In the face of apex arrogance
In the face of apex arrogance
Still your laughter can be heard
Marcellus Khalifa Williams and Enrique Delgado-Garcia—Outdoor Cat Hat—on abolition—Bergman’s bus blunder—local media goofs—odds and ends
In the face of apex arrogance
Mike Parson, the governor of Missouri, killed an innocent man this week—for no other reason than he could, and in spite of every reason why he shouldn’t.
Parson is now a murderer. Marcellus Khalifa Williams is now the victim of a murder for which there will be no reckoning—no investigation, no trial. There’s nothing to uncover. No “crime” that accounts for it. Parson killed with complete impunity. And he wasn’t the only killer.
Williams was also murdered by the correctional officers that walked him from his cell to the execution room. He was murdered by the technician that prepared the lethal injection and inserted it into Williams’ blood stream. He was murdered by the manufacturer of that substance, and the supply chain that brought the serum from the manufacturer to the prison. He was murdered by the cops who arrested him, back in 1999, the prosecutors who made the case to convict him, the twelve members of the jury who delivered his sentence. He was murdered by the media’s breathless reports of the prosecutor’s position. He was murdered by the public that consumed this news and saw in it any justice.
His murder is at the collective hands of the pig majority, all funneling down into the one hand of Parson—into the pen stroke that signed off on Williams’ state execution.
Williams’ last words were “All Praise To Allah in Every Situation!” Shortly before his death, he wrote a poem for Palestinian children, whom the pig majority also execute with impunity on a daily basis. The poem is titled “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine.”
The passage I found most affecting:
global aid thwarted,
global amnesia,
siblings and relatives gone forever,
parental worries -
in the face of apex arrogance
and ethnic cleansing by any definition...
still your laughter can be heard
and somehow you are able to smile
O resilient Children of Palestine!
To laugh in the face of an apex arrogance. To be resilient enough to smile. Every time I read this poem, a new layer of beauty unfolds.
The same carceral state—the same face of the same apex arrogance—killed an innocent man in Massachusetts, albeit in a different form. Someone within the State Police Training Center—we don’t even know who yet—beat Enrique Delgado-Garcia to death. Others watched this murder happen. After Delgado-Garcia died, politicians and attendant media apparati painted a picture of an accident. It was “unfortunate” and “heartbreaking.” But it was not “murder.”
The calls for an outside investigation have been loud. In response, Attorney General Andrea Campbell appointed David Meier, former head of the Suffolk District Attorney’s homicide unit, to carry one out—despite his not being an outsider. Not even a little bit.
“Mr. Meier has deep experience in death investigations and will ensure independence and integrity in this matter,” Campbell wrote in the announcement.
We are made to accept that his investigation will be impartial.
“The investigation into Trooper Delgado-Garcia's death will be undertaken professionally, thoroughly, and responsibly. The Delgado-Garcia family, their community, and the public have been waiting patiently. It is now time to get to work.” said Meier in the same statement.
Meier’s own professional biography paints a picture of a man more suited to represent the state police than Delgado-Garcia.
Mr. Meier counsels a full range of clients, including executives and companies faced with allegations of corporate fraud and other white-collar investigations, public officials and other professionals under investigation for alleged corruption or ethical violations, private individuals alleged to have committed serious felonies, sexual assaults, or death-related crimes, and students facing disciplinary and Title IX allegations at academic institutions.
And it’s hard to imagine that’s an accident. What the state is surely looking for here is an investigation that finds some “bad apples” but exonerates the institution. How would they be able to maintain the facade that the state police protect and serve if they indict its entire training facility? The violence our society calls upon the state police to inflict is too valuable to be brought to question so directly.
Meier will invariably look for the narrative that momentarily placates the public while providing long term cover for the institution. He will find some grunts to throw under the bus, or some cursory surface level reforms to introduce, and the net effect will be more money and more legitimacy for Delgado-Garcia’s murderers.
That’s his job. He knows it.
He is, after all, a member of the rotten, unreformable, amorphous blob of oppression required for the free flow of a racial capitalism: The pig majority.
And he’s dutifully served in this capacity before. Tapped to investigate the state police drug lab in 2012, Meier produced a report narrowly focused on the one chemist, Annie Dookhan, who’d been indicted for tampering with evidence. The report sought to prove that Doohkan was one bad apple in an otherwise well-run facility. It was later questioned after another chemist, Sonja Farak, caught charges for stealing drug samples. From a 2019 MassLive article:
The office of the inspector general is now saying in court documents that it did not seek to determine whether anyone other than Dookhan engaged in malfeasance. Rather, it conducted “a high-level review of the lab’s operation and management, and not an investigation specifically targeted at any individual’s conduct.”
They sought to find one bad apple, then when another emerged, they said they weren’t looking for bad apples but rather at the system as a whole. Convenient.
We should expect much the same this time around.
Meier is a cop, working at the behest of the cops. He will find precisely what he needs to and no more.
We should continue to demand a federal investigation, as the ACLU has called for, despite knowing even that is insufficient. But the solution on offer at the time being—to have a former prosecutor with a documented pattern of exonerating the state handle the “outside” investigation—is no solution at all.
Just yesterday, Delgado-Garcia’s parents gave their first interview to the local NBC station. His mother, Sandra Garcia, spoke through a translator as she recounted the moment she saw her son in the hospital.
She said all his teeth were broken and he has bruises on his body. Her heart tells her there was great negligence.
With so much damage done, she believes something strange happened.
She deserves a real outside investigation. The state owes her that, at the very least. But all the available evidence suggests she won’t get one. Not with Meier.
The governor of Missouri, a state-sanctioned murderer. The trooper or recruit or some combination of the two who broke Delgado-Garcia’s teeth and bruised his face, just the same. One finds impunity in an immoral law, the other in the peculiar way we ascribe the word “accident.”
Between the two stories, it’s abundantly clear that this system, which puts innocent people to death and allows gangs of sworn officers (and/or officers in training) to brutally beat recruits to a cold pulp, is a system that must be abolished. Full stop.
The cops must be eradicated—the first cop being the one in our heads. We cannot let that cop tell us there’s nothing to be done, that we have no real power, that the law is the law and that accidents happen. That we have to lie down in the mouth of this gaping maw and take its humid breath to be the weather.
In A World Without Police, a 2021 book by Geo Maher I quoted in the last newsletter, he lays out a short list of things we can all be doing right now to inch toward a collective awakening that there is indeed a cop in our heads, and that he shouldn’t be there any longer:
—Constant mobilization around every case of police brutality and violence. We need to fight for identities, for footage to be made public, for full names and addresses.
—Constant shame on city officials for their ongoing fealty to the police unions: “driving a wedge between mayors (and even police chiefs) and the aspiring fascists at the fraternal orders or police benevolent associations.”
—Encouraging breaks in the blue wall of silence. How do we make space for well-meaning cogs in a dirty machine to leak and defect? But not legitimize the “good apples” in the process, thus laundering the bad as an assumed fringe?
—Policing is a white supremacist institution that “increasingly relies on officers of color.” This is a peculiar and relatively new pressure point. Maher quotes a Pew survey that shows that Black officers differ from their white counterparts on issues like racial equality and the legitimacy of protest movements against police brutality. We saw this same dynamic in the racial equity audit the city commissioned for the WPD. The disconnect presents a useful wedge. The cops need to be careful to navigate this fault line, Maher writes, now more than ever. Raising the pressure makes it harder for them to do so.
—And then lastly, how do you give overpoliced communities (i.e. every Worcester neighborhood that’s subject to Shotspotter coverage) new room to breathe, to “regenerate a lost social fabric and build real alternatives.” How do you present a better alternative to the question of “who are we going to call when something bad happens”?
“This is how we break police power and build a world without police—not through policy papers, lobbying, or legal briefs but by helping communities recognize how much power they already have.”
My particular skill set and this platform I’ve built make me most adept at tackling the first three points: making police abuses known, shaming city officials, and encouraging leaks.
While the case of Williams is out of my wheelhouse, the case of Delgado-Garcia is not. Here we have a young Worcester kid brutally murdered by the institution he attempted to pledge his life to. We need to know who killed him in that boxing match, who let it happen, who has subsequently shielded them from accountability. We need to press for a full dismantling of this training center, and document a full accounting of its sordid history.
“The only antidote to the police is community, community, and more community,” Maher writes.
Cool Hat Alert!
On a lighter note, but along the same lines of supporting this outlet, I ordered some cool dad hats featuring Travis Duda’s (@hunchbacktravis) amazing outdoor cat design (background on the design here).
They can be found on the Worcester Sucks merch store! I also put in a big order for new shirts with new designs so stay tuned for that!
Trying to take the merch store a bit more seriously than I have in the past (sorry to all the folks who have waited literal months for orders!!). So if there’s some sort of Worcester merch you really want to see, let me know!
And as always, please consider a paid subscription or a tip!
On abolition
While we’re on the subject, Maher’s thoughts in the above piece have me looking inward, toward my approach to the Worcester Sucks project. It’s something I haven’t said, and couldn’t say as articulately as Maher, but I should say it: Worcester Sucks is an abolitionist newsletter.
I’ve consciously used the freedom of existing outside a corporate media structure to approach the question of oppression and the problem of police, within the narrow confines of this one city, in a way that feels much more innately honest and, thereby, accurate, than I was allowed to at more traditional outlets. Without knowing it, this pursuit of truth led me to abolition. And it's because the work is sustained by direct contributions that I’ve been allowed to go down that path without pushback.
It might be the only approach available to an unapologetically abolitionist local journalism project. Our foray into the world of non-profit funding via the Worcester Community Media Foundation has been a fraught, time-consuming endeavor. Just recently, we were passed over for grant funding from Press Forward, along with seemingly every other organization in ANNO (the Alliance of Non-Profit News Outlets, of which we’re a member), despite being very in line with the stated goals. It’s frustrating.
But the direct contribution model is working well. And it is fundamentally an exercise in community—we fund the kind of journalism we want to see. And I hope all of my paying subscribers have found it to be a good investment, and felt community in it.
On the road to abolition, those of us in media must confront and dismantle the crucial role it plays in upholding, laundering, and obscuring the current power structure.
“When we set ourselves to the task of building alternatives, of building a world without police or prisons, our strategic horizons expand by necessity,” Maher writes.
It’s not just cops and it’s not just jails. Everything about the carceral state needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. And that includes the local news.
I’d sooner let this project die on the vine than forfeit my ability to honestly interrogate the horizon of abolition. It occurs to me that this has been a guiding principal since the beginning—one I couldn’t quite find the words to describe, but felt with conviction.
The rest of this post covers local stories of little to no significance—just exercises in refining a style of reporting that, like any abolitionist project, tears down the old while building something new.
A farce of a city government
In a short snooze of a council meeting this week, there’s one moment worth focusing on in detail. Councilor Moe Bergman put on an order that seems innocuous enough. It read:
But when he got up on Tuesday night to speak on the order, it became... confusing. He began:
One of the benefits that came out of the unanimous vote we had with the WRTA taking it upon itself to be fare free is that fare boxes are removed but one of the downsides of them being removed is that we really don’t have a count of how many people use the buses.
That’s not even close to true. It took me all of five minutes to find a full report—from just last week—on ridership numbers, trends, and surveys of usage.
Bergman was apparently unaware of that report—or the fact that the WRTA still counts ridership despite it being fare free. In fact it was obvious he’d done no homework at all, and was basing his request solely on vibes...
I personally, and it’s anecdotal, I don't stop at every bus stop to look at how filled the buses are. But it seems to me that the buses are more empty than full.
...and the vibes of a handful of constituents...
I still hear people complaining about buses being late and routes not being efficient in terms of where people are being picked up and dropped off. And again I don’t see the buses being that full.
I remember on the stream, comrade Brendan Melican asking an important question right around when Bergman said the above line: When’s the last time you think Moe has crossed Park Ave except to go to the courthouse or city hall? I imagine it’s been quite some time. And then I’ll ask another: Has Bergman ever ridden the bus even once?
Bergman repeated himself:
I don’t know if we can tell how many people use the buses. I don’t know if there’s a way anymore to even know that. But I think it’s helpful to know that. We’ve had a lot of discussion over the last number of months over traffic related issues...
You mean the people dying, Moe? The kids getting hit by cars? Or do you mean the bike lane on Mill Street, which is in your opinion the pressing issue? (Remember when Bergman asked that the definition of “vulnerable road users” be expanded to include drivers in an effort to draw a false equivalent between a 13-year-old girl who got hit by a car and a 90-year-old man who rammed his car into a parked car, killing himself?)
And you know Boston has been thrown in the mix of the conversation. But the truth is Boston has a very efficient public transportation system. And we’re trying, but where are we? I don’t know how we measure that. So I'd like to see if there’s a way to measure that.
I pulled the clip:
Who is “we,” Moe? Because you’re clearly not even bothering to familiarize yourself with the issue, let alone “trying.” Instead of calling around to get numbers that are readily available, Bergman debased himself on the council floor “just asking questions,” as is tradition.
A report filed by the WRTA administration just last week has all the answers he’d need—though, I suspect, not the answers he’d like.
The report details a meteoric rise in annual ridership, up from 2.2 million rides in fiscal 2021 to 4.6 million in fiscal 2024.
As the report notes, it’s the highest ridership count this century. Every route, besides one (the 825) gained ridership.
Against this well-assembled data, we have Moe Bergman’s cursory observation that some buses are empty at certain times. That was enough for him, without looking any further, to suggest that something needs to change. We elect this guy. Every election cycle! It’s embarrassing.
Thankfully, Councilor Etel Haxhiaj pushed back on Bergman’s claims of a faltering system based on what the guys at Honeydew are telling him. In particular she homed in on Bergman’s strange claim that removing the fare boxes leaves us without solid data:
“I don’t want people to think that just because we have a fare free WRTA, that’s impacting our ridership in any negative way,” she said.
The WRTA was actually spotlighted in a recent national report on ridership trends, Haxhiaj said. “So I'm unsure what this order will do.”
Bergman got back up a second time. (Lying, he called it “a rare second time speaking.”)
“I don’t recall ever saying that fare free affected the quality of the ridership or the riders. I never said that. And If I did say that, it certainly was misinterpreted.”
For the record, Moe, if you’re reading this, you said 1., that the buses are empty (wrong) and that the move to fare free leaves us no way of assessing which buses are empty and which aren’t (also wrong). .;/////1
Bergman asked the city manager what the city contributes to the WRTA. The manager said nothing.
“So we have no oversight besides our representative (on the advisory board)?”
The manager said “that is correct.” One of our stream commenters, MainSouthMom, nailed it with this one:
Now understanding that the council has no oversight, Bergman continued to call... for oversight:
I’m concerned that there’s a lot of space on those buses that aren't being utilized. I don't know how to quantify it. It’s not a negative comment on the fact it's fare free or that we don't spend any money. It's just a reality [note: no it isn’t] and maybe we could make it more efficient. That's all I’m getting at. And it starts with a conversation.
My “that’s all I’m getting at” shirt has people asking questions already answered by my shirt.
But seriously: Nothing that happens in this city starts or ends with a conversation that Moe Bergman is involved in. He fundamentally misunderstands his role if he believes that to be the case. How can you, in the same breath, acknowledge that the council has no oversight, then say the way to fix the supposed problem is to “have a discussion” with the people who do have oversight. What do you think such a conversation will accomplish?
Bergman did however raise an important question by accident: Why does the city not contribute any money at all to its public transportation service? Now that right there is a worthwhile topic of council conversation.
What would an additional, say, $1 million from the city operating budget accomplish for our increasingly popular and well-used bus network? Between ShotSpotter ($575,000 annually) and Discover Central Massachusetts ($500,000 annually), there’s a little more than $1 million in the city’s operating budget that’s currently being more or less lit on fire. What could the WRTA do with that money instead?
Unfortunately, in this same meeting, the city council voted to dramatically curb its power to make those kinds of decisions. With only Haxhiaj, King, and Nguyen opposed, the city council voted to curb speaking time during budget hearings to a total of 20 minutes per councilor. That means just 20 minutes to ask the police, for instance, about their requested expenditures for the year. Any department.
Whose idea was that? Moe Bergman’s.
If you consider the role of a city councilor to be a sort of pontificator “just asking questions” in the weekly cable access spotlight, as Bergman obviously does (see above), then such a rule change makes sense. If, however, you see the role of a councilor differently—as a position of oversight and accountability in how public money is used by city hall—then this rule change makes no sense at all.
The council yet again showing it is a farce of a city government, and it’s content to stay that way.
Local media goofs and spoofs
Two local media goof-ups worth documenting.
For one, the Worcester Guardian caused a small stir with an agenda preview of the council meeting Tuesday. Within, editor Charlene Arsenault reported that the council will be discussing rent control (I wish)—by way of a 2019 item from Konnie Lukes. Even a casual follower of the council knows that the “tabled” section of the agenda is nearly identical every week, containing a hodge podge of orders that were formally “put on the table” over the years and never taken off. Lukes’ rent control item is one of those orders. It has been on every single council agenda since it was tabled five years ago. Nevertheless, the Guardian wrote:
A tabled item dating back to 2019 asks the city solicitor to provide a legal opinion on implementing a residential rent control program and its potential impacts.
A reader might get the impression that there’s some new action on the pressing issue of the housing crisis. But there simply wasn’t. Despite being called out for it, the Guardian has not updated the story. Great job, guys.
Our second media goof comes from Telegram statehouse reporter Kinga Borondy in a Sept. 23 story about Question 4 on the upcoming ballot (legalizing shrooms). Within, Borondy quotes one James Davis:
James Davis, co-founder of the advocacy group Bay Staters for Natural Medicine, wants the state to step on the brakes on implementing Oregon’s approach, citing the high cost of accessing the therapy in Oregon.
He said his group has chosen not to support the ballot question due in part to the high cost of setting up treatment centers, and questions about whether the Cannabis Control Commission is the right model for a regulatory agency for psychedelics.
What she doesn’t mention at all is the swirl of controversy around Davis. A former pro-legalization activist, he’s abruptly changed his tune in recent months, working behind the scenes to support an opposition committee while secretly pocketing a $35,000 donation from a pro-legalization group. He also co-opted the social media channels of a now defunct veterans group, at times impersonating the former founder of the group in emails to attack other activists. A real character! None of that comes through in the Telegram’s reporting.
Odds and ends
Thanks for reading! One more subscriber plug for the road:
And don’t forget about those dad hats on the merch store!
This post was yet again a day late but I’ll be back on track on Sunday I promise!
You may have already read it but Liz has a great interview for her Worcester Speaks column with local horror author Gretchen Gretchen Felker-Martin about writing and Worcester and what makes good horror. Give it a read if you haven’t: Worcester Speaks #4: Gretchen Felker-Martin
A few odds and ends...
The former city manager’s development company has secured funding from the backers of the Polar Park to turn the old Worcester Boys Club into senior housing. On and on the circle jerk goes.
There’s a GoFundMe for Jay Fish, the most recent pedestrian fatality in this city. More on her avoidable death in my last post, in case you missed it.
On the council agenda next Tuesday there’s going to be a public petition that the rest of the ARPA money left to spend goes directly to BIPOC orgs.
John Stewart is performing at the Hanover Theater coming up. Pretty neat.
Chris Faraone and Sam Stecklow of the Boston Institute of Non-Profit Journalism have a really big and comprehensive story up about the failings of the POST Commission.
Great work from Tom Marino at This Week In Worcester on the WPI situation: The Myth of Corporate Partners and Gateway Park’s Hotels
Good piece in Jacobin by Richard Schweid about criminalization and homeless children.
To institute a policy of rapid rehousing, however, a community must be willing to provide rent subsidies for, say, a year, and to have a stock of decent housing with accessible rental prices. A community commitment is needed to assure that our children do not have to live in cars or motel rooms. By converting homelessness into a crime, communities can turn their collective backs on these people without feeling qualms.
Last night me and Katie watched Rebel Ridge, a new movie out on Netflix. It’s a surprisingly cool action flick with a great premise: A man goes to a podunk Southern town to post his cousins bail and the cops rob him by way of an illegal traffic stop and civil asset forfeiture scheme. He burns the town down to get his money back. James Cromwell plays the town’s judge. Very sick.
We love to see media where cops are unequivocally the bad guys they are in real life! More of that, please.
Ok see ya on Sunday!
See: The Crime / The Criminal (X formerly known as Twitter user Bill_Shaner Oct 3 2024)