Through the Prism of Nonviolence

Through the prism of nonviolence

By John Heid

Summer Quarterly 2017

Jamar Clark, 24, was shot and killed Nov. 15, 2015 by Minneapolis police officer Dustin Schwarze while officer Mark Ringgenberg held him on the ground. No criminal or civil charges were brought against the officers. In June his family filed a federal lawsuit against the officers saying the police subjected Clark to unreasonable seizure and excessive force.

The trouble with our state / was not civil disobedience, / which in any case, was hesitant and rare./… / The trouble with our state / — we learned it only afterward / when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead / and civil virtue shone like paint on tin / and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip / — our trouble / the trouble with our state / with our state of soul / our state of siege — / was / Civil / Obedience.

— Excepted from “The Trouble with Our State” by Daniel Berrigan

“I am troubled by the ongoing civil disobedience.”

— Judge Christian Sande, Hennepin County District Court, Minn., March 29, 2017

The verdict in most political trials is usually anticlimactic. The heart of such trials lies in our testimony, and, once in a blue moon, in a prosecutor or judge’s statements. Every now and then a ray of light makes its way through the decorum into the “halls of justice.” This actually happened in Hennepin County District Court in late March when Eddie Bloomer of the Des Moines Catholic Worker and I were tried on charges stemming from an April 2016 Black Lives Matter/Catholic Worker action in Minneapolis.

My defense to the charges of trespass and obstruction of transit was based on my claim of right to stand precisely where I did, in front of a Metro Transit light rail vehicle, in order to raise awareness and create a tension that would pressure Minneapolis police to address their lethal policies and practices toward people of color. Our vigil focused particularly on the murder of an unarmed young man, Jamar Clark, who was shot in the head by a Minneapolis police officer. The investigation into Jamar’s killing was closed earlier in the year by the Minneapolis Police Department without charges against the officer involved.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. carefully laid out the rationale for the practice of creative tension in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I referenced this hallowed letter in laying out my “claim of right” defense. Throughout the three-day trial presiding Judge Christian Sande paid careful attention. Then during pre-sentencing remarks he gave a stern, thought- provoking rebuke to the rationale for my defense. He began by saying: “I am troubled by the analogies that I see—particularly, the Letter from a Birmingham Jail…. Dr. King talks about constructive tension. But again, the constructive tension he was citing in the Letter… had to do with a direct challenge to an unconstitutional law and a public sentiment that supported that unconstitutional law. This (Eddie’s and my cases) was much more amorphous and so it’s much harder for the community and the Court in a situation like this to really do much to address the issues.”

Judge Sande’s comments are a rare courtroom gift. They summarize the mindset of status quo “liberal ideology—for the record. True, we were not protesting the trespass laws or the right-of-way for public transit. What we were protesting was the violation of Jamar Clark’s constitutional right to due process, civil and human rights, and to a fair trial by a jury of his peers. A Twin Cities police officer had robbed him of these rights by playing the roles of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. In a single irretrievable moment in time.

With a bullet. There is no appellate court for Jamar, let alone a trial. This killing was not an isolated incident in the Twin Cities or in our country for that matter. It is a nation-wide matter of fact and an epidemic.

Our vigil followed carefully what Dr. King laid out from his Birmingham jail cell. He wrote: “Its (Birmingham’s) ugly record of police brutality known in every section of this country.” Minneapolis’s track record of death-by-cop is not so widely published, but is well known in the black community. Dr. King was labeled an outside agitator. Yet he had local ties. We, catholic workers were invited to the Twin Cities by local human rights workers including people of color. Regardless, Dr. King reminded us from his cell that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We were victims of a broken promise… and the dark shadow of disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except for that of preparing for direct action.” In Minneapolis the investigation into Jamar Clark’s murder closed without charges. Negotiations had failed.

Judge Sande’s comments articulate the point of view that believes the system can self-correct by means of checks and balances, by petitions, sanctioned rallies, town hall meetings, and the ballot.
These activities do not change the fundamental character of the system. They don’t rock the boat. Activist Philip Berrigan called these “acts of consent. Ones that go along with business as usual.” The difference between consent and dissent lies in whether one believes that the system is fundamentally just—or not. The principle attitude underlying our direct action in Minneapolis was
dissent, challenging the system at its roots, which is what radical means. Dissent recognizes that the system is in need of radical transformation. Dr. King reminds: “My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.” Howard Zinn wrote in his A Peoples’ History of the United States that no social change has occurred in this country without both consent and dissent.

Two more black men were killed by Twin Cities police officers between the time of our vigil and our trial.

The challenge that Judge Sande laid out—however inadvertently or intentionally—is for activists to more clearly and consistently articulate the necessity and efficacy of dissent. Which, simply put, means more creative tension, more court time.

I close where I began with Daniel Berrigan. In the early 1970s, he and exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn shared a series of midnight conversations in Paris. These were printed in The Raft Is Not The Shore. Daniel said: “But nothing is understandable while it’s going on—the sixties are only understandable when they’re over, which makes most people into morticians—ready to bury the dead. But it costs something to say while the killing is going on, ‘No one should die!’ And the killing is going on.”

Over the past 10 years, 100 percent of the people killed by the Minneapolis Police Department have been black or brown. I rest my case. Again.

—John Heid volunteers for the immigrants’ rights groups No More Deaths, and Humane Borders in Ajo, Arizona.

By John Heid

“We recognize the weight that the language of disappearance holds; we use it to call attention to the fact that disappearance is not a natural or inevitable phenomenon but rather a direct consequence of US border-enforcement policies and practices.”

—From “Disappeared: How The US Border Enforcement Agencies are Fueling a Missing Persons Crisis,” by La Coalitión De Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths

The sunbaked skull seemed to complement the volcanic rocks that lie strewn around it. Haunting in its symmetry. Ivory amidst ebony, splayed across the desert floor. The year-round searing heat of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge can do that, bake things into anonymity. Were it not for the vacant eye sockets, we likely would have walked right by these human remains unaware that someone’s life ended there, or nearby. Eerily the eyeless skull faced south.

Joel Smith, Director of Operations for Humane Borders, and I were hiking in the Growler Valley region of the Refuge on our annual maintenance check of loosely-scattered water stations. The region’s austerity is at once beautiful and perilous. The aptly named El Camino del Diablo (Devil’s Highway) cuts a parallel swath across part of the valley. There is little shade anywhere, save the occasional Palo Verde or mesquite tree. Teddy bear cholla, salt and brittlebush, ocotillo and prickly pear cactus provide modest ground cover. The horizon is elusive. One can walk all day and not feel any closer to the mountain just ahead. Time and distance seem like illusions. I have never encountered anyone on my hikes there. Not one.

Joel tried unsuccessfully to summon Border Patrol agents to report the remains. As dusk approached we planted a blue flag on a high pole marking the site for later recovery. Then we returned to our camp miles away.

Prior to the mid 1990s, deaths in the desert were rare and usually attributable to vehicular accidents. Today the Sonoran Desert, 100,000 square miles of Arizona, California and Northern Mexico, particularly its remotest areas, is a veritable death trap. “Exposure” or more frequently “undetermined” is listed as cause of death. In late December 2016, humanitarian aid workers initiated an exploratory effort in the vast reaches of the Refuge. Four sets of skeletal human remains were recovered in the first week, in the Growler Valley. Several more were discovered in the ensuing weeks. The border-hugging refuge is a cemetery of the unknown, and unburied.

Since 1999, the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office has handled more than 2,800 human remains, those who died attempting to migrate through the southern Arizona deserts. Border Patrol reports 6,029 human remains recovered in the same region since the 1990s. Fifty-one bodies have been recorded already this year, with deaths trending between 100 and 250 annually over 10 years. Skeletal remains like those Joel and I encountered are not counted; nor are the deaths of migrants in Border Patrol custody. Estimates of the total number of migrant fatalities vary between three and 10-times the official number of bodies recovered.

This is a dark untold chapter behind this staggering body count, the story of the dead never recovered, the disappeared.

“I’m looking for a disappeared person” was the gist of over 800 phone calls to the Missing Migrant Crisis Line in 2015 alone. A family member is desperately seeking information on the whereabouts of a loved one who has come north from Mexico or Central America—and has not turned up.

The term “disappeared” has generally been associated with people kidnapped by authoritarian regimes and killed without explanation. The United Nation’s definition of “enforced disappearance” now includes state policies which result in persons being disappeared. People don’t just vanish into thin air in the Sonoran Desert. A sophisticated technological network which includes surveillance towers, drones, ground sensors, and cameras work together with an ever-increasing number of Border Patrol agents to create a vast zone of enforcement which pushes people further into formidable, lethal terrain. In effect, the desert becomes a weapon. People do not just disappear. They are disappeared. Their numbers are unknowable, uncountable, and reprehensible—at least in the view of civil society. Even one lost is one too many, let alone thousands. The 1999 “Prevention Through Deterrence” enforcement directive which fueled this catastrophe is not only fatally flawed, it is criminal.

Members of La Coalitión De Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths held a press conference near the border fence in Nogales, Arizona last December to announce the publication of their latest abuse report: “Deadly Apprehension Methods, The Consequences of Chase and Scatter in the Wilderness.” The study spotlights one of the US Border Patrol’s more egregious tactics, “Chase and Scatter.”

“Chase” is defined as “the active period of pursuit of border crossers by US Border Patrol agents during an attempted apprehension.” Four-wheelers, horses, and low-flying helicopters—euphemistically called “dusting”—are used to pursue people. The copter hovers directly over people creating a maelstrom of rocks, branches and dust, which scatters people in the chaos. Then the chase ensues.

In 42 percent of the over 500 interviews conducted by La Coalitión de Derechos Humans, people reported members of their group lost to the wilderness by this tactic; 41 percent reported injuries including broken limbs and lacerations. A few individuals are usually apprehended. The rest are scattered, often unable to regroup, fleeing alone into the wilderness. This tactic has contributed to untold numbers of the disappeared. The policy’s title is “Prevention Through deterrence.” Human remains are what deterrence looks like.

As I’m writing Feb. 14, I’ve been told that four more sets of human remains were recovered in the Growler Valley last week. There is no end in sight.

—John Heid lives and works with the Mariposa Community in Tucson.

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