The Soros-funded War on Police Targets

Chicago in May and Tampa in August

Why is George Soros

Predicting Riots in the U.S.?

By Tina Trent, PhD

Americas Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org 443-964-8208

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 Introduction: The War on Police
Revolutionary radicalism did not disappear after the Sixties. Instead, it relocated.
Scores of former political activists entered academia and continued spreading
the twin gospels of revolution and collectivism under the guise of critical theory
and race and gender studies. Many became law professors or achieved
positions of authority in K-12 education schools, thus ensuring an influential
place for their ideas in classrooms and courtrooms. Entire academic disciplines
were transformed into taxpayer-subsidized platforms for proselytizing against
capitalism and against America itself.

Others former revolutionaries signed on to the expanding rolls of non-profits and

government bureaucracies. Few remained active on the streets. Having
institutionalized and monetized their causes, they hardly needed to do so. The
new ramparts were faculty hiring committees, city council meetings, human rights
conferences, and book signings.

By the late 1980s, one consequence of the radicals flight to academia become
clear as a new direct action movement awoke. Young people who had been
educated in classrooms awash with nostalgia for the Sixties took to the streets.
Weaned on textbook Marxism and exposed since infancy to apocalyptic
predictions of ecological collapse, these self-defined anarchist, eco-extremist,
anti-capitalist, anti-corporate globalists attacked animal research laboratories
and sabotaged logging sites in the Pacific Northwest.

For nearly a decade, this new movement remained on the margins of the news
cycle, and thus, public consciousness. Then, in 1999, a loose confederation of
groups calling itself the Direct Action Network temporarily shut down a G-8
meeting in Seattle, causing millions of dollars in property damage and attracting
national attention.

Seattle authorities were caught off guard when hundreds of anarchists and other
radicals executed a sophisticated blockade of city streets. Wearing bandannas
to conceal their identities, they vandalized businesses and rioted. The anarchists
represented only a fraction of the G-8 protesters, but they exploited the presence
of 45,000 other activists to provide cover for targeted strikes and tactical
blockades. The final price tag for the city was at least $3 million in additional
public costs and $20 million in loss and damages for Seattle businesses.1

This younger generation of anarchists and eco-warriors now receives support

from older activists who completed their march through the institutions and
emerged wielding power in precisely the sorts of places that used to provide
more or less counterbalance to such radicalism: the mainstream media, city
leadership, and federal agencies, not excluding the Department of Justice. Now,
troublingly, much of the establishment nostalgically shares loyalties with the
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protestors rather than the non-protesting public. These older activists fill the
mentorship roles that Socialist and Communist Party elders used to play in the
movements of their own youth, but without the baggage that restrained party
members from openly assuming positions of authority in their public lives.

None of this bodes well for law enforcement. Today, as in the Sixties, police
(including prison guards) constitute a special target of the Left. Inciting clashes
with law enforcement is still both a primary strategy and a means to an end for
Marxists and leftists. In important ways, it works better today than it did in the
1960s, when elected officials and other establishment figures, as well as
majorities of the public unambiguously sided with police. In the current
environment, in which cops have fewer allies and more powerful enemies, the
leaders of the Occupy movement have managed to rack up even unlikely public
relations victories simply by asserting they are locked in a battle with volatile
police forces that threaten to victimize them.

Abetted by sympathetic media -- mainstream, left, progressive, and even

libertarian-right -- the Occupy movement has succeeded in making the police, not
themselves, the primary target of scrutiny as they break laws, blockade streets,
test the boundaries of indulgence by civic authorities, and otherwise straddle the
increasingly porous boundary between non-violent and violent civil
disobedience.

The mainstream media is also complicit in failing to properly investigate the ties
of the Occupy movement to radical, anti-police activist groups such as ANSWER,
Critical Resistance, CopWatch, the Ella Baker Center, the Midnight Special Law
Collective, The Ruckus Society, the Jericho Movement, the new SDS and Black
Panthers, and Anarchist, Socialist, and Communist splinter groups.

These organizations, many of which are funded directly or indirectly by billionaire

financier George Soros, are using Occupy encampments as training camps to
teach the confrontational protest strategies perfected by radical, eco-anarchist
crisis-makers including Lisa Fithian and others.2 Such strategies include:

selective videotaping of orchestrated clashes with police

faking police-inflicted injuries during arrest
faking injury from a police motorcycle or mounted rider
screaming when touched by the police
methods of street reconnaissance, aided by texting and tweeting, to
disrupts police efforts to maintain order during mass protests.

Yet even as members of the media eagerly report each new arrest or scuffle,
they have remained entirely incurious about the existence of anti-police training
seminars at Occupy camps and the activist networks that are training protesters
in these methods.

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Many Occupy street encampments have been shuttered, but other types of
actions perfected at G-8, squatters rights, and anti-foreclosure demonstrations
are emerging. Ominously, Adbusters magazine, which announced the beginning
of the Occupy movement last September, has just instructed Occupy protesters
to start making their way to Chicago to lay the groundwork for the biggest
occupation to date: a mass blockade and shutdown of the historic, back-to-
back G-8 and NATO conferences being hosted by the city in May, thanks to the
machinations of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, President Obamas former Chief of
Staff.3

If police are unable to contain the chaos Occupy leaders are clearly planning to
unleash on the streets of Chicago, the threat to social order is grave. How
clearly are Occupiers planning this? In the tradition of the Chicago 8, the
Adbusters poster reads, the words superimposed on a photograph of a helmeted
Chicago cop swinging a billyclub at a fleeing protester.

From Adbusters:

On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set
up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a
month. With a bit of luck, well pull off the biggest multinational occupation
of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

And this time around were not going to put up with the kind of police
repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention
protests in Chicago, 1968 nor will we abide by any phony restrictions
the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights.
Well go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long
peoples summit well march and chant and sing and shout and
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 exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want the
constitution will be our guide.

And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, well
be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax a ban on high frequency
flash trading a binding climate change accord a three strikes and
youre out law for corporate criminals an all out initiative for a nuclear-
free Middle East whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in
our global internet brainstorm we the people will set the agenda for the
next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.

And if they dont listen if they ignore us and put our demands on the
back burner like theyve done so many times before then, with
Gandhian ferocity, well flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges,
campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe well
make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big
bang in Chicago this Spring. If we dont stand up now and fight now for a
different kind of future we may not have much of a future so lets live
without dead time for a month in May and see what happen4

Occupy Chicago also announced that they will be endorsing the so-called St.
Paul Principles for the Chicago occupation, which means that all groups must
agree to work in solidarity, even those who dont approve of the violent tactics of
others. The adoption of the St. Paul Principles suggests that the most radical
activists are already in charge. It also means, though this wont be
acknowledged, that nobody participating in these protests may honestly claim
ignorance of the potential for violence, nor claim that such violence is not being
done in their name. Ironically, Occupy Chicago is re-naming the St. Paul
Principles, calling them The Chicago Principles, thus slyly echoing The Chicago
Way, an infamous political slur referencing Chicagos legendary corruption.5

Even in the best-case scenario, if order is maintained on Chicago streets, this

next phase of Occupy activism is likely to be framed as a clash between
protestors and police, and it will be the police who bear the brunt of the blame
for the chaos and destruction being planned by the protesters. This is all by
design, though one wouldnt know it, reading the Chicago papers.

In recent months, the media has not been alone in its failure to interrogate the
Occupy movements radical goals and radical anti-police agenda. Politicians and
other civil leaders have abdicated responsibilities to the law enforcement officers
they employ and entrust with public safety. Loyalty for police has been thin on
the ground in cities as diverse as New York, Washington D.C., Oakland, and
Atlanta. Politicians in each of these cities carelessly (or strategically) set
precedents for selectively excusing lawbreaking by Occupy protestors, thus

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stripping law enforcement of its authority and encouraging spectacles where
protestors negotiated regarding which laws they planned to obey and which they
planned to continue violating, a recipe for disaster.

Trapped between opportunistic city leaders and equally opportunistic protesters,

police have been isolated and placed on the defensive as they endured verbal
hostility, threats of violence, and even protesters flaunting signs with the names
of celebrity cop-killers such as Mumia Abu Jamal, Lovelle Mixon, and Troy Davis.

The protestors thus created a low-stakes game for themselves and a high-stakes
game for everyone else, and still, there was little urgency precisely because it
was police they were targeting. This is an indication of a War on Cops extending
far beyond the Occupy Wall Street movement. If the Occupy protestors behaved
with such callous disregard for the lives of any other group of people in
contemporary society -- if they carried posters and signs celebrating individuals
who had murdered soldiers, or judges, or politicians -- they would immediately
lose the reservoir of goodwill granted to them by an inattentive public. But their
celebration of cop-killers is given a pass.

The fact that law enforcement has professionalized itself and dramatically
diversified its ranks over the past half-century is meaningless to activists
screaming epithets in policemens faces. Despite the presence of women, blacks,
Hispanics, Asians, and gay officers in the ranks and serving at the highest levels
of police command, Racist Pigs remains an epithet of choice for protestors.
Instead, the professionalization of policing has resulted in police forces
excruciatingly responsive to even false claims of police misconduct, while on the
other side, the professionalization of radical activism has given activists multiple
new outlets for claiming police brutality and demanding recourse.

Meanwhile, private funding for anti-police activist groups has grown exponentially,
as did capacity-building, networking, and new means for electronic
communication, all of which give protesters and activists advantages that could
not have been imagined in 1968, the last time well-heeled (well-sandaled) anti-
police radicals converged on Chicago, hunting police. The Occupy movement is
only one manifestation of the multiplier effect of such new, new organizing, as
enthusiast and Northeastern University professor Jeffrey Juris calls it.6 The
super-coalition driving the recent California prison strikes is another example.
This is movement astro-turfing on a new scale, notched up from individuals, to
organizations, to organizations of organizations. The sophistication, rolodexes,
and wealth of the current activist networks are unprecedented.

And where police could once rely on Congress or the Department of Justice to
hold hearings on public safety subjects of general concern, such as rioting, or the
rise of radical activist groups, today such inquiries would be dismissed out of
hand as relics of the red-baiting era, even when contemporary activists
broadcast that they are using red strategies and communist street tactics. In

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one of many strange ironies of the current zeitgeist, politicians dont dare criticize
activist groups that are literally espousing revolutionary communism, out of fear
of appearing to be red-baiting. In contrast, organizations such as the A.C.L.U.
not only have the ability to demand action against police in the courts: they
possess similar powers through other administrative outlets, from municipal
community review boards stacked with their hand-picked representatives, to the
current Justice Administrations activist Civil Rights division, and even, someday
soon, if the campaign by former Weather Underground terrorist Bernadine Dohrn
and others succeeds, through direct appeal to the United Nations Human Rights
Council as well.

Coming full circle, the radicals who entered academia back in the 1970s after
participating in violent clashes with the police are now embarking on a vast re-
writing of the last forty years of rioting and other anti-police violence. Academic
conferences and publications rethinking Attica, Chicago 68, the Kent State and
Rodney King riots, the 1999 Battle of Seattle, and even the nascent Occupy
movement (already the subject of several pending conferences) are proliferating.
Tenured radicals paint rioters as non-violent heroes and police as the sole
instigators and cause of violence. Such biased rewriting of history is a growing
field in university grievance-studies departments, from where it will inexorably
trickle down through K-12 curricula. These days, neither the historical record,
nor kindergarteners are safe from activist, anti-police messages.

It is far past time to look beyond the motley street theater of the Occupy
movement and to study and understand the nihilistic intentions and violent plans
of its founders. If we permit Occupy protestors and other activists to continue
demonizing the police while the majority of Americans stand by silently, we are
guaranteeing increasing chaos in the streets.

And if we permit protestors and politicians alike to keep chipping away at the
polices authority to maintain public order, then we are delegitimizing the law
itself. Unfortunately, as this report will show, there are many forces working to do
just that including willing participants within the justice system itself.

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 Whos Really Watching the Police?
CopWatch and Anti-Police Activists
Cop-watching is frequently depicted in the media as the act of an individual who
sees wrongdoing by one or more police officers and records it in order to
document the injustice. The classic example is the citizen who videotaped police
beating Rodney King in 1991. Many people do not realize that cop watching is
also part of an organized movement which has the express purpose of inciting
and documenting incidents of purported police brutality in order to further a leftist
agenda.

Although they attempt, when it suits them, to portray themselves as just

concerned citizens documenting incidents like the King beating, CopWatch, a
coalition of leftist groups, was actually founded before the Rodney King riots and
is in some respects simply the latest iteration in a long history of anti-police
activist organizing. It is an institution expressly dedicated to documenting a
skewed narrative about police-minority relations in order to incite riots, which they
view as legitimate uprisings against perceived injustice. CopWatch activists
begin and end with a Marxist analysis that asserts that all policing is essentially
racist and oppressive.

Today, the CopWatch network is growing thanks to movement support

from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). In related efforts, the CCR
grooms other anti-police activist groups and mobilizes them in different
locales, striving to create the impression of widespread opposition to law
enforcement. CopWatch receives legal assistance from the CCR, the
A.C.L.U. and the National Lawyers Guild, three organizations that, in turn,
receive substantial funding from George Soros Open Society Institute.
Each of these organizations, and Soros himself, are dedicated to
undermining the legitimacy of our nations criminal justice system. Cop-
watching has proven to be an effective strategy for propagandizing this
cause. It appeals to young people enamored of social media; to a
politically diverse swath of anti-authority activists; and to people engaging
in protest movements that rely on confrontations with police to attract
media, most recently Occupy Wall Street.

Among the general public, support runs high for the idea that individuals ought to
be able to record police in public places. Recently, courts have ruled in favor of
the right to videotape police actions, and, despite a handful of highly publicized
incidents in which an officer took away someones camcorder or cell-phone,
police are actually adjusting rapidly to the new consensus. In fact, many law
enforcement officers feel positively about trends towards recording their
interactions with the public. Such recordings educate the public about the
realities of police work. They also turn out to prove that the vast majority of

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people who complain about being mistreated by police are lying. One study
commissioned by the Department of Justice and conducted by the International
Association of Chiefs of Police found that in 96.2% of cases, the recording of the
event exonerated the officer of the allegation or complaint.7

Believing in the right to videotape an officer is not the same as believing, as cop-
watchers do, that all policing is racist and fascist and that we live in a police
state that requires radical transformation. Cop-watchers seek to capture police
committing acts of brutality or racial profiling. They assert that such brutality and
profiling by police are common enough to be captured in even random
encounters. Another presumption guiding the CopWatch movement is that
whenever police investigate or stop and search minorities, it is prima facie
evidence of racial profiling.

So on websites hosted by the Soros-funded Center for Constitutional Rights,

CopWatch activists speak of abolition of the prison-industrial complex and
argue that the need for police and prisons will be eliminated with the
redistribution of wealth.8 One CCR-sponsored website compares police killings
in New York and New Jersey to the murder of thousands of innocent Americans
in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.9

Police abolition is the real goal of CopWatch. Police abolition literally means
creating a society without police. On the website of the Rose City, Portland,
Copwatch, activists explain: Copwatch works to eliminate or radically change
police institutions . . . We want to reduce police violence, and disrupt the polices
ability to enforce race and class lines.10 Policing only exists, such activists
argue, as a conspiracy to keep classes and races (and even genders) separated.

Such claims are repeated at academic conferences and in speeches posted on

YouTube, delivered by tattooed activists.11 CopWatch activists paint a grim
picture of the current dystopic police state. [P]olice rarely meet our needs,
reads one manual, [t]hey dont help us heal . . . they dont prevent future
harm . . . they use their incredible power to reinforce the oppressive status
quo.12 In the moral universe of CopWatch, police are subhuman and
unredeemable characters doing the dirty work of a fascist, totalitarian state.

Such an absolutist outlook justifies both unethical ruses and outright

endorsement of murderers and other violent criminals who target police. In 2000,
COPWATCH.com Inc., which describes itself online as a nonprofit organization,
published a detailed manual for teaching activists to drum up public anger at
police by posing as victims of police brutality using wheelchairs, or carrying toilet
plungers pained with fake blood to signify the attack on Abner Louima by rogue
police officer, Justin Volpe.13

Socialists and leftists predominate in CopWatch circles, but some libertarians

also agitate for the elimination of policing. Bureaucrash, a project headed by

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libertarian prankster Peter Eyre, is a rare but significant example.14 While
Eyres politics could not be more different from those of most cop-watchers, he
shares their angry and personal animosity toward the institution of policing. Cliff
Kincaid describes Eyres group, CopBlock, as an anti-police organization which
depicts police officers as demonic figures with blood on their hands and batons.

Eyres animus for police may have something to do with the fact that he
obtained an undergraduate degree in law enforcement but was then turned down
for jobs in various police departments, Kincaid observes.15 However it is that
anti-police activists arrive at their views, they all seem to end up susceptible to an
extremism that necessitates denying the problem of crime, or the culpability of
any criminal, unless he is the one-in-a-million violent offender wearing a badge.

One might reasonably ask: who will deal with criminals, once police are no
more? The answer from the CopWatch movement is that crime will wither away
with the elimination of private property, border control, racism, bullying, hetero-
normativity, and, of course, police. Until this revolution arrives, they offer a
hodgepodge of alternative policing strategies, some of which surfaced in
Occupy encampments, to the confusion and surprise of many observers.

Call a friend, not the cops, recommends Critical Resistance, the Angela Davis
group (they further suggest: choose someone who can arrive quickly). Other
proposals to replace policing include:

rely on rape crisis activists to address rape, but only crisis workers who
have not been co-opted by accepting state money
publish lists of bad dates, so sex workers know which potential clients to
avoid
create Sex Offenders Anonymous support groups for offenders to learn
self control, rather than being incarcerated

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 expand the safe space movement beyond college campuses to reduce
violence against gays and minorities
encourage truces between gangs such as the Crips and Bloods
implement restorative justice and dispute resolution
establish street committees like the ones formed in South Africa under
apartheid, so communities may police themselves.16

In other words: vigilantism (which will work perfectly this time, cop-watchers say,
because it will be accompanied by political analyses of oppression performed by
gang members, sex offenders, and entire communities). It is tempting to dismiss
the seriousness of CopWatch simply because they articulate such utopian
longings. But the movement has many allies and is far from powerless.

According to CopWatchs anarcho-Marxist analysis, to achieve utopia, society

must eliminate the police. But more mundane and violent meanings of police
elimination also delight CopWatchers. The inflammatory rhetoric these activists
use in discussing this goal is disconcerting, but more disconcerting is the ease
with which activists flip from talking about valuing peace and equality, to angrily
ranting about committing acts of violence against the class of people they refer to
only as swine or pigs.

For example, in 2005, Rose City CopWatch held a fundraiser titled The
Language of Swine and Freedom. The previous year, they distributed posters
offering a reward of $40 in groceries to the first person to provide a verifiable
photograph of killer cop Scott McCollister. Kristian Williams, CopWatch member
and author of Our Enemies in Blue, coyly called the posters a photography
contest aimed at puncturing the veil of anonymity protecting killer cops.17 The
shooting death McCollister was involved in was deemed justified, but CopWatch
believed, doubtlessly because of McCollisters skin color, that it was not.

After Rose City CopWatch acquired a photograph of McCollister, they created a

second wanted poster featuring him and Jason Sery, another Portland
policeman who was involved in a shooting death, one also deemed justified.
The man Sery had shot was a repeat offender with previous felonies for gun
possession and assault of a police officer. But CopWatch accused both men of
being racist murders of innocent blacks. Spokesperson Loretta Rock said the
officers demonstrate a culture of racism and brutality thats sort of at the core of
policing. Her group plastered the city with these charges.

ARISSA, another Portland CopWatch group, distributed posters that read: The
pigs are getting away with murder: what are we going to do about it? Its about
time we put an end to these pigs, their brutality, their murders. A reporter who
confronted ARISSA founder Craig Rosenbraugh about the posters observed:
Rosebraugh . . . claims it is a little bit of a misstatement to say his poster calls
for killing cops. He claims it merely says that people in the community need to

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stand up for themselves, and if we don't, we're going to keep planning more
funerals. Yeah, right, the reporter added.

Jason Sery quit the Portland police force. Rose City CopWatch still features both
of their police wanted posters on its website, under the heading: Shaming the
Police.

Its more like threatening police officers lives. Such expressions of hatred, and
intimations of violence are common on CopWatch websites. The Committee to
Connect the Dots, a Portland anti-police coalition, advocates rioting against
police violence, and hosts Off the Pigs parties.18 West Denver CopWatch found
great amusement in a burglary at a police officers home: On the brighter side,
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they wrote, [a]ccording to the Denver Post, some brave souls stole two
handguns and a tazer from a Pig$ house in Boulder.19

Graffiti artist Shepard Fairey, who invented the Obama Hope poster, along with
45 other artists, created a Police Brutality Coloring Book depicting police as pigs
and Nazis. One particularly crude rendering shows a female pig with extended
teats torturing a Winnie-the-Pooh-like protester.20 The hate-filled rhetoric of the
Days of Rage and the Weather Underground are alive again in the CopWatch
movement.

Cop-watch organizations escalate tensions in high crime areas by plastering city

streets with posters depicting silhouetted mobs of jackbooted officers beating
helpless victims. But they arent alone in fomenting such anti-cop hatred. They
are consciously taking their cues and slogans -- from earlier waves of anti-
police activists, from the Yippies and SDS, to the Weather Underground, Black
Panthers, and Black Liberation Army. And they are being aided by the same
organizations that supported these earlier waves of radicals: the Center for
Constitutional Rights and the A.C.L.U.

Its a deal for all involved: the cop-watchers act out angrily and encourage others
to go even further, and their legal advocates turn their confrontational behavior
and accusations of racial profiling into lawsuits in the courts while remaining

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ready to provide the legal defense for anyone who goes further and injures or
kills a police officer.

Meanwhile, a third activist cohort responds to CopWatchers police elimination

rhetoric in ominous ways. Following CopWatchs lead in choosing police to
target, the hacker group Anonymous breaks into police e-mail accounts and
employment records and publishes their personal information, including home
addresses, online. Nothing could be more threatening for police than to have
their spouses and children endangered through such exposure.

In Arizona, hackers leaked personal information belonging to several members of

the Arizona Department of Public Safety, including, in Anonymous words,
names, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, social security numbers, online
dating account info, voicemails, chat logs, and seductive girlfriend pictures.
They did so, they announced, out of anger over "the racial profiling anti-
immigrant police state that is Arizona."21 In New York City, Anonymous went
further, singling out an officer who pepper-sprayed two Occupy Wall Street
protesters and publishing his home address and identifying information about his
children. The officers family received death threats and needed police protection.
Occupy Wall Street spokespeople claimed that they did not condone Anonymous
actions, but it was the Occupy protesters who identified the officer, posted his
name on the Internet, and encouraged outrage against him. Then the hacker
group simply stepped up the attack.22

In that incident, Anonymous statement, followed by the names of the officers

children, reads:

[W]e observed you barbarically (sic) pepper spray wildly into the
group of kettled women. We were shocked and disgusted by your
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 behavior. You know who the innocent women were, now they will
have the chance to know who you are. Before you commit
atrocities against innocent people, think twice. WE ARE
WATCHING!!! Expect Us!

In Atlanta, cop-watchers energized by Occupy post videos of themselves

haranguing police on the streets and demanding to know polices names. Their
videos illustrate one of the ironies of the current CopWatch movement: the
activists are white, while most of the police they are harassing are black men.

CopWatchers relentlessly call police murderers and pigs. They participate in

Fuck the Cops rallies. They exploit other peoples tragedies and destroy other
peoples careers, all in the name of a ridiculously nave vision of a world without
police. But the amount of harm they were capable of doing was limited until they
joined forces with an older generation of anti-cop activists.

Cop watching has recently grown in scale from its origin as an underground,
subculture activity. Recent coordination of CopWatch groups in different cities
can be traced to the George Soros-funded Center for Constitutional Rights,
which provides marketing and coalition-building resources for ever-expanding
activist networks, including The October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, The
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the Peoples Justice Coalition. These
groups claim to be grassroots, activist-driven organizations, but the intensive
networking, similar web pages, and replication of events and promotional
materials in different cities suggests otherwise.

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The Center for Constitutional Rights, which was founded in 1966 by William
Kunstler, acknowledges providing coordination between activist groups through
its Movement Support initiative:

Movement Support is a crucial element of CCR's education and

outreach work. Its primary function is to complement CCRs legal
work by linking the Center to various movements, projects and
initiatives. CCR engages in movement support in order to: facilitate
networking and the regular flow of communication and information
between progressive organizations, agencies and constituencies;
strategically undertake collaborative efforts around issues,
campaigns and initiatives and facilitate the exchange of information
between organizations and agencies about issues.23

Under the CCR umbrella, CopWatch groups form partnerships with older
prisoner rights and anti-incarceration organizations with CCR ties, such as the
Jericho Movement. They also participate in new, high-powered coalitions, such
as the Pelican Bay Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity group, which boasts more
than 150 participating organizations, including the New Afrikan Black Panthers,
the Anarchist Black Cross, Rethinking Schools (which provides leftist curricular
materials for K-12 students), the United Methodist Church, the Womens
International League for Peace and Freedom, and no fewer than three groups
dedicated to freeing cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal.24

The A.C.L.U. and the National Lawyers Guild also partner with CopWatch,
providing training and legal services and sharing in the publicity that comes with
lawsuits arising from CopWatchs clashes with police. Staff attorneys at the
A.C.L.U. also use footage filmed by CopWatch activists in lawsuits accusing
police of a variety of injustices, while using these lawsuits to lobby the Justice
Department for oversight of city police departments. It is a sophisticated strategy
that seems to have eluded scrutiny, not least because the national media has
been willing to represent cop-watchers as self-motivated civil liberties activists
and earnest reformers.

In one coordinated effort to bring down Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpiao and overturn
Arizonas SB1070, the A.C.L.U. and CopWatch in Arizona trained scores of
volunteers to monitor Maricopa County police for evidence of racial profiling.
These CopWatch groups do not limit themselves to accusing individual police of
acts of brutality: instead, they shadow crime sweeps and send out advance
warnings of police activity.

Lydia Guzman, a prominent Hispanic activist, who, along with a

group called CopWatch, designed a detailed messaging system to
warn the Phoenix Valley of immigration sweeps. Guzman sent an
initial text blast to 100 rapid response teams of business owners,
Spanish radio stations, pastors and teachers, each of whom

17

 messaged their respective networks. At the same time, Guzman
contacted lawyers, social workers and elected officials to be at the
ready to help. "It spiderwebs out," she says. "Before you know it
my text tree spreads out to thousands of people."25

With the assistance of the A.C.L.U. and the CCR, CopWatch in Arizona is literally
engaging in tactical strikes against law enforcement. Their efforts doubtlessly
helped bring Justice Department pressure to bear on Sheriff Arpaio, even as
violent crime rates soared in Maricopa County. In a letter warning Arpaio of its
intentions to investigate racial profiling in his office, the Justice Department
acknowledged that violent crime in his county rose by 69% between 2004 and
2007, including a 166% increase in homicides.26 So how many of these
murderers and other criminals eluded capture after being alerted to police actions
by CopWatchers pumped up with A.C.L.U. representation, CCR activist networks,
and Soros money? This is a question nobody bothered to ask.

Who is Emily Good?

Media Complicity in the Anti-Cop Movement
The media continues to portray cop watchers as innocents caught up in incidents
of police violence. The story of cop-watcher Emily Good illustrates the medias
complicity in allowing the extreme leftists in CopWatch to pursue their anti-police,
Marxist agenda while portraying themselves as simply concerned citizens.

On May 12, 2011, police in Rochester, New York, arrested 28-year old Good
after she attempted to videotape the officers searching a car they had stopped
outside her home. A misdemeanor charge of obstruction of governmental
administration was quickly dropped. But the video Good made of her
confrontation with the police went viral, and she quickly became the latest poster
child for an ongoing campaign to promote the rights of citizens to video and
audiotape police. Civil-rights lawyers, newspaper columnists, and even
conservatives and libertarians wrote and blogged in her defense. She appeared
on CNN and attended court to hear the dismissal of her case, surrounded by a
crowd of supporters.

With a soft voice, long skirts, and a face sweetly reminiscent of a Doonesbury
character, Emily Good seemed like some harmless hippy from the local health
food collective, a woman naively caught up in events beyond her control.
Throughout her fifteen minutes of fame, that is precisely the image she promoted.
Im just passionate about trying to make the world a more just place, she told
one reporter.

18

 Emily Good Loading Donations for a Ministry

In interviews about the night she was arrested, Good described herself as a
concerned citizen who had gotten out of bed when she saw flashing police lights
and then became worried that what she was witnessing through her living room
window was racial profiling, because, she claimed, she had recently read an
article about profiling in the newspaper.

My friend Ryan was over, Good told a reporter, we peeked outside, saw that it
was a case (sic) of several white officers, and they had pulled over a black man.
I think that week or the week before there was an article in the newspaper saying
racial profiling is hard to prove, and I grabbed the iPod that I had and we stepped
outside to tape it.27

How does one detect racial profiling by looking out a window and seeing police
standing beside a stopped vehicle? The media didnt ask. Nor did they inquire
too deeply into Goods four prior arrests resulting from staged confrontations with
police officers, or evidence of other, even more troubling activism that quickly
disappeared from Goods Facebook page. In the Rochester media market,
reporters treated Goods prior arrests with kid gloves; the national media simply
ignored them. Nor did anyone report that Ryan Acuff, the friend Ryan who was
with Good the night of her arrest, was the leader of a group called Rochester
CopWatch. In post-arrest interviews, Acuff was identified merely as a witness or
as Goods friend.

19

The media was so busy not noticing things that they didnt even notice when
Emily Good showed up for one interview about her accidental brush with the
police wearing a t-shirt for Food Not Bombs, a self-described revolutionary
international socialist organization that participates in anti-police activities and
conducts CopWatch training seminars.28

Reporters in Rochester must have known more about Emily Good than they let
on in published reports: there was no way they could not know. She had recently
been in the news in another activist cause clbre and another highly publicized
scuffle with police. But they minimized that story in their coverage of Goods
latest arrest. In truth, they did not have to try very hard to present Good as a
credible and objective critic of police behavior to the national press, because that
was what the national press was looking for anyway.

Although there was no evidence of racial profiling in the policemens actions

outside her house, Emily Good went on CNN and talked about racial profiling by
Rochester police before a national audience, and nobody bothered to correct the
record. The police are guilty until proven innocent, and the media rarely bothers
to exonerate them. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, activist law professor
Jonathan Turley compared Good to the private citizen who videotaped the
Rodney King beating twenty years ago.29 As Good and Turley both knew, it
didnt really matter whether police in Rochester were justified in stopping and
searching the car outside Goods house that night. It didnt matter if Good had,
as police allege, claimed to know the men in the car before she turned on her
recorder, a detail that would have entirely justified police concerns about their
own safety.

None of those things were considered. In the end, the story of Emily Good is a
story of the power of the media to confirm their own prejudices. Police: racist
and brutal. Liberal activism: good. Evidence to the contrary: irrelevant. The fact
that Emily Good and Ryan Acuff got away with pretending to the national media
that they were just citizens concerned about the possibility that a black motorist
was being mistreated by police says everything about the lengths reporters will
go to in order to get the precisely story theyre looking for.30

Otherwise, the failure of the media and the punditry to investigate Emily Goods
ties to a radical anti-police movement would just be baffling. Good showed up for
one Rochester Democrat interview wearing a tee shirt for an organization that
had sponsored an anti-police, CopWatch training, yet the subject did not come
up during the interview. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle eventually did
ask Good about her work as an activist, but the reporter did not challenge her
when she denied any history of anti-police activism. "I'm really passionate,
Good says in the interview, I follow a lot of issues . . . I have never agitated
directly against the police. I wouldn't say I'm an activist against the police at all."31

20

Talk about cognitive dissonance. Food Not Bombs, whose tee shirt Good was
wearing during this interview, is a leftist organization that, among other activities,
provides vegan food to the homeless while making grandiose claims about
starvation in America. In 2006, along with Rochester Indymedia and the
Rochester Anarchist Forum, Food Not Bombs co-hosted a Screening, Speak-out,
and Open Mic against Police Brutality and State Repression, titled, Support The
Police: Beat Yourself Up.

Goods tee shirt was not the only clue that she was lying when she said, I
wouldnt say Im an activist against the police at all. There is footage from
Rochester in late March showing her violently breaking through a police line and
collapsing in studied hysteria as officers restrained her at a foreclosure protest
orchestrated by Good and Ryan Acuff group, Take Back the Land, yet another
grassroots groups supported by the Center for Constitutional Rights Movement
Support project.

Emily Good is a professional activist with a long history of staged confrontations

with the police. She and Ryan Acuff knew that her record would need to be
concealed if she was going to use her May, 2011 arrest to promote a message
about being an accidental observer of racial profiling by police. So after that
arrest, Good immediately began removing pages from her Facebook account,
but not before a prescient blogger named 12iggymoms captured some of the
pages before they went missing.32

I spent an entire afternoon scrolling back through her Facebook and found a
wealth of information on other rallies where she instigated police and cheered on
others instigating the police, 12iggymoms wrote. She also bragged on pushing
an Olympic torch runner to the ground. While mainstream journalists and other
bloggers credulously repeated Goods claims of nonviolence, 12iggymoms
watched as Emily Good erased the record of her radical politics. As I scrolled
back further, it looks as though a lot has already been 'scrubbed,' as the pages
went from tons of entries of Emilys activities, to just who she had 'friended', she
said.33

The picture of Emily Good that emerges from the few pages 12iggymoms saved
is neither flattering nor peaceful. In one, Good plans a flash-mob targeting a mall,
but the mall corporation found out and foiled our plans. The next time, Good
writes, id . . . set the flag on fire, and . . . reconsider the lorax leotard.

21

Far worse, in a violent 2009 protest in Ontario, Good and a handful of other
protesters attacked the female jogger carrying the Olympic torch. They created a
confrontation that resulted in the torch-carrier being knocked over and nearly lit
on fire, then blamed police for causing the melee. Good wrote gleefully of the
near-tragic event: The runner actually tripped over all of her security people who
were frantically shoving us out of the way. Anyway, the torch went down! Hitler
started that tradition for the nazi olympics time to extinguish it! Peace and love,
indeed.

In August 2011, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle finally ran a feature story
detailing some, though obviously not the worst, of Emily Goods radical past.

22

She had been arrested four times prior to her May 12, 2011 arrest, twice at the
School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia; once in 2009 when she
climbed a tree during a protest in Rochester and had to be dragged down by
police, and once in March 2011 when she and other activists broke through
police lines and blockaded an eviction for take Back the Land.

Good also met Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. At a Youtube video titled,

Professional Protester Harasses Rochester Police, maintained by
HonestTheObserver, footage appears that has disappeared from other sources:
a picture of Good smiling with Chavez; video of Good breaking through police
lines at a foreclosure protest; video of her screaming at police, and screaming
and crying in fake pain as she is arrested.34

While employed by AmeriCorps and thus, by the taxpayers, Good participated in

at least two violent protests. She invaded the shareholders meeting of a natural
gas company in Oregon and setting off stink bombs in the building.35 She also
recently praised Greek bombers who targeted banks, writing:

This is how activists in Greece oppose the banks: take great care to
blow them up without hurting anyone. People may gripe about this
being "violence" but I would disagree. US wars throughout the
world are truly violent. The big banks are actually killing people.
Stopping them is necessary. The EA activists are on trial right now:
best wishes to them.36

Emily Goods activism represents a troubling resurgence of the type of anti-police

hatred that eventually claimed police lives in the Sixties and Seventies. And the
media is not reporting it. She is now, of course, helping run Occupy Rochester,
where she was recently arrested again.

Activist Emily Good was the last protestor arrested early Saturday morning. She refused
to remove her hat, which she said represents the voiceless animals on this planet this
planet. 37

23

 Occupy Wall Street and the
Media: Selling Out the Police
We dont need a million activists to jumpstart
this revolution. We just need an influential
minority that smells the blood, seizes the
moment and pulls off a set of well-coordinated
strategic moves.
Kalle Lasn, 201038

Before the first tent went up in New Yorks Zuccotti Park last September, a price
was already on police officers heads. The architects of Occupy Wall Street were
veterans of more than two decades of sophisticated and sometimes violent
direct action protests. They were people who knew how to shut down a
corporate shareholder meeting using superglue and bicycle locks, or perform
reconnaissance on city streets. But most important was their knowledge that in
order to sustain the medias interest in occupations that might stretch weeks or
months, they would need something more than giant paper mache puppets and
handwritten signs. They would need headline-grabbing confrontations with the
police.

Kalle Lasn, founder of the eco-apocalyptic, anarchist magazine Adbusters, a sort

of almanac of the Occupy movement, refers to these confrontations as
revolutionary moments. Lasn believes that an accumulation of such moments
will unleash worldwide cultural paroxysms, from which the
corporate/consumerist forces never fully recover.39 He also believes that
destroying capitalism and peoples attachment to owning private property is the
human races only hope of averting ecological collapse and spiritual nullity.

So while most people spent the summer and autumn of 2011 worrying about the
economic downturn, the editors of Adbusters magazine were energized by it.
They designed the Occupy logo, set the date for the first occupation, and
penned essays gleefully envisioning hand-to-hand warfare with law enforcement
as cities and capitalism crumbled.

The fact that the hand-to-hand warfare with police part of the Adbusters
message didnt raise more eyebrows or more questions in newsrooms -- is
evidence of a serious societal breakdown. The media did not ignore signs that
protesters were planning to break laws: they anticipated it eagerly, like a sporting
event. They had an arsenal of techniques for blaming police and excusing
protesters. And when the first waves of civil disobedience turned into clashes
with police, reporters sat back and judged the police response. In city after city,
protesters thus succeeded in turning their behavior into referendum on police
response.

24

The Occupy protests are a complicated game rigged against cops. The fact that
nobody will acknowledge this is a complicated residual of the Sixties and of those,
like reporters, who have intense nostalgia for the protest culture of 1968. This
never went away, even as much of the rest of the world changed. Kalle Lassn
gets this. But in order to understand the threat posed by Occupy, you have to
understand the movement he represents, and the role of police in his vision of
the world.

Like many of its mask-wearing adherents, the Occupy movement has two
faces. Its public, official one is that of non-violent protesters engaging in
spontaneous and leaderless actions to oppose the greed of the financial
industry and the wealthiest 1% of Americans. In its desperate wish for the
hoodied squatters of Occupy to morph into a left-wing Tea Party, the media has
accepted this image as fact and repeats its talking points. Thus, Occupy
protesters are non-violent even when engaging in brazen lawbreaking and
leaderless despite the presence of experienced organizers orchestrating their
every move. They are spontaneous even when they dispatch tactical advance
teams and materialize on location en masse, toting sleeping bags and tents and
checking their twitter feed for further instructions.

Given such painstaking double-speak by the press, it should not be surprising

that the other face of Occupy is not so much hidden as hiding in plain sight. The
professional agitators and anarchists who steer the Occupy movement need not
take many pains to conceal the extremism in their rsums, nor the sources of
their funding, nor the movements real goals, because the media is busy
concealing such things for them.

Consider the three activists widely credited with starting the Occupy movement:
Kalle Lasn and Micah White of Adbusters magazine, and David Graeber, an
anthropology professor at the University of London. All three men are anarchists,
by which they mean, literally, that they support the goal of eradicating
government itself and returning to extremely localized communal living in the
shell of what will be left of society. The three eagerly anticipate a period of
insurrectionary revolution during which all existing socio-political arrangements,
from national sovereignty and industrialism to banking and private property rights,
will be challenged and then toppled. They view the Occupy movement as a test-
run for putting these ideas into action, one city block at a time.

So they say, in blog posts and articles and even entire books. But you would not
know this about Occupys founders by reading recent news stories about them.
Instead of exploring the implications of their politics, reporters focus on the mens
personal eccentricities, or chat with them about the minutiae of Occupy camp life,
or, at most, slip in a quote about Lasn cheerfully anticipating the apocalypse as
he publishes his art magazine. But there seems to be little cognizance that he
means what he says.

25

A New Yorker profile is typical: the reporter expends so much energy observing
Lasn and Whites daily routines that a discussion between the two about plans
for the next phase of Occupy activism is merely mentioned in passing.40 Lasn
speaks of impending surprise attacks that will be more intense and visceral.
But rather than asking whether visceral means violent and violent against
whom, the reporter seems distracted by the fact that Lasn is saying these things
while sitting in a bathtub.

And so it goes with the movement itself. The novelty of the general assembly,
where adults who are trespassing and defecating in city parks pretend that they
are scrupulously obeying noise ordinances by shouting other peoples words in
unison seems to have short-circuited appropriate media inquiries. Months after
the start of Occupy, the public has been thoroughly instructed in consensus-
based leadership versus hierarchy, finger fluttering, and mic-checks, but they
continue to be told that nobody has managed to ascertain what the Occupiers
ultimately want, not even the Occupiers themselves. Such incoherence is a
success for the leaders of Occupy: the street theater component of the protests
are performing as planned, garnering media attention while creating a buffer
zone for more radical activism.

Even activists with the most radical pedigrees are being depicted by the media
as benign players on the Occupy stage. Lisa Fithian, a legendary agitator who
specializes in fomenting conflicts with police, invading buildings, and destroying
private property,41 is described in the New Yorker merely as a fifty-year old
organizer who worked on the nineteen-seventies anti-nuclear campaign and the
W.T.O. protests in Seattle. That is akin to calling Barack Obama a college
instructor who got a job in Washington. The presence of Fithian at Occupy Wall
Street should have raised serious questions about the movements allegedly
non-violent nature. But it didnt.

The first sign of the medias willful naivety regarding Occupy Wall Street was
their response to the movements logo, an image of a ballerina dancing on the
back of the Wall Street Bull. Reporters expounded on the cleverness of the
image and wondered at its caption. But they studiously ignored the logos
backdrop: crowds of marauding, stick-wielding rioters in gas masks emerging
from a fog.

In a typical story, William Yardley of the New York Times described the image as
merely that of a ballerina dancing on the back of the muscular sculptured bull.42
So, what were the Clockwork Orange-looking thugs doing in the background?
Who were they charging at, waving sticks and clubs? Nobody in the mainstream
media bothered to ask. Amazingly, the unsubtle implication that Occupy Wall
Street was merely a smokescreen for Seattle-style rioting and warfare against
the police passed entirely unnoticed.43

26

After the novelty of Occupy Wall Streets impromptu tent cities wore thin,
protesters in New York City, Oakland, Atlanta, and elsewhere struck out from
their tents to occupy other targets in actions strategically designed to elicit
responses from the police, and thus attention from the media. Armed with
camera phones and accompanied by legal observers from the A.C.L.U. and the
National Lawyers Guild, they swarmed streets and bridges and tried to invade
buildings and shipping ports. Then they acted outraged and denounced police
brutality when they were stopped at the front of a building, dispersed from busy
intersections, or kettled, a method of crowd control in which police corral
protesters into contained spaces to prevent the spread of mayhem.

The media was mostly delighted by these spectacles, which offered good copy
and opportunities for grandstanding when one of their own got arrested by some
officer who failed to pause in the midst of chaos to scrutinize a press pass. For
the protesters, there was the excitement of organizing into formations and
probably no small amount of relief in taking a break from the endless general
assembly meetings. But for the police, any misstep during these confrontations
could spell the end of a career. In the age of Anonymous, the anti-police
hacking group, clashing with protesters could even lead to threats against their
own families.

And this was precisely the point. Protesters might say they had no goal, or the
goal of economic justice, or mortgage fairness, or jobs, or student loan relief, but
somehow, their response to each of these disparate goals was the same -- start
a fight with the police. And when a movement is populated with activists who
believe that the law is illegitimate and those who enforce it are fascist pigs,
nobody should be surprised, as the media seemed surprised, when things
deteriorate very quickly, from protesters seizing public land, to defecating on
police cars, to seeking ever-more aggressive stand-offs with the police.

That, in a nutshell, was the progression of Occupy Wall Street between

September 17, 2011, when the occupation of New York Citys Zuccotti Park
began, and November 15, when Mayor Bloomberg finally ordered the dismantling
of the illegal tent city. In just two months, Occupiers wasted $7 million in police
overtime, left behind tons of debris, and drained besieged local businesses of
nearly half a million dollars in lost profits. Although OWS received more than
$700,000 in cash donations alone, there are no reports of efforts by them to
reimburse affected business owners, or efforts by the city to recoup the protests
costs. Instead, taxpaying New Yorkers paid police overtime while absorbing
other losses.

Mayor Bloombergs early indulgence of the protesters frayed a number of social

contracts and placed police in the terrible position of being forced to ignore
lawbreaking while being unable to serve the law-abiding. Bloombergs
subsequent negotiations with Occupy leaders concerning which laws and
ordinances they would or would not obey exposed police to additional hostilities:

27

the mayor could be magnanimous or scolding, but it was the officers who
absorbed the reactions of protesters being denied special privileges, privileges
they had already claimed as rights.

The police also went to work every day aware that activists eager to turn any
incident, however trivial, into a civil rights case were recording every step they
took. And only police had to be present under such conditions: reporters,
politicians, celebrity visitors, and even protest leaders could and did come and go,
as police were left to cope with the addicted and mentally ill homeless who
flocked to Zuccotti Park for food and excitement and also committed crimes and
targeted less streetwise campers.

Within days, the Occupiers upped the ante, moving out of the camp to blockade
streets and try to invade buildings. For all their talk about the economy,
Occupiers focused their energy almost exclusively on such cat-and-mouse
stratagems against the police. They blockaded streets: the police cleared them.
They tried to blockade the Brooklyn Bridge, and police kettled or contained
them behind fencing, giving rise to complaints that kettling itself was inhumane
and then the inevitable class-action lawsuit against the NYPD.

The leaders of the Occupy movement thus succeeded in micromanaging

everyone around them because Mayor Bloomberg and mayors in other cities
abandoned their responsibilities early. But inaction by elected officials was only
one factor that delayed the eventual dismantling of the camps and the restoration
of order. Another factor was careless and even misleading coverage of Occupy
Wall Street by reporters who formed virtual alliances with protesters and
promoted their versions of being subjected to brutality by police.

An incident at the New York City encampment demonstrated reporters

willingness to believe the worst about police officers, while failing to report
protesters violence against police. On October 14, the New York Times and
other media outlets reported that a motorcycle officer had run over a legal
observer from the radical National Lawyers Guild. Although other observers
and police sources immediately reported that the man had staged the accident,
shoving his own leg under the motorcycle and pretending to be trapped, the
Times immediately ran a story accusing police of heinous violence:

Near Broadway and Exchange Place, officers drove scooters into a

crowd of marchers. One man, a legal observer for the National
Lawyers guild, had his leg pinned under a police motorcycle. Video
appears to show an officer on a motorcycle, after running over the
mans leg, leaving his motorcycle parked on the mans leg to go off
to pursue protesters while the man writhes in pain.44

28

The Times later updated the story, suggesting that there was perhaps another
version of events. But their update was hardly a retraction: it was carefully
worded to avoid reporting that many witnesses said the incident was completely
staged:

Amid the chaos in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning as the

Occupy Wall Street protesters marched through the streets, there
were two encounters between protesters and the police that were
captured, however imperfectly, on video and then ricocheted
across the Internet . . . a civilians leg winds up under an officers
motor scooter; the officer leaves his scooter, with the rear tire
apparently parked on the mans leg, to pursue protesters while the
man writhes on the ground.45

Under these circumstances, to say that a leg winds up under an officers motor
scooter is a dishonest effort to avoid saying that many people were accusing the
man of putting his leg there. The Times then dropped the story, rather than
attempting to investigate further, an investigation that would have necessitated
acknowledging that they had leapt to accuse police. By doing so, they also
avoided acknowledging that CopWatch activists, of whom the NLG legal
observer was one, train people to drop to the ground and feign severe injury at
the hands of the police.

Months later, the Times has still not bothered to investigate their own explosive
accusations of literal torture by police, and those accusations continue to
29

ricochet across the internet, feeding dangerous anti-police hatred. At least they
got the ricochet part right.

Not reporting details that revealed Occupiers violence towards police became
the pattern in nearly every city with an Occupy encampment. In Atlanta, after
weeks of intensive coverage of Occupy Atlantas allegedly more peaceful
actions, the news stations, daily paper, and weekly alternative press managed to
collectively not notice when Occupiers blocked the entrance to a hospital
emergency room in a surprise attempt to storm the hospital, which they absurdly
accused of racism towards black men and of sabotaging a highly controversial
homeless shelter.

The only people who reported the emergency room blockade were conservative
commentator Mary Grabar, who happened to be interviewing protesters, one
writer for an online-only neighborhood paper, and a college student writing for
her schools paper. Grabar, who is my colleague, found herself trapped in the
crowd and wrote in Pajamas Media:

[A]n ambulance and then a few seconds later, a fire truck, needed
to get through the traffic. With the narrow street congested with
marchers the emergency vehicles had to stop and blare their horns.
I could see frustration in the firemens faces in the stopped truck . . .
three young men in orange Cop Watch t-shirts, who were walking
on the opposite sidewalk, had video cameras zeroed in on this
policeman heroically getting emergency vehicles past marchers
and traffic . . . the crowd soon crossed the street to the hospital.
Still shouting and drumming, they rushed and blocked the hospital
entrance. A security guards orders to leave, as bewildered
hospital visitors pulled up, did not seem to have much effect, nor
did a single policemans orders. When about a dozen police officers
showed up and notified the marchers that they were on private
property, the crowd slowly made its way across the street,
drumming out a chant about private property being public property.
The police officers stood across the street from the crowd, and so
did the Cop Watchers, holding video cameras in policemens
faces.46

A few days later, with the public still uninformed about what had happened at the
hospital, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed announced that he would be permitting the
Occupiers to continue to stay in a downtown park. I think there is a very real
problem . . . when you make a decision to arrest large numbers of people for
engaging in an act of civil disobedience while at the exact same time youre on
the mall of Washington honoring Martin Luther King, who practiced civil
disobedience, Reed said. The Mayor did not mention the raucous hospital
protest; the cognitive dissonance of comparing such behavior to the civil rights
protests of the early 1960s was simply concealed from the public.

30

For its part, the Atlanta Journal Constitution merely ran another puff piece on the
good intentions of the Occupy movement, titled Its Not Just A Bunch of Hippies
Playing Bongos and inexplicably illustrated the piece with a photo of a bongo-
less young hippy.

More Newsworthy Than 300 Occupiers Attacking a Hospital?

Photo Credit Alexis Stevens47

The papers reporters behaved as if the hospital confrontation had not occurred.
It is hard to imagine that they would have done so if the police pictured above
had so much as pushed back against the protesters who were waving middle
fingers and cameras in their faces. Then the story would have been police
brutality, and it would have made national news.

The failure of the mainstream (and even alternative) media to cover the Atlanta
Occupy hospital raid raises questions about what else is not being reported.
Throughout the autumn occupations, the professional activists leading the
Occupy movement relied on such selective reporting to conceal their extreme
anti-cop agenda. They insisted that they were engaging in peaceful civil
disobedience while training people to incite and escalate confrontations with
police and working to make false accusations of police brutality stick. In an
incident that should have led to some discussion about anti-cop strategies being
deployed nationwide, East Atlanta CopWatch and Occupy Atlanta accused a
motorcycle officer of running down a protester who clearly lunged towards the
officer instead, knocking him to the ground.48

31

But instead of scrutinizing such events, reporters maintained an unspoken policy:
the protesters could say anything, do anything, and act out against the police
with no consequences. Incidents would only rise to the level of being
newsworthy if police reacted in a way for which they could be criticized for
brutality or for violating protesters free speech or civil rights. The activists
directing the OWS movement know how to use first amendment law. Using
threats of litigation, they are busy creating new norms in which protesters may
scream epithets in police officers faces, but if the police are captured on video so
much as swearing back, they might face discipline or civil rights charges.

In a manual titled Fighting Police Abuse, the A.C.L.U. advises activists on ways
to file charges against police for police problems including verbal abuse, and
especially, of course, racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs.49 Legal observers
from the A.C.L.U. and the National Lawyers Guild attend every Occupy action,
on the alert to detect so-called hate speech only from the police, not directed at
them, of course. CopWatch activists hold workshops for Occupy protesters on
the history of police brutality and discussions about whether police are working
class or working class traitors. Occupiers name their camps after cop-killers and
hold events honoring Mumia Abu Jamal and Troy Davis -- honoring them
because they killed police, while simultaneously complaining about the slightest
insensitivity on the part of the officers being forced to patrol camps where the
names of cop-killers are displayed on signs.

Occupy Oakland Photo Credit Zombietime

The Occupy movement is reinforcing the expectation that policing involves

absorbing flagrant abuse, and by whitewashing this aspect of OWS, the media is
helping them do it.

32

 Conclusion
As this report is being finalized, in January 2012, the extremely liberal mayor of
Oakland, Jean Quan, is experiencing the weighty hangover of her previous
leniency towards Occupy protesters lawbreaking. She is facing a city
devastated by a weekend of violent protests. Hundreds of 911 calls for help were
delayed and five homicides were committed as police had their hands full playing
cat-and-mouse games with protesters who stormed and vandalized Oaklands
City Hall, attacked officers with an elaborate shield made of corrugated metal,
and threw bottles at them.

Now Quan is talking tough, for her at least, by threatening at least some
repercussions where there had been few, or none. She wants restorative justice
from the rioters, for instance, a trendy term for picking up garbage while feigning
responsibility for ones behavior instead of going to prison.

But ideas like substituting restorative justice for actually punishment is what got
Mayor Quan, and Oakland, into this mess.

The Occupiers response to Quans weak effort to locate her inner Giuliani is
telling. They howled that the 400 weekend arrests of protesters were illegal
because protesters werent given enough time to disperse before being
arrested, one of the many rules of engagement apparently ceded to them
previously which will now doubtless spawn endless lawsuits on the grounds of
that precedent.

How doubtless? The Occupiers put it in writing, while throwing a tantrum at the
city for daring to arrest them for attacking police, destroying property, and rioting.
Incidentally, the New York Times reports that police were pelted with bottles,
metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices, and burning
flares.50

Here is the Occupy statement on the arrests, from the Los Angeles Times:

Contrary to their own policy, the OPD gave no option of leaving or

instruction on how to depart, the group said in a press release, These
arrests are completely illegal, and this will probably result in another class
action lawsuit against the OPD, who have already cost Oakland $58
million in lawsuits over the past 10 years.

With all the problems in our city, should preventing activists from putting a
vacant building to better use be their highest priority? the group asked.
Was it worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent?"51

33

Such language seems to belie the notion that restorative justice will do the trick.

This report has focused on the war on cops in an immediate sense, on the
ground, in events like the events of last night in Oakland, as well as the medias
complicity in misreporting these events. With protesters targeting Chicago and
Tampa, a more dangerous phase of the war on cops lies ahead.

End Notes

1
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2000/01/06/wto000106.html
2
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/magazine/them-against-the-world-part-
2.html?scp=1&sq=lisa fithian&st=cse
3
http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/tactical-briefing-25.html
4
http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/tactical-briefing-25.html
5
http://occupychi.org/phpbbforum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2244
6
http://www.jeffreyjuris.com/articles/juris.annals.pdf
7
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display&article_id=358&iss
ue_id=82004
8
http://ccrjustice.org/movement-support
9
http://october22-ny.org/
10
http://rosecitycopwatch.wordpress.com/
11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNSg0zWbSVQ, see also parts 2 5.
12
http://rosecitycopwatch.wordpress.com/alternatives-to-police/
13
http://www.copwatch.org/2personprotest.html
14
http://www.copblock.org/
15
http://www.aim.org/special-report/drugs-guns-and-madness-in-the-ron-paul-revolution/
16
ibid.
17
http://conference.winnipegcopwatch.org/sessions/copwatch-tactics
18
http://razethewalls.weebly.com/
19
http://westdenvercopwatch.wordpress.com/
20
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/12/police-brutality-coloring-book/
21
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/06/29/arizona-police-confirm-2nd-hack-on-officers-email/
22
http://www.dnainfo.com/20110928/downtown/nypd-lauches-probe-into-pepper-spray-incident-
as-new-video-surfaces
23
http://ccrjustice.org/movement-support
24
http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/statements-of-support/
25
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2007858,00.html
26
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/15/nation/la-na-justice-sheriff-20111216
27
Emily Good Talks About Her Arrest, video story by Kris Murante, Rochester Democrat and
Chronicle, date unknown.
28
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/story.html
29
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/08/opinion/la-oe-turley-video-20111108
30
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/08/opinion/la-oe-turley-video-20111108
31
Emily Good Talks About Her Arrest, video story by Kris Murante, Rochester Democrat and
Chronicle, date unknown. The passage quoted here appeared in the original video but not more
recent versions.
32
http://a12iggymom.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/activist-and-professional-protester-goded-cops-
into-arresting-her/
33
http://a12iggymom.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/activist-and-professional-protester-goded-cops-
into-arresting-her/
34
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf4V4TtKpUE&context=C3970ad4ADOEgsToPDskJKrS4Bvh
y9XS9PkI-dfk-b
35
Emily Good: The Making of an Activist, Sean Dobbin, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
(August 10, 2011).

34


36
http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/news/blog/2011/11/Activism-How-far-do-you-go/
37
http://reportermag.com/article/11-04-2011/occupy-rochester-leads-to-arrests
38
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/91/i-revolution.html
39
ibid.
40
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz
41
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/magazine/them-against-the-world-part-
2.html?scp=1&sq=lisa fithian&st=cse&pagewanted=1
42
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/business/media/the-branding-of-the-occupy-
movement.html?pagewanted=all
43
see also: http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-12-05/news/30480397_1_studies-social-movements-
protesters-wall-street/2
44
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/cleanup-of-zuccotti-park-
cancelled/?scp=3&sq=national lawyer's guild observer run over&st=cse
45
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/video-of-protesters-leg-beneath-scooter-spurs-
conflicting-accounts/?scp=1&sq=national lawyers guild observer run over&st=cse
46
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-occupations-anarchy-waiting-for-crisis/?singlepage=true
47
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/occupy-atlanta-its-not-1205984.html
48
http://www.copwatchoea.org/content/officer-motorcycle-rams-occupy-atlanta-protesters
49
http://www.aclu.org/racial-justice_prisoners-rights_drug-law-reform_immigrants-rights/fighting-
police-abuse-community-ac
50
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/us/occupy-oakland-protest-leads-to-hundreds-of-
arrests.html?_r=1&sq=occupy oakland&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1327962016-
mOcs2SWHIsaf0DuAfo6XqQ
51
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-occupy-oakland-
20120130,0,6365053.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campai
gn=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Flocal+%28L.A.+Times+-
+California+%7C+Local+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

35