Content Warning: Pregnancy loss, still birth.

Hey everyone, If you’ve friended me on Facebook, then you already know this. But for those who haven’t, I feel like I need to explain the radio silence of the past week.

Last Tuesday, on February 26th, Teal and I lost our baby. At 20 weeks into our pregnancy, we had a miscarriage resulting in a still birth.

It’s been a really hard week. We both want to be parents very badly and very much wanted this child. We’re grieving and slowly processing together. Part of that processing has been gaining an understanding of the ways in which grief affects us and just how long it could last.

The campaign is paused while we work through this. I want to continue, but I need to work through the initial grief before I can really even make the decision whether or not I can continue this campaign.

According to Google, to bike from Whitehall Plaza (the big box stores west of I-69) to the College Mall would take about 30 minutes. It’s roughly a 5 mile trip.

Of course, I can think of few people who would even attempt that bike ride. The roads aren’t built for it. 3rd street might have bike lanes all up and down it, but I’ve been in those bike lanes. It’s terrifying.

To go from where North Walnut meets the Bypass all the way south to the Kroger on South Walnut is also a 30 minute trip by bike. It’s also about a 5 mile trip.

Again, I’ve been in the bike lanes on College. They’re barely separated from two lanes of traffic that can move really fast. They eventually disappear into the 3rd lane of traffic with a sharrow.

Only about 3 to 4% of trips happen by bike in Bloomington right now. There’s a good reason for that.

How often have you seen a bike using one of those sharrow lanes on College or Walnut? How often do you see bikes actually using those lanes on west 3rd street?

Now think about how many bikes you see on the B-line trail, every day.

More than 70% of trips in Bloomington happen by car right now.

What if we built out protected bike lanes on all of these roads? What if 3rd street was an east / west bike highway with one lane each way for cars (and a low speed limit) and a broad boulevard for cyclists? What if Walnut and College were structured similarly? Could we take the 70% of trips that happen by car and make half of them happen by bike?

It might seem like an impossible goal, but in Copenhagen 45% of all trips happen by bike. Only 35% happen by car. To travel from one side of Copenhagen to the other by bike is a 50 minute, 8 mile trip.

We can do this. Bloomington is compact enough that most trips could happen by bike, if only the infrastructure were built to prioritize bike travel.

I’ve gone to City Council meetings on and off to advocate for issues I care about for years. In the past, I’ve gone to a council meeting or two, spoken to an issue on the agenda and then continued about my life.

Some fights we win. Some we lose. Some we take a compromise. Life goes on.

Climate change is different. This moment in history, is different. In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did everything they could to light a fire under our collective rear ends.

After the IPCC Report came out, I started going to council meetings much more frequently.

At first, it was advocating against taking debt to build two parking garages. In the context of climate change, taking on millions in debt to build garages that last 50 years makes zero sense. The council was slow to respond, and even the most climate focused of the current representatives didn’t go as far as to vote down both garages. After that, I started reaching out to those who seemed to be listening for meetings. And for the rest, I started coming to council just to step up to the public comment microphone.

For several weeks, I built up the argument for drastic climate response in 3 to 5 minute chunks. It still seemed like most of the current council members were struggling to wrap their minds around the full scope of the issue - and the required response.

I wanted them to panic. We need them to panic. (And then take a breath, and get to work.) They weren’t panicking.

That’s why I decided to run.

I know, it’s a hard thing to come to terms with. Not only do you have to believe that we have to change drastically, you have to believe that drastic change is possible. You have to believe it’s with in our power on the local level. And you have to be willing to completely set aside business as usual, to reassess everything.

Well, I believe that it’s not just possible, but imperative for the survival of future generations. It is with in our power on the local level. In fact, one way or another, the local level is where change is going to have to come.

We can do this.

We just need leaders who will panic. Then take a breath and get to work.

I didn’t make the decision to run lightly or eagerly. I’d be lying if I said this felt like the best time in my personal life to be approaching an undertaking of this size. But given what we face, I had to do my part.

Last October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has consistently underestimated the consequences of climate change, released a report in which they did something unprecedented: they called for a World War II level mobilization to cut carbon emissions by 45% in the next decade (by 2030) and by 100% in the next three decades (by 2050). If we don’t, they predict we’ll start to see “catastrophic” consequences as early as 2040. That, in and of itself, should drop your jaw. UN bodies seldom call for drastic action like that, and calling for a world wide mobilization of that scope and scale is unprecedented.

We can’t wait any longer. We can’t keep making tiny, incremental improvements and hoping, praying, someone else is going to fix this for us. Every community is going to have to do its part, and we have to do our part. Right here, right now, in Bloomington. If we get help from State or National governments, great! But we have to set a goal of cutting our own emissions by 45% in the next decade and start working towards it. We have to try.

Our leaders, unfortunately, aren’t really even trying. Not really. Not yet, anyway. Mayor Hamilton has pushed for some progress on sustainability, but his policies don’t even begin to go far enough. There are some on the City Council who appear to be trying to grapple with this issue, but few seemed to have fully grasped the consequences of our plight. It’s not good enough.

We have to do better.

So, I’m going to do my part. If nothing else, I can make sure we have this conversation and grapple with the issue. I can put the goal on the table and say “We have to go there”. We have to work to cut our emissions by 45% in the next decade. That means completely reconfiguring our transportation infrastructure to support low emissions modes (walking, biking, and public transit). It means getting solar and wind on the grid by any means necessary. It means helping people retrofit their homes for energy efficiency so we can cut home heating oil use. And it means finding ways to put pressure on local industry to cut their own emissions.

It’s not going to be easy. And, in some cases, it may mean asking people to change long ingrained habits. But if we want there to be many future generations, we have to grapple with this challenge. I truly believe we can. Previous generations have overcome challenges just as great. Now it’s our turn.

If you want to learn more about the campaign, here’s my campaign website: http://danielbinghamforbloomington.com

You can also follow along on our Facebook Page.

On February 6th, the Herald Times posted a short article about purchases being made by the Bloomington Police and Fire Departments. Contained in that article was this unassuming snippet, which set off a firestorm.

The Bloomington Police Department this spring will receive a Lenco BearCat; the letters stand for “ballistic engineered armored response counter attack truck.” It is not a military surplus vehicle, but is being purchased new for $225,000.

It will be paid for with local income taxes, city spokeswoman Mary Catherine Carmichael said.

Bloomington’s Police Department is purchasing a Lenco BearCat. This is a Lenco BearCat.

When I first read those sentences, I didn’t quite believe it. I had thought that our administration understood the problems inherent in the militarization of the police and wouldn’t have supported this.

I reached out to various folks I know in the mayor’s office to find out what the deal was. Apparently, it was first brought up in the budget talks in August. The CIRT team (essentially our SWAT team) asked for it. They get called to incidents all over the southern part of the state.

They want the armored truck for protection when they’re approaching an incident site. That’s the most dangerous part of incident response. Right now, they approach in unarmored vans and are vulnerable. They are asking for the BearCat as a replacement for a used Brinks bank truck they used for the roughly ten years spanning from 2002 to 2012.

In response to the viral uproar, the Police Department posted a “Talking points” document to social media, further clarifying their case.

Since 2012 when the last armored vehicle was retired due to poor condition, the Bloomington Police Department has been without the protection and capability afforded by such a vehicle, placing officers, suspects and innocent civilians at risk. The CIRT vehicle will only be used at the direction of the Chief of Police and only to deal with situations in which a heavily armed threat is imminent or believed imminent. The use of CIRT and any special equipment utilized by CIRT is governed by department General Orders.

The lack of an armored vehicle added to the danger level faced by all involved in several recent local instances:

• a stand-off with an armed suicidal suspect on South High Street
• a confrontation with an armed suspect on Strain Ridge Road
• an incident on West Vernal Pike where a group of home
• invasion robbery suspects had barricaded themselves
• a hostage-taking on South Rogers, which ended with the law enforcement use of lethal force

Since I started researching and writing this post at the beginning of this bruhaha, Black Lives Matter has disrupted Mayor Hamilton’s State of the City speech to protest the BearCat. The City Council held a Town Hall to elicit feedback on the purchase. Steve Volan enlightened us as to how, exactly, it got to the point where the purchase was nearly a done deal with out anyone catching wind of it (including, apparently, the council). The Council responded to questions taken at the town hall and the Police Department elaborated on their talking points in an executive report. The conversation is on-going, with Mayor Hamilton announcing a decision whether to back out the purchase or go ahead with it coming at the end of March.

I’m willing to explore the argument that there is a real need for some sort of armored vehicle. But a BearCat should not be that vehicle. A quick google turned up other perfectly viable options, like this armored van used widely in Canada. If, at the end of this piece, you find my reasoning convincing, please reach out to the city ask them to stop the purchase of the BearCat.

Is the BearCat a Military vehicle?

At the heart of the issue is the question of whether the BearCat is a Military (militaristic, military-style) vehicle. The council has requested the police not militarize in the past. They kept a careful watch on the Police Department to prevent them from taking advantage of the Military Surplus program and obtaining anything like an MRAP. So it’s clear at least some in our city government understand the problems inherent in police militarization.

But the Bloomington Police Department are arguing that the BearCat is a civilian vehicle. It’s not military surplus. It has a civilian frame (that of a Ford F550 truck). They’re saying that it doesn’t represent a militarization of the police and so it shouldn’t fall under the same restriction.

I strongly disagree.

Though the Lenco BearCat may not be a military surplus vehicle, it is a military vehicle, and it does represent a militarization of the police.

From Lenco’s own website:

Lenco trucks can be used in a variety of missions. The BearCat, our best selling truck, may be used as a S.W.A.T. or Military Counter Attack and Rescue Vehicle and is often used in hostile Urban Environments or as a Patrol/Reaction Vehicle on a Military Base. The BearCat, with its standard NIJ IV armor and 4WD system, can carry up to 10 people through varying terrain. The BearCat has been embraced by several DoD and DoE Security Forces and, because of its affordability, low maintenance expenses, ease of use and superior armor level, is increasingly the replacement vehicle of choice for up-armored Humvees. It may also be equipped with our optional Mechanical Rotating Turret with Cupola (Tub) and Weapon Ready Mounting System, suitable for the M60, 240B and Mark 19 weapons system.

Let me just emphasize a few parts of that.

The BearCat […] may be used as a […] Military Counter Attack and Rescue Vehicle and is often used in hostile Urban Environments or as a Patrol/Reaction Vehicle on a Military Base.

Military Counter Attack. Often used in hostile Urban Environments. Often used on Military bases.

The BearCat has been embraced by several DoD and DoE Security Forces and […] is increasingly the replacement vehicle of choice for up-armored Humvees.

The DoD is increasingly replacing its Humvee fleet with BearCats. This doesn’t sound like a civilian vehicle. The Military seems be quite amenable to it!

It may also be equipped with our optional Mechanical Rotating Turret with Cupola (Tub) and Weapon Ready Mounting System, suitable for the M60, 240B and Mark 19 weapons system.

The M60 and M240B are heavy machine guns. The Mark 19 is a grenade launcher. That Weapons Ready Mounting System can also mount high powered water canons, by the way, and was used to do exactly that against protesters at Standing Rock, soaking them with water in sub-zero temperatures leading to hypothermia and frostbite.

This is how Lenco has promoted the BearCat to police departments in the past:

I’m sorry, this is not a civilian vehicle. This is a military Armored Personnel Carrier. BPD may have ordered an unarmed one, but the BearCat is thoroughly armable. Counter Assault Truck is right there in the name. It’s not a defensive platform. It’s not a “Protected Escape Truck”. It’s a Counter Assault Truck.

A quick aside is necessary here. In their recent executive report on the whole situation, our BPD made the claim that “BearCat” isn’t an acronym for anything, attributing the claim that it is to an erroneous wikipedia page. However, if you search for the phrase “Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck” you will find it in news articles going back to the BearCat’s introduction, including several articles reproduced on Lenco’s page. What seems likely is that Lenco faced a backlash for its use of the acronym, and, in a classic example of corporate gaslighting, dropped it.

At its most stripped down, a BearCat is still a mobile sniper platform sporting gun ports from which officers can fire rubber or real bullets depending on the situation. And from what I’ve been told, that’s more or less exactly how the BPD CIRT team intends to use it. They intend to bring it to barricade or active shooter situations and snipe the shooter or barricader out of it.

Like I said, I’m open to hearing the argument that our police need some sort of armored transport to bring them safely to, and remove them safely from, active shooter situations or barricade situations. But that doesn’t have to mean letting them purchase a military weapons platform.

Of course, how you feel about our police purchasing a weapon of this sort depends heavily on whether you trust our Police Department. Or the institution of policing in general. Many people, especially people of color, have very good reasons not to trust either.

The Context of Policing in America

In recent years, we’ve seen a wave of deeply disturbing revelations about police activities across the US. Black Lives Matter has highlighted instance after instance of police officers using excessive force against people of color, especially black men.

Many of these instances involved the police killing unarmed black men who posed no threat to them. The instances seem endemic to policing in America, occurring in cities big and small and in almost every state in the country. It seems new ones continue to occur on a weekly basis. Few of the officers involved face any sort of justice, even when there is clear video evidence showing that their use of force was in no way justified.

Because no government entity tracks police involved shootings, The Washington Post and other news organizations have had to comb through local news reports to tally the number of officer involved shootings across the country. In 2015, the Post counted 965. Of those, only about half involved suspects armed with a gun. 281 were armed with “another weapon”. 90 were unarmed. Even though Black men only account for about 6% of the US population, they made up 40% of unarmed men shot to death by police that year.

Keep in mind, Philando Castile, who was shot while legally carrying a firearm and did everything by the book during the police stop, technically counts as armed.

Other tallies in that year came up with even higher numbers. The Guardian counted 1146 that year. Fatal Encounters, a blog and independent research organization founded by the former Editor of the Reno News and Review, and a journalism instructor at the University of Nevada, Reno, counted 1,357. That same year, there were only 13,286 total gun homicides. Of which about 475 occurred during mass shootings.

Britain had 3 police involved killings in 2015. The number of killings since 2000 fits on a Freddie Grey and Sandra Bland, stand out in that regard.

But that’s just the tip of the ice berg.

As BLM has worked to shine a light the issues of race and policing, research has highlighted just how deep the problems racial profiling and excessive force go.

In lawsuits and investigations, the U.S. Department of Justice has concluded that a number of major police departments have engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force. The Cleveland Police Department was most recently found to be an offender, but it follows a long line of other wayward law enforcement agencies: Seattle, New Orleans, Portland, Newark and Albuquerque among them. Clearly, cases like Eric Garner’s are not isolated — police use of excessive force is a systemic, national problem.

We’ve seen how that targeting results in the vastly disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color. These are structural issues, embedded in how we do policing everywhere.

But that’s not all.

In 2014, we saw the militarized response to the protests against Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson. That same year, the ACLU completed a year long report on the militarization of the police. It revealed some disturbing facts about how the police have been using their SWAT teams with their military style equipment:

Among the notable findings:

• 62 percent of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
• Just under 80 percent were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight in 10 SWAT raids were not initiated to apprehend a school shooter, hostage taker, or escaped felon (the common justification for these tactics), but to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime.
• In fact, just 7 percent of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
• In at least 36 percent of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. The report notes that due to incomplete police reports on these raids this figure could be as high as 65 percent.
• SWAT tactics are disproportionately used on people of color.
• 65 percent of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.
• Ironically (or perhaps not), searches to serve warrants on people suspected of drug crimes were more likely to result in forced entry than raids conducted for other purposes.
• Though often justified for rare incidents like school shootings or terrorist situations, the armored personnel vehicles police departments are getting from the Pentagon and through grants from the Department of Homeland Security are commonly used on drug raids.

It’s notable that much of the reasoning that BPD is using to justify the purchase of a BearCat is very similar to the public reasoning used by departments across the country - talk of hostage situations, and mass shootings loom large. Strangely, many of those departments use very different reasoning with the each other and with the military when making requests for equipment.

No community, they argued, not even the smallest one, is safe from worst-case scenarios like mass shootings, hostage situations, or terrorist attacks. The use of this military equipment has resulted in “substantial positive impact on public safety and officer safety,” Jim Bueermann, the president of the Police Foundation, a research group, said in a 2014 Senate hearing on police militarization. He cited hostage situations, rescue missions, and heavy-duty shootouts where the vehicles had come in useful. 

But in private, police justify these same programs in radically different ways.

Mother Jones obtained more than 450 local requests, filed over two years, for what may be the most iconic piece of equipment in the debate over militarizing local police: the mine resistant ambush protected vehicle, or MRAP.* And an analysis of these documents reveals that in justifying their requests, very few sheriffs and police chiefs cite active shooters, hostage situations, or terrorism, as police advocates do in public.

Instead, the single most common reason agencies requested a mine-resistant vehicle was to combat drugs. Fully a quarter of the 465 requests projected using the vehicles for drug enforcement. Almost half of all departments indicated that they sit within a region designated by the federal government as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. (Nationwide, only 17 percent of counties are HIDTAs.) One out of six departments were prepared to use the vehicles to serve search or arrest warrants on individuals who had yet to be convicted of a crime. And more than half of the departments indicated they were willing to deploy armored vehicles in a broad range of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) raids.

In 2015, we learned about Homan Square, the off the books interrogation site Chicago police had been using for decades to violate citizens rights. Suspects would be disappeared to Homan Square, where their attorneys couldn’t find them, held there for hours or days and aggressively interrogated.

We also saw police across the nation react with derision and disgust to the body camera video of an officer in Ohio who didn’t shoot a suspect, and successfully de-escalated the situation.

In 2016, we saw an officer in West Virginia get fired for trying to de-escalate a situation. That officer recently won a civil case against his department, but that does nothing to allay the clear cultural trends.

Through out all of this there were almost daily reports from across the country of people of color, especially young black men, being killed at the hands of police. Police might say they train in and practice de-escalation. The evidence strongly contradicts that.

But it gets even worse (as if Homan wasn’t bad enough).

In 2017, we saw the Charlottesville police stand by as neo-nazis invaded the town, shot at protesters, assaulted people, [threatened a synagogue filled with faith leaders], and killed a young woman by driving a car into a crowd. After the dust cleared, it took national pressure on the Charlottesville Police Department to get them to pursue the neo-nazis responsible for the violence, even when they were caught on video.

In 2018, we’ve seen police in California revealed to be actively working with neo-nazi groups to track down and harass anti-fascist protesters.

And we’ve seen widespread corruption revealed in the Baltimore Police Department. The trial has seen some truly stunning revelations:

• Ward said the officers kept BB guns in their vehicles “in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them.” He did not say whether the officers ever planted a BB gun on anyone.

• Ward testified that his squad would prowl the streets for guns and drugs, with his supervisor, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, driving fast at groups of people and slamming on the brakes. The officers would pop their doors open to see who ran, then give chase and detain and search them. Ward said this occurred 10 to 20 times on slow nights, and more than 50 times, “easy,” on busier nights. The officers had no reason to target the crowds other than to provoke someone who might have drugs or a gun into running. “A lot of times” guns and drugs were recovered in this way, Ward said.

• In one incident, police took a man’s house keys, ran his name through databases to find his address, went into the home without a warrant and found drugs and a safe. The officers cracked open the safe, which had about $200,000 inside. They took $100,000 out, closed the safe back up, then filmed themselves pretending to open it for the first time. “Nobody touch anything,” Jenkins can be heard saying on the video, which was played for jurors.

All of this isn’t even touching on things like the police’s widespread abuse of civil asset forfeiture, or the many stories from small town departments that don’t grab national attention, like this one from 2006 that reveal officers egregiously abusing their power the moment they feel even slightly challenged. After that story aired, the police harassed and pursued the reporter who recorded it, arresting him on a charge of “violently resisting arrest” and getting him fired.

This section of this post is already absurdly long and this is just the stuff I remembered hearing about and was able to find in a night or two of Googling. As I’ve worked on this post I’ve continued to find more examples of police racism, abuse of power, overreach, corruption, and authoritarianism.

Of course, anyone knowledgeable about the history of the police as an institution in America will tell you that none of this stuff is new. There are whole books written on the abusive and racist history of policing in this country. On the targeting of minorities and marginalized populations. The abuse of power. The corruption.

Simply put, the way we do policing in this country, the way we hire police, the way we train them, the procedures we instruct them to follow, the rules that govern them – all of it. It is all deeply, fundamentally broken.

Bloomington and BPD Are Better

Over and over again through out this debate, the Bloomington Police Department, and those supporting the purchase of the BearCat, have made an argument that boils down to “The Bloomington Police Department is better”. Bloomington isn’t Ferguson they say. They point out that BPD meet most of the ACLU’s recommendations from their report about militarization of the police. They’re trained in deescalation and the reasonable use of force. Our BPD won’t use the BearCat against protesters.

“Trust us.”

I’m going to jump right past the problems inherent in the purchasing process for this BearCat, I think Steve Volan covered that fantastically. Suffice it to say, if BPD really did “know what Bloomington wants” as Chief Diekhoff says, they’d have at the very least flagged the BearCat as a potentially controversial purchase and asked Mayor Hamilton to hold some public engagement around it. Instead, it sure looks as if they tried to sneak it by as a fait accompli.

To the larger question, would it surprise you to learn that Bloomington has a greater racial disparity in our arrests than Ferguson does? That’s what the Indianapolis Star found when they looked into it after the Ferguson protests.

In more than 40 percent of the nation’s police agencies studied, the disparity in arrests was higher even than in Ferguson, Mo., where the arrest rates of blacks are nearly three times those of whites. That was true in Indiana, too.

Among those departments with a higher racial disparity in arrests than Ferguson were Avon, Bloomington, Carmel, Fishers, Greenwood, Indianapolis, Johnson County, Kokomo, Lafayette, Speedway, Westfield and West Lafayette.

Bloomington’s just so segregated that, if you’re white, it’s easy not to realize it.

I grew up on Bloomington’s wealthy, and white, south east side. I grew up in the Elm Height’s neighborhood near Bryan Park. I don’t think I can remember seeing a single person of color living in my neighborhood during my childhood. I only rarely saw Police cars, and then it was just them driving by.

I now live on Bloomington’s poorer, and more mixed race, west side – just down Adams from Crestmont, one of Bloomington’s public housing developments. I see people, often people of color or low income people, pulled over by police on a regular basis – monthly, if not weekly. I’ve seen more than a few arrests, something I didn’t see once while growing up on the south east side.

There’s a national (and deeply problematic) trend of poorer and more racially diverse neighborhoods being more heavily policed. Which leads to higher levels of arrests and ticketing. Which leads to those neighborhoods getting labelled “high crime” (though the stats that justify the label are just “high arrest numbers”). Which justifies heavier policing and creates a feedback loop that harms low income people and people of color.

From what I’ve seen, Bloomington isn’t exactly bucking that trend.

I’ve heard from friends who were there during the final days of the Occupy protests that they overheard BPD officers lamenting the hands off approach dictated by Chief Diekhoff. Many have tales of beatings and police brutality at the hands of BPD officers when the order to break up the encampment was finally given. My friends of color have many tales of harassment and unnecessary escalations at the hands of BPD officers.

The stats on our CIRT team’s outings aren’t on the City of Bloomington’s Data Portal, so there’s no way to confirm that they’re only being called out for barricade or active shooter situations. There’s no way to compare them to the numbers from the ACLU’s report on police militarization.

What’s more the complaint process goes through the Police Chief, not through any citizen body. According to the complaint form, at no point in the complaint process does anyone outside of the Police Department even see the complaint. Marginalized people who’ve had bad run ins with police are not likely to trust a complaint process that goes through the Police Chief.

The data in City’s Data Portal about complaints against the Department is exceedingly vague. There are only 19 complaints recorded. I can’t help noting that only a single complaint in the last two years has lead to any sort of discipline.

I know some people may look at this and go “Well, this is mostly anecdotal.” But often, when there are structural power imbalances like this, anecdote is all you have. The #MeToo movement is built almost entirely on anecdote: victim after victim standing up to tell her story.

One of the key pieces of hard data we do have, the racial disparity of arrests, is very telling. It should give anyone who thinks BPD are better than other departments serious pause.

And then, in the midst of all this, BPD showed us exactly how they treat people of color in Bloomington.

With a Family of Color, BPD Escalate

On February 18th, The Herald Times ran a front page article detailing a recent encounter between the Bloomington Police Department and a local family of color. An encounter the Bloomington Police Department escalated beyond all reason.

Apparently, the previous Saturday, a social media post was brought to the attention of BPD. It featured two young – 10 and 11 – boys of color posing with, apparently, real weapons and a caption that angrily referred to some of their classmates saying they would be “lit up”.

In the current moment, an action like that was bound to create a powerful reaction. BPD were entirely justified in investigating.

They tracked the boys down to a residence, that was apparently hosting some sort of party or event, the article isn’t terribly clear on the matter. I’m guessing some details have been obfuscated because the boys are minors.

Once they arrived at the residence Laquita Perry-Leverston revealed to them, and they confirmed, that the “guns” in the social media post were BB-guns. The BB-guns didn’t represent a danger to anyone. It’s a good bet that BPD were told that the boys didn’t have access to real firearms.

At this point, were they the experienced, respectful, and well trained police force, worthy of our trust, we’ve been told they are, they would have deescalated the situation. They would have stepped back and reassessed whether they really even needed to proceed. They would have worked to calm those present and, if they felt it absolutely necessary, just confirmed that there were no real firearms present before ending the whole encounter.

They didn’t.

They obtained a search warrant and began removing people from the building. In the course of removing people from the building, they came across the Perry-Leverston’s 17 year old son, on probation for a previous armed robbery conviction. This young man was reasonably agitated on encountering the police, having experience with the criminal justice and the prison system, and when they went to remove him from the building he requested they respect his personal space: (“Don’t touch me.”)

They could have respected his request and found a way to calm him. Instead they escalated, and arrested him on a charge of “resisting arrest”. That classic, all purpose, self referencing charge the police can apply to anyone who’s rights they want to disrespect. Never mind that they had absolutely no reason to bother the young Perry-Leverston in the first place, other than that he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When his parents, Laquita and Paris Perry-Leverston, expressed their entirely reasonable outrage at this turn of events, the police further escalated. They arrested both the elder Perry-Leverstons and charged them with Disrupting the Peace and Resisting Arrest.

In the end, they found no firearms. Only one more BB-Gun. But instead of admitting that they were in error, and perhaps finding some non-criminal way to discipline the two young boys, they brought all 5 of those they arrested, the two boys, the 17 year old Perry-Leverston and his parents, to prison and charged them all.

In the end, 5 people of color, who didn’t represent an active threat to anyone were in prison and charged with crimes.

I find it very hard to believe a white, middle class family would have been treated this way in Bloomington. This whole affair is a classic example of the unjust, and, yes, racist treatment people of color experience at the hands of the police across the country.

If you’re still arguing that our police force is different, maybe you should step back and ask yourself what else has transpired in our town that you might have missed? How else have our officers treated the marginalized and dispossessed, those who don’t necessarily have the tools to call attention to their plights?

Conflict of Interest in Bloomington

While we’re on the topic of whether or not Bloomington does policing better than other places, a local BLM activist, investigating the Perry-Leverston’s case, recently brought a serious problem in our local judicial system to my attention.

Apparently the search warrant that lead to the Perry-Leverston’s arrest was signed by Judge Mary Ellen Diekhoff, the same judge currently slated to hear their cases. Judge Diekhoff is Police Chief Mike Diekhoff’s wife.

I called the County Court to try to confirm if, in fact, Judge Diekhoff had signed that warrant. Or signed any criminal warrants. The County Court didn’t know if they were public records or not. They passed me off to the Clerk’s office, they didn’t know either.

I finally wound up with the Prosecutors office. After a moment of confusion the secretary passed me off to a gentlemen who didn’t identify himself. I, stupidly, neglected to ask him to identify himself. Whoever I was speaking to told me that search warrants are public records unless they’ve been sealed. He was about to send me off on another merry go round the County’s departments in search of this particular warrant when I decided to just tip my hand and ask my question. I told him why I wanted to know and then asked him if Judge Diekhoff ever signed criminal search warrants.

“Well, of course she does! She deals with criminal and police matters all the time.”

“She signs warrants… for her husband?”

“Of course she does!”

What is Judge Diekhoff doing signing warrants for, or hearing cases brought, by her husband’s officers?!

That’s a serious ethical violation. I’m no lawyer, so it’s possible the gentleman in the prosecutor’s office was right when he told me that it’s not a legal violation.1 But if it’s not a legal violation, then it’s a moral one. A very serious failure of moral judgement. It’s a massive conflict of interest!

Our criminal courts are supposed to be adversarial, with the judges acting as neutral arbiters and facilitators. There is no way for Judge Diekhoff to be truly neutral when her husband’s officers are on one side of that court room. There is no way she can truly hold warrants to the proper legal scrutiny when it’s her husband or his officers asking her to sign them.

Not only are there emotional issues involved, but there are financial ones as well. She stands to lose or gain by the twists and turns in her husband’s career and those can play out in the warrants he gets and the cases his officers win.

I know many in Bloomington hold both Judge Diekhoff and Chief Diekhoff in the highest regard. With respect to those people, many I count as friends, it doesn’t matter how highly you think of people. The whole problem with conflicts of interest is that human psychology and bias prevent us from being neutral in those situations. It doesn’t matter how much we might try, it doesn’t matter how much we might intend to do the right thing, it is simply not possible for us to as unbiased as we should be when we have a conflict of this sort.

Frankly, the fact that neither Judge Diekhoff, nor Police Chief Diekhoff, recognized the problems inherent in a wife signing warrants for, or trying criminal cases involving, her husband’s police officers seriously calls into question both of their judgements. They should know better. And they should have worked to avoid the situation.

A conflict of interest of this sort, involving Judge and Police Chief, especially, is not only inappropriate, it’s dangerous and it’s a violation of the public trust. This same Police Chief wants us to believe he can be trusted to know when it is and isn’t appropriate to deploy a BearCat.

What About Protecting Our Officers?

The fact that I don’t trust our officers (or Police Chief) with a BearCat does not mean I don’t value their safety, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t other possibilities for protecting them.

A quick Google Search turned up this rather fetching looking SWAT van made by a Canadian company. It’s a Ford Transit 350HD built for SWAT teams. It’s armored to the EN1063 BR6 standard. That’s the European armor standard and BR6 is the second highest rating. Somewhere between NIJ III and NIJ IV, it can take multiple shots from a high powered rifle, and plenty of hits from an assault rifle.

Best part about it, it’s just a van. It’s not a military vehicle. No weapons mounts, no gun ports, and no battering ram. It is civilian, armored transport.

Our officers do have a right to protection, but they do not have a right to military style hardware. And we can give them that protection with out further militarizing them. We can buy them an armored van.

But that shouldn’t be the end of the conversation. Bloomington is our city. We can truly make it better. We can to listen to what the activists of Black Lives Matter are saying. They put a big pile of reforms on the table, Shaun King’s reforms, and we’d do well to listen. These reforms won’t solve all the problems inherent in policing – those problems run very, very deep – but they take a big step in the right direction. And it’s a good place to start.

Footnotes

1. After posting this, I decided to see if Google could confirm for me that there was no law barring Judge Diekhoff from signing warrants for or presiding over cases for her husband’s officers. Google was very helpful. From Title 28 of the United States Code:

(a) Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

(b) He shall also disqualify himself in the following circumstances:

[…]

(5) He or his spouse, or a person within the third degree of relationship to either of them, or the spouse of such a person: (i)Is a party to the proceeding, or an officer, director, or trustee of a party;

(ii)Is acting as a lawyer in the proceeding;

(iii)Is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding;

(iv)Is to the judge’s knowledge likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.

Granted, I’m not a lawyer. This is the United States Code, so it’s possible it only applies to federal judges and doesn’t apply to local judges. But if that’s what our local Justice officials want to hang their hats on to excuse this, then we need to clean house.