The Est. collected open letters on Sessions, familial separation and the current administration’s response to asylum seekers and immigrants — good grief our collective heart! — to publish on a dedicated landing page as a kind of evolving pastiche of opinions and concerns, anger and empathy. Resistance is vital.

On the thread of a truly good friend of mine—who supports the policy of Trump and Sessions—I referred to the sadism of the immigration policy.

I was responding to someone, I think a mutual friend, who claimed that the policy was for the purpose of upholding the law. The mutual friend objected, saying I was emotional and name-calling. I posted the following response to her. It is a simple fact that people I love support these horrors. I want to speak to a larger audience about this. Almost all the people who agree with me have friends who are Trump supporters.

This horror needs to be explored, I think, because I believe breaking through to the people we love who are sleepwalking to fascism is our last best hope.

Every single one of us is descended from oppressors and the oppressed. The arguments justifying cruelty circulating now were going around in Europe during Hitler’s rise to power.

Sometimes the truth comes across as an insult. In part because enough nice people were too polite to be frank with their friends who supported the nazis, it ended up with my grandparents and many, many of my family being murdered in the Holocaust. Of course my family was just one of an ocean of families comprised of gypsies, jews, homosexuals, leftists, and decent people who objected to atrocities.

I am thinking, friend of my friend, that you are highly educated and have had every opportunity to understand that the people who come to our borders are in desperate situations, and that our country is largely responsible for creating those conditions.

The sadism and callousness exhibited by a large minority of our citizens must be named. I feel solidarity with those persons whose torture you approve. Patriotism — especially in this country — requires that your feelings of solidarity with other humans be greater than your allegiance to your government, when your government turns to torture.

Sometimes the truth comes across as an insult.
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Because money plays such a big role in our elections, the significant minority of Trump supporters may continue to gain power. Clearly Trump and Sessions have no more compassion than Hitler. They have both shown it for years. This isn’t name calling, this is truth. (Name calling is that stupid stuff that Kathy Griffin and Samantha Bee do.)

We are coming to a crisis. Either good people who have been sleepwalking toward fascism will come to their senses, or all our liberties and our national decency will be gone. Then it will end very badly for all of us, you and me and all of us. But until our tenuous democracy is snuffed out, you will be hearing the truth from all sides, from the too-small majority who knows sadism when they see it.

The conditions that we have had a large hand in creating in Central America are so terrible that humans will follow the biological imperative — let’s call it God’s law — and try to save their children. The Sessions policy will not be effective in significantly deterring immigration. It will be effective in making us poorer, in many ways. Resources are being diverted from serious crime because of this policy that can’t work.

You will be confronted with this truth every day, and you won’t like it. We are connected by our mutual friend, whom I love, and who thinks I am a murderer because I don’t believe abortion is murder. Yet my family and her family have a strong affinity for each other. It does not stop me from loving her, and I don’t think it stops her from loving me. As far as I can tell, she and you have the same opinions on the immigration issues. Perhaps my family would love your family as we do her.

Until our tenuous democracy is snuffed out, you will hear the truth from the too-small majority who knows sadism when they see it.
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But that doesn’t stop this from being true: Ripping babies from their mothers is perverse and evil. Read Memory of Fire, by Eduardo Galeano, Books 1, 2 and 3. This tells the history of all the Americas from the Europeans’ first landing, in vignettes of one, two or three pages. I think that if you actually read them your heart could not remain as hard. I am sorry to have to say that your heart is hard but it is an unfortunate truth that must be said, for our present, our future, and the people referenced earlier who suffered torture and death because people were too enamored of a false civility to say these things that must be said.

If you don’t want to hear this, you are going to have to restrict yourself to the company of those who agree with you, until such time as the fascist takeover is further advanced.

I myself deal with everybody, and am open to friendships with people who think I am a murderer for believing that women have a right to safe and legal abortion. I have to, because people I love are supporting evil, and that mystery is for me a central question in understanding the world.

A new investigation reveals that the number of people being shot — and shot at — by police is troubling.

Jeff Sessions (Credit: flickr/Gage Skidmore)

By Kali Holloway

I n major metropolitan areas around the country over the last half-decade, police have shot — and shot at — people in numbers dramatically higher than previous tallies suggest. A new Vice News investigation finds that between 2010–2016, cops in the 50 largest police departments in the country shot more than 3,630 people, nearly double some previous estimates. Of the 4,381 people cops fired upon in that period — including the 700 people they shot at and missed — two-thirds survived those shootings.

Absent a comprehensive federal database of police shootings, the Vice report offers the most complete picture of fatal and nonfatal police shootings available.

The data analysis also found that police shot black people “more often and at higher rates than any other race,” and “two and a half times more often than white people.” Vice found that cops shot no fewer than 1,664 black people in the period studied, comprising “55 percent of the total and more than double the share of the black population in these communities.” Twenty percent of the African Americans tallied were shot following “relatively innocuous pedestrian or traffic stops,” which was true for just 16 percent of whites shot by police. Those figures are of particular importance considering that studies find black drivers are more likely to be stopped by cops based on less evidence, less likely than their white peers to be spoken to respectfully during those stops, and more likely to be ticketed and arrested than white drivers.

Police shot black people ‘more often and at higher rates than any other race,’ and ‘two and a half times more often than white people.’

While police narratives of shootings studied by Vice suggest the majority of blacks shot by cops were themselves involved in shootings or robberies, the proliferation of cell phone and body camera footage that contradicts police versions of events brings the trustworthiness of those numbers into question. Many videos made public after the fact have illustrated that shootings initially described by police as being self-defensive were in fact extrajudicial executions of African Americans. Unquestionably, some shootings of black citizens result from actual crimes being committed. But the demonstrated fallibility of police accounts shows that in a disturbing number of cases, police officers “shoot first and come up with reasons later.” The Vice News investigation finds that a significant number of people (20 percent) shot by police were unarmed. Among those, 44 percent were African American.

“It is a complex picture, but what’s clear is that black people are more likely to be unarmed, and that more of these sort of low-level incidents escalate to shootings,” Samuel Sinyangwe, data analyst and co-founder of police reform organization Campaign Zero, told Vice.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

America’s problems with gun violence across the board are reflected in its police shooting figures. A 2015 assessment found that 1 out of every 13 people killed by guns every year is killed by police. As the Washington Post notes, that’s roughly one killing “every 9 hours, or 2.5 shootings per day.” Undoubtedly, based on the number of unarmed victims, not every shooting is the result of justifiable safety fears by officers. But few cops are held accountable even for the most extreme mistakes in the field. An investigation by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last year found that between 1995 and 2015, “[f]ederal prosecutors declined to pursue civil rights allegations against law enforcement officers 96 percent of the time.” It’s notoriously difficult to secure a conviction against cops even in unequivocal cases of police abuse.

“There doesn’t have to be a gun involved. We see these cases where somebody has a cell phone or somebody makes the wrong move,” Bruce Franks Jr., a Missouri activist who went from Ferguson protester to state senator, told Vice. “There’s a million reasons they give so it ends up being justified.”

One of the few positive trends in the numbers Vice examined is a 20 percent downturn in police shootings since 2014, the result of Obama-era reforms in response to Department of Justice recommendations. Of the 10 cities that saw the largest drops in police shootings, seven complied with changes proposed by the federal government.

Cities that voluntarily adopted DOJ-recommended reforms saw a 32 percent decline in officer-involved shootings in the first year. The police departments that were forced to take on reforms through binding agreements with the DOJ saw a 25 percent decline that year, including Baltimore, whose agreement began this year. In Chicago, shootings by cops dropped by more than 50 percent after McDonald’s death, an incident that prompted a DOJ investigation and a package of recommended reforms.

That downturn is likely to end. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has characterized the DOJ’s work with local police departments as “federal intrusion,” and ordered a review of all reform agreements aimed at curbing civil rights violations and police abuses. “It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” Sessions stated in a two-page memo issued earlier this year.

The Vice investigation of the country’s 50 largest police departments was met with some resistance by the forces being scrutinized. Just 47 departments ultimately responded to Vice’s stats request with numbers that offered enough data for proper examination. “Many [law enforcement departments] fought hard to keep the information secret,” Vice claims, “and some responded to our requests only under threat of legal action.”

On Police Brutality, Who Are We To Believe?

Despite dozens of high-profile police killings in recent years, the FBI still doesn’t mandate that local police departments around the country report to a centralized data-keeping mechanism. Just 35 of the 18,000 local police departments in the U.S. participate in the Police Data Initiative, an Obama administration program to increase transparency around policing that will likely also be diminished under the Trump administration and the Sessions DOJ. Yet, this is critical information about the state of justice and civil rights in this country.

“We should know about how often it happens, if for no other reason than to simply understand the phenomenon,” David Klinger, an ex-LAPD officer and professor of criminal justice, told Vice. “How often is it that police are putting bullets in people’s bodies or trying to put bullets in people’s bodies?”

[h/t Vice News]

This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.

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