Postal Fiasco, Private Guns, Corporate Surveillance

In June, protests against the police killing of George Floyd prompted votes from Minneapolis’ City Council to disband the city’s police department. Other cities followed suit, cutting police department budgets.

But, as Truthout reports, some of the same cities that have voted to cut police funding have also experienced an influx of private security guards in recent months. In Minneapolis, for example, council members spent $4,500 per day to hire guards for their own protection after voting to disband municipal police.

Private security firms are even more difficult to hold accountable than public police, as they aren’t obligated to disclose records, nor are they held to the same (already insufficient) standards.

Policing approaches in the “private sector are likely to simply exacerbate economic inequality and the already violent and racist culture of public policing as the industry expands.”

The movement to reinvest police budgets into community health and safety was reinvigorated by last week’s unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But late Wednesday, Donald Trump’s justice department released a memo “that would restrict federal funding to U.S. cities determined by Attorney General William Barr to be so-called ‘anarchist jurisdictions’”—cities aiming to defund police departments, writes Truthout.

The move aligns with the Trump campaign’s anti-dissent “law and order” message.

The family of a Salvadoran American teenager shot dead in June has sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over his killing. Eighteen-year-old Andres Guardado died after a police officer shot him in the back five times. Guardado, working as a security guard at an auto body shop, had started running after one of two approaching police officers drew a gun.

A whistleblower in the Sherriff’s department says the deputy who shot Guardado was a prospective member of a violent police gang called the Executioners, whose members get inked for killing civilians.

In San Leandro, California, officer Jason Fletcher has been charged with felony manslaughter for shooting 33-year-old Black man Steven Taylor inside a Walmart on April 18. Within 40 seconds, Fletcher shot Taylor with a Taser, then in the chest with his gun. Taylor, whose family said he was homeless, was trying to leave the store with a tent and a bat.

According to the Alameda County district attorney, “Mr. Taylor posed no threat of imminent deadly force or serious bodily injury to defendant Fletcher or anyone else in the store.”

Colorlines shares perspectives from Portland, Oregon, which “has been one of the most surprising cities to fight for Black lives, with protesters marching on the grounds for more than 80 days.”

“With the Black population dropping in a historically racist city, it is a huge risk for Black and brown people to lead protests in Portland—they are twice as likely to be arrested than white protestors.” The Portland uprising has also faced violence and abduction from law enforcement and white supremacists, with media often framing protesters as the instigators.

But demonstrators like DeAndre Marquise, also known as Sol Luna, have captured footage of dozens of instances on the ground showing police using brutal force on peaceful protesters.

Cornell University is the only Ivy League school still set to conduct in-person classes for the fall semester. Affected communities, such as Ithaca and Tompkins County residents and Cornell employees, including resident assistants on strike, have been resisting the decision to limited effect, reports The Progressive.

Already, a cluster of nine student COVID-19 cases have been traced to a maskless, non-distanced gathering. If the campus remains open, Cornell anticipates 1,200 cases throughout the fall semester.

“As of August 24, Tompkins County reported a total of 242 COVID-19 cases, in a population of just more than 100,000; residents suspect the return of Cornell students, and their anticipated 1,200 cases, could cause that number to spike.”

With rent due for tenants nationwide on September 1, the Trump administration announced a sweeping moratorium on residential evictions through the end of the year.

The move saves millions of renters who had run out of options, in a “stunning move from a president who began his career in a family business synonymous with housing discrimination—and an unmistakable pivot meant to draw voters’ attention away from the Trump administration’s disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The Center for Disease Control issued the order, which will likely be challenged in court. But for now, all tenants who make less than $99,000 per year appear to be covered through December, when they still face an “eviction cliff.” For that, Democratic measures—which this move far surpassed—will be insufficient. In These Times elaborates on the need to cancel rent.

On Tuesday, Amazon posted two job listings for intelligence analysts to monitor threats that included labor organizing. “The company immediately yanked the listings, claiming they were made in error,” but screenshots remain of the company looking for experts to collect “actionable intelligence” on “organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders,” among others.

Jacobin explains that Amazon doesn’t, and works to never, have unions; CEO “Jeff Bezos would not be the richest man in the world if he weren’t versed in the fundamentals of profit maximization, suppressing labor costs, and dodging regulations chief among them.”

Amazon is another in a long line of anti-worker corporations that pays to spy on activists and critical politicians, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

Donald Trump issued an executive order banning Americans from using TikTok for concerns that the company could hand over user data to Chinese authorities. But recently hacked documents published in the BlueLeaks trove show the information the company has shared with U.S. law enforcement in dozens of cases, underscoring that data privacy issues extend beyond China.

The Intercept writes that experts familiar with law enforcement requests say what TikTok collects and hands over is in line with what companies like Amazon, Facebook, or Google regularly provide, “but that’s because U.S. tech companies collect and hand over a lot of information.”