Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police. Since the George Floyd protests began, there have been more than 400 claims of aggressions against the press, according to the U.S. Press Freedom tracker. Violations include being assaulted with pepper spray and rubber bullets, dealing with damaged equipment, and even facing arrest. This week, At Liberty is joined by Jared Goyette, a freelance reporter who was hit in the eye with a police projectile while covering a protest in Minneapolis. 

“There’s always been a degree of tension between police, protesters, and media,” said Goyette of the protest at which he was attacked. “They are tense environments…But based on my experience in these types of events, this was markedly different than anything I’d seen before. It was different by the degree of the lack of clear communication. And it was different in the degree to which the projectiles coming from police seemed continuous, and to some degree arbitrary.”

Goyette is now the named plaintiff in a lawsuit the ACLU of Minnesota filed last week against the City of Minneapolis, seeking justice for the violence he and other journalists experienced covering the protests.

“There’s a feeling of just being in a historic and important moment and wanting to do as good a job as possible to document it,” Goyette told At Liberty. “And there’s just so much happening at once. As journalists, we’re doing the best we can.”
 

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Policing the Press: A Journalist on the Frontlines

Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police…

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I never expected to get an abortion. But I knew I could tell my mother. I grew up in New York and abortion was still illegal when I was born. One of my earliest memories is being in the car with my mother when she turned to me and told me that if I ever needed an abortion, I should let her know, because she “knew a lot of doctors.” My mother survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Catholic boarding school in the South of France. Her parents were active in the Jewish French resistance, and my grandmother helped my grandfather escape from Beaune-la-Rolande, a French-run Nazi transit camp which fed Jews to Auschwitz. My mother knew a thing or two about defying unjust laws. 
 
Any day now, the U.S. Supreme Court is due to hand down its decision on an unjust law in Louisiana. The Court’s decision in June Medical v. Russo could drastically alter the ability of people in the United States to access abortion. June Medical involves a law in Louisiana that requires doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. This is so even though abortion is one of the safest medical procedures and admitting privileges for abortion providers have no correlation to women’s safety. If left in place, Louisiana will be left with one doctor in the entire state permitted to perform abortions. One doctor to serve the 1 million women of reproductive age in Louisiana. The politicians in Louisiana justify this law as “protecting women’s health,” even while Louisiana has the highest maternal death rate in the country. The politicians also ignore that autonomy is intrinsic to health. Women cannot be healthy if we cannot control our destiny. And the Supreme Court does not need to overturn Roe v. Wade to make abortion an impossibility for millions of women. Already, abortion access is dying the death of a thousand cuts. As of 2017, 89 percent of counties in the U.S. lacked an abortion provider, and 38 percent of women of reproductive age lived in a county without a clinic.
 
If I had not been able to control my reproductive life, I do not think I would have been able to craft my resulting career. When I unexpectedly became pregnant in my twenties, I was just starting out in my legal career, and not ready personally or professionally to be a parent. When I was more settled, I did have two wonderful children. I dedicated my professional life to fighting gender-based violence. I worked for more than 20 years as a legal aid lawyer representing low-income domestic violence survivors (some of whom were prevented by their partners from getting abortions), and then joined the local government in my city to improve policies on intimate partner violence and human trafficking. And now I get to fight for reproductive rights at the mothership — the ACLU of Southern California. 
 
Even though I had my abortion over 25 years ago, and I have never hidden it from friends and family, this past year is the first time that I have spoken publicly about it. I feel obligated to normalize this experience — to add my story to the multitude of others that show how many people have exercised their right to have an abortion, and how our lives were saved by this ability. I am privileged to be able to share my story with support from my personal and work families, and I recognize that not all people enjoy this option. I feel impelled to speak out since I can, particularly since so many others cannot. One in four women in the United States will get an abortion in their lifetime, but many don’t feel they can talk about it.
 
Access to abortion enables us to control our destiny, to be truly free. I was privileged from a young age to know that I would always be able to control that destiny — because my parents knew doctors; because I had a job that gave me health insurance; because I lived in a state that protected my rights. But it shouldn’t matter where you work, what your ZIP code is, or whom your parents know, to be free. Let’s hope the Supreme Court doesn’t leave freedom to the states.

Minouche Kandel, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Southern California

This post also appears in Cosmopolitan.

Almost exactly six years after NYPD officers murdered Eric Garner in New York City, Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd. Activists, advocates, and protestors are still screaming “I can’t breathe” and begging government officials for police reform that will end police violence in Black communities. But today’s demands are bigger and bolder: Now, protesters are advocating for systemic changes that require a complete reimagining of law enforcement in the United States.

American policing has never been a neutral institution. The first U.S. city police department was a slave patrol, and modern police forces have directed oppression and violence at Black people to enforce Jim Crow, wage the War on Drugs, and crack down on protests. When people ask for police reform, many are actually asking for this oppressive system to be dismantled and to invest in institutions, resources, and services that help communities grow and thrive. That’s why many protestors and activists, following in the footsteps of Black-led grassroots groups, are demanding immediate defunding of police departments.

The idea of defunding, or divestment, is new to some folks, but the basic premise is simple: We must cut the astronomical amount of money that our governments spend on law enforcement and give that money to more helpful services like job training, counseling, and violence-prevention programs. Each year, state and local governments spend upward of $100 billion dollars on law enforcement—and that’s excluding billions more in federal grants and resources.
 
Budgets are not created in a vacuum. They can be changed through targeted advocacy and organizing. We can demand that our local officials (including city council members and mayors) stop allocating funds for the police to acquire more militarized equipment and instead ask for that money to go toward community-run violence-prevention programs.
We can demand that our federal government redirect the money that funds police presence in schools to putting counselors in schools instead.

Funneling so many resources into law enforcement instead of education, affordable housing, and accessible health care has caused significant harm to communities. Police violence is actually a leading cause of death for Black men: A recent study found that 1 in 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police, and public health experts have described police violence as a serious public health issue. For a country like ours, which considers itself a modern democracy that pushes ideals of freedom and justice for all, that number should be truly shocking.

We can demand that our federal government redirect the money that funds police presence in schools to putting counselors in schools instead.
Funneling so many resources into law enforcement instead of education, affordable housing, and accessible health care has caused significant harm to communities. Police violence is actually a leading cause of death for Black men: A recent study found that 1 in 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police, and public health experts have described police violence as a serious public health issue. For a country like ours, which considers itself a modern democracy that pushes ideals of freedom and justice for all, that number should be truly shocking.

We have little evidence, if any, to show that more police surveillance results in fewer crimes and greater public safety. Indeed, funneling police into communities of color and pushing officers to make arrests just perpetuates harm and trauma. Yet since the 1980s, spending on law enforcement and our criminal legal system has dramatically outpaced that in community services such as housing, education, and violence prevention programs. Those are the institutions that help build stable, safe, and healthy communities.
 
For example, Los Angeles’s budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city’s $10.5 billion. Spending on community services such as economic development ($30 million) and housing ($81 million) pale in comparison to the massive LAPD budget. (On Wednesday night, after years of Black Lives Matter grassroots activists demanding a cut in LAPD’s budget, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced he would cut $100 million to $150 million from the LAPD budget and reinvest those funds in communities of color.) Similarly, in New York City, the government spends almost $6 billion on policing, which is more than it does on the Department of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community development combined.
 
By shrinking their massive budgets, we can help end decades of racially driven social control and oppression as well as address social problems at their root instead of investing in an institution that further oppresses and terrorizes communities.

In addition to divesting from police and reinvesting the savings in nonpunitive programs that benefit public safety and health, there are other critical steps we need to take to foster the systemic change people across the country are calling for:

1. End enforcement of minor offenses that drive street-level harassment. We can do this by repealing laws across the country that criminalize minor behaviors and passing laws that legalize activities such as marijuana possession and distribution.
2. End the presence of police in schools, which exacerbates racial inequalities, puts immigrant students at risk of deportation, and limits opportunities accessible to low-income students. (Minneapolis Public Schools just voted to end its contract with the city’s police department.)
3. Develop mobile crisis services, peer crisis services, and crisis hotlines and warmlines (where people can call when they just need to talk to someone who understands what it’s like to live with mental health problems) to support people who have a behavioral or mental health crisis.
4. Ban pretextual stops and consent searches that act as common mechanisms for police to engage in racial profiling and circumvent legal standards.
5. Implement common-sense, civilly and criminally enforceable legal constraints so there will be only rare instances in which officers are able to use force against community members.

For too long, the focus on police reform has been dominated by reforms that try to reduce the harms of policing rather than rethink the overall role of police in society. But six years after the Black Lives Matter movement rose to national attention, activists across the country are coming together to demand what many have known has been the solution all along: defund the police.

Paige Fernandez, Policing Policy Advisor, ACLU