ASU gives Nazis what they want: The "Problem of Whiteness" debacle reaches new low

Do white supremacists call the shots at ASU these days? The Neo-Nazi National Youth Front (NYF) showed up at ASU on Tuesday (along with National Socialist Movement member Harry Hughes, the former comrade of JT Ready) to thank the university for silencing professors associated with the "The Problem of Whiteness" class and demanding their termination. And according to information provided to us, it looks like ASU is giving them exactly what they want.

Although they were straining the definition of "youth" to the point of pure absurdity, the NYF's small cadre of mostly middle-aged worn out white nationalist protesters held signs with one saying "Thank you ASU", while a crowd of about fifty surrounded them, mocked them and challenged them. They invoked "free speech" in their own defense while advocating censorship of classes they didn't like.

And they shouted their support for former ASU police officer Stewart Ferrin. Ferrin, you will recall, is the white officer who resigned last month after much hemming and hawing from the university, in the fallout from the violent arrest of a black ASU professor, Dr. Ersula Ore, for jaywalking on a blocked off street at night. Things got heated at one point during the demonstration as protesters and counter-protesters faced off, but the NYF, surrounded and outnumbered, didn't seem interested in following through with their threats against "the militant Left" which appeared online.

NYF and NSM at ASU. That's Harry Hughes with the camera.

Yup, that Harry Hughes.

A little background. The "outrage" of Professor Lee Bebout's The Problem of Whiteness course was originally instigated by a right wing ASU student correspondent to a Fox News show.  The controversy over "The Problems of Whiteness" class took an even harder right turn when the NYF posted anti-Muslim posters on campus and handed out fliers on campus specifically targeting Bebout denouncing him as "anti-white."

The NYF won't claim credit for it, but someone distributed the fliers targeting Bebout in his neighborhood, an action clearly meant to intimidate him. Because "free speech", right? Posts about the class on Stormfront, the infamous white supremacist website tied to scores of murders, encouraged racist militants to email the university, and naturally threats of violence came with it.

Emboldened by ASU's silence on the issue, the boneheads today also demanded the termination of ASU grad student Robert Poe, who teaches at the Tempe campus, and who two weeks ago led a workshop on the same topic.

Poe's flyer clearly says "informal and unsanctioned"

Poe's teach-in was specifically labeled "informal and unsanctioned." NYF member "John Hess" attended the teach-in with a video camera and recorded it. Hess then cherry picked a moment where Poe, responding to a question from Hess, said that he supported violence "against racists who choose to politically mobilize" and posted it online in the hopes that ASU would take the bait. A moral trip about violence from a Neo-Nazi, now that's rich. And ASU apparently fell for it.

It isn't hard to find examples of the use of political violence against racists in history, or even locally. Why Poe's statement would be controversial on a campus that has poli-sci departments overflowing with advocates for war, history departments that debate the use of violence, and that maintains such a cozy relationship with the most violent organization on Earth, the US Military, is a little baffling. If advocating violence against politically active racists is forbidden at ASU, then a whole generation of WWII vets should probably stay off campus -- and maybe stop sending their grandchildren and their money there, since it's obviously not welcome.

A 2009 anti-Nazi riot in Phoenix that you're not allowed to talk about at ASU

Of course, the university regularly grants free speech rights to all manner of right wing nuts who advocate violence. On the day before Poe's teach-in, for example, there was an anti-gay protester who called publicly for the government to kill homosexuals. And of course there's the "you deserve rape" guy (watch a video where he advocates death for "whores" below). And anti-abortion protesters, who belong to a movement that has been killing doctors for decades, regularly set up shop in front of the Memorial Union. Apparently this is protected speech at ASU, but referencing historical violent resistance to Nazis and the Klan is not.

According to information provided to Down and Drought, as threats poured in, the university told both professors to be quiet, likely hoping to hunker down and avoid controversy at a time when they were negotiating looming budget cuts with a Fox News adoring far right governor and legislature who might be agitated by the idea that such ideas are being taught on campus.

Our sources tell us that the university administration told both Poe and Bebout to stay quiet. Bebout was reminded that he is up for tenure and Poe was essentially issued a delayed termination, with the university removing his name from the class, forcing him to get class materials approved weekly, and forbidding him from teaching next semester. This looks a lot like ASU hoped to shift his official firing into the future, when there would be less eyes on it.

Where's Rob Poe's name?

We received a screen shot of the class that Poe is teaching this semester and his name has been removed from it. In his place is the name of the head of his department school, the School of Social Transformation (SST).  Is the head of department  SST now teaching Poe's class? Meanwhile, a search for Poe's name on the faculty website turns up no results. Where did he go? What happened to him? Did ASU throw him under the bus?

It appears that ASU has caved in to Neo-Nazi demands. Which, in essence, means that Neo-Nazis basically are making hiring and firing decisions at ASU, and have imposed some measure of veto power over curriculum. At today's protest, various members of the NYF ranted about eugenics, about biological differences between races and about their deep hatred for Jews. Will the biology department be the next target? You have to wonder where it will stop now.

According to the website "Problem of Whiteness 101", which catalogs the various racist posts, comments and Facebook "likes" of members of the NYF, local leader John Hess is interested in a lot of things that ought to really disturb the university, if they are indeed planning on continuing to cede curricular and staffing decisions to them. These things include the books Mein Kampf and the Bell Curve, and racist bands like Skrewdriver. The NYF likes to pretend that they are just "white activists," whatever that means, but their associations with Hughes and Hess's affinity for Nazi literature and white supremacist music tell a different story.

A recent State Press article detailed concerns among the ASU and Tempe Muslim community about a rise in anti-Islamic sentiment and vandalism following the Chapel Hill shootings. ASU giving in to Neo-Nazis certainly won't help on that front. At the protest today, one prospective student waiting for his tour of campus was overheard describing second thoughts about attending after seeing the NYF protest.

Previously the NYF has organized anonymously and avoided appearing in public. But now, thanks to ASU's surrender, they have taken their first step into the open. Just as they were encouraged by ASU's cowardice in the case of Dr. Ore, they are likewise now bolstered by the university's handling of the "Whiteness" class and subsequent fallout.

We reached out to ASU repeatedly via twitter and got no response, which is not surprising since silence seems to be their strategy. You have to wonder, though, where silence and capitulation to Neo-Nazis will get us in the long run.

CORRECTION:
The article incorrectly identified the person listed as teaching Poe's class (Dr. Brayboy) as the head of his department. Brayboy is the head of Poe's school, the School of Social Transformation.

Tempe, Scottsdale arrest blacks at a higher rate than the Ferguson PD

Truly shocking numbers were released today in a USA Today report detailing the massive disparities in arrest rates for blacks compared to, well, everyone else. In the Valley, Tempe and Scottsdale police stood out for particular distinction, with starkly high figures per capita.

The USA Today analysis of arrest records for police departments across the country found that almost 1600 police agencies nationwide took blacks into custody at rates above those in Ferguson, Missouri, the city well-known now for aggressive and racist policing following the shooting of Michael Brown and the turmoil that resulted.

According the the article, blacks were "more likely than others to be arrested in almost every city for almost every type of crime. Nationwide, black people are arrested at higher rates for crimes as serious as murder and assault, and as minor as loitering and marijuana possession." If you're not black, you're more likely to escape arrest for comparable crimes. Notably, the data, which came from the FBI, does not track arrests of Latinos, which in the Southwest is a major shortcoming. That number would be very good to have.

Of particular note, two Valley police agencies, Tempe and Scottsdale, not only have arrest rates for blacks higher than Ferguson, but take blacks into custody at more than double (triple in the case of Scottsdale) that which has set the Missouri city on fire with accusations of police harassment of a black population by white police agency.

Source: USA TODAY

Tempe, this year found itself embroiled in controversy when ASU professor Dr. Ore, who is black, was stopped off campus by a white university cop. The stop, which many viewed as unnecessary, aggressive and racially-motivated, set off a media firestorm and enraged many residents of the college town, some of whom took their anger to a Tempe city council candidates forum, disrupting the event.

Tempe, which likes to brand itself as a progressive city despite its history as a Klan bastion, will have a hard time making the case that these numbers don't indicate a serious problem for a police force that many see as out of control. While Ferguson's arrest rate for blacks was 186.1 (versus 66 for whites) out of a thousand, Tempe's came in at a staggering 405.5! Anglos, on the other hand, got arrested at a rate of 120 per 1000 in Tempe, still almost twice that of Ferguson but over a third less frequently than blacks. If you're black, Tempe PD has its eyes on you.

Tempe police have come under scrutiny lately as a result of a program called "Safe and Sober", which involves upwards of 20 police agencies flooding downtown with officers, making thousands of stops of all kinds, ostensibly to battle alcohol consumption. Locals report harassment and profiling.

The city hasn't released final numbers on this years' program (which has run for two years now) -- including data on the race of those people that were stopped -- but numbers like those compiled by USA Today lend support to suspicions that racial bias is very likely at work. Back of the envelop calculations by local activists put the rate of stops during the three weeks that "Safe and Sober" runs in Tempe at per capita levels comparable to NYC's highly controversial "Stop and Frisk" program, which was ruled racially biased this year.

Source: STATE PRESS

The City of Tempe has suffered a series of public black eyes around the issue of policing in the last couple years. In 2013, during the first year of "Safe and Sober," local cops gunned down Austin Del Castillo in broad daylight in downtown Tempe, sending bullets into a nearby restaurant.  Before that, in May of the same year, Tempe police opened fire on a man who had broken into the wine cellar of a local restaurant downtown. Then there was the Dr. Ore incident. In July, Tempe police were caught on video beating a homeless man, again on Mill Avenue downtown. An internal review by the police of the police ruled the violence justified, although they admitted that proper procedure wasn't followed when officers failed to file the use of force paperwork that should accompany such incidents. Tempe has also raised concerns by failure to come clean on their possession and use of a StingRay cell phone spy device and whether and how that is being used to snoop on residents.

Critics of the Ferguson PD point to giant disparities between the percentage of cops who are white on the force compared to the general population. A recent NY Times article. "The Race Gap in America’s Police Departments", highlighted these discrepancies in several departments nationwide, including half a dozen in Arizona. The study didn't give stats for Tempe, but it did show clearly that whites were over-represented in all the Valley departments surveyed, sometimes skewing (in the case of the Phoenix Police Department) as much as 35% more white than the local population they police. The Phoenix PD, by the way, ranked in the USA TODAY study at 220.5 for blacks, and 77.6 for everyone else. Incidentally, the city with the smallest gap between population and police, demographically, was Scottsdale. But that was only because Scottsdale is 84% white. There isn't much room to go higher than that, although SPD does manage to still put 6% more whites on their force than the general population.

Changing the racial makeup of the police force won't solve the problem of police brutality and profiling, but the fact that they are so out of whack with the general population again gives cause to believe, combined with those radically skewed arrest stats, that profiling is probably going on. And a lot of it.

We asked TPD if use of force paperwork was 

filed in the above case and they never replied

This data also shows how little things have changed in the Valley. Tempe and Scottsdale, both historically "sundown towns" where nonwhites were strongly encouraged, to put it mildly, to make themselves scarce when nightfall came, obviously still put a heavy emphasis on the policing of blacks within city limits. As troubling as Tempe's outrageous data is, Scottsdale's is even more disturbing. It wasn't that long ago that scandal wracked the SPD when it came out that some officers were enforcing what they called a "no n*gger zone" in the wealthier parts of a generally very well-off city. These stats show an inexcusable gulf between the policing that blacks and everybody else gets in Scottsdale.

Either way, if you're black in Scottsdale and Tempe you have good reason to worry about the police. Just like Dr. Ore, you may very well find yourself attracting the special attention of local law enforcement, for no other reason than your skin color. Perhaps data like this is the reason why Tempe has been so reluctant to release the racial breakdown of the "Safe and Sober" stops. But that's all the more reason why they should.

National League of Cities Prepares to Pressure Congress for More Military Equipment

As an expected grand jury decision could arrive this week in the case of the white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shooting and killing black Ferguson resident Michael Brown.  Brown, who was  unarmed when confronted by officer Wilson, died after being shot six times.  Brown's killing triggered long existing tensions between police and the residents, resulting in riots, and then protests in Ferguson. The rebellion in Ferguson also sparked a national debate in response to the images of the police and how the military grade weapons and equipment used to quash the protests got into the hands of the police.

The militarized show of force in the small community of Ferguson shattered any illusions that it was only the major cities that relied on such equipment. The proliferation of military equipment and weapons into small town police departments could be traced to America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and had its origins in the drug war hysteria of the late 1980s.  This movement of surplus military goods from the US military to police departments, both big and small, is run out of the Defense Logistics Agency's the Department of Defense Excess Property Program, or more commonly known as the 1033 program.

This program faced a critical review from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the wake of the Ferguson rebellion, with senators questioning why the Department of Defense continues to provide used, and often new weapons to local police departments.  Despite the increased coverage from journalists, outrage from protesters, and scrutiny from senators, the program is not without its supporters (principally law enforcement) and the advocacy group the National League of Cities may be joining them.

The National League of Cities (NLC) is an advocacy group for more than "19,000 cities, villages and towns it represents," and one of the key tasks of the NLC is to influence federal policy by lobbying Congress.  The NLC will be holding the Congress of Cities, their annual conference, later this month in Austin, Texas.  Among the resolutions up for a vote during the meeting is a pro-1033 program resolution passed by the Public Safety and Crime Prevention (PSCP) Steering Committee during their annual meeting held in Tempe this past September.

The resolution supporting the 1033 program takes into account that the majority of the equipment received from the Department of Defense are "non-military" items, such as office equipment, computers and recording gear, and other supplies for disaster response.  However, the resolution makes note of the criticisms raised over the transfer of specifically military hardware, such as "Humvees, mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles, aircraft (rotary and fixed wing), boats, sniper scopes and M-16s."

While these concerns are noted, the resolution highlights the use of military equipment in the response to the Boston Marathon bombing, and "other incidents where police officers have been under attack by heavily armed criminals." The resolution concludes by supporting increased pressure on the Presidential administration and Congress to "ensure local law enforcement agencies continue to have access to the 1033 program." The PSCP Steering Committee approved the resolution, as confirmed in an email response from Yucel Ors, the NLC's Program Director of Public Safety & Crime Prevention. Ors explained that the next step is for the resolution to be voted on by the full membership of the PSCP committee, then, if passed, it will face a final vote by the NLC's membership during the annual meeting.

There is much to worry about for the residents of Ferguson in the coming days.  Amnesty International denounced the human rights abuses committed by the assembled law enforcement agencies against those protesting the police.  Ferguson residents ready for the repressive police presence, comparing the possible upheaval from the grand jury decision as akin to "getting prepared for war."  Ferguson police are indeed also gearing up for war, preparing to turn the city streets of Ferguson into a war zone once again, having spent $100,000 on new helmets, shields and batons, in addition to restocking their supplies of pepper spray, smoke canisters and rubber bullets.  If the NLC's membership approves the 1033 resolution this month, then they will have joined the side of the domestic militarists in working to persuade Congress to keep the flow of military weapons and gear into police agencies for the foreseeable future.

Cops say what they really think about ASU Professor Ore in online fourms and it's not pretty

Just keyboard warriors? Behold one cop's response to the arrest of Professor Ore. Here's what a bunch more had to say. Are you mad yet?

REM870 is a reference to a shotgun commonly used by police

On August first, ASU English professor Ersula Ore will be sentenced for "passively resisting an unlawful arrest" after Officer Stewart Ferrin confronted her for jaywalking and obstructing traffic in closed off a construction zone near the university.

The case sparked outrage, protest and even some drama at one of the Tempe city council candidate forums when outraged community members vocalized their frustration with local cops. As the scandal put pressure on ASU, the officer was put on leave and the two top bosses at the university cop shop were eventually replaced. Local dissident cop blog, The Integrity Report, has been documenting the internal shakeup which at least some officers seem to hope will create an opportunity to rein in a police force that they allege (with a good deal of evidence) is unaccountable and out of control.

Professor Ore (Photo via Phoenix New Times)

But since Ore took responsibility for her act of self-defense, much of the tension has dissipated from this once highly controversial and contentious case. Coverage was mixed in the media but it has mostly dropped off the radar as she moves towards sentencing.

Notable exceptions include a recent exchange of letters to the editor, one by former Mesa cop Bill Richardson defending Ferrin's character, followed by a response challenging it ("Letter: Police officer's personality doesn't matter"), both run in the State Press, ASU's east campus newspaper. Over the course of the scandal, one particular local weekly news blog/magazine left some very interesting things out of the story, but we'll come back to that at the end.

We at Down and Drought pay a lot of attention to the police, including cop online forums. So when we saw last week that New York Magazine had run a piece focusing on the comments from officers on various cop websites regarding the recent death of a cigarette vender, who appears to have died as a result of very rough treatment by the NYPD, we thought we'd give the Ore case the same treatment. We thought: let's see what cops have to say online about her case, under the cover of (what they think is ) anonymity.

As the NY Magazine article points out, in order to post on cop forums like PoliceOne.com, you have to register and be verified as an actual cop or retired law enforcement officer. PoliceOne.com boasts over 200,000 members and claims that they "confirm the status of all officers registering... by calling that officer’s department directly." Which means when you read opinions from commentators on their forums, you can be pretty sure you're getting the thoughts of a cop or former cop.

We were able to track some of these officers back to their departments ourselves through basic internet searches and confirm that they are in fact cops, but we weren't able to link any of them directly to ASU -- although some of the comments we looked at demonstrated knowledge of policing in Tempe and Arizona.

READ: TEMPE POLICE HAVE A STINGRAY CELL PHONE SPYING DEVICE BUT THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT IT

That said, it's important to note that the comments we're sharing here, while outrageous, weren't out of step with the general tenor of comments we found. No comments defended Ore and most posters thought that Ferrin had been too forgiving with her. As we've demonstrated before, Phoenix and Tempe police have notoriously bad senses of humor (see here, and here, and here). So there's no reason to think that they are any better than online cops in terms of their opinions.

So let's dig in and see what some cops had to say about the Ore arrest. To get things started, here's one officer making a joke referencing sexual assault. Remember, Ore objected vocally on the video about Ferrin's manhandling of her causing her dress to hike up. Thus an officer naturally thought this was an appropriate joke to make.

 In the same comment thread, another officer chimes in:

In a different post on the same site, user "SgtDavidWilliams" rushes to Ferrin's defense, counseling that she's lucky she didn't get the rougher treatment he thinks she deserved:

Advocating for less tolerance and a higher degree of violence was common in the online cop forums we looked at. Most officers took the position that Ferrin had been too kind in his interaction with Ore.

Officers also frequently argued for liberal use of the Taser. One user hinted in a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" sort of way that "I did see a taser on his belt, correct?" In the comment below, the reference to "sparky" (the taser) may or may not be a double entendre also alluding to the ASU mascot, but it certainly indicates a casualness that is disturbing when it comes to the use of a weapon that has been linked to many deaths over the years.

Along similar lines was another comment boasting that the "college professor would've met the pavement far sooner had I been arresting her." Yet another joked that Ferrin should "probably work on that straight arm bar takedown." Later in the thread another member says, "She really needed to taste the color of the paint on the hood."

Another set of comments focused on Ore's race and gender, reflecting the usual tact and sophistication that one tends to expect from the reactionary right.

 

 

  

In an era of increasing skepticism and worry about the police, even on the traditionally law and order right, comments like those we found don't do cops any favors in the PR department. If white middle class people -- the traditional base of support for law enforcement, no matter how brutal -- are worried about their interactions with police then it's an indication of something significant going on. Police should be worried. The carte blanche they've had for, well, basically forever may be in danger.

And those curious omissions I mentioned at the beginning? One of the curious features of the Ore coverage was the oddly reactionary treatment from the Phoenix New Times, spearheaded by Ray Stern. Stern went pretty hard against Ore. He conceded Ferrin's approach appeared "mildly thuggish," but when Ore pleaded guilty he pronounced somewhat smugly that, "it looks like Ore's done fighting the good fight. We're not expecting her to follow up on the threat she made in the video to sue the (bleep) out of the officer or ASU."

Read: If ASU can't protect faculty from its violent police, what does it mean for the rest of us?

In one article, Stern in passing gives us a brief history of Stewart Ferrin, who it was revealed early on hails from a law enforcement family and had long harbored aspirations of continuing that legacy. But what legacy? Strangely, Stern fails to mention another little bit of Ferrin law enforcement family history -- one detailed in the very archives of the Phoenix New Times itself!

In a September 1998 article entitled "Thrust and Parry," the New Times detailed in a feature article the story of Alvin Yellowhair, a Native American student at ASU who alleged that Stewart Ferrin's father, John Ferrin, then an officer with the Tempe PD, had beaten and sodomized him with a nightstick after arresting him at a party.

"Advocating for less tolerance and a higher degree of violence was common in the online cop forums we looked at." 

The case, which involved missing evidence and allegations of obstructionism from city officials, was eventually ruled in Ferrin's favor, and he came out the winner in a lawsuit by Yellowhair, too, which was finally resolved by jury in 2005. But the case led to allegations of an out of control police force without proper supervision and the revelation that the senior Ferrin, at that point, had had four citizen complaints against him which the city didn't want to reveal. Does any of this sound familiar? White cop, civilian person of color, ASU, use of force, out of control police force, potential cover up and lack of investigation? Quite an omission, if you ask me!

But Stern's probably right when he says that "ASU's very sensitive to the pubic perception, especially given President Michael Crow's goal to attract 100,000 students to lucrative online-degree programs." Indeed, the University should be concerned about how they will be viewed by prospective or returning students and their parents. Especially if those students aren't white.

Nothing to see here!

As Professor Ore faces sentencing, with a shakeup going on at ASU PD, and with residents in the surrounding neighborhoods increasingly fed up with both the actions of local cops and the complete failure of the politicians to do anything about it, the university and the city would each be well-advised to consider taking immediate public steps to address these concerns with concrete actions.

Locals have put forward several options, from repealing the loud party ordinances that so quickly can escalate under heavy handed policing, to canceling the upcoming "safe & sober" campaign (in which cops invade the neighborhoods and detain residents at rates higher than NYC's "stop & frisk" program), or selling off controversial spy equipment like the Stingray mass cell phone monitoring device.

How about a program of de-militarizing TPD in general? In an era of mass corporate tax giveaways downtown, why not raise some cash by selling off that useless cop clutter? On a related note, does the Tempe Citizens’ Panel for Review of Police Complaints and Use of Force even meet? Down and Drought has been following the public page for this supposed oversight board for a year now and have yet to see a single posting for a public meeting nor any updates on what they're up to.

Meanwhile candidates for city council have to be forced by angry crowds to discuss the police, and the only solutions they seem to have is lavishing them with even more expensive toys which residents can be assured they will abuse. Increasingly, Tempe government looks completely out of step with a public that is asking themselves just what the hell is going on with the cops that patrol their neighborhoods. Does the city have any answers for them? It appears that answer is, no.

Arizona doubles down on school to prison pipeline, expands cops in schools

A big story broke for Arizona students the other day and it wasn't the tear-jerker faux apology of state school Superintendent and compulsive racist internet troll John Huppenthal.

While the media has been safely distracted with the important questions raised by the Huppenthal mess, such as just what would a menu at a Mexican restaurant look like if it couldn't use Spanish (i.e., "Can I interest anyone in a corn flour flatbread wrap stuffed with mashed pinto beans and cheese?"), meanwhile the legislature passed a massive expansion of Arizona's school resource officer program.

This program, partially funded by Proposition 301 which passed in 2000, was expanded last week, growing it to include 137 schools and 118 officers with an added price tag of $12 million. Aside from more officers, the deal also includes the addition of three juvenile probation officers. And here's where we get to the crux of the issue.

Source: Arizona Daily Star

Over the last several years, students, activists and parents have expressed increasing concern about what's called the "school to prison pipeline."  As the adult prison population has expanded in this country, so has the number of children behind bars. And even with a relatively recent rise in the use of diversion programs in Arizona, the consequences for students can be severe, as the presence of SROs in schools leads to the increasing criminalization of student behavior, particularly students of color. Police become involved in behavior problems that previously had been treated as administrative discipline issues.

According to a Justice Policy Institute report on SROs in schools:

"In 2001, the Pinellas County (Florida) School District Police made 146 arrests, of which 54 percent were of black students. Comparatively, 19 percent of the District’s enrollment is black.

In South Carolina, black students are more likely to be referred to law enforcement than their white peers. Black students make up 42 percent of student enrollment, but 75 percent of disorderly conduct charges, of which 90 percent are referred to law enforcement.

In the 2001–2002 school year, Latino students were 22 percent of student enrollment, but 34 percent of referrals to law enforcement agencies in Colorado."

Disparities of this order ought to concern anyone and should be part of the discussion around further expanding the role for police in schools.

Source: Justice Policy Institute (.pdf)

Further, racial disparities plainly evident in policing outside school also prevail behind school walls. The ACLU Arizona has also documented the disproportionate criminalization of students of color, noting that both Latino and black youth are over-represented throughout the process, from referral and arrest to incarceration. These disparities result, in no small part, from the proliferation of "zero tolerance policies" in schools, which combine with the presence of SROs to funnel students into the criminal justice system.

These policies, which emerged from the white suburban paranoia in the 80's and 90's over drugs and violence in inner city schools, and solidified as national policy with the passing of the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 (perhaps offering a lesson in the unintended consequences of gun control legislation), have had greater effect in schools attended by nonwhite students.

The Justice Policy Institute has shown a direct correlation between zero tolerance policies and the proportion of students of color in a school, as well as the way that youth of color are targeted at far greater rates than white kids for all manner of disciplinary processes. In Arizona, for instance, suspensions for Native American youth ranks second in the nation and well above the national average. Likewise, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, Indigenous Peoples number 5% of the Arizona population and yet total 10% of its prison population. More SROs will only further exacerbate that disturbing trend.

Source: New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty (.pdf)

And SROs in schools pose a particular threat to immigrant youth in the land of SB1070. In 2013, the ACLU Arizona filed a complaint (.pdf) with the then Superintendent of Sunnyside Unified School District, Dr. Manuel L. Isquierdo over an incident in which a student was turned over by a school resource officer to Border Patrol over his immigration status.  Again, data from the Justice Policy Center shows that, "Even when controlling for school poverty, schools with an SRO had nearly five times the rate of arrests for disorderly conduct as schools without an SRO." SROs also pose a safety risk to students. In Tempe in February, a SRO accidentally tased a eight grader when teaching a class on bullying.

Flooding Arizona schools with cops is obviously seen as uncontroversial among media types, as not one single article I could find had even a solitary voice of dissent on the matter. More cops in schools, in the age of school shooting paranoia, is viewed as a universal good, just like zero tolerance policies were during a previous wave of school violence fears. Meanwhile, the admittedly offensive and reactionary internet comments by Superintendent Huppenthal have created a national media firestorm.

While Huppenthal's racism is a serious issue, and certainly his attacks on ethnic studies were clearly racist, banning books in school doesn't prevent students from reading them. Ideally, students do most of their reading outside of class. Libraries exist, the internet exists. Huppenthal running the schools is certainly a problem, but the presence of police in those schools is a direct every day force for institutionalized racism with real, lifelong consequences for students. The silence that has greeted this expansion of the police state is telling.

Is Tempe PD planning to use cell phone data to identify participants at an anti-racist rally?

According to local media, the Tempe Police Department are preparing for a potential clash between a group of white supremacists who have announced a "White Man March" on Mill Avenue on Saturday, and a counter-demonstration organized by local anarchists and anti-racists, including residents of the surrounding neighborhood.

The TPD has a less than stellar history when it comes to dealing with protests. With that in mind, we want to put a spotlight on a secretive tool in the arsenal of the Tempe cops, one that can easily be used for spying on demonstrators in real time by using something almost everyone carries with them these days: a cell phone. The question is, will the TPD use it -- and what will be the implications for civil liberties if they do?

The Tempe Police Department's history of political repression through intimidation, electronic tracking, and surveilling of activists, radicals, anarchists, and participants in Occupy Phoenix, has been documented here at Down & Drought (and also quite extensively by journalist Beau Hodai, and by the anarchists themselves (1,2)), and includes using anti-terror cops to spy on gardeners and deploying mobile surveillance to gawk at tailgaters.

Knowing this historical context, and considering statements from TPD about their preparation for Saturday's protests,  we decided to do a little to research on the use of technology for the purpose of remote electronic surveillance. This led us to the Stingray, a device being discreetly used by law enforcement agencies across the United States to covertly collect data.

The Stingray is known as an “IMSI catcher”, meaning that the device records the International Mobile Subscriber Identity of a particular wireless device, such as a cell phone.  According to documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal,  the "Stingray works by mimicking a cellphone tower, getting a phone to connect to it and measuring signals from the phone. It lets the stingray operator 'ping,' or send a signal to, a phone and locate it as long as it is powered on."

The Stingray has the ability to connect to all cell phones within a mile of the device, without police having to contact a wireless service provider, by collecting data on the identification and location of all phone communications within range, and then forwarding the signal on to the nearest cell phone tower.  Among the data collected by the Stingray include all outgoing numbers dialed for phone calls and text messages, and the identification for a phone which can be used to obtain call and text history.  As the Stingray is usually mounted in a police vehicle, it can stay mobile and, due to the lack of familiarity the public has with the device, would be difficult to identify.

A handful of valley police departments admitted that they use the device in an Arizona Republic article, among them Phoenix, Mesa, and Gilbert departments. These devices are generally purchased with grant funds made available by the Department of Homeland Security.  According to the Republic, a number of valley police departments refused to acknowledge the use of the Stingray device, including the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, which denied any knowledge of the Stingray device. 

In a similar instance, journalists in Sacramento researching the use of the Stingray in the region were told by the the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office that the department had no knowledge of owning or using the Stingray.  When confronted with documents from other departments, including a purchase order from Sacramento County, which confirmed that the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office did own a Stingray and related technology, the department never fessed up to owning a Stingray, instead telling the journalists that their "legal counsel is coordinating a response" to the inquiry.

The Stingray is a product of the Harris Corporation, a company which specializes in high tech surveillance technology, and made the Stingray a sought after device for law enforcement after years of developing the technology for the US military. Harris Corporation refuses to answer reporters' questions about the Stingray and related products, telling them to ask the police agencies about the device, which would be great if Harris Corporation wasn't also requiring departments to sign non-disclosure agreements upon purchase. This is the case with one of the notable local departments absent from the Republic's article, the Tempe Police Department, who paid Harris Corporation $60,321.75 for a Stingray package in October 2012.

The contract, which the Public Intelligence project downloaded and hosts on their site, was removed from the City of Tempe's website in the weeks after the purchase.  The removal of the contract, between the Harris Corporation and the City of Tempe, was likely due to the non-disclosure agreement that Tempe probably violated by posting the document to the city's website. A subsequent request for an additional purchase from Harris Corporation to not exceed $123,497.50 was approved by the Tempe City Council at their August 22, 2013 meeting.  Naturally, the details of the recent purchase by the Tempe Police Department from Harris Corporation are not available to the public.

The use of nondisclosure agreements between the government and private industry to hide the acquisition of spy equipment with very serious civil liberties implications is troubling, to say the least! Why doesn't the city want its residents to know about this technology?  As noted in the USA Today expose on the Stingray, there is a concern that the device could be used to identify the participants of a rally or protest for a political cause.  

As we have previously noted in our article on the Facial Recognition Unit of the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC), local law enforcement have repeatedly used tools that were purchased under the pretext of "fighting crime", but were actually used to spy on the participants in protests and activist events, many of whom had never been accused or convicted of a crime.

So what does this mean for the future of protest in Tempe, or any town where the cops have a Stingray?  It likely means that anyone carrying a cell phone could have their identity placed at the scene by police, despite any other precautions (such as wearing a mask to conceal the face).  With the lengthy history of the Tempe PD's Homeland Defense Unit's efforts to stifle free speech and assembly, and the coordination between valley Terrorism Liason Officers (TLO) to identify radicals and anarchists in the valley, it seems quite likely that the Stingray could be discreetly deployed at this weekend's anti-fascist counter-protest to the "White Man March."

And if you think the Tempe Police Department using the Stingray on Saturday to collect the identities of people protesting a white supremacist march (or just anyone on Mill Ave who may get lumped in) is without precedent, think again.  In 2003, the Miami-Dade Police Department purchased a Stingray in anticipation of protests aimed at the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) conference.  The department claimed the device was needed to monitor protests, and the "anticipated criminal activities" which they claimed would be organized by cell phone. Following the FTAA protests, the City of Miami, the Miami Police Department, and its officers, faced a number of lawsuits concerning the level of violence and brutality used by police against demonstrators, as well as complaints over the use of surveillance to target journalists for arrest.

With concerns over the use of the Stingray, and the Tempe PD's history of repression towards protest groups, we reached out to Sgt Michael Pooley, the Press Information Officer at Tempe.  We asked Sgt Pooley for comment on the use of the Stringray by the Tempe Police in regards to the possible "White Man March" and counter-demonstration this weekend. We also asked about any past use of the Stingray by police at protests, and if the department has any concerns over the privacy concerns of anyone ensnared in the department's data collection.  As of the time this article was published, there has been no response from Sgt Pooley, continuing the silence from Tempe on what appears to be a serious attack on civil liberty.

Scumbag Tempe creates free public transit, criminalizes using it

Let's hearken back to 2007, shall we? Tempe was dreaming big.  Centerpoint Towers, now reborn as W6 after temporarily pooping out mid-development, was still in progress.  The twin towers steadily rose to unprecedented heights, along with the city's prospects, it was hoped.

So can this can be used arbitrarily? Yes.

And Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman was championing the transformation of the city's public transit system to reflect its New Urbanist vision -- a city of easy transport and just as easy-to-get-to entertainment and work. Easy money, you might call it. The city envisioned an expansion of the existing free transit system, the Flash Forward and Back, into a neighborhood system. Small free buses would snake through the areas surrounding the university, delivering students and shoppers to various city destinations.
 
Quoted in an official city press release at the time, Mayor Hallman described the purpose of the free Orbit system in broad, inclusive terms.  Not only was the system meant to be a simple, green means of getting to work, it was also supposed to serve the old and disabled.  "Many residents — young, old, disabled or those simply desiring to reduce vehicle emissions — are in need of alternative transportation," he said.

Read about Tempe's counter-insurgency strategy in downtown

So it might be surprising to know that a few weeks ago Tempe essentially made taking the city's neighborhood buses a crime for elderly and disabled people.  And probably poor people, too. And probably just about anybody that doesn't fit into the city's yuppie vision for the future. And not only that, the may have turned taking the bus into a potential Fourth Amendment nightmare.

On January 24, 2014, the city council passed a troubling expansion of the city's sidewalk sitting ordinance into the surrounding neighborhoods, effectively criminalizing sitting on the ground while waiting for the free bus. Given that the system utilizes a “flag” stop arrangement, meaning that residents and visitors can essentially wait for and wave down the bus anywhere along the circuitous route where it is reasonably safe for the bus to pick them up, this change in the law represents a dangerous expansion of the ability of police to harass and criminalize people using the system, or just hanging out in front of their own homes minding their own business.

The only no vote came from Councilman Kolby Granville, who questioned the broad language and potential arbitrary enforcement of the ordinance.

Before the vote, Granville questioned legal counsel, asking, "So if I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of my own house, conceivably, could I be violating this rule?" To which counsel responded in the affirmative.  Cops would use their discretion, came the reassuring response.  And when it comes to the police, we know what that means: it will be open season on the poor, people of color and mentally ill and other perceived undesirables.

The passage of the original Tempe sidewalk sitting ban was controversial at the time.  Starting in 1999, community members engaged in a series of protests against the law, and then local ASU graduate student (now a professor at Prescott College) Randall Amster challenged it in court. In an unusual move, the 9th Circuit Court, based out of San Francisco, took up the case and heard the case in Tempe, in a public forum at ASU. Sadly, the court upheld the law. Ironically, it went into effect on Martin Luther King Day.

Down and Drought contacted several city officials for comments on the new ordinance, including Councilman Corey Woods. As the only African-American council member, we were curious if he would have any concerns about potential profiling that may result from the law. In his response to us via Twitter, Woods said the city had considered the effect of similar laws in Phoenix and Mesa, and that their "analysis didn't show profiling happening in those cities."

We requested that data and followed up with Woods via email, who then put us in contact with Bill Amato, police legal advisor to the city. Amato didn't include any data in his response but reiterated the claim that the city had run a "best practices analysis with other jurisdictions that had similar language," and found no reason to suspect increased "4th Amendment or racial profiling claims."

The term Fourth Amendment claims refers to cops using the pretext of police contact made via enforcement of the sidewalk sitting ordinance as cause for a search, which otherwise wouldn't happen.  This troubles Granville, who told us via email that while he's not a legal expert on the question, 'I do not know if violation of the city code is considered to be "an arrest" subject to a search, or if it is something different.  However, my concern is that it may be.'

More coverage of how the City of Tempe is trying to domesticate downtown for developers

But after those initial comments, things get a little tricky. In his response, Amato reminds us that racial profiling and police harassment are not "ordinance specific," meaning that a police force that generally profiles is just as capable of profiling with any law at its disposal. Neither Phoenix nor Mesa have stellar records in this regard.

Readers may recall in 2010 when police assaulted and handcuffed Phoenix City Councilman Michael Johnson as he was checking on a neighbor whose house was on fire. Indeed, we here at Down and Drought broke a story last year involving a racist tweet from a Phoenix police officer. In 2012 a community group accused PPD of racial profiling during traffic stops. And a statewide review of traffic stops by DPS in 2008 by the ACLU revealed widespread bias in police stops in Arizona. And of course, many Tempe residents remember the Sgt. Schoville affair. And just recently we saw allegations that Tempe police offered protection to a frat that threw a racist party. So there is certainly cause for concern.

Criminals up to no good in Tempe?

So essentially Amato's message to us is that we should just trust the police, despite ample cause for skepticism. However, it seems even the city is having some second thoughts. Amato tells us, 'As one final note, staff will be bringing this ordinance back to Council to add some additional language. The proposed language will add additional safeguards by requiring the conduct to “unreasonably impede the right of way or cause a safety risk”.'

Tempe police sent anti-terror cops to spy on gardeners in a bar

So, if there's no reason for concern, why the need for additional language to prevent the abuses they claim won't happen in the first place? It certainly begs the question as to why the ordinance is needed at all. Is this a solution looking for a problem? Or is this push for increased policing related to other standardization measures in North Tempe, such as increased enforcement of noise ordinances and yard codes?

To us, it looks like a part of a broader attempt by the city to domesticate the valuable downtown area, to make it safe for development and high end condo owners, and to enclose all social life in Tempe in one of three places: in city sanctioned mega events and the bars of Mill Avenue (where they can be taxed and policed), or quietly and meekly inside residents' homes. Our guess is that's exactly what this is, and that's another big reason all residents should oppose it.

To the sidewalks!