She Couldn’t Afford Her Rent And Had Nowhere To Turn. That’s When She Joined A Tenant Union.

“I don’t know how people do it alone without some sort of community backing.”

Lam Thuy VoBuzzFeed News Reporter


Posted on October 21, 2020

Rene Morrison courtesy of SMC Tenants Council


The documents arrived paper-clipped and folded in Tiana McGuire’s mailbox in early September. She owed three months’ worth in rent, $3,050, it said on the packet of pages that her landlord, Sullivan Management Company (SMC), had shoved into her and her neighbors’ mailboxes in their apartment building in Oakland.

“Pay rent in 15 days or quit,” the first page read.

This was the notice McGuire had dreaded ever since she stopped paying rent in June. Even though she knew evictions had been suspended in Oakland since late March, the letter made it clear: She had two weeks to pay the rent she owed or she had to vacate her home of the last seven years.


She felt her stomach drop to her knees when she read the notice.

“With the loss of work and facing uncertainty at every angle,” McGuire said, she was at the end of her resiliency. She didn’t know where she’d live if she were kicked out. The long-term Bay Area resident had seen her chosen home, Oakland, gentrify and become unaffordable for her, a 40-year-old service worker. If she had to leave this apartment, she’d have to leave the region altogether.

“It felt like shit when it happened,” said McGuire, whose income as a body piercer and cocktail server dried up when the COVID-19 pandemic brought much of the US economy to a grinding halt. “I’d been hedging my bets ‘til this happened.”

Across the country, millions of out-of-work renters like McGuire are unable to pay rent and are amassing an increasingly insurmountable debt. Roughly a third of all US households rent their homes, with rates being higher in urban areas. A recent study by national housing experts suggested 30–40 million renters are at risk of being evicted in August. And like McGuire, many don’t know where to turn for help.

For McGuire, relief came two days after the letter arrived. But not from the government officials. Not from authorities who could potentially stop illegal evictions. It came from her neighbors and fellow SMC tenants.


Courtesy of Tiana McGuire
McGuire in her garden


Over the last couple of months, tenants who found themselves in a similar situation as McGuire had begun to organize a council that spanned across several units. They set up an encrypted communications platform to safely talk about their collective demands. They had written three letters to the company, asking for rent forgiveness. They got no meaningful responses from the landlord, but then, six months into the pandemic, SMC suddenly asked for people to pay their debt or leave.

McGuire had been loosely aware of the tenants’ efforts to collectively address issues with their landlord, but this eviction notice gave her the necessary push to get involved. And so she contacted the SMC tenants council.

It turned out that, according to the council, at least 100 other people had received the same paperwork. While the council’s organizers did not have an immediate answer for McGuire as to whether this notice was legal or not, they immediately activated their network of lawyers, tenant advocates, and neighbors to find out whether McGuire and other SMC renters were at risk of being booted from their home.

McGuire attended an emergency Zoom meeting with the tenants council and other renters and came away from it with a sense of relief.

“The meeting did not necessarily answer questions,” said McGuire. But “I had space to take a breath because there were people in conversations with different lawyer groups, and they were all going to report back. […] I had enough space to let a week go by without it having it at the forefront of my mind.”


Erik Mcgregor / Getty Images
A housing protest in Brooklyn, New York, July 5, 2020.


With the pandemic ripping its way through the US, and the economy in freefall, many renters find themselves navigating legislative chaos that involves all levels of government, local, state, and federal.

On local and state levels, moratoriums varied wildly, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. The state of Oregon, for example, will protect tenants from late fees for nonpayments while Minnesota will not. In Montana, landlords can start the process of eviction if tenants don’t pay rent, even if they can’t physically remove the tenants who are experiencing hardship due to COVID-19. The list of pressure points for landlords that the Eviction Lab tracks is long and includes things like cutting off utilities or reporting tenants to credit bureaus. And each state seems to protect tenants from some, but not all, of these methods to apply pressure.

On a federal level, the CARES Act protected renters from evictions temporarily, but the Trump administration took the biggest step to protect renters in early September, when it tasked the CDC to issue a national eviction moratorium — intending to keep renters like McGuire from being kicked out of their homes.

But it’s not as simple as that.

Renters have to jump through a number of hoops in order to stop from being evicted. For instance, to be protected under the moratorium, they have to sign a letter to their landlord, agreeing to a series of statements under perjury. One of these statements reads:


I understand that I must still pay rent or make a housing payment, and comply with other obligations that I may have under my tenancy, lease agreement, or similar contract. I further understand that fees, penalties, or interest for not paying rent or making a housing payment on time as required by my tenancy, lease agreement, or similar contract may still be charged or collected

Additionally, housing industry lobbyists and landlords have launched a barrage of lawsuits in local, state, and federal courts, challenging protections of renters from evictions and arguing that the federal government does not have the power to issue a blanket ban on evictions, according to the Washington Post. One of the cases was reportedly brought forward by an organization with financial ties to conservative billionaire and political donor Charles Koch. Facing increased pressure, the CDC amended its guidelines, allowing for landlords to begin eviction filings, even if they wouldn’t be executed until 2021.

Advocates across the nation are warning that the national moratorium is a temporary measure at best and that renters are facing an inevitable eviction tsunami once those protections are lifted. And a preliminary analysis from the Eviction Lab, which tracks evictions in 17 cities found that the new moratorium slowed down the number of new evictions filed to housing court, but didn’t entirely stop them. Since the pandemic, the Eviction Lab has collected data on more than 50,000 evictions in these 17 cities, which gives a sense of the scale of the problem faced all across the country.

All this legal chaos has forced a lot of people to take manners and form tenants councils like the one that is helping McGuire.

One month after McGuire received the notice to “pay or quit,” she found herself skating through the street in front of her landlord’s office during a car rally organized by the SMC tenants council, holding a sign that read in all caps: “CANCEL RENT. HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT.”

“It felt invigorating, honestly,” said McGuire about going to the protest. “The instant camaraderie, seeing people’s faces real-time in the flesh that I had only seen on Zoom calls — it was so empowering. We’re all real, and we’re all really here together doing this.”


A few days after the rally, McGuire got a message from the council. Its efforts had paid off. SMC had not only addressed the tenants collectively through the council, it had also dismissed the notice it had sent out. In an email to residents, the company wrote:

“There has been some confusion between State and County laws. Please let this email serve as a formal remission of the 15 day notice previously served upon you.”

In a statement provided to BuzzFeed News, SMC acknowledged the actions of the council and said it was, “committed to ensuring a stable living environment for all our tenants clientele. We do rely on rent in order to cover all expenses as well as ensure a safe and habitable dwelling for all tenants. Recently, we served the California Statute 3088, 15 Day Notices seeking either payment of rent or confirmation of Covid-19 related hardship. In light of the response we received, a decision has been made to rescind the served notices.”

“We remain hopeful that Covid-19 pandemic will soon pass and our tenants can, once again, be more confident and their abilities to timely pay the rent. For those tenants who remain in a difficult financial situation, Sullivan Management remains confident that a meaningful compromise can be reached that meets all parties’ objectives,” the statement read.

McGuire is ecstatic about this outcome and said she was “going to throw those papers in the recycling and feel really good about not having those papers in the house.”

“It’s done for me, and it’s done for everyone else who received that letter and is on the council,” she said. “And it’s done for tenants who don’t even know that we have a council. And that feels awesome.”

Jordan Rome never thought she’d find herself going through a spreadsheet of tenants, calling each one of them to see if they’d sign a letter of demands to their landlord. She never considered herself an organizer.


Adam Blaszkiewicz courtesy of Jordan Rome
Jordan Rome


But in the spring of 2020, Rome was left with two choices: either get her Chicago neighbors on board to organize a campaign to reduce rent or end up on the street.


A filmmaker and restaurant worker, Rome had applied for unemployment in March but didn’t receive anything in June. “There was fire under my ass,” said Rome, who didn’t have anyone else to fall back on for financial help. “I didn’t come from a trust fund.”

As she was searching online for information about the pandemic, she stumbled on a document put together by the Autonomous Tenants Union (ATU), a volunteer-run organization in Chicago that educates tenants on forming unions to collectively make demands from their landlords. The document read like a blueprint for organizing, said Rome, who suddenly found herself thrust into a leadership position she never thought she’d take on.

She began to canvass her neighborhood with flyers that said “cancel rent” and slid outreach letters under her neighbors’ doors in her apartment building, which she said has around 100 units. When she started, she had two people who were on board to meet and talk. Soon they had meetings in the laundry room, each time recruiting more people who happened upon them while folding clothes or throwing a load into the wash. The Chicago Reader and other local media picked up on Rome’s activism, and her email account began to fill up with pleas from other renters for help.

With assistance from the ATU and another Chicago-based organization ONE Northside, Rome’s operation became more sophisticated. When she realized her landlord — a company called Hunter Properties — owned several buildings, housing advocates helped her cobble together spreadsheets of tenants by looking up registered voters at those addresses. She cold-called dozens of tenants, as did other volunteers who signed on to her efforts, and was able to bring together 30 people by the end of May. Hunter Properties did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.


Courtesy of Jordan Rome
Jordan Rome speaking at a rally

“It became a refuge. You’re definitely not alone,” Rome told BuzzFeed News about the group that formed from these efforts. People were “not just talking,” she said — they found ways of “showing up” consistently.

“Initially, it was about saving myself, but then, as this grew, there was genuine community and purpose built through our organizing,” said Rome. “People were there for me through this entire process because everyone was going through something.”

Rome’s efforts are emblematic of a national movement that is brewing and that aims to assist renters who are facing a lack of protections.

Tenant unions are cropping up around the country and are increasingly forming statewide and national coalitions. They are collecting information about the latest policies in near real time and training one another about tenant rights on Zoom. Many have never been a part of this kind of grassroots organizing before.

The sophistication and rapid spread of Rome’s tenants movement is a testament to how the internet has accelerated this type of organizing. BuzzFeed News spoke to more than half a dozen tenant organizers in New York City, Oakland, Houston, Omaha, and Chicago who all organized in a similar manner: Many of them found resources written by long-term housing advocates or volunteer tenants organizers on public Facebook groups or anti-eviction websites.

You just have to google “how to organize tenants” and the internet will serve up a plethora of material. There are spreadsheets that track local moratoriums; documents that lay out clear marching orders for tenants to organize their neighbors; and flyer templates that people can modify to canvas their neighborhoods. Tenants use social media to exert pressure on landlords and have even begun to write up press releases for their latest rent-relief activities. And some Zoom meetings have seen as many as three to four dozen tenants convene in one sitting.


These documents can be used to mobilize dozens and hundreds of people on a hyperlocal level — whether it’s to coalesce entire neighborhoods or just one apartment building.

Tenant unions like Rome’s are stepping in where they feel the government is failing. All the organizers that spoke with BuzzFeed News have seen cases of harassment from landlords and an uptick in people seeking help to either organize rent strikes or seek help.

Even though numerous housing courts are not processing evictions, landlords are still finding ways to harass tenants for the money they owe. In Oakland, one landlord hired several men on motorbikes to remove the furniture of tenants who were behind on rent and locked the furniture up in a storage unit. Three immigrant families that occupied the home were without shelter for a night and only got their furniture back 10 days later after advocates intervened. Another landlord in the Bay Area removed a fence from a home in a neighborhood that had high rates of crime to intimidate nonpaying residents. In Sunset Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn with a high immigrant population, advocates told BuzzFeed News that landlords have called ICE on tenants and shut off utilities like cooking gas.

In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where a landlord changed a lock in a single-room occupancy building while the tenant was away, union organizers responded by summoning dozens of volunteers to protest in front of the home.


The protest was staged by the rapid response team of the Brooklyn Eviction Defense, made up of lawyers, organizers, and other volunteers who respond to landlord harassment and illegal eviction attempts.

Esteban Girón has been organizing tenants in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, since 2013, but has seen the number of people participating in their community meetings quadruple in recent months. His hyperlocal volunteer group, the Crown Heights Tenant Union, which covers one neighborhood, joined forces with the Brooklyn Eviction Defense during the pandemic.

As the armada of volunteers grows, tenants unions have increasingly begun to work with long-term housing advocates from NGOs and other organizations to attack the issue of housing insecurity from various angles. Girón and his peers are now working with NGO-based advocates to lobby for legal protections for tenants in the state of New York.

“We are able to do way more outreach than we have ever been able to do,” said Girón, who is hoping to push for a rent cancellation bill. “Coalitions are moving as a single unit right now.”

These legislative efforts are much needed, they say. While citywide and now federal eviction moratoriums have been introduced throughout the pandemic, most of them act as a way to delay an inevitable financial fallout. For many renters, this means that even after they move away, they are on the hook for the rental debt that they amass over time, said Leah Simon-Weisberg, legal director for anti-displacement and land use programs at the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

“We stopped the bleeding. [...] it kept people living there,” said Simon-Weisberg. But she worries that renters will face debilitating debt from months of not being able to pay rent. Most recently, her team of lawyers has started to explore bankruptcy as a way for people to get debt relief and are hoping to build toolkits for people to file for bankruptcy.


Advocates like Simon-Weisberg argue the only way to meaningfully address the looming housing crisis is to provide renters with assistance. This would help both renters who are worried about debt while also assisting landlords to keep their properties.

For some, even this kind of assistance would be too little too late. At the beginning of the summer, Rome decided to leave and temporarily move to Mexico. Before she left, she handed the reins of Hunter Properties Tenants Union to Hana Urban, a 27-year-old former barista, who had joined Rome early in her organizing efforts.

The union is still growing, even three months after Rome left, proving that the ad hoc organization now has a life of its own. The group has now grown to 50 active members under Urban’s leadership and they still convene on Zoom, closely monitoring developments in housing policies and writing letters to their landlord. With no clear end to the pandemic and its economic repercussions in sight, Urban finds solace in the fact that they have now found support and community through their work.

“I don’t know how people do it alone without some sort of community backing,” said Urban. “Knowing that there are a bunch of people with you in the same boat and want to do something about it [...] is much more empowering.”


Lam Thuy Vo is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Katie Porter Said Parenthood Has “Always Been Considered Unpaid Work,” And That Needs To Change

“What I’m trying to do is engage more Americans in speaking up about what they need,” said Katie Porter.

Venessa Wong BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on October 22, 2020

Mario Tama / Getty Images

Katie Porter is the only single mom with small children in Congress — and she wants people to understand that childcare will be key to America’s recovery from the recession caused by the pandemic.

Porter isn’t surprised that a wave of women, after trying their best over the last seven months, exited the workforce this fall. Of the 1.1 million workers who dropped out of the labor force in September, about 80% were women, and this is bad for our recovery from this economic crisis, the lawmaker said.

Working parents “have been hanging on [during the pandemic], and doing all these things we tell women to do — have a strong support network, be organized, make meals in advance, juggle, be flexible. And at some point, it just becomes overwhelming,” said Porter in an interview with BuzzFeed News. Their recent withdrawal from the workforce “is a huge issue, not only for equality in the workplace and opportunities for women, but also for our economy as a whole. Women in the workforce are a major driver of growth in GDP, and we can't have a meaningful economic recovery without those women coming back into the workforce.”

The struggles of pandemic parenthood can be felt across the 33.4 million American families, or two-fifths of all families, with kids under age 18.

It is a subject Porter frequently returns to, even if she didn’t have her meme-making whiteboard to demonstrate her points when she spoke. A survivor of domestic violence who divorced her husband in 2013, Porter has often discussed the difficulties of being the only single parent with young children in Congress.

Porter, elected in 2018 in California, has made a name for her searing and revealing interrogations of the country’s wealthiest, most powerful people at Congressional committees hearings in which she breaks down complicated subjects with simple language and shocking data on a whiteboard. “Rep. Katie Porter's Whiteboard Will Dry Erase Your Dignity,” wrote Elle.com. Last year, she grilled Wells Fargo’s then-CEO Tim Sloan, earning her social media fame. She asked JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose compensation was $31 million, to explain how the bank’s lowest-paid workers are supposed to make ends meet. And her whiteboard recently went viral when she asked a pharma exec why he made $13 million in 2017, including a $500,000 bonus for increasing the price of Revlimid, a cancer drug. “The drug didn’t get any better. The cancer patients didn’t get any better. You just got better at making money,” she said.




Public Citizen@Public_Citizen

Oh my god, Katie Porter.07:00 PM - 30 Sep 2020
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Throughout the pandemic, the 46-year-old member of Congress and former law school professor has spoken repeatedly about the struggles of working parenthood in video interviews from her own home, telling Yahoo News, “With three kids, the maximum in-person learning, the sum total of minutes that I will have all three children in school, so I can focus solely on my job — zero.” Indeed, the virus has had an outsize impact on single parents’ ability to work: Last month’s labor report shows the jobless rate was 10% for unmarried women who are caregivers compared to 6% of married women — suggesting many more single mothers had no choice but to leave their jobs to care for their children.

“What I’m trying to do is engage more Americans in speaking up about what they need,” she said about her favorite whiteboard. “Part of my goal is to try to, in concise ways, in a few seconds, in a couple of minutes, help working parents understand that we see them, that we value what they're contributing to our economy, and that we know they need help and support.”

While the pressures of pandemic childcare have disproportionately forced out working women, Porter doesn’t see this as a gender issue — bottom line, it’s just “extremely expensive to have talented, trained workers exiting the economy,” she said. “Just like we talk about needing to invest in green energy to keep up with China, you could make the exact same argument about childcare.” This is an infrastructure investment as she sees it.

The childcare industry is in crisis. The impact is disproportionate, as about 93% of childcare workers are women and half of these businesses are minority-owned, Politico reported. Thousands of programs have closed and fewer than 1 in 5 expected to survive longer than a year in a June survey by the NAEYC, raising serious concerns about how parents who relied on these programs can return to work.

While Congress has proposed various amounts of emergency relief for childcare businesses to prevent them from closing during the pandemic, Porter said it’s far cry from what working parents, many who could barely afford care before the pandemic, really need: systemic change. “There's this lack of seeing how this connects to our economic productivity, and the stability of our society. People are always told, ‘This is up to you to figure out.’ So in the workplace, women are told, ‘Go to your employer with a plan for how you'll continue to work after you have children,’ or ‘What’s your plan to come back to work after the birth of the child?’ We've always put these responsibilities on to women,” she said. “But I think what is obscured is any sense that these are collective problems. I think you hear a lot of women say, I can't figure it out. I just can't do this anymore. I’m out of ideas, instead of understanding childcare in a crisis nationally, and our country needs to make an investment.”

She pointed specifically at ongoing investments for universal preschool, bigger tax breaks for childcare expenses, funding for things like bus transportation and after-school programs, and paid family leave. “We just have to make sure that we're really understanding that we need structural change to support, women and men, parents of young kids in the workforce.”


This election, she said, could be a critical one for working parents, and she said she is “pleased” that caregiving is a larger part of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. One of the main issues to address is the cost of care, which has become unaffordable for many families. Families with children under age 5 spend about 10% of their income on average on childcare, but that percentage gets higher as income gets lower, according to the Center for American Progress. The average cost of center-based childcare for two children is 42% of median income for Black families.

Biden’s plan would cost $775 billion over 10 years to fund the care of young children and the elderly; it’s about as much as Trump requested ($740.5 billion) for national defense in the 2021 budget. “We’ve heard absolutely nothing, no alternate plan, no different proposal, we’ve simply seen President Trump ignore these issues,” Porter said.

And as Congress has become more diverse, “I think we're seeing and hearing a lot more diversity of perspectives on what women need to be able to be successful and how that really pays off.”


Venessa Wong is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Why are people protesting in Nigeria and why does Rihanna care?

Endemic police brutality sparked the latest bout of public anger but grievances against authorities go further

A protester waves a Nigerian flag during a protest against police brutality on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway at Magboro, Ogun State, on October 21, 2020. AFP


On October 4, a video of Nigerian police brutality circulated on social media showing two men being dragged from a hotel, one of whom was shot dead.

The police force blamed was Nigeria's notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad, or Sars.

The footage reopened an old wound in Nigerian society, that of endemic police brutality.

These allegations are not new. In 2016, Amnesty International accused police of routinely “torturing detainees to extract bribes”.

By 2017 a hashtag had appeared on twitter, #EndSARS, but the recent outrage has turned online anger into a major movement.

The Sars unit has provoked particular anger and there were growing calls to disband it.

The squad was abolished on October 11, but it was too late to stop growing unrest.

Protests began on October 7 with crowds gathering at the Lekki Toll Gate junction in an upscale neighbourhood of Lagos known for shopping malls and the homes of government officials.

On October 20, security forces opened fire on demonstrators at the toll gate without warning, killing at least 12. Some accounts put the toll far higher.

The shooting led to a major escalation, with arson and the looting of government buildings, including warehouses storing food in the city of Jos.



Nigerian protesters are seen in the streets of Alausa Ikeja after the authorities declared an open-ended lockdown in Lagos in the face of spiralling protests. AFP






What has the international response been?

The spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for authorities to “swiftly explore avenues to de-escalate the situation” after the violence.

The US will be sending a fact-finding mission to review policy in one of their most important allies in the fight against ISIS and their Nigerian affiliate, Boko Haram.

The recent violence received a mention in the US election campaign. Joe Biden called on Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to “cease the violent crackdown”

#EndSARS has also drawn the attention of celebrities including Beyonce, who said she intended to help those affected in a post on her Instagram account, which was “liked” almost 1.5 million times.

Not to be outdone, Rihanna chimed in the next day, tweeting an image of a bloodied Nigerian flag and expressing her outrage at the “torture and brutalisation” on the streets of Lagos.

Rihanna

@rihanna

#ENDSARS

5:20 PM · Oct 20, 2020

384.1K

224.2K people are Tweeting about this

What will the government do next?

Mr Buhari was initially silent on the allegations of police brutality and instead said demonstrations were being infiltrated by “subversive elements” to cause trouble for the government.

Mr Buhari, who was elected in 2015, also ruled Nigeria before the country’s transition to democracy.

He has been accused of bringing back tough crackdowns on political dissent, associated with the country’s former military rule.

The government appears to have launched a two-pronged approach, firstly disbanding Sars and pledging to investigate its crimes, but also warning that further demonstrations will not be tolerated.

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari addresses the nation on a live televised broadcast on October 22, 2020 but made no mention of the shooting of peaceful protesters at Lekki toll plaza. Nigeria State House via AP

Could the crisis escalate?

There is a risk that the #EndSARS movement could spill over into wider discontent.

Nigeria has been racked by economic turmoil in recent years as successive governments failed to contain corruption or build an economy that is not dependent upon oil revenue.

Fitch Ratings says the government needs an oil price of $133 a barrel just to pay recurring expenses.

READ MORE

Nigeria shooting fans long-simmering anger at the state

For Mr Buhari, the danger is that protesters will turn on the political elite because public anger goes far beyond police brutality.

By the government's admission, 40 per cent of Nigerians live in poverty.

Financial consultancy PwC says Nigeria needs to create three million jobs a year just to keep unemployment from increasing.

Sars may have been disbanded and the investigations that the government has promised might go ahead.

But even if this appeases protesters, the country’s economic problems and almost annual protests, are going nowhere.



Updated: October 26, 2020 01:32 AM

How young, queer Nigerians use Twitter to shape identity and fight homophobia
By Paul Onanuga

Twitter has grown to become a very popular microblogging platform in Nigeria, accounting for about 1.75 million users

NIGERIA continues to be largely homophobic, mainly as a result of cultural and religious conventions. Negative perceptions of homosexuality led to the criminalisation of same-sex relations in 2014.

The Nigerian environment is therefore toxic for LGBT people. They become easy prey to oppressive and exploitative state security apparatus. They are also vulnerable to public “moral police” who seek to make homosexual performance invisible and closeted.

One may assume that the marginalised Nigerian same-sex community and its allies have conceded to the widespread societal ostracisation. But that would be to ignore the vigorous advocacies that have been going on in the country’s cultural production and on social media.


Films and literary texts have been the more studied genres where same-sex agency has been iterated and reinforced. In Nollywood – the country’s film industry – early depictions were constructed by non-LGBT people who seemed to latch onto public inquisitiveness for financial gains.


More recently, however, members of the Nigerian queer community have taken over the task of shaping their public image and identity, to reasonable success, in these creative ventures. They have done so through movies as well as a growing body of literary writings.

READ MORE: Westminster has dragged its feet on outlawing LGBT ‘conversion therapy’

Social media, however, can be considered more potent as a medium which, to the authors of The Alternative Media Handbook, gives voice to “the socially, culturally and politically excluded”.

By unpacking “live” data from members of the queer community, one can identify the challenges as well as advocacies in Nigerian digital queer discourse. That’s what I did in a study of queer Nigerian Twitter. To explore the diversity of queer agency, I analysed selected tweets by Nigerian queer men. As a linguist, my focus was on identifying and discussing how the performative use of language can achieve the functions of coming out as well as confronting homophobic cyberbullying.

Twitter has grown to become a very popular microblogging platform in Nigeria, accounting for about 1.75 million users, with an annual growth rate of 4.4%. Communities with shared interests are built online. The queer community in Nigeria is no doubt on the margins, but it has found digital platforms safe havens for collective queer voices.

The digital space, I found, has become a location for the representation and assertion of queer agency. What I found interesting in these narratives was that these commenters were not only ready to come out on a “public” digital space, they were also expressive in revealing their offline identities. This despite the possibilities of homophobic violence.

For example: “This year I accepted the entirety of my sexuality and it’s one thing I’m very grateful about.

“I remember those days when I use to beat myself, cut myself, cry, pray and do all shits for being gay. Those days that I had to go to various priests for deliverance and guidance.”

This Twitter user reveals their sexual orientation within a narrative which expresses the difficulties of their lived reality.

What is striking is the conviction of self-acceptance and the roles played by the online queer community in the affirmation of this.

Even more exciting is how these Twitter users engage in anti-homophobic advocacy. They turn the narrative around by exploiting online platforms towards positive self-presentation. They also respond to and challenge their cyber-aggressors and other homophobic commentators. They further acknowledge the necessity of support.

READ MORE: The greatest risk to LGBTQ youth is pretending they don’t exist

The tweets I analysed draw attention to the role of family relationships, homosexual allies and larger non-queer communities in helping Nigerian LGBT people express and accept themselves.

The tweets have sociological implications as ways of creating meaning. They humanise the commenters as legitimate members of Nigerian society and attest to the naturalness of queer identities. The online discussions provide visibility for a marginalised community.

Since the tweets contest the normative portrayals of same-sex relations, they also constitute activist representations. These queer Nigerian males use digital platforms for the purpose of identity formation. In this self-assertion, they contest the monochromic representations perpetuated in popular culture.

The tweets I studied speak out against the bigotry and hate messages which are directed at them. They accentuate the human rights concern that a person’s sexuality is their personal decision. And they correct the perspective that problematises homosexuality as being the same as other social ills.

More crucially, I conclude, in view of the stifling and homophobic lived realities in Nigeria, these narratives engender conversations around the issue of queer visibility and acceptance within Nigerian society.

Paul Onanuga is a lecturer at Federal University, Oye Ekiti

This article is from theconversation.com

How Nigerian End Sars protests and BLM reveal global fights

By Layla-Roxanne Hill

Nigerians are protesting on the streets of Lagos against police brutality

FOREBODING headlines earlier in the year indicated African countries would see vast numbers of Covid-19 infections and deaths.

According to the latest World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics however, from January to October 2020 there have been 61,667 confirmed cases of Covid-19 with 1125 deaths in Nigeria. It may be argued that some countries don’t have the sufficient means of testing or recording Covid-19, but we could look back at how effectively Nigeria – and many African countries – dealt with Ebola in 2014 and conclude that the experience of handling viral disease has braced these societies for the global pandemic.

Across the planet, the inequality produced by unfettered capitalism – and latterly austerity – has become more pronounced. So too the failures to address the social and economic consequences of this are now very much in our present, as they cross-fertilise with the virus itself. And for much of the world, the historic legacy of imperialism adds a further dimension. In Nigeria, people aren’t only dying from Covid-19, but from years of colonial divide and rule, corruption and the refusal by wealthy elites to invest in public infrastructure.

As a friend in Lagos tells me: “Covid-19 is ok here. It’s the lockdowns which came as a shock to people, a lot of Nigerian people died from starvation... lots lost their jobs... everyone is hungry out here, even the police.”

For context, employees of the Nigerian police force have a starting salary of approximately N9019 per month. That’s around £18.01. For a constable, the monthly salary is N46,000, or £91.86. To give an idea of how much this is in real terms, a book bought on my last visit to Lagos in 2016 was N4500 (£8.98) and prices have vastly inflated since the pandemic took hold. This is compounded by the fact that the American Dollar and British Pound are considered to be of more value and often the only accepted currencies.

Before Covid-19 – and the accompanying restrictions – the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) embarked on strike action to force the government to fulfil agreements made at a truce more than 10 years ago. Then, as now, the ASUU called on the government to reduce its economic profligacy, which has accelerated the wilful neglect and decline of public universities in Nigeria.

A senior lecturer more than over six years’ experience receives approximately N220,000 (£439) per month, a salary which many lecturers use to pay for materials required to teach students. President Buhari’s (pictured below) 2021 budget allocated only 6.7% to education, a gross shortfall to the Unesco-prescribed minimum of 26%. As the ASUU states: “Hungry teachers can neither teach well nor carry out research. And poorly taught students can neither excel nor propel their nation to great heights.” Despite recent orders from the Nigerian government to resume teaching, public universities remain closed.

These are but a few examples, many others can be found including in transport and housing. In Lagos there is currently no city-wide rail service despite decades-old plans to undertake public transport investment. Lagos’s islands shimmer with unoccupied luxury developments, priced out of the reach of all but the city’s richest, while the masses continue to make do with slums. It is estimated Lagos has an existing shortage of more than five million homes and needs to deliver 200,000 houses annually to keep up with the growing population.


Like the West, the gulf between the rich and poor is widening and futures free of continued and increasing economic, climate and social crisis seem illusive. Those who see this most clearly are the youth. And now, instead of seeking brighter futures, which often end in the tragic loss of life owing to border restrictions and anti-Black modern slavery, the Nigerian youth are staying – and fighting back in the form of the #endsars movement.

Where there is crisis there is opportunity

THE global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement has reverberated throughout 2020 and the world. This is especially true when being Black is a category applied to the diaspora and the descendants of imperial ventures. I wondered how much the Black Lives Matter movement had inspired #endsars. I asked my friend in Lagos if Black Lives Matter has had much of an impact in Nigeria. She tells me: “This motivated the #endsars movement... after watching the West stand up for George Floyd, that sort of fuelled the moment.”

For weeks, the people of Nigeria have been courageously protesting from Abuja to Lagos, demanding an end to the killing, unlawful arrests, torture, sexual violence and other harm caused Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a controversial unit of the Nigerian

Police.

On Tuesday, October 20, Nigerian forces opened fire on protesters, killing multiple people and adding to the dozens who have already been shot and killed over the course of the demonstrations.


The reason people in Nigeria are demanding an end to SARS is the same reason Black people in the United States – and elsewhere – are demanding the defunding of police. Because in a time of crisis, the institution exists as a violent resource the state can call upon to impose order in an unequal and unjust society.

Only a few weeks before Nigerian forces opened fire and killed protesters in Lagos, Daniel Bertrand, the Belgian ambassador, visited Eko Atlantic City, also in Lagos. These events are not disconnected. Eko Atlantic City is a new coastal city, described as a public-private partnership between the Lagos State Government and the Chagoury Group, which owns South Energyx. Funded entirely by private investments, the role of government is limited to providing the concession for the project and receiving taxes on the

land sales.

The development, “standing on 10 million square metres of land reclaimed from the ocean and protected by an 8.5 kilometre long sea wall, will be the size of Manhattan’s skyscraper district. Self-sufficient and sustainable, it includes state-of-the-art urban design, its own power

generation, clean water, advanced telecommunications, spacious roads and tree-lined streets”.

In September 2009, Eko Atlantic City was awarded a “Commitment Certificate” by the Clinton Foundation Global Initiative. The certificate recognises “commitments” by members of the Initiative, who create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.


READ MORE: Nigerian demonstrators 'shot dead' as curfew broken

According to the Foundation citation, “South Energyx commits to combating the devastating effects of climate change by reclaiming nine square kilometres of land for a new city, Eko Atlantic. Eko Atlantic will be an environmentally conscious city, built with nature, to restore an original coastline and protect Victoria Island, Nigeria from the severe risk of ocean surge and flooding.” Modern imperialism, shrouded in progressive veneer.

Gilbert Chagoury, founder and chairman of the Chagoury Group, has donated between $1-$5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Protecting Eko Atlantic City will be the Great Wall of Lagos. Over eight kilometres long, it is designed as a barrier to dispel the force of the waves from the Atlantic Ocean. Like the gated communities in Lagos, investors are capitalising on what is a gateway to the emerging markets of the continent. But ordinary Nigerians are not to reap any benefits. Instead, they are subjugated by the state.

The Nigerian youth have other plans. Their movement is courageously challenging power, and in the process it is building its own. Just as capitalism, the fight for racial equality and the pandemic are global, so too is the struggle for another world. And that kind of internationalism from below is needed now more than ever. Nigeria has a rich history of revolutionary action and thought, often actualised through its women. This is much harder to erase and will take more than walls to keep at bay.

Three-quarters of Chilean voters want new constitution: partial count



By Aislinn Laing, Fabian Cambero

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chileans have voted overwhelmingly for the country’s Pinochet-era constitution to be redrafted, with more than a third of votes counted from around the nation and abroad, the electoral service said on Sunday evening.

A total of 77.71% had approved the option of a fresh charter to replace one drafted in 1980 during the Augusto Pinochet military dictatorship, compared to 22.29% who voted against with 36% of votes counted, the Servel election authority said.

With 19.5% of the second voting card counted, asking voters if they wanted the new charter drafted by a specially-elected body of citizens to draft the new charter over a mixed convention of lawmakers and citizens, 75.5% picked the former.

As votes were counted on live television around the country, excitement built as citizens streamed towards the capital Santiago’s main squares.

In Plaza Italia, the central hub for protests, a small number of rock-throwing demonstrators clashed with police using tear gas and water canons but they were later replaced by massive crowds in carnival mood letting off fireworks.

Police estimated their numbers at 9 pm local (2400 GMT) at 15,000 people, who wielded green lasers as “rebirth” was beamed in lights on a nearby tower.

Record turnout seen as Chileans vote in constitutional referendum

By Aislinn Laing, Fabian Cambero

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chileans turned out in record numbers on Sunday to vote on whether to tear up the country’s Pinochet-era constitution in favor of a fresh charter drafted by citizens - a key demand of fierce anti-government protests that erupted last year.


Electoral and government officials and analysts pointed to a particularly high turnout and significant representation of young people among voters, despite Chile continuing to be blighted by the coronavirus pandemic and recent violence linked to the demonstrations.

As dusk fell, police fired tear gas and water cannon to try to disperse hundreds of people who gathered in Plaza Italia, the central Santiago square that has been the focus of protests. The officers later appeared to stand down as the crowd grew with more people arriving to celebrate the likely result.

Patricio Santamaria of the Servel elections body said turnout would probably exceed 49% - the highest level recorded since voting was made voluntary in 2012. “Today, people have heard the call of history,” he said.

Claudio Fuentes, a political scientist at Chile’s Diego Portales University, said the months of protests had served to reverse a downward trend in voting engagement.

“I think we could see turnout of around 55 to 58%,” he said. “The more people who vote, the more legitimate and overwhelming the result.


Few Chileans are indifferent to the outcome of the referendum, and opinions were strongly-held among voters polled by Reuters on Sunday.

Natalia Ramos, 43, a kindergarten teacher who voted in favor of a new constitution in Santiago’s affluent Las Condes suburb, praised the protests that began a year ago over patchy public services and societal inequity, saying they had brought about radical change.

“The protests were unfortunately violent but history tells us that without violence, there is very little we can achieve to bring about important revolution - they raised awareness of the inequality of the past 30 years,” she said.

Jose Tomas Olivares, 18, voting for the first time at the same polling station, said only the current, free-market friendly constitution could safeguard the economic growth required to uplift more citizens.

“There is a lot of populism among young people but many people are voting to approve a new constitution just to be part of a trend,” he said.


More than 14.8 million people are eligible to vote up and down the long thin country, although COVID-19 sufferers have been told to stay away from polling centers on threat of arrest.

Chileans can decide whether to approve or reject a new constitution and whether it should be drafted by a specially elected citizens’ body or a mix of citizens and lawmakers.

The winning camp needs a simple majority. Opinion polls suggest a new charter will be approved by a significant margin. First results are due between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. local time, according to Servel.

Unofficial results from votes cast by 5,208 Chileans living in Europe and Asia, tallied by Diego Portales University, showed more than 87% voted in favor of a new constitution.

The country’s current constitution was drafted by dictator Augusto Pinochet’s close adviser Jaime Guzman in 1980, and has only been tweaked by successive governments to reduce military and executive power.

Reporting by Aislinn Laing and Fabian Cambero; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Daniel Wallis

PORTLAND RECKONS WITH POLICE ATTACKS ON PROTESTERS AFTER MONTHS OF UNREST

Witness testimony and a video reconstruction detail deliberate violence by police against peaceful protesters.

Alice Speri October 25 2020

DAYS INTO THE nationwide protest movement sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, the Black-led, police accountability group Don’t Shoot Portland sued the city of Portland, Oregon, over use of tear gas against protesters. The lawsuit led to a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Portland Police Bureau from using tear gas, except in narrow circumstances. But officers quickly switched gears, and in response to growing protests, they ramped up the deployment of OC spray, rubber bullets, pepper balls, flash bangs, and other impact munitions known as “nonlethal” or “less-lethal” weapons. Don’t Shoot Portland again sought and obtained a court order to limit police’s use of those weapons.

Then on June 30, just four days after a federal judge had sided with protesters and issued a restraining order on the use by police of less-lethal weapons, Portland officers meeting protesters outside the local police union building again fired smoke grenades, rubber bullets, and other impact munitions into the crowd, injuring several people. They then declared the protest a riot and deployed tear gas despite the court order restricting its use.

“They blatantly ignored the order,” Tai Carpenter, Don’t Shoot Portland’s board president, told The Intercept. “What happened on June 30 was just an all-out attack on civilians. That night just really stands out for the vast amount of violence that was being inflicted on the street.”

In August, as protests in Portland continued uninterrupted for a third month, Don’t Shoot Portland filed a new motion, asking the federal judge in the case to hold the city in contempt of court over police use of “less-lethal” munitions that night. In a court hearing this week, protesters testified in graphic detail about what they described as an unprovoked, violent response to a protest that had been largely peaceful.

A spokesperson for the city of Portland declined to comment on pending litigation. Attorneys for the city said in court that police response “was based on good faith and reasonable interpretations of the less-lethal order.” They argued that police were responding to protesters throwing bottles, rocks, and cans and shining green lasers at them, and that officers feared that protesters would set the police union’s building on fire. In court filings, they wrote that plaintiffs had offered “vague descriptions of uses of force such that it is not possible to begin to evaluate whether the uses violate the Less Lethal Order.”

The implication that a confrontation between protesters and police was too chaotic to discern, and that police were justified in their outsize response by some individuals’ actions toward them, is one that’s been regularly invoked following violent repression of protests. Often the official narrative established by police is hard to challenge in a court setting, because evidence is usually messy or incomplete, or the chain of events gets obscured in the fog of war surrounding many protests.

Read Our Complete CoverageProtests for Black Lives


But the June 30 incidents were not only among the most violent in Portland’s summer of protest, they were also some of the best documented, captured in several long videos shot from different angles by protesters and bystanders. “It was one of the most heavily visualized nights of the protests,” said Carpenter. “There were a lot of livestreamers there, there were people on their balconies, because it was in a residential neighborhood.”

In fact, the number and quality of videos has allowed attorneys for Don’t Shoot Portland, working with the applied-research group SITU, to produce an unusually detailed reconstruction of that night’s events, a granular analysis of a number of incidents of police violence over a 90-minute period of time that clearly shows the circumstances, and lack of justification, that preceded each deployment of force. The reconstruction, which was shown in court, offered a forensic analysis of a protest with a level of detail that is usually reserved for criminal investigations. It provided a rare piece of evidence of abuse by officers that is much harder to dismiss than many witness accounts of police violence, opening the door for an equally rare moment of accountability.

“What these protests have exposed is the utter contempt that the police bureau has for criticism or even the idea that anybody should question what they do at any time,” Jesse Merrithew, one of the attorneys representing Don’t Shoot Portland, told The Intercept.

“You can watch it on video what actually happened,” he added.“What we’re hopeful of is that this helps the court impose the accountability that the city has been unwilling or unable to impose on the police bureau.”



Video: Courtesy of SITU Research
The Night of June 30

On the evening of June 30, protesters who had previously stayed mostly downtown for the first time moved to the more suburban area where the Portland Police Association has its headquarters. By then, a growing number of people in Portland had begun to protest not only to demand justice for Floyd, but also large cuts to the police bureau’s budget and accountability for violence carried out by local police. In court documents, Don’t Shoot Portland called the police union “the chief obstacle to police accountability in this city.”

Protesters met a line of officers before reaching the union’s building and stopped at a distance, chanting or listening to speakers. Witnesses described seeing a couple plastic bottles hurled toward the officers, but no further criminal conduct and “nothing shocking or riotous.” But within minutes of protesters’ arrival, officers in full riot gear filled the street. Using a loudspeaker on an LRAD truck, a type of sonic weapon sometimes deployed at protests, they announced that the assembly had been declared unlawful and threatened to deploy force to arrest protesters. Then, as the crowd complied with orders to move back, police, unprovoked, begun pushing and beating people back with batons. Almost immediately, and responding to no visible provocation, they fired the first impact munitions and pepper-sprayed people at close range.

The reconstruction of the following hour and a half that was presented in court zeroed in on four moments that evening during which police deployed multiple types of less-lethal weapons, as well as a moment when they “bull-rushed” into the crowd. It ends showing police as they declared a riot and deployed tear gas.

In the first incident, police can be seen shoving and beating people with batons and pepper-spraying them in the face, before shooting munitions at them at close range, even as protesters are moving back as directed. Police are also shown grabbing a protester holding a banner, ripping it, and preventing people from dispersing despite ordering them to do so. In the second incident, a protester can be seen throwing a bottle on the ground in front of police — in response to which police fire impact munitions at the protester multiple times before rolling a smoke grenade into the receding crowd. Officers are then seen firing at a different protester who kicked away a smoke canister. In the third incident, police are seen shooting impact munitions at a crowd that was posing no threat, from 120 feet away, and then doing so again at a closer distance during a fourth incident.



Video: Courtesy of SITU Research

In court, James Comstock, a lead investigator in the case, walked a judge through SITU’s reconstruction, which he explained was built using a laser scan of the area to reproduce a three-dimensional model of the street where the protest took place. Visual evidence of each incident was then mapped onto the model and replayed in real time. Each incident was presented from multiple viewpoints, including side views and aerial views captured by a bystander filming from his balcony. And each deployment of force was shown in the context of the 30 seconds that preceded it, in order to paint as accurate a picture as possible of any action that might have justified it.

“I don’t know that anybody has used a reconstruction like this in a protest case,” Merrithew told The Intercept. “We use them all the time in criminal cases and we’ve used similar reconstructions for police shooting cases.”

“It gives a really good overview for people to understand what’s going on, the movement of the police and the protesters, and the violence, and it’s in real-time so you can actually see what’s happening,” echoed Carpenter. “It will show a lot of people what we’ve been saying, that it was all unprovoked.”

In court, the judge also heard firsthand accounts from protest participants, including Pedro Anglada Cordero, the protester who was shot with a rubber bullet after kicking a smoke canister away, and Eric Greatwood, a livestreamer and a regular presence at Portland protests who recorded most of the evening with a video action camera placed on top of a 20-foot pole, and who was shot in the groin with a FN303 round, a type of impact munition that has caused fatal injuries in the past.

Anglada Cordero, who was at the protest with his wife, was retreating from police along with most others in the crowd when a smoke canister was tossed toward him. Anglada Cordero, who noted that his wife had already been coughing because of the chemical agents in the air, said that he instinctively moved to kick the can away. When the can barely moved, he took a few more steps and kicked it further away, the video shows. Police immediately shot him with rubber bullets, hitting him once behind the knee and once in the thigh, and leaving tennis ball-sized bruises later documented in court filings.

“My first, spontaneous reaction was to get it away from us,” he told The Intercept, referring to the canister. “It was in my interest to keep our immediate group safe from being exposed to more agents.”

But police took the gesture as an attack on them, and right after he kicked the canister, things escalated quickly, Anglada Cordero said. Moments later someone who tried to grab and toss a can was tackled to the ground. In court, city attorneys sought to describe the incidents as evidence of protesters’ violent conduct. Anglada Cordero said he was just trying to protect his wife, himself, and those in his immediate vicinity.

“The moment they toss a smoke canister our way and the moment someone kicks it back, that constitutes a reason for them to escalate and retaliate,” he told The Intercept. “So suddenly they are in the right to use ammunition against the crowd, but the crowd has no right to defend themselves.”



Video: Courtesy of SITU Research

Eric Greatwood, an independent livestreamer who has filmed dozens of protests, captured much of the evening on video, providing footage that was used for the reconstruction presented in court. At one point, officers recognized him and called him by name, ordering him to move back. “That just sent the hairs of my arm up, just to call me by my name like that,” Greatwood told The Intercept. He complied but kept filming from the sidelines as police arrested protesters. Then moments later, as Greatwood crouched down to look at an unexploded smoke grenade, police fired an impact munition at him, hitting him in the groin.

“I know for a fact that they did it intentionally because there have been other people who have been fired on in that area,” said Greatwood, who can be heard moaning in the video as his camera kept rolling. “They have sights on those things, they know exactly how to fire them, they are supposed to bounce them off the ground. They fired directly at me.”

A U.S. Air Force veteran, Greatwood said that anyone in the military caught doing what police did to him would be in prison. “I don’t know how a man can actually hit another man in the groin, that just completely baffles me, he totally aimed for it.” The officer who shot him, Brent Taylor, said in court that had had not intended to target Greatwood’s groin. “I’m shooting at a moving target,” he testified. “I’m aiming at his lower legs but how quickly he changes his position, I cannot control.”

Greatwood, who has filed notice of his intent to sue the city for using excessive force, said that he was in pain for weeks after being shot and had difficulty using the bathroom. But he was back the next day to livestream another protest, and many more since then. “I just couldn’t not film what was happening.”
Competing Narratives

In court, attorneys for the city pushed back against the reconstruction presented on behalf of Don’t Shoot Portland. “It wasn’t an effort to provide an objective presentation from both police perspective and demonstrator perspective, right?” an attorney for the city asked Comstock in cross-examination, noting that the reconstruction focused for instance on the actions of Portland police, and not of Oregon State Police who were also on the scene. “The purpose of this video is giving context around the video that we’ve collected,” Comstock replied.

In fact, the legal team representing protesters said that they chose to reconstruct the June 30 incidents over other episodes during which police may also have violated court orders in part because of the volume of evidence available about them. “It’s important for the case to be able to give the court the best possible, quality evidence so the court can determine whether or not they violated the order,” said Merrithew.

But as Portlanders reckon with the historic wave of protests that has gripped the city for months, leading to two deaths and hundreds of arrests, and as the upcoming mayoral race is likely to be determined in large part by officials’ response to the protests, the broader public also has a right to see evidence of what happened, Merrithew argued.

“Probably a very small percentage of the public is looking at these things every night and actually paying attention to what’s going on; they’re hearing it from a 10,000-foot view, which allows them to sort of be naive in whatever camp they’re predisposed to be in,” he said. “We’re trying to bring the same quality of evidence to the public as we are to the court, because the public needs to understand that the justifications that are being made by the bureau are false. The public needs to understand what these public employees are doing in their name.”

The impulse to discern and record what was happening is also what drove Greatwood to start livestreaming the protests in Portland. “I’ve seen a lot of footage that was basically just the backs of people’s heads, and there was a lot of chaos, but you couldn’t exactly see anything,” he said, adding that his video camera, placed on top of a pole or sometimes on a drone, offers a bird’s eye view of the protests. “I wanted to figure out if protesters were causing the police’s actions or if the police were just being a little bit heavy-handed.”

Greatwood said that he has always been respectful toward officers at protests, getting out of their way when asked and limiting himself to documenting what was happening, including on June 30. But he felt he had been targeted that night because he was there with a camera. “They are probably upset because they know that they have been acting out of line, and they don’t like it being broadcast,” he said. “If you are doing things that are proper, you shouldn’t be afraid of a camera and the truth.”

That night, he said, he had seen “barely anything happening” before police unleashed on protesters. “I saw more things that seemed blown out of proportion when it came to the police providing footage or photos to the press,” he added. “I felt like there was a lot of gaslighting from the police, and that there was not a whole lot that the protesters were doing to get them egged on.”

Others who testified last week also said that regardless of the outcome in court, it was important for Portland residents to document and address the harm and trauma inflicted on countless protesters over the last months. “There are so many people that have gone through something so similar to what I went through that night,” said Anglada Cordero, who after being shot helped other protesters who were maced at close range and couldn’t breathe. “When you go through such an experience, and you see others hurt, then you feel compelled to come out and be in solidarity with others. And that’s what happens every night, when people are getting hurt, more people come out and help each other.”

The judge in the case is expected to rule on whether to hold the city in contempt of court in the coming days.

“It’s hard to have faith in the court system when it’s been proven all your life that your civil liberties don’t matter,” said Carpenter of Don’t Shoot Portland. “But the trauma and the violence have been clearly documented on the record; they’re facts that can’t be ignored. Even with the way that our justice system works, there has to be accountability.”