by Virgil Vaduva

Xenia is a small city in Ohio, peppered with foot-deep potholes, abandoned buildings with a high unemployment rate and very busy bureaucrats. Just a few months ago, the city’s council decided to spend $6 million on a new “Justice Center” and the cost is expected to balloon well into the $20+ million range. The city is in dire need of infrastructure upgrades, road repairs and sewage system improvements, but a new police station and a new office building for the city’s employees became critical.

But these are not even the worst things about the city of Xenia.  A few years ago, Xenia also decided to ban the practice of panhandling. At the request of the police department and cops who were “too tired” of dealing with homeless people on the street, the city decided to pass an ordinance that banned panhandling virtually anywhere in the city, making it impossible for anyone to ask another individual for financial help, anywhere in the city. In essence, the city has made it illegal for someone to speak with a stranger if the speech involves asking for immediate help.

Many individuals have been fined and prosecuted under this unconstitutional ordinance, raking in thousands of dollars of fines extracted from the most vulnerable and poor people on the streets.

A bit over a year ago I decided to speak to the Xenia City Council and warn them about the fact that their ordinance is unconstitutional. They ignored my warning, and as a result the very next day I decided to take the path of civil disobedience and panhandle in front of the city hall and police station. I raised $41.98 which was donated to United Voluntary Service, a charity helping the homeless in Xenia. I was also ticketed for violating this unconstitutional law, which led to a full-blown jury trial after which I was found guilty, sentenced to 30 days in jail, community service and fines. The jail sentence was suspended on the condition of good behavior for a term of 2 years. During the trial I was not allowed to talk about the constitutionality of the law and my first amendment rights, I was not allowed to even mention the constitution, or the fact that the police in town were behind the passing of this ordinance. A judge literally told me, “there will be no mentioning of the Constitution in this court room.”

After immediately appealing, the appeals court finally reversed my sentence and they sent the case back to the court to be retried. All the charges were dropped a few days ago, and the city’s attorney said they will change the ordinance or get rid of it. Right now it’s unclear what this means.

After about a year and a half, the swift hand of the judicial system finally found me innocent of any wrongdoing spending tens of thousands of dollars of the city’s money and my own money, hundreds of hours going into my defense and substantial effort aimed to win and undo the work of the Xenia bureaucrats. What took them only a few minutes to ratify with the stroke of a pen, caused hundreds, if not thousands of people to be harassed, arrested and fined by their cops. None of the cops and Xenia bureaucrats involved in this will ever be held personally responsible for their decisions, and while I am fortunate enough to afford the legal fees to pursue such a case just for the immoral and unconstitutional aspect of their law, most people cannot do so and rarely, if ever anyone speaks on their behalf or stands up for them.

Now while this may be a win for me personally, the issue is nowhere near close to being resolved. The hundreds of people who have had their first amendment rights violated will need retribution. I am in the process of collecting all the names of the individuals detained or fined under this law and bring this issue to the attention of federal courts.

To make matters worse, the city of Beavercreek, which is next door to Xenia, has an ordinance identical to the one in Xenia, also banning panhandling everywhere within city limits. More and more local bureaucrats decide on a regular basis and in a systematic way to violate the constitutional rights of people in need who are unable to represent themselves in court. Beavercreek is the same city where a police officer shot a black man named John Crawford in a local Walmart for holding a BB gun he picked off a store shelf.

Beavercreek will be our next target for their unconstitutional and illegal practices regarding panhandling, and there will be no rest for the corrupt and immoral politicians and cops running these cities and violating our rights. Yesterday I “panhandled” for charity in Beavercreek and I was given a “warning” from their police and asked not to do it again in the future. I raised $18 dollars which will also be donated to United Voluntary Services to help the homeless in the area.

Officers Hall and Darkow (the second officer involved in the shooting of John Crawford) of Beavecreek PD showed up and threatened, attempted to intimidate me and warned me about standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign that said, “Help the poor.”  In today’s America, this is now a crime.

Officer Darkow was the backup officer involved in the shooting and killing of John Crawford in a Beavercreek Walmart. He is currently being sued by the Crawford family.

Officer hall attempting to give me a written warning about panhandling in the city of Beavercreek and threatening me with arrest if I continue to peacefully raise money for charity

Officer hall attempting to give me a written warning about panhandling in the city of Beavercreek and threatening me with arrest if I continue to peacefully raise money for charity

The officers refused to answer questions about the constitutionality of the law and why they are violating their oaths to the Constitution by enforcing a law targeting Americans’ first amendment rights.

The same individuals who have sworn an oath to obey and protect the Constitution are actively using their roles to undermine the very document and rights they were entrusted to protect.

If you have been one of the hundreds of people harassed, arrested or fined by the Xenia and Beavercreek police for panhandling, please contact me as soon as possible at [email protected] so I can help you out. I want to hear your story.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

The Guardian has dome some digging up into statistics posted by the FBI and discovered some interesting missing details from these reports.

Killings by police that unleashed a new protest movement around the US in 2014, including those of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford, are missing from the federal government’s official record of homicides by officers because most departments refuse to submit data.

Only 224 of 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the US reported a fatal shooting by their officers to the FBI last year, according to previously unpublished data obtained by the Guardian, which sheds new light on flaws in official systems for counting the use of deadly force by police.

The Counted, an investigation by the Guardian to report all deaths caused by police in 2015, had already logged deadly shootings by officers from 224 different law enforcement agencies by 10 April this year. Crowd-sourced counts in 2014 recorded deaths at a similar higher rate.

Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI, said exclusions were inevitable because the program remained voluntary. “We have no way of knowing how many incidents may have been omitted,” Fischer said in an email.

Amid mounting pressure on public authorities to overhaul the recording of deadly incidents involving law enforcement, an extensive review of all data on “justifiable homicides” by police collected by the FBI from police departments between 2004 and 2014 found:

• No police departments from the state of Florida reported any homicides by officers, meaning deaths caused by police in the country’s third-most populous state were not logged by the FBI. The New York police department, by far the country’s biggest, submitted data for just one year during the past decade.

• The FBI records only basic personal details of each person killed and not information such as whether they were armed with a weapon – a critical factor in ongoing debates over the use of force by police around the country.

• A chaotic approach was applied to recording other high-profile deaths over recent years. Some were logged, some filed to a separate category with general homicides without noting the subjects were killed by police, and others were ignored.

• An increase in the number of homicides by police publicly reported by the FBI over the past five years was effectively matched by a rise in the number of individual departments reporting any homicides, casting doubt over purported trends in the data.

• Details of other controversial deaths that prompted protests were entered incorrectly in the FBI database, damaging government efforts to monitor demographic information about people killed by police.

The analysis of raw FBI data was carried out as the US Department of Justice announced it was trialling a new open-source system for counting homicides by law enforcement. The system’s methodology closely resembles those of The Counted and a Washington Post record of fatal police shootings.

News of the pilot program, which is being run by the department’s bureau of justice statistics, came following strident comments from both US attorney general Loretta Lynch and FBI director James Comey, who reiterated calls for better official records of homicides by police.

Comprehensive records of killings by law enforcement officers has been a demand of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has risen to prominence since the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown in August 2014. It was also among the recommendations made by Barack Obama’s White House policing taskforce, which was convened following Brown’s death, which was among those recorded in the FBI database.

While the people killed were not named in the FBI database, some could be identified by matching entries with publicly-available information on their age, sex and race, as well as those of the officer who shot them, the location of the incident, and the month it occurred.

But the death in July of Eric Garner, who was placed in a chokehold by an NYPD officer allegedly confronting Garner about selling loose cigarettes, was not included in the official federal record. The NYPD has not submitted data to the FBI since 2006. It pledged earlier this month to release more detailed data on officers’ deadly use of force from next year.

Erica Garner, Garner’s daughter, said she was “outraged but not shocked” by the omission. “It’s just another part of the cover-up and erasing of his murder from the record,” Garner said. “It says to the NYPD and the city and state of New York that my father’s life doesn’t matter.”

No other department in the state of New York had any homicides by officers recorded by the FBI during the decade except for one, by Rochester in 2006. In its annual Firearms Discharge Reports, NYPD has recorded 117 “subjects shot and killed by officers” between 2004 and 2014. Its total of 13 shooting deaths for 2006, however, exceeded the 10 reported to the FBI that year, the only 12-month period in which the department participated in the FBI’s count.

NYPD’s own counts also did not include non-shooting deaths such as Garner’s. By contrast a more comprehensive count of incidents and details of the demographics of the people involved would be “a huge help in this so-called ‘push to improve police relations with the Black community’,” said Erica Garner.

Florida keeps its own annual record of justifiable homicides by law enforcement, despite no departments in the state filing a report to the FBI in the past decade. The state data from 2013 was provided to the Guardian but did not list the departments responsible for each death, instead it recorded a single, statewide figure of 60 deaths from all departments who submitted records that year. NBC South Florida was provided with records dating back over a decade, showing the number of recorded justifiable homicides has risen from 14 in 1999 to 67 in 2012.

Departments behind some of last year’s most controversial homicides by police, including Cleveland and Beavercreek in Ohio, whose officers shot dead 12-year-old Tamir Rice and 22-year-old John Crawford respectively, also did not file reports on those incidents to the FBI.

A review of data collected over the years by the FBI showed that high-profile homicides in which officers were found to be at fault were not recorded or were logged inconsistently. Problems stem from the fact that only one of the FBI’s 32 classifications for all homicides – which are precise enough to include “child killed by babysitter” and homicides linked to gambling – makes reference to the person who carried out the homicide being a police officer. This classification, “felon killed by police”, is automatically counted as a justifiable homicide.

Apparently because the FBI offers no category for recording killings by law enforcement officers of people who were not felons, some departments have filed unjustified homicides by their officers among the general stack of murders, manslaughters and other killings between civilians.

A record matching the case of Yvette Smith, a 47-year-old black woman who was shot dead by Bastrop County deputy Daniel Willis in Texas when she opened the door to him, appeared among the general unjustified homicides for 2014. As a result, it was not included in the total figure for killings by police publicised by the FBI last month. The death was filed under “circumstances undetermined” and Willis was logged as a stranger to Smith rather than an officer. A prosecution of Willis on charges of murder recently ended in a mistrial.

Similarly Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old former football player at Florida A&M who was shot dead by officer Randall Kerrick after knocking on a door when he crashed his car in North Carolina, appeared to be included among general homicides for 2013. But his death was categorised as “manslaughter by negligence” and Kerrick was recorded as having been known to the victim. A trial of Kerrick for voluntary manslaughter also ended in a hung jury.

Yet no record in either file – homicides by police officers and those by civilians – could be found that matched other major cases, including that of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old black man shot dead at a transit station in Oakland, California, in January 2009. Grant’s death was dramatised in the film Fruitvale Station. Officer Johannes Mehserle, who said he meant to use a Taser, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter but cleared of murder.

No entries appeared for Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old woman shot dead by an off-duty Chicago police officer in March 2012, nor for Malissa Williams, 30, and Timothy Russell, 43, who died after 137 shots were fired into their car by police officers in Cleveland, Ohio in November the same year.

The FBI has also logged incorrect information for several deaths. Among these was the case of Darrien Hunt, a 22-year-old who was shot dead in September last year while running away from police in Saratoga Springs, Utah, after allegedly wielding a replica sword. Hunt was listed as the person who carried out the homicide, and a knife or blade was said to be the deadly weapon. Hunt and the officers who shot him were listed as acquaintances.

Hunt’s mother, Susan, said the confused logging of her son’s death came even after federal officials said earlier this year that the FBI and Department of Justice were carrying out their own review of the fatal shooting. “There has been so much wrong with the entire incident,” she said.

Fischer, the FBI spokesman, said departments had until December to submit missing or corrected data and said the information analysed by the Guardian for 2014 was “a snapshot in time” that may be updated.

A knife was also listed as the fatal weapon for a case matching the details of Chieu-di Thi Vo, a 47-year-old woman shot dead by a Greensboro, North Carolina, police officer in March last year after allegedly brandishing a knife. Vo’s demographic information was given for both the person who was killed and the officer who carried out the homicide, who was in fact a man. The FBI’s final published tally counted only one homicide by a blade, but did not state which this was.

The Counted has documented more than 900 deaths caused by encounters with law enforcement officers so far this year. The FBI count, from which basic statistics were published earlier this month, documented just 444 justifiable homicides for the whole of 2014. That total was reached by the Guardian count before the halfway point of 2015.

The FBI data showed that while the number of departments reporting killings by their officers rose 14% from 196 per year in 2009 to 224 last year, the number of homicides increased by 12% from 392 to 439 per year in the same period.

Because of the nature of the FBI program there is no way of calculating whether these increases reflect a genuine rise in the number of people killed by police over the years or simply that more agencies have decided to submit their data.

Comey said last week that it was “unacceptable” the Guardian and the Washington Post were “becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians”.

“You can get online today and figure out how many tickets were sold to ‘The Martian,’ which I saw this weekend … The CDC can do the same with the flu,” Comey said. “It’s ridiculous – it’s embarrassing and ridiculous – that we can’t talk about crime in the same way, especially in the high-stakes incidents when your officers have to use force.”

From The Guardian

by Virgil Vaduva

Update (August 6, 2015):

Representatives from Ohio Students Association have contacted me and have denied any association with the individuals behind the e-mails sent to Jim Anderson. As of right now, nobody has taken any responsibility for the statements made in the e-mails sent to Jim.

Original story: 

A clear pattern of discrimination and exclusion has been emerging within the last few days regarding the organization Black Lives Matter. It started with the organization attempting to schedule an event at the same time and location as other organizations and immediately attempting to put in place rules limiting attendance, excluding members of Anonymous, members of Cop Block and members of Ohio Open Carry, all organizations which oppose police brutality and work hard to further liberty.

These actions and attempts to control the narrative and attendance to the one year anniversary demonstration of John Crawford’s shooting by Ohio police have stirred up quite a debate in various circles, prompting individuals that would otherwise work together to further the cause of liberty to take sides based on political views and other opinions.

Black Lives Matter, the George Soros funded organization, is now on full attack against Anonymous, a de-centralized organization which has been attempting to participate in exposing police brutality throughout the world for years.  The attempt on the part of BLM to limit speech and control the message at public events is not new and I have documented a number of instances where bigotry is on display by members and leader in Black Lives Matter.

Just today an activist and journalist named Jim Anderson based out of Columbus, Ohio contacted me to inform me that he was told by members of BLM that he was “too white to attend a police brutality protest.”

As early as November 2014 the leaders of Black Lives Matter Columbus have contacted Jim and demanded that he cancels his event against police brutality due to conflict (as they scheduled it after he did) and informed him that no members of Anonymous are welcome to any of their public events.  Furthermore Guy Fawkes masks were banned and white people were told not to attend and were not welcome at any planning meetings. These tactics are identical to the tactics BLM is attempting to use to intimidate white attendees in Beavercreek, Ohio planning to attend the one year anniversary protest of the John Crawford shooting on August 5, 2015.

Screenshots of e-mail exchanges between Jim and representatives from BLM and Ohio Student Association show what appear to be outright and unapologetically bigoted attitudes towards police brutality supporters simply because of their association with Anonymous or simple due to their skin color.

When Jim inquired about the confusion generated by the exclusion of Anonymous members, he was told that Anonymous members lack “revolutionary-ness” (sic) and can be threatening to people of color. The insensitivity of the language used to describe Anonymous is astounding. The BLM leaders are attempting to describe Anonymous members as violent, unaccountable individuals who show up at protests in order to intimidate people of color.

This is not the first time members of Black Lives Matter have excluded whites from their events. In an event scheduled in Dayton, Ohio early in 2015 several messages went out indicating in essence that “no whites are allowed” at their events and that white people are not welcome to participate or take part in police brutality protests. When an outraged community pointed out the bigotry of these demands the request made on Facebook were deleted and BLM leadership pretended they never happened.

In a recent video allegedly recorded in Cleveland, Ohio, another white journalist who attended a BLM meeting to support their cause was assaulted, pushed, cursed at and grabbed before he had a chance to leave the public property he was on.

When asked about the bigoted remarks, the organizers defended the behavior by claiming this was a “private” meeting, however the meeting is clearly out in public on what appears to be public property.  Not only that, but the journalist was clearly in the process of leaving, as he was asked to do, when he was assaulted and threatened. You can watch the video here.

Talis Gage, a leader in Black Lives Matter compares Anonymous members with the KKK in a Facebook post

In a more recent event, a Black Lives Matter leader did not mince words when he outright stated that “the mask is the new sheet” when criticizing Anonymous for attending some BLM events.  He stated:

“Sometimes I wonder if the mask is the new sheet and are they in cahoots with each other I know I know there is some black mask anon members but like the old days you had house negros and field negros and we are not that far from those times. I have associated in all these diff groups but I can’t say I trust them.”

Additional BLM members followed with more inflammatory comments against Anonymous:

“Both anonymous masks and guns endanger people of color…”

All these comments were removed when I warned them that I was taking screenshots, as the story would be hard to believe otherwise.

I am aghast at the idea that Anonymous is being compared with one of the most despicable and racists groups in the world, the KKK, which has lynched, burned and executed people simply because of the color of their skin. Furthermore, Anonymous has shown incredible support for the black community on the issue of police brutality. Several prominent investigations by Anonymous have led to exposing internal e-mails and comments from NYPD and Baltimore PD showing extensive racism among police officers.

When members of Anonymous contacted the BLM leaderships to inquire about the public event scheduled in Dayton Ohio in April, they were told in very clear terms, “It’s an event that’s not for anonymous members.”

The ingratitude shown by Black Lives Matter and the outright disregard for any desire to cooperate with people and groups which have supported them for the past year is very disturbing, to say the least. Exclusion, discrimination and bigotry appears to be alive and well throughout the BLM organization, and is dishonorable to police brutality causes where black Americans have been targeted by police throughout the country.

I am unsure how to encourage BLM leadership to resolve this problem, or even if they are willing to solve the problem or eliminate bigotry from their midsts, but if you want to contact BLM, you can do so by going to their website and writing them a message about the serious problem they are creating by attacking groups of people which have been supportive of the cause of police brutality well before BLM even came into existence.

Words don’t break bones, but they should certainly prompt someone to step back and reconsider their support for such organizations.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

Beavercreek Police Department used a city firetruck and dispatched three firefighters to wash away the messages written by activists in chalk

by Virgil Vaduva

The Police Department in Beavercreek, Ohio did not take well to a group of local activists writing messages in chalk in the public property surrounding the PD building.  Yesterday the activists took it to the pavement mostly with messages regarding the shooting of an unarmed black man by one of the cops working for the Beavercreek PD; the shooting was found to be justified by an investigative board.  Sean Williams, the officer responsible for the shooting of John Crawford in a local Walmart is still employed by the department and continues to be paid by the local taxpayers.

The local community has shown overwhelming support for the police department.  In the past I have covered at least one pro-police rally and was able to record footage showing at least one police supporter stating that he was happy a black man was killed by the cops.

With messages calling out for the remembrance of John Crawford and the prosecution of Sean Williams, the activists spent about twenty minutes chalking the sidewalks surrounding the building.  I participated in the event and did not anticipate such a quick and massive response from the City of Beavercreek attempting to erase the truth behind these messages.

About an hour after the chalking, the city dispatched a tanker truck manned by three firefighters to wash away the chalk from the pavement.  As reminded in the video below, the area has experienced daily downpours and it is unclear why they responded so quickly to the chalking when they could have waited out for the evening rain to wipe out the chalk.  The cost and waste of city resources to cover the message of truth is not surprising as they continue to refuse to file charges against the killer of John Crawford and refuse to answer questions about the incident.

Fortunately I was able to anticipate the fast response and recorded the incident.  You can watch it below.