Pinkertons Making A 21st Century Comeback With Impunity

 

counterpunch  |  During a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, my husband and I watched a private security guard help up an unhoused man from the sidewalk. Three white women looked on at the interaction that took place in the trendy Nob Hill neighborhood on August 7, 2023, right in front of a yoga studio.

But the guard was not responding with compassion. Seconds earlier, the tall and very muscular man sporting a flak jacket emblazoned with the word “security,” had walked right by me toward the unhoused man and savagely knocked him to the ground without provocation or warning. Blood streamed from the victim’s face and onto the sidewalk. He stood up as the guard hovered over him and stumbled toward the damaged glasses that had fallen off his face during the assault. The guard, who was twice the man’s size, picked up and offered him the hat that had also fallen off his head and ushered him away.

It’s increasingly common to see private security guards patrolling the streets of Portland—considered one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Not only are businesses banding together to pay for private armed patrols, but even Portland State University is using such a service on its campus. The city of Portland also recently increased its private security budget for City Hall by more than half a million dollars to hire three armed guards.

The trend is a knee-jerk response to sharply rising homelessness. There are tents belonging to unhoused people sprinkled throughout downtown Portland and Nob Hill. Like much of Portland, many of the unhoused are white, but, as Axios in a report about a homelessness survey pointed out, “the rate of homelessness among people in the Portland area who are Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander grew more rapidly than among people who are white.”

Three summers ago, Portland—one of the nation’s whitest cities—was also an epicenter of the nationwide racial justice uprising in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “There are more Black Lives Matter signs in Portland than Black people,” joked one Black resident to the New York Times. As Donald Trump’s administration sent armed federal agents to Portland to quash the uprising, the city’s residents and officials came to symbolize a heroic resistance to rising authoritarianism.

The brutal savagery of what we witnessed in Nob Hill was in jarring contrast to the signs, stickers, and posters that many Portland businesses continue to display on their windows, declaring that “Black Lives Matter,” or “All Genders are Welcome,” and that promise safety to everyone. Everyone but the unhoused, apparently.

Shocked by the violence of the security guard’s assault, my husband and I confronted the perpetrator. He responded that hours earlier the victim had allegedly assaulted a woman in the neighborhood. In the seconds before he was attacked, however, I had walked within a few feet of the unhoused man as he muttered to himself in what sounded like a mix of English and a foreign language. The man had been minding his own business.

In a detailed three-part investigation for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in December 2021, Rebecca Ellis examined how businesses have begun paying unknown sums of money to hire private security patrols. According to Ellis, “Private security firms in Oregon are notoriously underregulated, and their employees are required to receive a fraction of the training and oversight as public law enforcement.” She added, “They remain accountable primarily to their clients, not the public.”

Business owners and residents are claiming that rising homelessness is the result of increased drug addiction, forcing them to resort to private security. But researchers point to high rents and a lack of affordable housing—not drug use—as the cause of people living without homes.

We Don't Take Medically Needy People...,

wave3  |  This story began December 1 at 5 p.m. with a phone call to our newsroom from a horrified University Hospital employee. The employee claimed security had just wheeled an elderly woman all the way out to the corner of Hancock and Ali, just off hospital property, dumped the woman out of the wheelchair on the sidewalk and left.

Minutes later, we shot video of her still in a soiled hospital gown and slippers, breathing hard under a blanket placed over her in 36 degree weather. Her stuff was in a bag next to her.

The caller claimed she saw this a lot.

So I started watching, and on December 16 at 7 p.m., 35 degrees outside, I recorded three security guards surrounding an elderly woman with a walker and slowly escorting her out of the emergency room.

She couldn’t move fast.

It took several minutes to make it all the way to the same corner of Hancock and Ali.

After they had her across the street off the hospital property, the security guards turned around and went back.

When they cleared I caught up to her. She said she couldn’t breathe.

“They told me I would not stay on the premises,” she said.

“Were you there as a patient?” I asked.

“I needed to be a patient because I’m sick,” she said.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“I’ve got COPD,” she said. “I got diabetes.”

“So they wouldn’t treat you?” I asked.

“The doctor talked to me for one minute,” she said.

“And told you what?” I said.

“That I had to leave,” she said.

“What reason did he give you?” I asked.

“He didn’t give me a reason,” she said.

She told me she was homeless.

“I’ve got to go because I’m hurting,” she said. “I’m in pain.”

Matthew Hauber and his mother claimed a similar story. They met us in front of Wayside Christian Mission in the spot where they said he was dumped in October.

“I was in a car crash,” Matthew said. “I completely shattered my hip and pelvis. I got like 30-some screws.”

“They said we can’t find a rehab right now,” Linda Hauber said.

She said when Norton Hospital told her they had a room lined up for Matthew at Wayside, she checked it out.

“I called Wayside just to confirm, and they said ‘No, we can’t do that, we can’t.’” Linda said. “‘We have beds and help find jobs, but we don’t take medically needy people, we don’t do that.’”

She said she then had a conference call with the hospital staff.

“The social worker said ‘We’re going to take him to a shelter’ and I said ‘Which one?’” Linda said. “And they said Wayside Christian Mission. And I said ‘Well I know that’s not true, because I called them and they don’t take them.’ Then the social worker said ‘That’s history, we’ll think of something else.’”
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Linda said the next day, her son was unloaded from a transport vehicle on the curb in the rain on Jackson Street in front of Wayside.

“I thought ‘They’ve dumped my son...’ my garbage I have to put out to the curb, that’s how they dumped my son,” Linda said. “Like garbage.”

Linda said she was in no shape to care for him at home. She died after the interview with us.

“They put all their stuff on the sidewalk over there, dump them off on the sidewalk, get back in their vehicle and get out of here just as fast as they can,” Wayside staffer Perry Layne said.
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Politicians Seeing "Which Way The Wind Blows" On Homeless Eliminationism

vice  |  New York City’s mayor and the state’s governor, who have tied their reputation to increasing the vaguely-defined feeling of safety that people get on the subway, were alternately vague or quick to deflect blame. When asked about the killing on Wednesday, Governor Hochul initially said, "People who are homeless in our subways, many of them in the throes of mental health episodes, and that's what I believe were some of the factors involved here. There's consequences for behavior." It was not clear who was deserving of consequences, in Hochul’s view, but many interpreted it to be Neely. 

On Thursday, Governor Hochul tried to strike a different tone, saying, ​​"I do want to acknowledge how horrific it was to view a video of Jordan Neely being killed for being a passenger on our subway trains. And so our hearts go out to his family. I’m really pleased that the district attorney is looking into this matter. As I said, there had to be consequences.” After apparently viewing the video, she said, “the video of three individuals holding him down until the last breath was snuffed out of him, I would say it was a very extreme response.”

Mayor Eric Adams is more hesitant to denounce Neely’s killing.“There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here, so I’m going to refrain from commenting further,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to Gothamist. “However,” he added in his statement, “we do know that there were serious mental health issues in play here, which is why our administration has made record investments in providing care to those who need it and getting people off the streets and the subways.” In a CNN interview, Adams called comptroller Brad Lander and others “irresponsible” for labeling the man who killed Neely a vigilante and calling his killing a lynching. 

When asked during the same interview whether it was right to intervene, Adams, a former transit cop, told interviewer Abby Phillip of CNN: “We have so many cases where passengers assist other riders. And we don't know exactly what happened here,” he said.

Adams has been intentionally provocative on the issue of houselessness: he made a rhetorical show of increasing sweeps of encampments, though they have more or less proceeded at the same pace as under his predecessor, who made 9,600 sweeps during his tenure. In November, he instructed police and medical workers that they can involuntarily detain people who appear mentally ill and homeless, though so far it hasn’t led to more people being taken to the hospital.

The statement released by Daniel Penny’s lawyers seemed to mostly reflect Adams’ perspective, pointing to the mental health crisis as the real culprit. They also presented Penny’s actions as a group attempt to maintain order and safety: “Daniel, with the help of others, acted to protect themselves, until help arrived,” they wrote.

The idea that visible homelessness means public order is breaking down, with an attendant rise in violent crime, is a powerful narrative being pushed by right-wingers and the wealthy, but Democratic mayors and civic leaders also participate in this rhetoric. Predictably, vigilantism has become normalized across the country. 

There have been a few high-profile cases just in the last few weeks where these violent fantasies are on full display. In San Francisco, a businessman named Don Carmigniani claimed to have been assaulted by an unhoused person wielding a metal pipe on April 5, and a 24-year old man named Garrett Doty was arrested for it.  

During the criminal case against Carmigniani’s assailant, video was released showing Carmigniani moments earlier approaching Doty while he was lying on the sidewalk and appearing to spray him with bear spray before Doty, startled, gets up and is confronted by Carmigniani, who a third party witness said was threatening the unhoused man. Based on police reports, defense attorneys alleged that Carmiginiani was regularly spraying houseless people with bear spray. Prosecutors later told the 52-year-old Carmigniani that they were dropping charges against Doty.

When tech executive Bob Lee was murdered in April, tech executives including Elon Musk blamed the killing on out of control violent crime. (According to Mission Local, violent crime in San Francisco is still near historic lows.). When police arrested a suspect, it turned out to be another tech executive, Nima Momeni, who had allegedly stabbed Lee. 

The rush of some in the tech sector to cast blame made sense, as the industry is complicit in this crisis: aside from causing rents to spike and exacerbating the homelessness crisis in the Bay Area, the Citizen app enables vigilantism,  and NextDoor is a cesspool of NIMBYism and anti-homeless rhetoric, 

Public camping bans have sprung up independently all over the country, and a single conservative think tank headed by a co-founder of surveillance tech company Palantir  has successfully made it a felony to sleep outdoors  in multiple states.

 

When The Hospital Wants You Gone: Unsolved Problems Are Simply Eliminated

knoxnews |  The Knoxville Police Department on Feb. 23 released video recordings of the arrest of a 60-year old woman who collapsed while she was being taken to jail and later died, and said the investigation into how officers handled the incident will continue.

Community reaction to the videos was swift: Nearly 400 comments, the majority critical of how officers handled the situation, appeared within hours on the department's Facebook post of a compilation showing excerpts from various police cameras.

Lisa Edwards, 60, was arrested Feb. 5 outside Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center, where she had been treated earlier. Hospital security called police when Edwards declined to move off the property after she was discharged.

Here's what Knox News knows about Edwards' arrest, her death and the ongoing police investigation.

'This shouldn’t happen': Family of woman who collapsed in KPD custody plans to sue

What did the body camera footage show?

A police video compilation from the Feb. 5 arrest shows how officers arrested her and what happened after she lost consciousness in the car. The compilation includes excerpts from body-camera footage of the initial interaction with Edwards, body camera footage of officers taking her into custody, and in-car camera footage from the time she was placed into the back of a cruiser.

Sgt. Brandon Wardlaw, officer Adam Barnett, officer Timothy Distasio and transportation officer Danny Dugan are shown in the video compilation. All four are on paid leave during the internal affairs investigation.

Body cam footage shows the first KPD officer arrived just before 8 a.m., about an hour after Edwards was discharged from the hospital. Edwards told the officer she had a stroke and couldn’t walk, but he responds by telling her the hospital wants her gone.

 

 

I Didn't Expect 4th Reich Eliminationism To Be So Profit Oriented And Racially Egalitarian

Tablet | The elevation of “domestic terror” to America’s No. 1 national security concern has less to do with social reality on the margins than it does with bureaucrats and experts at the center of American power. The latter are looking for a new enemy to justify the counterterrorism budgets that are endangered by the American drawdown from the Middle East, and their professional exigencies correspond with the Biden White House’s political program.

Hoffman told his Zoom audience about the Atomwaffen Division, defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “terroristic neo-Nazi organization.” I can find no evidence that Atomwaffen or any other neo-Nazi group was involved in the Capitol Hill riots on Jan. 6. After the Zoom meeting, I wrote Hoffman’s office to ask if they had found evidence I had missed. Neither he nor his office responded to questions from Tablet.

Hoffman noted that far-right ideologues preach “accelerationism,” a doctrine that urges its adherents to encourage and foment chaos to hasten the inevitable collapse of the existing system. But in less than a year, the political party that runs the system has pushed middle-class America to the brink of despair, with rising gas and food prices, ballooning inflation, open borders, a supply chain crisis, and experimental medical treatment mandates that have hollowed out heath care facilities and fire and police departments, and may impair the combat readiness of the U.S. armed forces.

Hoffman’s attempt to blame Trump supporters for the mess created by the country’s ruling class is an aspect of an information operation designed to deflect blame for elite decision-making onto a domestic opponent that does in fact seek to remove them from power by legal means: through the vote. And that’s partly what the effort to paint Trump supporters as domestic terrorists is about—to delegitimize the legitimate opposition in the in lead-up to the 2022 midterms.

“Domestic terror” is the establishment’s campaign platform. Sure, gas is almost $5 a gallon, heating oil prices are worse than in the 1970s, and grandma may need a fourth booster shot of a vaccine whose protective properties seem a lot less important to policymakers than the money that pharmaceutical companies—now the single biggest lobbying group in Washington—are receiving from the federal government. But what will your neighbors think if you vote for domestic terrorists? And why should domestic terrorists be permitted to incite domestic terror among their domestic terrorist base by advertising or posting on Facebook?

As with every information operation that political operatives, intelligence officials, and the media have run the last several years, the goal is not simply to smear opponents, but also to obtain from the federal government political and legal instruments to wield against them. The hysterical media coverage of Jan. 6 first gave rise to a congressional committee designed to target Jan. 6 protesters, and GOP officials, as domestic terrorists. The next step, it seems, is anti-domestic terror legislation.

Hoffman has explained in interviews since Jan. 6 why he backs domestic terror statutes: “It would require the federal government to gather data and statistical information on terrorist incidents in the United States,” he said in April. In other words, it would create work for contractors, consultants, and analysts who research terror-related issues, like … Bruce Hoffman.

Further, in an appeal to the progressive left, Hoffman contends that domestic terror laws would make America more just because they would “bring greater equity to sentencing.” What he means is that Muslim supporters of designated foreign terror groups already get long prison terms—so white people involved in “domestic terror,” however that’s defined, should also get long prison terms.

The reason there is no federal statute on the books for domestic terrorism is glaringly obvious: A politicized justice system would use it to attack its political adversaries, as the Biden administration is currently doing by defining the Jan. 6 riots as an “insurrection.” Insurrection sounds serious, it’s in the Constitution, so it’s used to frame Trump supporters, even though no one has been charged with it. The push behind a domestic terror statute is to turn the deplorables into untouchables.

Bruce Hoffman’s role in all this is to keep the Jewish community in line behind the party and Biden, who the majority of American Jews voted for in 2020. And they can help sell the operation, too, for few can speak more poignantly about the age-old dangers of white power violence than the Jews.

The terrible irony of course is that Hoffman is seeking to align the American Jewish community with spy services that are using a conspiracy theory to persecute their enemies on behalf of a ruling party increasingly comfortable with using state power and censorship to enforce its will. This runs counter to the country’s central principle—that citizens have rights that must be protected against the majority and the powerful. By desecrating civil rights, this new dispensation does not seem likely to create a polity in which Jews themselves would avoid persecution for very long.