Alabama Cop Who Shot Armed Citizen Didn't Issue Any Warnings

The police officer who shot and killed an Alabama man who was responding to a shooting at a mall in 2018 has acknowledged he failed to activate his body camera or issue a verbal warning to the armed citizen before opening fire, but says that he “acted reasonably and consistently under fast moving circumstances” and should be immune from a civil lawsuit filed over the death.

The new details in the case emerged in a response to the civil lawsuit filed by the officer’s attorneys and offer some additional information about the chaotic scene at the Riverchase Galleria on November 22nd, 2018.

EJ Bradford was at the mall when gunshots rang out that afternoon. The 21-year old Bradford, according to attorneys representing his family, initially tried to flee from the gunshots, but turned back and ran towards the sound of the gunfire when he realized that someone had been hit and injured.

Bradford, who possessed an Alabama carry permit, drew his gun as he approached the wounded man, identified as 18-year old Brian Wilson, in order to protect Wilson and others from any further attack. Instead, Hoover police officer David Alexander and one other officer whose name has not been publicly released arrived at the scene of the shooting seconds later it took place. Alexander, spotting Bradford with a gun in his hand, fired four rounds from his service pistol, striking Bradford multiple times.

In his answer to the lawsuit on Aug. 13, Alexander agreed there was no body camera activation. But the attorneys point out he had only seconds to respond.

“Alexander admits that at the time of the Wilson shooting, he was wearing a body camera provided by the City of Hoover, and did not activate the camera in the three seconds after hearing gunshots and before shooting EJ Bradford.”
He also said he fired the fatal shots.
“Alexander admits that, upon observing EJ Bradford with a handgun moving toward Wilson and a second person who was leaning over Wilson, he fired four rounds from a Glock 19X 9mm pistol at EJ Bradford.”
Also, despite witnesses who had initially said they heard warnings issued by officers, Alexander stated in his answer that he has no recollection of a verbal warning were made before the shooting.
“Alexander admits that he has no recollection of issuing a verbal warning or command to EJ Bradford in the few seconds after shooting began and before EJ Bradford was shot,” Alexander’s attorneys wrote.
But Alexander denied he violated any standard police procedure or training.
Alexander’s attorneys emphasized the condensed time frame of events.
“Alexander admits that, in the two seconds it took him to fire four bullets, all within less than three seconds after hearing shots fired in a crowded mall filled with innocent shoppers, EJ Bradford was moving towards two persons as if ready to fire.”
Only one officer fired his weapon. “Alexander admits that the police officer with him did not fire his handgun,” the defendants said. “Alexander admits that the shooting of Wilson by Erron Brown occurred within three seconds before EJ Bradford was shot.”

Alexander’s shooting of Bradford was deemed to be justified by the Alabama Attorney General’s office in February of 2019, but Bradford’s mother, April Pipkins, filed a civil lawsuit shortly after the decision was released.

Here at Bearing Arms we’ve been talking quite a bit recently about the conflict between qualified immunity for police officers and our right as American citizens to keep and bear arms, and the Bradford case is another example of the legal system placing law enforcement over armed citizens. No one alleges that Bradford was the one responsible for shooting Brian Wilson. In fact, no one’s alleged that Wilson committed a crime at all. The position of the Alabama AG and the Hoover police appears to be that it was just bad luck that Bradford was mistaken for the shooter by Alexander.

The fact that Alexander acknowledges that he never issued a verbal command to Bradford to drop his weapon or gave him a warning before firing, however, is important. I can understand forgetting to turn on your body camera in the seconds between hearing gunshots and arriving at the scene of the shooting, but the fact that Alexander shot Bradford without first telling him to drop his weapon is troubling, to say the least.

Alexander’s attorneys argue that the officer’s actions were “reasonable, necessary and justified under the circumstances at that time,” but I disagree. Clearly the actions weren’t necessary, since an innocent man was killed while the actual suspect had already fled the scene and wouldn’t be arrested until almost a week had passed. Given the fact that Bradford had no warning before he was shot and killed, I also have to disagree with the assertion that Alexander’s actions were reasonable and justified.

We’ll see what the courts have to say. Alexander’s attorneys are trying to get the civil case dismissed on the grounds of qualified immunity, and a judge could issue a ruling soon that will determine if the litigation can proceed or if EJ Bradford’s death will go unchallenged in a court of law.


THE LAWLESS LAWYER CLASS

LAWYER JACKIE LACEY PROTECTS HER MURDERING GANG INFESTED L.A. SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. SHE IS A REMINDER THAT THE LAWS DO NOT APPLY TO THE LAWYER CLASS!

ONLY KAMALA HARRIS HAS DONE MORE FOR MURDERING COPS AND THEIR GENEROUS NEO-FASCIST COP UNIONS!

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-lawless-class-how-lawyer-jackie.html

During her time in the DA’s office, Lacey has prosecuted only one officer for killing a civilian, leading to protests outside her office and her home

“She continues to find that it is necessary for police 

to kill unarmed people,” Gascón said. “Perhaps she 

thinks it’s fine, or perhaps it’s all the money she 

has taken from police unions.” Lacey has benefitted

from more than $5 million in contributions to 

outside committees benefiting Lacey has come 

from law enforcement unions. 

In terms of her politics, there is clearly nothing “historic” about Harris. As district attorney in San Francisco (2004-2011), attorney general in California (2011-2017), and, finally, US senator (2017 to the present), Harris has compiled a track record of backing the police, locking up workers and immigrants, covering up for the banks and supporting militarism and war.

 

The selection of Kamala Harris and the degradation of American politics

13 August 2020

With the selection of Kamala Harris to be the running mate of Joe Biden, the framework of the 2020 elections has been set. As was to be expected, the Democrats have chosen the most right-wing candidates to run the most right-wing campaign possible.

There is a certain inevitability to the choice of Harris. In July of last year,—based on a survey of who would be the worst, most reactionary and at the same time most suitable choice for second spot on the Democratic Party ticket— predicted that Harris would most likely be named the vice presidential candidate if she failed to win the nomination. She had all the ruthlessness, narcissism and careerism requisite for the job, plus the ethnic background to suit the Democrats’ obsession with racial and gender identity.

Kamala Harris is a dyed-in-the wool political reactionary.

This year has seen mass demonstrations throughout the country in response to the police murder of George Floyd. As a direct result of the policies of the ruling class, nearly 170,000 people have died to date in the coronavirus pandemic, with the daily death toll now at more than 1,000. There is growing anger in workplaces over the homicidal back-to-work campaign and broad opposition among teachers to the efforts to reopen the schools. Tens of millions of people are unemployed, and they have been cut off from federal benefits and face being evicted from their homes.

In the midst of this monumental political, economic and social crisis, and against the backdrop of so much suffering, the American people are to be offered the “choice” between the fascistic Trump, the conman from New York, and a Democratic Party ticket headed by a corporate shill from Delaware and an ex-prosecutor from California. This says everything about the degraded state of American politics.

Following the announcement by Biden on Tuesday, the media leapt into action with its nauseating effusion of state propaganda. The selection of Harris has been universally proclaimed to be “historic,” a watershed moment.

In terms of her politics, there is clearly nothing “historic” about Harris. As district attorney in San Francisco (2004-2011), attorney general in California (2011-2017), and, finally, US senator (2017 to the present), Harris has compiled a track record of backing the police, locking up workers and immigrants, covering up for the banks and supporting militarism and war.

Wall Street is certainly happy with the choice. “A VP pick that big business can back,” ran a headline on the inside pages of the New York Times. As for the military, its main concern is what will happen if the aging Biden doesn’t make it through a full term. Since the beginning of the Trump administration, opposition from the Democratic Party has been focused on issues of foreign policy. Harris, who has no other agenda than her own self-promotion, will be silly putty in the hands of the military-intelligence apparatus.

The “historic” character of the Harris nomination is premised entirely on her race and gender. She would be the “first African-American vice president,” the “first Asian-American vice president” and the “first female vice president.” She already is the “first Black woman on the national ticket of the Democrats or Republicans.” Everything is about the symbolism involved in the choice of Harris, with not a word about the program of a Democratic Party administration.

As if any of this makes a bit of difference for workers, whatever their race, gender or ethnicity. As if, moreover, the world has not already had the example of Obama, not to mention Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and many others.

The selection of Harris exposes the utterly reactionary character of politics that bases itself on race, gender and other forms of identity—anything but class. In response to the eruption of protests against police violence, the Democrats did everything they could to obscure the class issues, promote racial divisions and propagate the lie that the violence of the police is an expression of the oppression of “black America” by “white America.” The outcome of this racialist campaign is the selection as their vice-presidential candidate of a right-wing ex-prosecutor who once covered up evidence to keep an innocent man on death row and worked to tear immigrant children from their parents.

Those invested in the racialist campaign have jumped on the bandwagon to declare the selection of Harris “historic.” Ibram Kendi, author of How to Be An Antiracist and one of the chief inspirers of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, wrote on Twitter that “the Democrats now have a presidential ticket that reflects the American people better than the GOP ticket and every presidential ticket in US history.”

According to Kendi, politicians “reflect” the American people not because of the socioeconomic forces they represent, but solely by their racial and ethnic background and their gender. Interests are determined by race. This is not progressive politics, but right-wing and racialist politics, which shares much in common with the fascistic politics of Donald Trump.

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King wrote that he was “incredibly proud to see a brilliant Black woman, and HBCU [historically black colleges and universities] grad, chosen as a vice presidential nominee.” This was, he added, the stuff “dreams are made of.”

Commenters on Twitter quickly pointed to the contrast between this statement and his declaration in November 2018 that he would never support Biden or Harris because “they both helped build & advance mass incarceration.”

Political principles have never been a strong suit of Democratic Party hacks. They look forward to positions within the Biden administration and other opportunities that will reap financial rewards.

Then there is Bernie Sanders. In the Democratic Party primaries, Sanders won widespread support for his attacks on social inequality and his calls for a “political revolution” against the establishment. On this basis, he emerged as the main contender against Biden for the Democratic Party nomination. In the end, however, the “Sanders wing” of the Democratic Party got nothing.

BLOG EDITOR: SANDERS ALSO ENDORSED BANKSTER-OWNED CROOK ON THE LAM, HILLARY CLINTON!

This has not, however, stopped Sanders from praising the outcome. Sanders tweeted that Harris “will make history as our next vice president.”

Since packing in his campaign in mid-March, Sanders has assumed his assigned role as principal cheerleader for the Biden campaign, along with Elizabeth Warren, et. al. The more that social anger grows, and the more the Democrats are exposed, the more determined is his support for the Democratic Party.

What an exposure of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jacobin magazine and other political agents of the Democratic Party who claimed that Sanders was the path to the transformation of American politics and even the realization of socialism! They make fools of themselves every election. They will tag along with the Democratic Party in one form or another, no doubt accompanied by talk about how they are building a “progressive movement” inside that party of American imperialism, along with other varieties of political fraud. Every four years, the same play is performed.

There is something incredibly degrading and shameful about the whole process, testifying to the intellectual and cultural collapse of American politics.

Certain conclusions must be drawn from this experience, not only about Sanders, but about an entire type of pragmatic politics that hopes for easy answers to the crisis confronting the working class without a direct challenge to capitalism and its state apparatus.

The politics of the working class must begin with a serious theoretical understanding, rooted in a Marxist and class analysis. The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. The politics of race and gender identity, which it relentlessly promotes, gives expression to the interests of layers of the upper-middle class, which employ this right-wing ideology in their fight for positions of power and privilege in the state, academia and corporate boardrooms. The pseudo-left, including the DSA and associated organizations, represent this social layer.

All of this is directed against the working class and the development of a genuine movement for socialism. Objective conditions, however, have created the conditions for a powerful eruption of class struggle, in the United States and internationally. The coronavirus pandemic, as the Socialist Equality Party has explained, is a “trigger event in world history that is accelerating the already far-advanced economic, social, and political crisis of the world capitalist system.”

Nothing progressive will emerge except through the intervention—the interference—of the working class. The Socialist Equality Party and our election campaign are oriented to the development of a socialist leadership in the working class. Our campaign is the only campaign that raises critical questions of perspective, exposing the reactionary promoters of racial conflict and the cheerleaders of Sanders’ “political revolution.”

The SEP is spearheading the organization of workers against the homicidal policy of the ruling elite, in opposition to all factions of the ruling class, on the basis of a revolutionary program to put an end to inequality, war, dictatorship and the capitalist system. This is the way forward.

Oversight Panel Calls for Resignation of LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva

 

BY FRANK STOLTZE 

FILE: L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva speaks in August at the graduation ceremony for the latest Academy Class. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

In a significant erosion of support for Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva, the Sheriff's Civilian Oversight Commission Thursday called on him to resign as leader of one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the country. Commissioners said the sheriff has obstructed oversight at nearly every turn and failed to address major problems at the agency, including the existence of "deputy gangs."

The commission's resolution describes "a serious lack of judgement and leadership by Sheriff Villanueva" and decries "his efforts to block meaningful reform." It also says Villanueva has restricted access to the department by the county's inspector general.

In an extraordinary move, the sheriff opened a criminal investigation into Inspector General Max Huntsman in 2019, accusing him of unlawfully accessing department records. Huntsman — and the county's attorney — said he had access to those files under the law that created his office. Members of the commission called the sheriff's move an act of intimidation.

LOST CONFIDENCE

The nine-member panel says it has lost confidence in Villanueva's ability to effectively govern the agency, which employs nearly 18,000 people and operates the largest local jail system in the country.

Villanueva was an unconventional candidate for sheriff when he beat incumbent Jim McDonnel in the 2018 election. He was a retired lieutenant with little management experience who had never supervised more than 100 people. Villanueva won largely because of the backing of the deputy's union and an endorsement by the LA County Democratic Party.

The vote Thursday to call on Villanueva to resign was unanimous. Some of the panel's most traditionally pro-law enforcement members agreed the sheriff must go, including former Federal Judge Robert Bonner, former Deputy District Attorney Lael Rubin, and former Sheriff's Lt. J.P. Harris.

Despite those credentials, Villanueva has called the panel anti-law enforcement.

"They're political philosophies are either they really, really hate cops or they slightly hate cops or they're not too sure," he said. In the sheriff's view, attempts by the panel to oversee his department are part of a "proxy war" by the Board of Supervisors. The board appoints the panel.

It's worth noting Villanueva's relationship with the board has deteriorated too — two members of the board have asked him to resign. Aspiring members of the board also are critical of the sheriff. In Wednesday's debate hosted by our newsroom, Herb Wesson and Holly Mitchell both said the sheriff was unqualified to do the job. They're vying for the open District 2 seat, which represents cities such as Carson, Compton, Culver City and Inglewood; all or part of L.A. neighborhoods including Crenshaw, Koreatown, La Brea, and Mar Vista; and other unincorporated areas of the county.

Villanueva did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the commission's vote.

AN ELECTED OFFICE

The sheriff is elected by the voters — so it's unclear what effect the calls for resignation will have. In fact, several commissioners worried their resolution will close the door on any hope for effective oversight — even though it simultaneously calls on the sheriff to cooperate with the panel.

"It does seem to be a bit of a contradiction," said Harris. "I hope it doesn't close the door."

"He is the one that closed the door, he's the one that can open it," said Commissioner and Loyola Law School Professor Priscilla Ocen.

The vote comes amid a raging debate over policing in the country and a demand for more accountability and transparency. It also follows a series of controversial shootings by sheriff's deputies that drew angry protests, as well as accusations of brutality by the department during the George Floyd and other demonstrations.

Among the resolution's points:

§  Sheriff Villanueva removed the Sheriff's Department's constitutional policing advisors, while at the same time attempting to rehire deputies who were fired for cause, such as fabricating evidence and domestic violence.

§  Sheriff Villanueva alleged, without proof, that the disciplinary process was "unfair" and deactivated the disciplinary proceedings against deputies accused of using excessive force and committing child abuse

§  Violent deputy cliques or gangs continue to operate within the department, particularly in the Compton and East Los Angeles stations... Despite Sheriff Villanueva's claims that members of these cliques/gangs have been disciplined or reassigned pursuant to Sheriff's Department policy, Inspector General Max Huntsman has said that he is "'aware of no implementation whatsoever' of the policy and that his office can't effectively investigate the secret societies 'because of the obstruction of the Sheriff's Department.'"

In another part of the resolution, the commission says the commission has "violated the First Amendment rights of residents engaging in protest activity as well as journalists covering protests." It cites the arrest of LAist/KPCC reporter Josie Huang, who was taken into custody by deputies last month after identifying herself as a member of the press. "In defending the arrest, Sheriff Villanueva cited inaccurate and misleading information that was contradicted by contemporaneous video footage."

THE BACKSTORY

When Villanueva took office in December of 2018, commissioners initially were hopeful for a better relationship with him than his predecessor Jim McDonnell, who sometimes resisted requests for information from the panel and attended only a handful of their meetings.

Indeed, Villanueva attended several meetings during his first few months in office but as commissioners' questions became more pointed about deputy discipline, use of force and other matters, he quit showing up.

Villanueva was particularly perturbed by the panel's demand for more information about his decision to rehire a former campaign aide who had been terminated by the department for alleged domestic violence and lying. The rehiring of Caren Carl Mandoyan sparked a lawsuit by the board of supervisors and a judge's ruling it was unlawful.

His relationship with the nine-member civilian panel steadily deteriorated since then with his often refusing to even send subordinates to answer questions necessary for them to conduct effective oversight. McDonnell almost always sent his undersheriff to meetings - even if his responses to inquiries left the commission unsatisfied.

In May, Villanueva defied the first ever subpoena by the commission to testify about how he was handling the spread of coronavirus inside LA County's sprawling jail system. The sheriff worried it would be a "public shaming" of him.

The commission was created by the Board of Supervisors in January of 2016 to increase transparency and accountability at the department. In March, voters approved a measure giving subpoena power. At each point, criminal justice reform advocates expressed high hopes for better oversight and changes at the sheriff's department.

With the commission now at a standoff with the sheriff, nobody expressed much hope.

There was talk of a recall of the sheriff among a few activists who spoke at the meeting - the only hope for some to oust a sheriff who's vowed to remain in power.

»

 

“Burn It Down”

Activists in Seattle want to abolish police, prisons, and courts.Autumn 2020 
The Social Order
Public safety

American cities are entering a period of chaos. Protests and riots have dominated headlines, but beneath the surface, activists are launching an unprecedented campaign to overthrow the traditional justice system and replace it with a new model based on a radical conception of social justice.

In Seattle, where this campaign may be most advanced, activists have crafted a narrative about police brutality, mass incarceration, and punitive justice that leads to a natural sequence of solutions: “abolish the police,” “divest from prisons,” and “defund the courts.” Over the past three decades, the city’s radical-progressives have seized control of municipal government—with the notable exception of the criminal-justice system, which they see as the final obstacle to total control. If they can dismantle it, activists believe, they can bring about their transformation of society.

The city’s political establishment has joined the campaign to “deconstruct justice.” Since the outbreak of the George Floyd–related protests starting in late May, elected officials in Seattle and King County have announced their intentions to defund the Seattle Police Department, permanently close the county’s largest jail, and gut the municipal court system. They believe that, when the oppression of the justice system is lifted, a new society can be shaped through criminal diversion, psychotherapy, and harm reduction.

The theoretical underpinnings of this movement can be traced back to the academic currents of “critical race theory,” long pervasive in university humanities departments, which holds that all legal structures—and society generally—can be understood as a function of embedded racism. The law is shot through with white supremacy, critical race theorists believe, which must be rigorously identified and dismantled if true justice is to be achieved. In recent years, critical race theory has expanded beyond the academy and become a force in progressive politics.

For today’s radical-progressives, the nation’s traditional institutions are little more than vestiges of white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and colonialist domination. Seen in this light, the recent unrest in America’s progressive cities becomes clear: the chaos is the necessary price—and the accelerant—for the revolution. During the recent occupation of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, self-described “abolitionist” Nikkita Oliver translated the sentiments of the graduate seminar into the language of the streets, calling for the overthrow of “racialized capitalism” and “patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism.” Motivated by such goals, mobs have seized control of police precincts.

If radicals are successful in moving Seattle toward police abolition, the results will be catastrophic. The city is coming apart. Crime has exploded in the downtown corridor, businesses have barricaded their windows, and citizens fear that the city will collapse into anarchy. Yet the activists and political class are moving forward with their experiment at astonishing speed. Nearly every week, they offer new proposals for transforming the constituent parts of the criminal-justice system. “Burn it down” has evolved from a street slogan into a political platform.

In the progressive narrative, American police forces were established to catch fugitive slaves and have acted as the guardians of white supremacy ever since. As the activist group Decriminalize Seattle argues: “The police have never served as an adequate response to social problems. They are rooted in violence against Black people. In order to protect Black lives, this moment calls for investing and expanding our safety and well-being beyond policing.”

Reform, then, is no answer. The irredeemably racist institution of policing must be excavated root and branch—and then demolished. With this in mind, the Seattle City Council recently released draft legislation that suggests a path for replacing the police with a civilian-led Department of Community Safety & Violence Prevention. The plan is predicated on the idea that “institutional racism” and “underinvestment in communities of color” are the underlying causes of crime. Once the department is abolished and its budget redistributed to minority communities, social workers and nonprofits can keep the peace with a “trauma-informed, gender-affirming, anti-racist praxis”—more activism, in other words. The legislation also calls for race-based redistribution and “the immediate transfer of underutilized public land for BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] community ownership.”

Meantime, to exert maximum pressure from the outside, mobs have been patrolling the streets of residential neighborhoods and paying midnight house calls to wavering public officials. One group, which calls itself Every Day March, has assembled gatherings as large as 300 people and descended on the personal residences of Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan, former police chief Carmen Best, and nearly all city council members. They bang drums, chant slogans, and leave threatening messages on the driveways and doors of their perceived enemies: “Liberate oppressed communities,” “Don’t be racist trash,” “Guillotine Jenny.”

In one incident, the mob marched to the home of Councilman Andrew Lewis after midnight and rousted him out of bed. When Lewis arrived at his building’s entrance, ringleader Tealshawn Turner demanded that he verbally commit to defunding the police. Lewis, standing alone at the gate, was visibly frightened—and he relented, promising to cut the police budget by 50 percent, fire cops with citizen complaints against them, and redirect millions to “communities of color.” Having extracted her demand, Turner left with another threat: “If you don’t keep your promise, we’re for sure coming back.”

Even as chaos engulfed Seattle, the city council passed a measure depriving police of essential crowd-control tools, including pepper spray, tear gas, blast balls, and stun grenades. In a desperate letter to business owners and residents, Chief Best warned that officers had “no ability to safely intercede to preserve property in the midst of a large, violent crowd.” In essence, she was announcing the end of law and order within the city.

“Policymakers have laid out a rationale to close the region’s largest jail and end youth incarceration.”

Though the crowd-control munitions ordinance was blocked by a judge hours before taking effect, one veteran cop told me that the activists have settled on a bare-knuckled strategy: reduce police power enough to achieve “mob rule” in the streets. If the activists can defund the police and disarm officers, they can break the state’s monopoly on violence. Whenever it can mobilize a crowd of 250 people or more, the mob will dominate the physical environment.

Yet despite rising street disorder and intimidation of public officials, 53 percent of Seattle voters in a recent telephone poll supported the plan that would “permanently cut the Seattle Police Department’s budget by [half] and shift that money to social services and community-based programs.” According to police officials, officers are in “disbelief.” They find themselves besieged both on the streets and in city hall.

For now, the chaos-to-revolution strategy has the momentum. As black-clad mobs smash the windows of banks and storefronts, the city council has voted for budget cuts that set the stage for police “abolition,” and activists have pushed out Chief Best through a campaign of legislative humiliation and political intimidation. “Our leadership is in chaos,” says one frontline cop. “The mayor has made a decision to let a mob of 1,000 people dictate public safety policy for a city of 750,000.”

Prison abolition has long been a goal of radical movements, from the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution to the jailbreak of Kresty Prison during the Russian Revolution. In modern-day Seattle, though, the revolution is developing from within. According to a set of leaked documents that I obtained from inside the King County Executive’s Office, policymakers have laid out the rationale for permanently closing the region’s largest jail and ending all youth incarceration—including for minors charged with serious crimes such as rape and murder.

The documents cast the prison system as an institution of “oppression based on race and built to maintain white supremacy.” In a pyramid-shaped graphic, policymakers claim that crime and incarceration are merely the “tip of the iceberg.” On a deeper level, the justice system is rooted in “white supremacist culture,” “inequitable wealth distribution,” “power hoarding,” and the belief that “people of color are dangerous or to be feared.” Once these premises are established, the conclusion is foregone—white supremacy must be eradicated. To this end, days after I released the internal documents, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced a plan for terminating youth detention and closing the downtown Seattle jail, which represents approximately two-thirds of the county’s jail capacity. More than half of all inmates are incarcerated for violent crimes; the plan will release such violent criminals onto the streets.

County corrections officers, who were not consulted on the executive’s surprise announcement, were horrified. One senior manager told me that “activists [are] seeking to rewrite the narrative of society,” and, if the shutdowns come to pass, “the ones who will suffer in the end are [people of color], as crime skyrockets and lawlessness becomes the norm.” Frontline correctional officers and medical staff within the jails are in a state of “chaos” and bracing for “mass layoffs,” the manager told me. According to the internal documents, the county executive warned his team to expect “stress, confusion, and a sense of overwhelm” within the department, but reassured them that this should not impede their work to create a “shift in power structure” that would let “internal discrimination and racism come to the surface.”

What will replace jails? According to Budget for Justice, the leading coalition of the progressive-justice movement, the government should “transfer resources from formal justice systems to community-based care” programs “rooted in restorative justice practices that are trauma-informed, human rights-, and equity-based.” Specifically, the activists highlight three nonprofit programs as models for the new justice system—Community Passageways, Creative Justice, and Community Justice Project—which will offer programs such as “healing circles,” “narrative storytelling,” art-based therapy, and community organizing. The three providers share a philosophical foundation predicated on the assumption that poverty, racism, and oppression force the dispossessed into crime and violence. The programs are designed to reveal how “systems of power create conditions that perpetuate violence in our homes and daily lives” and help offenders “reimagine a society in which their liberation is not only possible, but sustainable by the community itself.”

Though these programs are ideologically aligned with revolutionary goals, they have failed to serve as practical replacements for the “formal justice system.” In one high-profile case, prosecutors diverted a youth offender named Diego Carballo-Oliveros into a “peace circle” program, in which nonprofit leaders burned sage, passed around a talking feather, and led Carballo-Oliveros through “months of self-reflection.” According to one corrections official, prosecutors and activists paraded Carballo-Oliveros around the city as the “shining example” of their approach. However, two weeks after completing the peace circle program, Carballo-Oliveros and two accomplices lured a 15-year-old boy into the woods, robbed him, and slashed open his abdomen, chest, and head with a retractable knife. The victim placed a desperate phone call to his sister and a passerby called an ambulance, but the youth later died at the hospital.

Despite public setbacks and no tangible record of successful alternatives, County Executive Constantine is moving forward with his plan to close the downtown jail and end all youth incarceration. For activists, however, the revolution is not happening fast enough. To increase the pressure, they dispatched a mob to Constantine’s home one night to demand that he speed things up. They shouted him down and shook cans of spray paint, calling on Constantine to release all youth prisoners, including minors charged with murder, because “the police are murderers all the time.” Constantine, standing under a streetlamp with his arms crossed, tried to placate them.

A demonstrator outside the city’s abandoned East Precinct police station (SOPA IMAGES LIMITED/ALAMY LIVE NEWS)
A demonstrator outside the city’s abandoned East Precinct police station (SOPA IMAGES LIMITED/ALAMY LIVE NEWS)

Seattle’s activists have long sought to limit the scope and authority of the municipal courts. For years, influential organizations such as Budget for Justice and the Public Defender Association have advocated for eliminating cash bail, ending probation, reducing the number of municipal judges, and easing sex-offender registration requirements—all under the rubric of “dismantling systems of racism, oppression, and poverty.” Now, with momentum from Black Lives Matter, the activist coalition is mobilizing behind a much more ambitious agenda: abolishing the municipal court altogether and transferring authority to a “shadow court system,” administered by ideologically aligned nonprofit organizations such as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), which provides “crisis response, immediate psychosocial assessment, and wrap-around services including substance-abuse disorder treatment and housing”—that is, replacing the punitive state with a therapeutic one.

The reforms put into place so far are already spiraling into anarchy. In recent years, Seattle has become a haven for tent encampments, public drug use, and street disorder, and the city now has one of the nation’s highest property-crime rates. LEAD, which receives $6 million in annual city funding, has repeatedly failed to produce results. In its original “scientific study,” when controlling for old warrants, LEAD had no statistical effect on new arrests—in other words, participation in LEAD was as effective as doing nothing. Despite mounting skepticism from the public and even Mayor Durkan, LEAD executives have refused to release detailed recidivism data since 2015, even hiding critical participant information from municipal court judges.

Finally, last year, following a series of high-profile “repeat offender” cases, Seattle Municipal Court Judge Ed McKenna tried to raise the alarm about the city’s failure to prosecute career criminals like Francisco Calderon, a homeless man who had garnered more than 70 criminal convictions but continued to secure jail-free plea deals from the prosecutor and public defender’s offices. The Calderon trial was widely covered in the media and dovetailed with an explosive report about the city’s “prolific offenders” who had been terrorizing residents and businesses. But McKenna’s call to restore public order provoked a powerful backlash. Almost immediately, progressive leaders—City Attorney Pete Holmes, Public Defense Director Anita Khandelwal, and LEAD cofounder Lisa Daugaard—waged a public-relations war against the judge and pressured him to retire two years before the end of his term.

Judge McKenna warns that the progressive-justice coalition is perilously close to establishing a shadow court system. He argues that Holmes, Khandelwal, and Daugaard are becoming “modern-day lords and landowners,” with the power to dispense justice outside the constitutional framework. McKenna believes that nonprofit diversion programs, which exist beyond the confines of the state and are not subject to meaningful public oversight, are potentially violating the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a public trial before a jury of one’s peers. “In [pretrial diversion schemes], potential defendants are contacted by prosecutors and told that if they ‘voluntarily’ participate in specific programs, criminal charges will not be filed against them,” McKenna says. “The ethical concern, however, is whether accused persons are waiving their rights ‘knowingly and voluntarily’ or whether accused persons feel compelled to waive those rights under threat of prosecution and jail.”

Despite such concerns, the campaign to replace traditional justice with activism continues. After the George Floyd–related unrest, dozens of King County prosecutors, organized as the Equity & Justice Workgroup, issued a letter encouraging their own office to stop filing charges for assault, theft, drug dealing, burglary, escape, fare evasion, and auto theft. In effect, they want to move all but the most serious crimes into the nonprofit-diversion process. Meantime, LEAD, seeing a chance to extend its power, severed ties with the Seattle Police Department and declared its intent to move “beyond policing” and serve as the centerpiece of the new progressive-justice complex. According to several sources with whom I’ve spoken, a sense of foreboding is pervasive within the municipal court. Its officers believe that their entire branch of government, designed to provide an open forum for justice and a bulwark against tyranny, could be obliterated.

“The system does not wish to be remade and it resists remaking,” Daugaard told reporters. “And there’s no doubt that we would not be having anything like the scale of a redesigned conversation that is occurring if not for the top-line demands of people in the street.”

In Seattle, the movement to “abolish the police, prisons, and courts” is not simply the dream of marginalized radicals; it has also been adopted at the highest levels of municipal government. Activists have demanded that the public imagine a world beyond justice, and the political class is trying its best to imagine it, too.

These modern remakers of society are not hoping to achieve new policies within the given social order. Rather, they are looking to overturn that social order completely. “We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society,” declared socialist city council member Kshama Sawant in a recent committee hearing. “We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism—this police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it and replace it with a world based instead on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality—a socialist world.”

Though the new revolution is couched in the language of science—its programs are “data-driven” and “evidence-based”—the real objective is a revolution in values. The activists seek to establish what might be called a “reverse hierarchy of oppression,” destroying the final remnants of tradition, law, and order, and establishing the dominance of the outcast, the minority, and the oppressed. In the leaked documents from the county executive’s office, policymakers suggest that prisoners should be seen as society’s legitimate “rights holders” and that the “government is responsible for the problem [of crime]”—society is the criminal, on this view, and the criminal is the ideal citizen. It’s a disorienting inversion of values.

In reality, the progressive revolutionaries are replacing traditional justice with street justice; they are supplanting the rule of law with the rule of the mob. The early results of this experiment are sobering: armed gangs roam downtown, while fatal shootings are up nearly 50 percent from last year. For the first time in living memory, the police department is losing its position as hegemon of the streets. The rioters of the Every Day March have begun to descend on residential neighborhoods, demanding that white homeowners “open [their] wallets” and “give black people back their homes.” As they move down the street, they chant in a call and response: “Who do we protect? Black criminals!”

One veteran Seattle police officer told me that he thinks that the recent disorder is merely the prelude to a long and dark era for the city. “Derek Chauvin is the Gavrilo Princip of our time,” the officer said, comparing the Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd to the Serbian assassin who sparked World War I. “The tide of public opinion is on the side of the activists, and they’re pushing the envelope as far as they can. It’s not hyperbolic to say that the endgame is anarchy.” But anarchy, too, is a feature of the revolution. The activists leave no room for grace, humility, or continuity. Like their historical predecessors, they will burn down entire cities in a fevered search for utopia.