During the middle of my interview with Spencer McNaughton of Uncloseted Media, I was asked to denounce murder. I felt a bit ambushed by the question – why should I or anyone need to denounce murder? I gave a simple answer in the moment. Of course I denounce murder! Murder’s not my style, I said, I’m a radical pacifist. I didn’t say as much, but even killing a spider makes me feel grief.
So why am I still thinking about this question? In part because “What is a murder?” turned out to be an important legal question in our trial, one which was answered by trial judge Mark Pittman by fiat, when the government filed a motion requesting he forbade my codefendant Champagne Song from using the arguments of self-defense, defense of another, or even the mention of either legal argument. On what basis?
I will preface my account of the shooting by saying I was not present when the violence occurred. I can only base my account on footage and testimony I saw at the trial, and the statements and questions of lawyers and defendants. If my understanding of events is erroneous, forgive me.
When Lt. Gross arrived at Prairieland Detention Center, he was following up on a 911 call, advised that someone might be trying to break in. Upon getting out of the car, he saw graffiti sprayed on a guard shack and a toppled stop sign. He ordered a fleeing individual, clad in black, to stop—probably Nathan Baumann. He immediately pulled his service weapon, a handgun, and pointed it in their direction, his muzzle light illuminating their back. Let me say that again. Seconds after arriving at the scene, before he ever saw a weapon, Lt. Gross pointed a loaded gun at the back of a fleeing person. Multiple police officers testified at trial that they think it is okay to do so – “depending on the circumstances,” they were sure to qualify. Judge Pittman agreed. He believes Mr. Gross was in the right, that this use of force was objectively reasonable, and that therefore no person could claim self-defense or defense of another in responding to this force with force.
What happened from the shooter’s perspective is not entirely clear. The shooting was never reconstructed, a glaring procedural error I’m told should prove reversible on appeal because of its propensity to yield exculpatory evidence. As Champagne’s lawyer Philip Hayes argued, the first shots fired visibly strike the earth, sending up puffs of dirt that prove the rifle could not have been pointed at Gross. The bullet police say was caught by Gross’ jacket showed signs of having slowed before striking, evidence that it may have ricocheted. According to the opinion of rifle enthusiasts I know and love, a direct hit from that gun, at that range, in that part of the body ought to predictably kill outright. And if Champagne, a former marine reservist, had wanted to kill Gross, or as many federal law enforcement professionals as she could, as the government argued, evidence shows she had ample opportunity to do so competently.
Gross didn’t shoot Baumann (who I will suppose was the fleeing protestor), but what if we had?
At sentencing, Champagne herself said she saw Gross stop pursuit and lean forward into his gun to brace for recoil, that she “knew what was about to happen.” If Gross had shot and, Heaven forbid, killed Baumann, would he have been treated as a murderer? Almost certainly not. Cases where police are held accountable for improper uses of force are vanishingly rare. Johnson County is one of the most conservative counties in one of the most conservative states, under one of the most conservative presidencies in decades; and support for the police, support which is unfortunately often uncritical, is a basic tenet of American Conservatism. I don’t need to fish for examples – Renée Good, Alex Pretti. It seems like ICE kills someone new every week, and top officials in the administration are often quick to call the deceased domestic terrorists on the flimsiest of pretenses. If police kill someone, the government almost always calls it self-defense. It is almost impossible to successfully claim self-defense if someone kills a police officer.
There is a particular narrative behind this. It usually goes a little something like this: There are good and evil forces in the human heart, and all people are tempted sometimes to do evil, particularly certain malefactors who habitually do evil deeds. Though violence is itself an evil, unless people feared violent retribution, malefactors would dominate their gentle neighbors, the good would give in to evil inclination, and society would be ruled by the most power hungry and corrupt. It is for this reason we have created the law, and established authorities to enforce it. It is the duty of this protected class to threaten and kill, the story goes, so that others might not.
And reader, you have plenty of reasons to believe this story! American pop culture is flooded up to the crown of the forehead with copaganda—movies, TV shows, and other media that glorify and valorize the Police. Even in jail, I can’t get away from it. There is often a TV set to a channel playing some show with a name like “Cops Reloaded” or “Police Patrol,” as protagonist cops narrate the events portrayed by their body cam footage. My cellmates are people who might lose years or decades of their lives because of the justice system, and sometimes even they can be convinced to root for its agents. How can this be? It is the glamour of power—a viral meme that can convince even the captive to worship their captor.
I first heard the counter-narrative from Black siblings in the liberation struggle, one that says the American justice system preserved the institution of slavery in prisons after Reconstruction, that policing practices descend from those of antebellum slave catchers. A story that says, all throughout the racial apartheid known as Jim Crow, police and prosecutors stood by and watched lynchings in front of court houses—a story that says they often participated in, and enforced, that very apartheid. It is a story that tells me that the faces of police and even judges were often behind the white hoods of the KKK, and that even today, police foster a culture of white supremacy in police departments. It is a story that tells me police protect fascists when they bring their violent rhetoric into the hearts of American cities where the people they hate live, and that the same police arrest community members who show up to resist that violence. It is a story that tells me that when peaceful protests turn violent, it is the police who are the usual suspects in instigating that violence so they have an excuse to disperse the protests and arrest the leaders.
None of the people who went to trial with me was Black, of course, but I want to take this opportunity to put the spotlight on anti-Black racism. Police can end Black lives in our country with near impunity. Our case is the Trump Administration’s setpiece in their struggle to equate left-wing community self-defense with right-wing stochastic terror, to muddy the waters by calling it all political violence; but that struggle started during the George Floyd Rebellions, and it is fundamentally about the most protected form of political violence in the country, police violence against Black people. While the Trump Administration is loudest about immigrants and trans people for now, the root of this is in anti-Blackness, and the bias of people in favor of the police narrative and against the narrative of the Black-led liberation struggle that counters it.
The story of the authorities can only explain the history of America’s liberation struggle by co-opting its gentler voices, and casting its more radical leaders as those special malefactors it loves to blame; but don’t forget that in his day, MLK was called the “most dangerous negro” in the country for his rhetoric about Vietnam, and that he called riot the language of the unheard. He was considered one of those malefactors in his day. The story of the authorities has to resort to defamation and demonization, to stirring up hatred and fear by hallucinating terrorist conspiracies, and fantasizing about protest as a mob of violent undesirables stirred up by these shadowy cabals of their imagination. MLK would be called a terrorist today.
But the second story has a more realistic explanation. American urban rebellions—riots—occur because of conditions of concentrated poverty, facilitated by inequality in housing, healthcare, and policing—that is to say, by segregation, which never went away. And this story offers a solution: desegregation, and defunding the police by devolving their secondary functions to social workers, only employing police in the most violent situations. This is not even a radical solution—it was first recommended by a bipartisan committee of lawmakers and interested business leaders called the Kerner Commission, convened in the 1960s. Their report was shelved, and arch-conservatives like Nixon and Reagan doubled down on the police story of so-called “Law and Order”—defunding welfare, and beginning a regime of mass incarceration as well as the War on Drugs.
Today, the United States incarcerates more people, and a greater percentage of its people, than almost any other country. If you don’t at least support defunding the police, you are behind the times, and against the evidence—you ought to at least support that. If you do, though, dare to dream bigger with me for a moment. If our police forces and prisons are relics of slavery, then abolishing them, finding another way, isn’t foolish idealism; it’s what we must do to abolish slavery.
Slavery survived the Confederacy, it survived Jim Crow, and it survives today. We must put it to death today! We must get rid of this rotten peg in our house today. No one will be free until the old ways are gone forever. No one is free until everyone is free. But you can’t just get rid of a rotten old peg, you have to push it out with a new one. Ask yourself, what is that fresh peg? How would our society have to change if we wanted to end slavery for real today? Who would pay for it? Who should have to? How could we go beyond the Kerner Commissions recommendations? I am a radical pacifist because I believe that violence always has a material cause, that it doesn’t come from nowhere, that it arises through dependent origination, and that if you remove the conditions that lead to it, the violence disappears.
In our society, most violence, by my reckoning, comes from the condition of inequality—that some people have power over others that is not reciprocal. Your landlord has power over you that you don’t have over them. They can evict you, or repossess your home. Your boss has power over you that you don’t have over them. He can fire you. In both cases, if you are like most people, you face the threat of homelessness. For many folks of European descent, white and otherwise, our ancestors lived on land they held in common before the government took it away to sell to rich householders and displaced them. The ancestors of indigenous folks lived on land they held in common before the government took it away and displaced them to give it to white settlers, and mostly to the rich. Black Americans are mostly the descendants of people violently displaced from their land too to work as unfree laborers. The question of shelter and home, too, is a root of violence, and one of the central issues facing us today, as mega corporations gamble on houses, and everyday people pay the price when they lose. And prison is a housing solution as much as it is a labor solution. My cell is my house. For most of the last year, I laid my head in the same room where I used the toilet.
Even now, industrial wars of extermination, and the civil wars that are the legacy of colonialism displace millions of refugees who flee to the first world from the third to face the same defamation and dehumanization when they arrive that are the favorites of those seeking to divide and conquer Earth’s people, and the violence of the police state. The War on Terror, like the War on Drugs, has been going on my whole life. As we speak, the United States props up a genocidal colonialist settler state in an unprovoked war, waged, like the violence against so-called domestic terrorists, on the flimsiest of pretenses. The President of the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in war, immediately upon its completion, says that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon, because they’d immediately use it in a war.
I am also a radical pacifist because I am a radical lover. Justice, to me, is about love. It is about wanting for all people what I want for my partners – shelter, dignity at work, freedom from gratuitous violence. It is never about hate or revenge. Justice cannot go back in time and undo the consequences of the past – retaliation cannot to teach anyone a lesson or make anyone pay. Punishment has never shown anyone a better way, and pain has never compensated anyone for their own loss. Above Pittman’s seat in Fort Worth, an engraving boasts that Reason is the whole life of the Common Law, nay the Common Law is nothing but reason. Belief, like justice, is also about love as much as it is about reason. The very word comes from the archaic “Lief,” meaning to love. To believe is to belove, to treat a person as worth listening to. It is an arational, pre-rational choice.
When two stories conflict, we have to make choices about which one we believe. Before we ever got to the courtroom, the jury made choices about what stories they believe, about whether they love and listen to the voices of the black-led liberation movement, about whether they love the unheard enough to listen to their language, and do the work to understand it. And in the courtroom and jury room, they made their decisions based not only on the facts, not on what they believed, but who they believed. Our trial was a battle between two stories about violence, about murder – two stories before trial, two stories during trial. Which story do you believe? Who do you believe? Who murders?
Abolish Slavery and Genocide
Peace and Love on Earth Forever
Autumn Hill, aka Lady Hell