NLG CHICAGO

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Statement Opposing SB 2562 – Increased Police Surveillance by Drone

We the undersigned organizations stand together in opposition to SB 2562. This bill would allow police to use drones equipped with facial recognition capabilities to spy on large public gatherings across the state of Illinois.

Increased surveillance of demonstrations and other public gatherings will make us all less safe because it intimidates and deters people from exercising their First Amendment right to protest, a necessary tool for holding elected officials accountable–especially in the age of Trump. If we want to build a more equitable world, the Illinois legislature must encourage political engagement, not scare our fellow Illinoisans away from its most elemental form: public gathering.

We are greatly  troubled by the dramatic expansion of surveillance powers this bill would make available to Illinois law enforcement. The Chicago Police Department’s long history of violating the rights of protesters is well known and includes unlawful surveillance and targeted abuse of people working to make this a more just city for our most marginalized residents. Chicago police violence as exemplified by the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in 1969 continues today. We need only look at the recent attempts by the Chicago police to interfere with protected First Amendment activity by the #BlackLivesMatter to be convinced that the Chicago police are not to be trusted with a legal tool that will allow them to invade personal privacy and impede political activity from the skies.  

We strongly encourage elected officials to oppose SB 2562 and the widespread use of surveillance technology by police.

Signed,

Current Status of SB 2562

On May 2nd, the Illinois Senate approved SB 2562. The bill passed out of committee in the House on May 17th. SB 2562 must now be presented three times in the House before it can be put up for a vote.

How Did We Get Here:

Currently, Illinois law only allows police to use drones if they have obtained a warrant, suspect a high risk of loss of life, are searching for a missing person, or are taking crime scene photos. citizens of Illinois are currently protected by the Biometric Information Privacy Act which prohibits most kind of facial recognition technology being applied to them, although these protections do not apply to police departments.

SB 2562 would dramatically increase the ability of law enforcement to surveil public gatherings and public gatherings. The bills were introduced in early 2018 by two legislators who are extremely-friendly to Rahm Emanuel’s policy agendas and both currently in committee. The ACLU of Illinois went as far as accusing Rahm Emanuel and his administration as secretly being behind the bill. The threshold for deploying drones could be very low: a “large-scale public event” of over 100 people or “if the United States Secretary of Homeland Security determines that credible intelligence indicates that there is that risk”.

Racial Bias and Facial Recognition Technology:

Facial Recognition is automated process by which computer algorithms compare unknown faces to a known database of previously collected images such as mug shots or driver license photos. First, a large data set of images must be collected and then an unknown image will be classified to return the probability of a match against a known image. It is estimated that the FBI’s FACE system has access to forty-three million faces from driver licence photos from the Illinois Secretary of State. An import assumptions of the training data is the faces are usually in well-controlled environment, with a face looking directly at a camera and with good lighting.  

According to a report by the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, the use of facial recognition technology has several racial biases. After an analysis of the top three algorithms used by facial recognition “all three of the algorithms were 5 to 10% less accurate on African Americans than Caucasians”. There was also a “a similar decline surfaced for females as compared to males and younger subjects as compared to older subjects”. Furthermore, since facial recognition technology only returns the probability of a match and other similar faces, a person can come into contact with law enforcement for the actions of other individuals. This issue is exacerbated due to the racial discrepancy of interactions between minorities and law enforcement which leaks to an over-inclusion of minorities in facial recognition datasets.

A Troubling Trend

The Chicago Police have abused surveillance technology in recent history. Most recently, the department came under scrutiny for their use of Stingrays. Multiple lawsuits have challenged the lack of oversight and the use of Stingray technology to collect data from the phones of thousands of unsuspecting individuals attending protests. After it was discovered that Chicago Police were using Stingrays with minimal legal protections, the legislature passed a strong warrant requirement bill in 2016. Now, some members of the legislature are pushing to give police more access to surveillance technology despite the fact that state law already allows law enforcement use of drones in a genuine security crisis.

In a 2012 Senate hearing, Senator Al Franken, then Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, confronted the FBI about an agency PowerPoint presentation showing how face recognition could be used to identify people attending the 2008 presidential campaign rallies for then-senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.150 In 2015, the FBI admitted that it conducted surveillance flights over Ferguson and Baltimore during protests of police use of force. The Department of Homeland Security has monitored Black Lives Matter protests. And footage of Chris Wilson’s protest shows an officer videotaping the event.

In Hassan v. City of New York, a 2015 case challenging the NYPD’s pervasive video, photographic, and undercover surveillance of Muslim Americans following 9/11,161 the Third Circuit agreed with the plaintiffs—the victims of surveillance—that the manner by which the program was administered—specifically targeting a group of people for their beliefs and religious affiliations—may have caused them “direct, ongoing, and immediate harm.” Hassan v. City of New York, 804 F.3d 277, 292 (3d Cir. 2015).

Surveillance Doesn’t Mean Accountability

While some argue that such technology can be used to hold police accountable, the proliferation of body cameras has shown the fallacy of this position. Police body cameras now allow us to watch the ongoing abuse of power in viral social media videos, yet have little impact on the consequences for police officers involved. In Washington DC, The Lab @ DC conducted a study on the Metropolitan Police Department’s use of Body Worn Cameras. That extensive study found that “body-worn cameras had no statistically significant effects on any of the measured outcomes.”

This was displayed quite clearly in the body camera footage of the Chicago Police murder of Paul O’Neal in July 2016. The fact that the officers were wearing body cams didn’t stop them from shooting 18-year-old O’Neal in the back or from high-fiving each other as he bled to death in a Southside backyard. More often than not, surveillance technology is used to criminalize the victims of police violence, not to hold the perpetrators of state violence accountable. Like body cams, new cameras on drones will be trained on civilians and not on the police themselves.

What You Can Do

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We Remember Debra Evenson – Celebrating 80 Years of Law for the People

Debra Evenson leafleting in Daley Plaza for women’s rights

A past president of the Guild, law professor, and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the legal system and institutions of Cuba, Debra Evenson represented the finest tradition of a People’s lawyer.

Debra was an American legal expert on Cuba, a practicing lawyer, and an educator. She was president of the National Lawyers Guild from 1988 until 1991. During the McCarthy era, Guild membership dwindled to a few hundred. She was part of the generation of young lawyers and law students that revived it in the late 60s and early 70s, combining political passion to combat injustice and exploitation with outstanding legal skills.

Debra also was a founding board member of the Sugar Law Center and remained on the Board until her death. Her work as a board member was instrumental in helping the Sugar Law Center defend the rights of working people in plant closing cases and the Center’s other important work.

She left DePaul University in 1992, and joined the New York City law firm Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman. With the firm, Evenson represented the Cuban government, supporting Cuban sovereignty. She was also licensed to practice law in Cuba, where she worked with high government officials and civilians. From 1996-2001, Evenson was president of the Latin American Institute for Alternative Legal Services (ILSA) headquartered in Bogota, Columbia. During her tenure as president, ILSA organized important conferences related to legal services and human rights in Latin America, Asia and Africa and expanded its collaboration with human rights lawyers in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean.

Debra died in Chicago on August 17, 2011, continuing to teach us through her grace and resilience confronting cancer. She was awarded the Kinoy Award for that year. She will be deeply missed.

With your help, we can build the next generation of people’s lawyers. For our 80th Anniversary, show your support for the Guild by buying a ticket!

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NLG Chi Proud to Present Kinoy Award to Bernardine Dohrn

This year the National Lawyers Guild is honoring Bernardine Dohrn for the Kinoy Award at our Annual Celebration. We are grateful for her steadfast and decades long commitment to the struggle for justice and global equality and her tireless mentorship of the next generation of people’s lawyers.

 
 
 

Here Bernardine Dohrn tells us of her work with the Guild, and shares a chapter from her book, Race Course: Against White Supremacy.
I moved to New York City to work as the first NLG law student organizer right out of law school, in June 1967.  We argued that law students and lawyers could and should be part of the Movement, as well as legal defenders of the movements: struggles against the imperialist war against Vietnam, against the draft and military injustice, in support of the Black Liberation movement including political prisoners, SNCC and the Black Panther Party.  We mobilized legal support for mass arrests at the Pentagon, demonstrations against Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, GI’s returning their medals, the demands of Black Student Unions for African American history, culture, faculty and open enrollment, for an end to secret university war-releated research and their occupation of neighboring Black communities. We urged support for living wages for university staff and employees, and the rights of Black workers in DRUM. As I travelled to law schools across the country, law students eagerly establish NLG chapters to focus their work, and the NLG took root among radical lawyers and flourished.

 

After a decade as a federal fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list I was subpoenaed and called before a federal grand jury investigating the Brinks robbery in Manhattan in 1982.  Two of the persons charged in the Brinks robbery were Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert.  Due to their imprisonment, their 14 month-old son, Chesa Boudin joined our family as our third son, and always visited and maintained his close relationships with his biological parents, Kathy and David.   The narrative below tells that story.

 

by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Third World Press, 2009
Chapter: The Modern Slave Ship, by Bernardine Dohrn

 
 

“I did time in the federal correction center while the {3} children were young, and they visited me separately each week.  With Zayd, who was five, I did elaborate homemade crossword puzzles, we read books, and then talked about why the other women in the visiting room were incarcerated, and who was visiting them.  He jumped into my arms to tell me about the long wait downstairs, the searches, and the ways in which guards shouted to waiting families about dress codes and contraband.  He sat on my lap for the whole visit, and when he left with the comforting friend who always brought him, he would wave to me from across the street until I flashed the lights in my cell as a final goodbye.

 

Visits from two-year-old Malik were excruciating but deeply satisfying.  He almost always went directly to sleep in my arms, so I could breathe in his toddler smell and nuzzle his cheeks and neck, examine his hands with impunity.  Although he was verbal and articulate, able to say that his suddenly new brother Chesa “can’t have my mommy,” he chose silence during our visits.  Chesa, already visiting his biological parents in prison as a one year old, visited me less often.

 

The Metropolitan Correctional Center is at the edge of Chinatown and across from the New York City Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan.  From certain cells, we could see the Brooklyn Bridge.  Only one floor of the tall, narrow pre-trial building housed women: we were some eighty women in a prison of more than a thousand men.  That made every venture away from our unit an unpredictable voyage: entry into a packed elevator of male prisoners and guards; processing in the lawyers’ visiting area with shouting male voices vying to hear each other; unexpected conversations in line waiting to see a medic.  Because none of us were yet convicted, we did not endure the routine strip searches and internal examination of bodily cavities that characterize women’s prisons, nor were we routinely subjected to sexualized violence.

 

The women on our unit were African American if they lived in New York City, or Latinas direct from Colombia or Mexico who spoke only Spanish.  The women from Latin America had seen only Kennedy Airport and the MCC in North America; they cried and said rosaries and were humorously willing to try to teach this ignorant gringa Spanish.  All were charged with  carrying drugs into the U.S. as “mules”; none were major or even regular drug dealers but each had taken one crazy, terrible risk, in the hopes of getting money to help their children have better lives.  The women were being prosecuted primarily to “flip” them, to give evidence against male higher-ups.  There was no word then for globalization but these women were an advanced wave of the so-called war on drugs and the escalating incarceration and criminalization of women.  At the current rates of incarcerating women, there will be more women in prison in 2010 than there were all prisoners in the U.S. in 1970.  Such is the taken-for-granted of what passes for crime control.

 

My closest friend was Cheryl, ten years older and able to beat me regularly at Scrabble.  Cheryl spent a good part of the day on the pay phone; she was openly proud that her craft (hotel boosting, or robbing hotel rooms) required wit and never violence.  Cheryl taught me to count to ten slowly whenever it appeared that a fight was jumping off between women prisoners, and she schooled me in the fact that women were likely to shout, to get in each other’s faces, but that if a punch had not been thrown by the number ten, it would stay verbal.  In fact, the women on the unit were generous and kind to one another, organizing efficiently to nurse a new prisoner who was detoxifying and miserably sick by sitting with her in shifts, sponging her face, offering clean sheets.  They knew how to get through holidays together.  We shared books and cosmetics.  We plotted how to get out along with the (all male) guards if there were a fire in the building.  Some were geniuses at sewing and making the miserable navy blue uniforms look tight.

 

My term in prison was indeterminate and bizarre.  I was jailed for refusing to obey the order of a judge to cooperate with a federal grand jury by giving samples of my handwriting.  I was held in civil contempt of court, although my lawyer and I argue that the government was in possession of rooms filled with my handwriting, since they had seized files and letters from my apartments during COINTELPRO, a secret and illegal FBI program), and I had subsequently been a federal fugitive for eleven years.  It was anguishing to be separated from our young children, but I saw resistance as a question of principle.  During our years outside the law, scores of people refused to cooperate with grand jury witch hunt, organized to try to find members of the Weather Underground.  The government grand jury strategy failed because ordinary people, innocent people, refused to cooperate.  I could not do differently, even in different circumstances.

 

The dilemma was that there is no sentence when you are held in contempt.  The idea of the prosecutor is to coerce your testimony, a relic from the British Star Chamber proceedings.  So we (there were fifteen women who defied the grand jury, all of us at MCC) were ordered to be held until we cooperated, or until the U.S. attorney decided to indict us, or until their interest moved on to other matters.  I had been back in ordinary life, above ground, for just a year, working as a waiter, then at a law firm, being a mom of three boys, and thinking about how to reinvent myself as an activist at the age of forty.  Bill visited me every single day, parented three small children, and tried to cope.

 

As it turned out, I served just seven months.  I was released on a motion that argued that since I would never cooperate, because I was willful and stubborn, the contempt sentence had become “punishment” instead of “coercion”.  The other grand jury women were similarly released, or were charged in huge RICO conspiracy indictments.  I thought I would never forget my prison number, never want to read another murder mystery, or do yoga again.  But back with my family, we began the prison visits with Kathy and David that would characterize the next twenty years.”
 

The National Lawyers Guild is proud to be presenting the Kinoy Award to Bernardine Dohrn. For our 80th Anniversary, show your support for the Guild by buying a ticket!

 

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NLG Chi Proud to Present NextGen Award to #ExpandSanctuary Campaign

The #ExpandSanctuary Campaign is the joint venture of Mijente, BYP100, and OCAD. These three Black, Latinx, and migrant organizations came together in the wake of Donald Trump’s attack on “sanctuary” cities to push Chicago to stand in defiance of the President, defend the constitution, and promote policies that offer real safety to all residents. Their campaign is focused on four major goals:

  • The decriminalization and alternative processing of crimes of survival, DUIs disproportionately policed in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, incidents at schools, drug related offenses, and more.
  • Elimination of the flawed gang database.
  • Reallocation of city resources from law enforcement to community institutions that provide long-term safety such as schools, clinics, and hospitals.
  • Amendments to the Welcoming City ordinance to prevent collusion with federal deportation agents.

For another overview of the #ExpandSanctuary Campaign, you can watch this video with Tania Unzueta, the Legal and Policy Director for Mijente; and Janaé Bonsu, National Public Policy Chair of BYP100.

Expand Sanctuary from Sensitive Visuals on Vimeo.

Mijente is a new hub for social justice organizing both online and on the ground. They are meant to be the political home for Latinx and Chicanx people, helping develop the next generation of leadership for social change. The folks behind Mijente understand that in order to dismantle systems of oppression, Latinx leaders, advocates, organizers, cultural workers, media-makers, writers and theorists must come together to make the culture and policy changes their community needs.

Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) is a community based organization in Illinois that organizes against unfair and inhumane immigration enforcement practices that impact immigrant communities. We fight case by case, person by person, at the same time that we work to change the implementation and enforcement practices that criminalize our community.

BYP100 is an activist member-based organization of Black 18-35 year olds, dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. They do this by building a collective focused on transformative leadership development, direct action organizing, advocacy and education using a Black queer feminist lens. Their work includes training young black activists in organizing and tactics, mobilizing young black leaders on issues of dismantling the prison industrial complex and securing LGBT and women’s rights, and running campaigns against the criminalization of Black youth, racial profiling, and police brutality.

The #ExpandSanctuary Campaign was launched in Chicago in a press conference on January 26, in which Mijente, OCAD and BYP100 called on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to do more to committing to keeping Chicago a sanctuary city.

Since then, the campaign has also highlighted the effects of the gang database on Black and Brown residents of Chicago. In the case of Luis Vicente Pedrote-Salinas, his lawyers say he is not and never has been a gang member, but was falsely labeled as one after being arrested six years ago for allegedly having an unopened can of beer in his truck. Pedrote would qualify for DACA were he not erroneously listed in the database. To read more on the case, check out:

Chicago Sun Times: Unopened beer can, gang database errors fuel deportation case

Chicago Tribune: Immigrant sues Chicago, police for placing his name in gang database

On October 10, the #ExpandSanctuary Campaign, held an action against the proposed $95 million police academy by blocking a section of Randolph Street with three life-size representations of statistics that show how Chicago and Mayor Emanuel have failed to live up to the claim of being a “Sanctuary” city.

A bar graph that shows that for every dollar that the City of Chicago has allocated to the Police Department for 2017, there are 12 cents for the Department of Planning and Development, 2 cents for the Department of Public Health and 5 cents for the Department of Family and Support Services. To put this in context, the City of Chicago spends close to 40% of its budget on the Policing its residents, in addition to the $52 million that was paid by taxpayers for police misconduct in fees and fines in 2016.

A series of silhouettes that show that when a police officer designates someone as a potential gang member — without any due process or judicial review, as currently happens in Chicago — the effects can include incarceration, unemployment, and in the case of immigrants, could mean deportation. An initial analysis of the CPD Strategic Subject List (SSL) reads that of those marked as “gang affiliated” 95% are Black or Latinx, and 97% are men.

A series of coffins and bodies to represent that 88% of the people hit or killed by the Chicago police between 2008 and 2015 are Black or brown.

The National Lawyers Guild is proud to be presenting the NextGen award to the #ExpandSanctuary campaign. Mijente, BYP100, and OCAD represent some of the most innovative and outstanding organizing in Chicago.

For our 80th Anniversary, show your support for the Guild by buying a ticket!

 

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We Remember Arthur Kinoy – Celebrating 80 Years of Law for the People

Arthur Kinoy (center)

Arthur Kinoy (September 20, 1920 – September 19, 2003), was an American attorney and progressive civil rights leader. He served as a professor of law at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark from 1964 to 1991.

Kinoy took an active part in the defense of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg from 1951, who were convicted of atomic espionage. During the 1950s and 1960s, Kinoy represented persons called to hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; in 1966 he was officially removed from a hearing by Senator Eastland, its chair, and subsequently convicted of disorderly conduct. In 1968, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the conviction. In 1964, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement activities in the South to end disenfranchisement and segregation, he participated in a conference sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild’s Committee for Legal Assistance in the South. It briefed attorneys on legal problems confronting civil rights demonstrators in Mississippi, where state and local governments resisted change. He and his partner, William Kunstler, were two of the most prominent attorneys during the 1960s to handle civil rights cases in the South.

Mr. Kinoy was involved in a number of landmark legal verdicts. In 1965, he successfully argued the case of Dombrowski v. Pfister before the Supreme Court, which empowered federal district court judges to stop enforcement of laws that had ‘a chilling effect’ on free speech. In a subsequent case, Dombrowski v. Senator Eastland, he established that the Counsel of the Senate Internal Security Committee was not immune from suits for violations of citizens’ civil rights. In 1972, the Supreme Court upheld his contention that President Richard M. Nixon had no ‘inherent power’ to wiretap domestic political organizations.

You can also watch an excellent interview of Kinoy, hosted by the Film Archive.

We honor and remember Arthur Kinoy for his visionary leadership. His stalwart defense of free speech, and his commitment to the rights of oppressed people, is an inspiration to all of us in the Guild. We thank him for passing on the torch to a whole new generation of people’s lawyers during his years as a professor.

With your help, we can build the next generation of people’s lawyers. For our 80th Anniversary, show your support for the Guild by buying a ticket and becoming a sponsor!

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NLG Lawyers Fight Against the Prison Industrial Complex for Over 46 Years

Jeff Haas Speaking at Attica Rally Cook County Jail 1971

After returning from the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising in upstate New York, Jeff Haas spoke at a rally at the Cook County Jail to pass on the stories of the men inside. Their message was a call to prisoners to stand up against brutality and inhumane conditions, and for people on the outside to support their struggle.

You can read an article about the rally published at the time by the Notre Dame & St. Mary’s Observer.

PLO lawyers took the lead in the legal representation of the Attica prisoners. Following the suppression of the uprising and the killing by law enforcement of 39 guards and prisoners, the PLO lawyers were some of the first outsiders to enter the prison. They worked on several cases in which prisoners sought relief from maltreatment and abuse by guards following the riot. PLO lawyers joined with other attorneys to file a civil case for damages on behalf of the prisoners and against the state correctional system. This case continued for years, and eventually resulted in a settlement for the prisoners of $12 million.

On October 14th, last year, Loyola NLG, the Uptown People’s Law Center, and People’s Law Office hosted a panel/discussion about Attica and the prison strike of Summer 2016.

https://nlgchicago.org/blog/loyola-nlg-the-attica-prison-rebellion-its-legacy-and-the-prison-struggle-today/

For our 80th Anniversary, show your support for the Guild by buying a ticket and becoming a sponsor!

 

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