There’s no Ministry of Truth here
There’s no Ministry of Truth here
The American machine recognizes apathy is useful
All right all right back as promised with a regularly scheduled Sunday story. If you missed it, we got into Foucault’s Boomerang and the rental registry foolishness and other stuff on Wednesday.
Today, we’re looking at Gaza media bias via our local paper of record, then taking a dive into the Human Rights Commission meeting this week with police brass. Then, Joe Early’s especially garish civil asset forfeiture policy gets a shout out in a Supreme Court decision. Then other stuff.
Worcester Sucks is free to read but not free to produce. It takes a lot of work! Would not be possible without the 715 paying subscribers allowing me to treat this like a full time job. Consider joining them and if you already have thank you for the 1,001 time I love you!
Also I just want to say hello and thank you to all the new people here after the last post, in which I took a quick moment to highlight the credible rape allegation against local bar owner Sean Woods. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive and that’s a good look for all of us.
Cute pugs alert!!
First a palette cleanser.
I was down at Rewind Video on Thursday recording a video essay for a new project you’ll be hearing about soon.
And as I’m down there milling about I run into Bill and Jeri Gillin sitting outside Cordella’s Coffee (Rewind’s sister coffee shop!) enjoying a nice brew with their two adorable pugs. We talk for a while and then I’m thinking okay this is too perfect. Let me do a little video interview if you guys don’t mind. Well here that is!
“End the silence.”
That’s punchy lede of a story by Telegram reporter Henry Schwan on Thursday, headlined “Speakers at Worcester Jewish Community Center call for greater focus on Hamas brutality.”
What silence, exactly? Well, to answer that, we have to go through the top of the piece bit by bit. After “end the silence,” the second paragraph:
That message was delivered Thursday night at the Jewish Community Center in Worcester. Organizers kept the event largely under wraps, choosing not to promote it broadly because of tensions surrounding the conflict in the Middle East.
Ok, that all seems fine. Sure. Graf three starts this way:
Representatives from roughly a dozen Jewish organizations were in attendance, including the Jewish Federation of Central Massachusetts, and the message was clear.
Yup, still following. But then...
The attacks on Israeli women on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas were so brutal and unimaginable that not only should they never be forgotten, they must also be a central talking point in any discussion pertaining to the war in Gaza.
What those in attendance heard is that it's not been the case.
Wait, wait, wait... which attacks?
They say the silence has been deafening, and some expressed concern that politicians, those attending pro-Palestinian rallies, and the media aren't talking about sexual violence suffered by Israeli women on Oct. 7.
Ah. Those attacks. The ones that happened absolutely nowhere but in the pages of the New York Times. The ones that have since been debunked in highly public fashion—that prompted the biggest media scandal since the Iraq War. The ones that, just like the “aluminum tubes” piece back in 2002, greased the wheels for escalation of untold actual violence and hooting for said violence. That “sexual violence” must be the “central talking point,” apparently. That’s what politicians at pro-Palestine rallies and the media are being silent about, according to our local newspaper.
This “Hamas weaponized rapes” narrative promulgated widely following Oct. 7 as justification for a mass slaughter of Palestinians stemmed from a deeply spurious piece in The New York Times headlined “'Screams Without Words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It was published on Dec. 28, with three bylines: Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella. Obvious caveat: this is not to say that rapes didn’t happen, they just didn’t happen in the “weaponized” way that made it good propaganda. And Israel would do well to not play the “who does more rape” game.
I’m sure most of you are at least partially familiar with how the following scandal played out. But it’s worth going over the broad strokes.
The story was what we like to call a “bombshell” and came at a convenient time: the “dead babies” myth wasn’t holding up to scrutiny and the warmongers needed a new one. Finding a receptive audience, the story naturally spread like wildfire. But, at the same time, it started to raise some eyebrows in the journalism community, and continues to do so.
In late February, The Intercept published a long and substantive unraveling of this shady piece tilted “Between The Hammer And The Anvil: The Story Behind The New York Times October 7 Exposé”
It turns out there wasn’t much evidence at all to support the “weaponized rapes” narrative, and that the authors of the story had deep ideological and even professional connections to Israel. This is the main takeaway:
The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Rape is not uncommon in war, and there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day in a “second wave,” contributing to and participating in the mayhem and violence. The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details “establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7”—a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war.
The New York Times has not corrected or retracted the story. They’ve only taken the step of reviewing social media activity of one of the authors, Anat Schwartz, after it came to light she had liked a tweet calling for Israel to turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse” and “violate any norm, on the way to victory.” (Mission accomplished on both fronts, I think we can say by now.)
Schwartz also is a former member of the Israeli intelligence community and is the aunt of one of the other reporters and was not a professional journalist at all previous to the publishing of this story. So lots of hmmmm.
The fallout from this story continues. Just a few weeks ago, on April 30, an open letter signed by dozens of journalism professors called for The New York Times to commission an outside group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough review of the reporting, editing, and publishing process. From the letter:
The impact of The New York Times story is impossible to fathom. This is wartime and in the minds of many people, The Times’ story fueled the fire at a pivotal moment when there might have been an opportunity to contain it before, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, the situation devolved into the “plausible” realm of genocide. Considering these grave circumstances, we believe that The Times must waste no time in extending an invitation for an independent review.
The debunking of that story was so thorough that the narrative has mostly faded into obscurity as the warmongers on the TV walked it back in favor of more solid talking points. At this point, the story about “weaponized rapes” is a story about The New York Times. So to see the trope in the Telegram now, months later and without any mention of the media scandal, is jarring.
The way it’s sourced is even worse.
After presenting the narrative as a matter of fact—”so brutal and unimaginable that not only should they never be forgotten, they must also be a central talking point”—Schwan cites a UN report released in March that seems to support the claim to a reader who isn’t squinting too hard.
In March, the United Nations' special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict reported there were "reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel" on Oct. 7, while adding that the full extent of sexual violence committed during the attacks might never be known.
The representative, Pramila Patten, also said there was "clear and convincing information" that hostages held in Gaza had been subjected to sexual violence.
But when you read the UN report he’s quoting from, there’s also this...
Concurrently, the team determined that at least two allegations of sexual violence in kibbutz Be’eri — widely reported in the media — were unfounded.
And this, regarding Israeli sexual violence...
Turning to the West Bank, she painted a grim picture of “intense fear and insecurity, with women and men terrified and deeply disturbed over the ongoing tragedy in Gaza”. On her visit to Ramallah, she spotlighted instances of sexual violence in the context of detention, such as invasive body searches; beatings, including in the genital areas; and threats of rape against women and female family members. Sexual harassment and threats of rape during house raids and at checkpoints were also reported. She expressed disappointment that the immediate reaction to her report by some Israeli political actors was not to open inquiries into those alleged incidents but, rather, to reject them outright via social media.
The deeper I read into this UN report, the more spurious it became. The outlet Mondoweiss has a fantastic breakdown of the report and the context in which it was released.
The report, which details the findings of Patten’s visit, has emerged at a crucial moment. At a time when Israel’s narrative that Hamas committed systematic sexual violence on October 7 is crumbling, and the media outlets that spun this narrative are under fire, the report is being widely heralded as a vindication of both.
Our analysis shows that this is not true. The report does not, in fact, reach many of the conclusions for which it is being lauded in Western media, and several of its findings undermine the Israeli narrative. While we point these out, we note that the report contains severe limitations and pitfalls in credibility. It is important that we understand why the report cannot be trusted, as it has given new life to the cycle of mass rape propaganda that is being used to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Ah, that last line. That’s exactly how the Telegram is using it here!
After quoting the UN report selectively and uncritically, Schwan’s story is essentially a series of pot shots at local people who’ve supported Palestine.
One attendee said it's bad enough that college students are accepting "conspiracy theories" that denigrate Jews, but it's "scarier" that some faculty and a few Worcester city councilors are promoting the same ideas.
Steven Schimmel, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Central Massachusetts, expressed dismay that a Worcester State University professor had posted support on social media for students who disrupted the speech of an Israel Defense Forces officer invited to campus.
Councilor Moe Bergman doesn’t miss the opportunity, of course...
Worcester City Councilor Morris Bergman told attendees that he is the child of Holocaust survivors and that this is the “first time in my life I fear for the Jewish community in America."
Bergman is troubled by positions on the Mideast conflict taken by some members of the City Council.
Letters and calls to elected leaders won't work, said Bergman. What gets their attention is a unified Jewish community. “When we're divided, we're weak. They listen only if we're unified.”
There’s no attempt in the article to make even a vague overture toward “both sides.” It uses the convention of a meeting recap story to do so. Just reporting what people said at the meeting!
But this same reporter also covered a recent pro-Palestine demonstration at Worcester State. And wouldn’t you know it in that story there’s a whole lot of “fair and balanced” caveats. Like so…
There were collective chants, including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Some in the Jewish community consider the chant inflammatory, believing it's a call for the destruction of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
What Palestinians believe the chant to mean goes unmentioned. Instead, the next line reads:
The word “genocide” appeared on some homemade posters that popped up in the crowd, and the word was uttered in a speech or two.
The word was uttered. Lot of critical distance in that wording whereas no critical distance when it comes to the sexual violence narrative in the other story. Genocide is up for debate but not the mass rapes.
The end is dedicated to the anti-Palestine perspective. It gets a whole section! Under a subhead which reads “It's anti-Jewish, anti-Israel,” Schwan quotes an Israel supporter on the sidelines:
Worcester resident Lewis Lasky stood on the perimeter as the rally wrapped up with collective chants that included “Take your hand, make a fist, Palestine will resist,” and "Up, up with liberation, down with occupation."
Lasky, who is Jewish, held miniature flags of Israel and the United States when he remarked that he's troubled by what he witnessed at the rally.
“What we’re witnessing is not pro-Palestinian support, it’s anti-Jewish, anti-Israel,” said Lasky. “Half of these people have no idea what they’re chanting.”
Then, the kicker:
Lasky’s sister, Arlene Lasky, also held miniature versions of the two flags and noticed one of the homemade rally signs with the words, "Israel Commits Holocaust with our $$$."
“These people don't have any idea,” she said while gazing at the poster. “They don’t know the Holocaust. They say we’re doing it. That’s absurd.”
In the tradition of newspaper reporting, every story needs a good kicker. A last line which leaves the reader with something to chew on. Like a lot of things that go into “objective reporting” the kicker is the result of a subjective decision on the part of the reporter. The kicker here translates to “these people are wrong and stupid.”
Now let’s look at what the kicker of the other story looked like!
One attendee likely summed up the anxiety in the room when he called out, "What are we going to do?"
Schimmel had an answer. “There’s no single approach. There's no one pill to solve all of it. When we're together, we're much better."
Then came Schimmel's sobering advice: “Apathy will kill us. If we don’t take one step, that will be it."
That’s a message of conviction right there. An impassioned plea to not fall to apathy.
Now, you might say hey wait a minute if there were pro-Palestine demonstrators at the Jewish Community Center event, Schwan would have quoted them just like he did the Israeli flag wavers at Worcester State. There just weren’t any there. Not his fault.
Maybe so! As stated in the story’s second paragraph, organizers chose “not to promote it broadly because of tensions surrounding the conflict in the Middle East.”
On one side of the “tensions,” demonstrations are held in public and run a real risk of hostile and violent counter protestors, as we’ve seen a lot of lately. The Worcester State demonstration went off without any major incident, thankfully. But there were counter protestors, and at least one of them had to be escorted away for shouting.
On the other side, we have an event here that was “largely kept under wraps.” But the Telegram still knew about it! They assigned a reporter for a full story of similar length to the pro-Palestine dispatch days before it. In doing so, they deemed it just as newsworthy as the public event which hundreds attended—despite it being seemingly invite-only, with fewer attendees, and no “other side” perspective in the room for a reporter to capture. Absent the content of the two stories, there’s already a bias on display in these decisions. It’s not subtle, nor is it remarkable. Just an example of run of the mill “objective news” here in the USA.
When you get into the actual writing, the bias becomes more transparent. But again, not remarkable! Schwan didn’t do anything reporters across the country aren’t doing every day.
But the fact the same exact reporter was assigned to both of these stories makes it a useful example. There’s none of the plausible deniability you have when it’s two different observers. The smart move for cover purposes would have been to assign different reporters to these events, but the Telegram probably just couldn’t. Not enough staff. So you get to see here the tradition of U.S. media bias on Israel and Palestine through the rare prism of one single observer. And, more useful still, a person tasked with turning his observations into a narrative that at least appears accurate to reality and free of personal opinion.
It was the same person here who decided “from the river to the sea” needed a caveat, but the “Hamas weaponized rapes” narrative did not. The person who decided to end one story with an emotional plea from the main character also chose to end the other on a note of criticism.
In one story, he went out of his way to provide evidence of a claim made at the event. It was a choice to include information from a UN report on sexual violence. But, in the other story, he interrogated claims made. Instead of quoting speakers who called the ongoing genocide in Gaza a genocide—or back the claim up with any of the thousands of available sources for it, including a UN report—he said “the word was uttered” and it “appeared on some homemade signs.” Where the sexual violence narrative was presented as fact, despite limited evidence, the genocide narrative was present as opinion, despite overwhelming evidence.
It’s too easy to chalk this up to the writer’s personal biases. And those biases, while obvious, aren’t what make it noteworthy. These two mundane local news stories by one entirely ordinary local reporter serve as a Petri dish for a deep understanding of how the news media truly serves as the propaganda arm for American empire. There’s no Ministry of Truth here. No Goebels-like figure at the wheel. No shadowy mind control device out of science fiction. Public opinion is bent to the will of empire–man-made atrocities are laundered into natural facts of life–via a set of unspoken assumptions about what comprises “acceptable” and “reasoned” and “sober” discourse.
Within these assumptions, a state like Israel is afforded a crucial benefit of the doubt that Palestinians are not. Israel is innocent until proven guilty. Palestine is guilty until proven innocent. Submission to these assumptions is rewarded while testing them is punished. Our understanding of reality is quietly molded into a propaganda—one that’s so encompassing and ingrained that merely calling it such is a fringe opinion. Marks you as a “radical.” And once you’re a radical, it’s harder to make money. Basic self interest within this propagandized reality mandates submission to it. Think about your career! To submit to it means to co-sign the unending violence it unleashes on the world. It’s hard to maintain a sense of yourself as a “good person” if you really understand what it is you’re co-signing. So you don’t try. And you come to resent the people who do. When they appear in a narrative as the villain, it resonates. You get to feel superior to the dirty annoying activists causing trouble for no reason. They aren’t “respectable,” the people on the TV tell you. Not like you good, hard-working Americans watching at home. The propaganda relies on there being “activists” and “radicals” in this way. You don’t have to support or even think about the endless proxy wars to be a “good American.” You just have to be unlike those people.
Where a less sophisticated propaganda machine aims for nationalistic fervor and pride, the American machine recognizes apathy is just as useful. If you don’t care about politics that’s totally fine as far as the empire is concerned. The ideal ratio is 50 percent disengaged, 40 percent on the right to center left, and 10 percent radical for scapegoating purposes.
Back in the 60s we let the radical population climb up to 20 percent and things got testy so we invented student loan debt and the deep state.
In the 80s we went the other way and the disengaged percentage got too high and now the stock market is our boss and it’s gunna cook the human race and politics is a reality TV show :-(
Don’t worry though, we struck a deal with the market and now we stay on top by selling weapons to half the world and imposing economic sanctions on the other half. The sanctions create perfect conditions for growing the terrorist cells and civil wars we need in order to keep selling weapons. It’s a good system for us and the market. Public private partnership baby!
Please support Worcester Sucks!
Having the freedom to write about Israel and Gaza and especially the way the local media handles it would not be possible if I wasn’t truly independent. That’s the best part about this newsletter project and it only works if enough of my readers throw me some money on a monthly or yearly basis! Please consider it if you can afford it.
And I promise to keep speaking the truth as I see it until the U.S. inevitably puts me in jail for it. The way we seem to be going after these campus protests... Here’s some nightmare reading: Criticizing Israel? Nonprofit Media Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status Without Due Process.
Ok anyway, on to the Human Rights Commission.
“You can’t tell me that responding to a gunshot is racist”
Shotspotter, homelessness response, the lack of translators, the problems with the Civil Service Exam and disciplining officers were among the highlights of The Human Rights Commission’s annual meeting with the Worcester Police Department. There was also a testy exchange about police officers wearing “thin blue line” swag.
I’m going to get into them one at a time, and try to be brief. Ahead of the meeting, the HRC sent the department questions, and the three-hour meeting was a process of going through those answers one question at a time.
For those interested, the police provided a lot of interesting documents and spreadsheets along with those written answers. I put them all in a public Drive folder: WPD Responses.
Shotspotter
It was a breath of fresh air to see someone—anyone!—in local government bring up the recent landmark Wired investigation into Shotpotter’s gun detection technology. (Deep dive on that.)
“My understanding of the concerns about Shotspotter,” said HRC member Ellen Shemitz, “...if the percentage of calls lead to increased presence but a very low percentage of those calls lead to arrest then they are false alerts. But those false alerts lead to increased police presence to those areas where there has been crime in the past. And that can lead to a self-perpetuating reality.”
What wasn’t so breezy was Acting Police Chief Paul Saucier’s defense.
“You can’t tell me that responding to a gunshot is racist,” Saucier said.
He chocked up the opposition to it, in Chicago especially, as “all political.”
To which HRC member Shemitz responded: “In fairness I think the argument is where the Shotspotter receptors are located is racially based.”
The conversation was frustrating and going nowhere and ended with the HRC asking the police for more data.
In the written response, though, there’s some stuff to chew on. Question 24 in the response document reads “How many times in 2023 did WPD respond to data from shot spotter? How many instances led to arrests and convictions?”
A clear question, I think. The answer is extremely confusing.
ShotSpotter-2023 517 incidents were alerted on.
Of those 517; 116 involved shootings where either a person was struck by gunfire or some sort of property damage was found (bullets into a home, into a vehicle)
Of the 116 shootings 70 of those incidents involved a ShotSpotter alert.
This is hard to parse. There were 517 Shotspotter alerts. Then 116 of those alerts involved shootings. Okay. But then, of the 116 shootings, 70 of them involved Shotspotter? I think what it means is there were 116 confirmed shootings overall, and 70 of those involved Shotspotter alerts. The way I’m reading it is backed up by Saucier’s annual crime statistics report to the City Council. So finally we have a crucial data point we’ve been lacking: 517 Shotspotter alerts led to 70 times a gun was actually fired. That means that 447 Shotspotter activations did not lead to a confirmed gunshot, but nevertheless triggered some sort of police response.
Saucier described that response in the meeting.
“When an officer responds to a shotspotter alter, they have to go with another car and a supervisor. The only person to clear that scene is the supervisor.”
The 70 times they were able to confirm that a shooting happened accounts for 13.6 percent of Shotspotter triggers. That means 86.5 percent of the time, Shotspotter led police to a dead end. But still, two patrol cars and a supervisor went to the scene.
This is the problem. All of those dead ends still mean a police response. It means cops going into neighborhoods looking for trouble. And the sensors are only in the poor, Black, and Brown neighborhoods, as we got into in our big deep dive on this issue: A streamlining solution for crime manufacturers.
But continuing on in the WPD response...
In 41 of those 70 incidents the police did not receive one phone call. If not for ShotSpotter the police would not have been alerted/there.
Of the 70 that involved ShotSpotter, there were 12 arrests and 8 firearms recovered.
Let’s do that math, shall we? 517 shotspotter activations versus 12 arrests is 2.3 percent. As in: two percent of shotspotter calls in 2023 led to arrests. Shotspotter activations versus guns recovered is even lower, at 1.5 percent.
But Saucier, at the meeting, said:
“I can tell you that 95 percent of all Shotspotter alerts were actually confirmed... and 80 percent of the time no one calls the police.”
This is just marketing material from Shotspotter, which promises 97 percent accuracy and claims 80 percent of gunshots aren’t reported.
And then, on the “predictive policing” AI Shotspotter provides the WPD, the written response (question 14) was...
We use a patrol and analyst tool, ResourceRouter, that automates the planning of directed patrols by using 5 years of data generated from citizen calls. Officers then do "Community Engagement Patrols” in those areas for approximately 30 minutes. Their function is to speak with as many community members as they can while also creating a deterrent effect by being visible outside of their cruisers.
That’s all new information. We know almost nothing about how “predictive policing” works. But it’s the same exact concern as the gun detection technology. Probably moreso. The same private company that decided to put the gunshot sensors in the poor, Black, and Brown neighborhoods is also dictating where these “Community Engagement Patrols” go. Wonder where!
Civil Service
The civil service exam is not going anywhere, despite all the problems with it, like its inherent racial bias getting in the way of recruitments and promotions of officers of color and the fact things like second language proficiency can’t be considered in hiring decisions.
Shemitz asked whether the WPD has thought about moving away from it.
“That’s a big undertaking,” said Saucier. “For the city of Worcester to take that on and actually do the whole process would be very difficult.”
Departments that leave civil service are generally smaller, Saucier said. That’s not entirely true. Boston is considering leaving it. Framingham already has. Watertown too. Marlborough. Webster. Over the past decade, 37 departments across the state have parted ways with the test. If Boston is looking at it, so should Worcester.
“There’s a lot of misconception out there that we’re not promoting people of color for whatever reason,” Saucier said.
“But that’s really the question,” Shemitz responded. “If the civil service exam is racially biased, then by definition you’re not going to be able to promote people of color in the department.”
It’s up to the city manager, Saucier said. He’s already removed the chief and deputy chief. What happens to the lower ranks I don’t know.
HRC member Randy Feldman motioned to have the city manager look at moving away from civil service entirely. It passed unanimously.
Ball’s in City Manager Eric Batista’s court now, like every other ball. And don’t forget the police unions hate the idea.
Translators
It turns out the WPD has no translators and doesn’t particularly want any and doesn’t see any problem with it. In Worcester, there’s a lot of people who don’t speak English, of course.
“I don’t think it needs to call for a designated staff,” said Carl Supernor, deputy chief of operations. “Because quite frankly the city doesn’t have them and we certainly don’t have them.”
That’s making the problem twice as bad, not explaining it away.
Instead, officers rely on people at the scene or the Language Line service, if they have access to it.
Shemitz said this leaves the city open to major civil rights lawsuit risk.
Thin Blue Line
Tensions flared briefly when Shemitz asked the chief about officers wearing Thin Blue Line patches. Saucier said officers have a first amendment right to do so.
“Some people, say the alt right, think it has to do with white supremacy,” he said. “That’s their opinion.”
Way he sees it, the flag is commemorating officers who died in the line of duty.
A motion to send the issue along to the city manager was tabled.
Homeless response
I’ve often written about the routine nature of homeless encampment sweeps. How they most often happen without anyone knowing and they happen all the time. We’ve got some data to back that up now. From the police responses:
During 2023 the Inspectional Services/QOL team received 2,300 total complaints. There currently is not a category for “homeless encampment” when the complaint is assigned for follow up. Many of these complaints are categorized as excessive trash and the reason for the trash is not apparent until the complaint is investigated.
Police officers and inspectors for the QOL team recall 611 complaints and interactions directly related to encampments. These sites were visited several times over the course of weeks by the QOL team as well as outreach workers from Health and Human Services and CIT officers from the WPD. These visits are an attempt at engaging the individuals at these sites into accepting the services available to them prior to any clean up actions.
These sites are located on property not owned by the homeless present.
Gotta love that last line. But anyway, the data here are 2,300 complaints initiating 611 “interactions” with camps. But that doesn’t mean 611 camps cleared. The police didn’t provide that data point. But we can safely say it’s a three digit number.
The HRC asked for more pointed data on the number of camps cleared, and also for a specific reporting category related to homeless encampments, not just “garbage.”
Other interesting tidbits: a spreadsheet of all officer complaints and outcomes and a spreadsheet of all use of force incidents, with some officer names coming up quite a bit more than others.
Joe Early in the Supreme Court!
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled on the practice of civil asset forfeitures, particularly on the issue of returning people’s property once they’re found innocent of whatever crime allowed the police to seize it.
Civil asset forfeiture is essentially state sponsored theft and extortion. This is a good description courtesy of Slate:
In theory, civil asset forfeiture is a tool for depriving scary street gangs and wealthy drug kingpins of the means to keep plying their deadly trades. In practice, it amounts to legalized extortion or even outright theft, and empowers armed state agents to line their pockets at the expense of legally innocent people who have no meaningful recourse.
It wasn’t the most high profile Supreme Court ruling and didn’t change much about the overall practice and didn’t get much press attention.
But in the ruling there was a Worcester connection! Writing the dissent opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor says:
Similarly, in Massachusetts, one investigation found over 500 instances in a single county where law enforcement held property for a decade or more before officials finally commenced forfeiture proceedings.
That’s Worcester, baby! She cites a 2021 Propublica investigation headlined “Massachusetts Police Can Easily Seize Your Money. The DA of One County Makes It Nearly Impossible to Get It Back.”
The following passage is what we like to call “not good.”
WBUR took an in-depth look at Worcester County, which ranks among the top counties for forfeitures in the state. An examination of all forfeitures filed there in 2018 found that of the hundreds of incidents, nearly 1 in 4 — or 24% — had no accompanying drug conviction or criminal drug case filing.
And that is likely conservative; another 9% of seizures had no publicly available court records, meaning there were no charges or courts sealed the records.
In an investigation with ProPublica, WBUR also found that Worcester County District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. regularly stockpiles seized money, including that of people not charged with a crime, for years, and sometimes decades.
This should be a bigger deal, I think. Joe Early is the example a Supreme Court Justice chooses of all the examples across the country to point to the problem with civil asset forfeiture. According to the investigation, Early’s office brought in $4 million in forfeitures from 2017-2020, and the money is usually split between the DA’s office and the cops. But not all the time!
Early has been criticized by the state auditor for spending forfeiture funds on a Zamboni ice-clearing machine and tree-trimming equipment. Over the years, his office has posted photos on its website of Early handing out checks for “Drug Forfeiture Community Reinvestment,” to pay for baseball and softball fields or to support a cheerleading team.
Early said he’s proud that his office has spent large sums of confiscated money on youth programs and drug prevention. “I love taking the drug dealers’ money. I love taking their lifeblood and putting it back into the community,” he said.
But WBUR’s analysis shows many of the people who lose money to Early’s office are not charged with dealing drugs.
Woof!! I think it’s time we took another long hard look at this.
Odds and ends
As always, thanks for reading! Any support would be appreciated.
In case you missed it, Aislinn’s got a preview of the school committee meeting this coming Thursday.
Down in Providence there’s some noteworthy homelessness news: Providence police will force two homeless encampments out. Where will they go?
Despite the given reasons, Mayor Brett Smiley has said it is the city's policy to break up every encampment that forms.
Those who work with the unhoused population say it will only lead to more health problems and more dangerous situations for people who have nowhere to go when there are 800 more people seeking shelter than beds available.
In Worcester city council is back at it on Tuesday and it looks like a sleepy one. Nothing of any real note but you love to see an order about taking property from Holden.
Let the annexation begin!
Aidan Kearney was barred from the courtroom in the Karen Reed trial. You also love to see that.
What you don’t love to see is the town of Sutton up in arms about a drag queen at a school event. Or the Telegram misreprenting what the drag queen was doing there.
Ok that‘s all! Have a good rest of your Sunday. I’m heading into Boston right after I smash the publish button to see Say Anything with Katie lol. Admit it!!