More balls than you guys
“The avalanche is coming. What are we going to do about it?”
“Why do the women with no guns have more balls than you guys?”
She said it right to Officer Patrick Hanlon’s face, as others around her pleaded with him: to do something, to just ask why the ICE agent to his right was ripping a teenager off the hood of an SUV he’d just stuffed her mother into. This ICE agent did so without saying why, or where they were headed, with his face covered, his tactical vest a generic operator green-grey, his identity still unknown, his commercial-brand bear mace loose in the Tactical Center Pocket at the front of his operator vest... where it was prone to falling, his mask prone to slipping down from his nose, revealing his entire face, the concealment of his identity forever rendered moot each time it happened and yet each time he’d pick the mask back up, reapply it to his nose. His badge looked plastic, no name, his restraints amateurish and limp-wristed.
She was holding her hand up, as if cupping them, these balls the women had and the cop didn’t.
“Why?”
This is bound to be a heavy post so I figure we start with the good before getting to the bad and the ugly. I have never in all my days seen someone say something so cutting and so cool and so Worcester to a police officer. It belongs on the very top shelf of the Worcester Is Ungovernable collection. It fills me with civil pride for this place the likes of which I haven’t felt in some time.
It’s funny, yeah, but it also strikes at the core of the thing: We are all being asked right now if we have any balls.
“You have the ability to stop this,” said the man to her right, community organizer Kevin Ksen.
“No we don’t,” Officer Hanlon weakly replied.
“Yes, you do.”
Having the ability means fuck all if you don’t have the will. Having body camera footage of this disaster means fuck all if we have no structural power to impose our will on the police department.
Oh yeah, I should say: we’ve got three whole body camera feeds of the May 8 Eureka St. ICE raid, courtesy a “first phase” dump on the City of Worcester’s YouTube page Friday. That’s what we’ll be discussing today. I have spent hours upon ungodly hours going through these tapes.
Back to the matter of balls, everyone who showed up to stop this forced disappearing proved they have ‘em. The cops, in turn, demonstrated their core function is not preserving “the peace” but rather suppressing anyone with balls enough to stand up to this senseless cruelty.
That the police showed up to assist something monstrous has been documented far and wide—most notably, to my mind, in a Rolling Stone story from Tuesday headlined “Trump’s ICE Used a Woman’s Kids and Grandchild as ‘Bait’ To Arrest Her.” I’ve since seen some unreleased video that confirms everything about the baiting described. Pure evil, and the WPD, which sucks up our public funds but bows to no public accountability, wantonly and aggressively facilitated it.
It matters a great deal, when you think of it that way, that an unarmed woman looked a cop dead in the eye, an agent of the federal government feet away from her, and said “man up.” It becomes necessary to understand why the cop said, in so many words, “I can’t.” That is why this story went national. It was not the “chaos.” It was that someone dared to say fuck this and found out what happens when you do that.
What we are staring at here—point blank—is the limits of “police reform.”
While the above moment takes the cake for me, honorable mention is the sweet-seeming elderly woman driving past the scene, who leans out of her car window at one Officer Juan Vallejo and says “I hope you’re happy with yourself,” in the particular brand of singular Worcester snark. The Masshole bless your heart. The comment takes him so off guard he obviously swears at her, but the feed is muted, and the stated reason given at the bottom of the screen is that the identity of a 16-year-old was at risk of being divulged. The same 16-year-old he’d just tackled and kneeled on moments prior.
Much if not most of the body camera footage released by City Manager Eric Batista on Friday is a grim cataloguing of over-the-top, reckless, antagonistic behavior. It captures lies. It captures the little tricks officers have developed to mute and obscure unsavory footage. It captures the crybaby sense of victimhood widely adopted by these men and women who have a monopoly on violence and a bastardization of the labor union praxis to keep it that way.
What I am asking you to consider is where compromise platitudes like “police have a difficult job but...” have gotten us. What I am asking you to think seriously about is the raw power of looking a cop in the face and saying, “Are you a man or not?”
The official line on the other hand is that the footage exonerates the police. Batista, Mayor Joe Petty, Candy Mero-Carlson... they’re all saying it. As if trying to will that reality into being. An approach straight out of Downfall.
Mero-Carlson, in a statement issued to her chosen media outlets (not us), makes the most outlandishly direct show of fealty: “The footage released today confirms this: Worcester Police officers did not aid ICE in any detainment. Instead, they responded with professionalism, compassion, and restraint in a complex and challenging situation.”
Joe Petty delivered a top 10 career highlight to Spectrum News: “At the end of the day, nobody got hurt.”
Jesus, Joe.
Who is the audience for this crap?
You say something so cartoonishly at odds with reality to your own detriment. You prove at once that you are sealed off, in your own hermetic world, and that you’ve given up any pretense you are the police department’s boss. That they have a boss becomes an open question—one of the only questions worth asking. We nearly got there with the DOJ report but in the final analysis that was subsumed, same as the anger back when they force marched the protestors in June 2020—the five year anniversary rapidly approaching. If they have a boss, we don’t know who it is. The footage everyone’s writing about right now is itself a long tail of the failures of 2020: I Demanded These Body Cameras And All I Got Was More Irrefutable Evidence Of What I Still Have No Power To Change.
‘What if they all had cameras?’ was a lousy question. We need to be asking better ones. The best question—Can Someone Actually Tell Them What To Do?—remains unanswered so long as no one with the power to ask ever tries. The only people who have that power are the mayor, the city manager (whom the mayor unilaterally chooses usually) and the chair of the public safety subcommittee (whom the mayor appoints). Petty, Batista, Toomey. All three of them in slightly different postures, but conveying the same total deference.
You can see how this is a mutually beneficial situation for the police and these three. One needs people to think they’re not in charge, the other desperately wants people to believe that they are.
Another good question: Can you become as supposedly powerful and influential as Joe Petty without that posture of total deference to the police department? Could a city manager ever get hired here without the police unions’ seal of approval? Those questions have not been asked in my lifetime.
Then, you have to ask, to whom is this deference given, exactly: the administrative structure of the police bureaucracy, or the more diffuse cultural influence of the union heads? We have to come to grips with the fact “the cops” are a separate entity from “the police department.”
The ultimate question, to my mind, is whether Thomas Duffy is the most powerful person in the city.
If you think that’s a silly thing to say, put a pin in it for when we get to the statements he’s made of late that would get any other rank and file city hall staffer fired.
In a recent post on How Stuff Works Hamilton Nolan put it potently:
The lesson in this is that the thing to win from powerful institutions is not a specific policy, but power itself. You don’t ask for an institution to make a decision that you like—you demand the ability to make the decisions.
What does that look like in Worcester? That looks like the public safety subcommittee. That’s where power is, and that’s where the powers that be have historically ensured that the power is neutered. Back to Nolan:
You don’t ask the Democrats to file a nice bill that they can later abandon; you demand particular personnel be installed in particular positions, where they can wield power directly.
You want to emerge from your moment of opportunity holding more of the power structure’s territory than you did before.
The ‘executive order’ Batista released on Friday is a master class in this not-trying-but-trying-to-make-it-look-like-you’re-trying approach Nolan articulates. More on that later. For now, let’s just look at what he told Spectrum News a few hours before the body camera footage dropped.
“I think there's been some back and forth in terms of whether we assisted or not assisted ICE in detaining this individual. The video footage will show that the individual was detained prior to our first officer arriving on scene.”
And then let’s look at this beautiful line Simón Rios over at WBUR pried from the Vic Mackey of Worcester, Local 911 President Thomas Duffy…
“From the perspective of the first officers who arrived on scene, the biggest risk right now is to protect the safety of the federal agents based on the actions that they observed when they got there.”
(The whole story is worth a listen/read: “Worcester ICE raid has city on edge.” I supplied some background info, scanner audio and audio from the scene. Thank you for the credit and link, Simon!)
Batista: We didn’t assist. Duffy: We assisted. When we have two such directly contradictory statements made on the same day we’re forced to ask which one is false. While I could give my opinion, writing is all about showing rather than telling. So let’s look at a little-discussed moment from the body cam footage of Officer Vallejo.
It’s 11:32 a.m. The teen and Ashley Spring are on their way to the paddy wagon. The ICE agents have their abducted mother in tow, safely on the road. The game is over, in other words. Time to pat butts and shake hands.
Officer Vallejo walks over to some federal agents milling about in the middle of the road. He’s with the gang unit officer who was wearing a WooSox hat the whole time and another officer in brand new blues who looks to be about 15. The five of them form a loose huddle. They’ve all got their thumbs tucked under their tactical vests as is the style of the times apparently.
“What the hell,” one of them says. Can’t make out who. WooSox Hat Guy shrugs.
The two agents both have ATF on their breastplates, perhaps they’re on loan to ICE to help fill the quotas from the Big Man. In any case, they look like IT guys more than hardos. You can barely hear it but the one closest to Vallejo says something about some “fucking idiot.” And Vallejo responds in the fashion of someone who just got thanked for what they did back there. “Whatever,” he says. “Yeah, of course.”
The ATF guy takes that as his cue to offer a return favor: “You guys good?”
“We’re here to handle it,” Vallejo says, as if to say ain’t no thing.
“You're just doing your job,” he continues, sympathetic and dismissive at the same time. His delivery is well worn. He’s said that phrase a lot, you can hear it. If you’re just doing your job that means you’re not responsible for why the job is being done in the first place. If you’re just doing your job you find it easy to resent anyone who makes it harder. Let me do my job they scream at the people pointing out their job is evil.
They may as well have dapped up. Then they were all on their separate ways.
It was a quick and forgettable moment of camaraderie but it serves as a unique reminder of the cultural problems that cannot be fixed with more training, better policies, or tougher discipline. The “law enforcement community” will look after its own. When Vallejo showed up on the scene he knew exactly who he was defending and who was the enemy. One side had the tactical vest on and the other didn’t.
A few moments later, as Vallejo walks away, he reveals he has the ability to manually mute his body camera at will. You see his thumb come over the screen then, under the time stamp in the top right, a new alert: MUTE. He talks to another officer on his walk from the scene. We can’t hear what they’re saying. He then walks up to his partner, the man who was driving when the video started. Though there’s no sound you can make out that he’s telling him to mute his camera. For a second, the guy looks puzzled. Then he figures it out.
The failure of body cameras as a substantive police reform is there to see in that little exchange if you want to see it. These are not tools that hold anyone to account. But that hasn’t stopped the checks coming in for Axon.
Help us not do copaganda!
Reading Copaganda, the new book by Alec Karakatsanis, and it’s amazing. (Might have to do a summer book club?) One particularly strong diagnosis: local papers of record and TV stations are essentially captured by a police PR apparatus that is much much larger and more comprehensive than you might think.
Police PR units literally produce content for the news, in a format that allows reporters, editors, and producers to exert as little work as possible. The replication and replacement by police PR officials of traditional journalist functions is particularly important given the prolonged and steep decline in the number of reporters and budgets in local newsrooms. Busy reporters, including those who aren't necessarily punishment bureaucracy zealots, thus fall into place, generating daily streams of copaganda because it is the path of least resistance.
I know this path of least resistance all too well. I used to be forced to take it as a harried beat reporter at a daily paper. I started my career on that path. Understanding it as such came slowly at first but proved a thorough political awakening that has informed all of my work here in this newsletter.
I will never ever ever ever take the path of least resistance and really that’s the business model here. You pay me directly so I don’t have to. And my not having to allows me to tell the truth in a way that others, still forced to walk that least resistant path, simply can’t.
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Baby bottles are dangerous weapons
School Committee candidate Ashley Spring is facing felony charges for her brave resistance to both ICE and WPD’s assistance of ICE. She also had a GoFundMe abruptly canceled on the severity of these charges (more on that in the days to come).
The felony is assault with a dangerous weapon. The dangerous weapon, we can now confirm, is… water from a literal baby bottle.
Vallejo’s footage shows clear as day that he knew it was water straight away. He goes over to her, points at her, shouts “She sprayed me in the face with water.”
But somehow, between that moment and the report being written, “water” turned into “an unknown liquid,” providing the necessary grounds to elevate the baby bottle carrying the water into a “dangerous weapon.”
In lay speak we call that a lie. In cop speak, we call that an understandable judgement error in the process of assessing the interior chamber of a dangerous weapon to ascertain the threat level posed by an unknown liquid within.
Kudos to Adam Bass at MassLive for making this the lede and headline in a story posted Saturday. With any luck this gets the charges dropped posthaste: “VIDEO: Worcester police knew ‘unknown liquid’ sprayed during ICE arrest was water”
The charges on the 16-year-old, it seems, already have been. Or, at least, the police have requested the court does so. Sure looks like the liability risk has made them blink.
Vallejo’s footage also debunks perhaps the loudest talking point—and boldest lie—from the Blue Lives Matter set in the wake of this: that Councilor Etel Haxhiaj assaulted brave police officers in the line of duty. After Vallejo and McGuirk pinned this young desperate woman to the ground, Haxhiaj comes over and demands they treat her better.
Haxhiaj: Please Let her go. She's my constituent.
Vallejo: The people who are under arrest are under arrest.
Haxhiaj: She's not… she hasn't done anything!
Vallejo: She's under arrest.
All the while Vallejo and others are shoving Haxhiaj, who endures it to continue making desperately demands that they treat a grieving girl with a shred of dignity and compassion. The cops stubbornly refuse.
“She hasn't done anything. Let her go. Please let her go. Let her go. She hasn't done anything. She's traumatized. She's traumatized. Why are you holding her?”
Silence in response. Once they’re done pushing Haxhiaj around they ignore her, and walk the young girl in cuffs to a paddy wagon down the street.
It’s the moments like these that have Local 911 President Thomas Duffy lobbing accusations of assault, and our state’s U.S. Attorney Leah Foley releasing a cryptic statement about how public officials who interfere with ICE will be investigated.
It all calls to mind a comment Khrystian King made at the last city council.
“If you have policy without oversight and accountability, if you have policy without community input, and if you have policy that's without buy-in from the union... If it's not there, the policy is just a piece of paper,” King said. “The union needs to get on board and participate in this, rather than participating in targeted attacks of politics. Let's focus on keeping people safe here in the city.”
He went on to call out certain union officials for trying to bully him.
“I've been informed that there's a number of folks in law enforcement who have a close eye on me, and I'm going to say this publicly. I'm going to say this publicly to all of you... I will not be bullied. I will do what's right on behalf of the people. I'm not a puppet for anybody. I'm not bossed. I'm not going to be bothered with this.”
This is how our brave police officers have rewarded King and Haxhiaj for demanding they do better: with shoves, insults, ridicule, vague threats.
He ended with a good line. “The avalanche is coming. What are we going to do about it?”
Batista’s executive order
We now have Eric Batista’s answer to that question and folks, it is a bad one! In the same statement announcing the release of the three body camera tapes, Batista also announced and linked to an “executive order” that is allegedly “implementing” some “new protocols.”
The document simply restates the law and prevailing practice, but with a weird emphasis on how you’re not to do certain things.
Thanks Eric. And then this gem:
To call this an “order” that “implements” anything at all is just a lie.
Others have responded much better.
Haxhiaj and Nguyen signed onto a call for the governor to take action. Worcester Havurah had a good statement.
Jennifer Gaskin knocked it out of the park with a recent post on her newsletter:
This is not democracy. This is power unchecked.
And Worcester, Massachusetts—the city I live in—is a perfect case study in this slow slide. We don’t have a strong mayor system. Instead, we have a city manager who holds more centralized power than most residents even realize. And when that city manager fails to serve the people—when they enable harm, silence dissent, or protect police violence—the City Council is supposed to hold them accountable.
But what happens when they don’t?
Or worse—what happens when they won’t?
So now what? I’m not sure. I’m tired. Tuesday is a budget hearing not a full council meeting, so we’re unlikely to see any major updates there.
I’m not convinced there’s anything to be won from the municipality on this issue, probably not even from the state government. The Democrats are just... not it.
I’d suggest getting involved in Neighbor to Neighbor and LUCE directly. They’re doing the work while city hall is doing nothing. So long as Petty is mayor, that will continue to be the case.
Request more footage!
This week Thu Nguyen and I teamed up on calls to action: records requesting the shit out of city hall for body camera footage and incident reports.
Interesting to note is that we launched the body camera requests the day before the city manager suddenly decided to release the “first phase” of footage.
There’s a lot of footage left to uncover! A lot of little details to be gleaned.
For instance, there’s a moment at the end of Vallejo’s tape where he’s obviously teaching his partner how to mute his body camera. What does that footage look and sound like from the partner’s perspective?
There were at least 30 cops at the scene and a good number of them were wearing cameras. Most of them would have had to have written incident reports.
You can join in on the fun by heading over to this document and following the instructions in the linked video.
Odds and ends
I was going to share the speech I gave at city hall on Tuesday with some annotations but this post is already much too long so... we’ll save it. For now you can watch it on the Worcester Sucks Instagram or on YouTube.
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Also go read homie of the newsletter Andrew Quemere’s big story in The Appeal. It’s fantastic.
Insane copaganda out of Auburn: using a dog and a drone to hunt down a shoplifter over $250. And they don’t even say what he allegedly took.
Here’s a good thing to sign if you like the fact I’m not in jail lol
Friend of mine who teaches over at Holy Cross AK Thompson tipped me off to this band Apes of State that’s playing at The Firehouse this week, on the 21st.
This video rocks. Makes me want to do some ghillie suit activities.
Ok like I said I’m tired!! It was a slog getting this over the finish line to be honest with you. But we did it folks. We fa-reakin did it. Talk soon!