April 8 update (late!): Trumpwaffen profiles; LAPD Trains Up Oil Oligarch Cops; NYPD's Posting Addiction
Forgive the tardiness on this week's update, I was in transit to Southern California on Friday and got caught up catching up with friends down here and preparing for the opening of Atomwaffen Division member Sam Woodward's murder trial for the 2018 killing of Blaze Bernstein. In case you missed it, here's my curtain-raiser that ran yesterday in The Guardian. Opening statements are tomorrow morning, and I'll have at least one related story from that case this week that'll run behind the paywall.
I also did an interview on Tuesday with Sunni Khalid at KALW 91.7 FM (my old station! RIP the Informant) in San Francisco about the state of affairs facing Floyd Mitchell, Oakland's new police chief. We covered a lot of ground, including the still-unfolding internal affairs investigation into how OPD homicide detective Phong Tran was cleared of misconduct in 2022 for bribing a witness in a murder case eleven years earlier. No one has yet matched that exclusive I broke here a week and change ago, but I fully expect that to change in the immediate future.
Let's get to it.
BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM
-Just Security is a bit of an oddity in journalism: the national security blog is housed within New York University's law school and routinely runs lawyerly analysis that veers into opinion journalism alongside deeper reported articles. That said, it's a valuable publication for coverage of the federal courts, particularly the January 6th cases that have inundated the Washington, D.C. dockets. The J6ers are some of Donald Trump's most rabid partisans who now make up a large component of his road show when he's not babbling about Biden beating Obama, how much electronic vehicles will make your kids gay or some other syphilitic nonsense.
Last week, Just Security dove into the "Patriot Wing" detainees in D.C. jail who Trump has vowed to free. Unsurprisingly, almost all of them assaulted cops on J6 and many are members of the Proud Boys, 3% militias or other extremist groups that formed the hardcore of J6's protagonists. A timely reminder of the Pandora's box unleashed on the United States following the 2016 election, and the sort of actors that will be given impunity should Trump prevail this November.
Tom Joscelyn, Fred Wertheimer, Norman L. Eisen
-Policing does not occur in a vacuum. Tactics, equipment, policies and know-how are traded across borders, and the United States has played a long and ignominious role in training some of the most repressive law enforcement agencies in the world, as documented by historian Stuart Schraeder's 2019 book Badges Without Borders. The LAPD in particular is complicit in this heritage, and continues to do so by training up cops from the United Arab Emirates, a dictatorial petro-oligarchy in the gulf that has also bought off influence in the NYPD and employed former American spooks to crack down on internal dissent. Read Libor Jany's Los Angeles Times piece with that deeper historical context in mind.
Libor Jany
-If you're not in New York City, you may or may not know that NYPD Chief of Departmnet Jonathan Chell and his lackeys have been posting like drunk college fratboys for the past few months, lambasting the wrong judge in the wrong borough for releasing a suspect and deciding to go after individual journalists ad hominem for what they perceive to be 'unfair' coverage - which is risible since the public, judging by callers for today's Brian Lehrer Show segment with Chell, is livid with the department for shirking traffic enforcement and essentially treating their taxpayer-funded, well-renumerated, pensioned job as an excuse to fuck around on their cellphones for the entire shift. And yes, look over their shoulders and tell me how often they're looking at criminal data and how often they're on Facetime or playing Candy Crush. Hell Gate took the NYPD to task this past week for their thumbs of fury. It never fails to astound me how absolutely petty these people are, and how much effort they're devoting towards a war of perception rather than improving the basics of their department, which has been on a silent strike since the 2020 George Floyd Uprising.
Nick Pinto
BOOK OF THE WEEK - David Dufresne, Tarnac Magasin General (2012). The Stop Cop City trial has brought the Invisible Committee's books back to public attention after the Fulton County District Attorney decided to introduce the French insurrectionary anarchist collective's highly influential books from the Aughts as evidence in the racketeering case against opponents of a proposed police training center in Atlanta.
The members of the Invisible Committee advocated in favor of property destruction and sabotage to kneecap contemporary capitalist society, a tactic reminiscent of the Earth Liberation Front and other far left monkeywrenchers. In 2008, French anti-terrorism prosecutors charged ten residents of the small village of Tarnac, who they accused of comprising the Invisible Committee's core member ship, with sabotaging a high-speed rail line. The prosecution, which failed to yield ANY convictions, was the longest in French history and a huge embarrassment for the country's security services. There is a good chance of
FILM - Japanese icon Akira Kurasawa is on that 'five directors who changed cinema' shortlist. Though his collaborations with Toshiro Mifune and period-piece samurai epics are the films that made his reputation in the West, Kurasawa did not shy away from the post-war noir movement that elevated Japanese filmmakers to the same status as their American forerunners and French New Wave contemporaries.
The Bad Sleep Well (1962) features who else but Toshiro Mifune, the Japanese Marlon Brando, as a young business executive who hunts down his father's killer amidst a morass of corporate corruption and moral decay. You will not forget this one anytime soon.
In Theaters
MUSIC - Cran is a relatively new punk band (2019) out of Paris and have a nice mix of traditional and hardcore sound. I'm a sucker for political, fast punk with good graphics...
and any band with a guillotine and "Pride of France since 1789" poster for their shows deserves a mention. They're playing in San Francisco on Friday, Long Beach, California and a bunch of other American cities later this Spring. You should buy their music at Bandcamp but here's their 2023 album Natë (night in Albanian) in entirety.