mississippi – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Now That Six ‘Goon Squad’ Deputies Are Going To Jail For Torturing Two Black Men, The DOJ Says It’s Time To Investigate Their Employer

from the better-late-than-never dept

One of the most horrific acts of police brutality has now resulted in two DOJ investigations. The first concerned the torture of Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker by six white deputies who referred to themselves as the “Goon Squad” for their willingness to break rules and violate rights.

The first investigation involved the incident itself to determine whether or the DOJ would be joining the prosecution of the Rankin County (MS) deputies who engaged in the reprehensible, hours-long torture of two black men. The description of this prolonged brutality can still turn stomachs, even when recounted in the dry wording used in charging documents.

During a search of the house, OPDYKE kicked in the padlocked door to the front bedroom. Inside, he found a white-flesh-toned dildo and a BB gun. OPDYKE mounted the dildo on the end of the BB gun and brought the dildo to the living room, where M.J. and E.P. were handcuffed and seated on the couch. OPDYKE forced the dildo into the mouth of E.P., and attempted to force the dildo into the mouth of M.J.

[…]

DEDMON forced M.J. and E.P. onto their knees with their backs to DEDMON, and DEDMON threatened to anally rape M.J. and E.P. with the dildo. DEDMON grabbed the back of M.J.’s pants and moved the dildo toward M.J.’s backside, but DEDMON stopped when he noticed that M.J. had defecated himself.

[…]

M.J. and E.P., still handcuffed, were forced onto their backs on the floor of the living room. ELWARD held them down, and DEDMON poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths, forcing M.J. and E.P. to involuntarily ingest [these fluids]; and DEDMON poured cooking grease on E.P.’s head.

On top of that, the men were tased 17 times and Jenkins was shot in the mouth. The deputies wrapped up the night by generating bogus GPS data, throwing the house’s security camera hard drive into a nearby lake, concocting a story about a controlled drug buy gone wrong, and destroyed whatever other physical evidence they thought might tie them to the scene.

With six deputies heading to jail, the sheriff who ignored the Goon Squad and their tactics for years promised to root out any remaining bad apples from his barrel. Of course, Sheriff Bryan Bailey is hardly the man for the job. He has his own ethical issues (to put it lightly), ranging from abusing the subpoena process to secure his girlfriend’s phone records to performing some very questionable dismissals of DUI cases.

A man like that can’t be trusted to clean up his own backyard. Fortunately, the DOJ has returned to the scene to announce its own investigation of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. It may have already looked into the six officers who are now incarcerated, but something as horrible as this doesn’t form in a vacuum. It happens because more minor violations and acts of violence were ignored repeatedly, emboldening the Goon Squad to the point of engaging in the literal torture of two black men.

The Justice Department will investigate whether the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department has engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force and unlawful stops, searches and arrests, and whether it has used racially discriminatory policing practices, according to Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.

[…]

“The concerns about the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department did not end with the demise of the Goon Squad,” Clarke said Thursday.

The Justice Department has received information about other troubling incidents, including deputies overusing stun guns, entering homes unlawfully, using “shocking racial slurs” and employing “dangerous, cruel tactics to assault people in their custody,” Clarke said.

There’s no need to use the word “whether.” The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department is definitely “engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force” and other rights violations. That much was made clear by these deputies’ actions, which are a trailing indicator of patterns of rights violations. The only question the DOJ’s investigation will answer is just how bad things are. The other certainty is that some high-profile resignations will be filed in the very near future as department supervisors and county officials hurriedly try to put some time and distance between them and this miserable excuse for a law enforcement agency they helped cultivate.

Filed Under: brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, doj, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, joshua hartfield, mississippi, police violence

With Multiple Deputies Headed To Jail, Sheriff Vows To Get To Bottom Of ‘Goon Squad’ Horror Show He Ignored For Years

from the fox-to-henhouse:-what-up dept

Reminding everyone that racism is just a thing we do in the United States, six Rankin County deputies were indicated on criminal charges related to the literal torture of two black men. All six pleaded guilty. Deputy Hunter Elward was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison. The other officers are also currently serving prison time.

This all began because a “helpful” Mississippi resident called the cops because they had witnessed the most Mississippi of crimes: black men hanging out with a white woman. What went on from there not only chills the blood, but triggers the gag reflex:

During a search of the house, OPDYKE kicked in the padlocked door to the front bedroom. Inside, he found a white-flesh-toned dildo and a BB gun. OPDYKE mounted the dildo on the end of the BB gun and brought the dildo to the living room, where M.J. and E.P. were handcuffed and seated on the couch. OPDYKE forced the dildo into the mouth of E.P., and attempted to force the dildo into the mouth of M.J.

[…]

DEDMON forced M.J. and E.P. onto their knees with their backs to DEDMON, and DEDMON threatened to anally rape M.J. and E.P. with the dildo. DEDMON grabbed the back of M.J.’s pants and moved the dildo toward M.J.’s backside, but DEDMON stopped when he noticed that M.J. had defecated himself.

[…]

M.J. and E.P., still handcuffed, were forced onto their backs on the floor of the living room. ELWARD held them down, and DEDMON poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths, forcing M.J. and E.P. to involuntarily ingest [these fluids]; and DEDMON poured cooking grease on E.P.’s head.

[…]

Pointing out that M.J. and E.P. had been tased by both RCSO-issued tasers and an RPD-issued taser, the defendants decided to test their tasers on M.J. and E.P. to see which one was more powerful.

At this point, DEDMON, MIDDLETON, HARTFIELD, and ELWARD tased M.J. and E.P. repeatedly: ELWARD’s taser was discharged 8 times, HARTFIELD’s taser was discharged 5 times, and DEDMON’s taser was discharged 4 times.

[…]

ELWARD surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun.

ELWARD forced M.J. onto his knees, stuck the gun in M.J.’s mouth, and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not discharge.

ELWARD racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When ELWARD put the gun back into M.J’s mouth and pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.

I want to set the scene for what’s been happening since then. The six members of the self-proclaimed “Goon Squad” are all now facing jail time. The sheriff who oversaw this group (and by “oversaw,” I mean “ignored”) has not only received a raise that makes him the highest paid law enforcement official in the state, but is now pretending he’s capable of cleaning this mess up.

And who better to do this than the sheriff who, in 2014, abused the subpoena process to dig up info on his girlfriend. He presented a subpoena for phone records to the local DA under the pretense that he was requesting general info to present to a grand jury. But the phone records request targeted his girlfriend (who was cuurently married to someone else) and the school employee the sheriff believed she was romantically involved with. An investigation was opened, but it dead-ended after the chairman of the (LOL) House Committee on Ethics recused himself because of his “years-long friendship” with the sheriff. It was then passed on to the state attorney general who simply decided not to pursue it.

Another bombshell of bad press has rocked the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department still run by ethically-challenged sheriff Bryan Bailey. A collaborative report produced by the New York Times and Mississippi Today uncovered messages sent between deputies in the “Goon Squad” WhatsApp group.

As can be assumed from the description of the atrocities committed by Goon Squad members in the only case they’re currently facing prison time for, the contents of these messages is more of the same:

Some of the messages discuss brutalizing and demeaning suspects, as well as exchanging disturbing crime scene photos and pictures of “rotting corpses,” the report said.

In one exchange from a 2022 domestic violence arrest, then-Deputy Hunter Elward wrote, “Did you Tase him in the face!?”

Fellow Goon Squad member Daniel Opdyke asked if they had shocked the man in the anus.

Another deputy said the suspect would have “gotten more lovings,” seeming to indicate they held back because of potential witnesses, saying, “All the neighbors were outside watching.”

Chat members also “discussed taking nude pictures of a woman they had arrested,” the Times reported.

Another exchange discusses deputies getting “points” for shooting someone.

One member of this chat group has already opted for the “locker room talk” defense popularized by convicted felon Donald Trump:

One member of the group chat, who no longer works for the sheriff’s department, called his messages “absolutely all jokes,” in an interview with the New York Times.

Huh. Well, they don’t look like “jokes.” Jokes are supposed to be funny. Were these messages only funny because they were true? Because, given what’s reported, the “jokes” referenced acts of violence Goon Squad members actually committed. If these were jokes, they were in-jokes that were only funny in the context of habitual acts of torture and violence committed by members of the Goon Squad group.

The state should be jumping in here to take the lead on an independent investigation of the members of this chat group. But it hasn’t done that, which has allowed none other than Sheriff Bryan Bailey to get a head start on exonerating himself, if not the rest of chat group participants not currently serving federal prison time.

The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office says it will conduct a review and analysis after a Wednesday report from The New York Times and Mississippi Today detailed messages in an encrypted WhatsApp group chat between known “Goon Squad” members and other law enforcement officers, some of whom are still employed by the county.

[…]

Neither the department nor Sheriff Bryan Bailey “knew of the existence of ‘a shift of officers who called themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ until a bill of information was filed in federal court,” the sheriff’s office statement said.

Bullshit. If the sheriff was truly unaware of the existence of a “Goon Squad” or the violent tactics of its members, he’s either incompetent or a liar. The acts committed by these officers were not the acts of officers who went a little off the rails when dealing with violent or extremely hostile arrestees. These are the acts of officers who felt truly comfortable torturing their fellow human beings, secure in the knowledge they would most likely get away with it — either because their boss was bad at his job or was willing to ignore their criminal acts. Neither is a good look for the person who’s supposed to be on top of everything happening in his department.

If Sheriff Bailey actually cared about this, he would have asked for an outside law enforcement agency to handle this “review and analysis.” If the state cared at all about this, it would have already initiated an independent investigation utilizing its Inspector General’s office or, at the very least, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Although the latter is still a law enforcement agency and just as prone to look for reasons to exonerate fellow officers, it still wouldn’t be the extremely compromised Sheriff Bailey pretending he can provide a competent investigation of stuff he was either too stupid or too corrupt to notice despite running this department for more than a decade.

Filed Under: brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, mississippi, police, police brutality, police violence, rankin county

‘Goon Squad’ Deputies Headed To Jail For Torturing Black Men For The Crime Of Being Black

from the it's-like-we've-gone-back-a-century dept

They called themselves the “Goon Squad.” Six Mississippi deputies bestowed this name upon themselves, perhaps hoping to invoke the more violent era of the National Hockey League — an era overseen by “enforcers” fueled by cocaine and testosterone who gave the home crowd what they wanted: blood on the ice in return for any perceived slight during the game.

That these deputies would align themselves with violence isn’t unusual. To this day, cops still adorn themselves, their personal vehicles, and their social media accounts with signifiers of violence, beginning (and often, ending [because cops have no imagination]) with the logo of the Punisher, a comic book creation who personifies vigilantism. The irony is completely lost on these officers, who seem to feel they should be not only above the law, but beyond the retributive forces of their employers (the general public) and the agencies they work for.

The agencies they work for are largely to blame. The “Goon Squad” would never have felt comfortable rising to this level of violence if its members didn’t believe they’d never be held accountable for it.

The details of the case are sickening and horrifying. And it clearly indicates it takes a certain culture to breed this sort of specific violence — violence that was ushered into existence by a call from a white woman complaining about black men in a nearby residence.

The 1950s haven’t ended. For that matter, neither have the 1850s — not when biased cops are free to roam the streets. In 1955, black man Emmett Till was tortured to death because a white woman claimed he “whistled” at her. In 2023, two black men were tortured and sexually assaulted by the “Goon Squad” because someone complained that these two were currently in the residence of a white woman.

Brace yourself. It gets ugly.

The defendants admitted that on Jan. 24, without a warrant or any exigent circumstances, they kicked in the door and entered a home in Braxton, Rankin County, Mississippi where two Black men, M.J. and E.P., were residing. The defendants handcuffed and arrested the men without probable cause to believe they had committed any crime, called them racial slurs, and warned them to stay out of Rankin County. Further, the defendants punched and kicked the men, tased them 17 times, forced them to ingest liquids, and assaulted them with a dildo. During the incident, Dedmon fired his gun twice to intimidate the men.

At the conclusion of the incident, Elward surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun, forced the gun into M.J.’s mouth and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not fire. Elward racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When Elward pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.

As M.J. was bleeding on the floor, the defendants did not provide medical aid, but instead gathered outside the home to devise a false cover story and took steps to corroborate it, including: planting a gun on M.J.; destroying surveillance video, spent shell casings, and taser cartridges; submitting fraudulent drug evidence to the crime lab; filing false reports; charging M.J. with crimes he did not commit; making false statements to investigators; and pressuring witnesses to stick to the cover story. Three of the defendants admitted in court that they were members of “The Goon Squad,” a group of RCSO officers who were known for using excessive force and not reporting it.

And that’s the “just the facts” reporting by the DOJ, which investigated this incident and, ultimately, filed criminal charges against the six “Goon Squad” deputies. What’s not noted in this recounting is that the dildo was attached to the end of a BB gun before being used to sexually assault the men. What’s also shown in this recounting is that the men were tased 17 times during this ordeal.

The good news is that these officers appear to be headed to prison.

Hunter Elward, 31, was sentenced to about 20 years in prison, while Jeffrey Middleton, the leader of the so-called “Goon Squad” that abused the men, was given a 17.5-year prison sentence. Four other former law enforcement officers who admitted to torturing Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker are set to be sentenced later this week.

It takes a lot to make a court throw the book at a law enforcement officer, but the “Goon Squad” managed to make this happen.

Before sentencing Elward, U.S. District Judge Tom Lee called the former deputy’s actions “egregious and despicable,” and said a “sentence at the top of the guidelines range is justified — is more than justified.” He continued: “It’s what the defendant deserves. It’s what the community and the defendant’s victims deserve.”

Here are the names of all the officers involved:

The officers included Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department and Joshua Hartfield, a Richland police officer.

Hopefully, all six will be imprisoned for years and never given the chance to hold a government position for the rest of their lives. This event sounds like the sort of thing that went out of style more than 70 years ago. But racism never goes out of style, and some of the nation’s most violent racists are employed by US law enforcement agencies.

As I stated earlier, no one on the “Goon Squad” would have felt comfortable torturing two black men in response to a “black men in a house with a white woman omg” that deserved no response, if they hadn’t spent years being assured tacitly or explicitly that they could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.

The New York Times has the backstory on the “Goon Squad.” The long, detailed article by Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield shows how this sort of abuse is allowed to become just another part of the thing we call “police work” by agencies and officials who honestly couldn’t care less what happens to minorities, women, or pretty much anyone who doesn’t wear a badge.

The details are just as horrific as those in this case that’s currently generating prison time for these badge-sporting criminals.

In the pursuit of drug arrests, deputies of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department shocked Robert Jones with a Taser in 2018 while he lay submerged in a flooded ditch, then rammed a stick down his throat until he vomited blood, he said.

During a raid the same year, deputies choked Mitchell Hobson with a lamp cord and waterboarded him to simulate drowning, he said, then beat him until the walls were spattered with his blood. That raid took place at the home of Rick Loveday, a sheriff’s deputy in a neighboring county, who said he was dragged half-nakedfrom hisbed at gunpoint, before deputies jabbed a flashlight threateningly at his buttocks and then pummeled him relentlessly.

It wasn’t just the six officers facing charges. Public records and complaints filed against the sheriff’s office show at least 20 deputies have been involved in acts of violence like these. That number includes high-ranking supervisors, including a former undersheriff, detectives, and a deputy who has since moved on to become the police chief of another department.

Here’s the CV on one of the deputies pleading guilty to federal charges for the torture of these two black men:

Brett McAlpin, former chief investigator for the department, was involved in at least 13 of the arrests and was repeatedly described by witnesses as leading the raids. He was named in at least four lawsuits and six complaints going back to 2004. Even so, Sheriff Bailey named him investigator of the year in 2013.

Getting sued and named in complaints? Apparently, that sort of thing deserves a raise, at least in Sheriff Bailey’s department.

And say what you will about Axon/Taser (and there’s plenty to be said!), but at least its products gather tons of data. Taser deployment records generated by deputies show they routinely exceed the recommended deployment limits, both in terms of length and frequency. It’s difficult to determine whether these excessive deployments are linked to any of the cases described above because the paperwork filed by these officers almost always conveniently “forgot” Tasers were deployed.

This racist strain of policing runs deep in Mississippi. Officer Lloyd Jones was accused by the DOJ of beating black residents in the 1960s, something that didn’t prevent him from being elected sheriff of Simpson County. He also bragged about shooting a black protester in the back during a 1967 civil rights protest and participated in the jailhouse beating of black reverend in the Rankin County jail in 1970. (Unsurprisingly, cops love him.)

The current sheriff of Rankin County — the one employing the criminally-charged members of the “Goon Squad” — claims Lloyd Jones is one of his mentors.

“He is on my life’s wall of gratitude and had a huge impact on who I am,” Sheriff Bailey wrote on Facebook in 2015. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him or recall something that he taught me.”

These are the acts the racist-inspired Sheriff Bailey allowed to happen under his watch:

Deputies held people down while punching and kicking them or shocked them repeatedly with Tasers. They shoved gun barrels into people’s mouths. Three people said deputies had waterboarded them until they thought they would suffocate. Five said deputies had told them to move out of the county.

Many of the targets teetered on the edge of homelessness and were caught with a few grams of meth or with only drug paraphernalia — a glass pipe or used syringe. Several people sat in jail for days or weeks only to have their charges dropped.

There’s nothing that was considered too far to go in this sheriff’s war on drugs:

As the deputies ransacked his home looking for drugs, Mr. Manning said, they wrapped a pair of jeans around his head and punched him repeatedly in the face before using a blowtorch to melt a metal nutcracker handle onto his bare leg as he screamed. On Mr. McAlpin’s orders, Mr. Manning said, a deputy then forced him to sit, pulled a belt around his neck and yanked it upward, choking him until he believed he would suffocate.

[…]

In interviews, Mr. Paige said the deputies pulled him into his roommate’s bedroom and sat him upright on the bed, where he felt someone press a knee into his back and stretch a washcloth across his mouth. Then, he said, deputies poured gallon after gallon of water over his face. As he struggled to breathe, he said, one of them pressed a lit cigarette into his thigh.

All the while, they shocked his groin intermittently with Tasers, Mr. Paige said. Taser logs show that one of the four deputies who reported being at the scene triggered his Taser during the arrest.

These are not the actions of law enforcement officers. These are the actions of sadists who’ve somehow found a way to get paid for indulging their worst impulses. This may now be coming to an end, but for years this abuse was ignored by a sheriff who openly claims to be inspired by another bigoted sadist who left his mark (in all senses of the word) while battling back against integration.

The list of horrendous abuses of power goes on and on. If you have the stomach for it, I strongly suggest you read the entire NYT article. What’s detailed here shocks the conscience. Unfortunately, I doubt it’s an outlier. Deep-seated racism is a problem anywhere cops do business. But in the deep South, it’s probably a little bit easier to get away with, what with heirs of plantation owners still possessing some of the deepest pockets.

Years of supervisory indifference have led officers to believe they’re a law unto themselves. The jailing of six deputies ultimately won’t make much of a difference. What it will do is force violent bigots to be a little more subtle.

Filed Under: brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, joshua hartfield, mississippi, police, police violence

Here, Hold My Lube: Pornhub Blocks Virginia and Mississippi

from the why-should-I-bother-anymore dept

Mandatory age verification rules are entering force in Mississippi and Virginia. Mississippi has a population of barely 3 million people. Virginia has a population of over 8.6 million people. Like Utah (population over 3 million) back in May, one of the world’s most popular adult tube websites chose to block IP addresses from both of these states as a protest against age verification laws that may threaten data privacy and security.

That’s roughly 15 million people — many of whom are minors, but the vast majority of whom are legally-aged adults who likely use the internet for a variety of purposes, including watching porn or viewing erotic materials on sites like the one site I refer to. The website you ask? It’s pretty obvious it’s Pornhub — owned by MindGeek.

While not the largest tube site in the world, Pornhub still brings in billions of visits every year, making it one of the most trafficked web properties in the world — on par with sites like Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook.

Pornhub published a scathing rebuke through its official Twitter account to point out why a VPN will now be needed for users who wish to access popular sites in the Pornhub network like Brazzers, Mofos, RedTube, PornMD, and ModelHub. All of these sites are blocked.

These laws, Pornhub explained in the statement, are also not equitably enforced. This means that some sites, like the Pornhub network, will comply with these laws while others will ultimately choose not to. “We already saw how this scenario played out,” reads Pornhub’s press statement, referring to the Louisiana age verification law that entered force in January 2023.

In this case, Pornhub adopted a measure that used the Louisiana state digital driver’s license application as a tool to verify age for people over 18 who want to access the site. But the result ended up being a loss of 80 percent of Pornhub’s Louisiana traffic.

“These people did not stop looking for porn,” says the site. “They just migrated to other corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take your safety seriously, and that often don’t moderate content.” These are fighting words from a site that is trying, despite recently being accused of illegally collecting data and violating GDPR regulations.

I’ve personally spoken with individuals of power — leaders in Pornhub’s corporate leadership and ownership group (Ethical Capital Partners) — who are legitimately and openly concerned over the clearly inconsistent implementation of age verification laws in the United States. Laws that have been adopted in several states offer very little in the way of clarifying age verification codes. Pornhub, and other major players in the online adult entertainment industry, have long been supportive of age verification measures to prevent minors from viewing age-restricted materials.

The laws that are dominating the state-by-state legal patchwork that is characteristic of the United States are impotent. For starters, Pornhub expressed early on when blocking entire states from their site that a viable option for age verification is device-based verification, rather than collecting government ID cards and credit card numbers. Porn star Cherie DeVille gave this spiel in a video first published to Utahns before the age verification law there entered force. As I explained previously, the Utah case featured DeVille in a video explaining that local laws no longer incentivize Pornhub to allow site access in particular jurisdictions. This resulted in users raging against the elected officials who adopted the law and spurred a federal lawsuit brought by members of the adult entertainment industry. Now, as I reported for AVN the other day, Cherie is back telling users in Mississippi and Virginia how it is.

Age verification won’t work if there is no form of equal enforcement and the proposed compliance strategies add even more undue burdens, like increased information security costs and a bloat of sensitive personal data that is ripe for the taking by hackers.

These age verification laws have absolutely no point at this moment in time, either. States that have adopted these laws are controlled by elected politicians who are influenced by groups who wish for types of expression that are otherwise protected by the First Amendment to be stifled. And all this in the name of protecting kids, showing a shameful belief among a select few elites that they know what’s best for the nation’s children, consenting adults, and entire digital industries.

Michael McGrady covers the tech side of the online porn business. He is a contributing editor at AVN.com.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, adult content, age verification, geoblock, mississippi, virginia
Companies: mindgeek, pornhub

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves Signs Dumb New Restrictions On Electric Vehicles

from the not-so-free-market dept

Mon, Mar 20th 2023 01:26pm - Karl Bode

If you’re an automaker or oil giant keen on slowing the rise of electric vehicles, there’s no shortage of captured lawmakers ready and willing to implement your terrible ideas, however harmful or impractical.

In North Carolina, Republican leaders have pushed a bill demanding locals destroy any free electric vehicle stations on public land, if local authorities don’t build free gas and diesel pumps alongside them. In Wyoming, state Republican leaders tried to implement a ban on electric vehicles, though the ban itself is little more than performative, oil industry ass kissing.

In Mississippi, Republican Governor Tate Reeves signed a bill recently restricting electric car manufacturers from selling vehicles in person unless they open traditional, franchised dealerships. Reeves is pretending the move, clearly a futile bid to protect oil interests and automotive companies that have lagged on EVs, is all about protecting small businesses:

“Almost 200 small businesses in communities across our state are seeking assurances that big manufacturers can’t just destroy their businesses. That’s fair!” Reeves, a Republican, said in a statement posted to social media. “I also recognize that innovation in this industry is inevitable. And with innovation comes new companies with new business models. I am committed to find long-term solutions—in an ever changing market.”

That justification, of course, makes absolutely no fucking sense in context of what the bill actually does.

Republicans have spent decades pretending to be dedicated to free market innovation. Though their actual track record of coddling giants (see: telecom, banking, energy, airlines, insurance, health care) widely disproves the claim. More recently, they’ve pretended to be a party super interested in “antitrust reform,” though those efforts are also as hollow as a cheap Easter chocolate bunny.

In this case, Mississippi’s more “traditional” restrictions don’t ban the sale of electric cars, but if you’re oblivious or indifferent to Musk’s reputational implosion and in the market for a Tesla, they’ll force you to visit the state’s only sanctioned (via carve out) Tesla dealer in Brandon. EV makers in general are restricted from opening any new stores unless they adhere to the traditional, dated and convoluted franchise model people have been complaining about for decades.

Granted there are still some Republicans that realize this kind of mindless oil and traditional auto industry ass kissing is both harmful and idiotic:

Republican Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, had hoped Reeves would veto the legislation. Lawmakers were aiming to attract Tesla to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, an area Wiggins called the state’s economic driver.

“In today’s world, if you don’t innovate, you lose out. We as a state cannot afford to lose out,” Wiggins told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “My vote against the bill was a vote for capitalism, competition and innovation rather than for a policy of protectionism.”

Yet the new restrictions still passed the state legislature 39-13, driving would be EV buyers to a neighboring state. You know, out of an undying love of small business innovation.

Filed Under: big oil, climate change, corruption, electric vehicles, ev, franchise dealership, mississippi, regulatory capture, republican, restrictions, tate reeves

More States Get Dumb, Introduce Laws Requiring ID Verification To Access Porn

from the please-apply-for-your-access-to-porn-license dept

There’s no reason anyone should look to Louisiana for legislative leadership. The state still has an oft-abused criminal defamation law on the books in 2023 — the sort of law that would have looked out of place a century ago.

I guess you can be on the cutting edge when your legislative moves appeal to backwards people. A new wave of moral panic is upon us, led by legislators who think they can cleanse the world by cleaning up the internet. Since the internet remains out of reach, a moral minority clad in legislative clothing has arisen, determined to limit everyone’s access to pornography by forcing sites to collect identifying information from site visitors.

The Louisiana law that took effect at the beginning of this year mandated ID verification by any site hosting “at least 33.3% pornography.” How this percentage would be determined was a problem left to the governed to sort out. The implementation of the law resulted in some compliance, with PornHub demanding info from visitors with Louisiana IP addresses. Other sites simply refused access. One-third-or-greater porn sites were steered towards using the state’s in-house ID verification app — LA Wallet — to verify users’ ages.

Copycat legislation is now popping up elsewhere in the country, as Ashley Belanger reports for Ars Technica.

Last month, Louisiana became the first state to require an ID from residents to access pornography online. Since then, seven states have rushed to follow in Louisiana’s footsteps. According to a tracker from Free Speech Coalition, Florida, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia introduced similar laws, and laws in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia are seemingly closest to passing. If passed, some of these laws could be enforced promptly, while some bills in states like Florida and Mississippi specify that they wouldn’t take effect until July.

Not great news for internet freedom. And, despite what legislators might say in support of these bills, these are designed to limit everyone’s access to pornography. The proposals may state concern for minors accessing sexual material, but the intent is to add friction to porn access with a nasty undercurrent of passive government surveillance running just below the surface.

Legislators may claim they have no access to identifying info gathered by porn sites, but claims like these are only as trustworthy as the people making them. Most people distrust lawmakers. Hence, most people will believe governments will know they’re accessing porn content, whether or not that’s actually the case.

Despite there being plenty of legislators deeply invested in passing performative laws, not every one of these legislative pitches will survive the less-than-close scrutiny of other representatives and other components of the legislative machinery. Belanger reports the South Dakota effort is currently stalled. And the law’s lead backer has offered up an absolutely hilarious explanation of her failure to shove this past a deeply conservative state legislature.

Republican Jessica Castleberry, seemingly failed to persuade the committee of the urgency of passing the law, saying at the hearing that “this is not your daddy’s Playboy. Extreme, degrading, and violent pornography is only one click away from our children.” She told Ars that the bill was not passed because some state lawmakers were too “easily swayed by powerful lobbyists.”

“It’s a travesty that unfettered access to pornography by minors online will continue in South Dakota because of lobbyists protecting the interests of their clients, versus legislators who should be protecting our children,” Castleberry told Ars. “The time to pass this bill was in the mid-1990s.”

There has never been a less likely to exist lobbying group than Big Porn. Castleberry appears to believe her fellow legislators were talked out of passing the bill by shadowy, suited men bearing black bags full of barely used Hustler back issues and handfuls of suspiciously sticky currency.

Equally as stupid as this scenario is the loaded language used by supporters of these laws. Some of this loaded language actually makes its way into the bills’ wording, resulting in dry legislative boilerplate occasionally punctuated by terms like “health crisis” or a peculiar insistence on referring to any and all sexual content (whether artistic or educational or of public interest) as “harmful content.”

This childish thinking isn’t actually going to protect any children. Limiting minors’ access to porn is a good idea, but the government isn’t the entity that’s most likely to succeed without causing a shit ton of collateral damage.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, adult content, arkansas, florida, free speech, id verification, internet freedom, kansas, louisiana, mississippi, porn, south dakota, virginia, west virginia

Mississippi Courts Are Helping Cops Keep Search Warrants Out Of The Public’s Hands

from the much-despised-no-look-warrants dept

No-knock warrants remain under fire as they continue to needlessly increase the death toll of residents who often have no idea who’s violently entering their home and, therefore, respond in unpredictable ways. Supposedly obtained to increase officer safety, these warrants often seem like a handy way to put officers in “fear for your safety” mode, thus justifying the violence that follows.

But how often are they obtained? That’s tough to tell. Very few law enforcement agencies are willing to speak openly about their use/abuse of these warrants. Fortunately, public records and court proceedings will often provide the information cop shops and prosecutors won’t share freely.

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Warrants and affidavits are part of the court record in criminal proceedings. Warrants and their accompanying paperwork are often sealed by court orders, preventing the public from seeing them until the government (judge, law enforcement agency, etc.) feels comfortable sharing them.

In Mississippi, however, the status quo is even worse than the hit-and-miss warrant access available elsewhere in the country. This ProPublica report shines a light on the seemingly concerted effort to keep warrant documents out of the public’s hands across the state. (via FourthAmendment.com)

The opening details the struggles of public defender Merrill Nordstrom, who was simply trying to challenge the warrant (which happened to be no-knock) that had led to her client’s arrest. Police had violently entered her client’s home searching for drugs — an assault predicated by the alleged sale of less than a gram of marijuana to an informant. No drugs were found but cops came across a gun her client wasn’t allowed to own.

Hoping to find warrants showing a pattern of violent no-knock raids predicated on alleged criminal acts that seemingly would not require this show of force, she went to the Greenville courthouse to read through other warrants. That’s when she discovered the court did not keep these records. Perversely, the local justice system was lending itself to injustice.

Though she had the search warrant for Bryant’s home, she couldn’t find records for most other raids in the city. The search warrants and supporting documents weren’t at the courthouse, even though the state Supreme Court’s rules require law enforcement to return warrants to the court.

Instead they were at the Greenville Police Department, hidden from view because law enforcement agencies, unlike the courts, can claim a broad public records exemption over records in their possession.

Wow. It’s as if no one in the Greenville courthouse is aware files can be copied, either physically or digitally. The police have no right to stash away the sole copies of search warrants in their own files, especially when it appears the sole purpose is to invert the presumption of openness that guides court proceedings.

It’s a statewide problem.

An investigation by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and ProPublica has found that almost two-thirds of Mississippi’s county-level justice courts prevent access to some or all search warrants and related documents. So do municipal courts in at least five of the state’s 10 largest cities, including Jackson, the capital.

The court-enabled opacity takes multiple forms. Some courts violate state law by not requiring law enforcement to turn in search warrants and other documents once the warrants have been served. In some cases, courts don’t even bother having cops do the dirty work. They simply refuse to give the public access to these documents.

It’s this opacity that encourages abuse of no-knock warrants. The public defender discussed above discovered a majority of warrants issued in Greenville were no-knock. And most were likely approved by Municipal Judge Michael Prewitt, the only circuit judge in the area for the last two decades. Judge Prewitt admitted as much when questioned by the defender, stating that he’d issue a no-knock warrant to “search for a sweater.” His excuse? There’s a lot of drug crime in Greenville.

This information came from the judge himself. The court claimed it had no records of any searches authorized by Judge Prewitt, despite his two decades of service. And it didn’t. The only person with access to the documents was the person who rubber-stamped them to send cops searching for sweaters.

Prewitt said in an email to the Daily Journal and ProPublica that he personally keeps copies of all search warrants that are returned to him.

The courts in Mississippi are serving law enforcement, rather than the public. Multiple court clerks were questioned by ProPublica. Far too many admitted they weren’t in the business of assuring public records were accessible by the public.

“We don’t keep those,” said Lamar County Justice Court Clerk Sandra Owen.

“Usually the return goes back to the sheriff’s offices,” said Jones County Justice Court Clerk Stacy Walls.

“I hardly ever see search warrants — before, during or after,” said Marion County Justice Court Clerk Wynette Parkman.

Once again, government employees are conveniently pretending it’s impossible to make a copy of a court document before giving it back to a law enforcement agency. In other cases, they’re simply pretending the rule ordering law enforcement to provide these documents to the court following a search doesn’t apply to them or the cops.

There is some justifiable ignorance tucked into all the law enforcement subservience. In many cases, clerks aren’t made aware that warrants have been signed by judges. As such, there’s no way they would know documents cops are mandated to return to the court have not been returned.

But there’s also a lot of seemingly willful ignorance. Clerks seem to be aware of law enforcement’s obligations. However, they claim that, despite the clear wording, they’ve never been explicitly told these documents must remain in the hands of the court when (or, more likely, if) they’re returned by law enforcement officers.

The entire report is an infuriating read. The general tone that comes across is that both involved government parties — law enforcement and courts — believe the general public has no right to access these documents, despite them clearly being part of the public record, in terms of court proceedings.

Most respondents were at least able to hide their contempt behind shrugs and professed confusion. Some, however, were not.

Even some courts that do have search warrants on hand refused to let the Daily Journal and ProPublica see them.

“I cannot release any public information about search warrants,” said Kemper County Justice Court Clerk Lynn Puckett. “They are not public records and thank you for your call and you have a great day.” With that, she hung up the phone.

Nothing like a court clerk who’s not only wrong about the law but super-shitty about it.

That’s what decades of jurisprudence on the openness of courts has given the public, at least in Mississippi: a bunch of shrugs, middle fingers, and open flouting of court rules by people whose paychecks are signed by the people they’re screwing. Disgusting.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, mississippi, no knock warrants, transparency, warrant

Illinois Department Of Corrections Benchslapped For Spending Years Failing To Improve Medical Care For Prisoners

from the they're-still-human-beings-whose-health-the-state-is-responsible-for dept

In the space of less than a week, two federal courts have come down hard on prison systems for treating prisoners like meat suitable for nothing more than processing by the so-called justice system.

In Mississippi, a federal judge yanked control of a prison away from local officials, placing the Raymond Detention Center into receivership after the county had failed, for years, to implement court-ordered improvements. Hinds County’s Raymond Detention Center has been under a consent decree since 2016. And in those six years, it has only managed to comply with three of the decree’s 92 requirements.

The situation had gotten so out of hand, prisoners literally ran one part of the detention center. Since local officials seemed incapable of doing anything other than passing the buck, the federal court took the buck into its own hands, delivering the RDC into the hands of a court-appointed receiver — something that has happened less than 10 times in the last 60 years.

That happened July 29th. On August 5th, a federal court in Illinois declared the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) to be in contempt of court for failing to implement ordered reforms for more than three years. And the problems prompting the reforms were more than a decade old at that point, as CJ Ciaramella reports for Reason.

A federal judge ordered the IDOC to create the comprehensive reform plan in 2019 as part of a settlement in a 2010 lawsuit by inmates and several law firms against the IDOC alleging inadequate health care, dental care, and mental health treatment. But the monitor found “a wide gap” between what the agency believes it accomplished and actual progress. Furthermore, the monitor says the IDOC failed to send 80 percent of the information it requested.

The contempt order [PDF] is short and to the point. It only runs two pages and says little more than this:

For the reasons stated in open court, the Court finds defendants in contempt for their failure to complete an implementation plan as required by the Consent Decree and their failure to comply with this Court’s orders respecting an implementation plan.

The real dirt is in the 292-page(!!) monitor’s report [PDF], which details all the ways the IDOC continues to harm the health of incarcerated persons.

Despite being aware of the problems since 2010 and ordered in 2019 to fix these deficiencies, the IDOC has done next to nothing. The monitor’s report — delivered to the court in June 2022 — says the IDOC, despite what it argues in court, has barely made a dent.

There is a wide gap between what IDOC believes it has accomplished and the findings of the Monitor. The Monitor is concerned that this lack of acknowledgement of poor performance will be a barrier to forward progress. IDOC asserts substantial compliance on 30 provisions of the Consent Decree while the Monitor agrees with only three of these assertions. This gap is very concerning.

IDOC continues to fail to provide the evidence supporting their asserted compliance. Moreover, IDOC asserts that substantial compliance of a single facility warrants a substantial compliance score. The Consent Decree is clear that substantial compliance requires systemic compliance and non-serious violations.

Fudging the numbers is a non-starter. The IDOC itself is a non-starter. Very little has been done, but the IDOC wants credit for the bare minimum of compliance it has somehow managed to achieve over the last three years.

And the easiest thing to comply with — requests for documentation — wasn’t even satisfactory. The monitor requested records and the IDOC couldn’t even produce those, strongly suggesting evidence of compliance is missing because there is no actual compliance.

The Monitor did not receive data requested from IDOC to verify compliance with the Consent Decree. The Monitor’s document request for this report was sent 1/21/2022 and included 113 items. The Monitor requested delivery by mid-March 2022. IDOC was also requested to inform the Monitor if the information was not available. IDOC provided information responsive to only 21 of the items requested (18.5%).

The monitor goes on to note there is no apparent leadership when it comes to the ordered reforms. The chain of command is filled with interim posts and buck-passers. The IDOC committed to expanding staffing to meet the requirements of the consent decree, but so far has done nothing but post openings. As a result, staffing has actually dropped by 110 persons since the consent decree was put in place. And the IDOC refuses to cooperate with the monitor to achieve compliance, restricting its interactions to a few short conference calls where the IDOC claimed everything was moving along expediently.

The IDOC has failed to hire properly credentialed physicians and has tried to obscure the dearth of medical professionals employed by the system. In one case, a single physician was appointed as medical director to oversee medical care of nearly 5,000 inmates spread across four facilities.

When help is spread this thin, bad things become worse things. IDOC was already non-compliant. Medical care attrition was never competently addressed, leading to a downturn (bad to worse) in response to medical help calls, COVID-19 protocol compliance, dental care, and management of the increasing needs of the IDOC’s aging prisoners.

Prisoners suffering from mental illness were routinely ignored. Some were placed in solitary, exacerbating existing conditions. Some were given paperwork to sign (DNRs, living wills) they had no mental competency to comprehend. Dementia victims were punished solely for exhibiting symptoms of their illness. In other cases, they were ignored completely, and suffered from mistreatment, abuse, and a denial of their basic needs.

There are far too many people in positions of power who believe whatever happens to prisoners is something they deserve for committing crimes. This over-simplification declares prisoners to be subhuman — unworthy of even basic care.

But this ignores several things. It ignores pretrial detainees who can’t afford bail and must remain incarcerated despite being the supposed recipients of a presumption of innocence. It ignores the unfortunately large number of Americans who have been falsely imprisoned or convicted. It ignores those forced into extended incarceration by insane drug policies and overly zealous prosecutors who stack charges and argue vociferously against anything resembling mercy.

And it ignores the obligations the government takes on when it imprisons people at a rate far exceeding that of other “free” countries. These are wards of the state. On the outside, they had their choice of medical care and the opportunity to seek it at any given moment. On the inside, they have one choice: whatever the facility provides. And when that’s inadequate, they can’t take their business elsewhere. When the government fails to provide basic medical care, it violates rights. Unfortunately, prisoners are ill-equipped to argue on their own behalf and forced by federal court precedent to utilize internal remedies that seemingly can be ignored at will by prison administrators with zero repercussions.

A couple of federal court remedies in less than a month does not a movement make. But perhaps it signifies a shift in courtroom thinking — one showing judges are more willing to protect the rights of prisoners, even if this change of heart follows years of neglect.

Filed Under: idoc, illinois, medical care, mississippi, prisoners

Federal Judge Places County Jail Into Receivership After County Fails To Comply With Consent Decree

from the if-it's-broke,-don't-fix-it,-says-Kirby-County dept

In an extremely rare move, a federal court has ordered a jail into receivership, placing it under the direct control of a court-appointed third party that will (hopefully) carry out the needed changes Hinds County, Mississippi either can’t or won’t do. (h/t Scott Greenfield)

Receivership is uncommon. As Hernandez Stroud of the Brennan Center points out, this option has only been deployed eight times since it became an option for courts following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which allowed federal courts to yank control of schools away from local governments to ensure desegregation of schools.

The Raymond Detention Center (RDC) has been under a consent decree since 2016. And it has done nearly nothing to address court-ordered changes, as is noted in this March 2022 contempt order (the second[!] contempt order the county has received):

Since then, compliance has been elusive. Court-appointed independent monitors report that Hinds County is in sustained or substantial compliance with only three of 92 requirements of the Consent Decree. Problems remain with staffing, use of force, basic living conditions, and over-detention, among other issues. Today’s Order, though, is about A-Pod.

A-Pod is one of four “pods” the prison is divided into. A-Pod is completely controlled by inmates. It’s a hellhole, as a court monitor noted in his report:

A-Pod is a disaster. It’s filthy; lights don’t work; locks don’t work; doors can’t be secured; cells don’t have lights inside them. Inmates since they can’t even close the doors, end up hanging blankets down in front of them to have makeshift privacy to their cells. Showers don’t work. Everything in the place is torn up. It’s just a very bad mess. There’s no fire extinguishers inside, of course, because the inmates control that place. There are no officers who work inside the housing units in Alpha. There are no fire hoses. There are not even fire hoses out in the corridors, around the control room in Alpha. That area is ill equipped across the board.

Because the inmates have free run of the pod, they can access the roof and escape. For whatever reason, they rarely actually escape. Instead, they leave the prison and return with contraband. No one is assigned to work A-pod because it cannot be controlled in its current state. And that leads to incidents like these:

At about 0430 or 0500 in the morning, video footage showed the inmate being hit in the head by another inmate. A third inmate then stomped on his head several times. He was then dragged across the mezzanine. The video footage shows brief movement by the decedent and then none indicating that he was probably dead at that point but a time of death has not been established. He was eventually dragged back and propped in a sitting position and then later laid on a mat. He was not discovered by officers until 1:45, almost 9 hours later.

One of the many things the county agreed to was to not house inmates in A-Pod. As the March contempt order points out, this agreement was immediately and repeatedly broken:

Among a long string of broken promises, Hinds County vowed to no longer house detainees in A-Pod. The February 2022 Evidentiary Hearing, however, revealed that not only are detainees still being housed in A-Pod, but that is where they will remain indefinitely.

The RDC is chronically overcrowded and understaffed, in addition to the problems in A-Pod, which was also the subject of the first contempt order issued by this court, which noted then that it was “disturbed by the record number of assaults, fires, and deaths, including murders, suicides, and overdoses…”

The staffing problem is made worse by the remaining jailers, who will simply refuse to show up for work if they’re assigned to a pod they don’t like. Since the jail can’t afford to make its staffing problem worse, these jailers are able to pick and choose when and where they work. A-Pod may be a problem, but it’s one jailers are able to ignore, since actually patrolling that pod would put their lives in danger. But stuffing inmates into the pod puts them in danger, which is clearly “cruel and unusual punishment,” a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The receivership order [PDF] makes all these points while turning control of court-ordered detention center reforms in the hands of someone who might actually get something done. The court cannot allow the RDC to continue being the horrific nightmare it has become under the county’s watch.

First up is whether RDC presents “grave and immediate threat or actuality of harm” to detainees. The record indicates that it does. As discussed extensively in the November 2021 Show Cause Order and April 2022 Order instituting the New Injunction, conditions at RDC subject detainees to unconstitutional risk of harm, including death, rampant physical and sexual assaults, and neglect of the seriously mentally ill. Indeed, the record overwhelmingly indicates that RDC is “an institution ‘where terror reigns.’”

Persistent shortcomings in staffing and supervision embolden gangs and encourage the prevalent circulation of contraband, including narcotics and weapons, within RDC. Jail staff continue to receive inadequate training regarding use of force, such as the use of tasers.

The court notes that the jail system needs a minimum of 248 employees. At this point, the system only employs 175 people and only 108 of those work at RDC. And, as the number of employees continues to plummet, the number of detainees housed by Hinds County’s inadequate facilities has increased from 500 to 700.

Despite two contempt orders and six years of court-ordered monitoring via a consent decree, things continue to get worse at the RDC.

Instead, then as now, conditions at RDC are severely deficient. Cell doors still do not lock. There is no lighting in many cells in A-Pod, which makes life miserable for the detainees who live there and prevents guards from adequately surveilling detainees. Many cameras do not function. (“At last count, 56 cameras were not working, 14 were missing and 10 needed adjusting.’”) Even when the cameras work, guards tasked with monitoring them sometimes turn to “sleeping instead of manning the cameras in the control room.” Staff fail to conduct mandatory welfare checks.

The court notes the remedy could be even more severe. It’s fully within its power to order all detainees released, something that has happened a handful of times in the history of federal consent decrees.

In this case, the court decides that might be too severe. But it simply cannot stand by while the county continues to fail to implement court-ordered changes. Too much is at stake, even if it mainly affects people the county clearly regards as expendable or useless.

But the court says it’s really county employees and officials who are useless.

Despite naming different individuals and entities, the defendants’ assessments had one thing in common. When asked who was responsible, each person deflected, saying essentially, “not me.”

And those overseeing the overseers who insist RDC problems are all someone else’s fault are possibly worse.

The Hinds County Board of Supervisors is dysfunctional. The Board is presently distracted by a struggle regarding who is entitled to be Board President. During the Board’s meetings, the would-be President, angry at being passed over, speaks over all others in the Boardroom and prevents the Board from conducting business.

[…]

A local journalists observed that “little progress has been made by the supervisors over the past five years,” and therefore, “with the terrible conditions and mismanagement at the Raymond Detention, this could be that one situation where federal oversight is warranted and extremely necessary.” Ted Fortenberry, Consider This: Hinds County Jail, WLBT (Dec. 2, 2021).

And that what is going to happen.

This Court agrees. The County and Sheriff cannot continue this exercise in accountability hot-potato, one which has proved deadly to detainees.

Since the county refuses to do its job, the federal government will do its job for it.

The County refuses to take responsibility. Instead, it offers a litany of excuses. But each of these excuses ultimately boils down to the same argument: conditions at RDC are out of the defendants’ hands. The County wishes to abdicate responsibility for ensuring the health and safety of detainees in its custody. The Court is compelled to grant that wish. We can’t wait for continued destruction of the facilities. We can’t wait for the proliferation of more contraband. We can’t wait for more assaults. We can’t wait for another death. The time to act is now. There is no other choice, unfortunately.

By November 1, at the latest, the court and its appointee will take control of the RDC reforms. Thanks to its unwillingness to handle its own problems, taxpayers from all over the nation will be paying to fix a jail Hinds County has refused to take care of for more than a half-decade. If nothing else, detainees will finally see some of their (limited) constitutional rights restored. And everyone involved in this debacle should consider themselves expendable. Hopefully voters will ensure the sheriff and board members are no longer worthy of their trust, support, or government positions.

Filed Under: consent decree, hinds county, mississippi, raymond detention center, receivorship

Mississippi City Trying To Turn Residents' Doorbell Cameras Into Law Enforcement Surveillance Network

from the Jackson-city-council-just-saying-the-quiet-part-loud dept

The Ring doorbell/camera has become a fixture of American life, thanks in part to Ring’s partnership with law enforcement agencies. In exchange for steering people towards Ring’s snitch app, the company has been giving deeply discounted doorbell cameras to police, who then hand them out to homeowners with the implied assumption homeowners will return the favor by handing footage over to cops any time they ask.

There are millions of cameras out there and Ring-enabled portals for law enforcement officers to request footage. If warrants seem to be too much trouble, Ring lets police know they can always approach the company with a subpoena to access recordings stored in Ring’s cloud.

Some enterprising city legislators are narrowing the gap between cops and homeowners’ cameras. A trial program is underway in Mississippi that would give police direct access to cameras, as Edward Ongweso Jr. reports for Vice. (h/t FourthAmendment.com]

On Tuesday, Jackson, Mississippi’s city council signed off on a 45-day pilot program that would let police access Ring surveillance cameras in real time.

In partnership with technology companies PILEUM and Fūsus, the pilot program will run through the police department’s surveillance hub, the Real Time Crime Center, from which Jackson’s police department can stream Ring surveillance camera footage.

The goal, of course, is to fight crime. But the methods are concerning, to say the least. The expansion of law enforcement’s surveillance network in Jackson co-opts cameras owned by private citizens. The police feel this would be a boon for their “Real Time Crime Center,” allowing them to seamlessly access any footage instantly near scenes of reported crimes. According to the mayor, this is a net win for everyone, but it provides the most benefit to the local government, which won’t have to spend money to purchase more CCTV cameras.

None of this is mandatory. Businesses and private citizens have to sign a waiver to grant the police real-time access to their cameras. But this move towards more pervasive surveillance comes at a strange time for the city, which recently took steps to limit local law enforcement’s access to surveillance tech.

This may come as a surprise to those who remember that just a few months ago, Jackson was the first city in the South to ban police from using facial recognition technology.

That might explain why this surveillance hub isn’t much of a hub at this point. According to Vice’s report, there are only five private participants in this program. As for Ring, it’s distancing itself from this co-opting of its cameras, stating that this isn’t a Ring program and the company has had no participation in this program. And while that may be true in this case, the company hasn’t been shy about pushing cameras on citizens via law enforcement and encouraging law enforcement to lean on recipients for camera footage.

This may not be Ring’s doing, but that’s always been the implicit promise of its hundreds of partnerships with law enforcement agencies: an expanded surveillance network that costs cops almost nothing. It hasn’t always worked out the way Ring suggests it will, but this trial program makes it clear others will step up to create a network of their own if Ring can’t or won’t help out.

Filed Under: doorbells, jackson, law enforcement, mississippi, police, real-time, ring, surveillance
Companies: amazon, fusus, pileum