses turned on kids during the Children’s Crusade in 1963. Today, “passive” Black people may have their hands in the air, or perhaps they are being carted away by police in riot gear. For white audiences, these photos stamp innocence onto Black people, thus translating the protest into an acceptable cause.

In this image from the May 30 Washington Post, a Black man kneels with his fists raised. Black viewers have tended to read photographs like this one as “images of power,” Berger tells me in an email. “After all, it takes strength to calmly confront militarized police to make one’s principled point.” On the front page of an establishment newspaper, however, different meanings more readily assert themselves. The man’s hands in the air represent the compliance demanded by the state, as embodied by the indistinct armed figures in the distance. The primary colors lock in the gaze, and the longer you linger, the more you might feel as if he is offering up his body, just as Walter Gadsden seemed to. The viewer is invited to appreciate the man’s ironclad will, his brave forbearance; the viewer is not implored to consider the desperation and anger it might have taken to put himself in that position in the first place.

Front page photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters

 

The Rioter

 

Photos from the urban uprisings of the late 1960s presented a different image of Black protest. Black people were now “forceful figures,” Berger says. They were no longer protesters; they were rioters. Media coverage tended to focus on the aftermath of riots, reinforcing white discomfort and solidifying resistance to anything other than a “peaceful” protest.

The person depicted here could be of any race; all the viewer registers is the dark figure—“literally black,” says Michael Shaw, publisher of Reading the Pictures, a website dedicated to analyzing the visual framing of social issues—silhouetted against a backdrop of destruction. “You can see that this generation and so much of the images that come out of this are forceful, are pushing back upon that authority, where the images beforehand were pulling for that sympathy,” says Brent Lewis, a Black photo editor at the New York Times and the co-founder of Diversify Photo, a site promoting the work of nonwhite photographers. Shaw was put in mind of “war photography,” calling it “a very toxic photograph, very loaded.”

The accompanying headline, “spreading unrest leaves a nation on edge,” only furthers the sense of anxiety. Of course not everyone was on edge in that moment—what of the people who felt a sense of joy and liberation watching Minneapolis’ Third Precinct burn down?—but the assumptions embedded in the presentation give a sense of the upper bound of the liberal establishment’s sympathy with the cause. Yet, while the riot photos may have evoked the imagery of the late 1960s, Berger points out that they were not received in the same way: “Millions of whites in the 21st century were able to look at these images of powerful Black actors without losing their sympathy or pulling back” from the cause.

Front page photo: Victor J. Blue/New York Times/Redux

 

The Crowd

 

Large, diverse crowds were irresistible subjects of last year’s protest coverage. “There’s a kind of anonymity to them and a redundancy,” Shaw says. The protesters are always squeezed into the frame, suggesting a crowd bursting at the edges, and signage is usually prominently featured. The mildness of these images reassures white viewers that the protests are peaceful while also communicating the scale of both the problem and the resistance to it. Berger notes the Black marchers holding up cell phones in the crowd shots—“individuals who have taken charge of their self-representation…no longer reliant on the white press to get their stories out.”

In this package from the June 16, 2020, Washington Post, Shaw sees “an interesting juxtaposition where you get a dialogue between the photographs.” The allusions to the civil rights era in the crowd shot—the “I AM A MAN” sign, with “KING” in the distance—are paired with the intimate portrait of Rayshard Brooks’ family, as if history itself were beckoning the viewer to come to the rescue of Black humanity.

Front page photo: Dustin Chambers/Getty 

 

Good Versus Evil

 

These photos are from different protests, yet they were placed together on the New York Times’ June 1 front page. Good vs. evil is the narrative. Note the ominous, depersonalized image of the police, portrayed like an alien invasion against the unarmed, white-presenting demonstrators in the streets of Brooklyn. As with the images from the 1960s, it’s clear who the bad guys are supposed to be. White viewers are thus reassured that they are not complicit.

The conflict, in the package’s telling, is about the cops and the violence they inflict on Black people—true enough but only part of the story. “Many millions of liberal whites have no problem seeing the problem of race as one of violent police,” Berger says. “That allows them to distance themselves from racism, since they can’t imagine themselves perpetrating white-on-Black violence. White outrage at police conduct downplays their complicity in a racialized system that benefits whites.” Until white people examine how they can be participants in a movement against police brutality and still receive racism’s dividends, America will keep spinning in circles. In the early days of the uprising, the action in the streets challenged the white response. The front pages of the country’s establishment newspapers seemed to coddle it. 

Front page photo: Victor J. Blue/New York Times/Redux

It’s been a year since I was shot in the face with a tear gas canister. I remember hearing the shot. When I close my eyes I can still see the spinning aluminum canister flying toward me. Like ripples in a puddle the impact rolled through my eye, instantaneously detaching my retina. It was the eye I used to create, to document, to share—a photographer’s eye—but now all I could see through it were dancing shards of light on a background of emptiness.

I was near Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, photographing the protests that had erupted in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. But my mind immediately went to Chile, to the work I had done there in 2019, to the dozens of eyes I saw destroyed during protests in that country, and others. In that moment I knew exactly what my injury could mean.

By September 2020 at least 23 people had been blinded or partially blinded by “less lethal” munitions used by the police to disperse protests across the country. Blinding by cop, largely an international phenomenon, had arrived in force in the United States. While calls for bans on these weapons have led to limited prohibitions of their use, most police departments continue to see “less lethal” weapons as legitimate tools for crowd control.

It’s been a year since my injury, and I’ve begun to accept that the damage to my eye is permanent. I wear eyeglasses now to help focus the limited vision in my bad eye and realign the sight of my good eye. When the sun is low I use an eye patch to reduce the glare. On a good day I can almost forget I was shot. The little vision I’ve recovered in the damaged eye is enough to give me limited depth perception. On a bad day, splitting eye aches leave me effectively bedridden. There is fear I’ll develop glaucoma and cataracts, and a blood shot eye is a constant.

As part of my own recovery I’ve been meeting, interviewing, and photographing the dozens of others—many of them fellow photographers—who’ve unwillingly joined what we’ve taken to calling the Shot in the Eye Squad. Last fall I created a chat on a secure messaging platform where everyone could meet, a sort of informal space of solidarity that has grown into something more organized. The group is now thinking about ways to leverage the shared trauma of its members to advocate for reform. Some people have been talking with members of Congress about legislation that would target the production and use of less-lethals, and we’ve been networking with other victims’ rights groups.

My own photography has changed as well. Unable to use my right eye, I’ve been forced to use the left. My work is more deliberate and composed now, and I’m finding new ways of expressing myself. For this project, I wanted to use photography to explore what “less lethal” really means and to re-create the way our vision has changed in the past year—both figuratively and literally.

 

I ask myself, How has your vision changed since being shot?

I see differently. It’s layers of light opening up new sight. A constant multi-exposure collage.

No doubt I’ve lost an old vision of the world around me, but strangely I feel as if there’s a new opening I’m just beginning to discover.

A close friend reminded me of Monet’s gradual loss of sight—his paintings slowly getting browner, the colors losing their contrast and melting into one color of many shades.

 

Linda Tirado, 39, Nashville, Tennessee

The photojournalist was hit during a Minneapolis protest. “I’m an uninsured American facing a ruinous amount of medical bills,” says Tirado, who in the aftermath of her maiming became the face of “less lethal” police violence. Even after two surgeries, Tirado still can’t see out of her left eye. She is back to taking photographs, though. “I have found the camera to be an adaptive device,” she says. The viewfinder captures “what I used to see with two eyes. It’s actually been really soothing.” 

Frank Hunt, 31, Richmond, Virginia

“I don’t have a doubt in my mind that they tried to kill me,” says Hunt, who was struck by a foam round. For a time, all he could see out of his left eye was silhouettes; lacking insurance he did not seek any additional treatment. His vision has improved, but he can’t see well at night, and the sun bothers his eye. “I still wear my patch when it’s too bright out,” he says, “but I try to stay away from the patch. It makes me noticeable, and I hate standing out.” He’s sought out lawyers, but he says he doesn’t care about the money. “It can’t take away the PTSD, can’t take away the long sleepless nights, can’t take away the insomnia, can’t take away the paranoia, can’t take away the ‘fuck you’s—can’t take away none of that shit.”

Matthew Leo Cima, 34, Washington, DC

“I remember hearing the crack of my skull, then feeling ice cold, smelling blood, and then a bright light like the negative of a Rorschach.” Cima was shot in the left eye with a “less lethal” round while protesting outside the White House in Lafayette Square. After four surgeries his vision was partially restored. He says he has 20/200 vision “in the areas where I am not light blind.”

 

At the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Virginia.

My sight. Two eyes and two distinctly different visions of the world. One simple, clear, and clean; one confused, muddled, and complex.

The brain is tired by the mixed signals.

 

Balin Brake, 22, Fort Wayne, Indiana

“It’s the little things: ATMs or having to hand people things.” Brake has a painted prosthetic that matches his other eye, but, he says, “I know my eyes and it’s not my eye. I’d rather just…” I finish his sentence: “Let people see you as you are.” He nods: “Yeah.”
 

John Sanders, 25, Sandusky, Ohio

A bean bag round left Sanders’ eye hanging out of his head. “It’s ironic as hell that I was protesting something and that same thing happens to me.” In the three months after being shot, he underwent three surgeries: one to stitch up his eye, one to remove the eye and reconstruct the lid, and one to fill in the orbit with fat from other parts of his body. He was also hospitalized for diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening complication of diabetes, which he blames on the heightened stress and depression brought on by the loss of his eye.

Soren Stevenson, 26, Minneapolis

Having answered the call for white bodies to move to the front of a march, Stevenson was hit by a plastic round fired by police. “I felt my face,” he recalls, “and it was wet and soft where there should have been bone.” He had just started his job search when he was shot; he did not find full-time work until April, nearly a year later. Today he works for the Northcountry Cooperative Foundation, a nonprofit that helps residents of manufactured housing communities buy the land beneath their homes and run the communities as cooperatives.

 

I reach out to my partner through the fog of my new sight.

 

Sean Stearns, 33, Kansas City

“I don’t want to be quiet and stay at home, and pretend it’s not happening,” says Stearns, when I ask him why he went out to the protests last May. Sean was helping his girlfriend with concussion when he was shot in the left eye with a rubber bullet or bean bag round. He’s blind in his left eye, and debating with his doctors whether or not they should remove the eye permanently to preserve his good one. For the moment Sean wants to keep it.
 

Me, 40, Richmond, Virginia

The shot sent a shockwave through my eye. My retina was partially detached, and there was severe bleeding in the back of my eye. My sight will never be the same. 

 

No one else can tell I was shot in the face, but I know. I’m not the same as before. Short tempers and burning resentment.

People say, Thank god it wasn’t worse. Thank god it didn’t hit your temple or blind both eyes. You were lucky. Yeah, yeah—but I still can’t see. It can always be worse. But this sucks.

It may normalize, and you may adapt. But then one day you’ll go into a fucking gas station and fumble around with your debit card like a drunk…

…and once again that unfortunately “lucky” event will shatter any new normalcy you’ve found.

 

This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Daniel Cole/AP

It has now been a year since white police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for approximately nine minutes, while a crowd of bystanders begged him to spare the 46-year-old Black man’s life. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, while the coronavirus pandemic was still ravaging communities, thousands of people in every single state took to the streets to protest what took place in Minneapolis and the structural forces that led to it. Former president Donald Trump’s excessive and violent response only seemed to further legitimize the actions of the protesters. And for a moment, it seemed as if we were on the precipice of meaningfully addressing systemic racism. 

But then the inevitable happened.

If there was a genuine racial reckoning in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, it’s already been eclipsed by the standard white backlash that has followed each Black uprising. In those long days of summer protests that were constantly met with police violence, while a president was hellbent on ignoring a raging pandemic that was disproportionately killing Black people, it seemed as if many of society’s most egregious injustices were on full display for the public. It wasn’t just police reform that dominated the national conversation, but economic and health inequities too. (Not to mention the fact that a presidential campaign was also taking place.) So, after what appeared to be a national effort to reckon with systemic racism and white supremacy, how did we fare? Are we a more tolerant, just, and equitable society today than we were before?

There are some obvious markers of racial progress: Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and while another white man was elected in his place, the first woman, Black person, and Asian-American has become vice president. But if we get get more specific, the progress feels stalled. According to Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group, police have killed at least 1,068 people since Floyd was murdered last year. There is no federal database of police killings, but since 2015 police have killed on average of 1,000 people per year. The coronavirus pandemic is still impacting people of color disproportionately. In Washington, DC, 8 of 10 new infections are Black people. People of color generally are most impacted by low wages across industries, but efforts to raise the minimum wage have been met with pushback from corporations and timidity from liberal politicians.

Then there are the public opinion shifts about Black Lives Matter. Last year, in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, support for the movement was at an all-time high, with even many Republicans expressing approval in higher numbers. Today, thanks to a decline among whites and Republicans, which are two groups that often overlap, support for BLM is at a new low, to levels even lower than before Floyd’s death. The New York Times researchers who analyzed the data suggested that the surge in approval in 2020 was due to the shocking nature of the viral video of Floyd’s grueling death, not an actual embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement. All of this adds up to what appears to be yet another example of the inevitable backlash that occurs after a broad movement for racial justice takes place. It’s a cycle that repeats itself throughout American history.

The history of Civil Rights era is often portrayed with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the widely hailed and appreciated protagonist. In reality, when he was murdered by a white supremacist in 1968, King had a 75 percent disapproval rating. In the 1960s, public opinion was “mixed” on civil rights despite, or perhaps because of, the efforts by the Johnson administration to address some of the systemic racism with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. When then President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, King still wasn’t satisfied. He began pushing for broader social and economic policies, like anti-militarism, labor rights, and fair wages. That was a bridge too far for many white Americans, who began to see him as being too aggressive. And thus the backlash began.

In 1965, King was joined with other prominent civil rights leaders such as John L. Lewis, who later served 17 terms in Congress, for a protest march in Selma, Alabama. They were met with dogs, fire hoses, and police violence; the scenes appeared on televisions in millions of households. Polling from that year showed that the public largely sided with the protesters over the state of Alabama, in much the same way that the footage of Floyd’s final minutes and the brutality inflicted on protesters became impossible to ignore. In the end, however, the general sympathy for the demonstrators didn’t last, but antipathy to King’s efforts to expand civil rights protections endured.   

Today’s “bridge too far” policy seems to be defunding the police. While the idea gained some traction during the height of last summer’s protests, the position remains only marginally popular among even Black people and urban residents. Now, violent crime rates are up across cities in the United States and conservative pundits have latched onto the idea that rising crime is due to “defunding the police” and the actions of Black Lives Matter as a whole. It is easy to ignore the fact that most cities increased their police budgets this year. It is also apparently impossible for some conservatives to make the connection between upticks in crime and a pandemic that has led to 590,000 and counting deaths—coupled with massive unemployment and economic hardship for many.  

Meanwhile, white America has begun their acts of retaliation against the George Floyd-inspired protests. It’s obvious in the anti-protest laws taking hold in Republican legislatures, the campaign to suppress the votes of people who vote for Democrats, and the rewriting of America’s history that casts powerful racists in a better light. Yes, a few statues of Confederate heroes have been taken down, and former officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted on three counts of murder for the death of George Floyd. But when it comes to sustained and concerted efforts to end police brutality and close the racial wealth gap, life has changed very little.

Why does this pattern keep repeating? Why does it seem like with every pivotal moment, like when thousands were taking to the street to protest police brutality, we eventually end up with some version of the status quo? Perhaps it’s the final result of the inherent friction between two competing ideas that are embedded in the American experience: That racial inequality is pervasive in our society—and the illusion that it’s actually a problem of the past.

A demonstrator near the White House raises a fist in May 2020 as others gather to protest the death of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.Evan Vucci, File/AP

It’s hard to quantify outrage and action, but roughly one year out from the devastating video of George Floyd’s life being snuffed out by former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, it’s fair to ask: Is the racial reckoning that followed Floyd’s death and played out over the summer of 2020 one that’s built to last?

In an opinion piece published by the New York Times, two political scientists, Jennifer Chudy of Wellesley College and Hakeem Jefferson of Stanford University, measured voters’ attitudes on key racial justice issues over the course of 2020. They specifically wanted to know, as they put it: “Did George Floyd’s death catalyze support for Black Lives Matter? If so, for how long and for whom?”

The answers, in a nutshell, are: yes, briefly, and for white Americans and Republicans. The fleeting support for Black Lives Matter among the latter groups didn’t merely fade in time. It fell to new lows. White Americans actually became less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were before Floyd’s death. This trend, the researchers note, “seems unlikely to reverse anytime soon.”

These two overlapping constituencies had plenty of help in reaching new levels of hostility toward Black Lives Matter, according to Chudy and Jefferson: “In the days and weeks following Floyd’s death, Republican politicians quickly turned attention away from the actions of a murderous police officer to those individuals protesting the injustice.” Put another way, the overwhelming grief of the pandemic combined with the shocking video of Floyd’s death was nothing when compared with the well-oiled machine of far-right groups and conservative media outlets.

Last summer’s protests set off an unprecedented outpouring of financial support for racial equity causes. Candid, a group that tracks foundation spending, reported $14.4 billion in racial equity giving from 2011-2020, of which $10.9 billion—76 percent—came in last year. Although approval of BLM is a flawed proxy for people’s support of racial equity, it remains to be seen whether white donors will keep supporting social justice causes at this level, or whether 2020 was merely a flash in the pan.   

There is some more-lasting good news, though. The nation’s reckoning offered an opportunity for communities of color to build stronger cross-racial coalitions, as Latinx activists advocated for Black lives, and various groups have come together in recent months to address anti-Asian hate crimes. “This coalition-building may prove essential in counteracting the backlash toward B.L.M. observed among some whites and Republicans,” Chudy and Jefferson write.

A Black Lives Matter activist protests the police killing of Ma'Khia Bryant, 16.Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP

Just minutes before a Minneapolis jury convicted former officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd, and less than a month after a Chicago police officer shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo while the boy raised both hands in the air, Officer Nicholas Reardon fired his gun at Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old Black girl, outside her foster home in Columbus on Tuesday, fatally wounding her in the torso.

The odds of Reardon facing discipline seem exceedingly low. At a press conference on Wednesday, interim Police Chief Michael Woods said her death was tragic, and an investigation is ongoing. He declined to pass judgment on the specifics related to her killing, but said that police officers are legally allowed to use deadly force against someone who appears to be threatening someone else’s life. Several former police officers and policing experts echoed Woods: Reardon appeared to have followed the rules.

Most police officers in the Ohio city who use force on the job—even dozens and dozens and dozens of times—don’t get fired or even reprimanded, because the police department concludes they were justified in using violence. Which might help explain why we continue to see more shootings: Law enforcement officers in Columbus have taken the lives of four people in the past four months. On top of that, the city ranks third nationally for the number of children killed by police over the past several years, according to one analysis.

Officer Rearden had gone to the foster home after a 911 dispatcher reported a fight there. In body-cam footage, he fired four shots at Bryant after she appeared to lunge with a knife toward another person dressed in pink who was pinned against a car in the driveway; Bryant dropped to the ground as the bullets struck her.

“She had a knife. She just went at her,” Reardon could be heard saying to bystanders who expressed outrage at the shooting, according to the body-cam footage. “She’s a fucking kid, man!” someone standing nearby said.

In response to a question about why the officer used a gun instead of a Taser, interim Police Chief Woods said that generally speaking, police don’t use Tasers in situations where someone else’s life is threatened. He added that officers are trained to shoot “the largest part of the body available to them.” In this case, Reardon aimed for her torso. “From a training standpoint,” James Scanlan, a retired Columbus police officer, told the Washington Post, “it’s textbook.”

Even if investigators were to disagree and find that Officer Reardon violated his training when he shot Bryant, it could be hard to fire him. History tells us as much.

Samuel Sinyangwe, a New York-based data scientist who studies police brutality, crunched the numbers and found that Columbus police officers who repeatedly deploy violence are very, very rarely punished. From 2001 to 2018, a single cop in the city used force a whopping 154 times, and he only faced discipline once—not in the form of a firing, but in the form of a reprimand and counseling.

In the charts below, out of all the Columbus cops who used force at least 40 times during those years, only one of them received any kind of discipline more intense than that. That officer was Adam Coy, who was fired last year after he shot and killed Andre Hill, a 47-year-old Black man who did not have a weapon. Officers handcuffed Hill as he lay unresponsive on the ground, and nobody offered him first aid for 10 minutes after the bullets hit him. Coy now faces trial for murder.

Regardless of how much force they used, few officers were disciplined. 99% of incidents resulted in no discipline. Even for the officers with the worst records. Among officers who used the most force (40+ cases), only 1 officer was disciplined more than reprimand/counseling.(2/x) pic.twitter.com/VsZjnpwO0i

— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) April 22, 2021

“The Columbus Police Department uses deadly force at a rate higher than the national average, and it uses deadly force in ways that are racially disparate,” says Sinyangwe. Black people in the city are five times more likely to be killed by the police than white people.

Thousands of times, people in Columbus filed formal complaints about police officers using excessive force against them, but over and over their concerns were dismissed. In fact, just 3 percent of their complaints about force were sustained between 2001 and 2017, according to an analysis by the Appeal, a national news outlet that writes about policing.

The Columbus police officer who shot and killed 13-year-old Tyre King in 2016 after the boy pulled a BB gun from his waistband did not face criminal charges, and after returning to work his bosses placed him on the narcotics team, a job that is reportedly coveted. The high number of police who are exonerated after using force suggests “there’s something wrong,” Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief and a national expert on police misconduct, told the Appeal. “That’s an organization that systematically tolerates abuse.”

When officers use excessive violence but aren’t disciplined afterward, they may be emboldened to continue the same behavior in the future. It’s often the same cops roughing people up: On average, just 6 percent of sworn police personnel in Columbus accounted for half of force cases annually from 2001 to 2014, according to the Appeal. (This analysis doesn’t reveal whether Officer Reardon had a history of force before shooting 16-year-old Bryant, since he didn’t join the city’s police department until 2019.)

And most of these officers keep their jobs—in part because of the protection they receive from their police unions, as I explained in a recent investigation. In Columbus and many other cities, these police unions have contracts that let officers appeal to independent arbitrators if they lose their jobs because of alleged misconduct.

More often than you might expect, arbitrators side with the cops: In Columbus, they overturned six out of nine of the police firings they looked at over the course of a decade, the Columbus Dispatch reported in 2018. One officer got his job back that year after stomping on a man who lay on the ground in handcuffs. “Even if you had a strong oversight process in Columbus, even if you had a police chief who really cared about accountability, they couldn’t discipline those officers because they would know their decisions would get overturned” by arbitrators, Sinyangwe says. “Almost no officers are disciplined for using excessive force.”

The president of the city’s police union, Keith Ferrell, expressed condolences to Bryant’s family this week. “It’s traumatic on everyone and we understand that,” he told CNN affiliate WSYX. But he added that officers must make split-second decisions to keep people safe. 

It’s little consolation for Bryant’s mother, Paula Bryant, who told reporters she’s so devastated at the loss of her daughter that she’s stopped eating. The 16-year-old girl was an aspiring cosmetologist, and videos posted on TikTok show her dancing and singing along to Beyoncé while pulling her hair into pigtails. She “had a sweet little voice,” her mom told CNN. “Oh my gosh, she was just so talented. She was…on the path to going many places, definitely.”

Bryant was at least the fifth child to die at the hands of police in Columbus since 2013, according to Sinyangwe. That compares with 12 kids killed by cops in Chicago, five kids in New York, and three kids in Los Angeles, all bigger cities. And she was the fourth person killed by law enforcement in Columbus over the last four months. If these deaths are an example of “textbook” training, as experts suggested of Officer Reardon’s decision to pull the trigger, it’s a pretty damning indictment of what police are trained to do.

Officers patrol a gas station in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, after the killing of Daunte Wright.imageSPACE via ZUMA Wire

Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, is a prime example of how little can change in a year. As former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin stood trial for the murder of George Floyd last May, police in the Minneapolis suburb shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop.

When protesters assembled outside the city’s police headquarters, they were met with brutal crowd control tactics. The following day, Brooklyn Center’s city council banned tear gas, rubber bullets, and kettling. But videos show protesters getting bombarded with tear gas just 15 minutes after that resolution passed. (It’s unclear whether the gas came from Brooklyn Center police or outside agencies, which are not included in the ban.)

It’s the latest instance of police appearing to ignore the hard-won reforms that followed last summer’s uprisings. More than 30 states, along with countless municipalities and police departments, have set new rules to reduce police violence—including funding cuts, crowd-control restrictions, body-camera mandates, and bans on no-knock warrants and neck restraints—since protests on behalf of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others killed by police rocked the country. But officers in at least half a dozen cities have allegedly violated those policies or carved out major loopholes. These flagrant work arounds throw into question how effective reforms are at controlling violent police behavior.

Last June, after several high-profile incidents—one in which police tear-gassed a child, and others where enough tear gas was used that it penetrated nearby apartments—Portland and Seattle halted the use of chemical irritants on crowds. The Portland order had one notable exception: tear gas could be deployed if police think lives are at risk. The police department invoked that exception at another protest just two days later. The alleged threat to protesters’ lives? A literal dumpster fire.

“The ink was barely dry on the order before the City violated it,” a lawyer wrote in a court filing for advocacy group Don’t Shoot Portland.

The Seattle ban was similarly ditched by police just two days after its announcement. When a man drove into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters and shot one demonstrator, the Seattle Police Department tweeted “CS gas has been authorized. In the interest of public and life safety, leave the area now.”

Capitol Hill right now. Everyone in the office is coughing, eyes hurt, confusion #seattleprotest pic.twitter.com/mNn4tNkGbk

— Chase Burns (@chaseburnsy) June 8, 2020

Limits or bans on neck restraints have been some of the marquee reforms of the past year. In late September, California passed a statewide ban on police use of carotid holds, a type of neck restraint that impedes blood flow to a person’s brain. (In Chauvin’s case, experts still debate whether he was attempting a carotid hold or another type of restraint on George Floyd.) Three months later, police in Antioch, California killed Navy veteran Angelo Quinto, who was in the midst of a mental health crisis. His family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit, claiming Quinto was killed by an illegal neck restraint similar to the one that killed Floyd. The Antioch Police Department denies that its officers used a knee-on-neck restraint.

In July, New York City criminalized all use of chokeholds, including “sitting, kneeling, or standing on the chest or back in a manner that compresses the diaphragm”; violating the ban is a misdemeanor offense. But in January, police in Queens were filmed kneeling on the neck of Sircarlyle Arnold, who is Black, after arresting him for riding an all-terrain vehicle. The video shows the officer continuing to kneel on Arnold’s neck even after he was handcuffed. The Queens District Attorney declined to prosecute the officer, citing “insufficient evidence of an unlawful method of restraint being used.”

In fact, the New York Police Department banned chokeholds more than 25 years ago—decades before an NYPD officer choked Staten Island resident Eric Garner to death. From 2014, when Garner died, to 2020, the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board received 996 reports from people who said police officers had placed them in chokeholds. If anything, the rate of complaints actually increased with time—proof positive of the fleeting nature of some police reforms.

“There’s this pattern of piecemeal reform,” says Samuel Walker, a police accountability expert and emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He says we shouldn’t dismiss the importance of small steps, like chokehold bans, “but what’s needed is a more systematic approach to the various kinds of abuses that officers can engage in while on regular duty.”

These piecemeal reforms, often the pet projects of progressive police chiefs, have a long, cyclical history. First, there’s a high-profile scandal—typically corruption or police brutality. That’s followed by public outcry and promises to implement the latest policing innovations. The reforms are often well received and effective, but only for a time. In a 2012 law review article on the subject of police reform, Walker recounts how that pattern played out at one Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department station:

The station was marked by a number of problems in the early 1990s, including a high rate of officer-involved shootings, a very bad image of the Station in the community, and, within the department, low officer morale and a high rate of officer turnover…A series of changes corrected many of these problems and the number of shootings had declined substantially—despite the fact that external factors such as the crime rate and community violence remained stable.

Several management reforms contributed to this positive development…supervisors imposed stricter standards for arrests (resulting in a decline in the number of arrests), standards for selecting field training officers had been raised, and the department had reduced the number of officer foot pursuits which were related to many shootings in the past. In 2001, however, the Special Counsel revisited the station and found that standards had eroded and the number of officer-involved shootings had returned to high levels compared with other Stations in the LASD. The captain responsible for the successful reforms had transferred out.

Other reforms are thwarted by police unions, which my colleague Samantha Michaels’ reporting shows are a particularly “impenetrable barrier” to reform in Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered. The Minneapolis police union’s hostility to reforms proposed by elected officials dates back at least 50 years. The union’s recently retired president, Bob Kroll, did everything in his power to uphold the tradition: 

As head of the union, he advocated aggressive policing. Under former police Chief Janeé Harteau, he opposed policies requiring officers to intervene if they saw a colleague use excessive force. (Kroll was disciplined at least three times and was suspended from the force—until a successful appeal—for beating up a man while off duty in 2004; he reportedly lost a chunk of his ear in another off-duty fight.)

He also pushed back last year when Mayor Frey banned “warrior-style” trainings that were linked to other shootings by officers, including of Philando Castile just outside Minneapolis in 2016. The trainings espoused a “killology” view of policing that urged officers to be prepared to use more force, not less. Kroll called the ban illegal and vowed to make the trainings free for union members. “It’s not about killing, it’s about surviving,” he told the Star Tribune. He reiterated this sentiment in a radio interview in April: “Certainly getting shot at and shooting people takes a different toll, but if you’re in this job and you’ve seen too much blood and gore and dead people, then you’ve signed up for the wrong job.”

Still, Walker says there’s been a “sea change in public attitudes” around police reform. “An awful lot of states passed laws mandating de-escalation and de-escalation training,” Walker says of the immediate backlash to Floyd’s murder. “I think that’s going to become embedded in routine police practices. A lot of them passed a law requiring independent investigations of officer-involved fatal shootings—that’s not going to change. There’s a lot of permanency in that.”

In other departments, reforms aren’t comprehensive—even with union support. They’re applied unevenly, exempting some officers. In Seattle, for example, the tear gas ban wasn’t extended to SWAT units.

But there’s still the question of enforcement. After last summer’s protests in Rhode Island, every police chief in the state pledged to implement a series of reforms, including outfitting every officer with body cameras. But in a recent letter, the ACLU of Rhode Island lamented that body camera policies are “regularly flouted, violations are rarely punished, and the transparency these cameras are supposed to provide the public is undermined.” In October, Providence police officers’ pursuit of a moped rider named Jhamal Gonsalves ended in a devastating crash. Gonsalves is now in a coma; his family has sued the city and several officers, alleging “excessive force and physical brutality.” Three of the officers involved failed to activate their body cameras.

A large-scale ground mural of Breonna Taylor is seen being painted in Annapolis, Maryland, in July. Patrick Smith/Getty

One year ago today, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black hospital worker, was shot dead by police in her home in the middle of the night. The Louisville, Kentucky, officers barged in around 12:40 a.m., looking for drugs and finding none. In the months afterward, Taylor’s name became a rallying cry at racial justice protests around the country as activists called on authorities to defund police, prosecute the officers who killed her, and put a stop to lethal raids of Black families’ homes. In her hometown, people took to the streets for more than 150 days straight.

But how much has actually changed? One year later, the racial justice protests go on, yet the protesters’ demands remain largely unmet. Three police officers lost their jobs because of their roles in the raid, but none were prosecuted for killing Taylor. The only officer now facing criminal charges is under investigation for firing his weapon into a neighboring home, damaging some walls. And while some big cities cut their police budgets during the pandemic, leaders in Louisville voted to slightly increase funding for local police after Taylor’s death.

Taylor was hardly the only Black woman who had police barge into her home over the past year. Such raids are common, according to Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who is a national expert on police tactics. He estimates that tens of thousands of residential drug raids now occur every year with little to no warning for the civilians inside—officers storm in unannounced or knock and enter forcefully seconds later. In an ACLU study of more than 800 SWAT team deployments, most of which involved search warrants, 42 percent of the people on the receiving end of the search-warrant raids were Black, and another 12 percent were Latino.

Very rarely do botched raids attract the level of attention Taylor’s case did. In fact, most fly under the national radar, like the case of Chicagoan Sharon Lyons. One evening in February last year, Lyons was in her kitchen when her front door flew off its hinges and more than a dozen police rushed inside with guns and flashlights. Her 30-year-old son, Julius, who has autism, ran toward her in terror, and her 4-year-old granddaughter screamed from the bedroom. The girl said police pointed guns at her. They’d raided the wrong address.

Six months later, Nashville resident Azaria Hines had fallen asleep on her sofa without clothing on after working a late shift. She awoke to banging on her door. Realizing it was the police, she told them she would let them in after she was dressed; instead, the cops knocked her door down with a battering ram, pointed guns at her as she stood naked, and refused to let her put on a shirt as they searched for evidence related to a stolen vehicle. Her 15-year-old cousin and 3-year-old nephew woke up and were ordered outside. Wrong address again.

Other poorly executed raids have killed or injured civilians. Last September in Jacksonville, Florida, Anthony Gantt and Diamonds Ford awoke to the sound of shattering glass. Fearing a burglar, Ford fired at one of the officers breaking in and called 911 to report a home invasion. The cop survived. Now Ford and Gantt face charges of attempted murder and marijuana possession. A similar scenario played out last month, when SWAT officers in Mobile, Alabama, busted into 18-year-old Treyh Webster‘s home early in the morning, looking for weapons. The officers said one of them shot and killed the teen after he fired a gun, but Webster’s mother, who was shot in the foot, said the cops didn’t knock and the family thought they were intruders.

Just over a year ago, one day before Taylor was killed, a SWAT officer in Potomac, Maryland, shot and killed 21-year-old Duncan Lemp and wounded his girlfriend during a predawn raid of his parents’ home. Police said they suspected that Lemp, a computer programmer, possessed weapons illegally and was part of a militia. They shot at him through a window, they said, because he got out of bed and grabbed a rifle. The cop who killed Lemp wasn’t wearing a body camera—and wasn’t prosecuted, either. The family said police opened fire while Lemp was asleep, and then charged into his room and stomped on his neck.

As the death toll mounts from problematic raids, reform attempts are underway. In Kentucky and other states, activists are pressuring lawmakers to end or restrict no-knock and quick-knock raids that have killed Taylor and others.

Last June 11, Louisville’s Metro Council voted unanimously to ban no-knock search warrants, which the officers who shot Taylor possessed, and which allow police to bust into a home without announcing their presence in advance. That same day, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said he would file the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act to end no-knock raids by federal law enforcement. Democrats in Congress are pushing for similar changes as part of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would compel federal officers to knock and announce themselves before conducting drug raids.

Last month, the Kentucky Senate also approved a bill that would ban no-knock warrants, except when a judge decides that knocking will endanger lives or allow the suspect to destroy evidence. At least 23 cities and 26 states are considering bills that would ban or restrict such raids, according to an analysis by Kraska and Campaign Zero, a police accountability nonprofit. 

Despite such reform efforts, even a blanket ban on no-knock warrants won’t stop police from making the same kinds of mistakes that led to Taylor’s death. Police more typically obtain standard search warrants, which require them to knock and announce themselves before entering, but that’s hardly any better, since most departments don’t dictate how long officers must wait after knocking, or their policies include exceptions that let police rush in fast. Police conducting a raid often barge in just after knocking to maintain the element of surprise. This may make the situation safer for them, but it is just as dangerous as a no-knock warrant for everyone inside.

During the 1990s, Kraska embedded with SWAT teams for two years, and witnessed about 65 police raids. Most involved standard warrants, but the officers usually went in very quickly. He saw children handcuffed, homes ransacked while the family watched, dogs shot, and innocents hospitalized. “We all get caught up in who died and we tend to forget we’re talking about squads of government officials breaking in and ransacking people’s homes on a routine basis.” 

The cops who killed Taylor say they knocked, but most of Taylor’s neighbors didn’t hear it. Her boyfriend, who said he feared an armed invasion, fired a gun at one of the officers, who, along with his colleagues, reciprocated with more than 30 rounds, killing Taylor. (Charges against the boyfriend were dismissed.)

Kraska and other activists are encouraging politicians to look at the problem more broadly. Ideally, he says, the laws should restrict regular warrants, too. Campaign Zero’s model legislation requires police to wait at least 30 seconds after knocking, and prohibits nighttime raids, when people are sleeping and more likely to wake up confused and thinking that bad guys are breaking in. Some lawmakers are considering bills that would limit the types of excuses cops can give to justify barging in immediately—they argue that the fear of evidence being destroyed isn’t a sufficiently compelling reason to put civilian lives at risk. 

It’s also important for police to document their raids, Kraska says. Lawmakers should enact body-cam requirements, and data-collection mandates that compel police brass to track the number of times their officers busted into homes, whether kids were present, and what casualties resulted. Some states, including New York, are pondering such restrictions on regular warrants.

Other state leaders are getting pressure in the opposite direction. Kentucky lawmakers are now considering a bill that would make it a crime to insult police during protests. The legislation, clearly aimed at Black Lives Matter protesters, is sponsored by a retired police officer. The bill would allow for up to three months’ behind bars, a fine, and temporary disqualification from public assistance benefits to anyone who “accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words,” or makes “gestures or other physical contact that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.” The bill passed out of committee recently. It’s “just surreal, Orwellian language,” says Kraska, who, along with the ACLU of Kentucky, believes such a law would violate the First Amendment.

Taylor’s family, meanwhile, still longs for justice. Her mother, Tamika Palmer, recently told NBC’s Today show that throughout the family’s whirlwind of grieving, filing legal petitions, protesting, and watching most of the involved officers escape criminal charges, it has been hard to keep track of all the time that’s passed—a full year since the police took her daughter’s life. “Nobody’s been held accountable,” she said. “I don’t even know the difference in the days anymore.”

Maxppp/ ZUMA; Ragan Clark/AP

Barack Obama rankled “defund the police” activists this week when he said that “snappy slogans” like theirs turned voters off. Maybe it would be better, many of them joked, if they simply prepended another snappy slogan—“yes, we can”—to “defund the police.” Obama was arguing in his capacity as a former president, perhaps one who felt unduly pressured by the Black liberation movement that had exploded anew on his watch. He had forgotten the lessons from the activism of his younger years about how progress is made in this country and what role activists play in making it.

After white police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into the neck of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black Minneapolis man, a demand long popular among left-wing and radical Black activists went mainstream: defund the police. Any activist well-versed in the movement will tell you that it’s an effort to reallocate municipal funds from police departments—many of any size are equipped with weapons of war—toward people-centered programs like mental health services or public schools. But one need not be an activist to understand the slogan’s plea: take resources away from the cops who hurt us. 

As racial justice protests spread across the country, the Black Lives Matter movement gained large, multiracial support. But even after watching what felt like an endless loop of police unleashing violence on protesters in major cities and suburban towns across the country this summer, liberal pundits and elected Democratic officials thought the demand to shrink police budgets was too radical and too confusing. They fretted that the idea that perhaps a suburban Ohio town of 78,000 doesn’t need a mine-resistant tank, or that cops don’t need more money to tear gas protesters or to shoot Black women while they slept in their beds, would hurt Joe Biden’s candidacy or turn off anonymous white voters who were considering voting for some down-ballot Democrat but who might now run screaming from the specter of Black people asking not to be killed. After all, what else should left-wing activists be doing besides making sure that Democrats win their elections?

Perhaps it is shocking to Democratic politicians, strategists, and those who consider party registration a central part of their identity, but activists do not exist solely to get Democrats elected. They are not instruments of electoral leverage. Let’s consider the way progress and actual change have always worked in the United States. 

The idea that enslaved Black people could be freed was once a radical idea. During the 1860 election, the New York Times published a story about Abraham Lincoln’s conservatism on the slavery question, grateful that anti-slavery activists like Wendell Phillips, a prominent abolitionist, had not backed Lincoln. “Thank God, Mr. Lincoln has not yet fallen so low as to command Mr. Phillips’ respect, on the infamous terms which alone can earn it,” the author wrote. “The Abolitionists have nominated a candidate of their own for the Presidency, and are likely to relieve the Republicans from the damaging odium of their support.”

The following year, the paper published an op-ed looking for a compromise to the slavery “problem” and settled on slow, gradual change for the institution. “We have admitted the impossibility and the folly of the immediate abolition of Slavery,” it read. Apparently, the “sudden release” of millions of Black people in civil society would be ruinous for a group of people who were dependent on their slave masters. It’s the same story. Slavery and police brutality are bad, but shouldn’t the machinery of change be slow and grinding?

This summer, as pundits tittered over the polling popularity of defunding the police, I drew comparisons to the civil rights movement:

Much like police reform, the Civil Rights Act, the sweeping bill signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 enjoyed broad popular support at 58 percent and a 1965 Gallup poll found that 76 percent of Americans approved of the proposed Voting Rights Act of 1966. But after the 1964 act became law, 68 percent wanted only “moderate” enforcement of its mandates. In fact, 42 percent thought the government was moving too fast to bestow voting rights and the right to be served in public places to Black people.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. also polled horrendously in the 1960s. Now, it feels as if white people invoke him at every turn.

But one doesn’t even need to look that far back to find more examples. As a millennial who grew up in religious settings, I vividly remember when gay marriage was unpopular among the public, an issue full of that “damaging odium.” In 1996, it was Democratic President Bill Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2004, during his re-election campaign, George W. Bush signaled support for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages, drawing ire from Democrats, including his Democratic opponent John Kerry. But Kerry wasn’t pro-gay marriage. He only supported civil unions. “I believe the best way to protect gays and lesbians is through civil unions,” he said in 2004. “I believe the issue of marriage should be left to the states.” Sound familiar? In 2005, only 37 percent of people believed same sex couples should be allowed to get married. 

Less than 20 years later, no Democratic candidate would dare come out against gay marriage, lest they be rendered an irrelevant bigot. In short, we’ve progressed as a country. But not because activists finally shut up or softened their slogans or accommodated themselves to “moderate” sensibilities—no, they did quite the opposite. After suffering a series of losses at the ballot box (11 states had passed anti-gay constitutional amendments in 2004) and California passed Prop 8, a state ban on gay marriage in 2008, activists regrouped. As The Atlantic reported in 2015, a coalition of gay rights formed a consortium to centralize the message and the strategy. The original message—”an appeal to reason that enumerated the benefits of marriage that were being denied to gay people”—was abandoned in favor of a more radical appeal: Gay marriage was about love. Snappy, you might say.

I remember all the polling suggesting that "same-sex marriage" was an election loser and that queer people should opt for lesser protections if they wanted to win at the ballot box.

Grateful for every activist who says "we don't care what's popular, we care what's right."

— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) December 2, 2020

Today, would any respected official or pundit dare suggest in public that Black people having the right to vote is radical? Is there a person worth listening to who would argue that we should’ve abolished slavery a little more slowly or perhaps not at all? The argument from many liberals is that getting Democrats elected is the only way to bring about change. But Barack Obama was president for eight years, during which time countless Black people became hashtags after their very public and violent deaths went viral.

The criticism of defunding the police isn’t about the slogan itself or whether it’s too confusing. It’s about change, and about who gets to make it. In truth, pundits and moderate liberals are uncomfortable with change, particularly when the demands for it are coming from people in the street, moving on their own power. The critics either simply don’t want to defund the police or don’t want to offend the moderate white voter, who has the immense power to hold Black progress hostage. But when that progress is finally achieved, those same moderates will put themselves at the center of the story of the movement, co-opting the fight that they once said was far too radical.

Defense attorney John Pierce, right, speaks as Kyle Rittenhouse, left, listens during an extradition hearing in a Lake County, Illinois, court in October.Nam Y. Huh, Pool/AP

Katie Walker was reading in bed just before midnight on October 8 when she saw a strange text message on her phone. It was a student who lived in the apartment building that Walker (not her real name) had recently moved out of. He was alarmed, because two men he’d never met had knocked on his door around 9 p.m., asking for Walker. They said they were investigators but refused to identify themselves, and they proceeded to knock on just about every other door in the apartment building asking for her whereabouts. “My roomate [sic] asked to see ID and they laughed said no and walked out of the building,” the student texted her. He said the guys looked “sketchy.”

Walker sat up in bed, nervous. She wondered whether the men were white supremacists, coming after her now because of what she’d seen in August in Kenosha, Wisconsin, less than an hour’s drive from her home. She’d gone there as a medic, to help people who were tear-gassed or otherwise injured during anti-police demonstrations. During the protests, she’d spotted Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old with an assault-style rifle. Soon after, he shot and killed two people, one of whom Walker tried to assist with medical care. He also wounded one of her fellow medics, whom she knew personally. (He says he fired in self-defense.)

After that awful night in Kenosha, Walker filed a police statement about what she’d seen near the shooting, hoping that would be the end of it: The experience left her exhausted, with post-traumatic stress disorder, and she wanted to lie low for a while and recover at home. But with the news now that two strange men were trying to track her down, she dialed the local police and left another statement. An officer jotted down that the two men had “looked scummy,” and sent someone over to the building to walk around and lock the door. Walker stayed up the rest of the night with her boyfriend, worrying, and reached out to the FBI.

The next day, her phone kept buzzing. And she wasn’t alone: The men called multiple members of Walker’s family, including her parents. It turns out these guys weren’t random white supremacists: They still refused to give their names, but, according to Walker, they mentioned they worked for the legal firm representing Rittenhouse, who now faces homicide charges. They said they wanted to take her deposition, something she’s not required to do under Wisconsin law except under very specific circumstances. One of the men also asked Walker whether she planned to give a statement to the cops about what she’d seen in Kenosha, and she said she already had. She begged them to leave her alone and hung up, but one of them called again later. Terrified, Walker reached out to John Pierce, a lead attorney for Rittenhouse. She told him about the men and asked him to make them stop.

“He didn’t deny that he sent the men; he didn’t acknowledge it either,” Walker told me recently. “All he said was, ‘I understand.'” And she prayed that he did. But the next day she received yet another phone call, from Pierce’s number, she said. When she answered it, the line was silent for a minute. She hung up, shaken, wondering whether he’d accidentally pocket-dialed her or was trying to scare her, to keep her from testifying. 

Walker pulled out her computer and started doing some research. What she found did nothing to assuage her concerns. Pierce, it turns out, is no fringe attorney: His Los Angeles–based law firm, Pierce Bainbridge, had previously represented high-profile clients and several Trump supporters, including Rudy Giuliani and former Trump campaign figures George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. Because he’s based in California and not licensed to practice in Wisconsin, Pierce needed an order from a judge to represent Rittenhouse. Prosecutors have asked for a hearing to oppose that order. (They are also asking the judge to require Pierce to follow Wisconsin rules about pretrial publicity or face sanctions; they accuse him of making statements, in interviews and on Twitter, that violate rules of professional conduct, such as by commenting on the character of Rittenhouse and victims in the case, sharing information that would be inadmissible at trial, and suggesting that the prosecution is politically motivated. His comments, they say, could prejudice jurors and encourage them to acquit Rittenhouse for reasons unrelated to the law.) 

What’s more, Walker found that Pierce is no stranger to menacing tactics. Walker stumbled upon a Medium post by a former Pierce Bainbridge attorney who is now suing Pierce for alleged wrongful termination. In it, she learned that Pierce is also accused of harassing his ex-wife. Mother Jones reviewed court records from a child custody case, and found that, in the course of a single day in 2019, Pierce sent his ex-wife more than 60 texts laced with violent language after she told him she couldn’t drive their son to soccer because of a work conflict: “I will bury u if I have to,” he allegedly wrote in one of the texts, copies of which were submitted to the court. “I will find u at Armaggedon [sic] and fuck u up.”

“I am good,” he wrote in another message that day. “U are evil. God is on my side.” In the texts, he repeatedly called her a “slut,” “cunt,” and “bitch,” and threatened to “hunt” her down. In one message, he mentioned a television character known for torturing terrorists: “Watch Jack Bauer on 24 if ur curious what I’m capable of.”

The next day, according to court records, Pierce apologized to his ex-wife and said he hadn’t meant what he texted her, but she remained afraid. She received a temporary restraining order against him, telling the court that he’d expressed a desire to kill her before, something he later denied.

Walker kept learning more. She connected eight days ago with Jennifer Sulkess, a Los Angeles resident who alleged that she was also intimidated by another attorney at the Pierce Bainbridge firm in a separate case. The firm had been retained to represent a Russian billionaire named Sergey Grishin, whom Sulkess had accused of harassing her and her friend, Grishin’s ex-wife, allegations he denies. The two women had taken out temporary restraining orders against Grishin, as he simultaneously pursued lawsuits against them. (These legal cases are ongoing.)

In September 2018, Sulkess said, the Pierce Bainbridge attorney instructed someone to repeatedly photograph her and Grishin’s ex-wife without their consent in public. The next month, she said, a man went to the apartment building where she had recently lived and showed the office manager there her photo, saying Sulkess was wanted for allegedly fraudulently borrowing money—accusations from Grishin’s lawsuit that she denies. 

Months later, at about 8 a.m. on a Sunday, a few weeks before a restraining order trial, Sulkess pulled into the parking garage of her new apartment and found that someone else had parked in her assigned spot. “As I go to back up, I see this guy in my rearview mirror, which is quite startling,” she told me. He stood near a pillar, taking photos of her, and then approached and served her with legal papers, even though she had her own attorney who could have accepted the documents during business hours. “It was so overdramatic,” she said. “The rest of the week, you’ve got this thought in your head—like, are people going to jump out of the pillars? It’s designed for psychological warfare.” She and Grishin’s ex-wife started checking the hallways of her apartment to see if there were wiretaps. 

In May, Sulkess filed a complaint with the State Bar of California about the Pierce Bainbridge attorney, Amman Khan, who has since moved to another firm but still represents Grishin. She did not mention the parking garage incident but accused him of other misconduct, including sending people to photograph her. But in June, the state bar closed Sulkess’ complaint without formally investigating the allegations. “We have determined that your complaint does not present sufficient facts to support an investigation,” wrote Scott D. Karpf, a senior trial counsel for the state bar. Pierce, his firm, and Khan did not reply to questions from Mother Jones.

Before talking with Sulkess, Walker had already filed her own complaint with the State Bar of California about Pierce and his firm. “My connection to Pierce and Bainbridge is that I am one of the witnesses in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. I believe they are harassing witnesses including myself,” she wrote. But she was disappointed to hear that Sulkess’ complaint had been closed. Now she had little hope that the agency would help her, and as far as she knew, the police and FBI hadn’t done anything to track down the men who’d gone to her old apartment building. So she agreed to speak with me. She wanted to come forward in the media, she said, because some of her friends were also witnesses the night of the Kenosha protest, and they’ve been scared off from testifying after hearing about her experience. They “saw significantly more than I did,” she told me. “And they’re afraid to go to the police and file witness statements, because they’re concerned that the same thing will happen to them.”

She added, “They’re like: ‘We might go to the police. But only if John Pierce faces some sort of consequences.'” She said none of them wanted to speak with media.

Mother Jones reviewed Walker’s complaint to the State Bar of California and her police report, and spoke with the student who texted her from her old apartment building. We also verified her real name, age, location, and corroborating reports about what she witnessed at the Kenosha protest. But we are not publishing these identifying details because of her concerns for her safety and the high-profile nature of the Rittenhouse case. The teen has become a celebrity on the right, accumulating $2 million in donations to post bond ahead of his trial. Earlier this month, people in Washington at a pro-Trump demonstration that included members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has advocated violence, chanted together, “Break out Kyle!” And on November 21, a lawmaker in Florida, state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, went so far as to tweet, “KYLE RITTENHOUSE FOR CONGRESS.”

Walker is taking her own precautions in the meantime. She hasn’t heard from Pierce lately, nor from the two men who went to her old apartment. But she wonders if she should arm herself anyway. “I’m not pro-gun,” she told me. “But after having a stalker in college and having this happen,” she added, referring to her experience with Rittenhouse’s case, “I was like, I want some way to defend myself.”

Kyle Rittenhouse, left, with backwards cap, walks in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25, 2020, at a protest about police brutality. Adam Rogan/The Journal Times via AP

On Friday, Cynthia Green stood outside a grassy field at a folding table, selling french fries, corn fritters, and rib sandwiches to try and raise enough money to bury her 18-year-old son, who had been shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy in Cocoa, Florida, one week earlier.

Green couldn’t afford the funeral costs on her own. And that’s not unusual: Families often struggle to gather enough money for expenses after police shootings. Many state governments offer financial assistance to the victims of violent crimes, but victims of police violence don’t qualify.

Green’s son, Sincere Pierce, left their home in Cocoa around 10:30 a.m. on November 13, and got into a car with some friends. Green, who is Pierce’s great-aunt and legal guardian, was leaving the house at the same time, and noticed a couple of sheriff’s deputies drive by. She got into her car and started following the deputies, afraid they might harass her son and his friends.

A few minutes later, she watched as her son’s car pulled into a driveway of a residential house. The deputies got out of their cruisers and ordered the driver to stop, according to dash-cam video. But he backed out of the parking space and started driving toward one of them, the officers say. “Please, don’t shoot! Please, don’t shoot! My baby’s in that car!” Green recalled screaming, according to a New York Times report. Deputy Jafet Santiago-Miranda fired his gun multiple times, killing Pierce and 16-year-old Angelo Crooms. Green says that from where she stood, their car did not appear to be heading toward the officer.

The deputies later claimed they wanted to pull the driver over because they suspected the car was stolen. But a lawyer for Green argues it was not stolen—it belonged to Crooms’ girlfriend. Police say two firearms were later recovered from the vehicle.

Green is now trying to raise $50,000 for her son’s burial expenses. By Sunday evening, she had gotten about $38,000 through GoFundMe. In other states, families who lost loved ones during police shootings have tried similar strategies. Michelle and Ashley Monterrosa, whose brother Sean, 22, was shot in June by an officer in Vallejo, California, recently told me they also used the fundraising website to pay for his funeral. But there were other financial problems. The sisters said their mom was exhausted after her son’s death but could only take a few days off work to grieve, because of the pressure to keep paying bills. One of the sisters’ high school teachers was trying to crowd-source funds from the community to help cover therapy costs.

The same day Green was selling corn fritters to pay for her son’s burial, Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, finished amassing $2 million in donations. It was enough to post bond so he could leave custody ahead of his trial, where he faces homicide charges for shooting three people who attended a protest against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August. Rittenhouse says he fired his weapon in self-defense, and that he went to the protest not to participate, but to prevent people from looting stores.

Rittenhouse was fortunate to get out of detention. Around the country, people regularly get stuck in jail for months before their trials because they can’t afford bail, and disproportionately these are people of color. Rittenhouse, who is white, posted bond with help from his attorneys, who created a group called the #FightBack Foundation to raise funds for him. His attorneys have used their Twitter accounts to call for donations while they promote conservative causes and show their support for President Donald Trump. “President Trump won reelection by a landslide. Biden cheated,” tweeted Rittenhouse’s attorney Lin Wood, who filed a lawsuit in Georgia seeking to block election officials from certifying Biden’s win in the state.

In another tweet on Friday, Wood thanked actor Ricky Schroder and a Minnesota businessman allied with Trump for contributing to Rittenhouse’s fundraiser and “putting us over the top.” Rittenhouse’s case has become a cause célèbre among the right wing. Last weekend, people at a pro-Trump demonstration in Washington chanted together, “break out Kyle!” On Saturday, a state lawmaker in Florida, Rep. Anthony Sabatini, tweeted, “KYLE RITTENHOUSE FOR CONGRESS.”

Two other organizations—one that supports gun rights and another that supports militias—gave $100,000 total to Rittenhouse’s mom, Wendy Rittenhouse, according to the Chicago Tribune, which cited another attorney, John Pierce, who has worked on the teen’s case. She is using the money to pay her bills while she takes time off from working.

In California, Sean Monterrosa’s mom might have benefited from the same break to process her son’s death, but she had to keep showing up to work seven days a week. Her family lives in a one-bedroom home in San Francisco; Sean, a carpenter, had contributed a sizeable portion of their income. I talked to Sean’s sister Michelle in August. “It hits her hardest when she gets home at 4 p.m.—that’s when I see her cry every day,” she said of her mom, who works as a caregiver for an elderly woman. “That’s around the time when Sean would come home from his job.”

Demonstrators protest the death of Walter Wallace Jr.The Washington Post/Getty

On Monday afternoon, nearly an hour into a virtual public hearing on how Philadelphia should oversee its police department, the Reverend Mark Kelly Tyler jumped into the video meeting, turning on his camera and microphone to inform the members of the city council’s Special Committee on Criminal Justice Reform that a young Black man had just been fatally shot by the cops. 

Walter Wallace Jr., 27, had been killed on a street in West Philadelphia by police responding to a 911 call from Wallace’s relatives, who, according to a lawyer for the family, requested an ambulance because Wallace was experiencing a mental health crisis. A video of the shooting that circulated immediately on social media showed Wallace walking toward officers, who backed away from him with their guns drawn, while somebody yelled to “put the knife down.” They then fired at least 14 times. 

Tyler saw the footage as the public meeting was beginning. His 16-year-old daughter had sent it to him on Instagram within minutes of Wallace being shot. The co-director of POWER Live Free, an interfaith activism campaign focusing on criminal justice issues in Philadelphia, Tyler at first didn’t believe it was real—it was so recent it hadn’t yet made the news. “It’s truly horrifying,” he told the committee when it was his turn to speak. “A man had a knife and I cannot—I stopped counting after 10 shots. So, I’m going down to the scene.” 

That night, Philadelphia erupted in protests. Police arrested more than 170 people over two days, the city imposed a curfew, and the mayor called in the National Guard. It was a redux of the demonstrations that shook the city earlier this summer after the death of George Floyd—which led 14 members of the City Council to send Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney a letter in June rejecting a proposed $14 million budget increase for police and demanding stricter police oversight. Later that month, council members fast-tracked a bill to place on the November ballot a measure that would replace the city’s existing Police Advisory Commission with a new Citizens Police Oversight Commission.

Now, amid the unrest over Wallace’s death, residents of Philadelphia are voting on whether to establish the new body, which would be tasked with reviewing and improving police officer conduct, holding the department accountable for officers’ actions, and establishing a clear and transparent process for the handling of police misconduct complaints. 

But the measure, known as Question 3, does not spell out how members of the commission would be selected, what their responsibilities would be, or how much power they would wield over the police department. Instead, it authorizes the city council to decide. 

That means that if Question 3 passes, it will be in the hands of the city’s elected leaders to decide if the new body will be able to impose meaningful accountability on the Philadelphia Police Department—or if it will be a recreation of the existing, underfunded Police Advisory Commission, which Tyler has called “beyond toothless.” After budget cuts and the departure of its executive director, the current commission currently has just a handful of employees and a $550,000 annual budget to provide a check on a $727-million force of roughly 6,500 police officers, according to the Inquirer. (Kenney had previously restructured the commission in 2017, but not much changed—it now focuses on issuing reports about systemic issues in the department, while civilian complaints about police are handled internally by the police department.) 

On Monday, the Special Committee on Criminal Justice Reform held a hearing to gather input from community members on what the commission should look like if Question 3 does pass. “This historic ballot question will create a blank canvas,” Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. said at the start of the meeting. “We as a city will be able to paint rules and regulations that will allow for questions of conduct of police to be considered.” 

For months, POWER Live Free has been hosting town halls on Facebook Live with police oversight experts and professionals from around the country to gather ideas for how the new oversight body could work. Among their priorities, Tyler says, is for the commission to be independent of the mayor’s office, with elected members from different districts of the city, and to have full responsibility for setting police department policy. At the Monday meeting, Gayle Lacks, another leader of POWER Live Free, outlined additional demands: more investigators, a database of complaints, and guaranteed direct access for the commission to all police department records, with penalties for the police department if it doesn’t comply with requests for information.

Eventually, Tyler adds, he would like the new commission to have the power to hire and fire the police commissioner, and determine how officers should be disciplined—but that would take another ballot initiative, as well as some serious wrangling over the police union contract. “What we don’t want is for this to be business as usual—that some deal gets cut with the [Fraternal Order of Police] and with the police department and council, we come out and police accountability in Philadelphia 2.0 is worse than before, and again, we have nothing but window dressing,” Tyler says. 

It’s still unclear how or whether the cops who shot Wallace will face repercussions for his death. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said the officers—who have not been publicly identified—have been taken off street duty while a team led by District Attorney Larry Krasner investigates; Outlaw has promised to release 911 recordings as well as the body cam footage. On Thursday, a lawyer for Wallace’s family said it did not want the officers charged with murder because “they were improperly trained and did not have the proper equipment by which to effectuate their job.” They intend to file a wrongful death lawsuit. 

After logging off early from the council meeting, Tyler spent Monday evening talking to young people on the streets of the city who, he says, believed the officers fired because they were afraid. “When they see us, it’s not as somebody who’s having the worst day of their lives, who needs to be saved,” Tyler says. “It’s like this threat that needs to be extinguished.”

He hopes voters will draw a line from the shooting to their vote on the ballot measure: “These things are not disconnected. Our hope is that the community will see the same thing that we see—and recognize that this is a real moment for a much bigger win for all of us.”

George Floyd protesters shut down the westbound lanes of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge on June 14, 2020.Chris Tuite/ImageSPACE/MediaPunch/IPX

Smile. If you’re in downtown San Francisco’s business district, you’re in view of Motorola cameras so sharp they can pick out the color of your eyes, the marks on your face. San Francisco cops used the footage to identify and arrest one man whom camera operators could see so clearly they nicknamed him “Dimples.” Then the police used the cameras to monitor protests against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And then they got in trouble.

Today, the city of San Francisco was sued in California Superior Court by three locals who took part in anti-police-violence protests. Hope Williams, Nestor Reyes, and Nathan Sheard allege that city police violated their civil rights and broke the law by using the privately owned cameras’ live feed to carry out dragnet surveillance of protesters.

They’re being represented by the ACLU of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group based in the city. The suit seeks a judgment that the police broke city laws requiring local law enforcement to not “acquire, borrow, or use any private camera network” without approval from the city’s Board of Supervisors.

Residents were promised more restraint when the camera network, which now covers 135 blocks, was set up. “The police can’t monitor it live,” cryptocurrency mogul Chris Larsen assured San Francisco’s ABC7 News earlier this year. “That’s actually against the law.”

Why is a venture capitalist opining on the cameras to begin with? Larsen is responsible for them. A San Francisco native, he funded the initial placement of the cameras and the “business improvement districts” that monitor them, assuring city officials and concerned citizens that he took their privacy concerns seriously. Police…did not, the lawsuit alleges.

Records reveal that SFPD’s Homeland Security Unit obtained real-time access to the cameras on May 31, as major protests were taking off in the city, and requested a five-day extension on June 2, which it received. The cops also received real-time access to the cameras to monitor gatherings for the Fourth of July, the Super Bowl, and San Francisco’s 2019 Pride Parade, according to the San Francisco Examiner. (The cameras are disproportionately concentrated in shopping districts and adjacent low-income neighborhoods.)

Under San Francisco’s Surveillance Technology Ordinance, police need approval from the city’s Board of Supervisors to acquire and use new surveillance technology. The ordinance provides exceptions for “an emergency involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.”

SFPD argues that its use of the cameras met the “imminent danger” standard; ACLU of Northern California attorney Matthew Cagle calls SFPD’s argument “a power grab that defies the law and brushes off the democratic checks on their power.”

“It was a tactic to provoke fear,” says plaintiff Hope Williams, and “an absolute, blatant disregard of the Surveillance Technology Ordinance in San Francisco.” Williams says she had a “visceral reaction” to finding out about police surveillance of the protests: “What troubles me the most is how this would affect the movement.”

Police nationwide have been quick to jump on surveillance technologies as they become available. Generous police budgets, on the rise despite a growing protest movement, allow departments to stock up on devices that track movements, listen in on calls, and even monitor biometric responses—a digital companion to police militarization. Tech firm Clearview AI, the subject of a HuffPost profile that alleged the company had employed open white nationalists, claims that “over 2,400 law enforcement agencies” have licensed its facial recognition software, often without outside oversight.

“Surveillance technology expands police power in a very dangerous way,” Cagle says. “That’s one of the reasons that San Francisco passed an ordinance. Just the other day, we found that they had illegally used facial recognition.”

(Larsen, the venture capitalist behind the cameras, says they don’t use facial recognition technology. “We’re strongly opposed to facial recognition,” he told the New York Times in July, calling it “too powerful given the lack of laws and protections.”)

San Francisco police, like their counterparts across the country, have scaled up conventional intelligence-gathering efforts to include a new array of tools for breaking into mobile phones, tapping into wireless communications, monitoring gatherings from the air, and automatically scanning license plates.

The city, long a home of left activism, has given police plenty to surveil. The department’s intelligence unit amassed over 10,000 files, beginning in the 1970s and covering everything from South African divestment protests to AIDS crisis protests, queer liberation protests, and student sit-ins at San Francisco State University. (One San Francisco police inspector, the lawsuit notes, was caught selling SFPD files on anti-apartheid protesters to South Africa’s government.) But new technologies, and cooperative business interests, have radically expanded their reach.

Even surveillance spending that appears tough to argue with—like ShotSpotter, an audio surveillance network meant to detect gunfire—can cost far more than shoe-leather policing and still produce few results. From the beginning of 2013 to June 2015, an 18-month period, ShotSpotter issued more than 4,300 alerts in San Francisco. They yielded two arrests.

Surveillance of protests, though, has led to arrests. Since May, police in Texas, Washington, and New York have harnessed surveillance technology to track down protesters on a variety of questionable charges. In Texas, state officials used surveillance footage to arrest a 25-year-old Black man despite an affidavit that “didn’t portray him engaging in any illegal behavior.” At least a dozen other Texans were arrested in that round of surveillance-based investigations.

Cases like those are part of Cagle’s concern. “If this is left unchecked,” he says, “surveillance networks will radically expand the police’s presence exactly at a time when we’re having a public conversation about these police departments and the power that they have.”

The San Francisco Police Department referred Mother Jones to the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. We’ll update if we hear back.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, with MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo looking on. Elizabeth Flores/Star Tribune

After the federales showed, on Portland’s 55th consecutive day of rage, Mayor Ted came through. Mayor Ted Wheeler, alma maters Stanford, Harvard, Columbia MBA; author of Government that Works: Innovation in State and Local Government; imminent tear gas victim:

#Portland's mayor went downtown last night to address the demonstrators who have been protesting racial injustice and police brutality nightly for nearly two months now.

He was met by a chorus of boos … and later, tear gas. https://t.co/jvHL95zr2p

— OPB (@OPB) July 23, 2020

Wheeler bounced after the cops sprayed him, but it’s not as if he’d gotten a friendly reception from his civilian constituents, either. “How can you let your people get gassed out here every night?” the crowd yelled at him, even as he spoke out against federal goons in the city and qualified immunity for cops. If the heckling seems odd to you, keep in mind that it was this Ted Wheeler:

Portland's mayor and police chief defend Tuesday night's policing, while Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty called reports of indiscriminate tear gas and flash bang use "completely unacceptable"https://t.co/778zIgUPpP

— OPB (@OPB) June 3, 2020

Who is also this Ted Wheeler:

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has hinted he might ban tear gas use by police. Instead, he's directing police to limit its use to situations that threaten "life safety" https://t.co/P53hlCB92N

— OPB (@OPB) June 6, 2020

And that this is the same Ted Wheeler who in June offered under 3 percent in budget cuts to the same Portland police force that brazenly thrashes unarmed kids and brown-noses Proud Boys.

We’ve witnessed this elsewhere. Around the US, liberal mayors in liberal cities are defying their citizenry in the streets, going to war on behalf of cops who loathe them, sometimes at the expense of their popularity.

In Minneapolis, there was the viral clip of protesters telling sweet, telegenic, Trudeauesque Mayor Frey to “go home, Jacob, go home!” They’d asked Frey, an erstwhile civil rights lawyer, to pledge to defund city cops. He declined. They sent him packing.

In New York, Bill de Blasio’s farcical denials of NYPD brutality outraged his own staff. “Who Will You Believe, de Blasio or Your Lying Eyes?” New York asked. (Human Rights Watch went with its lying eyes.)

In Philadelphia, where cops openly coddled white-power vigilantes, Democrat Jim Kenney said he’d add $19 million to Philly PD’s budget before retreating under fire. His city’s schools face a $38 million deficit. (Kenney had already overseen a 30 percent jump in Philadelphia’s police spending.)

Whom did Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan blame as news of police atrocities spread like a grease fire? From my colleague Jacob Rosenberg:

Anarchists and opportunistic leftists, neither of whom were present, for instance, in this viral video showing cops smashing up a downtown storefront. It wasn’t an anarchist who maced a man trying to barge through a police line, nor was it an opportunistic leftist who “would throw a flash bang or tear gas just randomly into the crowd.” Those were cops.

A Seattle cop shown on video deliberately rolling his bike over a wounded protester’s head and neck has been put on leave https://t.co/DVOcyQKwCz

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) September 25, 2020

In Washington, DC, NPR asked Mayor Muriel Bowser if she’d had second thoughts on raising the police budget.

“Not at all,” she said.

In Chicago, Lori Lightfoot raised the bridges to keep downtown protest-free, leveraging the city’s brutal legacy of apartheid. Even Richard Daley, a feudal mayor if there ever was, never tried moat-and-drawbridge segregation. Instead of coming downtown, Lightfoot suggested, protesters might try a moment of silence—the racial justice pause that refreshes.

All-blue city councils behind them, hours of footage in front: hundreds of unprovoked beatings and shootings on tape, the kind of proof prosecutors drool for in any other case.

These mayors deal daily with defunded schools, defunded hospitals, defunded transit, defunded arts. Policing’s budget share, generally one-third to half, leaves their towns fighting for scraps. Then add the externalities: billions in settlements, billions in overtime, children on life support. Tanks for school cops, tanks for townships, tanks for Mayberry.

The Moundsville Police Department has added a vehicle to the fleet! I’ll tell you everything this MRAP offers- and explain how the department get it for free- tonight on @WTOV9 pic.twitter.com/qveCV7X1i9

— Jaime Baker (@JBaker_WTOV) June 18, 2020

Why are Democratic mayors risking everything to defend the indefensible?

Let’s play SimCity. You won the race; you’re mayor. You’re an ambitious type who probably does want to help. But you’ve been in the big chair for a minute. You’ve burned hours and hours meeting with the rich, cutting ribbons for the rich, taking calls from the rich. You figured out by week 2 why your predecessors didn’t do the nice things they promised. You don’t answer to anyone whose first fear is the cops.

Yes, you could sub in a grab bag of psych professionals, social workers, EMTs, transit workers, firefighters, unarmed investigators, whatever. But that won’t cut it for the key funders of your town’s police foundation: Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, Amazon, Target, Walmart, Chevron, Coke. The rich don’t just oppose defunding. Like NCAA boosters, they fund their team directly. Police unions are vocal; this gang is not. But these are the constituents who keep police budgets safe—and who top them up.

The technically independent police foundations are tax-free operations, staffed by senior ex-cops, that donate surveillance cameras, rifles, and SWAT gear to local police departments. They’re a not-so-elaborate scheme to turn that cash (and Verizon’s, and Halliburton’s, and Facebook’s) into deep, loyal relationships. Why would Blackstone throw all that money at police? Can’t hurt that it’s Earth’s biggest landlord, a line of work that’s always counted on the badge for pandemic evictions, tenant disposal, color-line enforcement, and more. Call the #BlackLivesMatter LinkedIn posts icing on the cake.

These are familiar faces at your office. If Joe Billionaire has your ear and spends millions of his own on police, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what he’s saying in those off-record City Hall sessions.

So you don’t feel pressure to make a real offer on cop budgets. The people demanding it pose no electoral threat. What are they going to do—vote Republican? You do not take them seriously. You are genuinely scared of urban revolt, but only from the folks who scare you. The ones at Goldman, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, Amazon, Target, Walmart, Chevron, Coke. (Google any of those names next to “mayor.”)

These are your friends—if you deliver. You know them well from their threats to leave town, nailing you to the wall for yet more tax breaks. And from your attempts at paying them to come over. And if they make your constituents a little, well, broke, or if their services cost more than you can afford, they’ve still got your loyalty (and pensions). When they get regulated, you’re right there to rail against it. If you’re lucky, they might hire you later.

And because you are basically sane, you don’t expect to win a race after making enemies of your most powerful constituents—from individual upper-middle-class homeowners up the chain to landowners, bank owners, business owners, business-owner owners, and “human capital stock” owners—by allowing or encouraging deep police cuts. The Democratic mayor who breaks that seal also breaks Democrats’ tenuous electoral bond between the rich and the rest.

Remember how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker groveled when a prankster posed as “Tea Party sugar daddy” David Koch? Your blue-city mayors can’t escape that dynamic; they, too, are behind-closed-doors grovelers.

You might challenge the very rich, in a limited way, on a few issues. But you see them, you know them, and you need them. You’re accountable to them, not the crowds. And you know they’ll react to an imposition—a bit of property tax, dash of integration, too much transit—by mounting a keener electoral threat than either police or their victims can muster. And they have unmistakable views on race.

In the 1950s, upper-middle-class white Texans ran a high-profile insurrection against the Social Security tax they now had to pay for “domestics.” These people called a payroll tax for cleaners—I swear this is true—“indentured servitude.” Similar efforts carried on for decades.

In the 1960s, a John Birch–backed white voter revolt assassinated California’s mild new fair housing law by a two-to-one margin.

In the 1970s, nearly likable Republican George Romney enraged suburban Michiganders by opposing segregation. But he couldn’t stop their bare-knuckled campaign against school integration, which led to the Supreme Court’s screeching U-turn on busing.

The rallies against pandemic safety, where I WANT A HAIRCUT mingled freely with ARBEIT MACHT FREI, are the latest poison fruit off that tree.

All of these movements were gleefully vindictive toward political opponents, happy to ax incumbents, had easy access to funding and friendly media; when white money goes to war, it does not fuck around.

Hence the push to blame police unions, an enemy Democrats can agree on. Lori Lightfoot, finger on the pulse of the white North Side, has cultivated a high-profile spat with Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police. But it’s not the union Lightfoot’s scared of. With few exceptions, police unions already hate and oppose these mayors at every turn. If cops could unseat most blue-city mayors, there wouldn’t be many left.

The Minneapolis police union campaigned all-out against a Frey predecessor, the moderate Dem R.T. Rybak; Rybak beat the incumbent two-to-one, an unprecedented margin of victory. Police unions are hard-right institutions, and it really does limit their electoral power.

But mayors have every incentive to pretend it ain’t so. Who wins if you think the cop unions are that powerful? Who wants to be seen as well-meaning but stuck in an impossible bind?

Read it and weep:

What the bottom two-thirds of earners want has no impact on policy.

Most Americans back policies Fox would call “socialist.”

When the rich oppose a policy the rest of us want, they win about three-fourths of the time.

Police budgets grow with inequality. (From 1992 to 2010, as housing costs soared and safety nets shrank, guess what else rose? Spending on cops.)

Even the Economist concedes, “As inequality grows, so does the political influence of the rich.”

So police budgets grow with the political heft of the rich, which overpowers majorities. And almost all the truly rich live in blue cities. 

That means, for mayors, that their police violence dodges translate into real risks avoided, real political capital preserved among the Ring doorbell class. Jacob Frey didn’t stare into that rally and see the people he usually answers to. Ted Wheeler dropped in, six weeks into Portland’s daily protests, after a critical mass of white moms arrived. He bailed after an hour—back to a crowd that simply does not vote on police brutality. They vote on what the Northwestern scholar Jeffrey Winters calls “wealth defense.”

That, Winters writes, is your mayor’s real tightrope walk:

If the rich are unarmed or do not rule directly, the armed state is the sole source of security.…The modern state—which is possible only if there is a separation between wealth holders and their capacity to engage in or hire violence for wealth defense—gains much of its legitimacy from the successful replacement of violence done by individuals with rule-bound coercion done by institutions.

No display of conforming behavior is more important to modern wealth defense than a respect for property, which during the rise of absolutist states fully metamorphosed from self-enforced claims to state-enforced rights.

This is why Frey said, in his inaugural address: “Yes, we must expect more accountability from our police. But we also need to expect more of ourselves.”

It’s why Frey described structural racism as “$31 billion of lost opportunity in our amazing market due to gaps between people of color and white people,” and said, “Any smart business person would agree that this would be an unacceptable loss.”

Nothing about redistribution or taxes. That’s not because of the police unions. It’s about who has the last word at City Hall. These protests, for Wheeler and Frey, de Blasio and Durkan, are crises of legitimacy: friction fires between their job description and their actual job. This is white money’s thumb on the scales of justice. Their only choice is polite omertà.

Back to Jacob Rosenberg:

In New York City, when footage emerged of a police car mowing people over, Mayor Bill De Blasio said he was “not going to blame officers who are trying to deal with an absolutely impossible situation.”

In Nashville, Mayor John Cooper said vandalism “does not represent our city.” But he doesn’t feel the need to call out a SWAT team who lobbed explosives at reporters.

[Louisville police] shot a reporter with rubber bullets as she broadcast (for which they apologized) and fired tear gas before curfew into a crowd that “looked peaceful,” admitted a police official. None of that was deemed worthy of censure.

This is about negotiating in public. To stay credible, politicians have to tailor their reform offers to the degree of “legitimate” anger, to the public perception of what’s going on. They can’t afford to acknowledge the evidence because they can’t afford to act on it.

Those videos, reports, and broadcasts defy equivocation. They show methodical brutality against people who pose no threat. They give the lie to the “bad apples” line. They reveal that mayors do not directly control police. In other words, they call for change on a scale your most powerful neighbors just won’t accept. City Hall cannot bear very much reality.

And that’s what sleights-of-hand like Durkan’s and Frey’s are about. They’re about being able to say, when they defer and demur and preserve every core element of police power, that they’re not betraying the clearly expressed will of their constituents. Paint the protesters as rioters and looters, and fewer people mind when you don’t reform jack.

Look, this is the heart of the cop thing. John Jay liked to say that those who own the country ought to govern it; for most of history, they did. In early states, “a plunderer could become in effect the chief of police as soon as he regularized his ‘take,’” the historian Frederic Lane writes. That didn’t go out of style with chain mail. On the American frontier, Montana Territory sheriff Henry Plummer moonlighted as chief of the Innocents, a crew of killer highwaymen. Plummer began his career as a plain criminal, switching to vigilantism after police let him kill an escaped prisoner—and eventually took it professional. His successors just keep popping up.

England’s typical early sheriff, in the words of one history, was “a regional dictator with true executive authority,” whose office—a key forebear of modern police—was professionalized during the “consolidation of the gentry’s grip on local government.” From 700 to 1700, says Lane, “the most weighty single factor in most periods of growth, if any one factor has been most important, has been a reduction in the proportion of resources devoted to war and police.”

So we made a devil’s bargain: To get the rich to quit financing bandits, militias, and private armies—maybe even abide by some laws—early states had to subsidize property defense, big-time. Modern policing was born. The veneer of equal protection ain’t deep.

These individuals experience the height of privilege and are co-opting peaceful demonstrations that were organized by and meant to center people of color, particularly Black Americans.

— Mayor Jenny Durkan (@MayorJenny) May 31, 2020

You, the mayor, know this. You might not know the history, but you know whom you call to get things done: a mostly pale-faced posse of property developers, large business owners, old money, venture cap, corrupt bureaucrats, and machine bosses. People to whom these questions aren’t academic. The gang that literally owns the streets.

In the last decade, there has been just one good study on how mayors think. “When asked if cities should work to reduce income inequality,” it found, “a majority of mayors said ‘no.’” That includes a majority of Democrats. This, too, was true of both parties:

Overall, the mayors surveyed rated their relationships with their business communities, neighboring cities and their congressional delegation as positive. The relationship with federal government agencies and the state government were regarded as being more difficult.

You’d never guess from that how the feds and states ply mayors with cash. The late Ben Barber was the leading expert on mayors:

Benjamin Barber, the political theorist and author of “If Mayors Ruled the World,” is wildly biased in favor of de Blasio. He says he voted for him, has met with him to offer advice… For all that, Barber has not been swayed by de Blasio’s soaring rhetoric about reducing the gap between rich and poor.

City Hall has wised you up. You know the police unions will wither without cash, like every force in city politics. But you need constituents who see them as a rock in the road. To make a serious offer on defunding, you’d have to be more scared of your poor than your rich. You’re not.

The uprising, from Portland to New York to Louisville, has hardly paused since June. This is the US in the grip of democracy—a real contest for power, with all the fear and uncertainty that entails. Democracy crackles. It is not tidy or clean. But markets hate fear and uncertainty, and our electeds are tasked to avoid it. For you, the mayor, a little martial law is by far the better deal.

So impunity wears a badge.

A scene from Wheeler’s inauguration:

As he was preparing to speak, Wheeler was briefly interrupted by two protesters who rushed forward chanting, “Stop the sweeps, people are dying on the streets,” an apparent reference to sweeps of homeless camps. Wheeler did not mention them after they were quickly escorted outside by police. Nor did he refer to several other people in the crowd that held signs calling for a rent freeze during his talk. But he listed homelessness and housing affordability among the challenges he intends to address.

And then his speech kicked off, and Wheeler stood before his constituents and said: “Talk is cheap. Action is what matters. I know you’ll hold me accountable.”

He meant it. He just wasn’t talking to most of them.

Karen Ducey/Zuma

On March 13, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was asleep in her bed with her boyfriend when four police officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department used a battering ram to burst into her home. Multiple witnesses say they did not knock or identify themselves, however one witness says that the officers did announce their identity. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, assuming it was intruders, shot at the police officers. In response, the cops opened fire. After 32 rounds, they had killed Taylor and shot up some neighbors’ apartments. Walker was arrested and charged with attempted murder.

Six months after Taylor was killed, following a massive public pressure campaign largely led by advocates in Louisville, the state of Kentucky announced the results of a grand jury investigation of the case. The consequences for the crime of shooting Breonna Taylor to death in her own home while she slept were that three LMPD police officers will face no charges. Former LMPD officer Brett Hankison—who was fired in June for his role in her death—is being charged with three counts of wanton endangerment for shooting into the apartments of Taylor’s neighbors.

The sheer inadequacy of the charges reverberated across the country. Criminal justice advocates and Black Lives Matter protesters denounced the outcome. The stark contrast between the reality that Black people have been killed by police for much lesser crimes—including Taylor, whose only crime was sleeping in her bed—and the stunningly lenient charges communicates something that is increasingly impossible to ignore: A police badge appears to grant officers the right to circumvent the legal system, even as they claim to uphold it.

The decision on whether or not to indict Breonna Taylor’s killers was handled by a grand jury. During Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s press conference after the charges were announced, he said that it was important to follow the law, and that the law enforcement officials involved in the killing of Taylor had the right to presumed innocence until proven guilty.

The accused is innocent until proven guilty says @kyoag

"Justice must be done"

— Marvis Herring (@Marvis_WLKY) September 23, 2020

And yet, why wasn’t Taylor presumed innocent by the agents of the very same system they relied on to dismiss her death?

“This is the most absurd legal maneuvering that I have ever seen,” said Lonita Baker, the National Bar Association Vice President for Regions and Affiliates and lead counsel representing Taylor’s family in a statement. “If [Hankison’s] behavior was wanton to those in neighboring apartments, it was likewise wanton to Breonna and Kenny. He should have been charged with wanton murder and another count of wanton endangerment.” 

It seems as if due process and the presumption of innocence can be flexible concepts, deployed for the convenience of law enforcement. For others, especially Black people, that right is often stripped away, which means that regular citizens are held to a higher (or is it lower?) standard than armed public servants. Cops often deploy the “fearing-for-their-lives” justification as reason for shooting and killing civilians, whether those civilians are or are not armed. That same right did not extend to Walker. He was wrong to use a weapon to protect himself and his home against intruders, and yet the police were justified in shooting Taylor because they were protecting themselves. The charges against Walker were dropped in May.

This is not a new deadly contradiction. Back in 1895, the New York state legislature created the Lexow Commission to study the actions of the New York City Police Department after pressure from a social reformer. The commission found that the police “form a separate and highly privileged class.”

"It appears that the police form a separate and highly privileged class, armed with the authority and machinery for oppression and punishment, but practically free themselves from the operation of criminal law."

The Lexow Commission said this about U.S. policing in 1895.

— Matthew Guariglia (@mguariglia) September 23, 2020

How much has changed in the last 125 years?

To add insult to injury, in the six months between Taylor’s death and Cameron’s announcement, the city settled a wrongful death suit for $12 million with Breonna Taylor’s family. A settlement, naturally, whose bill the taxpayers will foot. The city also banned no-knock warrants so that police will announce themselves before breaking your door down. The settlement and the reforms are tacit acknowledgments that something bad happened here, but let’s not drill down on who’s responsible.

Routinely escaping consequences or accountability allows police to continue to inflict violence, pain, and trauma on the same communities over and over again. But what has taken place during 2020 feels worse. In the past, both major political parties would engage in the requisite mealy-mouthed calls for peace and understanding, while denouncing violence on “both sides.” But courtesy of Donald Trump, Republicans no longer need to pretend that they’re interested in equality. After Cameron’s press conference announcing that no one would be held responsible for the death of Taylor, the president was the first to applaud. Not surprisingly, Cameron is a Republican. 

Asked about the Breonna Taylor case, Trump says Kentucky’s AG, Republican Daniel Cameron, made a “really brilliant” statement and is a “star.”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 23, 2020

Of course, law enforcement can act with impunity. Who can blame them with this kind of high-level support? 

As more information was revealed about what the charge of “wanton endangerment” actually meant, a cruel truth was revealed: According to the state of Kentucky, the only crime the cops committed that night was one against property. Taylor’s walls mattered more than her life. As protesters took to the streets to decry the empty charges and the unjust system that police officers seem to uphold only when it suits their own, they were met with tear gas, arrests, and armed white gangs—who’ve been glorified by Trump, Republicans, and the conservative media. A suspect was taken into custody after shooting and injuring two police officers. What is the correct response to a system that repeatedly uses violence and then cherry picks the legal mechanism to justify it? More violence may not be the answer, but it certainly starts addressing the heart of the question.

A grand jury has indicted a former Louisville police officer with wanton endangerment of the first degree for actions he took during the raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in the early hours of March 13 when police officers raided her Louisville apartment. The two other officers involved in the shooting will not be charged. The outcome was announced on Wednesday following a process led by Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general.

The charged officer, Brett Hankison, blindly fired his gun into both Taylor’s apartment and a neighbor’s, violating department policy requiring that officers have a line of sight. For this, Hankison was fired. At the time, Louisville’s interim police chief Robert Schroeder found that Hankison “displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he “wantonly and blindly fired ten (10) rounds into the apartment of Breonna Taylor.” on March 13, 2020.” But according to the indictment against Hankison, the wanton endangerment charges are the result of firing into Taylor’s neighbor’s apartment. His bond was set at $15,000.

Protests calling for charges against the officers who took Taylor’s life have taken place in Louisville for more than 100 days. On the eve of the announcement, the city took steps to control potential coming protests. On Tuesday, the city was placed under a state of emergency order, a 25-block permitter was closed to traffic, city administrative buildings were boarded up. On Wednesday, prior to the announcement, a 9pm curfew was announced and the state national guard was activated.

Taylor’s death was the result of a police raid gone horribly wrong. Police claim they announced their presence, but inside her apartment, Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker claims he and Taylor heard an intruder breaking down the door without identifying themselves. In self-defense, Walker shot at the officers. The officers shot back, killing Taylor. The raid itself, part of an operation targeting her former boyfriend, should arguably never have involved Taylor. 

Cameron, a Republican and acolyte of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, chose to have a grand jury determine charges. Grand juries are generally known to fulfill the will of the prosecutor that leads them. In many cases involving officer shootings, they have facilitated decisions not to charge while serving as way for prosecutors to deflect public blame for the decision to the grand jury.

This post has been updated with more information about Hankison’s indictment.

A demonstration against police brutality on June 14, 2020 in Miami.Joe Raedle/Getty

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump lackey, is pushing legislation that would outlaw protests that turn disorderly and allow law enforcement to round up and prosecute all present, transforming participation in a protest from a protected constitutional right to a crime. The changes read like the rulebook of a dictatorship—and rather than being an aberration, represent a hot new trend on the political right.

The sweeping proposal out of Florida would allow state authorities to lock up and deny rights and benefits to anyone who attended a gathering deemed violent or disorderly. If you’re involved in an “assembly” of more than seven people where some property is damaged, you and everyone alongside you can be charged with a third degree felony. The same goes for unpermitted protests that block roadways. Drivers who murder or mow down protesters blocking roads would be given new legal defenses, as the proposal says drivers who hit protesters while fleeing are not liable for injury or death. The package would strip counties or municipalities who chose to reduce their police department budgets of state funds, essentially removing local control over spending. 

Today I announced bold legislation that creates new criminal offenses and increases penalties for those who target law enforcement and participate in violent or disorderly assemblies. We will always stand with our men and women in uniform who keep our communities safe. pic.twitter.com/ITl5GmmrZJ

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) September 21, 2020

“This effort has one goal: silence, criminalize, and penalize Floridians who want to see justice for Black lives lost to racialized violence and brutality at the hands of law enforcement,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, in response to the proposal. “Protesting is, and always has been, an indispensable part of our democracy’s history. We will fight any bill that violates the First Amendment.”

DeSantis’s push didn’t come out of nowhere. President Donald Trump warned recently that any protests against him on election night would be put down as an “insurrection.” In June, as Confederate statues around the country were toppled in anti-racist protests, Trump signed an executive order directing prosecutors to charge protesters who damage federal monuments and to withhold funding from cities that do not protect monuments. His attorney general, Bill Barr, has urged federal prosecutors to charge protesters under insurrection statutes. Trump and Barr used tear gas against peaceful protesters gathered outside the White House in June, a display that signaled that even peaceful gatherings are considered unacceptable. 

The introduction of this proposal just days before Floridians begin to receive ballots is widely seen as a political move by DeSantis, who admits it will only be taken up in March, when the legislature next convenes. Indeed, DeSantis himself has said he wants voters to judge politicians on the ballot this fall based on their response to his vision. “Every single person running for office in the state of Florida this year, whether you’re running for the House, whether you’re running for the Senate, you have an obligation to let the voters know where you stand on this bill,” he said Monday. “Are you going to stand with law and order and safe communities, or are you going to stand with the mob?” While Florida has not been a hub of protests this year in the way cities like Portland have been, DeSantis’s move underscores attempts by Trump to turn the November election into referendum on law and order.

DeSantis’s anti-protester wishlist doesn’t just read like a political document but also like an act of fear. In Florida, a state closely divided between Democrats and Republicans, the GOP controls all three branches of government. At the federal level, the power imbalance is starker. Republicans control the White House and Senate despite Democrats getting more votes for president and their Senate candidates, and together they are in the process of ramming through another Supreme Court appointment that will solidify conservative dominance over the nation’s highest court. In such a system, the opposition often has no outlet but protests. So it’s unsurprising that DeSantis and Trump want to shut those down too. 

President Trump offered a full-throated defense of the killing of Michael Reinoehl, the Portland man suspected of killing a member of a right-wing group last month, claiming that Reinoehl’s shooting by law enforcement officials was the inevitable price to be paid for his alleged crimes. 

“This guy was a violent criminal and the US Marshals killed him,” Trump told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro in an interview that aired Saturday. “And I will tell you something: That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

The remarks, which essentially encouraged extrajudicial murders by US police, come as the latest in the president’s open promotion of violence against his perceived political enemies. He holds his supporters to a very different standard. Less than two weeks ago, he defended the 17-year-old Trump fan suspected of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after police shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, seven times in the back. In the case of that suspect, Kyle Rittenhouse, Trump stressed that the situation was still under investigation, suggesting that it was important to let the justice system play out before rushing to any conclusions. 

Trump’s call to reserve judgment doesn’t appear to extend to Reinoehl, who an eyewitness says was killed by police without warning. The morning after his interview with Pirro aired, Trump on Sunday similarly demanded that prosecutors pursue a “fast trial death penalty” for the person suspected of shooting two police officers in Los Angeles.

If they die, fast trial death penalty for the killer. Only way to stop this! https://t.co/K3sKh28GjX

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2020

Donald Trump Jr. speaks at the Republican convention in August. OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images

Donald Trump Jr. seems to think that the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse, the white 17-year-old from Illinois, of three protesters last month in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is just another case of “boys will be boys.” Speaking in an interview on September 8 on the TV show Extra that has since gone viral, Don Jr. said he and his father had not condemned Rittenhouse for killing two people and injuring a third because they were still waiting for due process in the case.

He then added, “He’s a young kid. I don’t want 17-year-olds running around the street with AR-15s—maybe I wouldn’t have put myself in that situation, who knows? But we all do stupid things at 17.”

“That’s a little bit beyond stupid,” the interviewer, Extra correspondent Rachel Lindsay, responded. Don Jr. didn’t really take the point. “Really stupid, fine,” he said. “But we all have to let that process play out.”

Don Jr. was on the show to promote his new book, Liberal Privilege. But if we’re going to talk about privilege, let’s talk about the reasons why white teens accused of violence are so often described as boys who got a little too rowdy, but Black teens accused of violence are often regarded as predatory adults. They’re “murderers” who should be executed, as President Trump put it when referring to the now-exonerated Central Park Five in New York City back in 1989.

This kind of rhetoric trickles down into our criminal justice system and translates into vastly different punishments for kids based on the color of their skin. As I reported in an investigation a few years ago, Black teenagers are significantly more likely than white teenagers to be sent to prison for the rest of their lives when they commit violence. From 2012 to 2018, an astonishing 72 percent of teens who received life-without-parole sentences around the country were Black. Prosecutors and courts seem to believe that when these kids hurt someone, they can’t be rehabilitated and should be locked up until they die—no second chances. But when a white kid like Rittenhouse hurts someone, people like the Trumps argue he’s just young and foolish like “we all” were once. If that’s not privilege, I don’t know what else is.