^{*Edited a few hours after posting to include new information}

Officer (Cars) Down
Jeremy Hawthorne, member of the Wingnut Anarchist Collective in Barton Heights, received a felony sentence of one year in jail and a $1,300 fine today for allegedly slashing the tires of seven VCU police and security vehicles. The case was practically written for tabloid journalism – “Anarchists Attack and Disable Police Cruisers” – and I arrived at the courthouse expecting to hear as much about the anti-authoritarian politics of the Wingnuts during the trial as I did about whether Jeremy was actually guilty.

It was not to be. Minutes before the trial began, Jeremy’s court appointed attorney proposed that his residence at the Wingnut and its politics not be mentioned in front of the jury. She was worried that associating him with a high-profile anarchist group would affect the jury’s perception of him negatively. The prosecuting attorney would presumably love to bring the group’s not-so-subtle rhetoric into the courtroom as evidence against him.

Against expectation, the prosecution quickly agreed to the ban on politics, and what had been a powder keg was almost instantly robbed of any mainstream media relevance. Jeremy would soon be just another convicted felon.

To understand why the Commonwealth so readily agreed to omit politics from the trial and how that affected its outcome, a brief primer is in order.

Looking Back
The Wingnut regularly makes headlines in Richmond. From their participation in the occupation of Monroe Park (long before the more recent Occupy phenomenon) to their film screenings and house shows, to their appearance on the cover of Style Weekly holding rifles, one can expect to see the collective’s name in print almost monthly.

It was a year ago that the state last tested its legal resolve against the Wingnut. Richmond Cop Watch, largely staffed by Wingnuts, requested and received almost every Richmond police department training manual through the Freedom of Information Act. Immediately thereafter, the RPD realized who they had given the information to and filed a law suit to retrieve the documents, citing that the information should not have been given to “known and admitted anarchists”. The Washington Post picked up the story, as did Style Weekly, and I produced a 10 minute radio segment on the case for Weekly Sedition.

The ACLU harshly criticized the Richmond police department for openly denying the legal right to request information based on political ideology, and they eventually gave up, dropping the suit altogether.

Between conflicts like these, and the regular activities of Cop Watch in Barton Heights and at First Fridays, Jeremy and the other Wingnuts are well known to Richmond police.

Leaving Things Out
In one hypothetical scenario, we can imagine the prosecutor wanting the jury to know that Jeremy was a member of an anarchist group, counting on their verbal (but as of yet, not illegal) lashing out at authority in general and Richmond police specifically. But if the trial became political with this kind of past between the RPD and the Wingnut, it would bolster the impression that their accusations were politically motivated. They had seen where that led, and lost.

As it turns out, the omission of this political history ended up leaving huge gaps in the narrative of the prosecution during Jeremy’s trial. Officer Calhoun testified on the stand that when he saw stills of the perpetrator from overhead surveillance cameras, which the Commonwealth’s prosecutor called “admittedly grainy”, he immediately thought of someone who might resemble the person. Because of the gag agreement, he couldn’t say why the image of this barely discernible person in a city of 200,000 people made him think of one person in particular. The jury never asked.

Detective Greer of the VCU police told the jury that he had officially obtained Jeremy’s name from the DMV, but because of the gag agreement, could not specify how he knew what information to give the DMV to obtain that name. The jury never seemed to notice.

Because the Wingnut is a collective, property is not strictly delineated, and its bicycle rack (on which the police claim to have found a bike similar to the one in the video) is accessible to a large number of people. Because this broaches the political, it was not mentioned.

And finally, everyone without historical perspective was left to merely speculate as to why Commonwealth Attorney Christopher Toepp made the unusual move of requesting to try the case personally.

Final Impressions
Reporters and other observers were not able to view the surveillance video or the stills, except during the moments that the prosecution shuffled them around during the trial, and only then from a distance. I cannot say whether they reveal Jeremy as the perpetrator. I can say that they were grainy, dimly lit and did not reveal a face, but without adequate opportunity to examine them closely, I can’t have a firm opinion about the identity of the individual. Given that the prosecution’s case, in its own words, was “purely circumstantial”, I am forced to question whether the police department’s familiarity with Jeremy was the prime motivator for either the initial suspicion or the ensuing pursuit of his conviction.

Jeremy plans to file an appeal, and he may have good grounds for doing so. Only 48 hours before the case went to trial, the attorney assigned to represent him by the Commonwealth declared a family emergency and declined to appear. Despite the extremely short notice, the Commonwealth refused to set a new date and the new defense attorney, with zero time to prepare, did not call a single witness.

The case will continue to unfold on the morning of April 6th in the John Marshall court building.

Not only has the White House declined to veto the latest NDAA bill, but it turns out that the Obama administration is responsible for the language including American citizens. (http://youtu.be/jHaJrnlqCgo) Which is to say that rather than closing Guantanamo as promised, the president has expanded the worst of its principles to the entire country. What semblance remained of the rule of law as standard in the United States is now gone. You or anyone else in this country may be imprisoned permanently without trial.

This is terrifying for several reasons, which should not have to be elaborated on. Let me just point out that the government also retains exclusive rights to determine what groups are terrorist organizations. In London, Occupy was named on a terrorist watch list. (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/05/london-police-listed-occupy-protesters-as-potential-terrorists/) And you can bet your asses that federal agencies have been studying Occupy in the US since the beginning. A Richmond organization called Food Not Bombs that provides food for people who need it – another group that has appeared on terror watch lists. (In fact, a FOIA request made over the past year revealed that FNB has had FBI informants in the group.) Another Richmond group, Anarchist Black Cross, that gives support to incarcerated people by writing letters, sending literature and books – also on terror lists.

Make no mistake about it. This is the first door that opens before people just start disappearing. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week. But it will happen. If not to you, to someone else. I know it’s hard for us to think that way, given our relatively privileged upbringing. It sounds alarmist. But I think it’s time for an alarm to sound.

Festival Park
Monday, the 15th
6pm

Let’s figure out what to do. Pass it along.

November 25, 2011
It was only 7:18pm as a female student walked by VCU’s Bowe Street parking deck. It was dark, but not late by any measure. She did not have time to call 911 or find her nearest emergency call center as the man in the black hoodie approached her. She had no way to resist as he punched her in the face, knocking her to the ground.

By the time the encounter was over, she would be beaten, her face swollen, her body covered in bruises, her wallet stolen. Had her attacker decided to use the hammer that he held in one hand, she would have either been permanently injured or killed.

One of the victim’s acquaintances tells me that she’s not the same after the incident. She doesn’t go to class much. She feels unable to think and process her work in the way that she used to. And who could be the same after such an incident? I dare say that most of us cannot imagine what this kind of violence would do to us. If the young woman manages to avoid symptoms of post-traumatic stress, she will be one of the fortunate few.

Rallying
It was less than one week after this violent assault that I found myself standing in the VCU compass with a Ruger 9mm visibly strapped to my hip. A few dozen other people, also wearing guns, were milling about and casually talking amongst themselves and to the nearby police officers. Like most everyone else, I was also wearing a bright orange sticker that read “Guns Save Lives”. We had assembled to to protest VCU’s restriction of concealed weapons on campus.

The traumatizing experience of this VCU student was only the latest manifestation of the legal restrictions on students defending themselves. Guns are used in self-defense about 2.5 million times a year in the U.S., and in more than 90% of those cases, no one is injured. (The gun is merely shown, made reference to in a threatening manner, or a warning shot is fired.) With about 7,500 reported violent crimes on campuses each year, one doesn’t need to look hard to find instances in which self-defense with a concealed weapon would have been justified by the law – had they only occurred somewhere else.

What many people don’t know is that universities have no legal obligation to protect their students. What even more people don’t know is that police have no legal obligation to protect anyone (as determined by the Supreme Court). Neither a university nor the police can be held legally responsible or sued for injury or death, regardless of how negligent or egregious their behavior may have been. Without the right of students to defend themselves, there is no alternative to victimhood. This is why we had assembled.

Of course, our presence did not go unopposed.

About a dozen people from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence had shown up to counter-protest. The name of the group is both nonspecific – who, aside from the criminally insane, doesn’t want to stop gun violence? – and strategically misleading. The name is also relatively new. The organization started in 1974 with the more honest designation, “The National Coalition to Ban Handguns”^[1]. Just as it sounds, the stated goal was to eliminate the private ownership of all handguns in the US. The organization is opposed to the concealed carry of weapons entirely, and believes that legislation preventing the sale of guns between individuals, which they refer to as “the gun show loophole”, will reduce violent crime.

I showed up to this event with my video camera, determined to document not only what the speakers in favor of concealed carry had to say, but also some conversation with the counter-demonstrators to more specifically identify what their concerns with concealed carry on campus were. I ended up with this 12-minute video, which contains enough of the speakers to have some understanding of their point of view, and about 80% of the conversations I recorded with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence members and supporters.

Cops to the Rescue?
There were a number of arguments advanced against concealed carry in this video, some more interesting than others. It would be foolish to try to address them all in a single article of this length, but there is one, given its timeliness and particular ubiquity in the anti-gun camp that deserves immediate attention. The point of view can be summarized thusly:

“Let the police take care of things.”

Criminologist Gary Kleck has spent a lifetime studying guns and their effects on society. In 1993, he won the Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology for his book “Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America”. His knowledge has been sought out from independent panels, state legislatures and the United States Congress. In the course of these studies, he has naturally interacted with a number of people who subscribe to the view that citizens ought to leave the use of guns for defense to the police. He breaks these arguments into three categories:

Doubts about the defensive utility of guns [for people other than the police], then, appear to rest on any of three beliefs: (1) civilians do not need any self-protective devices, because they will almost never confront criminals, or at least will almost never do so while they have access to a gun, or (2) they do not need guns because they can rely on the police for protection, or (3) civilians, unlike police, are not able to use guns effectively, regardless of need.

The first two proposals here are obviously false, and only deserve passing comment:
1) The FBI’s National Crime Victimization Survey estimates indicate that 83% of Americans will, sometime over the span of their lives, be a victim of a violent crime, all of which by definition involve direct confrontation with a criminal.
2) The police almost never stop crimes in progress. Most of their job involves patrolling for visibility and cleaning up after crimes that have already occurred. This is common knowledge and common sense.

The third proposition – that police have “special training” that allows them to use handguns more effectively – is one that I have continually heard echo throughout the anti-gun movement in all its forms, and deserves to be addressed, as it might be easily believed by someone not willing to look into the matter.

There are two reasonable ways we can determine whether the claim that police are far more qualified to handle guns is true.

Target Practice
The first is to simply find out what police training looks like. Fortunately, this is not difficult. I have a close friend who is a police officer (and a staunch supporter of concealed carry laws, I might add), and he shared with me the police “special training” methods: they shoot at targets.

Richmond Police Department firearm training room

Targets are hung up and turned edgewise, and at the click of a button by the trainer, the target turns to face the officer. The officer shoots at it. They score points for rounds that hit the target. The target moves closer and they do it again. A certain number of points means they pass. If they fail (it’s rare), they stay after class and try again.

Officers must qualify like this only once a year in most states (like Virginia), and in some states you never have to do it again at all.

No, really. That’s it.

Sure, some departments actually go outdoors and shoot at targets that don’t swivel, as you can see by this video. This “special training” includes instruction such as, “kneel down and shoot at any three targets you want”.

Some departments use video games, which the public occasionally gets to try out.

Suffice to say that police have no more training in the handling and firing of a weapon than anyone who takes occasional trips to their local shooting range, and there is certainly no special training relating to school shooting scenarios and the like.

Margins of Error
Another way we can test the claim that police are more qualified to defend us than we are is by taking a look at the performance of the two groups in violent, real-world situations.

You might be as surprised as the editors of Newsweek were when a study they commissioned found that police are 5.5 times more likely to shoot an innocent person than armed citizens are (11% vs 2% error respectively). The University of Chicago and others have found that discrepancy to be even more pronounced, but the conservative figure alone is telling. But that is not the whole story. As it turns out, armed citizens shoot and kill twice as many criminals every year as police do. When adjusting for this quantity, you are ~11 times more likely to be accidentally shot by a police officer than an armed citizen. This is no small margin of error.

But what about school shooting scenarios? Wouldn’t students with concealed weapons turn already dangerous situations into bloodbaths?

Assessing the risks of concealed carry holders in school shooting scenarios is difficult, primarily because states that permit concealed carry in schools have never had a shooting incident. (I’ll be careful not to draw a hasty conclusion from that.) But let’s take a look at a couple of examples where students and faculty ended up with guns in their hands anyway.

Sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham began his day by stabbing and bludgeoning his mother to death in her sleep. Afterward, he drove to Pearl High School with a rifle, walked inside, shot his ex-girlfriend and another young woman to death and went on to wound seven others.
Assistant Principal Joel Myrick took a .45 Colt with him everywhere, but due to school regulations, was not able to bring it inside the building. Unfortunately, he had to run all the way to the parking lot and retrieve it from his car before he could hold Woodham at gunpoint for the police, who had not arrived.

Peter Odighizuwa, a former student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, VA, showed up one afternoon with a handgun. He headed directly to the Dean’s office, executing him at point-blank range. The same happened to professor Dale Rubin. Odighizuwa continued firing, killing one student and wounding three others.
At the first sound of gunshots, two students independently ran to their vehicles to retrieve personal handguns that they could not legally carry on campus. They, too, were able to hold the shooter at gunpoint until police arrived on the scene.

Crossfire in these scenarios? None. Lives may have been saved, but none were taken – not even the lives of the murderers.

But let’s suppose that the students had opened fire on the murderers. To say that the risk of crossfire outweighs the known consequences of having none at all (as much death as the killer can deliver) is inexplicable. We know that in school shooting situations, killers methodically walk through classrooms and hallways, executing as many people as they possibly can. It strains the imagination to envision a student staring down the barrel of a gun held by someone who has just murdered 20 other people in cold blood, moments away from death, and not wanting there to be someone shooting at the killer. The options are certain death by a madman or possible death by someone who has the power to stop the carnage. It is beyond reason for anyone to choose certain death for themselves (not to mention for the other people whose lives could be saved!) because they otherwise might die.

One can hardly imagine police showing up to a school massacre, allowing the killer to continue slaughtering students until there are no more alive who could possibly be struck by an errant bullet before they fire, then telling the press, “Well, we didn’t want anyone to be injured in crossfire.”

All of this said, it’s important to note that school shootings are statistically very rare. Because of their horror and emotional potency, they stand out in our minds and make it easy for us to assume that they happen more often than they do. (This is known as the logical fallacy of misleading vividness.) The need for students or faculty to carry a concealed weapon are much more likely to resemble the vicious assault and robbery that took place at VCU not so long ago.

Sometimes guns are wildly fired on campuses in Richmond, but as we shall see, the perpetrators are not who you might expect.

“Campus Shooting, Richmond Style”
or
“Special Training in Action”
It was less than a week after the VCU event that gunshots rang out on the University of Richmond campus. But this time there was no disgruntled employee, no scorned student bent on revenge. This time students were ducking for cover for an entirely different reason.

Colin O’Leary just wanted to smoke some weed. On the day in question, he and a friend sat in a parked vehicle on the University of Richmond campus to do just that. The gunfire might have been avoided if only he had parked the SUV on concrete instead of grass. Vigilant U of R police, concerned with health and well-being of the lawn, approached the vehicle and asked why he was parked on it, and moments later, why they smelled marijuana.

In some of the only investigative reporting the school paper The Collegian has ever done, eyewitnesses report that a half hour of conversation ensued, during which Colin essentially continued made silly excuses for the smell. Finally, an officer noticed the small bag of weed in the armrest. When he asked Colin to produce it for him, Colin put the SUV into gear. The officer told him not to go anywhere, but Colin let off the break and pulled away.

Suddenly, in an utterly inexplicable loss of composure, the officer drew his handgun and began firing at the vehicle. The eyewitnesses ducked their heads as the bullets flew, one of which struck the officer’s own police car. (Also inexplicably, O’Leary escaped by simply driving away, though he turned himself in the next day.)

Is this the “special training” I’ve been hearing so much about? Illegally and wildly firing at non-threatening misdemeanor suspects on a college campus? If this person were not a police officer, he would be charged with attempted murder and a host of other firearm-related crimes, and rightly so. Firing the weapon was completely unjustifiable by any code of conduct – certainly by any code of responsible firearm handling. Is there anything so reckless as endangering the lives of students with a gun in an apparent attempt to kill someone in possession of a tiny quantity of a substance widely known to be less harmful than either cigarettes or alcohol?

If the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence needs a new location to demonstrate, I think I know just the place.

This footage was taken at the “No Guns? No Funds!” event hosted by The Virginia Citizen’s Defense League on the campus of VCU. Several members of VCDL and Students for Concealed Carry spoke in favor of extending carry rights to permitted students, while members of The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence demonstrated against the event nearby.

This video attempts to capture the substance of the speakers’ message, while also showing some of the lively debate that went on between individuals.

On Sunday, November 20th a member of Occupy Richmond received a rather nasty (and unconstitutional) visit by five officers from the Richmond Police Department. Here’s the story.

*An open letter to the Richmond police department:

What a disappointing state of affairs. This wasn’t supposed to be about confrontations with you. Truthfully, we are all part of the same socioeconomic class. This has been reiterated time after time. Sure, sometimes occupiers can be assholes to police, and vice versa.

But how much can we really blame each other for that? After attempting to use every single possible legal avenue to eliminate any conflict between us, the city of Richmond – by which I mean the small group of people who make your decisions for you – has made it clear that our Constitutional expression of free speech and assembly will not be respected.

In the end, hundreds of you (not including state troopers and homeland security) are forced to spend hours that you could be home with your families protecting a public park from the presence of the public. Tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money is wasted on airplanes, bulldozers, fire hoses (presumably for “riot control“, though there hasn’t even been an intimation of such a riot) buses for mass arrests, etc.

And for what? Overtime pay? Don’t count on it.

No, all of this is for the expressly stated purpose of enforcing a city code about people existing in a public place after the sun goes down. Occupy Richmond extended every possible offer of negotiation and compromise with the city, and we have conducted every bit of business with complete transparency and consideration of legalities.

So when people in this movement get pissed off after you destroy two weeks worth of work and start making frivolous arrests, please keep in mind the perspective of these people. Imagine, if you will, that you are not a police officer, but a citizen deeply and passionately concerned about the state of the society you live in. In an attempt to express what you believe are constitutional rights, your government openly (and sometimes violently) confronts you with a massive armed presence.

^{Jack Johnson}

^{Henry Stern}

So here we are, angry at this outrageous response by the city, and here you are, angry because you’ve been told that we’re somehow the enemy. Both occupiers and police have allowed ourselves to be distracted from the important work that needs to be done to make this country and this world better for all of our children. In the words of one of your own officers (and I’m transcribing from audio recording):

“We’re theoretically on the same team, but pitted against each other… Democrat, Republican, it doesn’t make any difference in the world. The people in power are going to keep the foot on our throat until maybe there’s some sort of wild overthrow of the government, and we all just take and burn everything to the ground.”

Regardless of this police officer’s revolutionary views, the Occupy movement has nothing to do with burning things down or overthrowing the government, nor has it ever. Richmond police certainly have no reason to view us this way, as we have always been nonviolent, and have sworn to remain so. But this officer was admirably perceptive to realize that all of us (occupiers and police) are being forced to waste ridiculous amounts of time and energy struggling against each other instead of the people and policies that are screwing over each and every one of us.

I understand that you gave up all individual decision making power in matters of law when you became a police officer. You do what you’re told. This is unfortunate for us all. I hope each and every one of you will consider the avenues available to express your concern about the well being of democracy and constitutional expression. As part of the 99%, you have always been invited to join us, and I hope that there can be an increased understanding between ALL parties that the conflict playing out between us is merely a distraction from what this movement (and ostensibly, your jobs) are about – making the world a better place.

- A Richmond Occupier

*This letter is the opinion of one person, and does not speak for the Occupy Richmond movement, which is open to all.