Emails reveal: New Times Reporter Took a Mulligan on Occupy Phoenix

A special for Down and Drought by Erik Blare

In golf, a mulligan is when a player gets to cheat for making a bad stroke. In serious competition, the practice leads to the player being disqualified.

Former New Times reporter James King appears to have taken a mulligan by calling on the cops to do his work for him. According to e-mails uncovered as a result of a FOIA request and released Monday by D.B.A. Press, King was playing golf with New Times editor Paul Rubin instead of covering Occupy Phoenix. He calls on top cop Trent Crump to give him the rumpus on what went down because he “can’t stand hippies” and “protesting with no cause is stupid.”  His poorly written e-mails may be a symptom of golf elbow.  Here is the e-mail in full:

From: James King <james.king@newtimes.com>
To: "Martos, Steve" <Steve.Martos@phoenix.gov>, "Thompson, Tommy" <Tommy.Thompson@phoenix.gov>,
"Crump, Trent" <Trent.Crump@phoenix.gov>
Sent: Sat, Oct 15, 2011 04:01:35 GMT+00:00

Subject: occupy phoenix

hello, sirs. was hoping for any info you have on the occupy phoenix march today. any arrests? any mayhem? anyone other than dirty hippies pretending it's 1968? here's my dilemma: i was supposed to go down there and cover it. instead, i went and played golf with paul rubin because i think protesting with no cause is stupid and I can't stand hippies. that said, i'm still expected to write something about it tonight. any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
JK

Someone whose profession is protected by the First Amendment should have some respect for the right of citizens to protest. The fact that King thinks there is no cause worth protesting is because he is short-sighted and single-minded. The Occupy Movement protested the fallout of one of the worst financial crises in the country’s history and the government’s unprecedented bailout. There were multiple causes to protest, which confused many journalists like King and irked others by the fact that they would have to do some work to cover the story.

It may be that King’s snarky and sarcastic tone is a ruse to cover up his rag’s “liberal” reputation amongst pols and cops, but his attitude is in full effect in his coverage of Occupy Phoenix. His October 15th, 2011 story 'Occupy Phoenix: Banks Are Evil, the Government's Evil, and Jan Brewer's a "Lying Whore" With Alzheimer's' show that he reported the story with extreme bias. King goes for the low-hanging fruit of finding the wackiest protestors to give him a complete action plan of how to overhaul capitalism. When he doesn’t get it, he dismisses the protestors whole-handedly.  He writes, “Apparently, blowing bubbles is the key to redistributing wealth. Who knew?”

Apparently, King was hoping for a riot because in King’s mind a protest looks the documentaries about the ‘60s that he saw in his high school civics class. When he doesn’t get one, he leaves disappointed and abrogates his duty to the police. “Tomorrow, Phoenix police will update us about any mayhem that went down after we left the demonstration.” After quickly surveying the scene and finding the wackiest protestors to photograph and mock, King presumably went to the links to get some face time with his golf buddy boss and to figure out how many Bud Lights it takes to get a decent enough buzz to kill 18 holes of boredom.  King was not connected to the community. He had no contacts in Occupy Phoenix, so he relied on the police for his reporting. His lackadaisical reporting led to his shoddy story.

As a reporter for a publication started by a counter-culture college drop out who protested the Vietnam War, King calling protestors "dirty hippies" would be ironic if New Times was still true to its original muckraking spirit.  New Times has a history of dismissing community activists with sarcasm. One of the most egregious cases was the fake pro-yuppie protest they sponsored in response to San Francisco’s late ‘90s anti-gentrification movement called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.

SF Weekly, a New Times publication, contacted a Project member named Nestor Makhno. The paper covered the story and Makhno wrote a well-researched report on the issues facing the Mission district because of internet-bubble-fueled rapid gentrification of a neighborhood of immigrants, artists and activists. Makhno even refused payment because he wouldn't have his real name printed on the check.

SF Weekly relied on a community activist to cover a burning issue that it couldn’t or wouldn’t. It was a wise move on their part because the then upstart alt-weekly faced stiff competition from long-standing and respected San Francisco Bay Guardian.  True to its snarky, pseudo-libertarian colors, the Weekly turned on Makhno and staged the fake pro-yuppie protest and mocked the counter-demonstrators.

What does a long ago beef between activists and a New Times publication in San Francisco have to do with Phoenix New Times’ reporting on Occupy Phoenix? It demonstrates that New Times has long strayed from its image as an alternative to the mainstream press.  As it became an alt behemoth, it bought out local publications and homogenized content, all of which is covered in a bitter sauce of sarcasm dripped from on high by reporters without connections to the community.

King, a New Yorker, is emblematic of this. He failed to see that a national protest had real roots in Phoenix, which had one of the highest home foreclosure rates in the nation. He didn’t take the time to find real people affected by a growing national disaster. For King, a protest is nothing more than spectacle. He brought his dismissive attitude and biases to Occupy Phoenix and left without the tear gas and batons he wanted for his pre-scripted story. It’s clear from his e-mails to Phoenix police what he wanted:   “tucson police have made 351 arrests so far during their ‘occupation.’ if phoenix police have arrested any fewer than 1,000 hippies, i'll be thoroughly disappointed.”

Occupy Phoenix was nothing but a joke to Phoenix New Times. Despite the real pain and sacrifice of Phoenix residents, King took it as nothing but a laugh at the expense of others, which is not comedy but a mark of arrogant contempt. King’s reporting never let on that he thought Occupy Phoenix was a joke form the onset. That joke was shared only between him and the police. Phoenix police chief responded to King’s written request for information by getting in on the joke. Crump wrote, 

James, I don't know if I believe anything you are saying, first of all rubin [couldn't] swing a golf club if [his]  life depended on it and I don't know what golf course would allow you two liberals to be out on it at the same time. But, in the spirit of helping you keep your job, the demonstration today was very peaceful.  They marched to the variety of locations in the downtown area and were dispersed by 6 pm. We had no arrest or problem to report. I know that does not make for a good story but, I can make something up if you really need it.

While King didn’t make anything up, he clearly had a story in mind before he actually did any reporting. His e-mails and reporting reflect the biases he had prior to covering the story. He prefers playing golf and joking with the police to doing his job. The joke is on New Times because it is a thoroughly discredited source amongst activists. (See Stephen Lemons' press conviction of the Arpaio 5, for example). King has had his last laugh. He disappeared from Phoenix to work for another community newspaper destroyed by New Times’ greed and guile, the historic and venerated Village Voice. Shortly thereafter, King was fired or left that paper and is now in journalism purgatory as a freelancer.

The lesson from this is that the community needs to do the reporting itself, which is why Down and Drought is the perfect forum for activists to tell the story as they see it and feel it. Despite some infrequent good reporting, Phoenix New Times can not be trusted to do the job they claim to do: “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” If any more evidence of this is needed, just remember that those “dirty hippies” who started the alternative newspaper have sold out to become pimps at Backpage.com. After all, advertising erotic services is far more profitable than serious business of reporting the truth.

James King was contacted for this story but did not reply as of press time. His e-mails can be read in full here.



This is part 7 in our ongoing series analyzing recently released police and Federal documents detailing their surveillance and infiltration of Occupy Phoenix and anarchists in the Valley. 

ARIZONA COUNTER-TERROR COPS USED FACIAL RECOGNITION ON FACEBOOK PHOTOS IN OCCUPY PHOENIX OPERATION

Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the FBI for access to their records regarding the function of the forthcoming federal facial recognition program and the potential for a combined civilian and criminal database. The lawsuit came on the heels of a report by the Washington Post on a facial recognition software manufactured by MorphoTrust USA, used in criminal investigations by local and state law enforcement agencies in 26 states.  The software accesses a database of over 120 million photos gathered from police booking photos, and, in some states, driver's licenses and identification cards. In the same article, Arizona is identified as one of 13 states with no facial recognition systems for driver's license photos.

Yet, in journalist Beau Hodai's report "Dissent or Terror", it is revealed that the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC) is using facial recognition software to identify persons of interest through a database composed of millions of photos, and that they have used this system to identify at least one participant in Occupy Phoenix by using a photo taken from Facebook.  The ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit is a division of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) which acts in partnership with ACTIC and participating agencies,  the Arizona Governor's office, Arizona Office of Homeland Security, county and city police agencies, and the Arizona Department of Transportation.

Incidentally, the purchase of the software by MCSO briefly became the subject of controversy in 2008, when it was revealed that $200,000 in seized RICO money, in addition to federal grant funds, had been used in relation to MCSO officers and trips taken to Honduras.  Channel 12 reporter Joe Dana and Phoenix New Times blogger Stephen Lemons documented back in 2008 that the Sheriff's Office used the software as an excuse to built a "Honduras Unit" along with a database of photos from Honduras that related to the gang MS-13. As Lemons pointed out, Arizona was not considered a state with a high number of MS-13 members, and Dana drew out connections between Hendershott and the facial recognition software contractor Hummingbird Defense Systems that may have helped the company financially profit.


According to a 2007 presentation by Norm Beasley of MCSO on "Fusion Centers & their Role in Information Sharing" the Facial Recognition Unit was capable of operating "field deployable for special events and onsite identification" and that the ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit, under the direction of MCSO, was in the process of coordinating a national network of counter-terrorism fusion centers, and obtaining all "criminal images" from participating agencies to buffer the MCSO's own facial recognition database.

While it's unknown if the MCSO was able to achieve the goals outlined in Beasley's presentation, the  information obtained by Hodai from an Arizona Department of Homeland Security record shows that the ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit could access a database of 24.7 million photos from their photographic databases to identify an individual:

"The ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit has the ability to match biometric data contained in photographs -- such as those found on Facebook -- with biometric data contained in roughly 18 million Arizona Driver's License photos, 4.7 million Arizona county/municipal jail 'booking' photos, 12,000 photos contained in the 'Arizona Sex Offender Database,' and 2 million photos available through the Federal Joint Automated Booking System."

According to the MCSO's Counter-Terrorism website, the ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit "contributes to all criminal and counterterrorism investigations by potentially identifying unknown subjects, or locating known subjects, through a comparison of their photographic images to millions of stored booking, driver's license, and other related data bases."

The ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit has been used by Phoenix Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst Brenda Dowhan, an intelligence analyst for ACTIC, in at least one attempt to identify a person believed to have been involved with Occupy Phoenix. As documented below, in an email obtained by Hodai, Dowhan responds to Phoenix police detective CJ Wren who had asked for help identifying this woman by her facebook photo. 

The facial recognition search was unable to identify the person in the photo amongst the database of nearly 25 million photos.

If the use of facial recognition technology is about furthering the ability of police to catch "bad guys", then why is it that just about anyone who challenges the rich and powerful can end up in an ACTIC database search?  Beau Hodai, the author of the report on the Arizona counter-terrorism fusion centers, was driven to undertake the research after he was ejected from the 2011 ALEC conference in Scottsdale by security as a "persona non grata."

Rather than his removal being a misunderstanding, or the actions of a rogue cop, it was the hidden collaboration between the Phoenix police department and the ALEC planners in identifying and removing unwanted individuals.  In addition to journalists, Hodai's report and police documents disclosed the level of attention paid to Occupy Phoenix, anarchists, and Indigenous activists who seem to be singled out for no other reason than their motivation to take action against the interests of the rich and powerful.

This raises even more questions in what already looks like at the very least to be a case of police abuse of authority.  Already, we have documented on this blog that the PPD and FBI were almost certainly sharing information on protests and protesters with perennial activist target and accused abuser of workers, Freeport-McMoran.  This sharing was direct through emails, but may as well have happened through the FBI Fusion Center, where private security firm Infragard was allowed to participate in information sharing.  Likewise, we have also revealed how Tempe PD anti-terror cops treated local activists as terrorists.

The Washington Post article does not list Arizona as one of the states that uses facial recognition technology to access drivers license databases, but the documents released surrounding Occupy Phoenix and anti-ALEC protests clearly do contain photos taken from drivers licenses.  Are there databases of Valley activists?  Down and Drought has documents that suggest that there are, at least in the case of the Tempe Police Department.  Further, is this activity legal?   Especially when it is being used to target and identify activists.  Many states have laws regulating this kind of activity, or preventing it to be used for political purposes.  What is the case in Arizona?  More and more it appears that regardless of its original intent, the growing police and surveillance apparatus in Arizona, under the cover of anti-terrorism, has increasingly become a weapon for police to target activists and, in so doing, to protect corporations.  While the US is gripped by the NSA spying story, we seem to have our own mini-version right here in the Copper State.



This is part 6 in our ongoing series analyzing recently released police and Federal documents detailing their surveillance and infiltration of Occupy Phoenix and anarchists in the Valley.

Emails raise more questions about PPD, the red squad, homeland security and the repression of Occupy Phoenix

As we continue to go through the emails released by the Center for Media and Democracy detailing Phoenix Police, Tempe Police and FBI collusion in spying and disrupting Occupy Phoenix, many troubling questions arise.

For instance, who was in the driver's seat during the police response to the ALEC protests of 2011?  It seems clear from the emails that at least some PPD officers were serving as off-duty private security for ALEC while others were working on-duty.  They were coordinating, perhaps as one might expect, but this cooperation raises real questions about the role of a police force that likes to claim that its presence at protests is to facilitate the exercise of constitutional rights.  Clearly PPD doesn't look like an unbiased actor given these facts, a conclusion that no seasoned activist would dispute.

These records also show clearly that PPD was working with banks and, through the FBI fusion center, private security firms like Infragard.  Many questions about these relationships will surely be answered as we dig deeper into these thousands of emails.  But as of now, the answers don't look good for PPD and other police agencies.

Still other emails raise questions about not just the independence of the PPD, but also of whether there was appropriate oversight of such police protest staples as the community relations unit (affectionately known by local activists as the "red squad"), just what it's actual role is in the era of anti-terrorism and even whether it ought to exist at all.

This team plays a central role in the released messages which show it several times to be very important on the ground links for funneling information to police anti-terrorism officials and the FBI fusion center, and for carrying out their plans.  Such a relationship validates the "red squad" monicker that activists have given the unit.  Time and again the community relations unit proves itself to be an integrated part of the overall spying apparatus.

One recurring source of serious concern centers around the role played by Detective Chris Wilson, at the time assigned to the Phoenix PD community relations unit.  As we have previously reported, Detective Wilson, now revealed to have been using his contacts and authority as liaison to the Phoenix LGBTQ community to target and sexually abuse underage boys, is frequently cited in these documents as a source of information and as someone who can use his community contacts to get details on protesters and their plans.  

In the documents features above and below, Brenda Dowhan of the PPD and an alphabet soup of various other anti-terrorism related units responds to a February 2nd request by Tracey Woods of the Glendale PD for "a list of Occupy Phx members with pics".   Woods email in turn was in response to an initial message from Dowhan warning that underage occupiers, known to "openly consume drugs and alcohol" and "create a riotous atmosphere", might attend a fundraiser for a gay pride scholarship at the Mighty Cup & Spoon in Glendale. Incidentally, among Dowhan's other duties was to monitor Facebook and other social media.

Dowhan refers Woods to Wilson, who she says "has contacts with the LGBT and can obtain more information on their plans for the night".  Here we not only see the direct relationship between the community relations unit and the homeland security behemoth, but also how Det. Wilson's directives from above to spy on and interface with elements within the LGBTQ community put him directly in contact with the community he was later to admit victimizing.  This is of course particularly disturbing given the November memo from Det. Wilson's direct supervisor on the community relations unit, Sgt. Mark Schweikert, alleging that Wilson had protection from powerful individuals in the police and city government, and that Wilson was as a result difficult to manage.

But we must resist the tendency to chalk this up to a single bad apple.  In fact, what these emails reveal is that the "red squad" was key in the repression, surveillance, and disruption Occupy Phoenix, not to mention the role it played in creating the opportunity and authority necessary for Wilson to abuse his young victims.  Further, it suggests strongly that it has become a key element of the larger anti-terror infrastructure, a vital part of the information funnel and repressive machinery of homeland security that increasingly targets domestic activists as part of its ever-expanding mandate.

As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  And this is precisely the model on which anti-terrorism operates, a form of policing to which community relations has become wedded.  Assets unused for fighting terrorism instead must be justified by hyping threats.  Likewise, resistance must be framed as terrorism.  And the red squad was situated at a crucial juncture in that system.  Such a relationship creates a chilling effect with regard to the exercise of the very rights it claims to protect and makes a very good case for the total dismantlement of the unit.



This is part 4 in our ongoing series analyzing recently released police and Federal documents detailing their surveillance and infiltration of Occupy Phoenix and anarchists in the Valley.