The Daily GRRR! - January 16th, 2015 - Waves Through Walls: Prison Radio

Welcome, I am your host Dan Kellar and you are listening to The Daily GRRR! Waves Through Walls: Prison Radio, on 100.3fm, CKMS in Waterloo, Ontario. Soundfm.ca on the web, today is Friday January 16th, 2015.

We are broadcasting from the centre of the Haldimand Tract, the occupied Grand River Territory of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations).

The Daily GRRR! is a project of the Grand River Media Collective; and is supported by the Community Radio Fund of Canada and CKMS.

The clip that kicked off the show is from Mumia Abu-Jamal with his piece entitled After Colony, Chaos . Check prisonradio.org for more of Mumia’s podcasts.

Today’s feature is another read from Rolling Stone. This time with an article by Jesse A. Myerson and José Martín called Smashy Smashy: Nine Historical Triumphs to Make You Rethink Property Destruction.

Now we will start with today’s headlines:

The Daily GRRR!
HEADLINES for January 16th, 2015 
1. ’Five Eyes’ Countries To Meet on ‘Counter-Terrorism’
2. RCMP Refusing To Pay Costs of Cell Phone Tracking
3. Ontario “Justice of The Peace” Guilty of Sexual Harassment For Second Time
4. Another Cop and An Air Cadet Commanding Officer Busted in Barrie Child Porn Raid
5. Toronto Police To Stop Racialised Stop-And-Question Carding Policy
6. NYPD’s Broken Windows Need To Be Thrown Out
7. Torture Report Reveals US Prison Officials OK’d CIA Torture Chamber
8. The 2014 Epidemic of Extreme Guard Violence In Florida Jails
9. A Cartography of Incarceration in the United States

1. ’Five Eyes’ Countries To Meet on ‘Counter-Terrorism’

Canada’s Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney told CTV earlier this week "We're going to have a meeting with our Five Eyes allies in London and this is serious stuff.” The meeting, taking place in London on January 22nd, will have “terrorism” on the agenda with a talk on intelligence sharing around the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The activities of Five Eyes is usually kept secret, but Blaney apparently felt the need to feel cool by gloating about Canada’s involvement in the spy network made up of Britain’s white founded former colonies.

2. RCMP Refusing To Pay Costs of Cell Phone Tracking
A months long dispute over fees Rogers wishes to impose on the RCMP drags on as the mounties refuse to cough up the coin for their surveillance operations.

Rogers is asking for compensation for some of the work they do at the request of police and the courts in canada which includes records reproduction, affidavit certification and tracking customer movements through their cell phones.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police’s released a statement saying “It is the view that police services throughout Canada should not be required to bear the costs associated with court-ordered activities.” With their spokesperson adding that based on recent court decisions Rogers has to “bear the reasonable burdens of compliance with such orders as part of its general corporate responsibility to the community.”

The CBC reports that beyond the new fees “the Mounties did pay more than $2-million to telecom firms in 2012-13 in connection with customer information and intercept-related activities”.

3. Ontario “Justice of The Peace” Guilty of Sexual Harassment For Second Time
Errol Massiah, a so-called “Justice of the Peace” in Ontario’s judicial system, has once again been found guilty of sexual harassment of women in the workplace. This is the second time that Messiah has been judged guilty of the misconduct by a Justices of the Peace Review Council, the first time in 2012, which led to a 10 day suspension and an order to attend “gender sensitivity training courses.” His legal bill for his first hearing process was 123,000$ and was paid by the public.

In addition to verbally harassing other court workers with sexually charged sexist language, Massiah would also “leer at female defendants, look them up and down in a sexual manner and give them the “once over” as they walked away.” The decision regarding the complaints read ““His testimony, and his demeanour while testifying, painted a picture of a man who is arrogant and who perceived himself to be appealing to women.”

Massiah will next be before the council in march where his discipline, ranging from a warning, to further training courses, to suspension for up to 30 days or a recommendation to the attorney general that he be removed from office, will be decided

4.Another Cop and An Air Cadet Commanding Officer Busted in Barrie Child Porn Raid
RCMP officer Michael Gavin Thomander and Air Cadet Major Collin Christopher Scott were arrested on distributing child pornography during raids in Barrie last week.

Thomander worked for the RCMP in the GTA but no further details on his job history have been posted, while Scott was relieved of his military duties and suspended from all cadet activities.

The arrest of the cop is another in a growing list of canadian cops caught with child porn.

5. Toronto Police To Stop Racialised Stop-And-Question Carding Policy
In a move that was to remain a secret, Toronto police chief bill blair has suspended the controversial “carding” program which say thousands of racialised youth targeted for questioning and information gathering by the toronto police.

Without giving any explanation for the suspension of the policy, which he has defended as an important and non-racist tool for policy-community interaction, Blair has ordered the practice to stop, Police Association leader “assured the public that while police are changing the way they document their conduct, that conduct itself will not change”

The torontoist report on the issue quotes community acitivst Andray Domise with “We haven’t really been having this conversation about why we have these interactions in the first place... I’m not going to be happy about this until I know that the practice of racial profiling is going to be ended once and for all.”

Blair has continually dismissed the experiences, observations and specific demands of the population under his jurisdiction, who have repeatedly blasted the carding policy as racist.

6. NYPD’s Broken Windows Need To Be Thrown Out
A new study from Justice Quarterly has argued that crime rates in new york dropped after implementation of the Broken Windows theory of social control, not because of the success of the practice, but because of widespread tampering with the data that tracks crime rates.

The study found that before broken windows was implemented a heavy majority of cops had no “personal knowledge of any instance in which crime reports were changed to make crime numbers look better than they were.” Following full implementation of the policy, the majority of cops surveyed answered that they did have such knowledge.

As reported on citylab.com The study’s co-authors Eli Silverman, John Eterno, and Arvind Verma, performed the research on retired cops and allowed the survey subjects to submit anecdotal comments as well. The study quotes one respondent, who retired in 2005, as saying, “A may ‘suggest’ that a burglary complaint was a criminal trespass.” Another wrote, “In some cases, larcenies became ‘lost property’ and values were skewed so they didn’t become grand larcenies. Also complainants were told they must go to the station house or to the precinct of record to report a crime.”

Current New York Mayor Bill d e Blasio has been critical of the racist “excesses of data-driven stop-and-frisk policing” and this study gives good ammunition to those who say reliance on quantitative data driven decision making is prone to corruption pressures.

As reported a few weeks ago on the Daily GRRR! NY Cops have been taking a time-out from ticketing for minor offences in the wake of the killing of two cops in December. As their actions have helped promote the idea that Broken Windows theory is a sham, their police bosses have ordered them back to abusing power, going as far as threatening cops “with transfers, no vacation time and sick time unless they write summonses”.

7. Torture Report Reveals US Prison Officials OK’d CIA Torture Chamber
The ACLU has been on a freedom of information act blitz following the revelations from the executive summary of the classified senate torture report that showed how the federa l bureau of prisons greenlighted a CIA prison in Afghanistan which has been described as a dungeon.

The prison, known as the Salt Pit, was run by the CIA and used to torture detainees through extreme isolation and stripdown shacklings among other techniques. The ACLU reports that “After the inspection, the BOP team commented that they were "WOW'ed" and had "never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived."”

Additionally “In a recent review of U.S. compliance with the Convention Against Torture, for example, the United Nations simultaneously condemned both the U.S.'s failure to hold anyone responsible for CIA torture and the widespread use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.” The BOP is responsible for federal prisons in the states and is set to open their newest SuperMax jail in Illinois: 1600 cell prison “devoted entirely to solitary confinement.”

8. The 2014 Epidemic of Extreme Guard Violence In Florida Jails
The federal department of justice is stepping in to investigate hundreds of deaths in Florida prisons over the past years after the state “recorded at least 346 deaths inside of their prison system , an all-time high in spite of the fact that its overall prison population has hovered around 100,000 people for the five previous years.”

The Daily Kos reports at least 32 guards have been fired in the past months, there is a trail of violence stretching far beyond those penalised.

9. A Cartography of Incarceration in the United States
HyperAllergic.com has covered the work of data artist Josh Begley who used google map images to create a “cartograpy of incarceration” - satelite picutres of more that 4900 incarceration and detention sites across the united states.

The work is from a project called Prison Map which works “to give the architecture of the growing prison population a tangibility and scale.”

The Article concludes” Like Tings Chak, whose Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detentionvisualizes the unseen migrant detention centers of Canada, Begley is interested in the cartography of this clandestine world. As he asks on Prison Map: “What does it mean to have 5,000 or 6,000 people locked up in the same place? What do these carceral spaces look like? How do they transform (or get transformed by) the landscape around them?” The aerial photographs reveal their stern structures as a growing, sequestered sprawl against the landscape.

Thats all for the headlines, lets take a little
Spoken Word Breakhere is Linda Ereikat with KRAPITILISM

And we are back, you just heard em>Linda Ereikat with KRAPITILISM.

You are listening to Waves Through Walls edition of The Daily GRRR! Today is January 16th, 2015, my name is Dan Kellar and we are now moving into the feature portion of our broadcast.

Today’s feature is another read from Rolling Stone. This time with an article by Jesse A. Myerson and José Martín called Smashy Smashy: Nine Historical Triumphs to Make You Rethink Property Destruction. Flag-burning and property destruction in Ferguson are part of a long, proud history

That was a read of Jesse A. Myerson and José Martín’s Rolling Stone article called Smashy Smashy: Nine Historical Triumphs to Make You Rethink Property Destruction.

This has been the The Daily GRRR! for January 16th, 2015. We are on weekdays from 9-10am on 100.3fm CKMS in Waterloo region, and http://soundfm.ca on the web. Check out all our past shows and other Grand River Media Collective work on our webpage http://grandrivermc.ca

The Daily GRRR! is supported by the Community Radio Fund of Canada and CKMS.

Stay tuned in for more Grand River Radical Radio after we close the podcast.

Thanks for Listening.