
Police have been spying on black reporters and activists for years - colinprince
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/police-have-been-spying-on-black-reporters-and-activists-for-years-i-know-because-im-one-of-them
======
reactspa
Honestly, I was blind to police racism against blacks. Until I watched this
video.

\----------------

This is a shocking video:

[https://www.wral.com/ace-perry-pulled-over-by-sampson-
county...](https://www.wral.com/ace-perry-pulled-over-by-sampson-county-
deputy-for-driving-under-the-speed-limit/18953130/)

\+ white cop pulls over black driver (North Carolina)

\+ refuses to tell him why he was stopped until he shows ID

\+ asks driver questions about company name on his tee-shirt

\+ expresses incredulity when driver says he works at the company

\+ asks driver other irrelevant personal questions.

\+ tells driver he was stopped for driving UNDER THE SPEED LIMIT (doing 65 in
a 70)

\+ asks driver: "wouldn't you find it suspicious if someone were doing 65 in a
70?"

\+ gives driver a WRITTEN WARNING for driving 65 in a 70.

\+ brushes off driver's questions saying "I've got stuff to do"

\+ Feb 2020

Googling about the case `"Ace Perry" Sampson` it seems no action was taken
against the officer. If anyone has an "in" with the ACLU (or similar), the
police dept. could use some publicity.

(Strange how some cases don't get the attention they deserve.)

(Note: in response to a now apparently deleted comment: I'm aware that some
roads have minimum speed limits. I remember once seeing on a highway: max75
min40. However, 65 in a 70 is just prudence.)

~~~
throwaway_jobs
I don’t know if it’s fair to call the cop here a racist, it’s possible sure,
but it’s likely the officer didn’t know the guys race before pulling him over.

Police, especially in small towns, are notorious for targeting out of towners
(the way a racist cop might target a race they don’t like).

Here you have to understand the training/experience of highway patrol. Here we
have a rental and it was traveling below the speed limit...a highway cop might
immediately think drug trafficking (again not knowing the race, something you
probably never thought without the training and experience), And being under
the speed limit gives him the right to make the stop (but what he really wants
to do is check up on his suspicion). This would explain the questions about
the job and where the driver was going to/coming from.

Maybe I missed something but there are hundreds of thousands of stops
everyday, many like this one are ridiculous...I’m not sure how much attention
this really deserves nor if the officer (who shouldn’t have made the stop to
begin with) deserves to be labeled a racist (especially because now a days
that is tantamount to being fired and losing your livelihood as well as all
the targeting him and his family would endure).

Maybe a potential policing solution would be something akin to jury duty where
citizens are selected to shadow officers on every shift, maybe require a
mismatch Of the officer/citizen pairing Based on race/sex.

~~~
andrewem
By this logic, what speed DOESN'T justify a police officer stopping a driver?
Under is somehow suspicious according to your thinking, over is obviously
illegal, and who can travel at precisely the speed limit all the time so they
never go over or under?

~~~
throwaway_jobs
> Under is somehow suspicious according to your thinking

Read my comment, where did I say this was suspicious? What I said in regards
to the stop is:

> there are hundreds of thousands of stops everyday, many like this one are
> ridiculous

>shouldn’t have made the stop to begin with

The law on police stops is very clear you need a violation of a statute or
pc...so if there is a minimum and you are under it that is a violation and a
cop can stop you...just the same as if you violate the maximum speed statute
the cop can stop you. In Florida they even have a “catch all statute” to pull
you over if you are driving the exact speed limit if that wasn’t safe based on
“conditions of the road” which of course is purely subjective.

I’m not arguing for or against the laws in any capacity and the laws are not
my logic.

~~~
andrewem
Your first comment said "being under the speed limit gives him the right to
make the stop". Here you've followed up with "if there is a minimum and you
are under it that is a violation". I agree with the latter statement, but
being under the maximum is not a violation, and it was never stated that the
driver was going under a minimum posted speed limit. The post you were
replying to says they were doing 65 in a 70, which seems highly unlikely to be
under the minimum - what would the minimum be in that case, 67? (Assuming good
intent, perhaps this derives from yoir misreading of the post you originally
replied to, or from some other factor I'm missing.)

~~~
throwaway_jobs
This stop occurred in NC and we don’t have all the facts about the stop...but
NC is 1 of 6 states to have laws on driving to slowly. While it is true most
states might have a minimum sign posted and 65 in a 70 would be unusual, some
of the statutes are unfortunately subjective...for example I think in NC they
prohibit “driving to slowly in the passing lane on a highway” so potentially
an officer might pull someone over for going the Actual speed limit in the
passing lane (presuming they weren’t passing).

Anyway I think you might be missing the point where the poster stated:

>”under is suspicious according to your thinking...”

I never said driving under the speed limit is suspicious, and I specifically
said I think this stop was ridiculous...still I don’t think we can say he was
stopped for being black (it’s possible) but more likely due to being a rental
car driving under the speed limit.

~~~
throwaway_jobs
Not sure why facts are downvoted, I am not even for the law, just stating it
exists...

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.newsobserver.com/news/polit...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.newsobserver.com/news/politics-
government/state-politics/article156166714.html)

------
hedora
The DEA’s founding mission was to persecute blacks, such as Billie Holliday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22394789](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22394789)

That was back in the ‘30s, and it didn’t start then.

Edit. Anslinger was the head of the Bureau of Narcotics, which eventually
became the DEA. (At the time, most (all?) famous jazz musicians were black:

> _Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with rebels like Charlie Parker,
> Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk, and—as the journalist Larry Sloman
> recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars. He wrote to all the agents
> he had sent to follow them and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your
> jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will
> have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I
> will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always
> simple: “Shoot first.”

He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good
musicians, but the jazz type.”_

~~~
burfog
You quoted his motivation, right at the end. Lots of people really hate jazz.
Really!

It not racist just because jazz musicians, by random historical accident,
happened to mostly be black.

It is unethical, without any racism, to go looking for excuses to arrest
people who play jazz. The proper response is to leave the music venue. Jazz
isn't awful enough to merit such heavy-handed tactics.

~~~
wetmore
I can't tell if you're being serious.

~~~
cheez
The comment is so well-written. This is pretty much the response I get from
most people about the topic. He's not being serious.

~~~
burfog
It's light-hearted, but not sarcastic.

Seriously, don't assume there is racism under every rock. That is a dismal,
pessimistic, miserable, negative, and hateful way to go through life. Bad
people exist, yes, but it is terrible to presume the worst out of every
unpleasant interaction and terrible to take it as a matter of faith that the
world is all about tormenting any particular group of people.

Cheer up. It's good for you. Appreciate the improvement and opportunity.

~~~
cheez
You say this as a white person, I presume.

------
mindfulhack
This isn't even a matter of security vs. democracy.

This is _political control_ vs. democracy.

How do we do helpful surveillance without destroying everybody's freedom?

Perhaps we can't? Perhaps we just need to focus on response and deterrence
measures to bad things people do?

Are we sacrificing too much by having 'prevention' measures (surveillance) in
place?

~~~
danharaj
Who's "we"?

Before we can even begin, let's dispose of the notion that the government
serves "us".

~~~
IanSanders
Government, people and the country, three completely different non-
intersecting concepts.

There's nothing to begin though unfortunately.

------
rdgthree
It's a bit frustrating that a large portion of articles just refer to "police"
as a singular group. This article is about the Memphis Police Department.

If a ring of doctors were caught illegally selling organs, we wouldn't title
an article "Doctors have been selling organs for years". If bank tellers in a
specific city were taking some money off the top of deposits, we wouldn't
write "Bank tellers have been stealing money for years".

I'm sure there are some national issues with policing in the United States,
but most police organizations are local. It's very unlikely that every local
organization is bad, and even if they were, it would be very unlikely that
every local organization is bad in quite the same way.

I don't think headlines like this help us balance the discourse. There's no
concerted effort by police nationwide to spy on black reporters and activists.
This is about a problem in Memphis, Tennessee. The content of the article
doesn't imply anything beyond that. The title is extremely sensationalized,
and many people will only read that far.

~~~
fiblye
>If a ring of doctors were caught illegally selling organs, we wouldn't title
an article "Doctors have been selling organs for years". If bank tellers in a
specific city were taking some money off the top of deposits, we wouldn't
write "Bank tellers have been stealing money for years".

I see headlines like this daily. They're meant to be eye catching and make it
seem like everyone is being hit by it, then a few lines into the article, they
rapidly cut back on the scope because they've already got your ad money.

But the FBI and police departments around the country have used intimidation
tactics for as long as they've been around. This author is writing about their
personal experience in Memphis. It's possible that other people will come
forward with similar experiences. We've already seen videos of police
arresting/intimidating journalists around the country for no reason these past
two weeks, so it's definitely not a problem confined to Memphis.

~~~
rdgthree
> They're meant to be eye catching and make it seem like everyone is being hit
> by it, then a few lines into the article, they rapidly cut back on the scope
> because they've already got your ad money.

I'm not certain it's fair to compare standard clickbait to a title on
NiemanLab - it seems like you agree with me that it's a not a positive thing.
I think we've definitely seen increasing amounts of this behavior from more
prominent publications, but I wish we wouldn't.

I'm sure other people will come forward with similar experiences, but they
haven't yet. It seems like a dangerous approach to assume the worst until
then.

------
cybernabjo
From COINTELPRO and beyond!

~~~
jacobush
Mike Ruppert

------
aSplash0fDerp
At the very least, for those on their 1st rodeo (who missed the 2008 burp),
they get to see the anatomy of a sh!t sh0w in vivid detail.

The current display has a little bit of everything (pandemic, social unrest,
narcissistic depravity, a few Trillion of deficit and China being China.

Hollywood can do dumpster fires, but this is way out of their league. Its
about the same on bad actors though.

