Changing The APD Narrative: Ferguson Protestor Arrests

CHANGING THE NARRATIVE: APD, ARRESTED PROTESTORS & THE RIGHT TO DISSENT

By Jim Chambers

January 12, 2015, Atlanta, GA- In the wake of the now notorious decision of a Grand Jury in Ferguson, MO, not to indict Ofc. Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, the nation-at-large has seen a torrent of protests, marches, rallies, and actions of civil disobedience.

In Atlanta, arguably the most significant, and unquestionably most heavily attended such action (estimates in the low thousands) was a 4-hour rally at Underground Atlanta, a shopping area in the heart of downtown, on November 25^th, 2014, the day after the non-indictment. The rally was organized by a coalition of civil rights activist groups known as the “Shut It Down ATL Coalition.” In the wake of this rally, a series of spontaneous marches developed, dominantly propelled by young people of color. The marches largely coalesced on Atlanta’s main thoroughfare, Peachtree St., and in the surrounding areas, commencing early that evening and continuing into the next morning. A number of protestors were arrested by the Atlanta Police Dept., all but one of whom were represented in a group of 23 that appeared Wednesday, January 7^th, for arraignment at Atlanta Municipal Court. The vast majority of these arrestees were charged with “pedestrian in roadway,” or “impeding traffic.”  Arrests began after dispersal orders had been given, with APD citing instances of property damage as cause to label the marches “illegal.” The genesis of the decision to disperse, and the nature of the arrests/police response are key points, which have heretofore been largely overlooked.

Quite laudably, a coalition of over 20 volunteer attorneys, spearheaded by the Davis-Bozeman Law Firm of Atlanta, appeared on behalf of the protestors; most of these attorneys were not dedicated activist/civil rights attorneys, but rather, had stepped aside from their customary work to assist in representing, pro bono, a group which they felt had been wrongly arrested, and wrongly charged whilst exercising their constitutional rights.  In a statement issued by Davis-Bozeman, it was affirmed that “none of the protestors represented were charged with any acts of vandalism…{and they} maintain their innocence and 1^st Amendment right to protest and assemble.” The attorney group was also given furtherance and aid from a collection of local law students and professors.

In order to thoroughly address these cases, a chronology of events that preceded the arrests, accompanied the arrests, and occurred thereafter must be properly examined.

To begin with, law enforcement communities nationwide predictably took measures to prepare for what would inevitably be a significant reaction to the Ferguson decision; protests in Missouri had been ongoing since early August, when Michael Brown’s killing occurred, and it was largely anticipated that regardless of the decision, some kind of national response would be heard. Preparation and response was visibly multifarious amongst law enforcement agencies in different cities, but in Atlanta, given the historical backdrop of civil rights action, measures were taken to foster pre-emptive dialogue between the rally’s organizers and APD. At APD’s behest, members of the Shut It Down Coalition agreed to a sit-down with APD officials, including Chief George Turner, the week before the event. In that meeting, assurances were given by the organizers that the rally, and any associated actions, would remain non-violent. In turn, Law Enforcement officials assured that excessive use of force in response to the rally would not occur, including, but not limited to, pepper spray, teargas, and riot gear; in essence, there was to be no militarized response.

This is the point at which the narrative sharply turns; by Mayor Reed’s account, which was buttressed by that of Chief Turner, a “splinter group of 150 or so” protestors led the post-rally march, and it was this “group’s” alleged complicity in a blockage of the I-75/85 Downtown connector, and property damage (a broken window at Meehan’s Pub, a broken Taxi window, and a handful of toppled objects), which spurned the arrests. In effect, the litany of events provided by Reed/Turner, the latter of whom at one point in the night announced that “We {Atlanta} are better than this,” was that APD was honoring its pledge to stand back, and this only changed once the protestors, rhetorically monolithic, reneged on their pledge of non-violence.

There are a number of major issues with this account. First, had one been in the vicinity of the rally & the marches, as was this author and myriad eyewitnesses, it was clear that there was no such “splinter group.” As stated earlier, the postliminary marches were almost entirely organic, and consisted of the bulk of those who remained at Underground at the original rally’s conclusion. The numbers were well over 150; groups were scattered around downtown, including a handful on the connector, but it’s worth noting that not one of those arraigned Wednesday were amongst that group. The largest culmination of the spontaneous marches was at Peachtree St and Ivan Allen Blvd. There, protestors were met by police clad in full riot gear, and this is where the bulk of the arrests took place.

If one observes the timeline, something does not add up: I myself “splintered off” from the initial rally, gathering a handful of students in need of rides to MARTA, and when I learned that marches were ongoing, I parked, and began to walk back towards downtown from the GSU area, in order to cover further ongoings. En route, at least 10 witnesses, including my fiancée and I, observed and photographed a staging area of dozens of APD already clad in full riot gear. The officers performed a series of what appeared to be drills, and proceeded to load into at least 3 full sized buses, including a MARTA commuter bus and a GSU student shuttle, headed towards the marches downtown. A small group of us followed the buses, and were actually led towards the bulk of the remaining crowd by them. When we arrived to Peachtree St., we observed a handful of protestors actually replacing those few toppled objects, including a display of Christmas trees and a magazine dispenser. Simultaneously, the first round of reports of property damage began to circulate, and clearly, the two windows broken, which represent the extent of any meaningful damage, had been broken within minutes of our arrival on to Peachtree.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that this author’s photographically documentable timeline is somehow errant by, say, 15 minutes. Let’s give authorities the benefit of the doubt, and say that all militarized response and arrests occurred only upon notification of property damage. If it takes at least 5-10 minutes for an officer to don full riot gear, another 15 minutes of preparation, and another 10 to load a few buses, that’s at least 30 minutes required, notwithstanding orders/organization from above, if not far longer, to mobilize such units to a scene. Other eyewitnesses claimed to have seen such stirring as early as 4pm that day in pockets of the city. Clearly, comprehensive preparation had been in place for hours, if not days, to send riot squad response teams. If APD’s promise had been in earnest, and they had no intent of escalating interactions with protestors, why would this have been the case? The reality is that these units were mobilized and ready well before any alleged breach of commitment had occurred on the parts of protestors, and basic human behavior dictates that if one shows up dressed for hostility, one being whoever was commanding APD’s actions, one is obliquely inciting hostility.

There’s another substantial problem with the APD’s decision to declare the Peachtree march “unlawful,” and to accuse the protestors and organizers en masse of breaking a vow of non-violence; in the midst of a crowd of thousands of mostly young black people, already justifiably agitated by the slayings of other innocent young black people, at the hands of police, and already aware of a looming, ominous police force descending upon them, we’re looking at two broken windows, and a handful of items which were knocked over, and subsequently replaced by protestors, 2 of whom, Sarah Garrett and Corina Cruz, were later arrested. It is this author’s opinion, alluding to Chief Turner, that “we” would be hard-pressed to be much “better than this.” In point of fact, in a metro area that roughly 2 million black people call home, seated in the heart of the South, where race has always been an issue of greater tension, an astonishing level of restraint was shown. What was shown was collective punishment, something that should be quite alien to law enforcement in an advanced democracy.

APD staging riot squads on DeKalb Ave.

As the march progressed up Peachtree, towards Ivan Allen Blvd., the visible presence of riot squads steadily grew, and a hefty perimeter was formed around protestors, the weightiest contingency grouped across Ivan Allen, thereby stopping the march in its tracks. At this point, dispersal orders were given from various officers, most notably a diminutive, well-groomed ranking officer with a megaphone. The mantra, “you have destroyed property, this assembly is unlawful, you will be arrested if you do not disperse,” was repeated. At the SW corner of that intersection, a group of 4-5 officers took it upon themselves to forcibly seize what had been a wide banner, supported by wooden posts, which read, “Black Lives Matter” from a group of protestors. The banner was torn, and in a particularly heightened moment, the posts were pointed back at protestors, conjuring an image eerily reminiscent of the famous photo of an American flag being jousted at a young man of color during Boston’s busing riots in the 1960’s. It was immediately after this that arrests began, seemingly randomly; if one happened to be in the front line of marchers, or in the wrong spot along the sidewalk, one was at risk of being apprehended. Indeed, to a man, not one of those arrested had been complicit in any way, shape, or form in the earlier destruction of property, and most were detained arbitrarily, as marchers attempted to re-route away from the blockades.

Aside from being effectively innocent bystanders, as were all of those arraigned Wednesday, a number of arrestees were detained amidst uniquely shabby circumstances, and a few sustained injuries at the hands of police:

Nile Bean was working at the downtown Hyatt hotel, adjacent to the dispersing march. He stepped outside, curious as to what was transpiring, and began to film the scene. As one of his feet flirted with the curb, he was grabbed, slammed to the ground, and arrested. Local photographer Steve Eberhardt was able to document much of this.

A young, interracial couple, Renzo Marches and Natasha Stewart, became alarmed when they saw the presence of militarized police units. They turned away from the main group, and pulled scarves across their faces, anticipating a possible pepper spray/teargas deployment. As soon as they had done so, they were accused of “inciting” and “wearing masks.” Ms. Stewart was pulled, by the scarf, incurring bruising to her neck, and Mr. Marches was thrown to the street; injuries to his leg and face were displayed in photographs at a press conference which followed Wednesday’s arraignment.

Corey Toole, a young black student, was also apprehended at random, and managed to gain access to his phone from the back of a prisoner van; he posted a troubling image of a bloodied, beaten face to Twitter, while the march was still ongoing, and his injuries remain visible to this day.

Corey Toole's photo, tweeted from APD Prisoner Transport Vehicle

Samuel Albanez, a Hispanic male who has worked for some time with local NAACP chapters, sustained injuries excessive enough to keep him at Grady Hospital overnight, resulting in a booking the following day.

The rest of the arrests occurred over the next two hours. Arrestees were released between 3am-8am the following day, and appeared in court that afternoon, November 26^th, where arraignment was postponed until January. Two members of the press had also been detained, but per the Mayor’s orders, charges against them were dropped in the morning.

Following Wednesday’s court proceedings, 14 of those initially charged pled not guilty, and await a hearing on January 21^st to determine a trial date, presumably to be set for mid-February. Six of the remaining defendants were granted dismissals, due to “ticket discrepancies,” on the part of arresting officers, while one man, a member of CopWatch, had charges dismissed due to video evidence provided to the prosecution amidst court proceedings by Atlanta’s NBC affiliate, 11Alive News. The footage clearly demonstrated that he had been filming the events on the street, and had violated no appreciable laws. Regrettably, another member of CopWatch also appeared in the video in the same capacity, but had already pled not guilty when the video appeared; as such, he will have to re-appear when a trial date is set. One remaining arrestee sought private counsel, and chose to plead no contest for personal reasons, receiving a commuted 2-day sentence and a small fine.

The assemblage of volunteer attorneys have indicated that their aim in this case is to achieve general dismissals, and have expressed vigorous confidence to that end, and no less. Without reserve, it is this author’s unwavering opinion that anything but dismissal would be an odious moment for the City and its administration; this is an opportunity for city officials to concede their own error, unfortunately disproportionate response, or perhaps even more germane to the issue at-large, to retract the narrative of irresponsibility and criminality previously ascribed to a group of well-intentioned, non-violent protestors. It would behoove the mayor, and the courts, to provide a show of magnanimousness, and embrace Atlanta’s Civil Rights legacy in a meaningful way, rather than persisting on a path of punitive chicanery, and politics of fear.

MO Grand Jury Shows Impact of Systemic Racism

Below is AFSC's position on the grand jury decision. For those that are near Atlanta we want to encourage you to join the local effort and gather at 5pm tomorrow(11/25) at Underground near 5 points station. Through this tragedy we hope the local effort to challenge systemic racism continue to build momentum. 

Now that the grand jury has decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, people across the country are justifiably seeking answers. The American Friends Service Committee also is seeking clarity in this case. We remain committed to addressing the issues of militarization of police, police accountability and systemic racism revealed by the killing and its aftermath. If we are to prevent future tragedies, people everywhere should join us in these efforts.

Those who pay the cost of these policies are disproportionally young people of color – and with alarming frequency that cost is death at the hands of police. Ominously, local police increasingly rely on militarized tactics and weapons not only to arrest but to contain people exercising their right to assemble and peacefully protest such tragedies as the Mike Brown killing.

Weeks before today’s announcement, Missouri police and elected officials began stockpiling riot gear and “less lethal” weapons to respond to public protest. We urge protesters to resist provocations such as armored trucks, dogs, and blockades staffed by officers in military garb. We   urge police officials to seek dialogue with those they swore to protect and serve, to find common ground and peaceful paths forward. Throughout our decades of work on social justice and human rights in the U.S. and around the world, we have witnessed the effectiveness of such dialogue and exchange programs.

We are proud of the young people with whom we work in Missouri, who are using peaceful means to work for fundamental change in systems that perpetuate racism and inequality. They deserve both applause and help for their leadership in healing and organizing their communities. We urge all people of good will to join us in supporting peace-building programs for these young people.

Starting just days after the shooting, AFSC has been helping youth process the killing of one of their peers through our two-year-old Peace Education Program working in Ferguson and St. Louis. We are standing with teachers and families, with the community organizations protesting, and with the family of Mike Brown.

Most of all we heed and support their vision of what democracy looks like: It looks like police accountability. It looks like equal access. It looks like an end to mass incarceration. It looks like the dismantling of the school-to-prison pipeline. It looks like the demilitarization of police.

As a Quaker organization that believes in the worth of every person, we call on people everywhere to join us in addressing the systemic and structural racism at the roots of Mike Brown’s death – and that of so many others nationwide.

We need to challenge policies – at every level, from the school house to the State House, from Missouri to Washington DC – that disproportionately incarcerate people of color  and boost profits for corporations running jails, prisons and immigration detention centers. We also must challenge media when they stigmatize youth of color instead of acknowledging their humanity.

Our nation will only prosper when we invest in all our children. Join us as we work to end militarized policing and the systemic racism that endangers youth of color and thus threatens our common future. 

King's Radical Message Rings True Today

When Martin Luther King, Jr. “broke the silence” on the war on Vietnam in 1967, he shattered the establishment rhetoric on America’s mission in Southeast Asia. His speech, “Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence,” delivered at Riverside Church in upper Manhattan, still has revolutionary ring to it as we approach MLK Day more than 40 years later.

Taking a politically risky and unpopular stance—and bucking the advice of some of his most trusted advisers—King drew a link between the destruction of war in Vietnam and the devastation of America’s stratified society. He framed the independence struggle of the Vietnamese as the freedom struggle of communities of color at home.

Civil rights advocates who had preceded King had often bound up patriotism with ideas of racial uplift—for instance, in the Double V campaign of World War II. But King recognized the cancerous injustice of the Vietnam War:

If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

Today, antiwar activism is much more entwined with movements for human rights and racial justice, thanks in large part to King’s prescience. But the march of war continues to trample souls, in distant battlefields and on blighted American streets. And some activists fear the antiwar movement has waned since the 2008 election, which drained momentum from the opposition that flourished under the Bush administration and left some groups less willing to challenge a presidency hailed as a civil rights victory to itself.

In the coming days, grassroots groups around the country will remember King’s stance on the war and take stock of how much, or how little, the country has progressed since King first broke his silence.

In New York City, Iraq Veterans against the War will bring together community members in the Bronx for a reading of King’s speech. IVAW organizer and Iraq veteran Andrew Johnson said that this time, the silence may be harder to penetrate:

The mobilization of the American people against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might be more difficult than against Vietnam. Casualties are lower, of course. Also, there is no draft, which allows most of the American public to ignore the problem without facing such a direct impact as a loved one being drafted. Most major news outlets do not offer serious reports about the wars…. It is important to get messages like those from “Beyond Vietnam,” but it is hard to do in a climate of apathy.

When King told his audience, “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home,” he inverted the prevailing notion that the price of national security would be borne solely by the country we designated as the enemy. He was advancing a globalization of the civil rights movement that was already underway. As historian Mary Dudziak has pointed out, “Third World” activists, embroiled in their on post-war, anti-colonial liberation movements, had watched the protests in Birmingham closely, seeking inspiration and a platform to challenge Washington’s hypocrisy.

King feared that eventually humankind’s capacity to self-destruct would grow faster than its capacity for compassion. Literary scholar David Bromwich wrote that King’s perspective on modern warfare was shaped by the fact that as technology evolved, “Things built over ages can be made to vanish in an instant under its annihilating stroke. That is what happened to the ancient culture, the farms, and the forests of Vietnam under the unleashed assault of American air power.” The methods of war are increasingly mechanized today, enabling an unmanned drone to destroy instantly an enemy on the ground, or the unfortunate civilians and children caught in the crosshairs.

Violence has a perverse way of reconfiguring social divides and loyalties, King noted:

So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

Tragically, the commemorations of King this year come just days after the shootings in Arizona exposed the violence poisoning the country’s political arena. The senselessness of the carnage bears out King’s imagery of “a society gone mad on war,” caught in a spiral of militarization that yielded only “might without morality, and strength without sight.”

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink told Colorlines that King’s uncompromising antiwar stance rings as true as ever today:

You change Vietnam to Iraq or you change Vietnam to Afghanistan, and you have the most powerful speech you can hear about why the wars that we’re engaged in are wrong, how they are wars against people of color, how they are racist wars, how we don’t care about our own soldiers—people who are struggling here at home just to get a job or an education, whom we’re sending overseas to kill poor people. Unfortunately, it’s not so much an echo of the past; it’s a clarion call to the present.

Other Kings

There is a Martin Luther King, Jr., that we may not recognize from elementary school textbooks, the human rights activist who has galvanized generations of resistance movements from the Horn of Africa to death row. Though many of his successors have taken a more radical tone or diverged from the nonviolent tactics he promoted, his message against war endures. That’s why some Pan-Africanist commentary on southern Sudan’s independence referendum this month invoked the preacher’s words. And Hugo Chavez, proud foe of American hegemony, recently hailed King as a martyr.

A statement commemorating King from the New York-based Pakistan Solidarity Network frames “Beyond Vietnam” as an essentially anti-imperialist critique:

As King urged, we must imagine our work holistically, because the imperial project we are resisting does not obey any boundary: the “War on Terror” has created a social, legal, and economic reality that is destroying countless people of color and migrants at home and world-round.

Yet King’s words are subject to distortion as well. His comments on Zionism, for instance, have been repackaged to bolster Israeli aggression in the occupied territories. His early death left open the challenge of interpreting and internalizing his legacy.

In a 2009 essay criticizing the politically sanitized, mainstream portrayals of King, Alan Singer argued:

If Dr King had not been assassinated, but had lived to become an old radical activist constantly questioning American policy, I suspect he would never have become so venerated. It is better for a country to have heroes who are dead, because they cannot make embarrassing statements opposing continuing injustice and unnecessary wars.

King was in fact considered an unwelcome troublemaker for most of his short life. The anti-war and antipoverty politics he’d begun to put at the forefront of his activism had drawn increasingly unflattering commentary in the run up to his assassination. We can celebrate that he lived long enough to further a legacy of antiwar activism rooted in racial justice.

This year, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace organization historically tied to the civil rights movement that now campaigns on every continent, draws inspiration from King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech in its new campaign, “Demilitarization of Life & Land.”

Focusing on the Middle East and Latin America, the group’s mission statement centers on “Resisting the militarization of territory (high schools, farm lands, military bases, whole nations) and of our bodies (through military recruitment, weapons sales, threats and acts of war),” and campaigning for “peaceful relations through grassroots diplomacy, protective accompaniment of threatened communities, and a federal budget with new priorities.”

At the annual King Peace Program at the King Center in Atlanta February 8th, coordinated by the American Friends Service Committee, community members are revisiting King’s Vietnam speech as a touchstone for contemplating today’s peace movement. Timothy Franzen, a program director with AFSC-Atlanta, pointed to “the striking connections between a bloated military budget, a broken domestic economy, and the institutional racism we see in our schools and communities.”

The financing of war at the expense of “programs for social uplift,” Franzen said, “has created a situation where low-income youth often get caught up in two of our country’s most destructive systems of violence and oppression, the military and prison industrial systems. Both thrive on tax dollars, racial inequity, and the constant production of enough fear to garner unquestioning support [from] the general public.”

When participants in today’s event read from King’s speech, their words will outline the same vision impressed on the audience at Riverside Church in 1967. When he looked “Beyond Vietnam,” King imagined transcendence and convergence: the weaving together of struggles that we’ve always been taught to keep separate, to form “a single garment of destiny.”

by Michelle Chen
Reposted from colorlines.com